Most likely the final generation of PS3 - post PS4 release, so around 2012, will utilise a smaller, but flash-based, hard drive compared to the mechanical ones utilised today. I could see 16 or 32 GB of flash being dirt cheap by then, and ideal for a budget console on the market that needs storage. They could remove the hard drive bay and all that gubbins and mount the flash on the motherboard, possibly achieving a
Remember the PS4 will be out by then, with all the high-end features, so the PS3 of that time can lose these features (PlayTV, hard drive bay, etc).
It seems that the price of BluRay Diodes hasn't dropped so drastically this year, as that's the major cost difference against the 360's BOM. That, and wireless - a major failing of the current 360.
What about those that got caught streaking for a joke during college?
What about those that had sex with their 17 year old girlfriend when they were 18?
The fact is that the sex offender registries, worldwide, are in general unfit for purpose. Someone who streaked is unlikely to rape someone. In fact many people develop some mental functions (empathy, social skills, etc) late in life - between 20 and 30, so anything they do before this time is actually very unlikely to occur afterwards. Now if you commit a full sex crime (rape, child sex offences, etc) then you should be on a register (DNA, Contact Details, etc) for law enforcement use, but if they're still a danger to the community then they shouldn't be in the community. If they're deemed safe enough to release, then that's it. At the very least they should have something to aim for, e.g., 5 or 10 years good behaviour and you are removed from the public registry. There has to be a limit on the sentence.
Why not create a registry of convicted drunk drivers, who may only buy cars that include a mandatory breathalyser test to start? This could save many many lives. Oh, but it would be an attack on the car driver. Regardless of the fact that drunk drivers are scum who cause heartache and misery for thousands.
It's a fricking cease and decease letter, for a trademarked term that Psion came up with at least 8 years ago. Not only do they have the right to do this, they practically HAVE to do this to protect their trademarked term. And they'll win, they have the active trademark. The term has only been misused for a short time.
I'm typing this on my mininote. Looks like HP's lawyers did some trivial checks...
Secondly they could have gone through several rounds of letter writing already regarding the use of the term.
Thirdly, the most recent use of 'netbook' isn't that old - commonly within the past 6 months, a few uses up to a year or two. In legal terms this is no time at all.
And when was the first time you heard the term "netbook" apart from Psion? The netbook was well publicised at its launch, although it was too early. The PSion 5 series was more popular, but Psion sat back on their laurels a little with that design and lost the advantage.
Anyway, back to the term 'netbook' and when you heard it recently. Not 4 years ago. Most likely not 3 years ago. Maybe 2 years ago, when Intel started talking about their plans for small systems, but at the time they were more interested in MIDs. The EeePC came out 18 months ago... and was it called a netbook back then?
You're thinking in internet time, not legal time. See a post above above for how such things could have proceeded once the term netbook started being used recently. I wouldn't be so certain that the term is 'generic' legally, nor that the trademark protection is late.
I think you also have to consider that Apple's Fairplay DRM isn't really that bad in the grand scheme of things. There is a proper deauthorisation mechanism (unlike with DRM on games like Spore) that allows you to migrate your music to new systems, you can have multiple copies of the music authorised at the same time, and so on.
The other problem is the labels providing the music. As long as they are having their petty iTunes Hatefest (oh noes, it's successful, but they're not playing by our rules and desires!) they are not allowing iTunes to provide DRM-free music, instead they're trying to get Amazon big enough to be a competitor so they have leverage over iTunes. The problem is, of course, that for Amazon, it's just another product on an already over-complex website with appalling search capabilities, and the company has poor working conditions for its employees so more and more people are boycotting them.
You have to consider the package as a whole. Not just the raw technical specifications or feature list.
The iPod was simply far better at its core feature when it was launched than any other player. I would argue that by not losing sight of the vision of a small, portable, music player they didn't get caught up with vast featurelists like other players until they could do it the best way. Styling has, of course, helped greatly - but it's not Apple's fault their competitors wanted to sell bricks.
The iPhone's interface is simply still far better and smoother than any other competitor. The difference isn't as much as with the iPod when it was launched, and the competitors are catching up faster this time.
The MacBook has Mac OS X. That's a massive technical advantage for many people, from different viewpoints. I shouldn't need to go into this in detail.
