Its not that we stopped dreaming, its that politics is blocking the dreamers and business can barely see past the next quarters results much less a 10 year research project.
Now days, the only kind of research you can get congress to fund is weapons related. Of course the original space race was founded this way too. Its wasn't about sending probes to venus, or men to mars, It was about lobbing bombs around the world, and putting men in space fighters.
A lot of that stopped when the outer space treaty started banning things. Which allowed the politicians to sleep at night.
Today, if you wanted to get the government to fund research into a star trek transporter, you would have to pitch it as a way to send bombs into foreign peoples houses rather than as a way to provide food aid. In the first case congress would shove more money at you than you needed, in the second you wouldn't get a penny.
Its the same thing with the war on terra, if you come up with a trillion dollar method of saving a hundred rich people from dying a violent death, then game on. But if you come up with a way to save ten thousand poor peoples lives a year from an illness, it doesn't really matter what it costs, it won't get funded.
They all think there is secret sauce in their product with some genuine trade secret level information.
In reality, having seen the secret sauce from a 3rd party perspective a few times, it turns out that often times the competitor is doing it basically the same way. So the only people being hurt by not publishing the hardware specifications (as was the normal state of things until the late 1990's) are the hackers and budding engineers trying to make the product better in some way.
In the case of graphics companies, it seems they are somewhat justified for not releasing the source to the proprietary drivers, as that is such a huge part of their performance work (aka sometimes the games aren't faster because the hardware is faster, they are faster because the driver is using a better algorithm, or has more micro optimization). Not releasing the hardware specs is just silly, because at this point, a big portion of the graphics chips are understood well enough that releasing information on mode setting or shader setup is more like filling in the details, rather than giving away any secrets.
The Optimus stuff is a prime example, its basically just going to be information on enabling/disabling parts of the chip or setting power envelops for certain functions. The real secret sauce is how to use that information. I have a similar issue with my little NAS box at home based on a guru plug. Marvell claims to be open source friendly, and gives away specifications that look good until you actually try to do something like power down an unused sata port. Then your SOL without the NDA, because knowing the register which controls the power gating is some kind of secret....
Mostly, what is being hidden is the fact that the emperor has no cloths.
Its a nice docking bay standard for laptops. Outside of that there are much better choices for desktop PCs.
For one SAS makes a much better disk attachment interface, as the x4 links normally used for external connections are already 24Gbit, and they can be ganged together. Plus, there are dozens if not hundreds of vendors selling external SAS arrays. Many of which can do significantly more than 1GB/sec read/write.
Thirdly, I can't see anyone actually using an external PCIe enclosure with a graphics card connected over 20Gbit of PCIe. A big part of graphics performance is moving things over the bus. Its the graphics card vendors shipping x16 boards and pushing for faster standards. I can see people connecting a bunch of monitors using the display port connections in thunderbolt. I can also see an assortment of proprietary pcie devices sitting in an enclosure like that, but I doubt the market is large enough to really justify inexpensive pcie enclosures. Hence the current prices, which seem to indicate the enclosure is going to cost more than a complete PC.
I can see people using TB instead of firewire to transfer data from prosumer cameras, but I suspect that most home camcorders will be limited to USB3.
Frankly, its a docking bay standard for people who bought laptops without expresscard slots. Its also peace of mind for people buying >$2.2k laptops that they won't get stranded with USB3 and giant hubs.
Thats funny because its says "starting UEFI" for 30 seconds, then it sits in some kind of EFI configuring devices screen for 3 minutes, then it starts scanning PCI devices, for another minute or so. Finally, it gives me an option to run the PCI/BIOS option roms, (which I skip). At that point grub starts.
That is a IBM desk side (to lazy to look at the model number), the x server in the lab takes probably 2x that long, not including the two minutes or so while it boots linux on the service processors if its started cold.
I was irritated with the bios manufactures after having a MR BIOS machine a few years ago that basically POSTed and booted fast enough, that it would display "waiting for disks to spin up" (when cold powered on), and immediately start lilo as soon as the disks had finished spinning up. Total BIOS time was 5 seconds.
Yet another reason to get better x86 support into u-boot. U-Boot is already everywhere, and seems to have won the race to be a BIOS replacement on every new platform. It works really well, POSTs and configures the machine generally in under a second, understands FAT/EXT2/etc well enough to directly load a linux kernel, yet is low level enough to just load a MBR like bootloader,etc.
Basically, it does what the BIOS should be doing (configure basic RAM/CPU/Disk/network, only enough to start something else).
Frankly, as I sit here waiting for my nice new IBM desktop machine to waste 5 minutes rebooting UEFI, I just want to smash the machine.
