If you are still not convinced, go down to your local OfficeMax and spend some time with a droid tablet or try to edit AVCHD Video on WIndows 7 PC.
This is just bullshit. Final Cut may be popular but it's not the only NLE product on the market. There's plenty of work done on Avid, Premiere, or even Vegas. All of which run fine on any mid-range to high-end PC laptop. There is no magic secret sauce that Apple products have here.
As for 'droid tablets' (presumably you mean 'Android tablets', since 'Droid' is a brand used only by Verizon for their Android products), there is no doubt that the $200 tablets on the market suck. Of course they suck. Google hasn't even released a tablet version of Android. The fact that some manufacturers have chosen to release products prematurely is no surprise.
I briefly owned a 11.6" MacBook Air, which I returned. It was a beautiful piece of hardware. But:
- I can't deal with clickpads. They make simple operations like dragging or right-clicking far more complex and error prone. Forget something like middle clicking unless you feel like doing some crazy multi-finger tap. It's also noisy, which can be annoying when you're trying to use it in class. My T400 has real buttons - left, right, and middle - with real tactile feel and quiet operation. - The keyboard is annoying. With a T400 I get buttons like Page Up and Page Down, Home, End, and Delete. These work consistently and don't require FN shortcuts. On Mac laptops, Home and End are FN+Left Arrow and FN+Right Arrow. Unfortunately they aren't consistent at all. Sometimes they take you to the beginning or the end of the line, sometimes they take you to the beginning or end of a document. Sometimes you can use Command+Left Arrow/Right Arrow for cursor movement on the line, but then sometimes (e.g. the terminal) it doesn't work. - Apple wants $80 for a MagSafe power adapter and sues anyone who tries to make a compatible adapter. You can get genuine ThinkPad power adapters for $30 or less on eBay, which means I can have 4 (couch, bedroom, desk, one for on the go) without breaking the bank. It's a hell of a lot more convenient to just plug in than it is to pull out and uncoil the adapter every time. - Mouse acceleration is totally screwed up in Mac OS X. The curve is not really a curve - it starts out extremely slow and then abruptly jumps to very fast. This makes cursor control with a high-resolution mouse (like my Logitech G5) extremely difficult. - X-buttons (back/forward) on a non-Apple mouse don't work. The only way to get them to work is to install third-party software, most of which costs money. - Scroll wheel acceleration. I don't know who thought it was a good idea, but it seems to be impossible to disable. - You can't make the machine stay awake with the lid closed without kernel extension hacks or plugging in a monitor. - There's no full disk encryption. Home directory encryption is not the same thing. - Window organization is annoying. There are no snaps (like in Windows 7 or KDE) and you can only resize windows from one corner. The zoom button is supposed to 'fit contents' or 'fit screen area', but in reality it seems to be completely arbitrary depending on the application. Maximize is useful and consistent. - Lots of screen space is wasted. Panels (in GNOME or KDE) or the Taskbar are usable with under 30px of height. The Dock is useless at that size and realistically needs to be more like 50-60px. Most people get around this by hiding it, which drives me nuts because it's too easy to inadvertently activate and not there to notify you when you need it. Then there's the menu bar, which takes up more of your screen space, even in applications that don't need menus (like Google Chrome). - You can hide a menu by clicking in it. There is 'dead space' between menu items that not only does nothing, it also closes the menu. This is another thing that makes absolutely no sense to me. - OpenGL performance SUCKS. I know that Apple has been working on t
Take a look at funnytranslator.com. After 30 online translations the phrase: "We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is at the end of its life cycle." becomes: "The Linux Caozuojitong what life in Russia, you know.
Your girlfriend should know better than to evaluate a translation system based on a series of repeated translations.
Translation, whether it is done by a human or a machine, always involves trade-offs. One of the most important trade-offs is between fluency and faithfulness. Fluency refers to how well the translation matches the conventions (syntactic and stylistic) of the destination language, whereas faithfulness refers to how precisely the translation matches the meaning of the original text. Because languages have idioms, and because often there are words in the source language that simply do not have a counterpart in the destination language, it is often necessary to simplify or modify the meaning to create a translation that is not awkward.
There is a constant balancing act - change too much and you end up with a translation that is misleading, change too little and you end up with a translation that's awkward and hard to understand. But the bottom line is that in ANY non-trivial translation, information is lost in the process. If you did the same experiment with human translators - and did it in a real sense, with different translators for each step in the cycle, you would end up with text that is perfectly readable but had very little in common with the source text.
I'm not saying that the translation in the article is 100% faithful to the original Russian. It's not. No real translation is. If the precise nature of the words is important, it's necessary to examine the implications of the Russian. You can't do that with a simple translation.
That's no longer the case - the Nokia N8 supports UMTS bands I, II, IV, V, and VIII so it will work with AT&T and T-Mobile in the US and with most other providers worldwide.
In theory, 1-4 of these modules connected thusly could give you performance up to that of an 8cy car, but use as few as two cylinders when the extra horse-power isn't necessary (by "turning on" extra modules as necessary, then turning them back off again when it isn't).
Yeah, it's called variable displacement. AKA MDS, Variable Cylinder Management, Active Fuel Management, etc. There are lots of GM, Chrysler, and Honda vehicles that have it right now.
This is the person that, as far as I can tell, single-handedly ruined WoW. I am not alone in this sentiment.
