That's going a bit far, especially when you consider performance per dollar per watt.
And the fact that a $20 chip is great for a $300 device, but a $100 chip isn't. And Intel won't want to destroy their lovely 60% profit margin.
As for the story "Even if more A6 chips could be produced per wafer — an unproven assumption" - the A6 is a known size, and that size is smaller than the i3, so more chips can be made per wafer. Working chips - that's another matter.
So shoddy that it worked fine for "decades". As one of the researchers said - it was designed before he was born.
Even if a few people had previously worked out their way around it, they could hardly mass-market their cloned cards on the market, and thus the number of users was always going to be rather limited - and probably not worth replacing the current system to deal with.
Now technology has got to the point where the average person could abuse the system, so I guess the system will get an upgrade soon.
It is clear that the low resolution of the Surface tablet is going to be one of the biggest downsides. People who had a retina iPhone and a non-retina iPad complained a lot that the iPad was very blocky after using the iPhone. Now all smartphones have high DPI displays, so the low resolution of the Surface will be quite obvious.
It does win on flash storage. Of course the amount of that storage taken up by each relevant OS and required software is not considered, but it's probably not significantly different. Hopefully this will drive Apple to actually stop pissing about profiteering from including a crappy amount of flash memory in the iPad by default.
I think the best option is to wait for comprehensive reviews before deciding on which of the two to buy, if those are your two options. The ocean of cheaper smaller-screened tablets are proving to be massively popular - is there an 8" Surface?
Nokia was in huge trouble, it's UI teams competing with each other and handset teams not building on the same platform as noted in in an article from yesterday.
Hardly a reason to dump it all in a very public manner and switch to something completely different, turning Nokia instantly from a mobile solutions company into a Windows Phone OEM.
You sort out the internal issues with development, resulting in a single coherent vision and roadmap for development of the platform that you have. You might have to fire a few egos to get things moving again, but they would have left as soon as the platform switch was announced anyway.
You also might choose to set up an alternative development process for an alternative platform - WP in this instance - using the resources freed up by sorting out the issues. That's your backup strategy should it turn out the main strategy is still not working out.
Regardless of the guy's grinding axe, the facts remain - Nokia is making losses instead of profits, and the Windows Phone choice has so far totally failed because nobody wants a Windows mobile., and it's unlikely that the market will change its mind when WP8 comes out.
Also, it's not like your emails are pored over by a human, it's just a computer system.
The main issue would be what the computer system "learns" and then tags onto your profile, or if it is anonymised should someone get hold of this learning data.
Amazing how a little bit of extra information can change a story entirely, and it really does make me wonder why it was missed out of the linked articles and the summary. Oh - that would make it a non-story!
On a more serious note, I guess it's pretty neat that they've designed a rocket that runs along the ground without taking off or digging itself into a crater, but what does it really prove in the end? It's just a record speed. Oh well, it's there to be done I guess, and that's a good reason.
For us "Fat PS3" owners, this may fix the damn fan noise - although I will wait for reviews. It will also allow Sony to drop the price over the next year so that more people can afford the system for the first time, or get a second PS3 for a different room. Yes, it's akin to buying a PS2 Slim in 2005, but lots of people bought PS2 Slims in 2005.
* As a multimedia centre having never contained an inbuilt decent Dual TV tuner [I have an ageing Pentium 4 under my TV] * As a computer crippling the Linux on launch, and dropping it once they failed to get the tax break they deserved, and haven't returned it post Surface. * Its not smart. In a world that knows smart. Google knows it. Apple knows; I think even Sony knows it.
1) It's a games console and blu-ray player, not a digital television decoder. Even so, Sony did release the Play TV. 2) It's a games console, the Linux function was a bonus on the first system, and was irrelevant by the slim (256MB Linux system, woo!) 3) It's a games console. What do you mean by "smart"? Do you mean it can play internet video streams - it can do that. I have iPlayer and 4od installed on mine. It has a store.
It also has professional games with tens of hours of playability. That's because it's a games console.
