You heard it here first, a company with $311 million in revenues and 600+ employees "doesn't have the scale" to do a tweaked interface for their primary product.
Don't get me wrong, I loathe Metro, and I fully agree with their assertion that not enough users are adopting Metro to make it worth it... but saying they don't have the scale is silly.
Note: I realize that TFA actually says the scale of their competitors is the reason, but I think the summary's "don't have the scale" is analogous.
All the existing USB connectors are about to be replaced too. Type A, type B, micro, mini, full sized; they are all being superseded by the new type C.
The USB IF hasn't showed any pictures or diagrams yet, but their design goals are that it be similar in size to micro, be reversible (like a Lightning connector), use the same connector on both ends (solving the printer problem, but with type A to C cables used for backwards compatibility), support USB 3.1 (with extra pins for forwards compatibility), and support the charging standards (which allow devices to say how much power they want, and get large amounts of power for charge-only situations).
Basically, it tries to address all the problems with the existing USB ecosystem, all the reasons why a company like Apple might make their own connector.
Considering that Microsoft charges money for Android (anybody using Android has to pay Microsoft for patents), can they really get away with giving away Windows Phone for free?
The problem with Jaguar is that it suffers from extremely poor performance per watt when compared to Haswell. That may not be an issue for all use cases though.
I am having difficulty finding any AMD-based mini PCs in the NUC-style form factor with RAM/wifi/storage included for $179, though. Could you point some out?
The problem there is that while the entry-level Asus chromebox is $179, including the RAM, SSD, CPU, wifi, etc... the cheapest NUCs are $190-200 before you add the RAM, the SSD, and the wifi card.
So the only reason for dealers to exist is to replicate the functions of an auto parts store and UPS? And that's why Tesla can't sell cars to people? That's absurd.
My buddy had to get his '95 Honda Accord repaired recently. The process for that (admittedly in Canada) was, take car to mechanic, mechanic orders parts online, parts are shipped to mechanic, mechanic installs parts. What exactly is the huge problem with that process that justifies making selling cars illegal?
Firefox OS doesn't run on phones with 128MB either, and Android launched on less RAM than Firefox OS requires. Nothing says a low-end device has to use the full stock Google experience; you can target the OS for lower memory devices.
The entire premise of this article seems to revolve around the unsubstantiated claim that Android is poorly optimized for low-end devices. I disagree with that claim, so the entire premise of the article seems suspect to me.
I feel bad for the guy. Even though I'm Canadian, this seems like the kind of thing you should sue over (publishing all your private info on the cover story of newsweek when the entire premise of the article is false). Does he have any grounds to sue Newsweek or the reporter who stalked and exposed him?
2.4ghz is still usable with 16 networks in the same area, but it's not a great experience. There are only three non-overlapping bands in the 2.4 GHz band, so you can see how there can be a rather lot of congestion.
The 5.8 GHz band, on the other hand, wouldn't have nearly as much of an issue. 802.11n in the 5.8GHz band devices can use 8 non-overlapping channels, significantly reducing the amount of interference.
802.11ac is kind of in a wierd spot. It's really 40MHz per channel minimum (twice the minimum for 802.11g or 802.11n), but many devices also support a whole whack of new frequencies that require the use of DFS to avoid interfering with radar (basically if the router detects radar on the channel, it blacklists the channel for a set amount of time and switches to another channel). That brings the total up to a possible 12 channels, even though they're twice as wide...
802.11ac also supports beam forming, which enables multiple simultaneous transmissions to happen on the same frequency at the same time without interfering. I believe that's more targeted at handling more users on a single network rather than letting multiple networks co-exist, though.
I don't see what javascript and computer upgrades have to do with PNG. Heck, the point of Opera's stuff was to run on lower-end devices. It was intended for use on mobile originally. And it still supports javascript.
There are plenty of services like Opera Turbo that will recompress all images as smaller lossy images. Why should all users get a degraded experience when those on slow connections have options to automatically recompress images to be better suited for their connections?
