Mario RPG? They claim Paper Mario was the spiritual successor, but having played both, that's like saying that System Shock 2 was the spiritual successor to Chrono Trigger...
I mean, "Side scrolling Mario game with some RPG elements" doesn't mean make it even remotely similar to what was in effect "Final Fantasy: Mario".
Intel *is* a foundry. They make chips for third parties. They have a whole "Intel Custom Foundry" division dedicated to this. They make chips for Cisco, Netronome, Altera, etc. Some of those chips even have ARM processors.
There's a lot of misinformation in these comments...
1) Intel does have a foundry business. They will make chips for third parties. They call this "Intel Custom Foundry", and they've already got clients using ARM chips (Netronome for example).
2) Apple is a huge potential customer, to the extent that Intel doesn't currently have enough foundry capacity to make both their own chips and Apple's chips (Apple sells almost as many iOS devices as Intel does chips). Getting the contract to make Apple's SoCs would be a huge win.
You can bet that Intel would rather that THEY were manufacturing Apple's ARM chips than TSMC.
I don't think it was only DRM. At the time they chose Silverlight (five years ago), Flash's video streaming support wasn't nearly as robust; it didn't support seamless bitrate changes at the time, for example.
I haven't kept up on things, so it's possible that Flash's video streaming support is as robust as Silverlight today, but it wasn't back then.
Not sure how a single 2560x1080 21:9 display is better than my current 2560x1440 16:9 display. If I wanted more pixels, I could get a second monitor, and if that was too wide, you could do two 2560x1600 rotated on their sides.
The wattage is by itself meaningless. How much power is produced varies wildly based on the duration and intensity of the sunlight, which varies by geographic location and local weather patterns.
Measuring it in watt hours, on the other hand, is a practical measurement, since it's both how power is actually paid for, and gives you an idea of the real output of the system.
For example, TFA indicates this is an 18 megawatt installation, but the 43.5 "million kilo" watt hours (or 43.5 gigawatt hours if you don't use bullshit units) indicates an average of a bit under 5 megawatts.
Start8 (boot-to-desktop, Win7 start menu, remove hotspots) slapped on top of Win8 solves most of my complaints about Win8, and ModernMix makes Metro apps (like Metro Netflix, since it can view SuperHD content) helps with Metro-only apps.
Start8 already has a beta out for Win8.1, to account for the fact that there is now a built-in boot-to-desktop, and that there is a system start button that needs to be removed before the fake one can be added. I'll undoubtedly get Win8.1 to get the improvements, and let Stardock fix the major annoyances for me.
Is there actually any capacity crunch on the physical fiber itself that makes it worth replacing? My understanding is that existing DWDM hardware can pump multiple terabits per second through a single fiber strand, and that the reason pumping a terabit through fiber requires multiple transceivers is simply because the electronics can't drive data rates, not because of any limitation of the fiber...
It seems that OAM would have the same problem; you still need electronics that don't exist if you want to push that much data through any single medium, and we're not even remotely close to the limits of regular fiber, so does OAM actually enable anything?
I agree with you that the patent is being intentionally broad (and as such is going to hit prior art), but your examples seem a bit different. Gluing multiple connectors together (the RJ11/power example) or using a single connector with pins in different locations (ethernet/CF) is not quite the same as a port that can accept multiple physically different and otherwise unrelated connectors in the same socket.
DisplayPort, for example, can act as a single-link DVI port. With a passive adapter, the DP host sends DVI signals out over the pins, repurposing them (it can't do dual-link DVI because there aren't enough pins). But that's not the same as if somebody somehow designed a port that you could plug a DVI and DisplayPort connector to directly. I don't think such a thing would be possible (the ports are too different in size), but you get the idea.
The patent specifically states that USB/SD is just an example and that the patent should apply to the same technique being used for other multi-plug sockets. Such sockets pre-date the patent. I don't need to be an IP lawyer to read plain English.
That's a strange accusation to make considering the patent explicitly states that the USB/SD combo is only an example of the general concept, and that the patent covers any such combination. I specifically point you to paragraph 54 of the actual patent, which directly contradicts everything you just wrote.
