That's not the kind of censorship which we're really talking about here, though. This is more akin to, say, going to a MS press bonanza and mentioning the faults in their product to others in the crowd - and then being forcefully ejected.
The censorship occurring at the Disney sight would be more like a child molester getting forcefully ejected from the library's Children's Reading Hour.
Norton isn't not keeping you from critiquing them anywhere else. Not on Slashdot, not on your own webpage, not out in the street, not via pamphlets or street marches, not anywhere else, not at all. Norton isn't beating down Slashdot to revoke your UID and retroactively delete every comment you've made. Norton isn't erasing your existence, making an example out of you, disappearing you, or destroying your life over this.
So is that sort of like saying "If you don't like the United States, then move"? Or maybe more appropriately, "if you don't like North Korea, then move?" Not that easy, Comrade. Just because it can be avoided does not mean it isn't an abuse of human rights.
No, it's not as bad as other human rights abuses. But it is an abuse.
I can't comment on the GP's comment, because I din't read it (nor do I care).
However, corporations are not people. They are publicly sanctioned enterprises run in the private sector. Nobody is liable for the "behavior of an organization". Much in the same way government itself operates.
And why could dd if=/dev/zero not be recovered from? What's special about newer drives that make it impossible? I seem to recall that some degree of the previous state is still retrievable with fancy things like micron electrsoscopes, or whatever.
If you're working in a collation of businesses on a standard, or for that matter in a project of any kind, there is a lot of motivation to let the others do the work and reap the benefits - and there will be cross-company competition and antagonism, as well (as many are competitors).
The only way they could reasonably pull it off, technically, would be to fund an organization which would create such an open standard, which would be equally owned by all involved. Said organization would fund the employment of programmers to fix things, so there'd be no loyalties to a given company.
Starship Troopers 1 was a cruel joke; ST3 was a farce of epic proportions. Surprisingly, they made Starship Troopers 3. Even more surprisingly, it's a half-decent movie, has Mobile Infantry (of a guise) and I found myself coming away entertained.
And Starship Troopers is one of my favorite books, at that.
Tools like this are decreasing the general ability of the population to research - resulting in a debt in 'comprehensive knowledge' on topics.
Yes, tools like search engines enhance our ability to retrieve information faster than written documents such as manuals, dictionaries, and fiction, but they do not - 100% of the time, or even 80% of the time - lead us to the answers to complex questions directly. We are still required, as human beings, to read material, digest it, and often confer an answer.
People will largely lose the ability to make (effective) decisions on their own, because the critical inputs for a good decision are usually both a broad and deep understanding of the topics at hand.
Think of what kind of impact this would have on the overall problem solving ability of a population. Problem solving is often largely qualified by a person's ability to get a good picture of what the problem is. What do we do when a person can simply ask complex questions where a wealth of experience was previously required? Sure, this allows people to move on to do other things, but...
When you make it so that your analytical people - the problem solvers and those who create new things - are made irrelevant by a technology, you as a society will stop evolving socially. No, it will not happen immediately. It will happen gradually, over the period of a generation. Consider the dearth between the research abilities of a previous generation, and those who are graduating college today. There is a substantial difference, and the ease in which information is acquirable today has had a lot to do with this shortcoming.
My guess is that 10 years of integration efforts have resulted in a system which can not be easily de-associated without causing problems - whether it's for their own products or other vendors' products.
Consider that there are a lot of 3rd party applications which use an embedded web browser - IE. You can't remove IE without breaking said applications.
Symantec has, almost as long as I've been familiar it, been almost useless. The last time I remember it being a quality product, Win98 was new.
Let's see, here's the short list of problems I've had with both personal and corporate editions in a period of about 6 months:
* In the case of corporate, I have seen workstations get repeatedly infected from 'quarantined' programs (!) * Corporate clients will (frequently) fail pushed upgrades and updates, inexplicably. Corollary: they will not report their failure in any sort of fashion which aids fixing it, short of doing it manually. Often, this is due to some other virus interfering with the AV which the AV is unable to detect. * They've allowed malware to 'break' the system in such a fashion that it is impossible to recover from it - to remove, disable, etc. - short of a reinstall, preventing access to most of the Control Panel, AV, etc. * A complete inability, and seeming unwillingness, to deal with spyware of any stripe.
