Please look up the bathtub model of hardware failure - most failures will happen right at the beginning of a product's lifespan, or after a period of time where failure rates are very low.
On the other hand 0.4% failure on the first day doesn't look great. 0.4% failure in the first month is good. 0.4% failure in the first year is excellent.
It looks like a dodgy HDMI connector is a common issue.
The Court is persuaded to issue a restraining order without notice based on defendants’ statements that they will release Visdom “shortly” as an open-source product.
Isn't the key here that Visdom, which he wants to open source, is alleged to include source code from Sophia? Surely the case is about ascertaining whether or not Visdom includes Sophia source code? They wanted the computer seized because they thought he would Open Source it as soon as he caught wind of the impending court order, and that such open sourcing, even if only temporary, would cause irreparable harm to the owner of Sophia.
If Visdom does not include such source code, then the whole case is without merit. But now it's in the legal system it could be years before he is allowed to release it, which is surely the aim of the owner of Sophia.
Most likely the developer has the source code online in a private source control repository somewhere anyway, so he can still release it if he wanted to. Most likely as a professional software engineer contractor he was never going to be doing anything
There are high end Mali cores - things have moved on in the three years since Mali-400 MP4 was on the market in the Galaxy SII. Sadly it is still a popular GPU core in the low-end market (ARM actually recently created Mali-450 to cater for this area), but there is the Mali T6xx family for higher end uses - e.g., http://www.arm.com/products/multimedia/mali-graphics-plus-gpu-compute/mali-t678.php
Agreed R.e., NVIDIA - Tegra 4 is an outdated GPU core, even by mobile standards, but there's a lot of it to get good performance, and most games don't use the more advanced OpenGL ES 3 yet.
AMD's ARM products aren't out until next year. They'll presumably be an ARM version of their low-end Jaguar-based APUs.
This would be a very good idea for Imagination to work towards - a "Raspberry MIPS" based around this MIPS core, a low-end current-gen Imagination GPU, and some other standard features. Get it out into the market at a cheap price, support it (the ecosystem is as important as getting it out there in the first place) and you could get a lot of people using their hardware, testing software by using it, etc.
ARM got the mobile phone market early on - very early on (late 90s) - presumably due to a very hard working sales team and an established pedigree in mobile designs (Apple Newton, for example), as well as proven low power (MIPS wasn't there then, Hitachi was with SH3/4 which was used in early Windows CE fliptops). They also had Java support (hardware assistance) which was very big on the client at the time.
ARM clearly has very good engineers who work with their customers - this means a lot when you're licensing cores to integrate, not buying ready made chips. And they went for the cheap licensing and hope for bulk option. I'm sure early MP3 players using it helped too.
And clearly since then they took the ball and ran with it, by delivering updates on time meeting what their customers need.
MIPS has languished for a long time, it's like the company didn't care to target what was to become a massive market - and by the time they did it was too late. They probably didn't see it coming, kept on selling into the embedded market, and have kicked themselves ever since. Until Imagination bought them that is - Imagination's established sales team (from GPU sales) will be able to get this core (which will be Android compatible) into SoCs - maybe not many initially.
It's nice to see a decent CPU architecture possibly re-emerging.
This is one of the annoying things about Android (and iOS) on a tablet.
I know there are some third party windowing solutions, and Samsung have their own (or licensed one) for side-by-side apps.
But yeah, for apps that are happy running on a thin phone screen, why can't they run on the side on a tablet whilst another (or two more) are also running on the screen? In a way, Windows 8 supports this in the Metro view, because apps have to support a narrow view as well as a wide view (I don't know the specifics).
Hopefully Lenovo have also licensed one of these window managers for Android, at least for side-by-side/tiling view if not a windowed interface. And hopefully Google are working on this for Android 5, at least for when it is running on a tablet.
None of the GPUs in current ARM SoCs are open in any sense of the word.
Some of them are getting painfully reversed engineered open source drivers - Lima (for Mali), Grate (for Tegra), etc. But the hardware and firmware is still closed source.
