"few of these Android apps are free software" doesn't mean that they cost money (although a significant minority do cost money), just that the source isn't available.
The solution is clearly for open source fans to write open source applications for Android. They'd be a wonderful development resource as well.
Android, as an application API, is effectively J2ME-Touch-Pure-Web.
J2ME - it uses a lot of the core Java API. Touch - it uses a custom Android UI API. Pure - it dumps the JVM in favour of Dalvik, and it dumps a lot of legacy apps. Web - it incorporates a lot of Java APIs from Apache, etc, for web uses.
If Sun weren't stuck in some weird place for the past five to ten years, they would have eventually come up with something like Android (but on the JVM instead of Dalvik) for the current generation of phones.
Google did the work for them, added their own twists and value-add as they deserved to do for the work they had done, and got going.
I can't see any reason why they can't incorporate an Android runtime for Android application compatibility - well unless there are any licensing issues for Android beyond the fact that it is open source.
Instant 20,000+ applications (mostly about manoeuvring shapes to cover areas). You don't need the launcher or all of that gubbins, just the application runtime compatibility.
This makes a lot more sense than developing their own "native" API, SDK, etc. Android is here to stay, in one way or another.
Halifax have these questions, but I've never been locked out - you can set multiple questions, and it doesn't block the account if you get it wrong a few times. So it can't be them. Not that I'm staying with them, for other reasons.
Barclays though, it could be them, they're a bunch of ineffectual failures.
I'll just move to a bank that charges the least, or not at all. Maybe it will be a mutual, like the Co-op, owned by its members.
I don't think I would be the only one to do that either.
It's not an entirely one way situation. There's enough competition in banking in the UK to make the banks change their charges very very slowly. They can bluff all they want about imposing charges, but they know that unless they collude to introduce it on the same day (which would be illegal), and that ALL banks and mutuals sign up for it, they're going to lose.
Bank transfers happen within two hours in the UK (made a requirement by law a couple of years ago), and they are free. This means they usually happen within a few minutes these days.
So this is far preferable to a cheque, that could bounce.
Person comes to view and buy your car. They transfer the money in front of your eyes, you know you are getting it, it pops up in your account quicky, happiness all around.
My URL shortening system is called JFGI (or JFBI if you prefer Bing).
Four characters. Beat that!
Btw, I have a submarine patent on the three characters FGI, and also the two character GI, which is more polite, but doesn't have the same level of exasperation with the recipient.
The big win is that you can safely use the above system at work, whereas because shortened URLs are inherently masking the destination, you cannot trust such a link, and thus must therefore never click on it in a work place, in case someone has linked to something abhorrent and vile, like foxnews.com.
My stupid Bosch washing machine hasn't died after ten+ years yet, apart from the on/off button falling off (but the switch behind still works). I cannot satisfy my need to purchase holdhold white goods because of this! I'm pining away, waiting for it to fail, but it doesn't, so my needs remain unsated.
My tumble dryer, on the other hand, although it is now six years old, failed in the second year, and I had to pay around £87 for that to be fixed.
I don't think you can sell electronics with a shorter than 1 year warranty in the UK anyway, and that is the liability of the *seller* anyway, under the Sale of Goods Act.
My next monitor is a Samsung, simply because they offer a three year warranty on their monitors. If it broke after three years, I would be annoyed, but at least I would have got three years use out of it. Why should I buy a monitor with a one year warranty? Especially since the Samsung monitors are pretty good overall anyway (I'm just waiting for a P2370HD monitor with DVB-T2 built-in (current one only has DVB-T, but UK is using DVB-T2 for HD Freeview)).
A premium product should have a premium warranty included by default, to show that it isn't just overpriced tat. To be honest with Apple if the computer broke, I would invoke my rights under the sales of good act, which mandates that a product should work for a reasonable amount of time (up to six years) after purchase.
Anyway, Macs seem to have a 1:10 fail rate at most (including year one, which surely has the highest figures), from various stories published over the past year. That means the warranty would have to be 1/10th of the product cost to be worthwhile, consolidated over time.
It's likely that Apple will have to use discrete graphics on all but the lowest-of-the-low (a theoretical $799 MacBook) in order to not regress graphically. NVIDIA GT240 could be an option as a discrete replacement for the integrated 9400M.
It will require motherboard redesigns, but the CPU will force that anyway. The Intel I/O hub for the new systems is quite small, so there should be room.
However Apple have regressed graphically in the past (Radeon 9550M -> Intel 2006 rubbish integrated graphics). It wouldn't fit in well with OpenCL and all that stuff that Apple harp on about though.
