I imagine that adjusting the media for each console's differences is a lesser task than the creation - possibly to the point of being an automated script.
It is also true of course that the PS3 is a compromise, and came too early for the technology it represents (especially Cell). Then again the PS2 was quite quirky. If a company keeps the expertise in-house then the games will improve over time.
ATI really did well with the 360 graphics chip.
The loss per unit isn't really known. A vast amount of cost reductions have happened over time so far in the PS3 - BluRay maturation, process shrinks, feature removal, technology advancement. But at least it is reliable!
32x 2mm^2 isn't trivial when your competitor has an equivalent performance part in under 300mm^2 and you're 600mm^2 *. Admittedly Intel has the fabbing capabilities to just deal with such an issue.
* Larrabee is rumoured to be 600mm^2 however, I presume that's 45nm, and maybe Intel are waiting for 32nm. A 45nm NVIDIA GT2xx chip would be around 300mm^2, even though it is currently made on 55nm and is quite hefty.
My point though is that on 32nm/22nm Intel's Larrabee architecture will make more sense in terms of general purpose capabilities, and Larrabee 2 or 3 will be good. Larrabee 1 is just to get things out there. Btw, there a rumour that L3 won't be x86 compatible - maybe they're moving to a functionally-equivalent RISC core!
Sorry, but the NVIDIA solder problems have been well documented, so you must have chosen to ignore this.
NVIDIA is going to use GDDR5 on their upcoming 40nm "midrange" parts. ATI actually did a lot of work on GDDR5 with the memory manufacturers, hence they got the technology early.
Quite simply with die sizes, the bigger the die, the more costly it is. AMD/ATI and NVIDIA both use TSMC for their products, so it comes down to die size. The bigger the die, the bigger the chance of a flaw affecting it, so yield drops, never mind getting fewer dies per wafer.
NVIDIA have to use a wider memory bus to compete on bandwidth using DDR3, that costs money, it requires a PCB with more layers, it increases complexity. There's a reason that AMD is selling decent graphics cards for $99 - $199, and NVIDIA have been forced to rebrand their old generation parts TWICE in the past year or two.
And ATI's drivers have been fairly good since they went with the monthly updates (it's not 2001 anymore), and even better since they've been part of AMD. There are issues still - hardware video transcoding is unusable, and thus the $30 NVIDIA hardware transcoder is a better option, for those who use it.
A key part of DirectX 11 is hardware tesselation, and ATI have had that since the 360's R600 chip. DirectX 10.1 includes some non-trivial performance enhancements. NVIDIA has been holding back the market by not being able to support 10.1. ATI have DX11 hardware already, they showed it off at Computex a couple of weeks ago.
NVIDIA aren't the same as the good old days when they had awesome chipsets like NForce2, the best graphics cards, etc. However they do push onwards with GPU computer (CUDA) and PhysX, but OpenCL will overtake the former, and the latter won't catch on unless it is cross-GPU.
Um, it's 2009. Phenom II is out, has been out for a while. It runs in any of the myriad AM2+ and AM3 motherboards. Reviews make it (and the Athlon II chips at the low end) clear that these CPUs are excellent value for money, have good performance for the price and more than compete with similarly priced Intel CPUs.
So stop trolling ("Phail" indeed, are you 15?) and keep up to date.
AMD is tightening up its product lineup, and gaining marketshare and sales this year. Intel is introducing a non-consistent Atom/Celeron/Pentium/i3/i5/i7 lineup that will introduce consumer confusion. AMD have been doing things right since mid 2008, and it's starting to pay off.
Why not use a small RISC core alongside the new 512-bit vector unit? No more x86 decoder overhead (non-trivial on a Pentium-level core replicated 32 times), remove the cruft, tighten up the ISA, etc.
Right now it looks like 2x the die area to achieve the same in 2010 as NVIDIA achieved in 2008, and rumoured power consumption figures that make a GT200 look lean and athletic.
