As Star Wars inspired road designs go, I'd prefer highways managed by a Wampa system instead. All drivers who slow down traffic are beaten in the head and left hanging to die somewhere.
Anyway, as the article ends the reason for "why electric cars?" instead of the alternatives is laid down. The hope is that they'll be powered almost directly by solar energy. Both the battery manufacturing and the solar panels need to become sustainable things to manufacture and keep running for that dream to play out.
Speaking of screws, the one holding the car together will of course be non-standard and tamper resistant, so that if you get any work done at a non-official repair location you'll lose your warranty. You'll have to take them to the Tesla Virtuoso Station instead.
Small businesses no longer make up the majority of the economy. In boom times, they do very well. But during periods when expansion capital is hard to come by and sales are weak, they are much less competitive against larger companies who have significant cash/resources to fall back on. We've been in such a bad growth situation for small businesses for several years now, and there's no sign of it improving in the near future either.
"A functional system for promoting invention and avoiding all the piles of crap that stifle innovation". Add a block diagram and it sounds like you've got yourself a patent right there.
I've always wanted to file a business process patent for patent trolling, and then sue all the patent troll companies for violating it.
Patent troll is only applicable to companies who lobby patent suits but don't make things; usage stretching behind that is sloppy terminology. The reason for that distinction is that patent troll companies are normally a non-practising entity (NPE), which lets them sue without fear of a counter-suit. That's what makes them so troublesome. When Apple and Samsung battle, ultimately both have products covered by patents held by the other. While Apple may not like licensing their patents, it's possible for them to be forced into cross-licensing with another company that builds real products, or both companies can be deadlocked and unable to sell. That possibility isn't there on a true patent troll company. They only sue for infringement and never need to license to cover their own products, because they don't have any.
What I said is that the Pentium Pro didn't include any new significant processor features in its architecture, by which I mean things like adding new instructions. The architecture changes were focused on performance instead. Those were significant, from the L2 cache improvements to the (in retrospect) vital early out of order execution work. But they sped up code rather than enabling new types of code.
In fact, if you compare feature sets, the first generation Pentium Pro was actually a step back from what was already available. The Pentium line had added MMX for accelerating some types of CPU intensive "MultiMedia" operations by then. The Pentium Pro line initially did not include MMX. That disconnect makes the split design team idea I was outlining even more obvious. From that you can go back and confirm the Pentium Pro must have been developed in parallel to the Pentium MMX, with more server oriented goals, rather than as part of a single sequence.
It is true that the Core line traces its heritage back to the P6 / Pentium Pro one. It would be a stretch to say it's the "same architecture they are using today" though. I would argue that the later redesign to optimize for low power, what lead to the Pentium M, was just as large and important. That was both critical and so disruptive that it deserves to be considered a new architecture.
Intel's Core line of processors came out in January of 2006. They were the first good performance per watt CPUs Intel had produced in some time at that point. Apple's Intel Mac started shipping in, surprise, January of 2006. There was a period before then that the Power PC vs. Intel situation didn't favor Intel in all cases. Intel improved their CPUs enormously during the year leading up to Apple's switch to Intel Macs.
It's not really safe to say that because ARM is only a few years behind but gaining performance per watt faster, they will therefore catch up. Intel (and AMD) performance gains have leveled off because it's gotten much harder to build things at the sizes they're targeting now. If ARM keeps going--developing faster than Intel does for a while still--I would expect them to run into the same wall too in a few years.
The problem is the graphics GPU, not the CPU. The Mac Pro desktop has a ATI Radeon HD 5770 card. If you look at ATI's 5000 series list, you'll see that's right in the middle of the product line. Considering how much the system as a whole costs, some people feel that's not good enough.
The "Retina" MacBook pros have an even worse problem. The NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M is also nowhere near the top of their mobile line. But the resolution being driven is one of the highest available. A fair number of people pushing it hard have discovered it's really not capable of keeping up with that system's 2880 x 1800 display very well.
Hedge funds look at Apple as the most important indicator of the tech industry, because it's one of the few trades that's been so simple they made money on it this year. No one in the financial industry seems to have any memory of Apple's boom/bust times; it's just looked like nothing but easy money for too long now.
