8088 is faster than a z-80? Better bus? (ISA) 6800 development died with the 68060(?). x86 lives on today in even 64-bit architectures. You might say it is a terrible standard, but it still runs the last 30 years of software written for the IBM PC just fine. (well sorta anymore) I'm just saying that it could have ended up a lot worse. Apple could have won.
Sure the early IBM PCs were expensive. If cost was the issue, you weren't desirable as a customer to them anyways. This is the same company that would sell mainframes and then later sell upgrades for tens of thousands of dollars that involved a technician visiting the site and flipping a switch. PCs won out because they became the gold standard. DOS and later Windows 95 cemented that with Microsoft's total monopoly on the market. The software carried the PC standard, certainly not IBM.
You sound bitter. I don't really see why. The focus and refinement on one particular platform over 30 years has proven been very productive and has followed moore's law fairly well. The PC of today is really a small supercomputer and if anything my biggest disappointment is that software hasn't really kept up and all these extra cpu cycles seemed to be wasted on more and more bloat because the complexities of software development has pushed features as a priority over optimization. Sorry I'm pretty tired and the pens lost, so I'm kind of bummed. Forgive the long ramble. Falling asleep as I type thisssssssssssssssssssasdfmkasalkdnakjdbn
Bzz wrong. The 6502 was not RISC. I quote the wikipedia:
"A Byte magazine article[citation needed] once referred to the 6502 as "the original RISC processor," due to its efficient, simplistic, and nearly orthogonal instruction set (most instructions work with most addressing modes), as well as its 256 zero-page "registers". The 6502 is technically not a RISC design however, as arithmetic operations can read any memory cell (not only zero-page), and some instructions (inc, rol etc.) even modify memory contrary to the basic load/store philosophy of RISC. Furthermore, orthogonality is equally often associated with "CISC". "
That's why I think such devices should be certainly running an os that is designed to be touch friendly from the ground up. Android comes to mind. I would love a decent 8-10" android tablet.
The atom seems permanently stuck at 1.6ghz. You'd think they'd have a 2ghz part with less energy requirements a year ago. I'm suprised AMD hasn't stepped into this space more. They had the geode, but that kind of fell by the wayside. I hear that if you take an athlon 64 and undervolt it, then clock it down to 1ghz, you get better performance than the atom with less power draw. I cannot for the life of me figure out why the dual core atoms aren't just standard on everything now? It would go a long way towards helping some of the performance issues the atom has. I'm pretty happy with my cheap acer laptop. amd turion ql-62 at 2ghz, nvidia 9100m, 14.1" screen, 5lbs. Sure I'd like something thinner and lighter with the same specs, but I doubt it would cost me the mere $500 I spent. Netbooks seem way too cramped for me and are certainly too slow to say run photoshop for anything serious. If I need to browse the web on the go, I can just whip out my g1 for that. I sure wish htc would come out with a new android phone with a decent keyboard and I doubt I'm alone in that desire........
Its directly integrated. In CS4 it is mostly used for image display and smooth zooming, but can be nice with a modestly fast gpu. I like how you can grab the image and slide it across the screen and release the mouse and it will keep on smoothly scrolling until you click again or it decelerates. I'm sure they included more stuff in CS5, but I have yet to see that in action. I find for CS4 a quad core athlon seems fine. Memory is really the bigger issue, and the more the merrier, though I regularly manipulate 1gig files with about 2 gigs assigned to photoshop and it works ok. A lot of tasks in photoshop are really single threaded, so multiple cores doesn't give you a great deal of gain in a lot of tasks. It does help in some areas though. My advice: if you have a machine that has been built in the last year or two, don't upgrade for CS5. Just maybe max out your ram situation and go for it, unless you happen to be running some ancient P4 or something.....
That's too bad. I had a printing project that required me to place two pages on a certain fixed page size. You think something like this would be trivial to do with acrobat, but NOOOOOOO the only way to do it is to have it resize the pages to fit the overall page. I wanted the pages to stay to a fixed size. This was impossible with acrobat and there were hundreds of pages, so laying them all down in illustrator was out of the question. I downloaded foxit and it had way better print options than adobe. I don't know about annotations displaying, but every pdf I've put in it looks fine as far as I can tell. It might not do what you need it to do, but it was nice to have some sort of alternative that gave me different options that happened to be the ones I need and shame on adobe for giving a total lack of output options on something that is designed to be print friendly.
Indeed. Once you root your phone you can install and run anything. Even if the vendors lock the damned phones down you can still reflash to a custom rom and get access to the marketplace (as long as its still there). I don't see the marketplace going anywhere, but it certainly needs a lot of improvement still. I've been able to do just about anything I want to with my g1. Now I just got google voice, so I'm looking at setting up a pbx loop and using sipdroid for unlimited calling. I love how I can tether wirelessly. I wish I could just find a sync app that allows wifi so I can just browse my sd card. Most of them seem to want to set up an ftp sever on your phone. That's sort of cumbersome. Its less of a pain to just plug in the damn cable.
