I had a server-grade SuperMicro motherboard in the thing. It had a serial port, but it was old, supporting nothing newer than a Core 2 and 3GB of RAM. Not wanting to spend money on an upgrade, I repurposed an unused desktop motherboard with an i7-920 and 24GB of RAM.
Not everybody can afford the latest and greatest rackmount server for their home fileserver.
I'd argue that it's not precise, since the architecture of a modern PC bears little resemblance to the original IBM PC, but beyond that, is it meaningful or useful?
The Macintosh originally launched on the Motorola 68k architecture. It then migrated to PowerPC, maintaining compatibility with 68k. It then migrated to x86, and eventually dropped all backwards compatibility. Does this mean that a current iMac is not a Macintosh computer, because it can't run the original Mac OS and doesn't use the 68k processor? By the same token, can you even run the original IBM PC version of DOS on a modern system? What will happen when UEFI motherboards eventually drop support for BIOS emulation? Will they still be PCs, even though they will essentially be architecturally completely different from the original PC?
So, I repeat, is it a useful definition? I think that a definition based on how a product is used is a much more useful definition of what a personal computer is.
Messing around with kernel boot parameters to solve the problem is not something a typical user should have to do, and researching the problem is frustrating because everybody already assumes you have knowledge that you don't when you approach the problem for the first time. This sort of stuff being broken out of the box is not something you can blame on the user.
As for your quip about serial consoles... don't make me laugh. Perhaps you'll find such things in dedicated server boards, but few consumer or even workstation class motherboards have onboard serial ports to begin with, and nobody that I know, no matter how may headless boxes they've got, uses a serial port to interact with it.
Last time that I had to connect to a serial port on something, a year or two ago, finding a goddamn serial port on a computer was the problem. USB serial adapters are extremely special order (none of the local computer or electronic stores carried them, even the business-oriented stores), and ordering online wasn't an option due to time pressures. I ended up having to borrow a 486 laptop with a serial port and a PCMCIA ethernet adapter so that I could connect the serial cable to the laptop, and SSH into the laptop.
My normally headless file server has a low-end nVidia card in it. This machine has no GUI, just the text console.
Video output of the text console on this machine does not work without installing the proprietary nVidia drivers. I just get garbled noise on the screen otherwise. This boggled my mind. It's a bug in the Nouveau drivers the kernel loads by default, of course, but the fact that video card driver bugs were preventing me from using the machine's text console...
It turns out that at some point the linux terminal switched to a GUI mode rather than using the actual character output mode. Hence why you now need graphics drivers for the most basic use of a machine.
That's an arbitrary distinction that has no real meaning, then. An x86 Chromebook is a PC, but an ARM Chromebook is not? Windows running on x86 is a PC, but Windows running on ARM is not? A Mac running on x86 is a PC, but a Mac running on PowerPC is not?
But the memory and hard disk in some laptops isn't upgradable, and that doesn't mean they're not a PC. You can put a different OS on an iPad if you want. People have gotten both Android and WebOS running on iOS hardware, and while it's not something you're supposed to do, neither is swapping out the OS on a Chromebook. So I'd suggest that neither upgradable hardware nor the ability to change the OS makes something a PC.
It's a really fuzzy distinction. Taking the iPad as an example, what aspect of it makes it not a PC? Not the hardware, it can be connected to a physical monitor, keyboard, etc. Not the general tasks you can accomplish with it, most of those overlap, and for many people, all of them do (my father uses one to replace a computer, doing his surfing, e-mail, word processing, etc. on a tablet).
I don't think your criteria of expandability works. The majority of computers sold today have little no no expandability; try swapping out the processor in your laptop. There are external peripherals, but so are there too for tablets.
I think what is a PC and what isn't depends largely on how the owner uses it. My father uses his iPad as a computer, because it does everything he did on the computer it replaced. I don't, using mine for occasional media consumption and casual games.
As a parting comment, I'd point out that the Chromebook is considered to be a personal computer, but that it is far less flexible and capable on a software level than an iPad; both the iPad and the Chromebook can use web apps, but the Chromebook has no ability to run native software beyond what it ships with (like the first-gen iPhone).
One quote in particular stands out, and a lot of assumptions in the article are predicated on it:
The GT 610 should still be quicker than plain-old Intel integrated graphics, however.