However it is a major improvement for Intel, and Larrabee 2 or Larrabee 3 will get it right. Also there are lots of Intel fans who will buy it regardless. My major worry for Intel would be the drivers, these are already rumoured to be why Larrabee is 2010 instead of late 2009 now.
Well they've got an Ion version for the VIA Nano processor finally. However teaming up with a CPU manufacturer who can't manufacture CPUs (have you seen a Nano? Even heard any news about it recently?) isn't a brilliant plan. I don't think that VIA's x86 license is transferable upon purchase.
I think NVIDIA is hoping for a future where many PCs are actually appliances - net and media especially. ARM is fine here, and the next Tegra is a dual-core ARM Cortex A8 and four times faster than the current Tegra. Beyond that it looks like they're upping clock speeds and going quad-core for a 10x increase in performance over the current Tegra. That's going to be good enough for portable media/net devices like netbooks. But they need to support Linux more, Windows Mobile is another boneheaded move.
And AMD are quite into making their platforms - CPU, Graphics, I/O. The next chipset looks quite compelling and hopefully fixes the remaining quirks. AMD don't need NVIDIA, especially as NVIDIA haven't created anything new for the AMD platform for a very long time - the NVIDIA AMD-platform integrated graphics are now quite outdated compared to Ion.
The majority of the cost of writing a game is in media creation, not programming. Media = textures, videos, 3D objects and animations, maps, structures, music, sound effects, etc.
The media can be reused across different platforms - typically 360, PS3 and PC. A Wii version might use scaled down versions of the same media.
On top of that, you usually develop a game on top of a game engine, so if you re-use that engine across titles, the per-platform development cost goes down even further.
The PS3 has plenty of games, many of then unique to its platform. Its sales rate is the same as the 360 across the world, and if you exclude the USA it's outselling the 360. The 360 does have a year's headstart on its side, hence its 7m extra sales. Most game developers have got the hang of the PS3's hardware to the point where the games are now no worse than the 360, with promises of more improvements to come.
If anything, this entire article says more about the standard of programmers at Activision.
However I do think a price drop on the PS3 hardware would benefit everyone. I do suspect that they're creating a slim-line version using 45nm components. This is when the sales will take off (as with the PS2 slim), especially if GT5 launches at the same time. Right now Sony must be making a profit on the hardware, given how much the price of BluRay drives has dropped.
There is a massive difference between a social network and just email though.
And for many people who just want to email their friends, the social network is better. You can broadcast statuses, you can SPAM EVERYONE WITH FUCKING MAFIA WARS WANK, you can arrange events and invite people, you can SPAM EVERYONE WITH FUCKING MAFIA WARS WANK, you can create or join groups, you can SPAM EVERYONE WITH FUCKING MAFIA WARS WANK, and share photos, etc.
However you can't receive emails notifying you that you have a new eBill, or your order confirmations, and so on. Of course you can set up email filters for these so they don't get caught by the spam filter.
Oh dear, that's not a very good show, Apple. Then again I've thought their security update policy is quite lacking in urgency, even when they are notified of a hole.
I hope that they do this in a sensible manner, introducing large parks inside the cities, instead of concentrating on creating a dense urban pimple with no nearby parks.
I.e., you make the city desirable via being an attractive area to live. This eventually brings in more modern businesses that have employees that demand such things.
So everyone that has applied for that job, could sue the city for discrimination because the application form broke the law, and for all you know it was the information that you may or may not have supplied there that decided it?
Of course, has your point actually been pointed out to the nosy busybody middlemanager that thought this would be a good idea?
I think that Google Chrome will get corporate friendly before Firefox.
Firefox doesn't really have a plan for targeting business users - it's as if they don't understand corporate needs!
* Redirect update server to internal corporate network so they can test new releases before updating the corporate desktops.
* Fine-grained control at the policy level over installable extensions, themes, plugins. I.e., stop users installing their own, define a set of standard corporate extensions, and so on.
* Can run those internal designed-for-IE6-by-inept-programmers websites, that the company has no budget to update.