The idea might have deserved patent protection; I don't think you can say it's "obvious" to figure out how to cram multiple connectors into a single port and make them work. There's some neat engineering that goes into making that happen. The problem is that somebody else did it first; eSATAp, which combines eSATA and USB in a single port (and can be used as either an eSATA port, a USB port, or with a special connector that combines the two) predates the patent filing by several years, if nothing else.
Right, but the patent was filed in 2011, when the obvious prior art (eSATAp, which combines eSATA and USB ports in a seemingly identical fashion to that described in the patent) has been around since 2008.
There's nothing wrong with what Apple wants to do with ports. In fact, I think it's a great way to expand connectivity on laptops with minimal space for ports. I've got a Macbook Air that would benefit greatly from this. But there's no justification for trying to patent an idea that has been shipping in laptops for years prior.
That's all well and good for the Model S today, but what about a few years down the road when Tesla is trying to introduce their $30-40k mid-priced version and the same dealership rules are in effect?
That option seems to basically be at the discretion of the system vendor. Perhaps it is available in newer drivers than I managed to get installed (it's a Dell notebook). I do know, though, that even when you tell it to default to discrete, it still runs some stuff on the iGPU. Enduro ultimately runs everything through the iGPU (framebuffer copies), so you need the Intel driver, and at the bare minimum the Intel drivers and control panel need to be run on the iGPU. It's unfortunately not possible to just run exclusively with the discrete chip.
Which is really what I want, because for this laptop's intended purpose, it will never be on battery power except excepting a few seconds here or there.
I got a new business laptop recently. My last experience with discrete graphics in a laptop predates switchable graphics, so I presumed that by now, everything would "just work". Boy does it ever not. Something as simple as installing a driver update can precipitate hours of re-installing the various drivers (both Intel and AMD graphics drivers) in different order hoping to get them both working again. Turns out the solution is to wipe out every trace of graphic driver and then install everything in a very particular set of steps, and even when everything is working, it's impossible to just say "run everything on the discrete GPU". You'll never be quite sure whether any given app is running on the iGPU or dGPU, and there are some apps that it would seem just don't want to run on the dGPU, or others that WILL run on the dGPU but will report that they're running on the iGPU (surely that's going to cause issues, if they think they're running on a different platform than they actually are)?
I don't remember the exact article, but one of the Anandtech reviewers had the exact same problems trying to work with Enduro on a laptop he was trying to review; he reported on his frustration, and how even when you follow the correct steps precisely, you must endure long install processes and multiple reboots.
It has same performance as the GTX 670, at the same TDP as a GTX 670, with the same board/shape/etc as the GTX 670, at a price that is $100 cheaper. It doesn't matter what it's based on.
AMD powered two of the three consoles this past generation (Wii and 360), the drivers are still terrible (getting Enduro drivers working on Windows is a nightmare). Why would adding one more console change anything?
How about banning the auto dealer laws that some states use to block competition, which are preventing electric car manufacturers like Tesla from becoming more popular?
Moving to electric cars is not THE answer to climate change problems, but it's a part of it, and getting rid of such ridiculous restrictions is a pretty low-hanging-fruit thing to do.
Six cars would be 720 kW with the new superchargers, actually:)
I'm not sure the demand would be all that unpredictable, though, and there are a rather large number of power plants in each NERC interconnect to pick up suerges in demand. Quebec's interconnect (yeah, we have our own, like Texas) is effectively entirely served by a power generation system that can ramp up/down rapidly (hydro) too. On top of that, there's currently a project under construction to connect three of the biggest North American power grids, the Eastern (eastern US and Canada excluding Quebec), western (Western US and Canada excluding Alaska) and Texas interconnects, and that'll start as a 5 gigawatt node, scaling up to 30GW. Using superconducting powerlines, no less.
Anyhow, maybe I'm biased because I come from a place where power is extremely plentiful and cheap to the extent that electrical heating is the overwhelmingly dominant form of heating, but I'm really not convinced that electric cars are going to be a major issue to the grid.
Yes, you need variable levels of detail, but again, how is that different from PC? The iOS platforms have a relatively limited set of targets that each update roughly once a year (PCs have an enormous set of potential variables), and you don't have to support them that far back. For the iPhone, it's pointless supporting anything older than the 3GS today, for example, meaning you have only four iOS smartphone targets to worry about, and you can usually get away with just doing a low/med/high or even low/high. Compare that to PC... One look at Valve's hardware survey should make anybody cringe at the variation there.