Intel Corp. today announced the release of their new FirstPost processor(tm), known internally as FristPsot and FrostyPiss. This new processor will let you post first on any web internet board. Demos of this processor's achievements have been given showing astounding performance on sites such as Slashdot.
The FirstPost processor(tm) will be available in Q1 2010. Sorry, 2014.
64 threads at 1.6GHz (I believe its available at that speed now), with the round-robin hiding memory access latency (i.e., each thread sees a 200MHz CPU with very low latency memory)? Note these cores are all cache coherent, unlike this 48-core creation.
This creation is more like a collection of x86 versions of the Cell SPU. Calculations are most optimal on local memory, main memory is highly contended even with 4 channels of DDR3, you want to run bits of algorithms in a chain rather than in parallel.
If it runs faster than 300MHz, it'll probably outperform the T2. OTOH it's nearly 600mm^2 in size, with the associated cost difference. Also it's not available.
This 48-core CPU is hopefully leveraging the Larrabee CPU (minus the vector unit), otherwise it's yet more Intel developmental waste. That, or it's the original Pentium, shrunk down (Larrabee's core started out with a Pentium-like design/specification too).
The core is under 6mm^2 when you look at the die. L2 cache, router, intra-core communications are about another 5mm^2.
it's like in Farmville - a very poorly written, underperforming isometric Facebook game that is quite fun despite it's flaws - you have to pay money (and not a small amount either, especially for a game with over a million players allegedly) to do common tasks, like buy fuel for tractors.
I like the game. It sucks performance wise. I think I'll create FarmYourselfSilly for Android when I get my new phone. Might add hills and dry stone walls for that authentic Yorkshire theme. I'll cloudify it with a Produce Market for trading crops. Too many players growing wheat? Well, sucks!
Server requirements of CPUs include virtualisation and power savings (saving power in the data centre is a top priority for companies now).
This CPU cannot do both at the same time, at least with Windows Server 2008's Hypervisor. Presumably it is being sold with both items listed as features however. I agree with the OP - the CPUs are broken as sold and advertised.
What we require now is for the hailer to signal to the hailee by standing in front of the approaching people conveyance, one forearm horizontal in front of the chest, the other underneath it pointing to the conveyance you are signalling to, and raise the lower forearm upwards. The more... aggressive... this is done, reduces the fee we pay on the conveyance. This is modelled upon nineteenth century railway signalling.
They've just redone Oxford Circus, so it's far less busy on the street now. It has Tokyo-style diagonal crossings and they've removed the street barriers that kept people hemmed in close to the tube entrances, and widened the footpaths too.
But generally rush hour (4.30pm - 7pm) in London is pretty busy near the tubes entrances. Best to stay in a pub and have a lovely pint of beer.
You can walk anywhere within the circle line part of the tube, but if you're short on time I wouldn't walk more than two stops.
A walk around Hyde Park is nice (Kensington Palace gardens), then take in Marble Arch, Wellington Arch (http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=wellington+arch&sll=51.504656,-0.150461&sspn=0.015066,0.038581&ie=UTF8&hq=Wellington+Arch&hnear=Wellington+Arch,+Grosvenor+Place,+Westminster,+London+SW1X+7,+UK&t=h&z=14), Green Park, Buckingham Palace, St James Park and then you're close enough in the evening to enjoy a night out.
Or walk up from Oxford Street to Regents Park, walk around there, see London Zoo, walk along Regents Canal to Camden for a night out.
Buses are £1 a journey on Oyster, hardly breaking the bank is it?
Their chip uses 340 transistors to model a neuron, and has 65536 neurons.
That means it has ~22m transistors for neurons, although there certainly more transistors managing non-neuron aspects.
It looks like it was made on a 130nm - 250nm process for the die size.
Shrink that to 45nm once the technology is proven, and you'll have 8 to 32 times as many neurons in a single chip. That's 512Ki to 2Mi neurons per chip.
A chip makes up a neural cluster, and you use multiple chips to simulate multiple neural clusters, like a brain. They're using 16 chips at the moment for 1Mi neurons. They'll get to 64Mi neurons easily, and with more clusters, 1Bi doesn't seem out of the question in a few years.
Slashdot Mirror
"few of these Android apps are free software" doesn't mean that they cost money (although a significant minority do cost money), just that the source isn't available.
The solution is clearly for open source fans to write open source applications for Android. They'd be a wonderful development resource as well.
Android, as an application API, is effectively J2ME-Touch-Pure-Web.
J2ME - it uses a lot of the core Java API.
Touch - it uses a custom Android UI API.
Pure - it dumps the JVM in favour of Dalvik, and it dumps a lot of legacy apps.
Web - it incorporates a lot of Java APIs from Apache, etc, for web uses.