And I'm sure many many more can be thought of by people who actually work in corporate IT departments.
Without open publication of the banned lists, it is all too easy for a government or police force to blanket ban whatever it decides too, regardless of the legality.
It's easy to argue that child porn websites should be blocked, but these systems have a habit of insidious creeping scope. Next it's websites about guns. Then it is opposition party websites. Then it is foreign websites that suggest that people should have freedom and rights and liberty and power over the state.
Without checks and balances, or due process (a site can only go onto the list with judicial overview, and with specific reasons. Accidentally linking to a site that was hijacked with banned material should not count) this is a horrendously one-sided system.
I think that both Sony and Microsoft would be insane not to build upon their current platforms with their next generations. Skipping to a new architecture (x86 + Larrabee has been suggested for Sony) would likely cost a lot to implement, and I think that both companies want to break even fairly close to launch this time.
Sony's best path, in 2011, is to launch a PowerXCell32 based PS4. This is basically a Cell with 2 PPUs and 32 enhanced SPUs (although I think they could do a 4 PPU version). Couple that to a GT300 series GPU and you've got a 1080p monster.
I also don't think that Sony can single-chip the PS3 unlike the PS2, because of the NVIDIA GPU. This might make it less economical to cost-reduce like the PS2 later in life.
Microsoft can just have an octo-core CPU running at higher clocks and whatever ATI can come up with in 2011 - R900 at 3TFLOPS?
Regardless, we'll only start hearing about the next generation when the current generation has had another price drop so people don't put off their purchase. I expect to start hearing concrete details in early 2010.
Yeah, my HP netbook has one of this, and it blinks away quite merrily and annoyingly, until you cover it with clothes. Even with your eyes closed looking away from the LED you can detect when it is blinking. It's far worse than sleeping in a room with a video record blinking "12:00" all night.
My old iBook has a pulsating white LED, it is far less annoying than the blinking blue LED though.
Standby LEDs are also annoying.
None of these are as annoying as background electronics hum when you have a less-than-perfect transformer in some product in the room doing that buzzy-hum.
Damn all of this, I'm going to live in a cave in the woods. Might get a good night's sleep finally!
Is TomBoy built upon Mono? I've used it - it's a terrible unusable bit of software that acts entirely counter-intuitively for taking notes, with a GUI that is neither compact or usable for managing the notes.
Someone could rewrite it in native GTK/Gnome/SQLite in a few days I'm sure.
Seriously, the old "note dock" applet for WindowMaker was better, and that was 12 years ago.
Damn right. Every few months this story about Intel driving their products down into the smartphone arena comes along.
Last year it was laughable, with a CPU + Chipset that needed more PCB space than your average brickphone's footprint, never mind other components. They've reduced that for 2011 to something that's still 10x the footprint of an ARM SoC. I can't see Intel getting anything competitive until 2013, but it's not as if ARM is standing still.
Cortex A9 brings out-of-order capability and multi-core (up to four way) in 2010, and will probably rule until 2012. It'll start on 45nm and drop to 28nm (via GlobalFoundries) very quickly. NVIDIA are using it in their next generation Tegra for 2010, never mind the other several dozen generic Smartphone/STB ARM SoC designers/manufacturers.
As Intel shrinks it's cores down by 'pentium-ising' them, the x86 decoder overhead grows in size relative to the rest of the core. This hurts them with multicore. I think it is hurting them with Larrabee in terms of die size.
It's also following the 'good enough' development path, and the path of adding specific hardware to accelerate tasks (in phone SoCs, DSPs, Security, and soon OpenCL) whereas Intel has always tried to get the CPUs to do that work.
Firstly, the vast majority of people don't actually own a spare phone battery, those that do are a minority (often business travellers) and they won't have the spare with them on a day to day basis. Therefore the common user benefits from having a larger battery that lasts longer (a LiPo instead of a LiIon for example).