Yes, it's true that you've got the iPod, iPad, and Apple TV on top of that, but the iPod usually tracks the iPhone close enough that you can just pretend it's an iPhone. The iPad normally tracks to the iPhone generation that comes after it, but the screen resolution being much higher differentiates it. And the Apple TV is actually really underpowered (single core), and outdated (still on A5), but if they decided to put some focus on that you could see it with hardware closer to the iPod.
So there's a few things to target there, but there's a lot of overlap, and it's still a much simpler situation than the PC, and you don't necessarily need to do more than two or three performance profiles to cover most or all devices...
Nintendo, I agree, they're in one heck of a pickle. I don't really understand why they went the way they did with the WiiU. If there was an award for "least changes made to hardware platform over three consecutive generations", they'd win it. But more to the point, by picking the previous generation of hardware as their performance target, they've pretty much locked themselves out of any potential cross-platform titles with the PS4 and XBone. That won't be as big a deal in the near term, but later on, when people aren't putting out games for the 360 and PS3? They'll have a hard time getting third party support. Last time around, the Wii had a massive install base, and it still had a real hard time getting compelling third party content. It had barely any cross platform titles, and when it did, they were normally dumbed-down versions. The WiiU has the exact same issue, but without the huge install base... First party titles will help, but I think this generation is really going to be a wash for Nintendo on the console front (the 3DS is selling very well).
In terms of hardware costs this coming generation, that's definitely true. Last time, the 360 and PS3 used bleeding-edge hardware that had a significant performance advantage over anything you'd find in a PC. This time around, the 360 and PS4 look to have about half the performance of a modern PC. They've definitely gone for low-cost and low-tdp there. And to be honest that's probably the right decision this time around. We're reaching a point of diminishing returns in CPU and GPU performance, but having a ton of RAM like the new consoles do, that's probably more valuable than more GPU or CPU power would have been.
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Mario RPG? They claim Paper Mario was the spiritual successor, but having played both, that's like saying that System Shock 2 was the spiritual successor to Chrono Trigger...
I mean, "Side scrolling Mario game with some RPG elements" doesn't mean make it even remotely similar to what was in effect "Final Fantasy: Mario".
Intel *is* a foundry. They make chips for third parties. They have a whole "Intel Custom Foundry" division dedicated to this. They make chips for Cisco, Netronome, Altera, etc. Some of those chips even have ARM processors.
There's a lot of misinformation in these comments...
1) Intel does have a foundry business. They will make chips for third parties. They call this "Intel Custom Foundry", and they've already got clients using ARM chips (Netronome for example).
2) Apple is a huge potential customer, to the extent that Intel doesn't currently have enough foundry capacity to make both their own chips and Apple's chips (Apple sells almost as many iOS devices as Intel does chips). Getting the contract to make Apple's SoCs would be a huge win.
You can bet that Intel would rather that THEY were manufacturing Apple's ARM chips than TSMC.
I don't think it was only DRM. At the time they chose Silverlight (five years ago), Flash's video streaming support wasn't nearly as robust; it didn't support seamless bitrate changes at the time, for example.
I haven't kept up on things, so it's possible that Flash's video streaming support is as robust as Silverlight today, but it wasn't back then.
Not sure how a single 2560x1080 21:9 display is better than my current 2560x1440 16:9 display. If I wanted more pixels, I could get a second monitor, and if that was too wide, you could do two 2560x1600 rotated on their sides.
What other choice did they have? Flash? Even HTML5 isn't really ready until more browsers implement the security features required.
The wattage is by itself meaningless. How much power is produced varies wildly based on the duration and intensity of the sunlight, which varies by geographic location and local weather patterns.
Measuring it in watt hours, on the other hand, is a practical measurement, since it's both how power is actually paid for, and gives you an idea of the real output of the system.
For example, TFA indicates this is an 18 megawatt installation, but the 43.5 "million kilo" watt hours (or 43.5 gigawatt hours if you don't use bullshit units) indicates an average of a bit under 5 megawatts.
Start8 (boot-to-desktop, Win7 start menu, remove hotspots) slapped on top of Win8 solves most of my complaints about Win8, and ModernMix makes Metro apps (like Metro Netflix, since it can view SuperHD content) helps with Metro-only apps.
