Can't Mathematica be told to stick to an 80-bit precision output? If you can specify that in software, it shouldn't matter what code the underlying platform runs on.
I am honestly not familiar enough with OpenCL implementations to even judge the situation there. But I thought the emergence of a new player interesting in its own right. Obviously good driver support and long-term OpenCL integration matters, but you've got to run before you can walk, and mid-to-low-end devices aren't going to be the first targets for the kinds of users that care about broad GPGPU support and want to play with the tricks it offers.
Alright, so, I don't normally comment on this sort of thing, but I'm going to make an exception. I'm the author of the article. I've written for hardware IT sites for 12 years. I've written for Hot Hardware since 2009.
Vivante contacted us in August and asked if we'd be interested in doing an article on the architecture. I looked over the slides and data, and said I'd like to see an example of the chip in action. They arranged for us to test a Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 7.0. This was done in exactly the same fashion as any other product review.
The Galaxy Tab 3 7.0 is objectively a pretty lousy tablet relative to other products in the market. It's an 8GB device with a dual-core Cortex-A9 at $199, when you can buy a 16GB Nexus 7 for $229. But remember -- the point of the article was to talk about Vivante, not the mediocre device the GPU is currently paired with. To be clear, the major problem here is *price.* If the Tab 3 7.0 was selling at $129, I'd call it a much stronger product and it would compare passing well against the non-advertising supported version of the Kindle Fire.
If I'd had more devices to compare against, I would have compared against them, but the only iOS product I own is an iPhone 4S that I bought out of my own pocket. I wrote the article to discuss an interesting, more modular approach to the GPU market, backed it up with standard benchmarks, and noted that faster, larger versions of the core were available. If I had access to those versions of the core, I would have benchmarked them.
I will be paid at a standard rate for this work, with no additional kicker from Vivante or Hot Hardware. I was not asked to take a particular stance on the product or its performance, and I chose my own benchmarks.
I maintain that it's interesting to see a new GPU vendor come on the scene, that building midrange parts that are designed for modest products is a viable strategy, and that a company doesn't need to deliver the fastest performance to build an acceptable product for a given price point. Vivante's work is still relatively new and so I am not surprised that its driver stack or OpenCL support is still in early stages.
Anyone claiming that this chip is automatically a Kepler, or PowerVR, or Adreno killer is mistaken. I did not evaluate the chip under such criteria and feel no obligation to rate it against chips it was not designed to face.
As the author: No, they weren't. I don't own them.
But furthermore, the iPhone 4S is the best comparison against the Galaxy Tab 3 7.0. Both are Cortex-A9. Both are dual-core. The Tab 3 7.0 has a faster chip. The two displays have *exactly* the same number of pixels. And the iPhone 4S generally wins.
While I'd have included the additional devices if I *owned* those devices, the point was not to simply dogpile a new chip by dumping far more powerful chips at it, particularly when the focus was on the GPU architecture itself and not the Tab 3 7.0 as a device.
In 2000 - 2001, the Athlon / Athlon XP were far ahead of the P4. But from Jan 2002 to March 2003, Intel increased the P4's clock speed by 60% and introduced Hyper-Threading. SSE2 became more popular during the same time. As a result, the P4 was far ahead of Athlon XP by the spring of the year in most content creation, business, and definitely 3D rendering workloads. Now it's true that an awful lot of benchmark shenanigans were going on at the same time, and the difference between the two cores was much smaller in high-end gaming. But if you wanted the best 'all around' CPU, the P4 Northwood + HT at 2.8 - 3.2GHz was the way to go. Northwoods were also good overclockers -- it was common to pick up a 2.4GHz P4 and clock it to 3 - 3.2GHz with HT.
Athlon 64 kicked off the process of changing that, but what really did the trick was 1). Prescott's slide backwards as far as IPC and thermals and 2) The introduction of dual-core. It really was a one-two punch -- Intel couldn't put two Pentium 4 3.8GHz chips on a die together, so the 820 Prescott was just 3.2GHz. AMD, meanwhile, *could* put a pair of 2.4GHz Athlon 64's on a single chip. Combine that with Prescott's terrible efficiency, and suddenly the Athlon 64 was hammering into the P4 in every workload.