This isn't about getting cheap hardware en-masse. It's about getting fully open source hardware at any cost. And the market for that (from a user perspective) is quite small, although the benefits for FPGA computer projects could be massive - essentially a free GPU if this gets funded.
I don't see a problem with patents for anything but the new functionality on the $1m bounty - this is all proven pre-existing hardware being open sourced at the Verilog level.
This will need some major backing from the open source extremists to get funded.
Well if they can find 20 commercial FPGA projects that need a 2D display controller for their FPGA that are willing to fund $10,000 each, then this Kickstarter might get funded.
However I'm sure you can buy 2D cores (proprietary) for less money already.
It is important in some ways to have a 2D LGPL GPU though, especially an optimised, proven design, one with hardware acceleration for drawing, text and blitting - it could benefit a lot of FPGA projects - e.g., FPGA reimplementations of classic hardware, especially Amigas (this hardware could be used for RTG support).
The only good thing is that a side-effect of having such a narrow comment area is that each comment isn't very wide, and thus is more readable (which is why newspapers are columnar).
This is just a mock-up running on live data, right? Nothing works like replying, moderating, etc. Individual comments aren't linkable. You can't collapse comments, or entire subtrees of comments. First and foremost the functionality has to be there. This isn't a "beta" in any sense of the word.
Secondly, my monitor is 1920x1080 (yeah, I wish it was higher). If you've gone to the effort of providing three different interface styles, then you can provide one that isn't a fixed pixel width (because it's easier for the web designer) but instead scales. And make the compact style actually make comment threads compact! There's loads of white space.
At least Stylish can be used to fix up CSS, but that means waiting for someone to do it well, rather than making it look "moody" and "dark" like half of the styles on that site.
The fair thing to do would be to grant extra paid holiday to the essential staff to equalise time off with those who did get to bum around playing the battlefield 4 beta.
It's not their choice to not turn up to work and not be paid.
And yet insurance is a competitive marketplace with extensive price comparison opportunity, and if what you wrote was true then it would only take one company to be significantly cheaper than the rest to get all the business - therefore driving all the other companies to drop their prices.
The fact is, the companies have assessed that they cannot afford to drop their prices as the above scenario suggests, the risk is too high. They work out the risk by using external risk assessment firms, of which one is cited in the article. These risk assessment firms get business by being good at estimating risk, not by costing their clients business by overstating risk, or by costing their clients money by understating risk.
800x480 hasn't been a typical 7" tablet resolution since... ever. Maybe the original EeePC?
Most 7" tablets are 1024x600 or 1280x720 (or 800). But in the past year there has been a move to high DPI, even at relatively low price points, so 1920x1080 in a 7" device, like the current Nexus 7 tablet.
Yeah, but Haswell is not going to be available in a $20 SoC.
Atom might be, but that's not Haswell.
And Windows apps on a touchscreen are just awful unless you have a mouse and keyboard - by which stage you might as well have bought a laptop.
Windows RT was actually a better attempt at making a tablet running Windows that was nice to use. Problem is, the market doesn't want Windows-Tablet, it wants Windows. On a laptop. Or Android/iOS on a tablet.
The TV resolution specifications (720p, 1080i, 1080p, etc) were set in the 90s. It was after this that digital movie recording started with a slightly different "2K" resolution. They are different display mechanisms after all, the home TV and the cinema - even if the home TV is approaching cinema size (factoring in viewing distance).
2048x1080 is a stupid resolution. 2048x1152 would be more sane as it's a 16:9 display. Maybe this is what Full HD should have been originally instead of 1080 lines. Too late now.
Maybe teachers would pick up this information if it wasn't presented in such a horrible way. I.e., they need a TL;DR version, not a massive wordy paper or newspaper article.
FFS teaching 10 year olds doesn't require that much in depth knowledge about any single subject. If a primary school teacher can't teach themselves the core curriculum for the age range they are teaching then there is a major problem with the teacher.
Oh, I can see that it's an issue for those doing their first year or two of teaching, where all the subjects have to be learned up front, but in later years surely these things don't change that much (government meddling aside).