As for the memory getting wiped - you just resync with your computer. Really, how many people end up in life-or-death situations that necessitate eeking the last juice from the phone battery, when they are travelling home from the Apple store?
The other ideas, like "I can't speak" buttons, are genuinely useful for emergency calls.
People might diss Virgin Media, but at least they host iPlayer and other TV on demand services like 4od, and provide them through their cable box (however naff the box is!).
BT's crapness in this regard suggests to me that their 21CN (21st century network) is just a pile of shit that has costed billions like everything else they do.
The whole point of iPlayer, etc, is that people will be using it when they have free time (i.e., in the evening) to catch up on TV they have missed. If it is unusable at this time due to throttling, then what's the point? It's not like we're talking about 8mbit streams either...
You've just broken it because you don't understand that there are better ways to do things (altering how you code), you can only think to bandaid the broken methodology. Change the programming language, or move the validations into an intermediary layer or database itself.
What is nicer (imagine a much larger table than the example), and maybe imagine the former in PHP instead?
String sql = "INSERT INTO foo (x, y, z) VALUES (?, ?, ?); PreparedStatement ps = conn.prepareStatement(sql); ps.setString(1, x); ps.setInt(2, y); ps.setString(3, z); int newRows = ps.executeUpdate();
Where are the "adhoc validations" here? They're inside the JDBC library, indeed they're inside the database server for those that support parameterised queries.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for your points.
I imagine that adjusting the media for each console's differences is a lesser task than the creation - possibly to the point of being an automated script.
It is also true of course that the PS3 is a compromise, and came too early for the technology it represents (especially Cell). Then again the PS2 was quite quirky. If a company keeps the expertise in-house then the games will improve over time.
ATI really did well with the 360 graphics chip.
The loss per unit isn't really known. A vast amount of cost reductions have happened over time so far in the PS3 - BluRay maturation, process shrinks, feature removal, technology advancement. But at least it is reliable!
32x 2mm^2 isn't trivial when your competitor has an equivalent performance part in under 300mm^2 and you're 600mm^2 *. Admittedly Intel has the fabbing capabilities to just deal with such an issue.
* Larrabee is rumoured to be 600mm^2 however, I presume that's 45nm, and maybe Intel are waiting for 32nm. A 45nm NVIDIA GT2xx chip would be around 300mm^2, even though it is currently made on 55nm and is quite hefty.
My point though is that on 32nm/22nm Intel's Larrabee architecture will make more sense in terms of general purpose capabilities, and Larrabee 2 or 3 will be good. Larrabee 1 is just to get things out there. Btw, there a rumour that L3 won't be x86 compatible - maybe they're moving to a functionally-equivalent RISC core!
Own NVIDIA shares do you? Or just a fan boy?
Sorry, but the NVIDIA solder problems have been well documented, so you must have chosen to ignore this.
NVIDIA is going to use GDDR5 on their upcoming 40nm "midrange" parts. ATI actually did a lot of work on GDDR5 with the memory manufacturers, hence they got the technology early.
Quite simply with die sizes, the bigger the die, the more costly it is. AMD/ATI and NVIDIA both use TSMC for their products, so it comes down to die size. The bigger the die, the bigger the chance of a flaw affecting it, so yield drops, never mind getting fewer dies per wafer.
NVIDIA have to use a wider memory bus to compete on bandwidth using DDR3, that costs money, it requires a PCB with more layers, it increases complexity. There's a reason that AMD is selling decent graphics cards for $99 - $199, and NVIDIA have been forced to rebrand their old generation parts TWICE in the past year or two.
And ATI's drivers have been fairly good since they went with the monthly updates (it's not 2001 anymore), and even better since they've been part of AMD. There are issues still - hardware video transcoding is unusable, and thus the $30 NVIDIA hardware transcoder is a better option, for those who use it.
A key part of DirectX 11 is hardware tesselation, and ATI have had that since the 360's R600 chip. DirectX 10.1 includes some non-trivial performance enhancements. NVIDIA has been holding back the market by not being able to support 10.1. ATI have DX11 hardware already, they showed it off at Computex a couple of weeks ago.