Hell, it might even expose that the teacher knows less of a subject than his student (which isn't as far fetched as it may seem, especially in a field like CS where new developments often render your knowledge obsolete in few years).
Hmm, your definition of CS must be different from mine, because I can't think of many Computer Science things that I know that have been rendered "obsolete" in the last 15-20 years. Sure things like how to copy a file, or when to put the semicolon after an end in pascal changes. But those are not comp-sci or even fundamental things about computers. Linked lists are still linked lists, and they still take O(n) to traverse. The dining philosophers problem is the same today with memory holding data structures as it was in 1965 with tape drives. Frankly, how computer hardware works hasn't changed much since the 1960's when the system 360 came out. The details of how to implement paging, or how many/big the registers are changed, but the concepts are still the same. If you understand those concepts you can move from one technology to the next with ease.
Uh, they teach linear algebra (called algebra 2) in HS. Unless your on the basic math track its sort of hard to avoid. Its pretty common to get calc in HS for kids on the advanced tracks.
Even so, it is possible to pick up a book and learn math if someone has any motivation at all. It is possible to be missing some of the prereqs, but that can be learned too. I recently had to learn a bunch about Galois theory for some signal processing applications, even though I didn't take any abstract algebra in college. I've considered taking some of those classes at the local university, but I don't do it because my basic algebra/calc/diffeq/etc skills are so weak through disuse that I will probably have to retake a large portion of the math curriculum before I can realistically expect to take more advanced classes. I'm better off just learning the isolated bits I need.
Yah same here, I took some french at the college level. A couple years after getting my BS (foreign language wasn't required at the school I went to for BS's if you had two or more years at the HS level!).
I thought I was going to have an advantage, even though I had pretty much forgotten all the french I had in HS. Boy was I in for it. French is the 2nd most popular language in HS after Spanish, and you could pretty much tell that about 1/2 the class had some experience with it. OTOH, about 1/4 of the class was completely lost. I had to work my ass off, and still got B's.
your theory would be fine except for the slight problem that without ARM Inc the massive global low power smartphone market wouldn't exist today,
Hu? No, they would be using MIPS or something else, just like they were doing in the days of PalmOS (originally 68k based) and windows CE. There is nothing magical about ARM and power/performance. In fact, MIPS had a power/performance lead for a long time. Apple could have probably used a PPC instead of a ARM, and they would be in the exact same place as today. The idea the ARM somehow made this happen is funny at best. Apple and Google made it happen, and in the latter case they obviously aren't depending on ARM (see Dalvik). The fact that most of the smart phones are ARM is mostly due to the huge number of SOC vendors creating a very nice momentum for ARM even as early as the late 1990's.
Anyway, I think the point is that if your depending on better power/performance numbers vs Intel, and intel is seriously interested in the market, you are going to have a very tough fight. It wouldn't surprise me if in 5-7 years android is mostly x86 and Apple is still ARM (because of the platform dependence).
Heck, maybe MS can make win8 happen (seems unlikely but what the heck). No one is really going to want it on ARM, if an x86 version is anywhere near competitive.
Maybe they determined that a lot of the problems could be detected in a QA cycle if they extended it. That doesn't keep them from releasing hot fixes for specific problems, but it can seriously help to avoid regressions and the like.
Frankly, as someone who writes drivers I find it hard to believe they can release quality drivers every month. It would be one thing if the monthly releases were bug fix rollups, but they include all kinds of things I would assume are more "feature" related, and therefor of no interest to a large number of people who have working systems.
Its even worse for ARM, because intel was doing it with a binary translation layer, and a older/slower version of android.
I would be pissing my pants if I were ARM right now. Intel has done this a number of times, some company claims intel can't do X, and a few years later, that company is gone because intel did it.
The smartphone market is especially problematic because ARM has failed to deliver a proper platform, and therefore vendor lock. So there are dozens of variations that are all incomparable with each other. So the market is flexible, they could just as soon switch to x86, superH, MIPS etc, as the next generation of ARM.
That said, I don't think ARM really has anything to worry about long term, they will just revert to where they were 8 years ago, when they were in all kinds of embedded products, only now they have more mind share.
One of my favorite ones, is a house about 8 doors down, which has a WPA secured network and a WEP one called "FBISecureInvest" or some such. Which I find funny, because while Im 100% sure its not the FBI, I'm still not going to mess with it.
The problem is that our society has decided that it's OK for a female to engage in a Mating Display and expect the males to not respond.
