So a bigger Palm is a Jobsian work of genius? Their Pilot PDAs were just small tablets running an OS specifically designed for the form factor, after all. Even Apple's Newton didn't run the same OS as the Mac.
There are actually pros and cons to a general OS on a tote-along device. It's really the interface that makes the big difference and not the OS as a whole. Having apps that run against the same services and libraries at home and on the road is actually a good thing (unless you run the app store). Having an interface that matches your hardware is good, too. Having a whole new OS just because the interface changes is not necessarily good.
It is a spectacular deal to buy your phone subsidized if the only plans you can get cover the cost of a subsidized phone anyway. If you have low-priced phone plans you can use with an unsubsidized phone, that's great. If all you can get decent coverage from are the plans that subsidize a phone, you'd be silly to still pay up front for the phone in addition to paying to subsidize the equipment.
AT&T, Cox, Comcast, and Time Warner didn't offer me a $1 PC to sign a two-year data deal, either. It's the subsidies. In a market with subsidies, always suspect the subsidies make the difference. After all, that's what why they exist.
An author doesn't profit when you sell a used book, either. A sculptor can have several castings made from a mold (it is harder to copy a purely hand-carved statue over and over). His family gets to sell each one.
I would probably require an updated filing every so many years, too. Just updating something and not notifying anyone of the modification would lead to a minefield of poor knowledge around what is still covered worse than we have now. Other than that, spot on.
It doesn't encourage the dead to continue once they're dead. It may encourage the living to create more works to leave the income to their progeny while they are still alive. Once you're wealthy to a certain point, earning for yourself is just overkill. Providing for three generations of family rather than two might make people feel a little better, though.
What's really scary is Sonny Bono was a Scientologist before he hit that tree. He was protecting L. Ron Hubbard's family as much as Disney's or his own.
The non-3G version gets free AT&T hotspot access. The 3G version gets free 3G access. They want you to use that for their books. If you root your tablet, you can download anything you want. I don't think they'll be subsidizing a bunch of us playing Doom for Nook across AT&T's network. They want to subsidize us buying their books.
They aren't. That's why they have this CPU+FPGA product that they'll sell in large volume to a large number of companies that do low volume work. That's what the FPGA is for: letting lots of low-volume products be built from one high-volume product.
The only sure answer is unfortunately "it depends". Just because they are programmable in the "field" doesn't mean you can necessarily do it from software. Some FPGAs require a service tech to hook some other system up to the motherboard to change anything. Some require pulling the chip and putting it in a portable device. Some can have different programs swapped in from ROM at different times. Some can have custom programs loaded from RAM by an application. I'm not sure which this is, but since it's the Atom line I'm guessing it's going to be one of the more restrictive types to reprogram.
Hey, if AOL could buy Time Warner... Seriously, though, OS X and Windows 7 under the same roof would probably piss off some regulators in a huge way no matter which direction the purchase went. This purchase of Novell by Attachmate makes sense, because Attachmate makes its money supporting clients of legacy systems. Netware is a legacy system now.
Solaris and Oracle Unbreakable Linux haven't gone away. Just because Sun is gone (which for now it isn't, just being rebranded Oracle America by its new owners) doesn't mean Solaris is dead. Oracle had their clone of CentOS (which is a clone of RHEL) already before the buyout. Then there are Canonical, Turbolinux, and for a while longer at least Mandriva. Debian isn't going anywhere, and neither are other major community projects like Gentoo or Arch. AIX is alive and well. OpenSuse and Fedora seem fairly capable of existing separate from Novell and Red Hat at this point. NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, MirBSD, and a few others have never really ridden the Linux wave of popularity and they are doing fine.
Meanwhile, Meego and especially Android are gaining share on mobiles. Linux is no longer gaining so much of its market share from proprietary Unix installations and is now starting to cut into Windows share on the server. IBM, HP, and thousands of other consulting companies support Linux and applications on it.
It's probably smarter during a downturn to cut marketing expenses and continue development at pace. That way, when your customers are ready to buy you can start heavily marketing your new product that's ready for them. The only companies that should cut production staff and especially creative design staff (which software developers are) during a downturn are ones that would go under otherwise.
I agree slapping our government around for gross stupidity would be more helpful. I was just making the point that if Google should get pinched for shorting Ireland then they should get pinched for using Ireland to pinch the US first. The fact that both governments make this sort of thing legal at the disadvantage to domestic-only companies is just silly.