I guess that the Android version of Chrome will JIT the Javascript into native ARM code, but when running on Intel it will be a slow interpreted codepath instead.
2x the CPU is certainly not enough. The Wii is hamstrung by it's ~730MHz early 2000s era PowerPC CPU. The PS3 is probably 3x as fast, CPU wise (ignoring SPUs), the 360 even more so (maybe even 10x).
Having a controller make up half the cost of the device - that's a real problem. The consumer need for this controller has not been explained well IMO.
1080p is what modern TVs top out at. No need for more. Dual-screen? Yes, it has it - the TV and the controller (two controllers even, apparently).
The WiiU is more powerful than the PS3 (3x more CPU, ?x more GPU, 4x memory), but will people buy it? People with dusty Wiis on their shelves? At least they can make use of their existing software and peripherals - maybe human psychology is such that people will think "I have the peripherals and games, so might as well get the improved device to use them with"!
Exactly, whilst the system isn't powerful, it is instructive in cluster design and programming, which is very relevant at a university.
They won't be running "real applications doing real calculations" on this thing. They'll be writing student-level clustered applications. For the price paid, it's probably a really instructive system for the university to have installed, if they make use of it in student courses and/or projects.
Javascript isn't a real problem, it's the developers writing code using it. We're talking about a client application that is mostly doing REST/JSON calls to the main backend servers, and then displaying it in the correct place on the existing page, and persisting it to a HTML5 local DB. Except it didn't do the latter, and all too often lost even the in-memory cache of data, making the app a PITA to use, especially scrolling back in history.
You only need to look at Twitter clients to realise that timeline-based clients can be written effectively, even in HTML5+JS.
The fact is that Facebook's use of HTML5 was distinctly sub-par, thus making their apps incredibly frustrating to use. Losing all the data, no apparent caching, etc, on a platform that you are using on a mobile device that often loses connectivity. Madness.
The other real problem with growing your food on the median, is that any "food gang" driving by can't just pick what they want (via use of guns). Given the number of city people escaping to where these crops would be growing, I expect the yields for the actual growers would be around 0%, unless the military were guarding them. Fat chance, as the military will be trying to keep control in the cities as the food riots get worse.
Indeed the gangs will be the biggest disincentive to growing your own food, wherever you try it. You'd want to be off the beaten path.
Actually, I'm now with the "five years of survival rations in the basement" people. Hide your food in case of raids. You'll need neighbourhood defense rotas too. Beware of backstabbing neighbours who want your food too.
No doubt about it, if anything like this were to happen and there was a famine (i.e., not enough food to feed everyone, even with food aid given to those who no longer could afford to buy food) then spending 50% of your time to survive would suddenly seem like a good option. That, or die, or join a gang fighting for ever dwindling food supplies and getting killed. Not a good prospect for your average middle-class person.
The problem is that until things go wrong, nothing will be done, and it won't be a priority for people. But for those people with gardens - mostly lawn - they have a large area to grow crops. You don't need a lot of space to grow enough food to survive on - you might have to lose some trees (you'll probably do that for firewood anyway) and decorative plants to maximise yield.
Growing 50% of your own food needs could make the additional food aid (probably rice) stretch much further.
If you live in an apartment, bad luck. Please die quietly. We could compost the bodies.
It's probably cheaper to get a low end tablet and a bluetooth keyboard than some of these graphing calculators however. And the tablet has so many other uses. A fully featured graphing and mathematical educational application for Android (with programming/scripting abilities) would be one part of making a fully featured educational tablet.
Actually, I am surprised at the lack of tablet/smartphone graphing applications that replicate and enhance the functionality provided by the dedicated graphing calculators.
Loaning them out when needed seems a perfectly suitable solution to the problem. Maybe get them to write some games - that was popular back in the day.
Yeah, but the allotments on the road-side would be managed by people growing for their own family, trading time (assuming everything goes to shit, so a job isn't the biggest concern any longer) rather than money to get the food they require.