He's the person who brought us the hungry-hungry-hippos style button-mashing PvP in 3.0. He's the person who brought us massive cleave teams. He's the person who made mana to a large extent irrelevant. He's the person who brought us Naxxramas (revisited) as "serious" raiding content. He's the person who basically eliminated threat as a mechanic. He's the person who wanted to make the game "less like Chess" and "more like Poker".
The problem with GC is that he likes to fuck with things. In major ways.
In PvP, this leads to 'flavor-of-the-month' classes/combos - who knows which one is going to be imba and at what time. In PvE, this leads to entire mechanics getting deprecated.
The problem is, many of us liked how the game played prior to GC. No, it wasn't perfect. Yes, there have been some improvements (like the queuing system for daily heroics).
You can't just go and upend everything whenever you feel like it. After a while players get tired of the change and decide, "screw it, I'm going to play something else".
That's what I did. After 5+ years of WoW, GC convinced me that it's not worth it anymore.
That's not true - Google released both 1.0 and 1.1 for the G1 before 1.5 (Cupcake) was released. Both were released more than 3 years after the Android acquisition in 2005.
There were no public releases from Android, Inc. And I can't find any reference to a release named "Bender", which would almost certainly run into trademark issues.
First, I'm 100% magnetic storage free for my PCs. My laptop has an Intel x25-m G2 160GB SSD, and I have a Corsair Nova 120GB SSD in my desktop.
But hard drives are not dead yet. It makes no sense to use an SSD in my DVR, in a backup device, or as a media storage drive. These are applications that do not require the kind of random-access performance you get with an SSD, but they do require decent sequential throughput (which hard drives deliver) and low cost per byte.
I think that laptop hard drives will die first. Low power usage and shock resistance are critical here, and notebook HDDs have even less performance and cost more per GB than desktop hard drives. Desktop hard drives will follow later. After that, hard drives will live on for years as backup and media storage devices.
Diesel contains significantly more energy per gallon than gasoline, so "MPG" comparisons to gasoline vehicles are totally useless.
Also, the UK fuel economy ratings are hopelessly optimistic, as are the Japanese tests.
The Third-Generation (ZVW30) Prius gets 59 MPUSG combined according to the UK tests, but 50 MPGUS according to the US tests. Anyone who actually drives their vehicle normally will tell you that the US tests are a lot closer to reality.
Whenever someone announces that a vehicle "beats" the Prius (or other hybrids) in fuel economy without a hybrid system, you have to look for one of several mistakes:
- Are they comparing diesel MPG (or L/100km) to gasoline? You can't do this because diesel contains more energy per unit volume. - Are they comparing a small vehicle to a much larger hybrid? Yes, you can get good fuel economy in a Smart, but it also doesn't hold 4 people and is considerably less safe if you get in an accident with a larger vehicle. - Are they comparing fuel economy ratings from different countries? Compared with the new EPA ratings (and reality), most ratings from other countries are hopelessly optimistic. - Are they using a different sized gallon? The Imperial gallon is larger.
Often this is done implicitly - the poster won't even mention the hybrid in their comparison. That way when you look up (or remember) the fuel economy ratings of the hybrid, you're likely to use US-EPA sources.
Well, to be fair, the MacBook Air is less than half the weight of your U30Jc (2.3lbs vs 4.8lbs). The U30JC isn't really a "thin and light" notebook, it's actually decently close to my ThinkPad T400 in size and wieght. It's what used to be called a normal sized laptop, but laptops have gotten increasingly large.
The Toshiba R705 is a better comparison. Optical drive, 13" display, 2.4GHz Core i3 - all in a 3lb package. Unfortunately it also has overheating issues because of the full-voltage CPU (although it's entirely possible that the MacBook Air does too) and the graphics are the normal Intel trash.
I am disappointed at seeing a Core 2 Duo. I know why Apple made the choice, but honestly I think most people would prefer a Core i5 and Intel integrated graphics to the Core 2 Duo and NVIDIA graphics. The number of people who plan on running CUDA or playing 3D games on an 11.6" notebook is vanishingly small.
Oddly enough, I'm in that category. The new MacBook Air would be an ideal machine for me as of 6 months ago, when my game of choice was World of Warcraft. The problem is that now I'm in to StarCraft II, which requires some serious CPU horsepower. Even the 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo and Radeon 3470 on my ThinkPad is just adequate, when I clock it down to 1.6GHz (using EIST) the frame rate drops from the 60 to the 40s (with now action) and from the 40s to the 20s (when there's action on the screen). That's a big difference in playability.
Hopefully Sandy Bridge will fix this. It's a shame that Apple didn't wait 4 months for it.
Is the Air underpowered? Of course. But you find me an 11" form factor laptop that doesn't look like a giant brick and has a 2ghz+ i7. Not even the Dell Alienware M11x offers more than a 1.06ghz i7 or 1.3ghz Core 2.
The Acer 1830 has an i7-680UM. It's not 2GHz base clock (it's 1.46GHz) but it does turbo to 2.53GHz. The reality is that you can't put a full-power Intel CPU in an 11.6" notebook today.
However, it's disappointing that Apple put a Penryn in the MacBook Air. Even a ULV i5 would run circles around the Core 2. The graphics argument is bogus, too - the i5 is an integrated CPU/northbridge (MCM), so it would in fact have fewer parts on the board. I think that most of the people who would buy an ultra-portable notebook would rather have a faster CPU and a slower GPU, since you're not going to do any sort of serious gaming on a 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo (and the Intel graphics are fine for desktop acceleration, HD video, and older games).
