If you have access, look at it over the last 6-7 years, it is brutal. Make sure you get installed rather than sales, MS keeps commissioning reports that somehow manage to not count Google, Facebook, Baidu, Tencent etc etc's servers. Not sure why though.:)
I can name a few possible scenarios, and I'll let you decide:
Ballmer had a notoriously short fuse and the company would rather pay for what he wanted to hear, not what they needed to hear.
Gartner, Forrester, et al were a bit intimidated by the piles of bodies in the C-level offices with gunshot wounds in them, and they liked the money.
Microsoft-commissioned reports aren't intended for market research, but rather publicity and their own marketing purposes. They don't publicize the ones they commission for actual research, because it's not pretty (especially since Windows 8/Server 2012).
BTW x86 32-bit doesn't run on x86_64 either. The software and chips have emulation routines that allow it to happen. The same as happens with A64 that allows old A32 and T32 instructions to still run on the same chip.
Disregarding built-in microcode that converts CISC instructions into simpler RISC-like operations, this statement is not accurate. All x86-64 processors have the same native 32-bit registers and instructions that the original 386 had (some may be deprecated, but IIRC there is 100% compatibility). No hardware emulation is being done.
You may be confusing the virtual memory translation scheme (Wow64) that Windows uses to run 32-bit processes in Windows x64. Yes, there is some slight overhead, but it isn't considered to be emulation.
No kidding. The one-line quips were usually top-rated for as long as I can remember, provided they were relevant and early. RTFA was never mandatory, however.
A free market presumes competition, and it presumes regulation against perverse incentives. Neither are the case here... That strongly implies that they have no leg to stand on when they argue 'free markets' to bypass regulations being imposed on their networks.
I think you're restating what parent wrote (only in more detail):
Make the market free so there is someplace else to go
I believe we're all in agreement that cable companies clamoring for "free market" are hypocrites, as there has never really been a free market for communication service providers, and it's amusing (yet sad, since it's often effective) to see the rent seekers that cry "free market" and "deregulation" only when it benefits them. Govt-subsidized and sanctioned monopolies and duopolies aren't capitalism, and neither is the collusion that results when the barrier to entry is so large due to these monopolies.
If they really want a "free market" and "deregulation", then they shouldn't be opposed to more open (unlicensed) spectrum, rather than allowing the FCC to auction frequency blocks off to the highest bidder. They also shouldn't ask for public handouts to "build rural infrastructure" and then completely renege on their contractual obligations through legal loopholes and shell games.
Personally, I don't like auto_ptr and would avoid the smart pointers. They are really cool in trivial applications but it is as easy to screw up mem management with auto_ptr as it is with naked pointers in more complicated situations (IMO YMMV).
I was with you until this. Having worked on large C++ with and without smart pointers and seeing the differences between the memory leaks firsthand has made me a believer in using smart pointers.
There are shortcomings of the commonly taught RAII approach when handling raw pointers, mostly having to do with ambiguity of pointer ownership. Maybe not the auto_ptr itself (which has now been made deprecated in favor of unique_ptr due to having stricter move/copy semantics), but the smart pointers in Boost and C++11 are very strict about who owns the data in question. There are other things smart pointers can fix (such as automatic cleanups/refcount decrements with stack unwinding, which addresses leaks caused by unexpected thrown exceptions).
Hell, simply having a ref-counted pointer that handles its own cleanup is a great way to ease developers who only have previous experience with garbage-collected languages into C++ development without introducing a ton of memory leaks or dangling pointers everywhere- not an ideal solution, but this crutch has saved us from many potential horrors introduced by senior developers who have only used C# or Java previously (yes, this is quite common today).
I would argue that sharing cache between CPU and GPU is not necessarily ideal. Also, keep in mind that GPUs and CPUs use memory very differently; CPUs prefer low latency, GPUs prefer raw bandwidth- this is why Llano's graphics performance is very sensitive to the clockspeed of the memory you're using.
MIDI is very limited. MIDI was set up 30 years ago as a communication interface, and by today's standards it's a poor one- you're limited to one note per millisecond. IIRC, you are also limited to 16 channels, so composing scores for an entire orchestra is out of the question.
To top it all off, it wasn't meant for music notation. Symbols like Accelerandos, Ritardandos are notably absent- changes to tempos are hardcoded. Many other symbols are absent as well. Sometimes notes need to be formatted in a special way (ie- for readability, or left/right hand on piano).