The biggest issue is getting water to the allotments. That's why I feel it would be doomed to fail, as most "garden crops" aren't suitable for dry summer conditions. Residential gardens would be the best plan - again with a failing infrastructure don't count on getting water if you live in a place dependent on imported water (e.g., Phoenix).
You might be better off planting fruit trees every 20ft along the median strips. A long orchard providing good seasonal food, or ingredients for alcoholic beverages.
And if you live in a place that would not be viable without imported water or food, when things hit the fan you need to get somewhere that is viable, and quick.
Studies have shown that motorways (freeways) are the safest roads to travel on. It is bendy roads, rural roads, thinner roads, etc, that are dangerous, despite the fact they have lower speed limits.
IIRC it was between 5% and 10% of all accidents were on motorways, despite the vast majority of journeys being done on them. Most of those were down to bad driving in adverse conditions (fog, etc) and old people driving the wrong way down the road (!). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reported_Road_Casualties_Great_Britain#Casualties_by_road_type_in_2008 says 6% of road deaths occur on motorways. Urban and rural (non motorway) roads were far far far more lethal.
Of course an accident at speed is far likelier to result in death, but the fact remains that when you have roads with few distractions, few interchanges, barriers on the side and in the median, wide lanes, you will have far far far fewer accidents. Safe road design is what matters for motorways, not the actual speed limit.
So the thing in the article stating the opposite really confuses me? Do the majority of American road accidents happen on your freeways? Oh wait, I see it - it's abuse of percentages. 9% higher sounds a lot, but the prior absolute figure (~12k) was for ALL rural road types. That 9% could be applied to just 5% of that (an increase from 600 deaths to 654 deaths).
Slashdot Mirror
That's going a bit far, especially when you consider performance per dollar per watt.
And the fact that a $20 chip is great for a $300 device, but a $100 chip isn't. And Intel won't want to destroy their lovely 60% profit margin.
As for the story "Even if more A6 chips could be produced per wafer — an unproven assumption" - the A6 is a known size, and that size is smaller than the i3, so more chips can be made per wafer. Working chips - that's another matter.
So shoddy that it worked fine for "decades". As one of the researchers said - it was designed before he was born.
Even if a few people had previously worked out their way around it, they could hardly mass-market their cloned cards on the market, and thus the number of users was always going to be rather limited - and probably not worth replacing the current system to deal with.
Now technology has got to the point where the average person could abuse the system, so I guess the system will get an upgrade soon.
It is clear that the low resolution of the Surface tablet is going to be one of the biggest downsides. People who had a retina iPhone and a non-retina iPad complained a lot that the iPad was very blocky after using the iPhone. Now all smartphones have high DPI displays, so the low resolution of the Surface will be quite obvious.
It does win on flash storage. Of course the amount of that storage taken up by each relevant OS and required software is not considered, but it's probably not significantly different. Hopefully this will drive Apple to actually stop pissing about profiteering from including a crappy amount of flash memory in the iPad by default.
I think the best option is to wait for comprehensive reviews before deciding on which of the two to buy, if those are your two options. The ocean of cheaper smaller-screened tablets are proving to be massively popular - is there an 8" Surface?
Nokia was in huge trouble, it's UI teams competing with each other and handset teams not building on the same platform as noted in in an article from yesterday.
Hardly a reason to dump it all in a very public manner and switch to something completely different, turning Nokia instantly from a mobile solutions company into a Windows Phone OEM.
You sort out the internal issues with development, resulting in a single coherent vision and roadmap for development of the platform that you have. You might have to fire a few egos to get things moving again, but they would have left as soon as the platform switch was announced anyway.
You also might choose to set up an alternative development process for an alternative platform - WP in this instance - using the resources freed up by sorting out the issues. That's your backup strategy should it turn out the main strategy is still not working out.
Regardless of the guy's grinding axe, the facts remain - Nokia is making losses instead of profits, and the Windows Phone choice has so far totally failed because nobody wants a Windows mobile., and it's unlikely that the market will change its mind when WP8 comes out.
I don't think this surprises anyone.
Also, it's not like your emails are pored over by a human, it's just a computer system.