There are services (Opera's work quite well, Google has one too) that will re-compress any images to lower quality lossy formats and into a single response to avoid round-trips. I don't think big image files are really the main problem for people still on dialup.
Since I started looking at web pages with JPEG images, the speed of my internet connection has increased by roughly 345,000%, the size of my hard disk by 200,000%. Why is a 300% increase in image size a concern?
The study you've linked to does not support your claims.
Only two out of the 15 SSD in their test suffered from serious issues. One unit suffered from an SSD metadata issue that effectively prevented access to about 30% of the data on it, and another failed entirely, after having been subjected to 136 power failures in rapid succession.
Only two HDDs were included in the test, and were subject to a much smaller of power failures. HDD #1 was subjected to only a single power failure (after which it corrupted a write), and HDD #2 was subject to only 24 power failures. How anyone could claim that this is evidence that HDDs are more reliable than SSDs is beyond me. Even the authors of the study don't claim that their results show HDDs to be more reliable than SSDs, they only claim that enterprise HDDs are more reliable than budget HDDs.
Furthermore, none of the drives were recent, with most being from 2011, and one being as old as from 2009. It's difficult to draw any conclusions on the current SSDs on the market based on testing results on drives from three to five years ago. There has been enormous technological progress in the SSD market over that timespan.
It's also worth pointing out that newer filesystems are more resilient to many of the faults noted in that paper, especially when redundancy is included. Linux has ZFS, and Windows has ReFS. Both support copy-on-write and block checksums, which go a long way to surviving the sort of issues that both SSDs and HDDs suffer from on power failure.
Using a system with a UPS or built-in battery does not completely protect you from unexpected power loss, but I don't think that it's happened to me more than once in the past few years. It certainly has never happened to me 136 times in a row at 8-second intervals.
That's a bit out of date (May 2013), but it includes the previous figures (the "contre" is from November 2012). I doubt they've changed too dramatically since then. I think it's fair to say that Intel and Samsung have similar rates, if nothing else, so Intel's huge price premium is hard to justify.
Power failure protection is nice, but I don't have any computers that don't have some form of battery backup, be it a UPS or a built-in battery, and some of the SSDs aren't even in use cases where that would matter (who cares if a ZFS cache drive gets scrambled on power failure, it gets reinitialized every boot). So considering that I'd need to suffer a UPS or PSU failure to have the SSD suffer from a power cut, and that the chances of an SSD scrambling its own management data on a power failure is fairly small (user data isn't relevant because the same thing happens to HDDs, and filesystems expect this scenario), it's not really a scenario that I worry about.
Don't get me wrong, I own five discrete SSDs (all currently in active use), and they're all Intel (one G1, two G2s, and two 330s). However, I've been disappointed with Intel of late. It used to be that they came with a premium price, but also dramatically lower failure rates than the competition, and you could usually find them cheaper than the competition if you waited for the right sale.
These days, however, Samsung's failure rates are lower than Intel's, and their price premium is so large that no sale is going to get their larger SSDs anywhere near as cheap as Samsung's. I was hoping that they might make a comeback with a new consumer model, but the 730 is a disappointment in terms of its extremely poor performance-per-dollar and capacity-per-dollar.
I've bought nothing but Intel in the past, because they were the safe bet, but at this point it looks like my next SSD will be from Samsung.
That's exactly what I meant, yeah. Before Challenger, NASA claimed the chance of a major disaster was about 1 in 100,000. But when Feynman interviewed many NASA engineers, he got estimates between 1 in 50 and 1 in 200. To him, this indicated that there was a complete breakdown of communication between NASA's administrators and NASA's engineers. In reality, the actual disaster rate of the space shuttle was 1 in 67.5.
Notably, Feynman had no problems at all with high rates of risk: he felt that high risk was acceptable if it was properly understood and communicated. What he objected to was that NASA used the 1 in 100,000 figure to convince civilians to fly on the shuttle for their own PR goals when this was clearly a number invented by PR people rather than the engineers who might actually be able to come up with a reasonable risk assessment.