I agree, but its worse than that, society expects women to engage in a mating display even when its not appropriate. Women's fashions are such that dressing "smartly" for a women of childbearing age always includes a strong display of femininity. Even styles (say shoulder pads and narrow waist pant suits) that decrease femininity, always are paired with things that result in an overall stress of some secondary sex characteristic.
The end result is that if a women wants to portray a sense of seriousness and success she has to wear things that are effectively a mating display. Only, once a women reaches her late 40's do the styles change sufficiently to get around this.
BTW: This is exactly the opposite for males. Male business dress styles almost universally hide male secondary sex characteristics. From the shaven face, to the hiding of wide shoulders. If you were to put a women in a suit for man, it would be hard (outside of her face) to determine the gender of the person wearing the suit. For most women the extra fabric and the lack of a bra would make it hard to even notice their breasts, as they would flatten down.
As the proud owner of an international model XXL 540 TM (IIRC... basically a midrange lifetime maps/traffic device), I can honestly say tomtom sucks.
The device is mostly ok, when it works. The problem is the map and firmware update process is so fcked up as to make the device unusable for non computer geek mortals. There is probably a 50% chance every-time I update it, that it ends up broken. Just go to the tomtom forums and look at the list of complaints. I could go on for hours about what is wrong with the device, but the summary is that, even with the "free" maps the hours you will spend updating it, and fixing the stupid crap that breaks, means your probably better off just throwing the device away every couple years and buying a new one.
All I can say is thank god for internet forums where people have figured out how to fix one bug or another by standing on their heads and doing some nonsensical thing. Otherwise I would have thrown mine away years ago.
Basically, I won't be buying another TT device, at any price.
Except I got my netbook (MSI), new for $199 with a (crappy inkjet) printer, and it fits in my hand. Plus, it runs for 8 hours. That is what the original netbook market was all about, before HP and Dell/etc decided they could subvert the netbook market with $500 netbooks.
The cheap laptop market generally were large machines, with crappy screens and crappy batteries. Its pretty much the same now, my tablet has equal or better resolution than 9/10ths of the machines under $1000.
How MSFT can be so blind as to not see that people buy windows for the Wintel programs and not for the MSFT brand is beyond me,
I totally agree, but the people who understand the windows marketplace left somewhere between XP and vista. When the 64 bit versions of windows were released I expected they would run 16 bit apps via some kind of software thunking or even a mini VM. The one reason to run windows before then really was the fact that you could get just about any application you wanted, and it would probably work for the rest of time. I have copies of MS word for windows 2.0 that could run on the 32-bit version of W2003. Then MS decided to throw compatibility and consistency to the wind. The one thing they were good at, they are throwing away. Now you can't even expect keystrokes to be consistent between Microsoft applications much less any kind of UI rules. I was just ranting to my co-workers how ctrl-end no longer works in firefox.. Of course its not firefoxes fault so much as MS which no longer has any kind of real UI guidelines. Even if they did, they would be throwing them away every 2 years.
As a final note both Dave Cutler (the designer of the NT kernel) and of all people Apple showed them the way but MSFT didn't listen and now its too late. Cutler pushed for NT to be kept portable and Apple showed that if you want to change arches you need to have a crossover period where you can run both new and old on the new platform.
There have been a number of other cases where vendors moved the arch underneath their user base. HP-UX comes to mind, the PA->Itanic conversion happened pretty much seamlessly, except for the fact that PA apps ran pretty bad on itanium for about 5 years.
And that is where the problem lies, see they could write an x86 emulator for ARM, and detect the binaries, and make the whole thing seamless. The one huge problem is that when apple moved from 68k to PPC, and then again from PPC to intel, there was a pretty extreme performance advantage on the newer platform to hide the inefficiencies of the emulation layers.
With ARM vs x86 this simply isn't possible there is at a minimum a ~2x to ~20x performance delta between the fastest ARM available and a x86 (atom to intel EE). So even with fat binaries, its going to be a noticeable speed impact for anything that is performance intensive.
All this is sort of moot though, because MS has been pushing.net for the last decade. In theory anything written for.net can run on any platform, the same way java could. Its just a matter of getting the.net layers working. Of course MS doesn't have a good track record of getting it working on new platforms. Look at the delay between the beta release of windows x64 and.net for the platform.
They have a second niche, much more directly focused on price, in compute-light, memory-heavy server applications(since you can populate your sockets with AMD CPUs for less and the number of DIMMs you get is roughly proportional to the number of sockets you have active)
I haven't tried AMD's latest server machines, but if they are even 1/2 as good as the old, ones they are a _MUCH_ better deal. My 6 !! year old DL585G2 is actually faster on every single thing it gets used for than the much newer westmere machines we have been buying. The problem is that intel is charging an absolute fortune for chips clocked fast, so we end up with 1.8 or 2.2Ghz westmere machines, and their single thread performance is abysmal compared to the much older 3.2Ghz AMD machine. Our application scales nicely, but quickly becomes IO bound, so both machines basically get the same throughput, but the AMD machine has much lower overall latency. This results in it actually getting much better benchmarks in our tests.