So maybe there is a high turnover of primary school teachers, meaning they don't stay long enough to become actually effective. This is probably down to poor wages for the stress of that role. Or very lazy teachers cosying down in a role doing the bare minimum. Or the fact that the teachers are doing so much paperwork they never have the time to self-improve. The system, not the teachers, is to blame.
Well, they should know how to operate the computers in 2013.
Oh, education is a big bag of fail all round. So much emphasis on measurement that educating takes a back seat (except for the part covering the tests only).
The first linked article mentions them explicitly:
Tesla is the only carmaker to use small "commodity" 18650 cells for plug-in vehicles; Nissan, General Motors, BMW, and others use larger-format cells, which contain up to 10 times the energy in each cell.
The issue is whether there is a production limit for "18650" cells, or if only enough are made that would be sold, and now Tesla need more, more will be made.
Given that ultimately they're all Li-ion, just in different formats, it's not a real issue as long as Tesla have managed their suppliers expectations.
The carmaker's rapid production scale-up has prompted Panasonic to expand capacity, by reopening previously idled plants, while simultaneously committing to build entirely new production lines.
All of the kids around my precious Jewel are already vaccinated, so she's not going to be exposed to those nasties anyways.
Luckily for Jewel, she was taken away from those kids (why would the parents associate with those "pro-vaccers" anyway, always going on that Jewel should get vaccinated, what do they know anyway, the church's pastor knows best) and into a group of like minded kids with parents who also didn't vaccinate their children.
Slashdot Mirror
Can't you find a lawyer that will take the case on a pro-bono basis, it looks like a slam dunk.
Please look up the bathtub model of hardware failure - most failures will happen right at the beginning of a product's lifespan, or after a period of time where failure rates are very low.
On the other hand 0.4% failure on the first day doesn't look great. 0.4% failure in the first month is good. 0.4% failure in the first year is excellent.
It looks like a dodgy HDMI connector is a common issue.
The Court is persuaded to issue a restraining order without notice based on defendants’ statements that they will release Visdom “shortly” as an open-source product.
Isn't the key here that Visdom, which he wants to open source, is alleged to include source code from Sophia? Surely the case is about ascertaining whether or not Visdom includes Sophia source code? They wanted the computer seized because they thought he would Open Source it as soon as he caught wind of the impending court order, and that such open sourcing, even if only temporary, would cause irreparable harm to the owner of Sophia.
If Visdom does not include such source code, then the whole case is without merit. But now it's in the legal system it could be years before he is allowed to release it, which is surely the aim of the owner of Sophia.
Most likely the developer has the source code online in a private source control repository somewhere anyway, so he can still release it if he wanted to. Most likely as a professional software engineer contractor he was never going to be doing anything
???
There are high end Mali cores - things have moved on in the three years since Mali-400 MP4 was on the market in the Galaxy SII. Sadly it is still a popular GPU core in the low-end market (ARM actually recently created Mali-450 to cater for this area), but there is the Mali T6xx family for higher end uses - e.g., http://www.arm.com/products/multimedia/mali-graphics-plus-gpu-compute/mali-t678.php
Agreed R.e., NVIDIA - Tegra 4 is an outdated GPU core, even by mobile standards, but there's a lot of it to get good performance, and most games don't use the more advanced OpenGL ES 3 yet.
AMD's ARM products aren't out until next year. They'll presumably be an ARM version of their low-end Jaguar-based APUs.
This would be a very good idea for Imagination to work towards - a "Raspberry MIPS" based around this MIPS core, a low-end current-gen Imagination GPU, and some other standard features. Get it out into the market at a cheap price, support it (the ecosystem is as important as getting it out there in the first place) and you could get a lot of people using their hardware, testing software by using it, etc.
ARM got the mobile phone market early on - very early on (late 90s) - presumably due to a very hard working sales team and an established pedigree in mobile designs (Apple Newton, for example), as well as proven low power (MIPS wasn't there then, Hitachi was with SH3/4 which was used in early Windows CE fliptops). They also had Java support (hardware assistance) which was very big on the client at the time.