Most of the malware out there is, seemingly, more intelligent than Norton. In my experience, Norton merely serves as an indicator that a system has become unstable and infested beyond use, telling me it needs to be re-imaged and the user chastised/educated. It usually means there's a bit more on there than the program is reporting. It's like that phone call to a priest when someone is on their deathbed.
And no, I don't readily distinguish between spyware, viruses, worms, etc. - it's all malware, because they all infect Windows machines in similar fashions. Most of this stuff needs to communicate with the system in a specific fashion to infect it fully - involving the registry. There are other tools which do 80% Norton/McAfee do, twice as well - and they're free.
The problem is that Symantec and McAfee have used the same basic technique - simple signatures - to find viruses since the early 1990s (and maybe longer, I don't know). That approach has proven itself to not work, but these companies refuse to improve their products due to the other AV companies likewise not improving,
I do remember those, I think. They were a response to Intel's MMX, weren't they? MMX, and GX, and AMD Now! and so on, all required a substantial CPU redesign, if I recall correctly. The same has bee ntrue for all subsequent Intel and AMD chips: yes, they've offered improvmenets and changes in that area, but it's been a costly venture each time.
Changes -improvements - like that are trivial on ARM.
Except, there are dozens of ARM SoCs out there for the cost of just an Intel processor, with comparable clock speeds. These SoC have integrated cores with specialized processing, to allow for faster-than-Intel function on the vast majority of tasks which traditionally need a fast CPU in x86 land: audio, video, 3D, I/O, USB, and so on.
Intel has always taken the "generic modularization" route, while ARM CPUs have taken the "lots of integrated specialization". For quite a long time, this made Intel more appealing. However, in the long run, ARM's approach is likely to win out: you can only make a processor so fast and generic before you hit a bottleneck, and have to start integrating anyway.
Intel is faced with having to redesign now. Sure, they can probably do it, but it's going to be costly to change 'paradigms'. ARM CPUs, on the other hand, are already integrated, with each of the integrated components largely improving independently and at-pace with the amazing performance/clock increases seen in the ARM CPU. In my mind, ARM processors/SoC have the clear advantage - if only because they can benefit from each other's advancements and have true competition.
Put another way, you can get a -developers- version of a 1GHz ARM SoC w/ 512M, ethernet, and USB2, half the size of a cell phone charger, using 1W, and costing $100. (The SheevaPlug.) How far is Intel from being able to offer something like this? Also note that the Tegra has been shown to consistently outperform the Atom.
Well, except that CPUs are not frequently being marketed by clock cycles anymore. Yes, the Atom has several variants ranging from 1GHz to 1.9GHz (iirc). But there are 1GHz ARM chips, and many of them have multiple cores.
Look at the desktop market of today to see where the portables will be tomorrow. There's little distinction between the various dual core CPUs, or the various quad core CPUs. ("a fraction of a GHz difference? that's hardly anything - why spend $30 on that when I could spend it on getting -four- cores at a similar clock?")
From my rough guess, half the ARM CPUs out there are multicore and over 1GHz. The emerging technology is in the low-end: netbooks, and other similarly powered devices. Think of the SheevaPlug. ARM SoC platforms totally stomp the Atom platform (just without the comprehensive and annoying marketing) on every single attribute that matters (ie, on everything except 'x86 compatible').
Like every other technology, geeks will get ahold ARM systems again due to their superior qualities, and it will catch on. Who doesn't want faster, smaller, cheaper, more power efficient devices? Green is in, baby. This will catch on, commercially, and it'll take off - likely throwing MS under the bus in the process, if they aren't able to get an OS and productivity products on the market by the time ARM starts gaining ground on the 'general computing' ground again.
You do realize that what you're talking about has nothing to do with 'integrated' anything, and everything to do with half-assed products from Intel put on the market to keep their market share up, and competition down, right?
Integrated Intel solutions have always been crap. As a general rule, integrated things -are- crap, but that's largely because they're the cheap solution from some unknown vendor (hey, cool, an integrated motherboard for $35!) or the cheapest solution from Intel.
SoCs are awesome. Let's just clear that up.