The real argument against this MacBook Air, though, is Zacata/Ontario and Sandy Bridge.
AMD Zacate will deliver similar CPU performance (compared with ULV Penryn - less IPC but higher clocks) with better GPU performance (Radeon 5400 class), using fewer chips and less power at a lower price. It arrives sometime early next year.
Sandy Bridge on the other hand will deliver similar GPU performance and vastly superior CPU performance with less power. It's probably going to be more expensive than Core 2, though. It also arrives early next year, although it's unclear when the ULV variants will ship.
The bottom line is that AMD and Intel are both working on major new architectures that are ideal for this application. Zacate/Ontario is all-new, and Sandy Bridge is Intel's biggest architecture change since Core 2. Launching at this point with a 2-year-old Intel platform just doesn't seem like the right timing.
Of course, they'll sell a bunch of them. Core 2 is still no slouch and the NVIDIA 320M graphics are the best integrated you can get right now. But if you can at all wait, do. Sandy Bridge and Zacate/Ontario are not the minor refreshes that we normally see from AMD/Intel, and they aren't years away - we're talking 4 months or less for Zacate/Ontario and 9 months or less for ULV Sandy Bridge.
What I don't get about the new MacBook Air is the default 2GB of memory. When every $500 PC at Best Buy is shipping with 4GB, you need to make it standard. We're spending $1000 on a MacBook Air, so it's silly to cheap out on the memory. Yeah, you can upgrade to 4GB for another $100. But you shouldn't need to special-order to get what should be the standard.
Core 2 Duo is disappointing but not unexpected. NVIDIA's chipset doesn't work with Nehalem and probably never will.
SSD is nice, but we'll have to see what the performance is. Depending on the controller it could range from poor to excellent.
Honestly, Apple did what they could. If you need to buy now, both of the MacBook Air models are nice - if expensive - machines. Getting a 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo and decent graphics in a 2.3lb package is really cool. Paying $1400 to get the configuration that this machine should have as stock (1.6GHz, 4GB, 128GB) is less so, but compared to other premium machines (ThinkPad X201s, Vaio Z) you're not paying much of a premium - you're just trading less performance for less size/weight.
The problem is that this category is about to be redefined. AMD is releasing Ontario and Zacate early next year, which will contain an out-of-order processor with similar performance to the Core 2 Duo in the Air, plus a Radeon 5400-class GPU that will handily beat the GeForce 320M in the Air. All of this in 9/18W (less than the Air) and a single chip, at a low price.
Intel is releasing Sandy Bridge next year. It will have similar graphics performance to the GeForce 320M, plus CPU performance that will blow it away. All while using less power, in a single chip.
You can already buy 11.6" notebooks with better CPU performance than the Air. The Acer 1830 series runs around $700 with an i5 and 4GB of DDR3. It has the same resolution screen as the 11.6" Air. It has a hard drive, which increases the size and weight. It also enables you to have 500GB of storage or to upgrade to a fast SSD (Intel, SandForce, etc.) for around $200. The Acer also has Gigabit Ethernet and an HDMI port.
The Air's advantage is that it's built better (aluminum vs plastic), that it's thinner/lighter (2.3lbs instead of ~3lbs), and that it runs OS X. But I can't help but think that the Mac would be better off with an i5 instead. Most people are not going to play games on an 11.6" notebook, both because of thermal issues (25W+ of CPU+GPU in that form factor means lots of heat/noise) and because PC gaming isn't that popular in general. I think most people would trade a slower Intel GPU for a faster CPU, and the Air could easily take a ULV Core i5 or i7 (18W).
Ultimately, Sandy Bridge or Zacate is the answer to this category, not a last-gen Core CPU. Apple made compromises that are acceptable but not ideal. Unfortunately, that's hard to swallow in a $1000+ machine.
C++ is successful for one big reason: it provides most of the advantages of C with the conveniences of an object-oriented language. Performance is excellent (close to C, which with a good compiler is close to hand-written assembly in most cases) and there's enough capability that you can write just about anything in it, including things that you would never consider writing in manged languages (like device drivers or the VM for those managed languages).
The problem is that the developers of C++ have trouble saying "no". There are a bunch of C++ features that aren't really necessary, but that exist either out of legacy or because someone thought it would be a good idea.
Like most users of C++, Google uses a severely restricted subset of the language. The thing is, most of what Google has left out is quite frankly unnecessary for 99.9% of C++ users. But we're all stuck with it anyway.
Once you get past some of the C-legacy anachronisms and restrict C++ to a small subset of its functionality, it's actually a nice language. The problem is that we can't take things out at this point.
The Volt uses a planetary gearset where the main gear is driven by the primary electric motor. The planet and ring gears can also optionally by driven by the engine and a second assist electric motor when needed. This allows the computer to continuously vary the power source that is driving the wheels. The only part of this equation that was not previously known was that the engine can directly give torque to the wheels under certain circumstances (without going through a generator).
This is exactly how the Prius works. The plug-in version of the Prius (currently in testing) even has ability to charge the battery from the grid, just like the Volt.
It's a sensible, efficient design. The problem is that it's neither particularly new nor particularly innovative, and it underscores the fact that the Volt is probably overpriced, which leaves GM open to being undercut by competitors like Honda or Toyota.