If Sun weren't stuck in some weird place for the past five to ten years, they would have eventually come up with something like Android (but on the JVM instead of Dalvik) for the current generation of phones.
Google did the work for them, added their own twists and value-add as they deserved to do for the work they had done, and got going.
I can't see any reason why they can't incorporate an Android runtime for Android application compatibility - well unless there are any licensing issues for Android beyond the fact that it is open source.
Instant 20,000+ applications (mostly about manoeuvring shapes to cover areas). You don't need the launcher or all of that gubbins, just the application runtime compatibility.
This makes a lot more sense than developing their own "native" API, SDK, etc. Android is here to stay, in one way or another.
What bank was this?
Halifax have these questions, but I've never been locked out - you can set multiple questions, and it doesn't block the account if you get it wrong a few times. So it can't be them. Not that I'm staying with them, for other reasons.
Barclays though, it could be them, they're a bunch of ineffectual failures.
I'll just move to a bank that charges the least, or not at all. Maybe it will be a mutual, like the Co-op, owned by its members.
I don't think I would be the only one to do that either.
It's not an entirely one way situation. There's enough competition in banking in the UK to make the banks change their charges very very slowly. They can bluff all they want about imposing charges, but they know that unless they collude to introduce it on the same day (which would be illegal), and that ALL banks and mutuals sign up for it, they're going to lose.
Bank transfers happen within two hours in the UK (made a requirement by law a couple of years ago), and they are free. This means they usually happen within a few minutes these days.
So this is far preferable to a cheque, that could bounce.
Person comes to view and buy your car. They transfer the money in front of your eyes, you know you are getting it, it pops up in your account quicky, happiness all around.
My URL shortening system is called JFGI (or JFBI if you prefer Bing).
Four characters. Beat that!
Btw, I have a submarine patent on the three characters FGI, and also the two character GI, which is more polite, but doesn't have the same level of exasperation with the recipient.
The big win is that you can safely use the above system at work, whereas because shortened URLs are inherently masking the destination, you cannot trust such a link, and thus must therefore never click on it in a work place, in case someone has linked to something abhorrent and vile, like foxnews.com.
My stupid Bosch washing machine hasn't died after ten+ years yet, apart from the on/off button falling off (but the switch behind still works). I cannot satisfy my need to purchase holdhold white goods because of this! I'm pining away, waiting for it to fail, but it doesn't, so my needs remain unsated.
My tumble dryer, on the other hand, although it is now six years old, failed in the second year, and I had to pay around £87 for that to be fixed.
I don't think you can sell electronics with a shorter than 1 year warranty in the UK anyway, and that is the liability of the *seller* anyway, under the Sale of Goods Act.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8253915.stm
So that was standard practice.
Damn right.
My next monitor is a Samsung, simply because they offer a three year warranty on their monitors. If it broke after three years, I would be annoyed, but at least I would have got three years use out of it. Why should I buy a monitor with a one year warranty? Especially since the Samsung monitors are pretty good overall anyway (I'm just waiting for a P2370HD monitor with DVB-T2 built-in (current one only has DVB-T, but UK is using DVB-T2 for HD Freeview)).
A premium product should have a premium warranty included by default, to show that it isn't just overpriced tat. To be honest with Apple if the computer broke, I would invoke my rights under the sales of good act, which mandates that a product should work for a reasonable amount of time (up to six years) after purchase.
Anyway, Macs seem to have a 1:10 fail rate at most (including year one, which surely has the highest figures), from various stories published over the past year. That means the warranty would have to be 1/10th of the product cost to be worthwhile, consolidated over time.
The ATI patents were not included in the recent settlement.
It's likely that Apple will have to use discrete graphics on all but the lowest-of-the-low (a theoretical $799 MacBook) in order to not regress graphically. NVIDIA GT240 could be an option as a discrete replacement for the integrated 9400M.
It will require motherboard redesigns, but the CPU will force that anyway. The Intel I/O hub for the new systems is quite small, so there should be room.
However Apple have regressed graphically in the past (Radeon 9550M -> Intel 2006 rubbish integrated graphics). It wouldn't fit in well with OpenCL and all that stuff that Apple harp on about though.
Intel; 5th December 2009, for immediate release:
Intel Corp. today announced the release of their new FirstPost processor(tm), known internally as FristPsot and FrostyPiss. This new processor will let you post first on any web internet board. Demos of this processor's achievements have been given showing astounding performance on sites such as Slashdot.
The FirstPost processor(tm) will be available in Q1 2010. Sorry, 2014.
Can SGEMM make use of FMA (how you get 2 TFLOPS from a system that can only do 1 TFLOPS without FMA)?
FMA = Fused Multiply Add, for readers who don't have the time to Google it.