NVIDIA aren't the same as the good old days when they had awesome chipsets like NForce2, the best graphics cards, etc. However they do push onwards with GPU computer (CUDA) and PhysX, but OpenCL will overtake the former, and the latter won't catch on unless it is cross-GPU.
Um, it's 2009. Phenom II is out, has been out for a while. It runs in any of the myriad AM2+ and AM3 motherboards. Reviews make it (and the Athlon II chips at the low end) clear that these CPUs are excellent value for money, have good performance for the price and more than compete with similarly priced Intel CPUs.
So stop trolling ("Phail" indeed, are you 15?) and keep up to date.
AMD is tightening up its product lineup, and gaining marketshare and sales this year. Intel is introducing a non-consistent Atom/Celeron/Pentium/i3/i5/i7 lineup that will introduce consumer confusion. AMD have been doing things right since mid 2008, and it's starting to pay off.
Hmm, no, reviews clearly put the AMD CPUs on-par or ahead of similarly priced Intel CPUs. The Phenom IIs are extremely capable CPUs.
Sure, you can pay a lot more for a Core i7 and a Core i7 motherboard, if you need the power. But you didn't write that, did you?
Yeah, it's 32 cores of x86 overhead.
Why not use a small RISC core alongside the new 512-bit vector unit? No more x86 decoder overhead (non-trivial on a Pentium-level core replicated 32 times), remove the cruft, tighten up the ISA, etc.
Right now it looks like 2x the die area to achieve the same in 2010 as NVIDIA achieved in 2008, and rumoured power consumption figures that make a GT200 look lean and athletic.
However it is a major improvement for Intel, and Larrabee 2 or Larrabee 3 will get it right. Also there are lots of Intel fans who will buy it regardless. My major worry for Intel would be the drivers, these are already rumoured to be why Larrabee is 2010 instead of late 2009 now.
Well they've got an Ion version for the VIA Nano processor finally. However teaming up with a CPU manufacturer who can't manufacture CPUs (have you seen a Nano? Even heard any news about it recently?) isn't a brilliant plan. I don't think that VIA's x86 license is transferable upon purchase.
I think NVIDIA is hoping for a future where many PCs are actually appliances - net and media especially. ARM is fine here, and the next Tegra is a dual-core ARM Cortex A8 and four times faster than the current Tegra. Beyond that it looks like they're upping clock speeds and going quad-core for a 10x increase in performance over the current Tegra. That's going to be good enough for portable media/net devices like netbooks. But they need to support Linux more, Windows Mobile is another boneheaded move.
And AMD are quite into making their platforms - CPU, Graphics, I/O. The next chipset looks quite compelling and hopefully fixes the remaining quirks. AMD don't need NVIDIA, especially as NVIDIA haven't created anything new for the AMD platform for a very long time - the NVIDIA AMD-platform integrated graphics are now quite outdated compared to Ion.
The majority of the cost of writing a game is in media creation, not programming. Media = textures, videos, 3D objects and animations, maps, structures, music, sound effects, etc.
The media can be reused across different platforms - typically 360, PS3 and PC. A Wii version might use scaled down versions of the same media.
On top of that, you usually develop a game on top of a game engine, so if you re-use that engine across titles, the per-platform development cost goes down even further.
The PS3 has plenty of games, many of then unique to its platform. Its sales rate is the same as the 360 across the world, and if you exclude the USA it's outselling the 360. The 360 does have a year's headstart on its side, hence its 7m extra sales. Most game developers have got the hang of the PS3's hardware to the point where the games are now no worse than the 360, with promises of more improvements to come.
If anything, this entire article says more about the standard of programmers at Activision.
However I do think a price drop on the PS3 hardware would benefit everyone. I do suspect that they're creating a slim-line version using 45nm components. This is when the sales will take off (as with the PS2 slim), especially if GT5 launches at the same time. Right now Sony must be making a profit on the hardware, given how much the price of BluRay drives has dropped.