So, in theory we could get an intel that kicks the crap out of the AMD machine, but its going to cost us 5x as much (from ~$5k to ~$25k). So we buy the cheap ones, and they get their ass handed to them by a 6 year old machine that cost $5k when it was new.
Same think on my atom. Netflix is apparently doing all the decoding in software, and the thing drops frames like crazy plugged into the wall in standard def mode. A lot of the time, its not really even watchable once the stream bitrate goes up due to action sequences or whatnot.
Doesn't Apple grasp this concept of source code versioning and build management?
Its not just apple (if this is even the case), its an amazingly huge number of "software" companies out there. For some reason, the idea of enforcing coding rules for debug flags and the like, along with enforcing a proper build system seem to escape a large (i'm guessing well over 50%) percentage of developers out there. I've seen/heard about it time and time again, where the build going out the door is the one generated on some developers desktop machine, our out of a developers personal checkout of code. What is even worse is often times no one else even sees a problem with this, because its been going on for so long.
I assume you talking about the kernel/lib changes in the service packs. In that case you are right, the other side of the coin, is that if they break something that was supported, you should call them and make them fix it, its after all the reason your paying for support.
Otherwise I haven't been paying really close attention to their upgrade cycle as we standardized on one of their versions and once it was working, haven't applied any of the service packs. In theory, there might be security issues, if we were running a standard externally accessible service, but we don't export anything that isn't being maintained in house.
I haven't seen a single other Linux distro with a control center. At least not one of the scale and functionality of Mandriva's
Try suse, I was a heavy mandrake user back in the day, Its light years ahead of unbuntu (and friends) when it comes to having an integrated control panel.
There are a number of other things good about suse, too, and with the addition of zypper a few years ago, the whole apt-get argument for deb based distributions was shot to hell. Of course, yast also has a package manager (same stuff in a GUI, rather than typing zypper install xyz) UI, and has been able to resolve dependency tree's and give the users control over such things using RPM for over a decade now.
I've tried ubuntu and a few others on and off for a few years, but I pretty much keep coming back to suse, because its better. I frankly, can't understand why everyone thinks ubuntu is so great. Within an hour or two of installing it I generally have a list of a dozen or so things that "just work" in suse that require me to hack text files, screw around with package versions, etc in ubuntu. Yast, is far from perfect, but it does concentrate the majority of the non window manager dependent configuration functionality into a single location. Plus, its extensible, meaning that as you install services or what not on the machine, additional yast options become available.
Plus, its got a long term enterprise version called SLES, which is as well supported as RHEL, so its possible to build packages that run on both desktop grade machines, as well as the bigger iron in the server room that has SLA's and such.
There is a raging debate about why city console rolled over and gave the richest corp in the US huge tax incentives to expand their campus here.
Its just more of the race to the tax bottom. Easily fixed if we just instituted minimum national tax rates for fortune 1000 corps, and figured out a way to actually have tarifs (to avoid having the whole company offshore everything) again.
We actually, know how to do this, because we did it in the past, and it made the US the most economically powerful country on the planet. The problem is the fools proclaiming free trade for all, and the politicians that base everything on dogma rather than trying to determine what has actually worked in the past, and repeat it. Sort of like the idea that trickle down economics actually works. It keeps being done, and every time the excuse why it failed is because we didn't have enough of it.
The underlying security model of XP is fundamentally flawed.
In what way? The model in 7 is basically the same as the security model in NT 3.1. The two most significant tweaks to the "model" itself was the runas and code signing functionality added in W2k.
In that way, the security changes in vista were actually little more than forcing people to use functionality already built in. Plus, adding a prettier face to it.
So that said, It seems to me that simply running as a limited user in XP gives you the majority of the security improvements gained by vista. The code signing is handy, but not really useful for the average windows user. It _IS_ handy for the expert who can detect signatures that have been tampered with, and attempt to track down the identity of the person who creates signed malware.
The one good thing about vista is that a lot more companies have fixed issues in their software that kept it from working in a limited environment, or actually signed their binaries to avoid the unsigned app notice. That helps XP users just as much as it helps users of 7.
All that said, for the security minded, running something like sandboxie on XP is actually going to give you _MORE_ security than running 7 by itself.