You can market generation n+1/2/3 devices all you want, but if people weren't satisfied with generation n then people won't buy. Apple has such high satisfaction ratings that they surely are hitting people's needs pretty much spot on.
I must also point out that I think Apple peaked already, and quality appears to be going down. There's no excuse for not having a wider range of computers to actually compete in the market. The Mac Mini is so out of date that Dell have better looking and specced offerings!
WinCE was originally developed as a PalmOS competitor/beater, running on fat Psion 5 look-a-likes with dire keyboards, snail-like interfaces and the stability of Mount Etna.
Since that time the platform has remained the same. The browser is still ancient, and their best promises for the next version are "IE 6" quality, i.e., irrelevant. Sure, there are new interfaces, the software is a little more up to date, the kernel has been switched to a more modern variant, it does wireless, bluetooth, 3G, etc, but it's still the same at heart. Rubbish.
Microsoft - you could sell iPhone Office for $99 and make a mint. Or you could sell licenses to WinMob+Pocket Office to manufacturers for cents. Microsoft have always said they'll develop where the market is. If the iPhone and iPod Touch ecosystem continues to grow, surely it is but a matter of time before they develop iPhone viewers, and then editors, for their file formats - before the formats become irrelevant... Pocket Project for iPhone would result in many a fevered brow in managers' offices around the world.
I expect that Broadcom will update their STA binary drivers for Linux to support this chip. They already support 4321 and 4322 802.11a/b/g/n products, so this 4329 can't be that different - probably the same wifi core on an integrated package on a smaller process...
Yes, I know, Broadcom have Linux drivers for some of their products! Shocking, eh? I know it is binary only (apart from an open-source kernel adaptor layer) but it's a move forward for Linux on the desktop.
Yeah, I'm using that on my HP 2133 + Ubuntu. It appears to work quite well thankfully, even reconnecting successfully after suspend, which is a first for me.
Well, it'll work until some vindictive kernel developer changes the kernel interface to make it incompatible anyway.
I did get it working eventually - had to switch the via_chrome9.ko with one appropriate for the kernel I was using, that the VIA installer had switched out. Cheers, VIA!
1) Chrome brings up a working web browser in under a couple of seconds.
2) The OS is Windows, and it's got all the slow software that work requires on it. It takes ages to get to an operational desktop. Firefox takes 30 seconds to launch if other things are launching after a reboot. Chrome therefore solves a massive problem.
3) Are you calling Linux a non-slow and non-broken OS? I've rebooted this Linux box 10 times in the past 3 hours getting compiz to work on it. By your metrics that means the OS is totally broken. Anyway Firefox launches quicker on a 1.2GHz VIA C7 in a netbook on Linux than it does on a dual core 2GHz Core 2 Duo in Windows XP.
The good thing with Chrome is that you can be browsing after booting up windows, whilst all the other crap and startup software is still loading in the background that somehow gets in the way of Firefox starting up.
In addition I don't spend all my day moving bookmarks around and so on. So Chrome is quite a reasonable browser if you don't need all the other options that are available in Firefox. OTOH I'm in Firefox on my home systems:) And they're not Windows:D
The 83xx series can have 32 cores in a single system (although 16 will be the most common, in a four socket configuration). Why are you talking about two cores?
The 23xx series can have 8 cores in a single system.
The 13xx series which will come out in due course will be the cheap 1-4 core processor you are talking about.
Note that Core i7 isn't available in a server platform yet.
Luckily for them Nehalem Xeons are a long time off in the computer world, especially in 4 and 8 socket variants, where AMD excels. Indeed the graphs in the review show that given another two processors, AMD would have been far more competitive. And in the server benchmarks Shanghai performed extremely well from the start, apart from the reimplementation in C# of XMLBench (instead of using the C, C++ or Java version that is well tested) that had problems.
In addition AMD have a platform that has already been tested and used by many companies. Nehalem is a major change that would require assessment before deployment.
On top of that, AMD will have a new platform out that enables HT3 and DDR3, which will improve performance, and this will be before the 4S+ Nehalem platform is out.
And maybe someone will test virtualisation in these reviews one day, where AMD will likely beat Intel into the ground (due to nested page tables and other optimisations), even on a 2S server.
Of course Intel have a far superior core and floating point. Many would argue that you should use a GPU for serious work involving the latter now of course... so would Intel, judging by their work on Larrabee.