Also, AMD has managed, for quite a few years now, to have very 'integrated' systems which perform well. Did you know their north bridge is integrated with the processor now? Also, the integrated ATI chipsets are pretty decent (good enough for gaming), especially when compared to what Intel pushes.
I've BTDT with integrated crap, myself. I currently suffer with all the crap Intel's got out there (from i810 through the current generation) that under-performs ATI chips from 10 years prior in 2D, and slower than software in 3D. Back in the mid-90s, when integrated stuff was fist coming out, I suffered with it then, too.
Yes, it is generally crap - but because it's usually a half-assed effort by the company, as a stopgap product. Intel makes processors, so such things as graphics and chipsets are secondary. NVidia makes graphics cores/cards, so the graphics section, at least, will be pretty solid. I imagine they'd license the x86 spec from Intel, or maybe try and join up with Via, to produce something that can at least run a basic desktop with good graphics (which is the main bottleneck in desktop performance these days, it seems - not CPU).
So? Find out how much is actually being written. It's trivial (at least in Windows). If this is a linux machine, you can either use iostat or look at the actual files within/sys which denote this information and do some basic arithmetic.
So, say you rewrite (say) 2Gb of data a day. Set the disk cache to be high. The SSD should last a year or two, minimum, at this rate of writing because it balances the writes across the disk.
Another approach which could be taken is not use the SSD for daily compiling use. Use a RAM disk. RAM is cheap. Load the project you're working on into a ramdisk, and you don't have to worry about it. At the end of the day, move the project back to storage.
The Republican party, eh? Were we paying attention? And by we, I mean you.
Not sure if you noticed, but Congress was predominantly Democrat when the 'stimulus' was passed. It is overwhelmingly Democrat now (when the biggest single gov't handout to industry, ever, is occurring).
What the Republicans have done in the past is not hypocrisy. It's lying. What the Democrats are doing (and have pretty much always done) is hypocrisy..
Or, try this: they conduct the poll blindly, with a "seed". In other words, regardless of how many people vote, the result is: "Yes, cut our pay." Actual results may have been the exact opposite, but it doesn't matter.
Or, they simply lie.
Then, they simply announce, "The poll results indicate that you overwhelmingly agree to a pay cut. Thank you for your support in this issue!" Voila, pay cut without too much triage: they get to keep most of their staff (ie similar output) while reducing costs.
I mean, c'mon. This is HR we're talking about. The only lower forms of life in the corporate environment are executive levels who parasitically eat from the company, and litigation lawyers.
Provided this device doesn't ship with something like a 200MHz CPU and 128Mb RAM/storage, this will be a real dream device. Pretty much exactly what I've been waiting for since the MobilePro 900 came out years ago. It's a logical extension of both the netbook and these small portables.
Basically, it's a tablet with an integrated/novel dock that is likewise portable with the tablet in an easy fashion which adds portability. It's an interesting (and somewhat obvious, in hindsight) innovation.
Regardless of what it sounds like, it's a foolish approach. A console comes out, and gamers immediately start evaluating it based on which games are available for it. That's why it's so important for the 'release title' that comes bundled (see: Halo) to be good/popular.
If no good games are available, then gamers will say "wait and see". They "wait and see" for only so long before simply writing the platform off entirely. Additionally, the platform not only has to have good games, but to have better games than the competition - not as an aggregate, necessarily, but it helps. Lots of crap games with only a few good ones is still not likely to promote the platform to the point where the non-hardcore gamer buys it.
And where the hell does he get this "9 and a half years" figure? Surely he doesn't think a game platform's life is that long, does he? Game developers will not focus on a platform that long, and if it gets games after (say) 3-4 years, it's only because it was convenient to port it to said platform after primarily developing it on another one.
I'm debt free as well. But I don't have a job, and have had nothing but short contracting gigs for the past year. Good for you if you have a job, but not having one right now is very, very painful, because hardly anyone is hiring.
Cooperative? Where do you get that idea? From my seat on the boat, it looks like it's fundamentally competitive and controlling. The Romans didn't come to power because they were 'cooperative' - it was because they controlled what they had and competed for everything else.
A part of human nature is cooperation, yes, though it is a fundamentally different approach. It can yield similar results, but it requires the participants to be internally motivated - often through grandiose speech, FUD, or something like nationalism. So even then, there is a degree of control, albeit exerted in more of a psychological rather than physical fashion.