Anandtech's benchmarks show that the Intel HD4000 in a desktop IvyBridge processor are 50 to 75% faster than a GeForce GT 610 (or more specifically, the GT 520 that was renamed the GT 610). In fact, the HD4000 is very nearly as fast as what was renamed the GT 630 in many benchmarks. The mobile version of this iGPU is not much slower, although the ULV mobile version of it is probably roughly on par to the GT 610.
Of course, the Celeron 847 was a Sandy Bridge part, not an Ivy Bridge part, and the Celeron 847 didn't even ship with a full fledged Sandy Bridge generation iGPU, so the GT 610 is likely still faster than the 847's iGPU. But this should give you an idea about how silly the "fast enough for Steam games" statement is. We're talking about a machine with a GPU that is at best two thirds the performance of a modern Intel iGPU.
Considering the Celeron 847 is one of Intel's ULV processors, with a TDP of half that of the lightest i3 Sandy Bridge, I really doubt they're disabling any power saving features. The whole point of their ULV line is to provide minimal power usage. Intel ARK seems to list the Celeron 847 as having all the same power management features of the full Sandy Bridge. It doesn't have demand-based switching, but no Sandy Bridge chip does.
Ivy Bridge ULV chips perform significantly better, hitting much higher clockspeeds at lower power usage levels, but that's to be expected, since the primary focus of Ivy Bridge was power reduction (via the 22nm die shrink, tri-gate transistors, new power saving features, etc). In fact, since we're on the cusp of Haswell, I'd expect that to improve even further. But the 847 is still going to turn out decent performance.
The dual-core SandyBridge celeron you find in the HP units is significantly faster than any ARM processor currently on the market. Of course, it also draws far more power, since it's a different class of processor. Apples and oranges there.
Typical IPD is 54-68mm. IMAX film stock is 70mm wide. This is not an insurmountable problem, at least for professional use.
Imagine a 70mm lightfield motion picture camera. Other than the fact that the data throughput would be positively insane, the requirements for physical size would be substantially less than a current IMAX camera.
I suspect that you can actually get away with less than the typical IPD and still produce a convincing effect. In which case, you can buy the required sensor today; you can get 48mm wide medium format digital sensors, and there's nothing special about the sensor in the Lytro. It's the array of microlenses and software that make it special. So it would be possible today to build a Lytro motion picture camera with a 48mm digital sensor, and I suspect that 48mm is close enough to the typical IPD to produce a convincing effect. Such sensors also have the resolution to make lightfield work for a motion picture (50 MP models turned in up the first page of results on B&H), and the cameras themselves are smaller than most motion picture cameras (or even ENG cameras)...
I suspect that the primary problem would be, again, the data throughput. Uncompressed 24fps 50 megapixel 36-bit images, those would pump out 41 gigabits per second... Compression would be pretty much required. If we use redcode as a benchmark (because apparently motion picture productions are happy with the quality of the compression enough to use it), where the minimum camera-supported compression ratio (on the RED ONE) is 8:1 and the highest is 12:1... This gives us about 5.1 Gbps and 3.4 Gbps... Heck, that's easy to handle. Existing communications tech can handle that, you could have a single 10 Gbps ethernet cable running out the back of your camera to an on-site storage box, and storing that sort of data rates isn't hard. Even a 4TB on-camera SSD module could store 156 minutes of footage... and handle those kinds of write speeds.
No, they fly powered for about a week and a half... Although I suppose they get power from the ISS while docked. Nonetheless, the powered flight time for a Dragon capsule between launch and docking is far longer than any commercial air flight.
So, let me get this straight... Instead of running an NES emulator directly on your Android tablet (and there are plenty such emulators available), you're going to run an NES emulator on top of Windows 3.1 on top of DOS inside of an x86 emulator on top of Android?