Now, whether there should be a 35% or even a 12.5% tax on profits in the first place is questionable. There are local and state taxes on much of the land US companies use. Then there are the profit taxes. Then there are taxes against the shareholders of a corporation if any of that profit becomes a dividend. Then there are capital gains taxes if any shareholders sell a large enough value of shares at a profit. That's all on top of the payroll taxes the employees and the company both pay. Then there's the state and local sales taxes the employees pay in many areas on everything they buy, and which the companies often also pay on some things they buy.
A profit tax encourages this sort of playing with profits vs. expenses in the first place. Going international just makes it easier. A small gross receipts tax makes more sense, but taxing only the employees (and maybe still the shareholders, and keep land taxes in place that exist) makes even more sense than that. Abolish profit taxes and the employer's portion of the payroll tax, and you'd get a lot more Americans back to work buying more American-made products.
The EPA estimates that 30% to 50% of solid waste in at least some areas of the US is generated from construction and demolition of buildings. Of that, about 55% is from demolition with the remainder being from construction and remodeling. Of what construction and demolition waste hits landfills, 30% to 40% is lumber.
Most C&D waste, including lumber, brick, concrete blocks, poured concrete, pipes, plumbing fixtures, wiring, flooring, drywall, glass, and asphalt can be either reconditioned or recycled.
So yeah, it's good to get your old laptop turned into something useful like fuel. Don't forget to get your building waste turned into something useful, too, though. Most of it can be processed and resold rather than going into the landfill in the first place.
The #100 on that list (bottom of the page) had 24 cores and a peak GFLOPS of 192.
The AMD Radeon 6850, which is a mainstream or low-end gaming graphics processor and available for around $200 as we speak, has 960 cores with a theoretical peak performance of 1.5 TFLOPS. I haven't seen LinPack numbers for it and I'm not sure AMD has it working under LinPack just yet.
The numbers of a workstation using OpenCL or CUDA on even one high-end graphics card would put it in the top ten from 2000. Some systems for professional workstations and clusters are specified with four or more GPGPU cards specifically for use as general-purpose accelerated vector processors.
NVidia's Tesla C2050 in a dual GPU dual CPU (Xeon X5670) single system had an actual test at 656.1 GFLOPS. That's a single 1U system. Granted, it had 48 GB of RAM installed and a street price of around $11k. Still, that's a far cry from a supercomputer price. These GPU cards are being put into supercomputer clusters being built as they offer about 8x the performance per node or a 2x Xeon node without the use of the GPUs. One node would be in the top 30 from ten years ago.
When measurements move from GFLOPS to TFLOPS, make sure you notice the difference. It's a big one. The top supercomputers are now in PFLOPS territory.
Right. The really interesting chips will arrive when you run between four and sixteen cores with the entirety of main RAM for those cores (in a NUMA configuration with other sockets, starting with maybe a gigabyte or so per die). You could then use SDRAM for both a paging file and for cache between the storage system and the processor/memory die.
You could map registers straight to portions of the on-chip memory if necessary for backwards compatibility. You'd probably be better off, though, compiling nearly everything to just use memory addressing. You'd only hit the SDRAM to load a new entire page into the on-chip RAM. On-chip cache and the circuitry to minimize misses in the cache could mostly go away, and the cores themselves could be simplified. You might even get away with moving the SDRAM controller back off-chip at first to free up some space on the die since the working memory would be so fast once the data was in it.
Unfortunately, this assumes billions of switches just for the main memory and probably quality control nightmares in the first several models.
However, it's the logical conclusion for the way forward. Caches keep taking more die space to deal with the fact that memory is so much slower than processors. Once you get over a certain size cache, you're just wasting circuitry on managing a large block of memory in little chunks that's better treated as a large single block of memory. The virtual to physical mapping already figures out what's in main RAM and what's out in the swap. Just let it do that with the on-die memory and eliminate the extra cache logic to make more on-die memory.
Intel has mentioned putting main memory on the die already. They even mentioned that they could do it with a form of DRAM rather than with SRAM.
I said the company shouldn't be reporting corporate profits in the US then keeping them in Ireland to keep from paying taxes on them. You see, the whole company's profits show up on the books in the US for stock share purposes. They don't show up on the US books for tax purposes.
Those extra-US presences are also shifting costs incurred extra-US back to the US presence on paper to lower the apparent profitability of the US presence. Basically, the US presence pays the bills for the overseas presence, the overseas presence operates at a subsidy from HQ, then reports a higher profit due to the subsidy. The HQ reports a lower profit because they report the subsidy to the branch as an expense.