I have a 42" plasma TV, sadly not full HD, only 720p. But at the 10' distance I view it at I don't really notice the lower resolution.
However in terms of DPI is it probably the same as my previous SD CRT display.
As for people thinking SD looks HD, it could be down to the upscaling logic within the HD television actually improving the picture or at least turning a 60Hz signal into 120Hz (perhaps even interpolating between frames using the motion information in the digital signal). I hear that 720p sets are better for this than 1080p, but again, I think it depends on viewing distance.
If you are moving from a mid-range SD CRT that would be typical of the previous generation, to a mid-range LCD, you will probably view the stable solid image as an improvement over the slightly warped CRT image, and not notice the lower contrast ratio. Basically standard technology improvements during the 5 to 10 year lifetime of a television are what people are mistaking for improvements due to HD.
To be fair, East London needs the investment. It will either regenerate a vast area, or it will become a giant white elephant park area (but at least it will be a park, and there will be housing, instead of a giant industrial wasteland).
Information terminals are so 2006 anyway. Wireless transmission of results sounds good to me, we'll all have netbooks, mids or smartphones by then anyway. Maybe the government should mandate all new mobile phones to have wifi or wimax capability by 2011.
I just hope that it will be cheaper to build things now because of the recession and increased unemployment, and that the savings will be passed on. On the other hand, we could end up with an olympic village built by Barratt Homes, ugh!
People know Shampoo isn't going to turn crappy hair into fantastic model-esque hair,
Why can you say that? That's what the advert is showing! I am not a shampoo expert, why would I assume that what the advert says is actually not true in any sense, that my hair would still be slightly curly and springy regardless of using that shampoo over any other?
I think people should know that mobile internet isn't instantaneous because their home internet isn't instantaneous, their old phone internet wasn't instantaneous, etc. Yet this ruling shows that "people know" isn't enough.
The app store advert is clearly showing functionality rather than making speed claims.
You click on the App Store icon. You browse the store. You select what you want to get. You wait for it to download. You can then play it, and the graphics are good and you use the phone as a steering wheel. Oh, and it's also a mobile phone. It's a good advert for the functionality it is showing.
The warning that it has been sped up is probably necessary because no 50MB game is going to download in 3 seconds as shown in the advert (but speed isn't the purpose of the advert), but I also expect that people should educate themselves about products before they buy.
The current iPhone adverts in the UK have exactly that on them now - well nearly, they state that parts of the process have been removed so that they can show you the functionality within a short time.
I don't think the screen shots are simulated however, they're actual screen shots, just that the process is edited as you would expect from any advert.
At least on the iPhone advert you can do everything that the advert shows, it just takes a little longer. Indeed it took me longer to load the PCPro website on my laptop just now than it did on their video - not the best choice of comparison website methinks...
The Axe adverts aren't even based in reality. I don't become as attractive as chocolate (that advert is disgusting to be honest, it's more offensive than most adverts, it's gross, I hope it gets banned under the new disgusting pornographic imagery law), not immediately, not even after a week of wearing it or bathing in it. Indeed Axe smells so disgusting that I am sure it drives women away. Maybe they add pheromones or something to it. I think carrying a kitten with you would be far more effective in attracting women.
As a side note, the iPhone adverts in the UK have had a disclaimer on the bottom of the advert saying that they cut out some steps and stuff in order to fit it into the advert. This has been for a few weeks at least, so Apple acted proactively it seems in regard to these adverts.
Now what about the adverts from Samsung and Blackberry about their phones that show the same stuff?
So when will we see commercially available devices?
The article says around three years, and from what I understood initially could be used to lower the cost and/or lower the size and/or increase the performance of FPGA circuits amongst other applications, but the memristor knowledge isn't widespread in the development community.
It would take you longer to drive into London than take the tube.
Especially if everyone else had the same idea.
You'd be at a standstill, getting 1mpg.
London needs extensive public transport. It couldn't function without. It couldn't function with 20% less, and the road network couldn't function with 20% more.