Anyone who has ever composed in Finale, Sibelius, etc and tried to export to midi will notice the limitations right away. Why, what's your beef with XML anyway?
Please don't confuse capitalism with corporatism. The very fact that the Government would dictate or allow someone else to dictate what someone can and cannot do with his/her own property goes against one of the basic tenets of free-market capitalism. In a true capitalist system, Sony wouldn't be able to take legal action against modchip manufacturers.
"Intellectual property" is another concept that is falsely attributed to capitalism. The government should never enforce monopolies, especially over ideas.
I don't know if you're being sarcastic, but in case you aren't...
Some Motorola Android phones have MotoBlur, which require a MotoBlur account (it does its own cloud syncing). My Atrix, unfortunately, is one of those phones.
I believe the Motorola Droid phones (Droid, Droid 2, Droid X) on Verizon don't have MotoBlur, and thus don't require a Motorola account.
This kind of thing pisses me off. After having knee replacement a few years ago, I was hobbling around on crutches for a month- and shopping with a regular cart was a pain in the ass. There were times when I went to the grocery store and the "mobility carts" were all taken up by fatasses who could really use the exercise.
I've always wanted to tell them off, "Hey tubby, laziness and lack of self-control isn't a disability!"
I can't imagine how people with permanent disabilities would feel in that situation.
That's why there are "no gays" in Iran, as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad joked about on a previous US visit. Known homosexuals are either forced to have gender reassignment surgery, or risk jail or execution. It mirrors the way western countries forced gays to undergo chemical castration as recent as 50 years ago (like what happened to Turing), but it's terrible that this kind of thing still happens today.
A capacitive stylus is more like writing with a crayon than a pencil. If you look at these, you'll quickly notice that they're not much more precise than your finger (unless you have really fat hands).
You're right, I was referring to the A8 core within the two SOCs. However, they both use the same PowerVR SGX 535 and were designed by the same firm (Intrinsity, which was acquired by Apple last year) in collaboration with Samsung. The A4 is slightly smaller, owing its decreased die size to smaller cache and other tweaks. Functionally, they're very similar, much moreso than any other A8-based SOC (TI OMAP, Qualcomm Snapdragon, etc).
1) The same argument was made before dual core made it to consumer PCs. If you build it, they will come.
In any case, waiting on either PC or phone is usually due to some IO task, not heavy CPU usage. By far, the most waiting I'm going to be doing is when web pages are being loaded.
Media playback and games are primarily where users will see the most benefit from dual-core in the foreseeable future. Having a heavy webpage with Flash running smoothly doesn't hurt either.:)
2) Today, chips have very good power-gating. If only one core is being used, only one core is being powered. Also, the power usage increase is logarithmic. For this reason, having a second core doesn't double the TDP of the entire chip.
Also, most of these dual-core chips add a fraction of die space in return for an extra core. The SOCs already only dedicate a minority of space to the ARM core- the rest is taken up by the GPU, Memory, radio, and other misc controllers.
And due to die shrinkages with every generation, many dual-core chips will be drawing less power than their single-core counterparts. Case in point: the 3rd generation Snapdragon with dual-Scorpion cores is claimed (at least by Qualcomm) to use less power than the Snapdragons in current smartphones. Going from 65nm to 45nm (28nm expected by end of 2011!) provides that kind of headroom.
Besides, the biggest user of battery space is usually the screen, then radio (wifi, 3G/4G, bluetooth, etc), then the CPU at a distant third.
Why not? Multi-core was marketed successfully for PCs, what makes smartphones any different? Tech specs are pretty important to the Android crowd. Besides, now that certain devices will have docks that allow them become netbook and HTPC replacements, people will find uses for that extra core.
A4 is not dual core- it's an ARM Cortex A8 core with a PowerVR SGX 535 GPU. It's nearly identical to the Samsung Hummingbird CPUs used in the Galaxy S phones.
The 5th gen iPhone is rumored to have dual core, but it won't be out until at least this summer.
I hate to break it you, but Fusion, Bobcat, and Bulldozer have been in development for quite a long time- all of these projects started when Hector was at the helm. Dirk can hardly be credited with these product releases, other than keeping AMD afloat long enough to allow these products see the light of day.