ARM clearly has very good engineers who work with their customers - this means a lot when you're licensing cores to integrate, not buying ready made chips. And they went for the cheap licensing and hope for bulk option. I'm sure early MP3 players using it helped too.
And clearly since then they took the ball and ran with it, by delivering updates on time meeting what their customers need.
MIPS has languished for a long time, it's like the company didn't care to target what was to become a massive market - and by the time they did it was too late. They probably didn't see it coming, kept on selling into the embedded market, and have kicked themselves ever since. Until Imagination bought them that is - Imagination's established sales team (from GPU sales) will be able to get this core (which will be Android compatible) into SoCs - maybe not many initially.
It's nice to see a decent CPU architecture possibly re-emerging.
This is one of the annoying things about Android (and iOS) on a tablet.
I know there are some third party windowing solutions, and Samsung have their own (or licensed one) for side-by-side apps.
But yeah, for apps that are happy running on a thin phone screen, why can't they run on the side on a tablet whilst another (or two more) are also running on the screen? In a way, Windows 8 supports this in the Metro view, because apps have to support a narrow view as well as a wide view (I don't know the specifics).
Hopefully Lenovo have also licensed one of these window managers for Android, at least for side-by-side/tiling view if not a windowed interface. And hopefully Google are working on this for Android 5, at least for when it is running on a tablet.
I was wondering about open source CPU cores to go along with this GPU - thanks. A better bet than the T80 or T68 core!
None of the GPUs in current ARM SoCs are open in any sense of the word.
Some of them are getting painfully reversed engineered open source drivers - Lima (for Mali), Grate (for Tegra), etc. But the hardware and firmware is still closed source.
This isn't about getting cheap hardware en-masse. It's about getting fully open source hardware at any cost. And the market for that (from a user perspective) is quite small, although the benefits for FPGA computer projects could be massive - essentially a free GPU if this gets funded.
I don't see a problem with patents for anything but the new functionality on the $1m bounty - this is all proven pre-existing hardware being open sourced at the Verilog level.
This will need some major backing from the open source extremists to get funded.
To me it looks like a last-gasp effort to get $200,000 from their old graphics IP, and possibly a nice year or two gig to enhance it.
Well if they can find 20 commercial FPGA projects that need a 2D display controller for their FPGA that are willing to fund $10,000 each, then this Kickstarter might get funded.
However I'm sure you can buy 2D cores (proprietary) for less money already.
It is important in some ways to have a 2D LGPL GPU though, especially an optimised, proven design, one with hardware acceleration for drawing, text and blitting - it could benefit a lot of FPGA projects - e.g., FPGA reimplementations of classic hardware, especially Amigas (this hardware could be used for RTG support).
Yeah, you can fix that on the current Slashdot site by adding:
.commentBody {
max-width: 50em;
}
to the site, via Stylish, etc. It just makes the individual comments narrower, the comment thread is still nearly the full browser width.
It is indeed horrible.
The only good thing is that a side-effect of having such a narrow comment area is that each comment isn't very wide, and thus is more readable (which is why newspapers are columnar).
This is just a mock-up running on live data, right? Nothing works like replying, moderating, etc. Individual comments aren't linkable. You can't collapse comments, or entire subtrees of comments. First and foremost the functionality has to be there. This isn't a "beta" in any sense of the word.
Secondly, my monitor is 1920x1080 (yeah, I wish it was higher). If you've gone to the effort of providing three different interface styles, then you can provide one that isn't a fixed pixel width (because it's easier for the web designer) but instead scales. And make the compact style actually make comment threads compact! There's loads of white space.
At least Stylish can be used to fix up CSS, but that means waiting for someone to do it well, rather than making it look "moody" and "dark" like half of the styles on that site.
The fair thing to do would be to grant extra paid holiday to the essential staff to equalise time off with those who did get to bum around playing the battlefield 4 beta.
It's not their choice to not turn up to work and not be paid.
And yet insurance is a competitive marketplace with extensive price comparison opportunity, and if what you wrote was true then it would only take one company to be significantly cheaper than the rest to get all the business - therefore driving all the other companies to drop their prices.