There is a massive difference between a social network and just email though.
And for many people who just want to email their friends, the social network is better. You can broadcast statuses, you can SPAM EVERYONE WITH FUCKING MAFIA WARS WANK, you can arrange events and invite people, you can SPAM EVERYONE WITH FUCKING MAFIA WARS WANK, you can create or join groups, you can SPAM EVERYONE WITH FUCKING MAFIA WARS WANK, and share photos, etc.
However you can't receive emails notifying you that you have a new eBill, or your order confirmations, and so on. Of course you can set up email filters for these so they don't get caught by the spam filter.
Oh dear, that's not a very good show, Apple. Then again I've thought their security update policy is quite lacking in urgency, even when they are notified of a hole.
"created earlier"
That's hardly in the spirit of the competition, in my opinion.
Anyway, good that Apple has fixed the bugs. Bad that iPod Touch users have to pay to get the bug fixes.
Come and visit Tower Hamlets, London, or any of the other "high rise" tower block areas in the UK.
There is nothing that suggests "poor" more than a residential tower block.
I hope that they do this in a sensible manner, introducing large parks inside the cities, instead of concentrating on creating a dense urban pimple with no nearby parks.
I.e., you make the city desirable via being an attractive area to live. This eventually brings in more modern businesses that have employees that demand such things.
So everyone that has applied for that job, could sue the city for discrimination because the application form broke the law, and for all you know it was the information that you may or may not have supplied there that decided it?
Of course, has your point actually been pointed out to the nosy busybody middlemanager that thought this would be a good idea?
I think that Google Chrome will get corporate friendly before Firefox.
Firefox doesn't really have a plan for targeting business users - it's as if they don't understand corporate needs!
* Redirect update server to internal corporate network so they can test new releases before updating the corporate desktops.
* Fine-grained control at the policy level over installable extensions, themes, plugins. I.e., stop users installing their own, define a set of standard corporate extensions, and so on.
* Can run those internal designed-for-IE6-by-inept-programmers websites, that the company has no budget to update.
And I'm sure many many more can be thought of by people who actually work in corporate IT departments.
Without open publication of the banned lists, it is all too easy for a government or police force to blanket ban whatever it decides too, regardless of the legality.
It's easy to argue that child porn websites should be blocked, but these systems have a habit of insidious creeping scope. Next it's websites about guns. Then it is opposition party websites. Then it is foreign websites that suggest that people should have freedom and rights and liberty and power over the state.
Without checks and balances, or due process (a site can only go onto the list with judicial overview, and with specific reasons. Accidentally linking to a site that was hijacked with banned material should not count) this is a horrendously one-sided system.
I think that both Sony and Microsoft would be insane not to build upon their current platforms with their next generations. Skipping to a new architecture (x86 + Larrabee has been suggested for Sony) would likely cost a lot to implement, and I think that both companies want to break even fairly close to launch this time.
Sony's best path, in 2011, is to launch a PowerXCell32 based PS4. This is basically a Cell with 2 PPUs and 32 enhanced SPUs (although I think they could do a 4 PPU version). Couple that to a GT300 series GPU and you've got a 1080p monster.
I also don't think that Sony can single-chip the PS3 unlike the PS2, because of the NVIDIA GPU. This might make it less economical to cost-reduce like the PS2 later in life.
Microsoft can just have an octo-core CPU running at higher clocks and whatever ATI can come up with in 2011 - R900 at 3TFLOPS?
Regardless, we'll only start hearing about the next generation when the current generation has had another price drop so people don't put off their purchase. I expect to start hearing concrete details in early 2010.
Yeah, my HP netbook has one of this, and it blinks away quite merrily and annoyingly, until you cover it with clothes. Even with your eyes closed looking away from the LED you can detect when it is blinking. It's far worse than sleeping in a room with a video record blinking "12:00" all night.
My old iBook has a pulsating white LED, it is far less annoying than the blinking blue LED though.