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Its not that we stopped dreaming, its that politics is blocking the dreamers and business can barely see past the next quarters results much less a 10 year research project.
Now days, the only kind of research you can get congress to fund is weapons related. Of course the original space race was founded this way too. Its wasn't about sending probes to venus, or men to mars, It was about lobbing bombs around the world, and putting men in space fighters.
A lot of that stopped when the outer space treaty started banning things. Which allowed the politicians to sleep at night.
Today, if you wanted to get the government to fund research into a star trek transporter, you would have to pitch it as a way to send bombs into foreign peoples houses rather than as a way to provide food aid. In the first case congress would shove more money at you than you needed, in the second you wouldn't get a penny.
Its the same thing with the war on terra, if you come up with a trillion dollar method of saving a hundred rich people from dying a violent death, then game on. But if you come up with a way to save ten thousand poor peoples lives a year from an illness, it doesn't really matter what it costs, it won't get funded.
They all think there is secret sauce in their product with some genuine trade secret level information.
In reality, having seen the secret sauce from a 3rd party perspective a few times, it turns out that often times the competitor is doing it basically the same way. So the only people being hurt by not publishing the hardware specifications (as was the normal state of things until the late 1990's) are the hackers and budding engineers trying to make the product better in some way.
In the case of graphics companies, it seems they are somewhat justified for not releasing the source to the proprietary drivers, as that is such a huge part of their performance work (aka sometimes the games aren't faster because the hardware is faster, they are faster because the driver is using a better algorithm, or has more micro optimization). Not releasing the hardware specs is just silly, because at this point, a big portion of the graphics chips are understood well enough that releasing information on mode setting or shader setup is more like filling in the details, rather than giving away any secrets.
The Optimus stuff is a prime example, its basically just going to be information on enabling/disabling parts of the chip or setting power envelops for certain functions. The real secret sauce is how to use that information. I have a similar issue with my little NAS box at home based on a guru plug. Marvell claims to be open source friendly, and gives away specifications that look good until you actually try to do something like power down an unused sata port. Then your SOL without the NDA, because knowing the register which controls the power gating is some kind of secret....
Mostly, what is being hidden is the fact that the emperor has no cloths.
Its a nice docking bay standard for laptops. Outside of that there are much better choices for desktop PCs.
For one SAS makes a much better disk attachment interface, as the x4 links normally used for external connections are already 24Gbit, and they can be ganged together. Plus, there are dozens if not hundreds of vendors selling external SAS arrays. Many of which can do significantly more than 1GB/sec read/write.
Thirdly, I can't see anyone actually using an external PCIe enclosure with a graphics card connected over 20Gbit of PCIe. A big part of graphics performance is moving things over the bus. Its the graphics card vendors shipping x16 boards and pushing for faster standards. I can see people connecting a bunch of monitors using the display port connections in thunderbolt. I can also see an assortment of proprietary pcie devices sitting in an enclosure like that, but I doubt the market is large enough to really justify inexpensive pcie enclosures. Hence the current prices, which seem to indicate the enclosure is going to cost more than a complete PC.
I can see people using TB instead of firewire to transfer data from prosumer cameras, but I suspect that most home camcorders will be limited to USB3.
Frankly, its a docking bay standard for people who bought laptops without expresscard slots. Its also peace of mind for people buying >$2.2k laptops that they won't get stranded with USB3 and giant hubs.
Thats funny because its says "starting UEFI" for 30 seconds, then it sits in some kind of EFI configuring devices screen for 3 minutes, then it starts scanning PCI devices, for another minute or so. Finally, it gives me an option to run the PCI/BIOS option roms, (which I skip). At that point grub starts.
That is a IBM desk side (to lazy to look at the model number), the x server in the lab takes probably 2x that long, not including the two minutes or so while it boots linux on the service processors if its started cold.
I was irritated with the bios manufactures after having a MR BIOS machine a few years ago that basically POSTed and booted fast enough, that it would display "waiting for disks to spin up" (when cold powered on), and immediately start lilo as soon as the disks had finished spinning up. Total BIOS time was 5 seconds.
There is a commercial option, they just have to have licensed it from Oberhumer.
That might have been a fun discussion.
Yet another reason to get better x86 support into u-boot. U-Boot is already everywhere, and seems to have won the race to be a BIOS replacement on every new platform. It works really well, POSTs and configures the machine generally in under a second, understands FAT/EXT2/etc well enough to directly load a linux kernel, yet is low level enough to just load a MBR like bootloader,etc.
Basically, it does what the BIOS should be doing (configure basic RAM/CPU/Disk/network, only enough to start something else).