If some company has offices in more than one country that operate at their own profit and loss and report those profits and losses for both taxes and balance sheets according to where the profits and losses are actually made, that's fine.
Thanks for anonymously calling me a moron, though, for attacking a point I never made.
The main problem is that they sell their shares on the stock market as if all the profit is in Mountain View, but keep much of it away from there and in a different country for tax purposes. The IRS and the SEC get two different numbers for profit reports. Meanwhile, they are using US infrastructure to coordinate their business in California with these offices in Ireland.
I'm not saying I think that 35% is the right amount on the part of the government. I'm just saying that if the company is going to make profit as a company they should show it on their US books or not.
Ideally, there would be an international agreement among many countries that multinationals pay some portion of overall company taxes to each country in which they have a physical presence. If they want US, Ireland, and Bermuda all to house parts of the company, then each location should get some share of the overall company profits to tax based on their portion of the company's presence.
Say, just for example, that 50% of the company's assets and personnel are in the US, 40% in Ireland, and 10% in Bermuda. Then the US could tax 35% against 50% of profits. Ireland could tax their 12.5% against 40% of profits. Bermuda could tax whatever they tax against 10% of the profits. If that causes companies like Google to move tens of thousands of jobs overseas to remain competitive, then that's a problem with the tax rate and not a problem with collecting what's due under that rate.
Personally, I still remember Sim Earth requiring me to answer "365.26" in order to keep playing when it asked specifically about the number of days.
The 24-hour answer is understandable if they didn't actually listen to the question and assumed you asked how long it takes the sun to appear in the same part of the sky. Otherwise, it's a really sad answer.
Personally, I think lots of people even after agreeing to be surveyed don't pay full attention, so some portion of them probably made an error of speaking without listening. How to tell the difference and how large a portion would be worth its own lengthy study, though.
That at least some of the people confuse a day and a year, though, or have no idea, is sad and a little scary. I also expected some of both of those, but half is disappointing.
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So a bigger Palm is a Jobsian work of genius? Their Pilot PDAs were just small tablets running an OS specifically designed for the form factor, after all. Even Apple's Newton didn't run the same OS as the Mac.
There are actually pros and cons to a general OS on a tote-along device. It's really the interface that makes the big difference and not the OS as a whole. Having apps that run against the same services and libraries at home and on the road is actually a good thing (unless you run the app store). Having an interface that matches your hardware is good, too. Having a whole new OS just because the interface changes is not necessarily good.
Not ones dumb enough to work for free, so make sure they think of that as an "audition".
It is a spectacular deal to buy your phone subsidized if the only plans you can get cover the cost of a subsidized phone anyway. If you have low-priced phone plans you can use with an unsubsidized phone, that's great. If all you can get decent coverage from are the plans that subsidize a phone, you'd be silly to still pay up front for the phone in addition to paying to subsidize the equipment.
AT&T, Cox, Comcast, and Time Warner didn't offer me a $1 PC to sign a two-year data deal, either. It's the subsidies. In a market with subsidies, always suspect the subsidies make the difference. After all, that's what why they exist.
Your DSL or cable provider typically doesn't discount your PC by 80% for signing a new two-year contract.
Gosh, subsidies influence buying decisions. Film at 11.
IDC are, as always, missing the real point of their own story.
An author doesn't profit when you sell a used book, either. A sculptor can have several castings made from a mold (it is harder to copy a purely hand-carved statue over and over). His family gets to sell each one.
I would probably require an updated filing every so many years, too. Just updating something and not notifying anyone of the modification would lead to a minefield of poor knowledge around what is still covered worse than we have now. Other than that, spot on.
It doesn't encourage the dead to continue once they're dead. It may encourage the living to create more works to leave the income to their progeny while they are still alive. Once you're wealthy to a certain point, earning for yourself is just overkill. Providing for three generations of family rather than two might make people feel a little better, though.
What's really scary is Sonny Bono was a Scientologist before he hit that tree. He was protecting L. Ron Hubbard's family as much as Disney's or his own.
The non-3G version gets free AT&T hotspot access. The 3G version gets free 3G access. They want you to use that for their books. If you root your tablet, you can download anything you want. I don't think they'll be subsidizing a bunch of us playing Doom for Nook across AT&T's network. They want to subsidize us buying their books.
They aren't. That's why they have this CPU+FPGA product that they'll sell in large volume to a large number of companies that do low volume work. That's what the FPGA is for: letting lots of low-volume products be built from one high-volume product.