What's particularly ridiculous to me is that the Volt only goes ~40 miles on a 16kWh battery pack (2.5 mi per kWh). The Leaf goes ~100 miles on a 24kWh battery pack (4.2 mi per kWh). That tells me that the Volt is too big and too heavy.
The simple answer is noise. Many of the nettops (such as the Foxconn Netbox, which I suspect is what you bought on Newegg) are annoyingly loud.
What we need is a nettop using AMD's Ontario APU.
An Atom D525 is 13W (and the Atom 330 is actually worse despite being only 8W because you also need a multi-watt chipset). For that you get a slow (by modern standards) in-order CPU and absolutely terrible graphics (that don't support HDMI or hardware video decoding).
The Ontario APU is supposed to be 9W, including the memory controller and a Radeon 5400 class GPU. That means that you don't need an external GPU (as you do in NG-ION). It also has a dramatically faster out-of-order CPU.
Once you get down to that level, passive cooling starts to become an option.
With an NVIDIA ION system you can absolutely do SD flash video. HD flash video is also possible but you might see some dropped frames depending on the bitrate.
The US doesn't have RDS at all (Believe it or not)
We absolutely do - my Prius and my Zune both support RDS, and I get station identifiers from a number of FM stations in the Denver and Fort Collins areas.
No they did not. Analog 2-51 and Digital 2-51 are exactly the same spectrum. In fact a lot of the stations are had to do a "live cutover" from analog-to-digital at midnight June 12, because they occupy the exact same spot. These stations include WPVI, WGAL, WBAL, WHYY, WJZ, and so on.
While that's technically true, ATSC also allows channels to be remapped - so what you see as "Channel 9" might actually be UHF channel 31.
I don't know of any market where all 51 channels are being used.
The disk drives are also controlled. The disk drive don't let you just get the bits out - they will only give you data if you have a key, etc. I don't know the specifics but this is a *well* thought out system. They have serious control over this shit.
That's not actually true. You can absolutely get almost all of the data off of a Blu-ray disc without breaking AACS. What you can't get (without a hacked drive or an un-revoked player certificate) is the volume ID, which you need to decrypt or duplicate the disc.
Note that Blu-ray drives have basically been irrevocably broken at this point, so this is sort of moot.
"Blanket license" is a pretty common term - it means that the license applies to everyone in the class, regardless of whether or not they have signed a specific agreement with Microsoft.
Leave the country, move somewhere with a 21st century mobile infrastructure. Learn to smoke, casually. Lose weight. Wear better clothes. Talk with an accent. Use a Nokia.
In short, become European. Life is better.
800x480 AMOLED display, 1GHZ Snapdragon CPU, and 512MB of memory beats pretty much the entire Nokia lineup.
And I like 48-oz beverages that are strategically shaped to fit in my cupholder, $3.50 T-shirts form Wal-Mart and Target, double cheeseburgers, and $2.65/gallon gas.
They basically thought everyone was going to start using their computers for watching movies, video editing, and little else. So they designed the P4 with a horribly long pipeline that meant any context switching resulted in terrible performance.
If you don't know much about CPU architecture, please don't make a bunch of random statements about the P4.
First, the pipeline length has minimal impact on the speed of context switches. Context switches are relatively infrequent (compared with the CPU frequency) and relatively slow (typically several hundred cycles at a minimum).
The major downside of pipeline length comes from branch mispredicts. Branch mispredicts hurt you more because you have to flush more wrong instructions. Additionally, the scheduler is less able to parallelize instructions because instructions with data dependencies need to be spaced further out in the pipeline (forwarding doesn't help you unless the result has actually been computed, and in long pipelines there are typically several execution stages). Some of this can be improved with tactics like better branch prediction or multi-threading, but ultimately you give up IPC in a longer pipelined design.
Second, the P4 was not designed for "watching movies, video editing, and little else". It was designed to be fast. When Intel was designing the P4, the IPC-bag-of-tricks was starting to run out. The P6 (Pentium Pro, later evolved into the Pentium II/III) already had all the common improvements including multi-level, fast on-chip caches, a fully pipelined design, out-of-order execution, branch prediction, and multi-issue. The bottom line is that Intel realized (like everyone else) that making the chip wider or increasing caches really didn't do much for performance anymore. To keep seeing dramatic improvements in single-threaded performance, we either needed a completely new bag of tricks or we needed much higher clocks. Intel figured that they would make a CPU that (architecturally) could hit very high clocks, which means very deep pipelines to meet timing constraints. Yes, P4 would have lower IPC, but it would more than make it up in clock speed.
For a while, it worked. P4 was not a huge winner at first but over time (with Northwood) the P4 managed to out-gun AMD's lineup and become one of the fastest CPUs available. It does't matter if the Athlon could retire more instructions per clock, the P4 was clocked dramatically higher.
The problem is that somewhere around Prescott, the process technology ran out of gas. Leakage current became an issue more quickly than Intel had anticipated, thermal issues became problematic, and despite Intel's tricks (sockets that could handle more power, BTX, etc.) it became clear that people just weren't going to put a 400W CPU in their machine.
None of this is really a problem with the P4 architecture. With the right cooling and power, P4 can hit 8GHz. That's higher than any Intel or AMD CPU before or since.
You'll hear people say that P4 was a marketing decision. While I'm sure that the high clocks did benefit marketing, people who know the actual architects will tell you that it had more to do with chasing single-threaded performance than it had to do with marketing.