Start8 already has a beta out for Win8.1, to account for the fact that there is now a built-in boot-to-desktop, and that there is a system start button that needs to be removed before the fake one can be added. I'll undoubtedly get Win8.1 to get the improvements, and let Stardock fix the major annoyances for me.
Is there actually any capacity crunch on the physical fiber itself that makes it worth replacing? My understanding is that existing DWDM hardware can pump multiple terabits per second through a single fiber strand, and that the reason pumping a terabit through fiber requires multiple transceivers is simply because the electronics can't drive data rates, not because of any limitation of the fiber...
It seems that OAM would have the same problem; you still need electronics that don't exist if you want to push that much data through any single medium, and we're not even remotely close to the limits of regular fiber, so does OAM actually enable anything?
I agree with you that the patent is being intentionally broad (and as such is going to hit prior art), but your examples seem a bit different. Gluing multiple connectors together (the RJ11/power example) or using a single connector with pins in different locations (ethernet/CF) is not quite the same as a port that can accept multiple physically different and otherwise unrelated connectors in the same socket.
DisplayPort, for example, can act as a single-link DVI port. With a passive adapter, the DP host sends DVI signals out over the pins, repurposing them (it can't do dual-link DVI because there aren't enough pins). But that's not the same as if somebody somehow designed a port that you could plug a DVI and DisplayPort connector to directly. I don't think such a thing would be possible (the ports are too different in size), but you get the idea.
The patent specifically states that USB/SD is just an example and that the patent should apply to the same technique being used for other multi-plug sockets. Such sockets pre-date the patent. I don't need to be an IP lawyer to read plain English.
The patent purports to cover any such combination (see paragraph 54 of the patent), not just USB/SD.
Paragraph 54 of the patent application widens it to cover any sort of connection rather than just USB/SD. They're only using USB/SD as an example.
That's a strange accusation to make considering the patent explicitly states that the USB/SD combo is only an example of the general concept, and that the patent covers any such combination. I specifically point you to paragraph 54 of the actual patent, which directly contradicts everything you just wrote.
The idea might have deserved patent protection; I don't think you can say it's "obvious" to figure out how to cram multiple connectors into a single port and make them work. There's some neat engineering that goes into making that happen. The problem is that somebody else did it first; eSATAp, which combines eSATA and USB in a single port (and can be used as either an eSATA port, a USB port, or with a special connector that combines the two) predates the patent filing by several years, if nothing else.
Right, but the patent was filed in 2011, when the obvious prior art (eSATAp, which combines eSATA and USB ports in a seemingly identical fashion to that described in the patent) has been around since 2008.
There's nothing wrong with what Apple wants to do with ports. In fact, I think it's a great way to expand connectivity on laptops with minimal space for ports. I've got a Macbook Air that would benefit greatly from this. But there's no justification for trying to patent an idea that has been shipping in laptops for years prior.
That's all well and good for the Model S today, but what about a few years down the road when Tesla is trying to introduce their $30-40k mid-priced version and the same dealership rules are in effect?
That option seems to basically be at the discretion of the system vendor. Perhaps it is available in newer drivers than I managed to get installed (it's a Dell notebook). I do know, though, that even when you tell it to default to discrete, it still runs some stuff on the iGPU. Enduro ultimately runs everything through the iGPU (framebuffer copies), so you need the Intel driver, and at the bare minimum the Intel drivers and control panel need to be run on the iGPU. It's unfortunately not possible to just run exclusively with the discrete chip.
Which is really what I want, because for this laptop's intended purpose, it will never be on battery power except excepting a few seconds here or there.
I got a new business laptop recently. My last experience with discrete graphics in a laptop predates switchable graphics, so I presumed that by now, everything would "just work". Boy does it ever not. Something as simple as installing a driver update can precipitate hours of re-installing the various drivers (both Intel and AMD graphics drivers) in different order hoping to get them both working again. Turns out the solution is to wipe out every trace of graphic driver and then install everything in a very particular set of steps, and even when everything is working, it's impossible to just say "run everything on the discrete GPU". You'll never be quite sure whether any given app is running on the iGPU or dGPU, and there are some apps that it would seem just don't want to run on the dGPU, or others that WILL run on the dGPU but will report that they're running on the iGPU (surely that's going to cause issues, if they think they're running on a different platform than they actually are)?