Columbia had enough consumables on board for a 30-day stay (the carbon dioxide scrubbers being the limiting factor, not food or water or oxygen). Had "launch on need" rescue missions been in the offing before the Columbia disaster, that the rescue wouldn't have HAD to be a rush, because it was a mission planned in parallel to the main one. Most launch-on-need missions (STS-3xx) were planned to launch 45 days after activation, but only because all but one shuttle mission after Columbia went to the ISS, meaning there was no urgent speed requirement. STS-125 went to repair hubble, however, so its rescue mission (STS-400) was planned to launch after only 7 days. Again, not a rush, because it was all planned and prepared in advance; STS-400 was on the launch pad before STS-125 even launched, one of the rare times that two shuttles have been out simultaneously:
Sorry, you don't get to call out the parent poster when you say something like this:
How many times had there been foam strikes with no damage?
That was the bloody root cause of the Challenger disaster. Something happens that indicates a design flaw that isn't supposed to happen, but since it doesn't cause a catastrophic failure, it's redefined as normal and safe. That's absurd.
Depends on the charge level. If you're going for maximum distance with minimum charging, you're not charging to 100% each time anyhow; the batteries charge slower the closer they are to full, so you'd probably charge to about 85% or something each time to maximize charge speed. 30 minutes gets you 170 miles of range at full speed.
Battery swaps address that, but they've been very much a paper launch. Tesla did a live demonstration during a press conference, but has not deployed any battery swapping stations in the wild, nor have they said anything about when that might happen.
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You heard it here first, a company with $311 million in revenues and 600+ employees "doesn't have the scale" to do a tweaked interface for their primary product.
Don't get me wrong, I loathe Metro, and I fully agree with their assertion that not enough users are adopting Metro to make it worth it... but saying they don't have the scale is silly.
Note: I realize that TFA actually says the scale of their competitors is the reason, but I think the summary's "don't have the scale" is analogous.
All the existing USB connectors are about to be replaced too. Type A, type B, micro, mini, full sized; they are all being superseded by the new type C.
The USB IF hasn't showed any pictures or diagrams yet, but their design goals are that it be similar in size to micro, be reversible (like a Lightning connector), use the same connector on both ends (solving the printer problem, but with type A to C cables used for backwards compatibility), support USB 3.1 (with extra pins for forwards compatibility), and support the charging standards (which allow devices to say how much power they want, and get large amounts of power for charge-only situations).
Basically, it tries to address all the problems with the existing USB ecosystem, all the reasons why a company like Apple might make their own connector.
That does get you down to the same price, but the CPU is going to be something like half the performance of the one found in the ChromeBox...
I'd argue that between NaCL and modern Javascript engines (what with Mozilla showing off UE4 running at 60FPS+), ChromeOS isn't a thin client.
Considering that Microsoft charges money for Android (anybody using Android has to pay Microsoft for patents), can they really get away with giving away Windows Phone for free?
The problem with Jaguar is that it suffers from extremely poor performance per watt when compared to Haswell. That may not be an issue for all use cases though.
I am having difficulty finding any AMD-based mini PCs in the NUC-style form factor with RAM/wifi/storage included for $179, though. Could you point some out?
The problem there is that while the entry-level Asus chromebox is $179, including the RAM, SSD, CPU, wifi, etc... the cheapest NUCs are $190-200 before you add the RAM, the SSD, and the wifi card.
So the only reason for dealers to exist is to replicate the functions of an auto parts store and UPS? And that's why Tesla can't sell cars to people? That's absurd.
My buddy had to get his '95 Honda Accord repaired recently. The process for that (admittedly in Canada) was, take car to mechanic, mechanic orders parts online, parts are shipped to mechanic, mechanic installs parts. What exactly is the huge problem with that process that justifies making selling cars illegal?
The NASA letter states clearly that fuel sold at government-owned civil airports is not taxable. There are no back taxes owed.