It took google to make it happen, but yes, android phones are certainly taking over the ecosystem and it is fascinating. I still use windows on the desktop, because I'm not the biggest mac fan anymore, and linux really isn't a replacement with its lack of the applications I need. I think linux is starting to fill niches that need good alternatives. I think windows ce was less than ideal for a lot of people, and iphone os really showed that it was possible to have very sleek experience with cheaply available hardware. Also the slow rise of ARM to prominence in a very large number of devices is very interesting as well and has given the embedded world the cpu it needs with horsepower available. Are these things going to take over the behemoth multi-core desktop CPUs? Not really. But, for a lot of people, I think they will, and that is an interesting shift in perception. I think time will tell if these sort of small, efficient internet enabled devices take off. Its certainly a new revolution and an exciting one in a world that has largely been dominated by stagnant 20 year old designs.
I pay like $30 a month for unlimited data through tmobile. You can turn off data on roam and just use wifi with a lot of devices. I mean is $30 so expensive for 3g internet everywhere? I agree it could be cheaper, but it is not wholly unreasonable, especially when you realize you can convert your phone into a portable wifi hotspot and there are no data caps on tmobile. Its not a real replacement for say something fast like cable, but it is certainly usable for web browsing. I mean what do you want? 100mpbs everywhere? Its not going to happen. Not any time soon. Even cricket has 3G services (I hear they suck) that you can buy data for like $35 a month. Its not going to get much cheaper than that.
There hardware slipped a lot in the 90s. I new a guy who started to work for them as an engineer and we talked about how their pcs at the time were utter sh*t. I don't expect much has changed as of late. They generally score pretty low in the reliability ratings. Yeah, this tablet had me about as excited as an enema. Compaq/HP laptops generally seem to do the worst, so what does that tell you. I know my Acer isn't far behind (and it is pretty crappy and cheap to be honest), but it still is running just fine. Anymore these days it seems like everything is made so cheaply in china with subpar surface mounting that I really don't expect hardly anything to last more than a year or two. A far cry from the 5-10 years you could eek out of 90s gear. I went through 3 mp3 players before I realized that they are all built so cheaply that they can't take any sort of abuse at all. My last sandisk fuze lasted me about 3 months before the surface mounts failed. Sure I dropped it about 3-4 times and even knocked the metal case off the back, but that sure doesn't say a lot about a device when it can't take a couple of 3-4 foot drops. My old powershot 590IS was a lot more sturdy than that, and it was a freaking plastic camera!
That I can understand. I really didn't understand what the whole point of this article was to be honest. Was it about the lack of licensing in the manual? Was it about ogg/theora potentially running afoul of several patents? Was it about lock in? It wasn't very well written if you ask me, but interesting because previously, I knew very little about the legal situation with h.264 but it is certainly making its rounds in the press these days....
I guess he is arguing that since everything uses h.264 as a base (my camera does not, it uses quicktime....) that ultimately you must obtain a license to publish anything commercially. I would argue that transcoding to a patent free codec would be the only way out of this at least on the distribution end. If they want to go to the extreme that to figure out what codec your camera is running, then we have entered the legal quagmire the article is talking about. Unfortunately it doesn't look like there are many patent free codecs. This is precisely a highlight of the issue of why software patents are a bad idea. Legally these shenanigans are certainly allowed to happen though.
Oh whoops. That's not what i meant to say at all. this is what happens when I type slashdot replies before coffee. I meant to say that theora is NOT a clean patent free solution. See what the difference a single word makes. My bad.
So every time the system restore cache is maxed out, it is supposed to warn you before it deletes files? You know how incredibly annoying that would be? You do realize that system restore is supposed fill up to its maximum and then start deleting older restore points as you make new changes to files. Imagine being asked nearly daily, if not more often, "would you like to delete the older restore point and create a new one?"
If the original parent is correct and these people just have system restore turned down to a small number, then really its their own fault their old restore points are gone. I mean, do these people expect them to be there for ever or something?
I've had system restore fail on xp, vista, and 7. I wouldn't exactly rely on its tecnology for something mission critical like a backup.
Slashdot Mirror
you must be new here...
Fair enough. I found it interesting, so I looked it up and found that paragraph, which I also found interesting.
Uh...leave the autoupdate enabled on firefox?
8088 is faster than a z-80?
Better bus? (ISA)
6800 development died with the 68060(?). x86 lives on today in even 64-bit architectures. You might say it is a terrible standard, but it still runs the last 30 years of software written for the IBM PC just fine. (well sorta anymore) I'm just saying that it could have ended up a lot worse. Apple could have won.