There are multiple solutions already available for Web-based SSH. GateOne says it needs a Python app installed on the server to support the tunnel. If that's hosted on their servers and this gets popular, expect that site to get blocked at the same sort of shops that block ssh. The main claims they seem to be making are for a higher quality of terminal emulation than the other ways around this issue that already exist.
There's Atomic OS, OS.js...that building an OS is ECMAScript seemed like a good idea to multiple people makes me cry. For full buzzword bingo, run the local browser in a virtual machine, and host the browser OS code in the cloud.
If you have to ask Slashdot, you're probably going to get screwed in the deal no matter what you do. In Facebook's position, I'd expect them to use the potential of buying the company to get more information about the shiny boxes, then abandon the purchase once they've gotten that free look. What is a 19 year old going to do about it? Sue them for ripping off his intellectual property? Good luck with that.
The problem with the "build something bigger" idea is that company purchases usually come with both non-compete requirements and the need to work for the buying company for a while. By the time he's able to work on something else, the opportunity to innovate in the area he's most interested in might be gone.
I would sell right now anyway. Companies and investors are still handing out money like it doesn't matter here in this Web 2.0,.com bubble 2.0. The bubble has already burst on Zynga, and Facebook's share prices have stabilized--for now--but could easily plunge further. Even hedge fund darling Apple has been getting smacked around recently. It's obvious a second.com crash has started; a year from now no one will be interested in a company like this anymore.
You're right to highlight this is nothing but a free PR announcement by Google. They got another round reminding everyone that Apple maps sucks, and they are the good guys, in front of our faces. All they're doing here is making sure they don't get any of the blame for screwing the IOS maps up, that it all stays firmly on top of Apple.
The only interesting part is how Google is laying the groundwork for an excuse if they decide to stop porting to IOS altogether. And given the multiple lawsuits between the companies also going on right now, why should they bother? Apple has made a serious competitive error here. They used to be able to credibly claim the best of breed smartphone applications in every major area, and now they've blown one of the biggest ones instead. I expect Google to squeeze that mistake as hard as they can.
"Original recipe is people!" This reminds me of the urban legend that fast-food burgers were made with worms that I remember hearing back in the late 70's.
This isn't unprecedented. When I looked into the 710 series models it was the same trade-off: those drives were also only specified to save their data for 3 months between refreshes.
The small amount of RAM on Intel's SSDs are not used to cache writes in a significant quantity. The idea that you'll only have to write the most popular cells once per shutdown is a dream. The main benefit of having a bit of reliable capacitor backup is that the drive can be less aggressive about forcing an erase of a large cell just to write a fraction of it out, therefore improving the write amplification situation on the drive. You can even see limiting small writes as a factor in the claimed longevity of the drives if you dig into their spec sheets enough. I did an article comparing the 320 vs 710 series lifetimes, approaching from the perspective of one of those specialist things you allude to--database server operation. One of the things that I noticed there is that the longer lifetime of the 710 came with the restriction that you couldn't do nearly as many small random writes per second (write IOPS) and still hit the claimed lifespan target. If the cache was larger and really effective at postponing writes, that trade-off wouldn't exist.
At the beginning of its release cycle, the odds of firmware bugs eating all your data is massively higher on this drive than the models that re-used existing controllers/firmware and have been out a while. The new controller means they've basically started over again with a firmware rewrite. PC hardware and software has so many possible configurations to test, it's impossible to get that right without beta testing the hardware in the field to see what problems the sucker early adopters get nailed by. The only way I'd feel comfortable relying on one of these during its first year of life, while that's getting ironed out, is to have even more backups than the current generation of hardware needs to be considered safe enough.
What "proprietary" means to me here is "untested and likely to be very buggy". I've helped people cope with losing terabytes of lost data eaten by Intel's early X-25 models, when they first played this game. The “BAD_CTX 13x Error” AKA 8MB size bug sucked; so did their flat out deception about the drive's write cache in order to cook benchmark results.