Some people say that the P4 was optimized for media. While it's true that highly predictable code (e.g. loopy scientific code and media encoding) performs especially well on the P4, compared with the Athlons of the day (before Athlon 64) so did everything else. You can't compare a 1.5GHz Athlon XP to a 1.5GHz P4 and argue that the Athlon is better because it's faster. P4 was specifically designed to make up for its lower IPC with very high clocks.
The whole thing was just a bad idea. AMD pretty quickly realized what was going on, avoided Rambus RAM like the plague, and concentrated on better performance at lower clockspeeds. AMD made huge inroads against Intel during this time.
The fact is, laws are made by both the religious and nonreligious.
In the US, not really. At the federal level nearly 100% of our representatives are either Christian or Jewish; the same is true to a somewhat lesser extent at the state and even local levels.
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This is just bullshit. Final Cut may be popular but it's not the only NLE product on the market. There's plenty of work done on Avid, Premiere, or even Vegas. All of which run fine on any mid-range to high-end PC laptop. There is no magic secret sauce that Apple products have here.
As for 'droid tablets' (presumably you mean 'Android tablets', since 'Droid' is a brand used only by Verizon for their Android products), there is no doubt that the $200 tablets on the market suck. Of course they suck. Google hasn't even released a tablet version of Android. The fact that some manufacturers have chosen to release products prematurely is no surprise.
I briefly owned a 11.6" MacBook Air, which I returned. It was a beautiful piece of hardware. But:
- I can't deal with clickpads. They make simple operations like dragging or right-clicking far more complex and error prone. Forget something like middle clicking unless you feel like doing some crazy multi-finger tap. It's also noisy, which can be annoying when you're trying to use it in class. My T400 has real buttons - left, right, and middle - with real tactile feel and quiet operation.
- The keyboard is annoying. With a T400 I get buttons like Page Up and Page Down, Home, End, and Delete. These work consistently and don't require FN shortcuts. On Mac laptops, Home and End are FN+Left Arrow and FN+Right Arrow. Unfortunately they aren't consistent at all. Sometimes they take you to the beginning or the end of the line, sometimes they take you to the beginning or end of a document. Sometimes you can use Command+Left Arrow/Right Arrow for cursor movement on the line, but then sometimes (e.g. the terminal) it doesn't work.
- Apple wants $80 for a MagSafe power adapter and sues anyone who tries to make a compatible adapter. You can get genuine ThinkPad power adapters for $30 or less on eBay, which means I can have 4 (couch, bedroom, desk, one for on the go) without breaking the bank. It's a hell of a lot more convenient to just plug in than it is to pull out and uncoil the adapter every time.
- Mouse acceleration is totally screwed up in Mac OS X. The curve is not really a curve - it starts out extremely slow and then abruptly jumps to very fast. This makes cursor control with a high-resolution mouse (like my Logitech G5) extremely difficult.
- X-buttons (back/forward) on a non-Apple mouse don't work. The only way to get them to work is to install third-party software, most of which costs money.
- Scroll wheel acceleration. I don't know who thought it was a good idea, but it seems to be impossible to disable.
- You can't make the machine stay awake with the lid closed without kernel extension hacks or plugging in a monitor.
- There's no full disk encryption. Home directory encryption is not the same thing.
- Window organization is annoying. There are no snaps (like in Windows 7 or KDE) and you can only resize windows from one corner. The zoom button is supposed to 'fit contents' or 'fit screen area', but in reality it seems to be completely arbitrary depending on the application. Maximize is useful and consistent.
- Lots of screen space is wasted. Panels (in GNOME or KDE) or the Taskbar are usable with under 30px of height. The Dock is useless at that size and realistically needs to be more like 50-60px. Most people get around this by hiding it, which drives me nuts because it's too easy to inadvertently activate and not there to notify you when you need it. Then there's the menu bar, which takes up more of your screen space, even in applications that don't need menus (like Google Chrome).
- You can hide a menu by clicking in it. There is 'dead space' between menu items that not only does nothing, it also closes the menu. This is another thing that makes absolutely no sense to me.
- OpenGL performance SUCKS. I know that Apple has been working on t
Your girlfriend should know better than to evaluate a translation system based on a series of repeated translations.
Translation, whether it is done by a human or a machine, always involves trade-offs. One of the most important trade-offs is between fluency and faithfulness. Fluency refers to how well the translation matches the conventions (syntactic and stylistic) of the destination language, whereas faithfulness refers to how precisely the translation matches the meaning of the original text. Because languages have idioms, and because often there are words in the source language that simply do not have a counterpart in the destination language, it is often necessary to simplify or modify the meaning to create a translation that is not awkward.
There is a constant balancing act - change too much and you end up with a translation that is misleading, change too little and you end up with a translation that's awkward and hard to understand. But the bottom line is that in ANY non-trivial translation, information is lost in the process. If you did the same experiment with human translators - and did it in a real sense, with different translators for each step in the cycle, you would end up with text that is perfectly readable but had very little in common with the source text.
I'm not saying that the translation in the article is 100% faithful to the original Russian. It's not. No real translation is. If the precise nature of the words is important, it's necessary to examine the implications of the Russian. You can't do that with a simple translation.
That's no longer the case - the Nokia N8 supports UMTS bands I, II, IV, V, and VIII so it will work with AT&T and T-Mobile in the US and with most other providers worldwide.