Sure the early IBM PCs were expensive. If cost was the issue, you weren't desirable as a customer to them anyways. This is the same company that would sell mainframes and then later sell upgrades for tens of thousands of dollars that involved a technician visiting the site and flipping a switch. PCs won out because they became the gold standard. DOS and later Windows 95 cemented that with Microsoft's total monopoly on the market. The software carried the PC standard, certainly not IBM.
You sound bitter. I don't really see why. The focus and refinement on one particular platform over 30 years has proven been very productive and has followed moore's law fairly well. The PC of today is really a small supercomputer and if anything my biggest disappointment is that software hasn't really kept up and all these extra cpu cycles seemed to be wasted on more and more bloat because the complexities of software development has pushed features as a priority over optimization. Sorry I'm pretty tired and the pens lost, so I'm kind of bummed. Forgive the long ramble. Falling asleep as I type thisssssssssssssssssssasdfmkasalkdnakjdbn
Bzz wrong. The 6502 was not RISC. I quote the wikipedia:
"A Byte magazine article[citation needed] once referred to the 6502 as "the original RISC processor," due to its efficient, simplistic, and nearly orthogonal instruction set (most instructions work with most addressing modes), as well as its 256 zero-page "registers". The 6502 is technically not a RISC design however, as arithmetic operations can read any memory cell (not only zero-page), and some instructions (inc, rol etc.) even modify memory contrary to the basic load/store philosophy of RISC. Furthermore, orthogonality is equally often associated with "CISC". "
That's why I think such devices should be certainly running an os that is designed to be touch friendly from the ground up. Android comes to mind. I would love a decent 8-10" android tablet.
Is the shell as shitty as the band its named after?
Ahhhh...but ubuntu only comes with the monolithic kernel. You have to use the hurd to get a microkernel and that's and even bigger load of crap......
Um, is that more or less energy than 1.21 gigawatts?
Its a trap!
Fair enough. At 1/100th of 1% you would only need 200 600MW reactors running at 100%. Better ramp up production of nuclear plants!
Jesus christ. Steve Jobs is that you?
Someone's been drinking too much of the apple koolaid.....
The atom seems permanently stuck at 1.6ghz. You'd think they'd have a 2ghz part with less energy requirements a year ago. I'm suprised AMD hasn't stepped into this space more. They had the geode, but that kind of fell by the wayside. I hear that if you take an athlon 64 and undervolt it, then clock it down to 1ghz, you get better performance than the atom with less power draw. I cannot for the life of me figure out why the dual core atoms aren't just standard on everything now? It would go a long way towards helping some of the performance issues the atom has. I'm pretty happy with my cheap acer laptop. amd turion ql-62 at 2ghz, nvidia 9100m, 14.1" screen, 5lbs. Sure I'd like something thinner and lighter with the same specs, but I doubt it would cost me the mere $500 I spent. Netbooks seem way too cramped for me and are certainly too slow to say run photoshop for anything serious. If I need to browse the web on the go, I can just whip out my g1 for that. I sure wish htc would come out with a new android phone with a decent keyboard and I doubt I'm alone in that desire........
So did $5.......what's your point?
Its directly integrated. In CS4 it is mostly used for image display and smooth zooming, but can be nice with a modestly fast gpu. I like how you can grab the image and slide it across the screen and release the mouse and it will keep on smoothly scrolling until you click again or it decelerates. I'm sure they included more stuff in CS5, but I have yet to see that in action. I find for CS4 a quad core athlon seems fine. Memory is really the bigger issue, and the more the merrier, though I regularly manipulate 1gig files with about 2 gigs assigned to photoshop and it works ok. A lot of tasks in photoshop are really single threaded, so multiple cores doesn't give you a great deal of gain in a lot of tasks. It does help in some areas though. My advice: if you have a machine that has been built in the last year or two, don't upgrade for CS5. Just maybe max out your ram situation and go for it, unless you happen to be running some ancient P4 or something.....
That's too bad. I had a printing project that required me to place two pages on a certain fixed page size. You think something like this would be trivial to do with acrobat, but NOOOOOOO the only way to do it is to have it resize the pages to fit the overall page. I wanted the pages to stay to a fixed size. This was impossible with acrobat and there were hundreds of pages, so laying them all down in illustrator was out of the question. I downloaded foxit and it had way better print options than adobe. I don't know about annotations displaying, but every pdf I've put in it looks fine as far as I can tell. It might not do what you need it to do, but it was nice to have some sort of alternative that gave me different options that happened to be the ones I need and shame on adobe for giving a total lack of output options on something that is designed to be print friendly.
I had to read that three times to get the full effect. Thank you! This has to be the best post I've read on this story!
