It might not have been a terrible feature in terms of very specific use cases for people who found it useful (some artists also found them useful for having direct feedback when drawing unlike a typical graphics tablet where there's a disconnect between your hand and what you're drawing, for example). But it was a terrible failure in terms of sales. It took the first iPad only nine months to sell more than every Tablet PC ever made from every manufacturer combined. Several other tablet companies can probably now claim something similar, lest you say this is an Apple thing. Microsoft envisioned Tablet PC as a broad-appeal thing, but it never made it beyond a niche product.
Remote rending isn't all that complicated, and it's something you can do today. There's no point streaming Direct3D stuff over the network, just run the whole game on the remote device. It's simple: your local platform (tablet, phone, laptop, etc) sends the inputs to the server, where they're injected as if they were local, and then you capture the video output, compress it, and stream it back over the network to the local device. You can set this up today, if you want.
The key factor is latency, but the LAN (be it wired or wireless) makes that much simper in multiple ways. You've got a lot of bandwidth to play with. Let's assume we're going high-tech and we're talking 802.11ac wireless; you can probably rely on several hundred megabits per second. A lot of the complexity of a system like OnLive is trying to get traditional video compression low latency enough, through various tricks (their approach to keyframes is completely different; there aren't any). Instead, it becomes simpler to just do something like compressing each frame as a JPEG and throwing it over the network. Of course, latency still matters. Whatever is capturing and compressing the frames on the server needs to make sure it's synchronized to the vertical blank to get in right after the frame swap and get the frame compressed and into the network buffers before the next frame is done.
It looks like they got the physical form factor closer than most, but it was still desktop WinXP with a stylus as the primary input. And it still weighed over three pounds, about the same as my pre-ultrabook portege. The iPad is already too heavy, double that is still impractical.
Um, no, I'm talking about the Tablet PC initiative, which lasted from 2001 until around when the iPad came out and finally killed it off... Android and iOS didn't exist at the time.
I hate the Metro interface, but even the most die-hard Microsoft hater has got to admit that Metro is a hell of a lot better for tablets than the standard Windows XP interface was.
The major failing of Tablet PC that I'm talking about is how their interface was horribly ill-suited for a tablet. At least they're doing a tablet-specific UI now.
Why would a large enterprise or government want to crack any of my accounts? The XKCD example of a $5 wrench is a joke, but the underlying message is accurate. It's a lot cheaper for a government to just give me a court order for my passwords than it is to devote a giant supercomputer to cracking my email.
Yes, it was from the "Tablet PC" era, and devices lack that were a terrible failure. People already complain that the iPad is too heavy at a pound and a half, nobody wants a six pound tablet. Admittedly, one of the major failings of the Tablet PC is being addressed with the Win8 touch interface and app ecosystem.
A botnet probably can't rely on GPU acceleration, and there aren't many botnets out there with half a million machines busy trying to crack my Starcraft password.
Nope, and my attempt to use even just four reasonable length words (the 5 to 7 letter each ones) on my Battle.net account failed. I ended up having to drop it down to three, so I threw in a single letter substitution and then activated two-factor authentication on my account.
So your solution to the problem that nobody can remember randomized-per-character passwords is to massively increase the character set that people need to memorize? That's not helpful. The XKCD example was to show that it's possible to create easy to remember passwords that still have a whole bunch of entropy; the status of ASCII versus Unicode doesn't change anything at all in this regard. If anything, it makes the case for XKCD-style passwords even stronger.
Even taking Gibson's original category of all-lowercase alphanumeric, his time-to-crack figure is silly (in that it's not realistic):
36^6 = 2,176,782,336 possible combinations 0.0000224 seconds to crack (given by grc) 2,176,782,336 / 0.0000224 ~= 97,200,000,000,000
So, somebody is going to devote a supercomputer capable of trying 97.2 trillion passwords per second to cracking a password for some service that I'd use? Right...
For an idea of how big of a machine you'd need to try 97.2 trillion passwords per second, Toms had two high-end GPUs in SLI doing 1.5 billion per second, which means even with GPU acceration you'd need roughly 65,000 machines...