China is getting richer. If China is getting richer, someone is getting poorer. We are getting poorer.
You should've stopped there, you were doing so well.
History has never followed any course but the one above when there are multiple groups of people working within the same ecosystem. Someone is always taking from someone else, with one group getting richer and the other poorer, regardless of economic systems and theories.
The Chinese will innovate with the resources that the Chinese have while the US will innovate with the resources that the Americans have (note no us and they).
Yet, we have no resources. Yes, we can design; but what happens when we want or need to produce, and nobody wants to take (or is prohibited from taking by their government) our money?
Why is it a problem if China is innovating and creating new business models and new kinds of electronics?
It isn't a problem. That's not what he said. He said it was a problem that we (the collective modern 1st world) have outsourced all production elsewhere.
Innovation is not a zero sum game. Instead of thinking about how can we protect what we know and stop Chinese people from innovating, it would be more productive for us to learn what we can from them, and then maybe improve our business models.
Aaaand you completely missed his point, don't understand what we're talking about, or have set up an emotional barrier on this issue preventing the intelligent discourse of the topic.
He never said it was a zero-sum game or that we should stop China from what they're doing. There is absolutely no problem with helping them along, or learning from what they're doing - that's a good idea, and it's something we should do.
I believe the point that GP was trying to make (and the one I will attempt myself) is that it is impossible to see what they're doing and learn from it - because we don't know how to do it anymore, ourselves! Outsourcing does not "help them along" without penalizing ourselves; it takes what we have, destroys it, and hands it
If there are no longer any people who are actually involved in production, we can not take what they have learned in production and improve upon it ourselves - as nobody will know how. There's a big difference between "book smart" and "hands-on smart". There are some things - most things but philosophical and theoretical, I'd argue - which you can not learn to any competent degree without doing. Likewise, you can
A cobbler can not improve upon his shoes if he does not wear shoes himself, or is not aware of available construction materials. An architect/engineer can not design a good, sound building (or improve upon designs) if he is not intimate with building techniques and materials, and doesn't have good communication with someone who has BTDT, like a building contractor. In the same way, a hardware engineer can not "build a better PCB" if he is not at least somewhat familiar with the actual fabrication process, and in direct communication with those who are doing it. When you ship off a design and say "build this, we'll pay you for it" you are contracting for a service. Even if you keep it internal, but in a different division in another country that has loyalties to that country before the company, you're in for issues.
Consider that India and China are substantially more nationalist than most Western countries, and you start to see why this is becoming a problem. They're taking our assets and improving upon them, while the people who used to do such things in our countries do not anymore, having forgotten the skills and tricks of the trade - antiquated skills and tricks at that, most likely.
I agree with you that hands on production work is important for innovation and businesses in the US and Europe should keep that in mind. But I just don't agree that everything is us vs. them. There's plenty of innovation to be done by all sides.
The Chinese would disagree with you. They have no incentive, and every disincentive, to kick their Western corporate overlords off their shoulders and push forward to their own dynasty of economic prosperity and independence. It's only a matter of time - until they've become strong enough to no longer need the training wheels.
Less governmentally encumbered, maybe; less capitalist? Doubtful.
I recall reading somewhere about these "shanzai" shops a while ago. Basically, they're a sort of government-sanctioned and organized cooperative: they offer a large handful of "open to China" designs from which a company can base their products. Remember that $100 "HiVision" laptop from China with a MIPS processor? Yeah, that was one of the many Chinese-Nationalist-sourced products. You'll find variations of the same exact hardware platform (different RAM, different quality, different peripherals/daughter-cards, etc.) for many different products. The dozens of different cheap MP4 players (like this really-small MP4 player or maybe this phone.
(Speaking of, I'd be really interested to see if there was open source software available for some of these devices. They're cheap enough to make "buy it just to tinker" very desirable, and aside from likely poor quality components, they likely have sufficiently powerful enough hardware to make things "go".)
You're not thinking hard enough, if that's the worst you can imagine.
How about "bored, under-employed, and broke"? Or worse, "unemployed, hungry, and desperate?" As in "even McDonalds is closing" desperate. Because if things keep going at the rate that they're going, that'll be the case (more or less) by the end of next year.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not the kind of censorship which we're really talking about here, though. This is more akin to, say, going to a MS press bonanza and mentioning the faults in their product to others in the crowd - and then being forcefully ejected.