The only sure answer is unfortunately "it depends". Just because they are programmable in the "field" doesn't mean you can necessarily do it from software. Some FPGAs require a service tech to hook some other system up to the motherboard to change anything. Some require pulling the chip and putting it in a portable device. Some can have different programs swapped in from ROM at different times. Some can have custom programs loaded from RAM by an application. I'm not sure which this is, but since it's the Atom line I'm guessing it's going to be one of the more restrictive types to reprogram.
Hey, if AOL could buy Time Warner... Seriously, though, OS X and Windows 7 under the same roof would probably piss off some regulators in a huge way no matter which direction the purchase went. This purchase of Novell by Attachmate makes sense, because Attachmate makes its money supporting clients of legacy systems. Netware is a legacy system now.
Solaris and Oracle Unbreakable Linux haven't gone away. Just because Sun is gone (which for now it isn't, just being rebranded Oracle America by its new owners) doesn't mean Solaris is dead. Oracle had their clone of CentOS (which is a clone of RHEL) already before the buyout. Then there are Canonical, Turbolinux, and for a while longer at least Mandriva. Debian isn't going anywhere, and neither are other major community projects like Gentoo or Arch. AIX is alive and well. OpenSuse and Fedora seem fairly capable of existing separate from Novell and Red Hat at this point. NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, MirBSD, and a few others have never really ridden the Linux wave of popularity and they are doing fine.
Meanwhile, Meego and especially Android are gaining share on mobiles. Linux is no longer gaining so much of its market share from proprietary Unix installations and is now starting to cut into Windows share on the server. IBM, HP, and thousands of other consulting companies support Linux and applications on it.
You forgot the most important part of the scalable system: "Akamai CDN".
It's probably smarter during a downturn to cut marketing expenses and continue development at pace. That way, when your customers are ready to buy you can start heavily marketing your new product that's ready for them. The only companies that should cut production staff and especially creative design staff (which software developers are) during a downturn are ones that would go under otherwise.
Last I checked, most Diebold kiosk-style machines like ATMs and voting machines were Windows CE. XP embedded may have overtaken it by now, though.
I agree slapping our government around for gross stupidity would be more helpful. I was just making the point that if Google should get pinched for shorting Ireland then they should get pinched for using Ireland to pinch the US first. The fact that both governments make this sort of thing legal at the disadvantage to domestic-only companies is just silly.
Now, whether there should be a 35% or even a 12.5% tax on profits in the first place is questionable. There are local and state taxes on much of the land US companies use. Then there are the profit taxes. Then there are taxes against the shareholders of a corporation if any of that profit becomes a dividend. Then there are capital gains taxes if any shareholders sell a large enough value of shares at a profit. That's all on top of the payroll taxes the employees and the company both pay. Then there's the state and local sales taxes the employees pay in many areas on everything they buy, and which the companies often also pay on some things they buy.
A profit tax encourages this sort of playing with profits vs. expenses in the first place. Going international just makes it easier. A small gross receipts tax makes more sense, but taxing only the employees (and maybe still the shareholders, and keep land taxes in place that exist) makes even more sense than that. Abolish profit taxes and the employer's portion of the payroll tax, and you'd get a lot more Americans back to work buying more American-made products.
The EPA estimates that 30% to 50% of solid waste in at least some areas of the US is generated from construction and demolition of buildings. Of that, about 55% is from demolition with the remainder being from construction and remodeling. Of what construction and demolition waste hits landfills, 30% to 40% is lumber.
Most C&D waste, including lumber, brick, concrete blocks, poured concrete, pipes, plumbing fixtures, wiring, flooring, drywall, glass, and asphalt can be either reconditioned or recycled.
So yeah, it's good to get your old laptop turned into something useful like fuel. Don't forget to get your building waste turned into something useful, too, though. Most of it can be processed and resold rather than going into the landfill in the first place.
The #100 on that list (bottom of the page) had 24 cores and a peak GFLOPS of 192.
The AMD Radeon 6850, which is a mainstream or low-end gaming graphics processor and available for around $200 as we speak, has 960 cores with a theoretical peak performance of 1.5 TFLOPS. I haven't seen LinPack numbers for it and I'm not sure AMD has it working under LinPack just yet.
The numbers of a workstation using OpenCL or CUDA on even one high-end graphics card would put it in the top ten from 2000. Some systems for professional workstations and clusters are specified with four or more GPGPU cards specifically for use as general-purpose accelerated vector processors.