The main issue would be what the computer system "learns" and then tags onto your profile, or if it is anonymised should someone get hold of this learning data.
Amazing how a little bit of extra information can change a story entirely, and it really does make me wonder why it was missed out of the linked articles and the summary. Oh - that would make it a non-story!
Sweet, this'll make my commute sound* awesome.
* but I'll still be stuck in a traffic jam
On a more serious note, I guess it's pretty neat that they've designed a rocket that runs along the ground without taking off or digging itself into a crater, but what does it really prove in the end? It's just a record speed. Oh well, it's there to be done I guess, and that's a good reason.
Are there shoe-based pictograms?
For us "Fat PS3" owners, this may fix the damn fan noise - although I will wait for reviews. It will also allow Sony to drop the price over the next year so that more people can afford the system for the first time, or get a second PS3 for a different room. Yes, it's akin to buying a PS2 Slim in 2005, but lots of people bought PS2 Slims in 2005.
* As a multimedia centre having never contained an inbuilt decent Dual TV tuner [I have an ageing Pentium 4 under my TV]
* As a computer crippling the Linux on launch, and dropping it once they failed to get the tax break they deserved, and haven't returned it post Surface.
* Its not smart. In a world that knows smart. Google knows it. Apple knows; I think even Sony knows it.
1) It's a games console and blu-ray player, not a digital television decoder. Even so, Sony did release the Play TV.
2) It's a games console, the Linux function was a bonus on the first system, and was irrelevant by the slim (256MB Linux system, woo!)
3) It's a games console. What do you mean by "smart"? Do you mean it can play internet video streams - it can do that. I have iPlayer and 4od installed on mine. It has a store.
It also has professional games with tens of hours of playability. That's because it's a games console.
From the Sony EU website:
connect a 5 inch SATA internal hard drive
Cripes. Where can we get 5" SATA drives?
12GB is a little low. Maybe it's 120GB? Or it's a 16GB flash that is also used for the system firmware?
I guess that the Android version of Chrome will JIT the Javascript into native ARM code, but when running on Intel it will be a slow interpreted codepath instead.
The European model (Razr i) is based around an Intel Atom at 2GHz with two threads via SMT.
The US model (Razr M) is based around the Qualcomm ARMv7 Snapdragon - dual-core at 1.5GHz.
A magnetic anomaly, buried in a crater on the far side of the moon?
2x the CPU is certainly not enough. The Wii is hamstrung by it's ~730MHz early 2000s era PowerPC CPU. The PS3 is probably 3x as fast, CPU wise (ignoring SPUs), the 360 even more so (maybe even 10x).
Having a controller make up half the cost of the device - that's a real problem. The consumer need for this controller has not been explained well IMO.
1080p is what modern TVs top out at. No need for more.
Dual-screen? Yes, it has it - the TV and the controller (two controllers even, apparently).
The WiiU is more powerful than the PS3 (3x more CPU, ?x more GPU, 4x memory), but will people buy it? People with dusty Wiis on their shelves? At least they can make use of their existing software and peripherals - maybe human psychology is such that people will think "I have the peripherals and games, so might as well get the improved device to use them with"!
Exactly, whilst the system isn't powerful, it is instructive in cluster design and programming, which is very relevant at a university.
They won't be running "real applications doing real calculations" on this thing. They'll be writing student-level clustered applications. For the price paid, it's probably a really instructive system for the university to have installed, if they make use of it in student courses and/or projects.
Javascript isn't a real problem, it's the developers writing code using it. We're talking about a client application that is mostly doing REST/JSON calls to the main backend servers, and then displaying it in the correct place on the existing page, and persisting it to a HTML5 local DB. Except it didn't do the latter, and all too often lost even the in-memory cache of data, making the app a PITA to use, especially scrolling back in history.
You only need to look at Twitter clients to realise that timeline-based clients can be written effectively, even in HTML5+JS.
The fact is that Facebook's use of HTML5 was distinctly sub-par, thus making their apps incredibly frustrating to use. Losing all the data, no apparent caching, etc, on a platform that you are using on a mobile device that often loses connectivity. Madness.