Look lower down.
The top diagram and technology is the older 80-core test-chip - but the article doesn't make it immediately obvious.
The core in the 48-core chip is around 6mm^2 (excluding L2 and other uncore) on 45nm, at 567mm^2 total area.
You could fit 4 65nm Cortex A9s in that space. But maybe the x86 core is quad-threaded, like Larrabee's cores.
64 threads at 1.6GHz (I believe its available at that speed now), with the round-robin hiding memory access latency (i.e., each thread sees a 200MHz CPU with very low latency memory)? Note these cores are all cache coherent, unlike this 48-core creation.
This creation is more like a collection of x86 versions of the Cell SPU. Calculations are most optimal on local memory, main memory is highly contended even with 4 channels of DDR3, you want to run bits of algorithms in a chain rather than in parallel.
If it runs faster than 300MHz, it'll probably outperform the T2. OTOH it's nearly 600mm^2 in size, with the associated cost difference. Also it's not available.
This 48-core CPU is hopefully leveraging the Larrabee CPU (minus the vector unit), otherwise it's yet more Intel developmental waste. That, or it's the original Pentium, shrunk down (Larrabee's core started out with a Pentium-like design/specification too).
The core is under 6mm^2 when you look at the die. L2 cache, router, intra-core communications are about another 5mm^2.
I doubt such a web app would have ever used Gears, and certainly wouldn't use HTML5, so it isn't a problem.
it's like in Farmville - a very poorly written, underperforming isometric Facebook game that is quite fun despite it's flaws - you have to pay money (and not a small amount either, especially for a game with over a million players allegedly) to do common tasks, like buy fuel for tractors.
I like the game. It sucks performance wise. I think I'll create FarmYourselfSilly for Android when I get my new phone. Might add hills and dry stone walls for that authentic Yorkshire theme. I'll cloudify it with a Produce Market for trading crops. Too many players growing wheat? Well, sucks!
It's pretty serious.
Server requirements of CPUs include virtualisation and power savings (saving power in the data centre is a top priority for companies now).
This CPU cannot do both at the same time, at least with Windows Server 2008's Hypervisor. Presumably it is being sold with both items listed as features however. I agree with the OP - the CPUs are broken as sold and advertised.
No no no, we changed that.
What we require now is for the hailer to signal to the hailee by standing in front of the approaching people conveyance, one forearm horizontal in front of the chest, the other underneath it pointing to the conveyance you are signalling to, and raise the lower forearm upwards. The more ... aggressive ... this is done, reduces the fee we pay on the conveyance. This is modelled upon nineteenth century railway signalling.
They've just redone Oxford Circus, so it's far less busy on the street now. It has Tokyo-style diagonal crossings and they've removed the street barriers that kept people hemmed in close to the tube entrances, and widened the footpaths too.
But generally rush hour (4.30pm - 7pm) in London is pretty busy near the tubes entrances. Best to stay in a pub and have a lovely pint of beer.
You can walk anywhere within the circle line part of the tube, but if you're short on time I wouldn't walk more than two stops.
A walk around Hyde Park is nice (Kensington Palace gardens), then take in Marble Arch, Wellington Arch (http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=wellington+arch&sll=51.504656,-0.150461&sspn=0.015066,0.038581&ie=UTF8&hq=Wellington+Arch&hnear=Wellington+Arch,+Grosvenor+Place,+Westminster,+London+SW1X+7,+UK&t=h&z=14), Green Park, Buckingham Palace, St James Park and then you're close enough in the evening to enjoy a night out.
Or walk up from Oxford Street to Regents Park, walk around there, see London Zoo, walk along Regents Canal to Camden for a night out.
Buses are £1 a journey on Oyster, hardly breaking the bank is it?
Their chip uses 340 transistors to model a neuron, and has 65536 neurons.
That means it has ~22m transistors for neurons, although there certainly more transistors managing non-neuron aspects.
It looks like it was made on a 130nm - 250nm process for the die size.
Shrink that to 45nm once the technology is proven, and you'll have 8 to 32 times as many neurons in a single chip. That's 512Ki to 2Mi neurons per chip.
A chip makes up a neural cluster, and you use multiple chips to simulate multiple neural clusters, like a brain. They're using 16 chips at the moment for 1Mi neurons. They'll get to 64Mi neurons easily, and with more clusters, 1Bi doesn't seem out of the question in a few years.
Well, their previous mouse had up to four buttons. Left, right, ball, squeeze. It sucked - the ball gummed up and it wasn't very comfortable.
This one has left, right, stroke, swipe, etc. It's too small according to a review I've read.
Who cares. If I get one with a computer, I'll use it. If not, I won't.