Slashdot Mirror
Most likely the final generation of PS3 - post PS4 release, so around 2012, will utilise a smaller, but flash-based, hard drive compared to the mechanical ones utilised today. I could see 16 or 32 GB of flash being dirt cheap by then, and ideal for a budget console on the market that needs storage. They could remove the hard drive bay and all that gubbins and mount the flash on the motherboard, possibly achieving a
Remember the PS4 will be out by then, with all the high-end features, so the PS3 of that time can lose these features (PlayTV, hard drive bay, etc).
It seems that the price of BluRay Diodes hasn't dropped so drastically this year, as that's the major cost difference against the 360's BOM. That, and wireless - a major failing of the current 360.
But what about the people who urinated in public?
What about those that got caught streaking for a joke during college?
What about those that had sex with their 17 year old girlfriend when they were 18?
The fact is that the sex offender registries, worldwide, are in general unfit for purpose. Someone who streaked is unlikely to rape someone. In fact many people develop some mental functions (empathy, social skills, etc) late in life - between 20 and 30, so anything they do before this time is actually very unlikely to occur afterwards. Now if you commit a full sex crime (rape, child sex offences, etc) then you should be on a register (DNA, Contact Details, etc) for law enforcement use, but if they're still a danger to the community then they shouldn't be in the community. If they're deemed safe enough to release, then that's it. At the very least they should have something to aim for, e.g., 5 or 10 years good behaviour and you are removed from the public registry. There has to be a limit on the sentence.
Why not create a registry of convicted drunk drivers, who may only buy cars that include a mandatory breathalyser test to start? This could save many many lives. Oh, but it would be an attack on the car driver. Regardless of the fact that drunk drivers are scum who cause heartache and misery for thousands.
It's a fricking cease and decease letter, for a trademarked term that Psion came up with at least 8 years ago. Not only do they have the right to do this, they practically HAVE to do this to protect their trademarked term. And they'll win, they have the active trademark. The term has only been misused for a short time.
I'm typing this on my mininote. Looks like HP's lawyers did some trivial checks...
Years? YEARS?
Firstly, Psion had to become aware of the misuse.
Secondly they could have gone through several rounds of letter writing already regarding the use of the term.
Thirdly, the most recent use of 'netbook' isn't that old - commonly within the past 6 months, a few uses up to a year or two. In legal terms this is no time at all.
And when was the first time you heard the term "netbook" apart from Psion? The netbook was well publicised at its launch, although it was too early. The PSion 5 series was more popular, but Psion sat back on their laurels a little with that design and lost the advantage.
Anyway, back to the term 'netbook' and when you heard it recently. ... and was it called a netbook back then?
Not 4 years ago.
Most likely not 3 years ago.
Maybe 2 years ago, when Intel started talking about their plans for small systems, but at the time they were more interested in MIDs.
The EeePC came out 18 months ago
You're thinking in internet time, not legal time. See a post above above for how such things could have proceeded once the term netbook started being used recently. I wouldn't be so certain that the term is 'generic' legally, nor that the trademark protection is late.
I think you also have to consider that Apple's Fairplay DRM isn't really that bad in the grand scheme of things. There is a proper deauthorisation mechanism (unlike with DRM on games like Spore) that allows you to migrate your music to new systems, you can have multiple copies of the music authorised at the same time, and so on.
The other problem is the labels providing the music. As long as they are having their petty iTunes Hatefest (oh noes, it's successful, but they're not playing by our rules and desires!) they are not allowing iTunes to provide DRM-free music, instead they're trying to get Amazon big enough to be a competitor so they have leverage over iTunes. The problem is, of course, that for Amazon, it's just another product on an already over-complex website with appalling search capabilities, and the company has poor working conditions for its employees so more and more people are boycotting them.
Hmm, gotta disagree there.
You have to consider the package as a whole. Not just the raw technical specifications or feature list.
The iPod was simply far better at its core feature when it was launched than any other player. I would argue that by not losing sight of the vision of a small, portable, music player they didn't get caught up with vast featurelists like other players until they could do it the best way. Styling has, of course, helped greatly - but it's not Apple's fault their competitors wanted to sell bricks.
The iPhone's interface is simply still far better and smoother than any other competitor. The difference isn't as much as with the iPod when it was launched, and the competitors are catching up faster this time.
The MacBook has Mac OS X. That's a massive technical advantage for many people, from different viewpoints. I shouldn't need to go into this in detail.
You can market generation n+1/2/3 devices all you want, but if people weren't satisfied with generation n then people won't buy. Apple has such high satisfaction ratings that they surely are hitting people's needs pretty much spot on.