Firefox OS doesn't run on phones with 128MB either, and Android launched on less RAM than Firefox OS requires. Nothing says a low-end device has to use the full stock Google experience; you can target the OS for lower memory devices.
The entire premise of this article seems to revolve around the unsubstantiated claim that Android is poorly optimized for low-end devices. I disagree with that claim, so the entire premise of the article seems suspect to me.
I feel bad for the guy. Even though I'm Canadian, this seems like the kind of thing you should sue over (publishing all your private info on the cover story of newsweek when the entire premise of the article is false). Does he have any grounds to sue Newsweek or the reporter who stalked and exposed him?
2.4ghz is still usable with 16 networks in the same area, but it's not a great experience. There are only three non-overlapping bands in the 2.4 GHz band, so you can see how there can be a rather lot of congestion.
The 5.8 GHz band, on the other hand, wouldn't have nearly as much of an issue. 802.11n in the 5.8GHz band devices can use 8 non-overlapping channels, significantly reducing the amount of interference.
802.11ac is kind of in a wierd spot. It's really 40MHz per channel minimum (twice the minimum for 802.11g or 802.11n), but many devices also support a whole whack of new frequencies that require the use of DFS to avoid interfering with radar (basically if the router detects radar on the channel, it blacklists the channel for a set amount of time and switches to another channel). That brings the total up to a possible 12 channels, even though they're twice as wide...
802.11ac also supports beam forming, which enables multiple simultaneous transmissions to happen on the same frequency at the same time without interfering. I believe that's more targeted at handling more users on a single network rather than letting multiple networks co-exist, though.
I don't see what javascript and computer upgrades have to do with PNG. Heck, the point of Opera's stuff was to run on lower-end devices. It was intended for use on mobile originally. And it still supports javascript.
There are plenty of services like Opera Turbo that will recompress all images as smaller lossy images. Why should all users get a degraded experience when those on slow connections have options to automatically recompress images to be better suited for their connections?
There are services (Opera's work quite well, Google has one too) that will re-compress any images to lower quality lossy formats and into a single response to avoid round-trips. I don't think big image files are really the main problem for people still on dialup.
Since I started looking at web pages with JPEG images, the speed of my internet connection has increased by roughly 345,000%, the size of my hard disk by 200,000%. Why is a 300% increase in image size a concern?
The study you've linked to does not support your claims.
Only two out of the 15 SSD in their test suffered from serious issues. One unit suffered from an SSD metadata issue that effectively prevented access to about 30% of the data on it, and another failed entirely, after having been subjected to 136 power failures in rapid succession.
Only two HDDs were included in the test, and were subject to a much smaller of power failures. HDD #1 was subjected to only a single power failure (after which it corrupted a write), and HDD #2 was subject to only 24 power failures. How anyone could claim that this is evidence that HDDs are more reliable than SSDs is beyond me. Even the authors of the study don't claim that their results show HDDs to be more reliable than SSDs, they only claim that enterprise HDDs are more reliable than budget HDDs.
Furthermore, none of the drives were recent, with most being from 2011, and one being as old as from 2009. It's difficult to draw any conclusions on the current SSDs on the market based on testing results on drives from three to five years ago. There has been enormous technological progress in the SSD market over that timespan.
It's also worth pointing out that newer filesystems are more resilient to many of the faults noted in that paper, especially when redundancy is included. Linux has ZFS, and Windows has ReFS. Both support copy-on-write and block checksums, which go a long way to surviving the sort of issues that both SSDs and HDDs suffer from on power failure.
Using a system with a UPS or built-in battery does not completely protect you from unexpected power loss, but I don't think that it's happened to me more than once in the past few years. It certainly has never happened to me 136 times in a row at 8-second intervals.
French retail return rates:
http://www.hardware.fr/article...
That's a bit out of date (May 2013), but it includes the previous figures (the "contre" is from November 2012). I doubt they've changed too dramatically since then. I think it's fair to say that Intel and Samsung have similar rates, if nothing else, so Intel's huge price premium is hard to justify.