Yeah, it's called variable displacement. AKA MDS, Variable Cylinder Management, Active Fuel Management, etc. There are lots of GM, Chrysler, and Honda vehicles that have it right now.
StartCom offers free x.509 certificates, and their root is trusted by Windows/IE, Mozilla, and Mac OS / Safari.
I can't read anything that GC says.
This is the person that, as far as I can tell, single-handedly ruined WoW. I am not alone in this sentiment.
He's the person who brought us the hungry-hungry-hippos style button-mashing PvP in 3.0.
He's the person who brought us massive cleave teams.
He's the person who made mana to a large extent irrelevant.
He's the person who brought us Naxxramas (revisited) as "serious" raiding content.
He's the person who basically eliminated threat as a mechanic.
He's the person who wanted to make the game "less like Chess" and "more like Poker".
The problem with GC is that he likes to fuck with things. In major ways.
In PvP, this leads to 'flavor-of-the-month' classes/combos - who knows which one is going to be imba and at what time. In PvE, this leads to entire mechanics getting deprecated.
The problem is, many of us liked how the game played prior to GC. No, it wasn't perfect. Yes, there have been some improvements (like the queuing system for daily heroics).
You can't just go and upend everything whenever you feel like it. After a while players get tired of the change and decide, "screw it, I'm going to play something else".
That's what I did. After 5+ years of WoW, GC convinced me that it's not worth it anymore.
That's not true - Google released both 1.0 and 1.1 for the G1 before 1.5 (Cupcake) was released. Both were released more than 3 years after the Android acquisition in 2005.
There were no public releases from Android, Inc. And I can't find any reference to a release named "Bender", which would almost certainly run into trademark issues.
First, I'm 100% magnetic storage free for my PCs. My laptop has an Intel x25-m G2 160GB SSD, and I have a Corsair Nova 120GB SSD in my desktop.
But hard drives are not dead yet. It makes no sense to use an SSD in my DVR, in a backup device, or as a media storage drive. These are applications that do not require the kind of random-access performance you get with an SSD, but they do require decent sequential throughput (which hard drives deliver) and low cost per byte.
I think that laptop hard drives will die first. Low power usage and shock resistance are critical here, and notebook HDDs have even less performance and cost more per GB than desktop hard drives. Desktop hard drives will follow later. After that, hard drives will live on for years as backup and media storage devices.
Diesel contains significantly more energy per gallon than gasoline, so "MPG" comparisons to gasoline vehicles are totally useless.
Also, the UK fuel economy ratings are hopelessly optimistic, as are the Japanese tests.
The Third-Generation (ZVW30) Prius gets 59 MPUSG combined according to the UK tests, but 50 MPGUS according to the US tests. Anyone who actually drives their vehicle normally will tell you that the US tests are a lot closer to reality.
Whenever someone announces that a vehicle "beats" the Prius (or other hybrids) in fuel economy without a hybrid system, you have to look for one of several mistakes:
- Are they comparing diesel MPG (or L/100km) to gasoline? You can't do this because diesel contains more energy per unit volume.
- Are they comparing a small vehicle to a much larger hybrid? Yes, you can get good fuel economy in a Smart, but it also doesn't hold 4 people and is considerably less safe if you get in an accident with a larger vehicle.
- Are they comparing fuel economy ratings from different countries? Compared with the new EPA ratings (and reality), most ratings from other countries are hopelessly optimistic.
- Are they using a different sized gallon? The Imperial gallon is larger.
Often this is done implicitly - the poster won't even mention the hybrid in their comparison. That way when you look up (or remember) the fuel economy ratings of the hybrid, you're likely to use US-EPA sources.
Well, to be fair, the MacBook Air is less than half the weight of your U30Jc (2.3lbs vs 4.8lbs). The U30JC isn't really a "thin and light" notebook, it's actually decently close to my ThinkPad T400 in size and wieght. It's what used to be called a normal sized laptop, but laptops have gotten increasingly large.
The Toshiba R705 is a better comparison. Optical drive, 13" display, 2.4GHz Core i3 - all in a 3lb package. Unfortunately it also has overheating issues because of the full-voltage CPU (although it's entirely possible that the MacBook Air does too) and the graphics are the normal Intel trash.
I am disappointed at seeing a Core 2 Duo. I know why Apple made the choice, but honestly I think most people would prefer a Core i5 and Intel integrated graphics to the Core 2 Duo and NVIDIA graphics. The number of people who plan on running CUDA or playing 3D games on an 11.6" notebook is vanishingly small.
Oddly enough, I'm in that category. The new MacBook Air would be an ideal machine for me as of 6 months ago, when my game of choice was World of Warcraft. The problem is that now I'm in to StarCraft II, which requires some serious CPU horsepower. Even the 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo and Radeon 3470 on my ThinkPad is just adequate, when I clock it down to 1.6GHz (using EIST) the frame rate drops from the 60 to the 40s (with now action) and from the 40s to the 20s (when there's action on the screen). That's a big difference in playability.
Hopefully Sandy Bridge will fix this. It's a shame that Apple didn't wait 4 months for it.
http://www.amazon.com/Acer-TimelineX-AS1830T-68U118-11-6-Inch-Display/dp/B0042X8W0Q/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1287636352&sr=8-5
The Acer 1830 has an i7-680UM. It's not 2GHz base clock (it's 1.46GHz) but it does turbo to 2.53GHz. The reality is that you can't put a full-power Intel CPU in an 11.6" notebook today.