Intel has also promised OpenCL support on Sandy Bridge and later integrated GPUs. Not to mention S3 and VIA support.
I predict that Cuda will quickly become irrelevant and die a long, slow death (ie- just legacy support, no new features). Much like Cg did, after GLSL and HLSL matured. No one wants to be stuck on a single hardware platform, despite performance advantages.
I'll agree with this. AMD's been seeing some triumphs lately- their graphics division has been very successful, even despite a minor delay with the Radeon HD6900 GPU. Nvidia might have the performance crown this generation, but their previous generation has been shaky and their 40nm chips haven't been as available as AMD's, allowing AMD to gain considerable marketshare.
I've noticed a few netbooks with AMD Bobcat cores appear at CES, and has enough performance and power efficiency to give both Atom and Ion some serious competition.
While Llano doesn't appeal to me personally, it's nice to see Fusion reaching the desktop shortly. I'm also anxious to see how the Bulldozer will perform once it's released in a few months.
With the delay of Intel's Ivy Bridge into 2012, AMD has a lot of potential to make this year a profitable one.
Re:The ridiculous problem is...
on
PS3 Root Key Found
·
· Score: 3, Informative
In a utopian future, people would pay the actual cost of manufacturing the console - plus a reasonable profit margin. Anyone could write games - and the cost of them would be reduced because they wouldn't have to pay the "Sony Tax" on each one. For people who'll own very few games over the life of the console, this is not so attractive - but for people who buy more than the average number of games, it's a huge win. But at least we're honest about it.
I already live in that future. I have a console hooked to my TV that runs code that doesn't have to be signed by Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, et al. I can also run multiple OSes on it without having to jailbreak it. And I have hundreds* of legally-purchased games to play on it that probably cost me less than what 20 new PS3/360 games would (at $60).
It's called an HTPC. It pretty much does everything a PS3/360 does better (including blu-ray playback). Not to mention backwards-compatibility with at least a dozen of older consoles via emulators. I still have my PS3, but primarily for GT5 and not much else.
*My Steam account alone has 300+ titles. Mostly bought through holiday sale packs at a huge discount. I've probably played less than half so far, but I'm still discovering games that I bought more than a year ago.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have access, look at it over the last 6-7 years, it is brutal. Make sure you get installed rather than sales, MS keeps commissioning reports that somehow manage to not count Google, Facebook, Baidu, Tencent etc etc's servers. Not sure why though. :)
I can name a few possible scenarios, and I'll let you decide:
BTW x86 32-bit doesn't run on x86_64 either. The software and chips have emulation routines that allow it to happen. The same as happens with A64 that allows old A32 and T32 instructions to still run on the same chip.
Disregarding built-in microcode that converts CISC instructions into simpler RISC-like operations, this statement is not accurate. All x86-64 processors have the same native 32-bit registers and instructions that the original 386 had (some may be deprecated, but IIRC there is 100% compatibility). No hardware emulation is being done.
You may be confusing the virtual memory translation scheme (Wow64) that Windows uses to run 32-bit processes in Windows x64. Yes, there is some slight overhead, but it isn't considered to be emulation.
No kidding. The one-line quips were usually top-rated for as long as I can remember, provided they were relevant and early. RTFA was never mandatory, however.
A free market presumes competition, and it presumes regulation against perverse incentives. Neither are the case here... That strongly implies that they have no leg to stand on when they argue 'free markets' to bypass regulations being imposed on their networks.
I think you're restating what parent wrote (only in more detail):
Make the market free so there is someplace else to go
I believe we're all in agreement that cable companies clamoring for "free market" are hypocrites, as there has never really been a free market for communication service providers, and it's amusing (yet sad, since it's often effective) to see the rent seekers that cry "free market" and "deregulation" only when it benefits them. Govt-subsidized and sanctioned monopolies and duopolies aren't capitalism, and neither is the collusion that results when the barrier to entry is so large due to these monopolies.
If they really want a "free market" and "deregulation", then they shouldn't be opposed to more open (unlicensed) spectrum, rather than allowing the FCC to auction frequency blocks off to the highest bidder. They also shouldn't ask for public handouts to "build rural infrastructure" and then completely renege on their contractual obligations through legal loopholes and shell games.