The censorship occurring at the Disney sight would be more like a child molester getting forcefully ejected from the library's Children's Reading Hour.
Norton isn't not keeping you from critiquing them anywhere else. Not on Slashdot, not on your own webpage, not out in the street, not via pamphlets or street marches, not anywhere else, not at all. Norton isn't beating down Slashdot to revoke your UID and retroactively delete every comment you've made. Norton isn't erasing your existence, making an example out of you, disappearing you, or destroying your life over this.
So is that sort of like saying "If you don't like the United States, then move"? Or maybe more appropriately, "if you don't like North Korea, then move?" Not that easy, Comrade. Just because it can be avoided does not mean it isn't an abuse of human rights.
No, it's not as bad as other human rights abuses. But it is an abuse.
I can't comment on the GP's comment, because I din't read it (nor do I care).
However, corporations are not people. They are publicly sanctioned enterprises run in the private sector. Nobody is liable for the "behavior of an organization". Much in the same way government itself operates.
And why could dd if=/dev/zero not be recovered from? What's special about newer drives that make it impossible? I seem to recall that some degree of the previous state is still retrievable with fancy things like micron electrsoscopes, or whatever.
Well, it runs deeper than that.
If you're working in a collation of businesses on a standard, or for that matter in a project of any kind, there is a lot of motivation to let the others do the work and reap the benefits - and there will be cross-company competition and antagonism, as well (as many are competitors).
The only way they could reasonably pull it off, technically, would be to fund an organization which would create such an open standard, which would be equally owned by all involved. Said organization would fund the employment of programmers to fix things, so there'd be no loyalties to a given company.
Starship Troopers 1 was a cruel joke; ST3 was a farce of epic proportions. Surprisingly, they made Starship Troopers 3. Even more surprisingly, it's a half-decent movie, has Mobile Infantry (of a guise) and I found myself coming away entertained.
And Starship Troopers is one of my favorite books, at that.
Tools like this are decreasing the general ability of the population to research - resulting in a debt in 'comprehensive knowledge' on topics.
Yes, tools like search engines enhance our ability to retrieve information faster than written documents such as manuals, dictionaries, and fiction, but they do not - 100% of the time, or even 80% of the time - lead us to the answers to complex questions directly. We are still required, as human beings, to read material, digest it, and often confer an answer.
People will largely lose the ability to make (effective) decisions on their own, because the critical inputs for a good decision are usually both a broad and deep understanding of the topics at hand.
Think of what kind of impact this would have on the overall problem solving ability of a population. Problem solving is often largely qualified by a person's ability to get a good picture of what the problem is. What do we do when a person can simply ask complex questions where a wealth of experience was previously required? Sure, this allows people to move on to do other things, but...
When you make it so that your analytical people - the problem solvers and those who create new things - are made irrelevant by a technology, you as a society will stop evolving socially. No, it will not happen immediately. It will happen gradually, over the period of a generation. Consider the dearth between the research abilities of a previous generation, and those who are graduating college today. There is a substantial difference, and the ease in which information is acquirable today has had a lot to do with this shortcoming.
My guess is that 10 years of integration efforts have resulted in a system which can not be easily de-associated without causing problems - whether it's for their own products or other vendors' products.
Consider that there are a lot of 3rd party applications which use an embedded web browser - IE. You can't remove IE without breaking said applications.
Symantec has, almost as long as I've been familiar it, been almost useless. The last time I remember it being a quality product, Win98 was new.
Let's see, here's the short list of problems I've had with both personal and corporate editions in a period of about 6 months:
* In the case of corporate, I have seen workstations get repeatedly infected from 'quarantined' programs (!)
* Corporate clients will (frequently) fail pushed upgrades and updates, inexplicably. Corollary: they will not report their failure in any sort of fashion which aids fixing it, short of doing it manually. Often, this is due to some other virus interfering with the AV which the AV is unable to detect.
* They've allowed malware to 'break' the system in such a fashion that it is impossible to recover from it - to remove, disable, etc. - short of a reinstall, preventing access to most of the Control Panel, AV, etc.
* A complete inability, and seeming unwillingness, to deal with spyware of any stripe.