NVidia's Tesla C2050 in a dual GPU dual CPU (Xeon X5670) single system had an actual test at 656.1 GFLOPS. That's a single 1U system. Granted, it had 48 GB of RAM installed and a street price of around $11k. Still, that's a far cry from a supercomputer price. These GPU cards are being put into supercomputer clusters being built as they offer about 8x the performance per node or a 2x Xeon node without the use of the GPUs. One node would be in the top 30 from ten years ago.
When measurements move from GFLOPS to TFLOPS, make sure you notice the difference. It's a big one. The top supercomputers are now in PFLOPS territory.
Right. The really interesting chips will arrive when you run between four and sixteen cores with the entirety of main RAM for those cores (in a NUMA configuration with other sockets, starting with maybe a gigabyte or so per die). You could then use SDRAM for both a paging file and for cache between the storage system and the processor/memory die.
You could map registers straight to portions of the on-chip memory if necessary for backwards compatibility. You'd probably be better off, though, compiling nearly everything to just use memory addressing. You'd only hit the SDRAM to load a new entire page into the on-chip RAM. On-chip cache and the circuitry to minimize misses in the cache could mostly go away, and the cores themselves could be simplified. You might even get away with moving the SDRAM controller back off-chip at first to free up some space on the die since the working memory would be so fast once the data was in it.
Unfortunately, this assumes billions of switches just for the main memory and probably quality control nightmares in the first several models.
However, it's the logical conclusion for the way forward. Caches keep taking more die space to deal with the fact that memory is so much slower than processors. Once you get over a certain size cache, you're just wasting circuitry on managing a large block of memory in little chunks that's better treated as a large single block of memory. The virtual to physical mapping already figures out what's in main RAM and what's out in the swap. Just let it do that with the on-die memory and eliminate the extra cache logic to make more on-die memory.
Intel has mentioned putting main memory on the die already. They even mentioned that they could do it with a form of DRAM rather than with SRAM.
Nice straw man you have there.
I said the company shouldn't be reporting corporate profits in the US then keeping them in Ireland to keep from paying taxes on them. You see, the whole company's profits show up on the books in the US for stock share purposes. They don't show up on the US books for tax purposes.
Those extra-US presences are also shifting costs incurred extra-US back to the US presence on paper to lower the apparent profitability of the US presence. Basically, the US presence pays the bills for the overseas presence, the overseas presence operates at a subsidy from HQ, then reports a higher profit due to the subsidy. The HQ reports a lower profit because they report the subsidy to the branch as an expense.
If some company has offices in more than one country that operate at their own profit and loss and report those profits and losses for both taxes and balance sheets according to where the profits and losses are actually made, that's fine.
Thanks for anonymously calling me a moron, though, for attacking a point I never made.
The main problem is that they sell their shares on the stock market as if all the profit is in Mountain View, but keep much of it away from there and in a different country for tax purposes. The IRS and the SEC get two different numbers for profit reports. Meanwhile, they are using US infrastructure to coordinate their business in California with these offices in Ireland.
I'm not saying I think that 35% is the right amount on the part of the government. I'm just saying that if the company is going to make profit as a company they should show it on their US books or not.
Ideally, there would be an international agreement among many countries that multinationals pay some portion of overall company taxes to each country in which they have a physical presence. If they want US, Ireland, and Bermuda all to house parts of the company, then each location should get some share of the overall company profits to tax based on their portion of the company's presence.
Say, just for example, that 50% of the company's assets and personnel are in the US, 40% in Ireland, and 10% in Bermuda. Then the US could tax 35% against 50% of profits. Ireland could tax their 12.5% against 40% of profits. Bermuda could tax whatever they tax against 10% of the profits. If that causes companies like Google to move tens of thousands of jobs overseas to remain competitive, then that's a problem with the tax rate and not a problem with collecting what's due under that rate.
Personally, I still remember Sim Earth requiring me to answer "365.26" in order to keep playing when it asked specifically about the number of days.
The 24-hour answer is understandable if they didn't actually listen to the question and assumed you asked how long it takes the sun to appear in the same part of the sky. Otherwise, it's a really sad answer.
Personally, I think lots of people even after agreeing to be surveyed don't pay full attention, so some portion of them probably made an error of speaking without listening. How to tell the difference and how large a portion would be worth its own lengthy study, though.
That at least some of the people confuse a day and a year, though, or have no idea, is sad and a little scary. I also expected some of both of those, but half is disappointing.
Ah, blissful ad hominem.
Let's discuss the appropriations and budgeting process for the US government in a thread where that's the topic, shall we?