At least they're honest about which drives do and don't care about cache integrity now, and firmware reliability of the models that do that right (the 320 and 710 series) seem pretty solid now. But since getting firmware right for a complicated SSD takes a lot of field testing, that they've switched to this new proprietary controller means the odds of data loss due to firmware bugs on this model are going to jump right back up again. Firmware seems to be the least reliable part of a typical SSD, so brand new firmware surely equals very high risk, even if the hardware is executed perfectly. Doesn't matter how well the flash cells work if you hit something like the "oh, the drive reports it's 8MB now" sort of bug--and that problem haunted multiple generations of drives in Intel's past firmware before they exorcised it. Now it seems they want to start over again. Didn't like that movie the first time, would not watch again.
The main complaints I get are that the commercial databases provide DR with GUI or web based management tools all ready go to. PostgreSQL provides APIs for building such things, but they only seem elegant if you agree that shell scripting is a good solution to some problems.
They re-used "HyperThreading" as the branding for something new, too, despite its name being associated with nothing but bad the first time. Anyway, Intel's Turbo Boost is a great feature for making single task systems faster, ones that weren't benefiting from having more cores around. AMD's Turbo CORE is obviously inspired by that, but hasn't been quite as good so far. This latest generation of chips from AMD closes more of the gap between them and Intel in that area though.
Some of the other developers in my company just recently released Barman for PostgreSQL. That's obviously inspired by Oracle's RMAN DR capabilities. A fair number of companies were already doing work like that using PostgreSQL's DR APIs, but none of them were willing to release the result into open source land until that one came out. We'll see if more pop out now that we've eroded the value of those private tools, or if there's a push to integrate more of that sort of thing back into the core database.
As a matter of policy preference toward keeping the database source code complexity down, features that are living happily outside of core PostgreSQL are not integrated into it. One of the ideas it's challenging to crack at some companies is just how many of a database's features need to be officially part of it. Part of adopting open-source solutions expects that you'll deploy a stack of programs, not just one giant one from a single provider.
Yes, Americans have much bigger problems than fake voting now. The party in power doesn't even need to win the election with votes; they can just declare whatever opposition they're most worried about terrorists to remove them. If your ability to be free citizen can be taken from you without trial, whether you can vote or not is really irrelevant. And that's where we are now in the USA.
Slashdot Mirror
As Star Wars inspired road designs go, I'd prefer highways managed by a Wampa system instead. All drivers who slow down traffic are beaten in the head and left hanging to die somewhere.
Anyway, as the article ends the reason for "why electric cars?" instead of the alternatives is laid down. The hope is that they'll be powered almost directly by solar energy. Both the battery manufacturing and the solar panels need to become sustainable things to manufacture and keep running for that dream to play out.
Speaking of screws, the one holding the car together will of course be non-standard and tamper resistant, so that if you get any work done at a non-official repair location you'll lose your warranty. You'll have to take them to the Tesla Virtuoso Station instead.
Small businesses no longer make up the majority of the economy. In boom times, they do very well. But during periods when expansion capital is hard to come by and sales are weak, they are much less competitive against larger companies who have significant cash/resources to fall back on. We've been in such a bad growth situation for small businesses for several years now, and there's no sign of it improving in the near future either.
"A functional system for promoting invention and avoiding all the piles of crap that stifle innovation". Add a block diagram and it sounds like you've got yourself a patent right there.
I've always wanted to file a business process patent for patent trolling, and then sue all the patent troll companies for violating it.
Patent troll is only applicable to companies who lobby patent suits but don't make things; usage stretching behind that is sloppy terminology. The reason for that distinction is that patent troll companies are normally a non-practising entity (NPE), which lets them sue without fear of a counter-suit. That's what makes them so troublesome. When Apple and Samsung battle, ultimately both have products covered by patents held by the other. While Apple may not like licensing their patents, it's possible for them to be forced into cross-licensing with another company that builds real products, or both companies can be deadlocked and unable to sell. That possibility isn't there on a true patent troll company. They only sue for infringement and never need to license to cover their own products, because they don't have any.
What I said is that the Pentium Pro didn't include any new significant processor features in its architecture, by which I mean things like adding new instructions. The architecture changes were focused on performance instead. Those were significant, from the L2 cache improvements to the (in retrospect) vital early out of order execution work. But they sped up code rather than enabling new types of code.