Power failure protection is nice, but I don't have any computers that don't have some form of battery backup, be it a UPS or a built-in battery, and some of the SSDs aren't even in use cases where that would matter (who cares if a ZFS cache drive gets scrambled on power failure, it gets reinitialized every boot). So considering that I'd need to suffer a UPS or PSU failure to have the SSD suffer from a power cut, and that the chances of an SSD scrambling its own management data on a power failure is fairly small (user data isn't relevant because the same thing happens to HDDs, and filesystems expect this scenario), it's not really a scenario that I worry about.
Don't get me wrong, I own five discrete SSDs (all currently in active use), and they're all Intel (one G1, two G2s, and two 330s). However, I've been disappointed with Intel of late. It used to be that they came with a premium price, but also dramatically lower failure rates than the competition, and you could usually find them cheaper than the competition if you waited for the right sale.
These days, however, Samsung's failure rates are lower than Intel's, and their price premium is so large that no sale is going to get their larger SSDs anywhere near as cheap as Samsung's. I was hoping that they might make a comeback with a new consumer model, but the 730 is a disappointment in terms of its extremely poor performance-per-dollar and capacity-per-dollar.
I've bought nothing but Intel in the past, because they were the safe bet, but at this point it looks like my next SSD will be from Samsung.
That's exactly what I meant, yeah. Before Challenger, NASA claimed the chance of a major disaster was about 1 in 100,000. But when Feynman interviewed many NASA engineers, he got estimates between 1 in 50 and 1 in 200. To him, this indicated that there was a complete breakdown of communication between NASA's administrators and NASA's engineers. In reality, the actual disaster rate of the space shuttle was 1 in 67.5.
Notably, Feynman had no problems at all with high rates of risk: he felt that high risk was acceptable if it was properly understood and communicated. What he objected to was that NASA used the 1 in 100,000 figure to convince civilians to fly on the shuttle for their own PR goals when this was clearly a number invented by PR people rather than the engineers who might actually be able to come up with a reasonable risk assessment.
Columbia had enough consumables on board for a 30-day stay (the carbon dioxide scrubbers being the limiting factor, not food or water or oxygen). Had "launch on need" rescue missions been in the offing before the Columbia disaster, that the rescue wouldn't have HAD to be a rush, because it was a mission planned in parallel to the main one. Most launch-on-need missions (STS-3xx) were planned to launch 45 days after activation, but only because all but one shuttle mission after Columbia went to the ISS, meaning there was no urgent speed requirement. STS-125 went to repair hubble, however, so its rescue mission (STS-400) was planned to launch after only 7 days. Again, not a rush, because it was all planned and prepared in advance; STS-400 was on the launch pad before STS-125 even launched, one of the rare times that two shuttles have been out simultaneously:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Although if memory serves things got re-ordered and they took one of them back to the VAB at some point.
Sorry, you don't get to call out the parent poster when you say something like this:
How many times had there been foam strikes with no damage?
That was the bloody root cause of the Challenger disaster. Something happens that indicates a design flaw that isn't supposed to happen, but since it doesn't cause a catastrophic failure, it's redefined as normal and safe. That's absurd.
It's acceptable because Tesla is building out the infrastructure with their own money. If somebody else paid for it, then it'd be a different story.
MtGox is dead (or down), so their rate is irrelevant. All the other exchanges are still trading at a little bit over $500. That's not down by 92%.
Depends on the charge level. If you're going for maximum distance with minimum charging, you're not charging to 100% each time anyhow; the batteries charge slower the closer they are to full, so you'd probably charge to about 85% or something each time to maximize charge speed. 30 minutes gets you 170 miles of range at full speed.
Battery swaps address that, but they've been very much a paper launch. Tesla did a live demonstration during a press conference, but has not deployed any battery swapping stations in the wild, nor have they said anything about when that might happen.