Good for you and your 1U box, but you need to use the right tool for the right job. A quick google search turned up at least one server vendor who has a 1U server with 32 ports onboard. Yes, you can get more ports on a dedicated switch, but in this case you're basically combining a switch/router/server in a single 1U chassis, which should make up for the space savings. I imagine that you'd want to replace one of the network modules with something faster for uplink anyhow, though.
Why would Samsung need to switch? HTC owned the Android market before, and now Samsung does. There is nothing to say that somebody else won't do a good phone with an Intel chip and get a good chunk of the market.
Apple is unlikely to switch away only because they value the control ARM licensing gets them. However, Intel has expressed interest in ARM-style licensing, and in fact made a deal with TSMC to manufacture Atom chips in an ARM-style arrangement. They dissolved the agreement due to lack of interest, because they didn't have anything interesting at the time. Now that they do have something interesting, that may change. And Intel may be willing to give it another go to get Apple on x86 on the mobile side of things. Apple would maintain as much control over the A-series as they do with ARM, and power/performance levels on smaller Intel processes might make it worth their while. I don't think it will happen, but it's not impossible.
That's exactly my point. Intel got their power/performance on par with ARM, and the customer-facing experience is seamless, so if they have a compelling phone, people will buy it anyhow.
That said, I'd point out how successful the Centrino branding was. Consumers did care that they got a Centrino laptop. They didn't know what Centrino was, or what it implied, but they knew they wanted it. Something similar with "ultrabook" is being attempted now. You don't need consumers to care about the technical stuff to sell them on something. If Intel can do a successful marketing campaign about how phones with Intel chips are somehow better (not for technical reasons, but because it's "the thing to have")...
I see Intel phones selling on Orange in the UK right now... Intel doesn't need Samsung to switch right this instant if they can get compelling phones on the market that people buy anyhow...
This market can swing quickly. Look at how fast HTC fell by the wayside.
Don't count on Apple being tied to ARM. They've changed architectures pretty seamlessly on the desktop twice now (68k -> PPC, PPC -> x86), and the walled-garden nature of the app store makes this a pretty trivial change for them. They just announce that iOS 7, say, requires apps to be recompiled, developers recompile stuff, everybody moves on.
ARM is right to be worried; Intel's first production smartphone, despite being single core, was able to produce similar performance and battery life to comparable ARM phones. If Intel pushes out their smartphone SoC on their smallest process, that could spell serious trouble for ARM.
I'm not sure you understand how ARM's business model works. They don't manufacture chips themselves, and they don't even hire somebody else to manufacture chips for them. They also don't design chips for a specific process node. They just produce a design and leave it up to a company like Texas Instruments to figure out how to build them at a certain process node (or hire some fab company to do it).
The 20nm statement is just a prediction. They're saying they expect their customers to get 20nm parts out in 2013.
Everyone knows everything comes from China. Including semiconductors. Well, actually, no. There's a nice list of plants at wikipedia. You'll see a lot of US addresses. Yes you can probably buy a knock off 555 or 741 from China, but they have almost no small scale plants at all. Pretty much processors come from the USA and a scattering of small time players around the globe.
You're pretty much exactly wrong. The US was, as of 2009, in fourth place for semiconductor manufacturing with a 14% share. Ahead were Japan (25%), Taiwan (18%), and Korea (17%). The largest independent semiconductor manufacturer in the world, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, is based in (appropriately enough) Taiwan.
When I look at all the different chips in my home and where they were made, pretty much only my Intel processor/chipset was made in the US. The rest? Asia.
It paves the way, but it's still way behind the curve since it's still in the distant future. Intel has been shipping 22nm chips for a while now, as in you can actually go out and buy them. But on the TSMC front, I'm not sure if they're even shipping 28nm, let alone 22 or 20nm...
I'm rooting for ARM, but they're not going to do much damage to Intel if they're a full process node behind. Intel will hit 16nm in 2013, putting them still at least a half-node ahead of TSMC... That might sound minor, but 100 mm^2 at 20nm would be 64 mm^2 at 16nm... They really need to sort this out or Intel will walk all over them.