However, it's disappointing that Apple put a Penryn in the MacBook Air. Even a ULV i5 would run circles around the Core 2. The graphics argument is bogus, too - the i5 is an integrated CPU/northbridge (MCM), so it would in fact have fewer parts on the board. I think that most of the people who would buy an ultra-portable notebook would rather have a faster CPU and a slower GPU, since you're not going to do any sort of serious gaming on a 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo (and the Intel graphics are fine for desktop acceleration, HD video, and older games).
The real argument against this MacBook Air, though, is Zacata/Ontario and Sandy Bridge.
AMD Zacate will deliver similar CPU performance (compared with ULV Penryn - less IPC but higher clocks) with better GPU performance (Radeon 5400 class), using fewer chips and less power at a lower price. It arrives sometime early next year.
Sandy Bridge on the other hand will deliver similar GPU performance and vastly superior CPU performance with less power. It's probably going to be more expensive than Core 2, though. It also arrives early next year, although it's unclear when the ULV variants will ship.
The bottom line is that AMD and Intel are both working on major new architectures that are ideal for this application. Zacate/Ontario is all-new, and Sandy Bridge is Intel's biggest architecture change since Core 2. Launching at this point with a 2-year-old Intel platform just doesn't seem like the right timing.
Of course, they'll sell a bunch of them. Core 2 is still no slouch and the NVIDIA 320M graphics are the best integrated you can get right now. But if you can at all wait, do. Sandy Bridge and Zacate/Ontario are not the minor refreshes that we normally see from AMD/Intel, and they aren't years away - we're talking 4 months or less for Zacate/Ontario and 9 months or less for ULV Sandy Bridge.
What I don't get about the new MacBook Air is the default 2GB of memory. When every $500 PC at Best Buy is shipping with 4GB, you need to make it standard. We're spending $1000 on a MacBook Air, so it's silly to cheap out on the memory. Yeah, you can upgrade to 4GB for another $100. But you shouldn't need to special-order to get what should be the standard.
Core 2 Duo is disappointing but not unexpected. NVIDIA's chipset doesn't work with Nehalem and probably never will.
SSD is nice, but we'll have to see what the performance is. Depending on the controller it could range from poor to excellent.
Honestly, Apple did what they could. If you need to buy now, both of the MacBook Air models are nice - if expensive - machines. Getting a 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo and decent graphics in a 2.3lb package is really cool. Paying $1400 to get the configuration that this machine should have as stock (1.6GHz, 4GB, 128GB) is less so, but compared to other premium machines (ThinkPad X201s, Vaio Z) you're not paying much of a premium - you're just trading less performance for less size/weight.
The problem is that this category is about to be redefined. AMD is releasing Ontario and Zacate early next year, which will contain an out-of-order processor with similar performance to the Core 2 Duo in the Air, plus a Radeon 5400-class GPU that will handily beat the GeForce 320M in the Air. All of this in 9/18W (less than the Air) and a single chip, at a low price.
Intel is releasing Sandy Bridge next year. It will have similar graphics performance to the GeForce 320M, plus CPU performance that will blow it away. All while using less power, in a single chip.
You can already buy 11.6" notebooks with better CPU performance than the Air. The Acer 1830 series runs around $700 with an i5 and 4GB of DDR3. It has the same resolution screen as the 11.6" Air. It has a hard drive, which increases the size and weight. It also enables you to have 500GB of storage or to upgrade to a fast SSD (Intel, SandForce, etc.) for around $200. The Acer also has Gigabit Ethernet and an HDMI port.
The Air's advantage is that it's built better (aluminum vs plastic), that it's thinner/lighter (2.3lbs instead of ~3lbs), and that it runs OS X. But I can't help but think that the Mac would be better off with an i5 instead. Most people are not going to play games on an 11.6" notebook, both because of thermal issues (25W+ of CPU+GPU in that form factor means lots of heat/noise) and because PC gaming isn't that popular in general. I think most people would trade a slower Intel GPU for a faster CPU, and the Air could easily take a ULV Core i5 or i7 (18W).
Ultimately, Sandy Bridge or Zacate is the answer to this category, not a last-gen Core CPU. Apple made compromises that are acceptable but not ideal. Unfortunately, that's hard to swallow in a $1000+ machine.
C++ is successful for one big reason: it provides most of the advantages of C with the conveniences of an object-oriented language. Performance is excellent (close to C, which with a good compiler is close to hand-written assembly in most cases) and there's enough capability that you can write just about anything in it, including things that you would never consider writing in manged languages (like device drivers or the VM for those managed languages).
The problem is that the developers of C++ have trouble saying "no". There are a bunch of C++ features that aren't really necessary, but that exist either out of legacy or because someone thought it would be a good idea.
Look at Google's C++ style guide: http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.xml#Inheritance
Like most users of C++, Google uses a severely restricted subset of the language. The thing is, most of what Google has left out is quite frankly unnecessary for 99.9% of C++ users. But we're all stuck with it anyway.
Once you get past some of the C-legacy anachronisms and restrict C++ to a small subset of its functionality, it's actually a nice language. The problem is that we can't take things out at this point.
This is exactly how the Prius works. The plug-in version of the Prius (currently in testing) even has ability to charge the battery from the grid, just like the Volt.