Frankly, as I sit here waiting for my nice new IBM desktop machine to waste 5 minutes rebooting UEFI, I just want to smash the machine.
Hell, it might even expose that the teacher knows less of a subject than his student (which isn't as far fetched as it may seem, especially in a field like CS where new developments often render your knowledge obsolete in few years).
Hmm, your definition of CS must be different from mine, because I can't think of many Computer Science things that I know that have been rendered "obsolete" in the last 15-20 years. Sure things like how to copy a file, or when to put the semicolon after an end in pascal changes. But those are not comp-sci or even fundamental things about computers. Linked lists are still linked lists, and they still take O(n) to traverse. The dining philosophers problem is the same today with memory holding data structures as it was in 1965 with tape drives. Frankly, how computer hardware works hasn't changed much since the 1960's when the system 360 came out. The details of how to implement paging, or how many/big the registers are changed, but the concepts are still the same. If you understand those concepts you can move from one technology to the next with ease.
Uh, they teach linear algebra (called algebra 2) in HS. Unless your on the basic math track its sort of hard to avoid. Its pretty common to get calc in HS for kids on the advanced tracks.
Even so, it is possible to pick up a book and learn math if someone has any motivation at all. It is possible to be missing some of the prereqs, but that can be learned too. I recently had to learn a bunch about Galois theory for some signal processing applications, even though I didn't take any abstract algebra in college. I've considered taking some of those classes at the local university, but I don't do it because my basic algebra/calc/diffeq/etc skills are so weak through disuse that I will probably have to retake a large portion of the math curriculum before I can realistically expect to take more advanced classes. I'm better off just learning the isolated bits I need.
Yah same here, I took some french at the college level. A couple years after getting my BS (foreign language wasn't required at the school I went to for BS's if you had two or more years at the HS level!).
I thought I was going to have an advantage, even though I had pretty much forgotten all the french I had in HS. Boy was I in for it. French is the 2nd most popular language in HS after Spanish, and you could pretty much tell that about 1/2 the class had some experience with it. OTOH, about 1/4 of the class was completely lost. I had to work my ass off, and still got B's.
your theory would be fine except for the slight problem that without ARM Inc the massive global low power smartphone market wouldn't exist today,
Hu? No, they would be using MIPS or something else, just like they were doing in the days of PalmOS (originally 68k based) and windows CE. There is nothing magical about ARM and power/performance. In fact, MIPS had a power/performance lead for a long time. Apple could have probably used a PPC instead of a ARM, and they would be in the exact same place as today. The idea the ARM somehow made this happen is funny at best. Apple and Google made it happen, and in the latter case they obviously aren't depending on ARM (see Dalvik). The fact that most of the smart phones are ARM is mostly due to the huge number of SOC vendors creating a very nice momentum for ARM even as early as the late 1990's.
Anyway, I think the point is that if your depending on better power/performance numbers vs Intel, and intel is seriously interested in the market, you are going to have a very tough fight. It wouldn't surprise me if in 5-7 years android is mostly x86 and Apple is still ARM (because of the platform dependence).
Heck, maybe MS can make win8 happen (seems unlikely but what the heck). No one is really going to want it on ARM, if an x86 version is anywhere near competitive.
Maybe they determined that a lot of the problems could be detected in a QA cycle if they extended it. That doesn't keep them from releasing hot fixes for specific problems, but it can seriously help to avoid regressions and the like.
Frankly, as someone who writes drivers I find it hard to believe they can release quality drivers every month. It would be one thing if the monthly releases were bug fix rollups, but they include all kinds of things I would assume are more "feature" related, and therefor of no interest to a large number of people who have working systems.
Its even worse for ARM, because intel was doing it with a binary translation layer, and a older/slower version of android.
I would be pissing my pants if I were ARM right now. Intel has done this a number of times, some company claims intel can't do X, and a few years later, that company is gone because intel did it.
The smartphone market is especially problematic because ARM has failed to deliver a proper platform, and therefore vendor lock. So there are dozens of variations that are all incomparable with each other. So the market is flexible, they could just as soon switch to x86, superH, MIPS etc, as the next generation of ARM.
That said, I don't think ARM really has anything to worry about long term, they will just revert to where they were 8 years ago, when they were in all kinds of embedded products, only now they have more mind share.
One of my favorite ones, is a house about 8 doors down, which has a WPA secured network and a WEP one called "FBISecureInvest" or some such. Which I find funny, because while Im 100% sure its not the FBI, I'm still not going to mess with it.
The problem is that our society has decided that it's OK for a female to engage in a Mating Display and expect the males to not respond.