Personally, I don't like auto_ptr and would avoid the smart pointers. They are really cool in trivial applications but it is as easy to screw up mem management with auto_ptr as it is with naked pointers in more complicated situations (IMO YMMV).
I was with you until this. Having worked on large C++ with and without smart pointers and seeing the differences between the memory leaks firsthand has made me a believer in using smart pointers.
There are shortcomings of the commonly taught RAII approach when handling raw pointers, mostly having to do with ambiguity of pointer ownership. Maybe not the auto_ptr itself (which has now been made deprecated in favor of unique_ptr due to having stricter move/copy semantics), but the smart pointers in Boost and C++11 are very strict about who owns the data in question. There are other things smart pointers can fix (such as automatic cleanups/refcount decrements with stack unwinding, which addresses leaks caused by unexpected thrown exceptions).
Hell, simply having a ref-counted pointer that handles its own cleanup is a great way to ease developers who only have previous experience with garbage-collected languages into C++ development without introducing a ton of memory leaks or dangling pointers everywhere- not an ideal solution, but this crutch has saved us from many potential horrors introduced by senior developers who have only used C# or Java previously (yes, this is quite common today).
The ! negates the = that came after it. Duh. ;)
I would argue that sharing cache between CPU and GPU is not necessarily ideal. Also, keep in mind that GPUs and CPUs use memory very differently; CPUs prefer low latency, GPUs prefer raw bandwidth- this is why Llano's graphics performance is very sensitive to the clockspeed of the memory you're using.
Don't you mean a hypothesis?
MIDI is very limited. MIDI was set up 30 years ago as a communication interface, and by today's standards it's a poor one- you're limited to one note per millisecond. IIRC, you are also limited to 16 channels, so composing scores for an entire orchestra is out of the question.
To top it all off, it wasn't meant for music notation. Symbols like Accelerandos, Ritardandos are notably absent- changes to tempos are hardcoded. Many other symbols are absent as well. Sometimes notes need to be formatted in a special way (ie- for readability, or left/right hand on piano).
Anyone who has ever composed in Finale, Sibelius, etc and tried to export to midi will notice the limitations right away. Why, what's your beef with XML anyway?
Please don't confuse capitalism with corporatism. The very fact that the Government would dictate or allow someone else to dictate what someone can and cannot do with his/her own property goes against one of the basic tenets of free-market capitalism. In a true capitalist system, Sony wouldn't be able to take legal action against modchip manufacturers.
"Intellectual property" is another concept that is falsely attributed to capitalism. The government should never enforce monopolies, especially over ideas.
I don't know if you're being sarcastic, but in case you aren't...
Some Motorola Android phones have MotoBlur, which require a MotoBlur account (it does its own cloud syncing). My Atrix, unfortunately, is one of those phones.
I believe the Motorola Droid phones (Droid, Droid 2, Droid X) on Verizon don't have MotoBlur, and thus don't require a Motorola account.
This kind of thing pisses me off. After having knee replacement a few years ago, I was hobbling around on crutches for a month- and shopping with a regular cart was a pain in the ass. There were times when I went to the grocery store and the "mobility carts" were all taken up by fatasses who could really use the exercise.
I've always wanted to tell them off, "Hey tubby, laziness and lack of self-control isn't a disability!"
I can't imagine how people with permanent disabilities would feel in that situation.
No joke.
That's why there are "no gays" in Iran, as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad joked about on a previous US visit. Known homosexuals are either forced to have gender reassignment surgery, or risk jail or execution. It mirrors the way western countries forced gays to undergo chemical castration as recent as 50 years ago (like what happened to Turing), but it's terrible that this kind of thing still happens today.
A capacitive stylus is more like writing with a crayon than a pencil. If you look at these, you'll quickly notice that they're not much more precise than your finger (unless you have really fat hands).
Now be serious... there's only 535 seats in Congress. That's hardly enough to put a dent in other criminal enterprises.
Considering that Android users use more data, it's a safe bet that Verizon's network can handle the load.
You're right, I was referring to the A8 core within the two SOCs. However, they both use the same PowerVR SGX 535 and were designed by the same firm (Intrinsity, which was acquired by Apple last year) in collaboration with Samsung. The A4 is slightly smaller, owing its decreased die size to smaller cache and other tweaks. Functionally, they're very similar, much moreso than any other A8-based SOC (TI OMAP, Qualcomm Snapdragon, etc).