I don't remember the exact article, but one of the Anandtech reviewers had the exact same problems trying to work with Enduro on a laptop he was trying to review; he reported on his frustration, and how even when you follow the correct steps precisely, you must endure long install processes and multiple reboots.
It has same performance as the GTX 670, at the same TDP as a GTX 670, with the same board/shape/etc as the GTX 670, at a price that is $100 cheaper. It doesn't matter what it's based on.
AMD powered two of the three consoles this past generation (Wii and 360), the drivers are still terrible (getting Enduro drivers working on Windows is a nightmare). Why would adding one more console change anything?
It's the GeForce GTX 670 for a hundred bucks cheaper. That's what all the reviews boil down to.
How about banning the auto dealer laws that some states use to block competition, which are preventing electric car manufacturers like Tesla from becoming more popular?
Moving to electric cars is not THE answer to climate change problems, but it's a part of it, and getting rid of such ridiculous restrictions is a pretty low-hanging-fruit thing to do.
Six cars would be 720 kW with the new superchargers, actually :)
I'm not sure the demand would be all that unpredictable, though, and there are a rather large number of power plants in each NERC interconnect to pick up suerges in demand. Quebec's interconnect (yeah, we have our own, like Texas) is effectively entirely served by a power generation system that can ramp up/down rapidly (hydro) too. On top of that, there's currently a project under construction to connect three of the biggest North American power grids, the Eastern (eastern US and Canada excluding Quebec), western (Western US and Canada excluding Alaska) and Texas interconnects, and that'll start as a 5 gigawatt node, scaling up to 30GW. Using superconducting powerlines, no less.
Anyhow, maybe I'm biased because I come from a place where power is extremely plentiful and cheap to the extent that electrical heating is the overwhelmingly dominant form of heating, but I'm really not convinced that electric cars are going to be a major issue to the grid.
Yes, you need variable levels of detail, but again, how is that different from PC? The iOS platforms have a relatively limited set of targets that each update roughly once a year (PCs have an enormous set of potential variables), and you don't have to support them that far back. For the iPhone, it's pointless supporting anything older than the 3GS today, for example, meaning you have only four iOS smartphone targets to worry about, and you can usually get away with just doing a low/med/high or even low/high. Compare that to PC... One look at Valve's hardware survey should make anybody cringe at the variation there.
Yes, it's true that you've got the iPod, iPad, and Apple TV on top of that, but the iPod usually tracks the iPhone close enough that you can just pretend it's an iPhone. The iPad normally tracks to the iPhone generation that comes after it, but the screen resolution being much higher differentiates it. And the Apple TV is actually really underpowered (single core), and outdated (still on A5), but if they decided to put some focus on that you could see it with hardware closer to the iPod.
So there's a few things to target there, but there's a lot of overlap, and it's still a much simpler situation than the PC, and you don't necessarily need to do more than two or three performance profiles to cover most or all devices...
Nintendo, I agree, they're in one heck of a pickle. I don't really understand why they went the way they did with the WiiU. If there was an award for "least changes made to hardware platform over three consecutive generations", they'd win it. But more to the point, by picking the previous generation of hardware as their performance target, they've pretty much locked themselves out of any potential cross-platform titles with the PS4 and XBone. That won't be as big a deal in the near term, but later on, when people aren't putting out games for the 360 and PS3? They'll have a hard time getting third party support. Last time around, the Wii had a massive install base, and it still had a real hard time getting compelling third party content. It had barely any cross platform titles, and when it did, they were normally dumbed-down versions. The WiiU has the exact same issue, but without the huge install base... First party titles will help, but I think this generation is really going to be a wash for Nintendo on the console front (the 3DS is selling very well).
In terms of hardware costs this coming generation, that's definitely true. Last time, the 360 and PS3 used bleeding-edge hardware that had a significant performance advantage over anything you'd find in a PC. This time around, the 360 and PS4 look to have about half the performance of a modern PC. They've definitely gone for low-cost and low-tdp there. And to be honest that's probably the right decision this time around. We're reaching a point of diminishing returns in CPU and GPU performance, but having a ton of RAM like the new consoles do, that's probably more valuable than more GPU or CPU power would have been.