I agree, but its worse than that, society expects women to engage in a mating display even when its not appropriate. Women's fashions are such that dressing "smartly" for a women of childbearing age always includes a strong display of femininity. Even styles (say shoulder pads and narrow waist pant suits) that decrease femininity, always are paired with things that result in an overall stress of some secondary sex characteristic.
The end result is that if a women wants to portray a sense of seriousness and success she has to wear things that are effectively a mating display. Only, once a women reaches her late 40's do the styles change sufficiently to get around this.
BTW: This is exactly the opposite for males. Male business dress styles almost universally hide male secondary sex characteristics. From the shaven face, to the hiding of wide shoulders. If you were to put a women in a suit for man, it would be hard (outside of her face) to determine the gender of the person wearing the suit. For most women the extra fabric and the lack of a bra would make it hard to even notice their breasts, as they would flatten down.
As the proud owner of an international model XXL 540 TM (IIRC... basically a midrange lifetime maps/traffic device), I can honestly say tomtom sucks.
The device is mostly ok, when it works. The problem is the map and firmware update process is so fcked up as to make the device unusable for non computer geek mortals. There is probably a 50% chance every-time I update it, that it ends up broken. Just go to the tomtom forums and look at the list of complaints. I could go on for hours about what is wrong with the device, but the summary is that, even with the "free" maps the hours you will spend updating it, and fixing the stupid crap that breaks, means your probably better off just throwing the device away every couple years and buying a new one.
All I can say is thank god for internet forums where people have figured out how to fix one bug or another by standing on their heads and doing some nonsensical thing. Otherwise I would have thrown mine away years ago.
Basically, I won't be buying another TT device, at any price.
Except I got my netbook (MSI), new for $199 with a (crappy inkjet) printer, and it fits in my hand. Plus, it runs for 8 hours. That is what the original netbook market was all about, before HP and Dell/etc decided they could subvert the netbook market with $500 netbooks.
The cheap laptop market generally were large machines, with crappy screens and crappy batteries. Its pretty much the same now, my tablet has equal or better resolution than 9/10ths of the machines under $1000.
How MSFT can be so blind as to not see that people buy windows for the Wintel programs and not for the MSFT brand is beyond me,
I totally agree, but the people who understand the windows marketplace left somewhere between XP and vista. When the 64 bit versions of windows were released I expected they would run 16 bit apps via some kind of software thunking or even a mini VM. The one reason to run windows before then really was the fact that you could get just about any application you wanted, and it would probably work for the rest of time. I have copies of MS word for windows 2.0 that could run on the 32-bit version of W2003. Then MS decided to throw compatibility and consistency to the wind. The one thing they were good at, they are throwing away. Now you can't even expect keystrokes to be consistent between Microsoft applications much less any kind of UI rules. I was just ranting to my co-workers how ctrl-end no longer works in firefox.. Of course its not firefoxes fault so much as MS which no longer has any kind of real UI guidelines. Even if they did, they would be throwing them away every 2 years.
As a final note both Dave Cutler (the designer of the NT kernel) and of all people Apple showed them the way but MSFT didn't listen and now its too late. Cutler pushed for NT to be kept portable and Apple showed that if you want to change arches you need to have a crossover period where you can run both new and old on the new platform.
There have been a number of other cases where vendors moved the arch underneath their user base. HP-UX comes to mind, the PA->Itanic conversion happened pretty much seamlessly, except for the fact that PA apps ran pretty bad on itanium for about 5 years.
And that is where the problem lies, see they could write an x86 emulator for ARM, and detect the binaries, and make the whole thing seamless. The one huge problem is that when apple moved from 68k to PPC, and then again from PPC to intel, there was a pretty extreme performance advantage on the newer platform to hide the inefficiencies of the emulation layers.
With ARM vs x86 this simply isn't possible there is at a minimum a ~2x to ~20x performance delta between the fastest ARM available and a x86 (atom to intel EE). So even with fat binaries, its going to be a noticeable speed impact for anything that is performance intensive.
All this is sort of moot though, because MS has been pushing .net for the last decade. In theory anything written for .net can run on any platform, the same way java could. Its just a matter of getting the .net layers working. Of course MS doesn't have a good track record of getting it working on new platforms. Look at the delay between the beta release of windows x64 and .net for the platform.