The other real problem with growing your food on the median, is that any "food gang" driving by can't just pick what they want (via use of guns). Given the number of city people escaping to where these crops would be growing, I expect the yields for the actual growers would be around 0%, unless the military were guarding them. Fat chance, as the military will be trying to keep control in the cities as the food riots get worse.
Indeed the gangs will be the biggest disincentive to growing your own food, wherever you try it. You'd want to be off the beaten path.
Actually, I'm now with the "five years of survival rations in the basement" people. Hide your food in case of raids. You'll need neighbourhood defense rotas too. Beware of backstabbing neighbours who want your food too.
No doubt about it, if anything like this were to happen and there was a famine (i.e., not enough food to feed everyone, even with food aid given to those who no longer could afford to buy food) then spending 50% of your time to survive would suddenly seem like a good option. That, or die, or join a gang fighting for ever dwindling food supplies and getting killed. Not a good prospect for your average middle-class person.
The problem is that until things go wrong, nothing will be done, and it won't be a priority for people. But for those people with gardens - mostly lawn - they have a large area to grow crops. You don't need a lot of space to grow enough food to survive on - you might have to lose some trees (you'll probably do that for firewood anyway) and decorative plants to maximise yield.
Growing 50% of your own food needs could make the additional food aid (probably rice) stretch much further.
If you live in an apartment, bad luck. Please die quietly. We could compost the bodies.
Tardigrad. There are 2.16 Imperial Tardigrads in a metric Tardigrade.
Of course there is a disparity between Imperial and US "English" measurements, as there are actually 2.58 English Tardigrads in a metric Tardigrade.
It's probably cheaper to get a low end tablet and a bluetooth keyboard than some of these graphing calculators however. And the tablet has so many other uses. A fully featured graphing and mathematical educational application for Android (with programming/scripting abilities) would be one part of making a fully featured educational tablet.
Actually, I am surprised at the lack of tablet/smartphone graphing applications that replicate and enhance the functionality provided by the dedicated graphing calculators.
Loaning them out when needed seems a perfectly suitable solution to the problem. Maybe get them to write some games - that was popular back in the day.
Or to draw the batman logo as an algorithm.
Yeah, but the allotments on the road-side would be managed by people growing for their own family, trading time (assuming everything goes to shit, so a job isn't the biggest concern any longer) rather than money to get the food they require.
The biggest issue is getting water to the allotments. That's why I feel it would be doomed to fail, as most "garden crops" aren't suitable for dry summer conditions. Residential gardens would be the best plan - again with a failing infrastructure don't count on getting water if you live in a place dependent on imported water (e.g., Phoenix).
You might be better off planting fruit trees every 20ft along the median strips. A long orchard providing good seasonal food, or ingredients for alcoholic beverages.
And if you live in a place that would not be viable without imported water or food, when things hit the fan you need to get somewhere that is viable, and quick.
Studies have shown that motorways (freeways) are the safest roads to travel on. It is bendy roads, rural roads, thinner roads, etc, that are dangerous, despite the fact they have lower speed limits.
IIRC it was between 5% and 10% of all accidents were on motorways, despite the vast majority of journeys being done on them. Most of those were down to bad driving in adverse conditions (fog, etc) and old people driving the wrong way down the road (!). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reported_Road_Casualties_Great_Britain#Casualties_by_road_type_in_2008 says 6% of road deaths occur on motorways. Urban and rural (non motorway) roads were far far far more lethal.
Of course an accident at speed is far likelier to result in death, but the fact remains that when you have roads with few distractions, few interchanges, barriers on the side and in the median, wide lanes, you will have far far far fewer accidents. Safe road design is what matters for motorways, not the actual speed limit.
So the thing in the article stating the opposite really confuses me? Do the majority of American road accidents happen on your freeways? Oh wait, I see it - it's abuse of percentages. 9% higher sounds a lot, but the prior absolute figure (~12k) was for ALL rural road types. That 9% could be applied to just 5% of that (an increase from 600 deaths to 654 deaths).