Indeed. Once you root your phone you can install and run anything. Even if the vendors lock the damned phones down you can still reflash to a custom rom and get access to the marketplace (as long as its still there). I don't see the marketplace going anywhere, but it certainly needs a lot of improvement still. I've been able to do just about anything I want to with my g1. Now I just got google voice, so I'm looking at setting up a pbx loop and using sipdroid for unlimited calling. I love how I can tether wirelessly. I wish I could just find a sync app that allows wifi so I can just browse my sd card. Most of them seem to want to set up an ftp sever on your phone. That's sort of cumbersome. Its less of a pain to just plug in the damn cable.
It took google to make it happen, but yes, android phones are certainly taking over the ecosystem and it is fascinating. I still use windows on the desktop, because I'm not the biggest mac fan anymore, and linux really isn't a replacement with its lack of the applications I need. I think linux is starting to fill niches that need good alternatives. I think windows ce was less than ideal for a lot of people, and iphone os really showed that it was possible to have very sleek experience with cheaply available hardware. Also the slow rise of ARM to prominence in a very large number of devices is very interesting as well and has given the embedded world the cpu it needs with horsepower available. Are these things going to take over the behemoth multi-core desktop CPUs? Not really. But, for a lot of people, I think they will, and that is an interesting shift in perception. I think time will tell if these sort of small, efficient internet enabled devices take off. Its certainly a new revolution and an exciting one in a world that has largely been dominated by stagnant 20 year old designs.
I must clarify everywhere to be everywhere that I go. I realize that 3g doesn't work everywhere....
I pay like $30 a month for unlimited data through tmobile. You can turn off data on roam and just use wifi with a lot of devices. I mean is $30 so expensive for 3g internet everywhere? I agree it could be cheaper, but it is not wholly unreasonable, especially when you realize you can convert your phone into a portable wifi hotspot and there are no data caps on tmobile. Its not a real replacement for say something fast like cable, but it is certainly usable for web browsing. I mean what do you want? 100mpbs everywhere? Its not going to happen. Not any time soon. Even cricket has 3G services (I hear they suck) that you can buy data for like $35 a month. Its not going to get much cheaper than that.
There hardware slipped a lot in the 90s. I new a guy who started to work for them as an engineer and we talked about how their pcs at the time were utter sh*t. I don't expect much has changed as of late. They generally score pretty low in the reliability ratings. Yeah, this tablet had me about as excited as an enema. Compaq/HP laptops generally seem to do the worst, so what does that tell you. I know my Acer isn't far behind (and it is pretty crappy and cheap to be honest), but it still is running just fine. Anymore these days it seems like everything is made so cheaply in china with subpar surface mounting that I really don't expect hardly anything to last more than a year or two. A far cry from the 5-10 years you could eek out of 90s gear. I went through 3 mp3 players before I realized that they are all built so cheaply that they can't take any sort of abuse at all. My last sandisk fuze lasted me about 3 months before the surface mounts failed. Sure I dropped it about 3-4 times and even knocked the metal case off the back, but that sure doesn't say a lot about a device when it can't take a couple of 3-4 foot drops. My old powershot 590IS was a lot more sturdy than that, and it was a freaking plastic camera!
That I can understand. I really didn't understand what the whole point of this article was to be honest. Was it about the lack of licensing in the manual? Was it about ogg/theora potentially running afoul of several patents? Was it about lock in? It wasn't very well written if you ask me, but interesting because previously, I knew very little about the legal situation with h.264 but it is certainly making its rounds in the press these days....
I guess he is arguing that since everything uses h.264 as a base (my camera does not, it uses quicktime....) that ultimately you must obtain a license to publish anything commercially. I would argue that transcoding to a patent free codec would be the only way out of this at least on the distribution end. If they want to go to the extreme that to figure out what codec your camera is running, then we have entered the legal quagmire the article is talking about. Unfortunately it doesn't look like there are many patent free codecs. This is precisely a highlight of the issue of why software patents are a bad idea. Legally these shenanigans are certainly allowed to happen though.
Oh whoops. That's not what i meant to say at all. this is what happens when I type slashdot replies before coffee. I meant to say that theora is NOT a clean patent free solution. See what the difference a single word makes. My bad.
So every time the system restore cache is maxed out, it is supposed to warn you before it deletes files? You know how incredibly annoying that would be? You do realize that system restore is supposed fill up to its maximum and then start deleting older restore points as you make new changes to files. Imagine being asked nearly daily, if not more often, "would you like to delete the older restore point and create a new one?"
If the original parent is correct and these people just have system restore turned down to a small number, then really its their own fault their old restore points are gone. I mean, do these people expect them to be there for ever or something?
I've had system restore fail on xp, vista, and 7. I wouldn't exactly rely on its tecnology for something mission critical like a backup.
The problem is that theora potentially infringes on patents that are tied to mpeg. So theora is a clean, patent free solution.