It's a sensible, efficient design. The problem is that it's neither particularly new nor particularly innovative, and it underscores the fact that the Volt is probably overpriced, which leaves GM open to being undercut by competitors like Honda or Toyota.
What's particularly ridiculous to me is that the Volt only goes ~40 miles on a 16kWh battery pack (2.5 mi per kWh). The Leaf goes ~100 miles on a 24kWh battery pack (4.2 mi per kWh). That tells me that the Volt is too big and too heavy.
The simple answer is noise. Many of the nettops (such as the Foxconn Netbox, which I suspect is what you bought on Newegg) are annoyingly loud.
What we need is a nettop using AMD's Ontario APU.
An Atom D525 is 13W (and the Atom 330 is actually worse despite being only 8W because you also need a multi-watt chipset). For that you get a slow (by modern standards) in-order CPU and absolutely terrible graphics (that don't support HDMI or hardware video decoding).
The Ontario APU is supposed to be 9W, including the memory controller and a Radeon 5400 class GPU. That means that you don't need an external GPU (as you do in NG-ION). It also has a dramatically faster out-of-order CPU.
Once you get down to that level, passive cooling starts to become an option.
With an NVIDIA ION system you can absolutely do SD flash video. HD flash video is also possible but you might see some dropped frames depending on the bitrate.
We absolutely do - my Prius and my Zune both support RDS, and I get station identifiers from a number of FM stations in the Denver and Fort Collins areas.
While that's technically true, ATSC also allows channels to be remapped - so what you see as "Channel 9" might actually be UHF channel 31.
I don't know of any market where all 51 channels are being used.
That's not actually true. You can absolutely get almost all of the data off of a Blu-ray disc without breaking AACS. What you can't get (without a hacked drive or an un-revoked player certificate) is the volume ID, which you need to decrypt or duplicate the disc.
Note that Blu-ray drives have basically been irrevocably broken at this point, so this is sort of moot.
"Blanket license" is a pretty common term - it means that the license applies to everyone in the class, regardless of whether or not they have signed a specific agreement with Microsoft.
Not true. News Corp was re-incorporated in Delaware in 2004.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3953407.stm
800x480 AMOLED display, 1GHZ Snapdragon CPU, and 512MB of memory beats pretty much the entire Nokia lineup.
And I like 48-oz beverages that are strategically shaped to fit in my cupholder, $3.50 T-shirts form Wal-Mart and Target, double cheeseburgers, and $2.65/gallon gas.
If you don't know much about CPU architecture, please don't make a bunch of random statements about the P4.
First, the pipeline length has minimal impact on the speed of context switches. Context switches are relatively infrequent (compared with the CPU frequency) and relatively slow (typically several hundred cycles at a minimum).
The major downside of pipeline length comes from branch mispredicts. Branch mispredicts hurt you more because you have to flush more wrong instructions. Additionally, the scheduler is less able to parallelize instructions because instructions with data dependencies need to be spaced further out in the pipeline (forwarding doesn't help you unless the result has actually been computed, and in long pipelines there are typically several execution stages). Some of this can be improved with tactics like better branch prediction or multi-threading, but ultimately you give up IPC in a longer pipelined design.
Second, the P4 was not designed for "watching movies, video editing, and little else". It was designed to be fast. When Intel was designing the P4, the IPC-bag-of-tricks was starting to run out. The P6 (Pentium Pro, later evolved into the Pentium II/III) already had all the common improvements including multi-level, fast on-chip caches, a fully pipelined design, out-of-order execution, branch prediction, and multi-issue. The bottom line is that Intel realized (like everyone else) that making the chip wider or increasing caches really didn't do much for performance anymore. To keep seeing dramatic improvements in single-threaded performance, we either needed a completely new bag of tricks or we needed much higher clocks. Intel figured that they would make a CPU that (architecturally) could hit very high clocks, which means very deep pipelines to meet timing constraints. Yes, P4 would have lower IPC, but it would more than make it up in clock speed.
For a while, it worked. P4 was not a huge winner at first but over time (with Northwood) the P4 managed to out-gun AMD's lineup and become one of the fastest CPUs available. It does't matter if the Athlon could retire more instructions per clock, the P4 was clocked dramatically higher.
The problem is that somewhere around Prescott, the process technology ran out of gas. Leakage current became an issue more quickly than Intel had anticipated, thermal issues became problematic, and despite Intel's tricks (sockets that could handle more power, BTX, etc.) it became clear that people just weren't going to put a 400W CPU in their machine.
None of this is really a problem with the P4 architecture. With the right cooling and power, P4 can hit 8GHz. That's higher than any Intel or AMD CPU before or since.
You'll hear people say that P4 was a marketing decision. While I'm sure that the high clocks did benefit marketing, people who know the actual architects will tell you that it had more to do with chasing single-threaded performance than it had to do with marketing.
Some people say that the P4 was optimized for media. While it's true that highly predictable code (e.g. loopy scientific code and media encoding) performs especially well on the P4, compared with the Athlons of the day (before Athlon 64) so did everything else. You can't compare a 1.5GHz Athlon XP to a 1.5GHz P4 and argue that the Athlon is better because it's faster. P4 was specifically designed to make up for its lower IPC with very high clocks.
AMD made inroads very late in P4's life af
D-Link routers have IPv6, as does the Apple AirPort.
In the US, not really. At the federal level nearly 100% of our representatives are either Christian or Jewish; the same is true to a somewhat lesser extent at the state and even local levels.