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Because it's sooo hard for FunnyJunk to implement something like:
if target_host == 'theoatmeal.com'
do_nothing()
else
post_content()
end
It might not have been a terrible feature in terms of very specific use cases for people who found it useful (some artists also found them useful for having direct feedback when drawing unlike a typical graphics tablet where there's a disconnect between your hand and what you're drawing, for example). But it was a terrible failure in terms of sales. It took the first iPad only nine months to sell more than every Tablet PC ever made from every manufacturer combined. Several other tablet companies can probably now claim something similar, lest you say this is an Apple thing. Microsoft envisioned Tablet PC as a broad-appeal thing, but it never made it beyond a niche product.
Remote rending isn't all that complicated, and it's something you can do today. There's no point streaming Direct3D stuff over the network, just run the whole game on the remote device. It's simple: your local platform (tablet, phone, laptop, etc) sends the inputs to the server, where they're injected as if they were local, and then you capture the video output, compress it, and stream it back over the network to the local device. You can set this up today, if you want.
The key factor is latency, but the LAN (be it wired or wireless) makes that much simper in multiple ways. You've got a lot of bandwidth to play with. Let's assume we're going high-tech and we're talking 802.11ac wireless; you can probably rely on several hundred megabits per second. A lot of the complexity of a system like OnLive is trying to get traditional video compression low latency enough, through various tricks (their approach to keyframes is completely different; there aren't any). Instead, it becomes simpler to just do something like compressing each frame as a JPEG and throwing it over the network. Of course, latency still matters. Whatever is capturing and compressing the frames on the server needs to make sure it's synchronized to the vertical blank to get in right after the frame swap and get the frame compressed and into the network buffers before the next frame is done.
It looks like they got the physical form factor closer than most, but it was still desktop WinXP with a stylus as the primary input. And it still weighed over three pounds, about the same as my pre-ultrabook portege. The iPad is already too heavy, double that is still impractical.
Um, no, I'm talking about the Tablet PC initiative, which lasted from 2001 until around when the iPad came out and finally killed it off... Android and iOS didn't exist at the time.
I hate the Metro interface, but even the most die-hard Microsoft hater has got to admit that Metro is a hell of a lot better for tablets than the standard Windows XP interface was.
The major failing of Tablet PC that I'm talking about is how their interface was horribly ill-suited for a tablet. At least they're doing a tablet-specific UI now.
Why would a large enterprise or government want to crack any of my accounts? The XKCD example of a $5 wrench is a joke, but the underlying message is accurate. It's a lot cheaper for a government to just give me a court order for my passwords than it is to devote a giant supercomputer to cracking my email.
Yes, it was from the "Tablet PC" era, and devices lack that were a terrible failure. People already complain that the iPad is too heavy at a pound and a half, nobody wants a six pound tablet. Admittedly, one of the major failings of the Tablet PC is being addressed with the Win8 touch interface and app ecosystem.
A botnet probably can't rely on GPU acceleration, and there aren't many botnets out there with half a million machines busy trying to crack my Starcraft password.
Nope, and my attempt to use even just four reasonable length words (the 5 to 7 letter each ones) on my Battle.net account failed. I ended up having to drop it down to three, so I threw in a single letter substitution and then activated two-factor authentication on my account.
10^8... So, crackable in a tenth of a second on a modern desktop computer with a moderately high-end GPU?
So your solution to the problem that nobody can remember randomized-per-character passwords is to massively increase the character set that people need to memorize? That's not helpful. The XKCD example was to show that it's possible to create easy to remember passwords that still have a whole bunch of entropy; the status of ASCII versus Unicode doesn't change anything at all in this regard. If anything, it makes the case for XKCD-style passwords even stronger.
Even taking Gibson's original category of all-lowercase alphanumeric, his time-to-crack figure is silly (in that it's not realistic):
36^6 = 2,176,782,336 possible combinations
0.0000224 seconds to crack (given by grc)
2,176,782,336 / 0.0000224 ~= 97,200,000,000,000
So, somebody is going to devote a supercomputer capable of trying 97.2 trillion passwords per second to cracking a password for some service that I'd use? Right...
For an idea of how big of a machine you'd need to try 97.2 trillion passwords per second, Toms had two high-end GPUs in SLI doing 1.5 billion per second, which means even with GPU acceration you'd need roughly 65,000 machines...