I must also point out that I think Apple peaked already, and quality appears to be going down. There's no excuse for not having a wider range of computers to actually compete in the market. The Mac Mini is so out of date that Dell have better looking and specced offerings!
Is it surprising?
WinCE was originally developed as a PalmOS competitor/beater, running on fat Psion 5 look-a-likes with dire keyboards, snail-like interfaces and the stability of Mount Etna.
Since that time the platform has remained the same. The browser is still ancient, and their best promises for the next version are "IE 6" quality, i.e., irrelevant. Sure, there are new interfaces, the software is a little more up to date, the kernel has been switched to a more modern variant, it does wireless, bluetooth, 3G, etc, but it's still the same at heart. Rubbish.
Microsoft - you could sell iPhone Office for $99 and make a mint. Or you could sell licenses to WinMob+Pocket Office to manufacturers for cents. Microsoft have always said they'll develop where the market is. If the iPhone and iPod Touch ecosystem continues to grow, surely it is but a matter of time before they develop iPhone viewers, and then editors, for their file formats - before the formats become irrelevant... Pocket Project for iPhone would result in many a fevered brow in managers' offices around the world.
I expect that Broadcom will update their STA binary drivers for Linux to support this chip. They already support 4321 and 4322 802.11a/b/g/n products, so this 4329 can't be that different - probably the same wifi core on an integrated package on a smaller process...
Yes, I know, Broadcom have Linux drivers for some of their products! Shocking, eh? I know it is binary only (apart from an open-source kernel adaptor layer) but it's a move forward for Linux on the desktop.
http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php
Yeah, I'm using that on my HP 2133 + Ubuntu. It appears to work quite well thankfully, even reconnecting successfully after suspend, which is a first for me.
Well, it'll work until some vindictive kernel developer changes the kernel interface to make it incompatible anyway.
I did get it working eventually - had to switch the via_chrome9.ko with one appropriate for the kernel I was using, that the VIA installer had switched out. Cheers, VIA!
1) Chrome brings up a working web browser in under a couple of seconds.
2) The OS is Windows, and it's got all the slow software that work requires on it. It takes ages to get to an operational desktop. Firefox takes 30 seconds to launch if other things are launching after a reboot. Chrome therefore solves a massive problem.
3) Are you calling Linux a non-slow and non-broken OS? I've rebooted this Linux box 10 times in the past 3 hours getting compiz to work on it. By your metrics that means the OS is totally broken. Anyway Firefox launches quicker on a 1.2GHz VIA C7 in a netbook on Linux than it does on a dual core 2GHz Core 2 Duo in Windows XP.
The good thing with Chrome is that you can be browsing after booting up windows, whilst all the other crap and startup software is still loading in the background that somehow gets in the way of Firefox starting up.
In addition I don't spend all my day moving bookmarks around and so on. So Chrome is quite a reasonable browser if you don't need all the other options that are available in Firefox. OTOH I'm in Firefox on my home systems :) And they're not Windows :D
It's not getting in the spirit of things is it now?
The 83xx series can have 32 cores in a single system (although 16 will be the most common, in a four socket configuration). Why are you talking about two cores?
The 23xx series can have 8 cores in a single system.
The 13xx series which will come out in due course will be the cheap 1-4 core processor you are talking about.
Note that Core i7 isn't available in a server platform yet.
Power and PowerPC is doing great. XBox360, PS3, Wii, Toshiba TVs, supercomputers, set top boxes, ...
Just because it isn't doing well in the desktop PC market doesn't mean it is losing its momentum.
Luckily for them Nehalem Xeons are a long time off in the computer world, especially in 4 and 8 socket variants, where AMD excels. Indeed the graphs in the review show that given another two processors, AMD would have been far more competitive. And in the server benchmarks Shanghai performed extremely well from the start, apart from the reimplementation in C# of XMLBench (instead of using the C, C++ or Java version that is well tested) that had problems.
In addition AMD have a platform that has already been tested and used by many companies. Nehalem is a major change that would require assessment before deployment.
On top of that, AMD will have a new platform out that enables HT3 and DDR3, which will improve performance, and this will be before the 4S+ Nehalem platform is out.