The fact is, the companies have assessed that they cannot afford to drop their prices as the above scenario suggests, the risk is too high. They work out the risk by using external risk assessment firms, of which one is cited in the article. These risk assessment firms get business by being good at estimating risk, not by costing their clients business by overstating risk, or by costing their clients money by understating risk.
800x480 hasn't been a typical 7" tablet resolution since ... ever. Maybe the original EeePC?
Most 7" tablets are 1024x600 or 1280x720 (or 800). But in the past year there has been a move to high DPI, even at relatively low price points, so 1920x1080 in a 7" device, like the current Nexus 7 tablet.
Yeah, but Haswell is not going to be available in a $20 SoC.
Atom might be, but that's not Haswell.
And Windows apps on a touchscreen are just awful unless you have a mouse and keyboard - by which stage you might as well have bought a laptop.
Windows RT was actually a better attempt at making a tablet running Windows that was nice to use. Problem is, the market doesn't want Windows-Tablet, it wants Windows. On a laptop. Or Android/iOS on a tablet.
The TV resolution specifications (720p, 1080i, 1080p, etc) were set in the 90s. It was after this that digital movie recording started with a slightly different "2K" resolution. They are different display mechanisms after all, the home TV and the cinema - even if the home TV is approaching cinema size (factoring in viewing distance).
2048x1080 is a stupid resolution. 2048x1152 would be more sane as it's a 16:9 display. Maybe this is what Full HD should have been originally instead of 1080 lines. Too late now.
"8K" in the home will be 7680x4320.
Sorry, 3840 wide. I just blindly copied what the OP wrote because the point was to explain why it wasn't 4096x2160.
1920 multiplied by 2 is 3820.
3820x2160 is merely Quad-1080p - which at least is sane.
4096x2160 is 17:9 (ish) - I don't see the point in this resolution.
I await the pointless 5040x2160 monitors (21:9, the "new shiny standard" for widescreen monitors).
Maybe teachers would pick up this information if it wasn't presented in such a horrible way. I.e., they need a TL;DR version, not a massive wordy paper or newspaper article.
FFS teaching 10 year olds doesn't require that much in depth knowledge about any single subject. If a primary school teacher can't teach themselves the core curriculum for the age range they are teaching then there is a major problem with the teacher.
Oh, I can see that it's an issue for those doing their first year or two of teaching, where all the subjects have to be learned up front, but in later years surely these things don't change that much (government meddling aside).
So maybe there is a high turnover of primary school teachers, meaning they don't stay long enough to become actually effective. This is probably down to poor wages for the stress of that role. Or very lazy teachers cosying down in a role doing the bare minimum. Or the fact that the teachers are doing so much paperwork they never have the time to self-improve. The system, not the teachers, is to blame.
Well, they should know how to operate the computers in 2013.
Oh, education is a big bag of fail all round. So much emphasis on measurement that educating takes a back seat (except for the part covering the tests only).
The first linked article mentions them explicitly:
Tesla is the only carmaker to use small "commodity" 18650 cells for plug-in vehicles; Nissan, General Motors, BMW, and others use larger-format cells, which contain up to 10 times the energy in each cell.
The issue is whether there is a production limit for "18650" cells, or if only enough are made that would be sold, and now Tesla need more, more will be made.
Given that ultimately they're all Li-ion, just in different formats, it's not a real issue as long as Tesla have managed their suppliers expectations.
The carmaker's rapid production scale-up has prompted Panasonic to expand capacity, by reopening previously idled plants, while simultaneously committing to build entirely new production lines.
Yes.
No real story, certainly no panic.
All of the kids around my precious Jewel are already vaccinated, so she's not going to be exposed to those nasties anyways.
Luckily for Jewel, she was taken away from those kids (why would the parents associate with those "pro-vaccers" anyway, always going on that Jewel should get vaccinated, what do they know anyway, the church's pastor knows best) and into a group of like minded kids with parents who also didn't vaccinate their children.
Bam, herd immunity compromised.