1) The same argument was made before dual core made it to consumer PCs. If you build it, they will come.
:)
In any case, waiting on either PC or phone is usually due to some IO task, not heavy CPU usage. By far, the most waiting I'm going to be doing is when web pages are being loaded.
Media playback and games are primarily where users will see the most benefit from dual-core in the foreseeable future. Having a heavy webpage with Flash running smoothly doesn't hurt either.
2) Today, chips have very good power-gating. If only one core is being used, only one core is being powered. Also, the power usage increase is logarithmic. For this reason, having a second core doesn't double the TDP of the entire chip.
Also, most of these dual-core chips add a fraction of die space in return for an extra core. The SOCs already only dedicate a minority of space to the ARM core- the rest is taken up by the GPU, Memory, radio, and other misc controllers.
And due to die shrinkages with every generation, many dual-core chips will be drawing less power than their single-core counterparts. Case in point: the 3rd generation Snapdragon with dual-Scorpion cores is claimed (at least by Qualcomm) to use less power than the Snapdragons in current smartphones. Going from 65nm to 45nm (28nm expected by end of 2011!) provides that kind of headroom.
Besides, the biggest user of battery space is usually the screen, then radio (wifi, 3G/4G, bluetooth, etc), then the CPU at a distant third.
Double core- Double battery usage? Right, whatever.
Why not? Multi-core was marketed successfully for PCs, what makes smartphones any different? Tech specs are pretty important to the Android crowd. Besides, now that certain devices will have docks that allow them become netbook and HTPC replacements, people will find uses for that extra core.
A4 is not dual core- it's an ARM Cortex A8 core with a PowerVR SGX 535 GPU. It's nearly identical to the Samsung Hummingbird CPUs used in the Galaxy S phones.
The 5th gen iPhone is rumored to have dual core, but it won't be out until at least this summer.
I hate to break it you, but Fusion, Bobcat, and Bulldozer have been in development for quite a long time- all of these projects started when Hector was at the helm. Dirk can hardly be credited with these product releases, other than keeping AMD afloat long enough to allow these products see the light of day.
Intel has also promised OpenCL support on Sandy Bridge and later integrated GPUs. Not to mention S3 and VIA support.
I predict that Cuda will quickly become irrelevant and die a long, slow death (ie- just legacy support, no new features). Much like Cg did, after GLSL and HLSL matured. No one wants to be stuck on a single hardware platform, despite performance advantages.
I'll agree with this. AMD's been seeing some triumphs lately- their graphics division has been very successful, even despite a minor delay with the Radeon HD6900 GPU. Nvidia might have the performance crown this generation, but their previous generation has been shaky and their 40nm chips haven't been as available as AMD's, allowing AMD to gain considerable marketshare.
I've noticed a few netbooks with AMD Bobcat cores appear at CES, and has enough performance and power efficiency to give both Atom and Ion some serious competition.
While Llano doesn't appeal to me personally, it's nice to see Fusion reaching the desktop shortly. I'm also anxious to see how the Bulldozer will perform once it's released in a few months.
With the delay of Intel's Ivy Bridge into 2012, AMD has a lot of potential to make this year a profitable one.
In a utopian future, people would pay the actual cost of manufacturing the console - plus a reasonable profit margin. Anyone could write games - and the cost of them would be reduced because they wouldn't have to pay the "Sony Tax" on each one. For people who'll own very few games over the life of the console, this is not so attractive - but for people who buy more than the average number of games, it's a huge win. But at least we're honest about it.
I already live in that future. I have a console hooked to my TV that runs code that doesn't have to be signed by Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, et al. I can also run multiple OSes on it without having to jailbreak it. And I have hundreds* of legally-purchased games to play on it that probably cost me less than what 20 new PS3/360 games would (at $60).
It's called an HTPC. It pretty much does everything a PS3/360 does better (including blu-ray playback). Not to mention backwards-compatibility with at least a dozen of older consoles via emulators. I still have my PS3, but primarily for GT5 and not much else.
*My Steam account alone has 300+ titles. Mostly bought through holiday sale packs at a huge discount. I've probably played less than half so far, but I'm still discovering games that I bought more than a year ago.
Are you sure? Both my debit and credit cards are Visa, and haven't had a problem so far.