Here's a direct comparison for you, from my local power company (the largest hydroelectric producer in the world, HydroQuebec) all prices in CAD, and I'm ignoring the fixed costs here:
Residential rate: Power over 50 kW (winter): $6.21 / kW Power over 50 kW (summer): $1.26 / kW First 30 kWh per day: 5.32/kWh Remaining consumption: 7.51/kWh
Business rates ("low power", below 100 kW every month): Power over 50 kW: $15.54 / kW First 15,090 kWh: 8.73/kWh Remaining consumption: 4.85/kWh
Business rates ("medium power", at least one month a year over 50 kW): Power over 0 kW: $13.44 / kW First 210,000 kWh: 4.41/kWh Remaining consumption: 3.19/kWh
Business rates ("Large power", every month over 5 megawatts): Power over 0 kW: $12.18 / kW All consumption: 2.95/kWh
I expect we'll see services like Netflix jump on the bandwagon pretty fast. They already produce multiple copies of their videos in different codecs to cater to different device capabilities. If memory serves, they do VC-1 for the desktop client, low bitrate h.264 for the mobile clients, and high bitrate h.264 for the STB/console clients.
Migrating platforms which can support it to h.265 will provide them with immediate savings. There aren't that many of them, but the PS3 happens to be their flagship and development platform (it's the single most popular Netflix device so they launch new features on it first), and it can probably handle h.265 in software. It's a dumb CPU design for general use, but it excels at this sort of thing.
As it stands, WebM is somewhat less effective than h.264, and as such, it will never be competitive with h.265... No more so than MPEG-4 ASP is competitive with h.264.
WebM completely failed to gain any traction whatsoever against h.264, so why should it do any better against h.265?
It depends how it gets measured. Is the $21 million in how much people pay for the content? If they offer a $5/mth subscription to a very large collection of copyrighted content, $21 million results in 4.2 million people downloading many copyrighted titles. That would bring in only $21 million to Antigua, but the US copyright interests would claim billions of dollars in damage.
Because the WTO is levying a penalty against the US for ignoring WTO rulings by allowing Antigua to suspend up to $21 million in US copyrights per year.
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Right, because I'm the only person in the world who has a home file server and doesn't use ECC RAM in it.
Welcome to the real world.
Does that mean my mac is a PC? It runs the x86 version of Windows, but has no evolutionary link to the IBM PC.
I had a server-grade SuperMicro motherboard in the thing. It had a serial port, but it was old, supporting nothing newer than a Core 2 and 3GB of RAM. Not wanting to spend money on an upgrade, I repurposed an unused desktop motherboard with an i7-920 and 24GB of RAM.
Not everybody can afford the latest and greatest rackmount server for their home fileserver.
And then what? Run a 40 foot USB cable from the server to the nearest computer?
I'd argue that it's not precise, since the architecture of a modern PC bears little resemblance to the original IBM PC, but beyond that, is it meaningful or useful?
The Macintosh originally launched on the Motorola 68k architecture. It then migrated to PowerPC, maintaining compatibility with 68k. It then migrated to x86, and eventually dropped all backwards compatibility. Does this mean that a current iMac is not a Macintosh computer, because it can't run the original Mac OS and doesn't use the 68k processor? By the same token, can you even run the original IBM PC version of DOS on a modern system? What will happen when UEFI motherboards eventually drop support for BIOS emulation? Will they still be PCs, even though they will essentially be architecturally completely different from the original PC?
So, I repeat, is it a useful definition? I think that a definition based on how a product is used is a much more useful definition of what a personal computer is.
Messing around with kernel boot parameters to solve the problem is not something a typical user should have to do, and researching the problem is frustrating because everybody already assumes you have knowledge that you don't when you approach the problem for the first time. This sort of stuff being broken out of the box is not something you can blame on the user.
As for your quip about serial consoles... don't make me laugh. Perhaps you'll find such things in dedicated server boards, but few consumer or even workstation class motherboards have onboard serial ports to begin with, and nobody that I know, no matter how may headless boxes they've got, uses a serial port to interact with it.
Last time that I had to connect to a serial port on something, a year or two ago, finding a goddamn serial port on a computer was the problem. USB serial adapters are extremely special order (none of the local computer or electronic stores carried them, even the business-oriented stores), and ordering online wasn't an option due to time pressures. I ended up having to borrow a 486 laptop with a serial port and a PCMCIA ethernet adapter so that I could connect the serial cable to the laptop, and SSH into the laptop.
My normally headless file server has a low-end nVidia card in it. This machine has no GUI, just the text console.