Most of the malware out there is, seemingly, more intelligent than Norton. In my experience, Norton merely serves as an indicator that a system has become unstable and infested beyond use, telling me it needs to be re-imaged and the user chastised/educated. It usually means there's a bit more on there than the program is reporting. It's like that phone call to a priest when someone is on their deathbed.
And no, I don't readily distinguish between spyware, viruses, worms, etc. - it's all malware, because they all infect Windows machines in similar fashions. Most of this stuff needs to communicate with the system in a specific fashion to infect it fully - involving the registry. There are other tools which do 80% Norton/McAfee do, twice as well - and they're free.
The problem is that Symantec and McAfee have used the same basic technique - simple signatures - to find viruses since the early 1990s (and maybe longer, I don't know). That approach has proven itself to not work, but these companies refuse to improve their products due to the other AV companies likewise not improving,
I do remember those, I think. They were a response to Intel's MMX, weren't they? MMX, and GX, and AMD Now! and so on, all required a substantial CPU redesign, if I recall correctly. The same has bee ntrue for all subsequent Intel and AMD chips: yes, they've offered improvmenets and changes in that area, but it's been a costly venture each time.
Changes -improvements - like that are trivial on ARM.
Except, there are dozens of ARM SoCs out there for the cost of just an Intel processor, with comparable clock speeds. These SoC have integrated cores with specialized processing, to allow for faster-than-Intel function on the vast majority of tasks which traditionally need a fast CPU in x86 land: audio, video, 3D, I/O, USB, and so on.
Intel has always taken the "generic modularization" route, while ARM CPUs have taken the "lots of integrated specialization". For quite a long time, this made Intel more appealing. However, in the long run, ARM's approach is likely to win out: you can only make a processor so fast and generic before you hit a bottleneck, and have to start integrating anyway.
Intel is faced with having to redesign now. Sure, they can probably do it, but it's going to be costly to change 'paradigms'. ARM CPUs, on the other hand, are already integrated, with each of the integrated components largely improving independently and at-pace with the amazing performance/clock increases seen in the ARM CPU. In my mind, ARM processors/SoC have the clear advantage - if only because they can benefit from each other's advancements and have true competition.
Put another way, you can get a -developers- version of a 1GHz ARM SoC w/ 512M, ethernet, and USB2, half the size of a cell phone charger, using 1W, and costing $100. (The SheevaPlug.) How far is Intel from being able to offer something like this? Also note that the Tegra has been shown to consistently outperform the Atom.
Well, except that CPUs are not frequently being marketed by clock cycles anymore. Yes, the Atom has several variants ranging from 1GHz to 1.9GHz (iirc). But there are 1GHz ARM chips, and many of them have multiple cores.
Look at the desktop market of today to see where the portables will be tomorrow. There's little distinction between the various dual core CPUs, or the various quad core CPUs. ("a fraction of a GHz difference? that's hardly anything - why spend $30 on that when I could spend it on getting -four- cores at a similar clock?")
From my rough guess, half the ARM CPUs out there are multicore and over 1GHz. The emerging technology is in the low-end: netbooks, and other similarly powered devices. Think of the SheevaPlug. ARM SoC platforms totally stomp the Atom platform (just without the comprehensive and annoying marketing) on every single attribute that matters (ie, on everything except 'x86 compatible').
Like every other technology, geeks will get ahold ARM systems again due to their superior qualities, and it will catch on. Who doesn't want faster, smaller, cheaper, more power efficient devices? Green is in, baby. This will catch on, commercially, and it'll take off - likely throwing MS under the bus in the process, if they aren't able to get an OS and productivity products on the market by the time ARM starts gaining ground on the 'general computing' ground again.
You do realize that what you're talking about has nothing to do with 'integrated' anything, and everything to do with half-assed products from Intel put on the market to keep their market share up, and competition down, right?
Integrated Intel solutions have always been crap. As a general rule, integrated things -are- crap, but that's largely because they're the cheap solution from some unknown vendor (hey, cool, an integrated motherboard for $35!) or the cheapest solution from Intel.
SoCs are awesome. Let's just clear that up.