In fact, if you compare feature sets, the first generation Pentium Pro was actually a step back from what was already available. The Pentium line had added MMX for accelerating some types of CPU intensive "MultiMedia" operations by then. The Pentium Pro line initially did not include MMX. That disconnect makes the split design team idea I was outlining even more obvious. From that you can go back and confirm the Pentium Pro must have been developed in parallel to the Pentium MMX, with more server oriented goals, rather than as part of a single sequence.
It is true that the Core line traces its heritage back to the P6 / Pentium Pro one. It would be a stretch to say it's the "same architecture they are using today" though. I would argue that the later redesign to optimize for low power, what lead to the Pentium M, was just as large and important. That was both critical and so disruptive that it deserves to be considered a new architecture.
Intel's Core line of processors came out in January of 2006. They were the first good performance per watt CPUs Intel had produced in some time at that point. Apple's Intel Mac started shipping in, surprise, January of 2006. There was a period before then that the Power PC vs. Intel situation didn't favor Intel in all cases. Intel improved their CPUs enormously during the year leading up to Apple's switch to Intel Macs.
It's not really safe to say that because ARM is only a few years behind but gaining performance per watt faster, they will therefore catch up. Intel (and AMD) performance gains have leveled off because it's gotten much harder to build things at the sizes they're targeting now. If ARM keeps going--developing faster than Intel does for a while still--I would expect them to run into the same wall too in a few years.
The problem is the graphics GPU, not the CPU. The Mac Pro desktop has a ATI Radeon HD 5770 card. If you look at ATI's 5000 series list, you'll see that's right in the middle of the product line. Considering how much the system as a whole costs, some people feel that's not good enough.
The "Retina" MacBook pros have an even worse problem. The NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M is also nowhere near the top of their mobile line. But the resolution being driven is one of the highest available. A fair number of people pushing it hard have discovered it's really not capable of keeping up with that system's 2880 x 1800 display very well.
Hedge funds look at Apple as the most important indicator of the tech industry, because it's one of the few trades that's been so simple they made money on it this year. No one in the financial industry seems to have any memory of Apple's boom/bust times; it's just looked like nothing but easy money for too long now.
There are multiple solutions already available for Web-based SSH. GateOne says it needs a Python app installed on the server to support the tunnel. If that's hosted on their servers and this gets popular, expect that site to get blocked at the same sort of shops that block ssh. The main claims they seem to be making are for a higher quality of terminal emulation than the other ways around this issue that already exist.
There's Atomic OS, OS.js...that building an OS is ECMAScript seemed like a good idea to multiple people makes me cry. For full buzzword bingo, run the local browser in a virtual machine, and host the browser OS code in the cloud.
If you have to ask Slashdot, you're probably going to get screwed in the deal no matter what you do. In Facebook's position, I'd expect them to use the potential of buying the company to get more information about the shiny boxes, then abandon the purchase once they've gotten that free look. What is a 19 year old going to do about it? Sue them for ripping off his intellectual property? Good luck with that.
The problem with the "build something bigger" idea is that company purchases usually come with both non-compete requirements and the need to work for the buying company for a while. By the time he's able to work on something else, the opportunity to innovate in the area he's most interested in might be gone.
I would sell right now anyway. Companies and investors are still handing out money like it doesn't matter here in this Web 2.0, .com bubble 2.0. The bubble has already burst on Zynga, and Facebook's share prices have stabilized--for now--but could easily plunge further. Even hedge fund darling Apple has been getting smacked around recently. It's obvious a second .com crash has started; a year from now no one will be interested in a company like this anymore.
You're right to highlight this is nothing but a free PR announcement by Google. They got another round reminding everyone that Apple maps sucks, and they are the good guys, in front of our faces. All they're doing here is making sure they don't get any of the blame for screwing the IOS maps up, that it all stays firmly on top of Apple.
The only interesting part is how Google is laying the groundwork for an excuse if they decide to stop porting to IOS altogether. And given the multiple lawsuits between the companies also going on right now, why should they bother? Apple has made a serious competitive error here. They used to be able to credibly claim the best of breed smartphone applications in every major area, and now they've blown one of the biggest ones instead. I expect Google to squeeze that mistake as hard as they can.
In your case then you'll also be required to license the Autotune patents.