Video output of the text console on this machine does not work without installing the proprietary nVidia drivers. I just get garbled noise on the screen otherwise. This boggled my mind. It's a bug in the Nouveau drivers the kernel loads by default, of course, but the fact that video card driver bugs were preventing me from using the machine's text console...
It turns out that at some point the linux terminal switched to a GUI mode rather than using the actual character output mode. Hence why you now need graphics drivers for the most basic use of a machine.
That's an arbitrary distinction that has no real meaning, then. An x86 Chromebook is a PC, but an ARM Chromebook is not? Windows running on x86 is a PC, but Windows running on ARM is not? A Mac running on x86 is a PC, but a Mac running on PowerPC is not?
But the memory and hard disk in some laptops isn't upgradable, and that doesn't mean they're not a PC. You can put a different OS on an iPad if you want. People have gotten both Android and WebOS running on iOS hardware, and while it's not something you're supposed to do, neither is swapping out the OS on a Chromebook. So I'd suggest that neither upgradable hardware nor the ability to change the OS makes something a PC.
Unfortunately, few consumers were able to afford the space fighter cockpit required to use Atari BASIC, as depicted on the cover of the box.
Producing bitchin' party banners on your dot matrix printer.
It's a really fuzzy distinction. Taking the iPad as an example, what aspect of it makes it not a PC? Not the hardware, it can be connected to a physical monitor, keyboard, etc. Not the general tasks you can accomplish with it, most of those overlap, and for many people, all of them do (my father uses one to replace a computer, doing his surfing, e-mail, word processing, etc. on a tablet).
I don't think your criteria of expandability works. The majority of computers sold today have little no no expandability; try swapping out the processor in your laptop. There are external peripherals, but so are there too for tablets.
I think what is a PC and what isn't depends largely on how the owner uses it. My father uses his iPad as a computer, because it does everything he did on the computer it replaced. I don't, using mine for occasional media consumption and casual games.
As a parting comment, I'd point out that the Chromebook is considered to be a personal computer, but that it is far less flexible and capable on a software level than an iPad; both the iPad and the Chromebook can use web apps, but the Chromebook has no ability to run native software beyond what it ships with (like the first-gen iPhone).
One quote in particular stands out, and a lot of assumptions in the article are predicated on it:
The GT 610 should still be quicker than plain-old Intel integrated graphics, however.
Anandtech's benchmarks show that the Intel HD4000 in a desktop IvyBridge processor are 50 to 75% faster than a GeForce GT 610 (or more specifically, the GT 520 that was renamed the GT 610). In fact, the HD4000 is very nearly as fast as what was renamed the GT 630 in many benchmarks. The mobile version of this iGPU is not much slower, although the ULV mobile version of it is probably roughly on par to the GT 610.
Of course, the Celeron 847 was a Sandy Bridge part, not an Ivy Bridge part, and the Celeron 847 didn't even ship with a full fledged Sandy Bridge generation iGPU, so the GT 610 is likely still faster than the 847's iGPU. But this should give you an idea about how silly the "fast enough for Steam games" statement is. We're talking about a machine with a GPU that is at best two thirds the performance of a modern Intel iGPU.
Considering the Celeron 847 is one of Intel's ULV processors, with a TDP of half that of the lightest i3 Sandy Bridge, I really doubt they're disabling any power saving features. The whole point of their ULV line is to provide minimal power usage. Intel ARK seems to list the Celeron 847 as having all the same power management features of the full Sandy Bridge. It doesn't have demand-based switching, but no Sandy Bridge chip does.
Ivy Bridge ULV chips perform significantly better, hitting much higher clockspeeds at lower power usage levels, but that's to be expected, since the primary focus of Ivy Bridge was power reduction (via the 22nm die shrink, tri-gate transistors, new power saving features, etc). In fact, since we're on the cusp of Haswell, I'd expect that to improve even further. But the 847 is still going to turn out decent performance.
The dual-core SandyBridge celeron you find in the HP units is significantly faster than any ARM processor currently on the market. Of course, it also draws far more power, since it's a different class of processor. Apples and oranges there.
Typical IPD is 54-68mm. IMAX film stock is 70mm wide. This is not an insurmountable problem, at least for professional use.
Imagine a 70mm lightfield motion picture camera. Other than the fact that the data throughput would be positively insane, the requirements for physical size would be substantially less than a current IMAX camera.