And maybe someone will test virtualisation in these reviews one day, where AMD will likely beat Intel into the ground (due to nested page tables and other optimisations), even on a 2S server.
Of course Intel have a far superior core and floating point. Many would argue that you should use a GPU for serious work involving the latter now of course... so would Intel, judging by their work on Larrabee.
I have a 42" plasma TV, sadly not full HD, only 720p. But at the 10' distance I view it at I don't really notice the lower resolution.
However in terms of DPI is it probably the same as my previous SD CRT display.
As for people thinking SD looks HD, it could be down to the upscaling logic within the HD television actually improving the picture or at least turning a 60Hz signal into 120Hz (perhaps even interpolating between frames using the motion information in the digital signal). I hear that 720p sets are better for this than 1080p, but again, I think it depends on viewing distance.
If you are moving from a mid-range SD CRT that would be typical of the previous generation, to a mid-range LCD, you will probably view the stable solid image as an improvement over the slightly warped CRT image, and not notice the lower contrast ratio. Basically standard technology improvements during the 5 to 10 year lifetime of a television are what people are mistaking for improvements due to HD.
To be fair, East London needs the investment. It will either regenerate a vast area, or it will become a giant white elephant park area (but at least it will be a park, and there will be housing, instead of a giant industrial wasteland).
Information terminals are so 2006 anyway. Wireless transmission of results sounds good to me, we'll all have netbooks, mids or smartphones by then anyway. Maybe the government should mandate all new mobile phones to have wifi or wimax capability by 2011.
I just hope that it will be cheaper to build things now because of the recession and increased unemployment, and that the savings will be passed on. On the other hand, we could end up with an olympic village built by Barratt Homes, ugh!
People know Shampoo isn't going to turn crappy hair into fantastic model-esque hair,
Why can you say that? That's what the advert is showing! I am not a shampoo expert, why would I assume that what the advert says is actually not true in any sense, that my hair would still be slightly curly and springy regardless of using that shampoo over any other?
I think people should know that mobile internet isn't instantaneous because their home internet isn't instantaneous, their old phone internet wasn't instantaneous, etc. Yet this ruling shows that "people know" isn't enough.
The app store advert is clearly showing functionality rather than making speed claims.
You click on the App Store icon. You browse the store. You select what you want to get. You wait for it to download. You can then play it, and the graphics are good and you use the phone as a steering wheel. Oh, and it's also a mobile phone. It's a good advert for the functionality it is showing.
The warning that it has been sped up is probably necessary because no 50MB game is going to download in 3 seconds as shown in the advert (but speed isn't the purpose of the advert), but I also expect that people should educate themselves about products before they buy.
The current iPhone adverts in the UK have exactly that on them now - well nearly, they state that parts of the process have been removed so that they can show you the functionality within a short time.
I don't think the screen shots are simulated however, they're actual screen shots, just that the process is edited as you would expect from any advert.
Where's my car that turns into a robot! :(
At least on the iPhone advert you can do everything that the advert shows, it just takes a little longer. Indeed it took me longer to load the PCPro website on my laptop just now than it did on their video - not the best choice of comparison website methinks...
The Axe adverts aren't even based in reality. I don't become as attractive as chocolate (that advert is disgusting to be honest, it's more offensive than most adverts, it's gross, I hope it gets banned under the new disgusting pornographic imagery law), not immediately, not even after a week of wearing it or bathing in it. Indeed Axe smells so disgusting that I am sure it drives women away. Maybe they add pheromones or something to it. I think carrying a kitten with you would be far more effective in attracting women.
As a side note, the iPhone adverts in the UK have had a disclaimer on the bottom of the advert saying that they cut out some steps and stuff in order to fit it into the advert. This has been for a few weeks at least, so Apple acted proactively it seems in regard to these adverts.
Now what about the adverts from Samsung and Blackberry about their phones that show the same stuff?
So when will we see commercially available devices?
The article says around three years, and from what I understood initially could be used to lower the cost and/or lower the size and/or increase the performance of FPGA circuits amongst other applications, but the memristor knowledge isn't widespread in the development community.
It would take you longer to drive into London than take the tube.
Especially if everyone else had the same idea.
You'd be at a standstill, getting 1mpg.
London needs extensive public transport. It couldn't function without. It couldn't function with 20% less, and the road network couldn't function with 20% more.