"Original recipe is people!" This reminds me of the urban legend that fast-food burgers were made with worms that I remember hearing back in the late 70's.
This isn't unprecedented. When I looked into the 710 series models it was the same trade-off: those drives were also only specified to save their data for 3 months between refreshes.
The small amount of RAM on Intel's SSDs are not used to cache writes in a significant quantity. The idea that you'll only have to write the most popular cells once per shutdown is a dream. The main benefit of having a bit of reliable capacitor backup is that the drive can be less aggressive about forcing an erase of a large cell just to write a fraction of it out, therefore improving the write amplification situation on the drive. You can even see limiting small writes as a factor in the claimed longevity of the drives if you dig into their spec sheets enough. I did an article comparing the 320 vs 710 series lifetimes, approaching from the perspective of one of those specialist things you allude to--database server operation. One of the things that I noticed there is that the longer lifetime of the 710 came with the restriction that you couldn't do nearly as many small random writes per second (write IOPS) and still hit the claimed lifespan target. If the cache was larger and really effective at postponing writes, that trade-off wouldn't exist.
At the beginning of its release cycle, the odds of firmware bugs eating all your data is massively higher on this drive than the models that re-used existing controllers/firmware and have been out a while. The new controller means they've basically started over again with a firmware rewrite. PC hardware and software has so many possible configurations to test, it's impossible to get that right without beta testing the hardware in the field to see what problems the sucker early adopters get nailed by. The only way I'd feel comfortable relying on one of these during its first year of life, while that's getting ironed out, is to have even more backups than the current generation of hardware needs to be considered safe enough.
What "proprietary" means to me here is "untested and likely to be very buggy". I've helped people cope with losing terabytes of lost data eaten by Intel's early X-25 models, when they first played this game. The “BAD_CTX 13x Error” AKA 8MB size bug sucked; so did their flat out deception about the drive's write cache in order to cook benchmark results.
At least they're honest about which drives do and don't care about cache integrity now, and firmware reliability of the models that do that right (the 320 and 710 series) seem pretty solid now. But since getting firmware right for a complicated SSD takes a lot of field testing, that they've switched to this new proprietary controller means the odds of data loss due to firmware bugs on this model are going to jump right back up again. Firmware seems to be the least reliable part of a typical SSD, so brand new firmware surely equals very high risk, even if the hardware is executed perfectly. Doesn't matter how well the flash cells work if you hit something like the "oh, the drive reports it's 8MB now" sort of bug--and that problem haunted multiple generations of drives in Intel's past firmware before they exorcised it. Now it seems they want to start over again. Didn't like that movie the first time, would not watch again.
The main complaints I get are that the commercial databases provide DR with GUI or web based management tools all ready go to. PostgreSQL provides APIs for building such things, but they only seem elegant if you agree that shell scripting is a good solution to some problems.
They re-used "HyperThreading" as the branding for something new, too, despite its name being associated with nothing but bad the first time. Anyway, Intel's Turbo Boost is a great feature for making single task systems faster, ones that weren't benefiting from having more cores around. AMD's Turbo CORE is obviously inspired by that, but hasn't been quite as good so far. This latest generation of chips from AMD closes more of the gap between them and Intel in that area though.
Some of the other developers in my company just recently released Barman for PostgreSQL. That's obviously inspired by Oracle's RMAN DR capabilities. A fair number of companies were already doing work like that using PostgreSQL's DR APIs, but none of them were willing to release the result into open source land until that one came out. We'll see if more pop out now that we've eroded the value of those private tools, or if there's a push to integrate more of that sort of thing back into the core database.
As a matter of policy preference toward keeping the database source code complexity down, features that are living happily outside of core PostgreSQL are not integrated into it. One of the ideas it's challenging to crack at some companies is just how many of a database's features need to be officially part of it. Part of adopting open-source solutions expects that you'll deploy a stack of programs, not just one giant one from a single provider.
Yes, Americans have much bigger problems than fake voting now. The party in power doesn't even need to win the election with votes; they can just declare whatever opposition they're most worried about terrorists to remove them. If your ability to be free citizen can be taken from you without trial, whether you can vote or not is really irrelevant. And that's where we are now in the USA.