I suspect that you can actually get away with less than the typical IPD and still produce a convincing effect. In which case, you can buy the required sensor today; you can get 48mm wide medium format digital sensors, and there's nothing special about the sensor in the Lytro. It's the array of microlenses and software that make it special. So it would be possible today to build a Lytro motion picture camera with a 48mm digital sensor, and I suspect that 48mm is close enough to the typical IPD to produce a convincing effect. Such sensors also have the resolution to make lightfield work for a motion picture (50 MP models turned in up the first page of results on B&H), and the cameras themselves are smaller than most motion picture cameras (or even ENG cameras)...
I suspect that the primary problem would be, again, the data throughput. Uncompressed 24fps 50 megapixel 36-bit images, those would pump out 41 gigabits per second... Compression would be pretty much required. If we use redcode as a benchmark (because apparently motion picture productions are happy with the quality of the compression enough to use it), where the minimum camera-supported compression ratio (on the RED ONE) is 8:1 and the highest is 12:1... This gives us about 5.1 Gbps and 3.4 Gbps... Heck, that's easy to handle. Existing communications tech can handle that, you could have a single 10 Gbps ethernet cable running out the back of your camera to an on-site storage box, and storing that sort of data rates isn't hard. Even a 4TB on-camera SSD module could store 156 minutes of footage... and handle those kinds of write speeds.
No, they fly powered for about a week and a half... Although I suppose they get power from the ISS while docked. Nonetheless, the powered flight time for a Dragon capsule between launch and docking is far longer than any commercial air flight.
So, let me get this straight... Instead of running an NES emulator directly on your Android tablet (and there are plenty such emulators available), you're going to run an NES emulator on top of Windows 3.1 on top of DOS inside of an x86 emulator on top of Android?
Here's a direct comparison for you, from my local power company (the largest hydroelectric producer in the world, HydroQuebec) all prices in CAD, and I'm ignoring the fixed costs here:
Residential rate: /kWh /kWh
Power over 50 kW (winter): $6.21 / kW
Power over 50 kW (summer): $1.26 / kW
First 30 kWh per day: 5.32
Remaining consumption: 7.51
Business rates ("low power", below 100 kW every month): /kWh /kWh
Power over 50 kW: $15.54 / kW
First 15,090 kWh: 8.73
Remaining consumption: 4.85
Business rates ("medium power", at least one month a year over 50 kW): /kWh /kWh
Power over 0 kW: $13.44 / kW
First 210,000 kWh: 4.41
Remaining consumption: 3.19
Business rates ("Large power", every month over 5 megawatts): /kWh
Power over 0 kW: $12.18 / kW
All consumption: 2.95
I expect we'll see services like Netflix jump on the bandwagon pretty fast. They already produce multiple copies of their videos in different codecs to cater to different device capabilities. If memory serves, they do VC-1 for the desktop client, low bitrate h.264 for the mobile clients, and high bitrate h.264 for the STB/console clients.
Migrating platforms which can support it to h.265 will provide them with immediate savings. There aren't that many of them, but the PS3 happens to be their flagship and development platform (it's the single most popular Netflix device so they launch new features on it first), and it can probably handle h.265 in software. It's a dumb CPU design for general use, but it excels at this sort of thing.
FYI, h.264 is a video compression format, and x264 is an encoder that produces h.264 output.
Saying "true sceners don't use h264 they use x264" is akin to saying "I don't drink coffee, I drink Folgers."
As it stands, WebM is somewhat less effective than h.264, and as such, it will never be competitive with h.265... No more so than MPEG-4 ASP is competitive with h.264.
WebM completely failed to gain any traction whatsoever against h.264, so why should it do any better against h.265?
It depends how it gets measured. Is the $21 million in how much people pay for the content? If they offer a $5/mth subscription to a very large collection of copyrighted content, $21 million results in 4.2 million people downloading many copyrighted titles. That would bring in only $21 million to Antigua, but the US copyright interests would claim billions of dollars in damage.
Because the WTO is levying a penalty against the US for ignoring WTO rulings by allowing Antigua to suspend up to $21 million in US copyrights per year.
Fiber does not connect directly into any consumer grade equipment
I'll be pedantic and point to the fiber connection present on at least one electronic device in almost everybody's home: TOSLINK.