Also, AMD has managed, for quite a few years now, to have very 'integrated' systems which perform well. Did you know their north bridge is integrated with the processor now? Also, the integrated ATI chipsets are pretty decent (good enough for gaming), especially when compared to what Intel pushes.
I've BTDT with integrated crap, myself. I currently suffer with all the crap Intel's got out there (from i810 through the current generation) that under-performs ATI chips from 10 years prior in 2D, and slower than software in 3D. Back in the mid-90s, when integrated stuff was fist coming out, I suffered with it then, too.
Yes, it is generally crap - but because it's usually a half-assed effort by the company, as a stopgap product. Intel makes processors, so such things as graphics and chipsets are secondary. NVidia makes graphics cores/cards, so the graphics section, at least, will be pretty solid. I imagine they'd license the x86 spec from Intel, or maybe try and join up with Via, to produce something that can at least run a basic desktop with good graphics (which is the main bottleneck in desktop performance these days, it seems - not CPU).
So? Find out how much is actually being written. It's trivial (at least in Windows). If this is a linux machine, you can either use iostat or look at the actual files within /sys which denote this information and do some basic arithmetic.
So, say you rewrite (say) 2Gb of data a day. Set the disk cache to be high. The SSD should last a year or two, minimum, at this rate of writing because it balances the writes across the disk.
Another approach which could be taken is not use the SSD for daily compiling use. Use a RAM disk. RAM is cheap. Load the project you're working on into a ramdisk, and you don't have to worry about it. At the end of the day, move the project back to storage.
The Republican party, eh? Were we paying attention? And by we, I mean you.
Not sure if you noticed, but Congress was predominantly Democrat when the 'stimulus' was passed. It is overwhelmingly Democrat now (when the biggest single gov't handout to industry, ever, is occurring).
What the Republicans have done in the past is not hypocrisy. It's lying. What the Democrats are doing (and have pretty much always done) is hypocrisy..
Or, try this: they conduct the poll blindly, with a "seed". In other words, regardless of how many people vote, the result is: "Yes, cut our pay." Actual results may have been the exact opposite, but it doesn't matter.
Or, they simply lie.
Then, they simply announce, "The poll results indicate that you overwhelmingly agree to a pay cut. Thank you for your support in this issue!" Voila, pay cut without too much triage: they get to keep most of their staff (ie similar output) while reducing costs.
I mean, c'mon. This is HR we're talking about. The only lower forms of life in the corporate environment are executive levels who parasitically eat from the company, and litigation lawyers.
Provided this device doesn't ship with something like a 200MHz CPU and 128Mb RAM/storage, this will be a real dream device. Pretty much exactly what I've been waiting for since the MobilePro 900 came out years ago. It's a logical extension of both the netbook and these small portables.
Basically, it's a tablet with an integrated/novel dock that is likewise portable with the tablet in an easy fashion which adds portability. It's an interesting (and somewhat obvious, in hindsight) innovation.
Regardless of what it sounds like, it's a foolish approach. A console comes out, and gamers immediately start evaluating it based on which games are available for it. That's why it's so important for the 'release title' that comes bundled (see: Halo) to be good/popular.
If no good games are available, then gamers will say "wait and see". They "wait and see" for only so long before simply writing the platform off entirely. Additionally, the platform not only has to have good games, but to have better games than the competition - not as an aggregate, necessarily, but it helps. Lots of crap games with only a few good ones is still not likely to promote the platform to the point where the non-hardcore gamer buys it.
And where the hell does he get this "9 and a half years" figure? Surely he doesn't think a game platform's life is that long, does he? Game developers will not focus on a platform that long, and if it gets games after (say) 3-4 years, it's only because it was convenient to port it to said platform after primarily developing it on another one.
You have a job, don't you?
I'm debt free as well. But I don't have a job, and have had nothing but short contracting gigs for the past year. Good for you if you have a job, but not having one right now is very, very painful, because hardly anyone is hiring.
Cooperative? Where do you get that idea? From my seat on the boat, it looks like it's fundamentally competitive and controlling. The Romans didn't come to power because they were 'cooperative' - it was because they controlled what they had and competed for everything else.
A part of human nature is cooperation, yes, though it is a fundamentally different approach. It can yield similar results, but it requires the participants to be internally motivated - often through grandiose speech, FUD, or something like nationalism. So even then, there is a degree of control, albeit exerted in more of a psychological rather than physical fashion.