Good for you and your 1U box, but you need to use the right tool for the right job. A quick google search turned up at least one server vendor who has a 1U server with 32 ports onboard. Yes, you can get more ports on a dedicated switch, but in this case you're basically combining a switch/router/server in a single 1U chassis, which should make up for the space savings. I imagine that you'd want to replace one of the network modules with something faster for uplink anyhow, though.
Huh? There's no browser plugin involved.
Why would Samsung need to switch? HTC owned the Android market before, and now Samsung does. There is nothing to say that somebody else won't do a good phone with an Intel chip and get a good chunk of the market.
Apple is unlikely to switch away only because they value the control ARM licensing gets them. However, Intel has expressed interest in ARM-style licensing, and in fact made a deal with TSMC to manufacture Atom chips in an ARM-style arrangement. They dissolved the agreement due to lack of interest, because they didn't have anything interesting at the time. Now that they do have something interesting, that may change. And Intel may be willing to give it another go to get Apple on x86 on the mobile side of things. Apple would maintain as much control over the A-series as they do with ARM, and power/performance levels on smaller Intel processes might make it worth their while. I don't think it will happen, but it's not impossible.
That's exactly my point. Intel got their power/performance on par with ARM, and the customer-facing experience is seamless, so if they have a compelling phone, people will buy it anyhow.
That said, I'd point out how successful the Centrino branding was. Consumers did care that they got a Centrino laptop. They didn't know what Centrino was, or what it implied, but they knew they wanted it. Something similar with "ultrabook" is being attempted now. You don't need consumers to care about the technical stuff to sell them on something. If Intel can do a successful marketing campaign about how phones with Intel chips are somehow better (not for technical reasons, but because it's "the thing to have")...
I see Intel phones selling on Orange in the UK right now... Intel doesn't need Samsung to switch right this instant if they can get compelling phones on the market that people buy anyhow...
This market can swing quickly. Look at how fast HTC fell by the wayside.
Don't count on Apple being tied to ARM. They've changed architectures pretty seamlessly on the desktop twice now (68k -> PPC, PPC -> x86), and the walled-garden nature of the app store makes this a pretty trivial change for them. They just announce that iOS 7, say, requires apps to be recompiled, developers recompile stuff, everybody moves on.
How small scale? Intel is at 22nm, TSMC is at 28nm, Global Foundries (which is mostly outside the US) is 32nm.
ARM is right to be worried; Intel's first production smartphone, despite being single core, was able to produce similar performance and battery life to comparable ARM phones. If Intel pushes out their smartphone SoC on their smallest process, that could spell serious trouble for ARM.
I'm not sure you understand how ARM's business model works. They don't manufacture chips themselves, and they don't even hire somebody else to manufacture chips for them. They also don't design chips for a specific process node. They just produce a design and leave it up to a company like Texas Instruments to figure out how to build them at a certain process node (or hire some fab company to do it).
The 20nm statement is just a prediction. They're saying they expect their customers to get 20nm parts out in 2013.
Everyone knows everything comes from China. Including semiconductors. Well, actually, no. There's a nice list of plants at wikipedia. You'll see a lot of US addresses. Yes you can probably buy a knock off 555 or 741 from China, but they have almost no small scale plants at all. Pretty much processors come from the USA and a scattering of small time players around the globe.
You're pretty much exactly wrong. The US was, as of 2009, in fourth place for semiconductor manufacturing with a 14% share. Ahead were Japan (25%), Taiwan (18%), and Korea (17%). The largest independent semiconductor manufacturer in the world, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, is based in (appropriately enough) Taiwan.
When I look at all the different chips in my home and where they were made, pretty much only my Intel processor/chipset was made in the US. The rest? Asia.
It paves the way, but it's still way behind the curve since it's still in the distant future. Intel has been shipping 22nm chips for a while now, as in you can actually go out and buy them. But on the TSMC front, I'm not sure if they're even shipping 28nm, let alone 22 or 20nm...
I'm rooting for ARM, but they're not going to do much damage to Intel if they're a full process node behind. Intel will hit 16nm in 2013, putting them still at least a half-node ahead of TSMC... That might sound minor, but 100 mm^2 at 20nm would be 64 mm^2 at 16nm... They really need to sort this out or Intel will walk all over them.
It seems like I should probably be able to add mountall to a startup script, but I shouldn't have to.