Standby LEDs are also annoying.
None of these are as annoying as background electronics hum when you have a less-than-perfect transformer in some product in the room doing that buzzy-hum.
Damn all of this, I'm going to live in a cave in the woods. Might get a good night's sleep finally!
Cheers. I see no reason therefore to include Tomboy + Mono by default with Gnome on Debian - or do other parts of Gnome depend upon Mono now?
Is TomBoy built upon Mono? I've used it - it's a terrible unusable bit of software that acts entirely counter-intuitively for taking notes, with a GUI that is neither compact or usable for managing the notes.
Someone could rewrite it in native GTK/Gnome/SQLite in a few days I'm sure.
Seriously, the old "note dock" applet for WindowMaker was better, and that was 12 years ago.
It's in the SheevaPlug device from Marvell - that's a 1.2GHz ARMv5 device (1.2GHz StrongARM / XScale effectively).
Damn right. Every few months this story about Intel driving their products down into the smartphone arena comes along.
Last year it was laughable, with a CPU + Chipset that needed more PCB space than your average brickphone's footprint, never mind other components. They've reduced that for 2011 to something that's still 10x the footprint of an ARM SoC. I can't see Intel getting anything competitive until 2013, but it's not as if ARM is standing still.
Cortex A9 brings out-of-order capability and multi-core (up to four way) in 2010, and will probably rule until 2012. It'll start on 45nm and drop to 28nm (via GlobalFoundries) very quickly. NVIDIA are using it in their next generation Tegra for 2010, never mind the other several dozen generic Smartphone/STB ARM SoC designers/manufacturers.
As Intel shrinks it's cores down by 'pentium-ising' them, the x86 decoder overhead grows in size relative to the rest of the core. This hurts them with multicore. I think it is hurting them with Larrabee in terms of die size.
It's also following the 'good enough' development path, and the path of adding specific hardware to accelerate tasks (in phone SoCs, DSPs, Security, and soon OpenCL) whereas Intel has always tried to get the CPUs to do that work.
This is absolutely ridiculous.
Firstly, the vast majority of people don't actually own a spare phone battery, those that do are a minority (often business travellers) and they won't have the spare with them on a day to day basis. Therefore the common user benefits from having a larger battery that lasts longer (a LiPo instead of a LiIon for example).
As for the memory getting wiped - you just resync with your computer. Really, how many people end up in life-or-death situations that necessitate eeking the last juice from the phone battery, when they are travelling home from the Apple store?
The other ideas, like "I can't speak" buttons, are genuinely useful for emergency calls.
People might diss Virgin Media, but at least they host iPlayer and other TV on demand services like 4od, and provide them through their cable box (however naff the box is!).
BT's crapness in this regard suggests to me that their 21CN (21st century network) is just a pile of shit that has costed billions like everything else they do.
The whole point of iPlayer, etc, is that people will be using it when they have free time (i.e., in the evening) to catch up on TV they have missed. If it is unusable at this time due to throttling, then what's the point? It's not like we're talking about 8mbit streams either...
* disclaimer - I used to work for BT
You've just broken it because you don't understand that there are better ways to do things (altering how you code), you can only think to bandaid the broken methodology. Change the programming language, or move the validations into an intermediary layer or database itself.
What is nicer (imagine a much larger table than the example), and maybe imagine the former in PHP instead?
String xs = sanitize(x);
String ys = sanitize(y);
String zs = sanitize(z);
String sql = "INSERT INTO foo (x, y, z) VALUES (" + xs + ", " + ys + ", " + zs + ")"
conn.createStatement().executeQuery(sql);
or
String sql = "INSERT INTO foo (x, y, z) VALUES (?, ?, ?);
PreparedStatement ps = conn.prepareStatement(sql);
ps.setString(1, x);
ps.setInt(2, y);
ps.setString(3, z);
int newRows = ps.executeUpdate();
Where are the "adhoc validations" here? They're inside the JDBC library, indeed they're inside the database server for those that support parameterised queries.