China is getting richer.
If China is getting richer, someone is getting poorer.
We are getting poorer.
You should've stopped there, you were doing so well.
History has never followed any course but the one above when there are multiple groups of people working within the same ecosystem. Someone is always taking from someone else, with one group getting richer and the other poorer, regardless of economic systems and theories.
The Chinese will innovate with the resources that the Chinese have while the US will innovate with the resources that the Americans have (note no us and they).
Yet, we have no resources. Yes, we can design; but what happens when we want or need to produce, and nobody wants to take (or is prohibited from taking by their government) our money?
Why is it a problem if China is innovating and creating new business models and new kinds of electronics?
It isn't a problem. That's not what he said. He said it was a problem that we (the collective modern 1st world) have outsourced all production elsewhere.
Innovation is not a zero sum game. Instead of thinking about how can we protect what we know and stop Chinese people from innovating, it would be more productive for us to learn what we can from them, and then maybe improve our business models.
Aaaand you completely missed his point, don't understand what we're talking about, or have set up an emotional barrier on this issue preventing the intelligent discourse of the topic.
He never said it was a zero-sum game or that we should stop China from what they're doing. There is absolutely no problem with helping them along, or learning from what they're doing - that's a good idea, and it's something we should do.
I believe the point that GP was trying to make (and the one I will attempt myself) is that it is impossible to see what they're doing and learn from it - because we don't know how to do it anymore, ourselves! Outsourcing does not "help them along" without penalizing ourselves; it takes what we have, destroys it, and hands it
If there are no longer any people who are actually involved in production, we can not take what they have learned in production and improve upon it ourselves - as nobody will know how. There's a big difference between "book smart" and "hands-on smart". There are some things - most things but philosophical and theoretical, I'd argue - which you can not learn to any competent degree without doing. Likewise, you can
A cobbler can not improve upon his shoes if he does not wear shoes himself, or is not aware of available construction materials. An architect/engineer can not design a good, sound building (or improve upon designs) if he is not intimate with building techniques and materials, and doesn't have good communication with someone who has BTDT, like a building contractor. In the same way, a hardware engineer can not "build a better PCB" if he is not at least somewhat familiar with the actual fabrication process, and in direct communication with those who are doing it. When you ship off a design and say "build this, we'll pay you for it" you are contracting for a service. Even if you keep it internal, but in a different division in another country that has loyalties to that country before the company, you're in for issues.
Consider that India and China are substantially more nationalist than most Western countries, and you start to see why this is becoming a problem. They're taking our assets and improving upon them, while the people who used to do such things in our countries do not anymore, having forgotten the skills and tricks of the trade - antiquated skills and tricks at that, most likely.
I agree with you that hands on production work is important for innovation and businesses in the US and Europe should keep that in mind. But I just don't agree that everything is us vs. them. There's plenty of innovation to be done by all sides.
The Chinese would disagree with you. They have no incentive, and every disincentive, to kick their Western corporate overlords off their shoulders and push forward to their own dynasty of economic prosperity and independence. It's only a matter of time - until they've become strong enough to no longer need the training wheels.
Less governmentally encumbered, maybe; less capitalist? Doubtful.
I recall reading somewhere about these "shanzai" shops a while ago. Basically, they're a sort of government-sanctioned and organized cooperative: they offer a large handful of "open to China" designs from which a company can base their products. Remember that $100 "HiVision" laptop from China with a MIPS processor? Yeah, that was one of the many Chinese-Nationalist-sourced products. You'll find variations of the same exact hardware platform (different RAM, different quality, different peripherals/daughter-cards, etc.) for many different products. The dozens of different cheap MP4 players (like this really-small MP4 player or maybe this phone.
(Speaking of, I'd be really interested to see if there was open source software available for some of these devices. They're cheap enough to make "buy it just to tinker" very desirable, and aside from likely poor quality components, they likely have sufficiently powerful enough hardware to make things "go".)
You're not thinking hard enough, if that's the worst you can imagine.
How about "bored, under-employed, and broke"? Or worse, "unemployed, hungry, and desperate?" As in "even McDonalds is closing" desperate. Because if things keep going at the rate that they're going, that'll be the case (more or less) by the end of next year.