They have a second niche, much more directly focused on price, in compute-light, memory-heavy server applications(since you can populate your sockets with AMD CPUs for less and the number of DIMMs you get is roughly proportional to the number of sockets you have active)
I haven't tried AMD's latest server machines, but if they are even 1/2 as good as the old, ones they are a _MUCH_ better deal. My 6 !! year old DL585G2 is actually faster on every single thing it gets used for than the much newer westmere machines we have been buying. The problem is that intel is charging an absolute fortune for chips clocked fast, so we end up with 1.8 or 2.2Ghz westmere machines, and their single thread performance is abysmal compared to the much older 3.2Ghz AMD machine. Our application scales nicely, but quickly becomes IO bound, so both machines basically get the same throughput, but the AMD machine has much lower overall latency. This results in it actually getting much better benchmarks in our tests.
So, in theory we could get an intel that kicks the crap out of the AMD machine, but its going to cost us 5x as much (from ~$5k to ~$25k). So we buy the cheap ones, and they get their ass handed to them by a 6 year old machine that cost $5k when it was new.
Same think on my atom. Netflix is apparently doing all the decoding in software, and the thing drops frames like crazy plugged into the wall in standard def mode. A lot of the time, its not really even watchable once the stream bitrate goes up due to action sequences or whatnot.
Doesn't Apple grasp this concept of source code versioning and build management?
Its not just apple (if this is even the case), its an amazingly huge number of "software" companies out there. For some reason, the idea of enforcing coding rules for debug flags and the like, along with enforcing a proper build system seem to escape a large (i'm guessing well over 50%) percentage of developers out there. I've seen/heard about it time and time again, where the build going out the door is the one generated on some developers desktop machine, our out of a developers personal checkout of code. What is even worse is often times no one else even sees a problem with this, because its been going on for so long.
I assume you talking about the kernel/lib changes in the service packs. In that case you are right, the other side of the coin, is that if they break something that was supported, you should call them and make them fix it, its after all the reason your paying for support.
Otherwise I haven't been paying really close attention to their upgrade cycle as we standardized on one of their versions and once it was working, haven't applied any of the service packs. In theory, there might be security issues, if we were running a standard externally accessible service, but we don't export anything that isn't being maintained in house.
I haven't seen a single other Linux distro with a control center. At least not one of the scale and functionality of Mandriva's
Try suse, I was a heavy mandrake user back in the day, Its light years ahead of unbuntu (and friends) when it comes to having an integrated control panel.
There are a number of other things good about suse, too, and with the addition of zypper a few years ago, the whole apt-get argument for deb based distributions was shot to hell. Of course, yast also has a package manager (same stuff in a GUI, rather than typing zypper install xyz) UI, and has been able to resolve dependency tree's and give the users control over such things using RPM for over a decade now.
I've tried ubuntu and a few others on and off for a few years, but I pretty much keep coming back to suse, because its better. I frankly, can't understand why everyone thinks ubuntu is so great. Within an hour or two of installing it I generally have a list of a dozen or so things that "just work" in suse that require me to hack text files, screw around with package versions, etc in ubuntu. Yast, is far from perfect, but it does concentrate the majority of the non window manager dependent configuration functionality into a single location. Plus, its extensible, meaning that as you install services or what not on the machine, additional yast options become available.
Plus, its got a long term enterprise version called SLES, which is as well supported as RHEL, so its possible to build packages that run on both desktop grade machines, as well as the bigger iron in the server room that has SLA's and such.
There is a raging debate about why city console rolled over and gave the richest corp in the US huge tax incentives to expand their campus here.
Its just more of the race to the tax bottom. Easily fixed if we just instituted minimum national tax rates for fortune 1000 corps, and figured out a way to actually have tarifs (to avoid having the whole company offshore everything) again.
We actually, know how to do this, because we did it in the past, and it made the US the most economically powerful country on the planet. The problem is the fools proclaiming free trade for all, and the politicians that base everything on dogma rather than trying to determine what has actually worked in the past, and repeat it. Sort of like the idea that trickle down economics actually works. It keeps being done, and every time the excuse why it failed is because we didn't have enough of it.
The underlying security model of XP is fundamentally flawed.
In what way? The model in 7 is basically the same as the security model in NT 3.1. The two most significant tweaks to the "model" itself was the runas and code signing functionality added in W2k.
In that way, the security changes in vista were actually little more than forcing people to use functionality already built in. Plus, adding a prettier face to it.
So that said, It seems to me that simply running as a limited user in XP gives you the majority of the security improvements gained by vista. The code signing is handy, but not really useful for the average windows user. It _IS_ handy for the expert who can detect signatures that have been tampered with, and attempt to track down the identity of the person who creates signed malware.
The one good thing about vista is that a lot more companies have fixed issues in their software that kept it from working in a limited environment, or actually signed their binaries to avoid the unsigned app notice. That helps XP users just as much as it helps users of 7.
All that said, for the security minded, running something like sandboxie on XP is actually going to give you _MORE_ security than running 7 by itself.