HPAA, from what I've seen, is taken pretty seriously. And the rules about what you can and can't disclose because of it are pretty strong. But how does this not flagrantly violate the protections it's supposed to offer? I'm not saying HPAA is perfect or implemented perfectly, but if you know what someone is taking, you know far more about them than if they simply see a doctor.
Seeing a general physician could mean you've got the flu, an infected cut, a torn muscle, or be the first step towards a cancer diagnosis. But if you're on Flexeril, you've probably got a muscle problem. If you're taking Enalapril, you've got a heart condition. If you're on Adderall, or Vicodin, or Cymbalta, you're being treated for ADD, pain, or depression. Some of those meds have off-label uses (Cymbalta is also used for fibromyalgia), but a quick check of Wikipedia against a script list will give you a darned good idea what someone is using a medication for.
There's no such thing as a half-citizen of a country. You are a citizen, a permanent legal immigrant, a temporary visitor with a visa, or an illegal immigrant. Taxation varies accordingly. There may even be a category or two in between those, like dual citizenship, but if you're a dual citizen, you aren't automatically assessed taxes in both locations -- other factors come into play.
What I suspect actually occurred was this: Almost all games report latency as an averaged value over n period of time. It's entirely possible that Dotcom's *average* latency went up 20-30ms because the network grabbing introduced substantially higher spikes. If a game takes one measure a second and reports the averaged value over 10 seconds, you can end up with a series like this:
100 100 180 100 150 100 100 180 100 100
Average Latency = 121ms.
So if his old latency was "100ms" and now it's "121ms" then Dotcom says "I immediately noticed a 20ms difference. But he didn't. What he actually noticed were the spikes up to 150 - 180ms that were then averaged out to produce a 20ms reported difference.
Sure, plenty of boards ship with a header. But *no* consumer board I'm aware of ships with the *chip.* Typical price looks like $65-$75 for the module itself.
So the answer to the question, I think, remains "All of them."
As the poster above explained, there's a requirement to meet an FCC-approved whitelist, but not a Dell-specific lockout. Every instance listed is an example of an issue that's created by technical incompatibility (PCIe over USB, for example) or FCC regulation, but not an example of Dell trying to force you to buy a Dell-branded product.
When did Dell ever build a system with a chip-based lockout on non-branded batteries?
pieces that prevent users from replacing things like the wifi in what is otherwise a standard slot. As a result if you get a system with a unsupported wifi card you can't replace it.
[Citation fucking needed]
Please, show me the special proprietary WiFi slot in Dell's latest $299 standardized-to-an-inch-of-existence system that only sends and receives electrical signals from Magical Dell WiFi.
TCM/TPM is often a business only feature. Consumer motherboards *frequently* don't support it. But full disk encryption programs can, and some do.
In other words, yes, you can totally opt out of buying a motherboard with TPM, including a top-of-the-line Haswell motherboard or an AMD chip, if that's your fancy. But if you buy one, you can also use it as a layer of security for a product like TrueCrypt (I do not know if TrueCrypt specifically supports it, that's just an example). And if you don't want it, you can turn it off.
"Show many ANY time in nature where plants have modified themselves with ANIMALS and FISH and then and ONLY then will I buy your bullshit, because in case you ain't been keeping up on current events they have been mixing everything from starfish to grasshopper into plants to increase yields and make them grow larger."
Of ~29,000 matched transcripts, ~10% were inferred from blastx matches to be horizontally acquired, mainly from eubacteria but also from fungi, protists, and algae. After allowing for possible sources of error, the rate of HGT is at least 8%-9%, a level significantly higher than other invertebrates.
They haven't had sex in 80 million years. 8-9% of their genome is made up of sequences captured from all of the above sources. They've got plant DNA right in the middle of their animal DNA, and they've got the DNA of multiple other microinvertebrates mixed up in there, too. They're also enormously resistant to radiation.
I believe this satisfies your criteria. But speaking to the larger point, you need to get over the idea that your DNA is some kind of pristine paradise. It's more like a hoarder's paradise shot through with fragments of viruses, bits and pieces from other species, and vast swaths of code that don't actually *do* anything -- they're just there. The degree of genetic bloat in a species varies enormously, the Norway Spruce has a genome of some 20 billion base pairs (we have just 3 billion). We both have the same number of protein-encoding genes -- about 30,000.
My point is not "There's no way this death COULD have been suspicious."
My point is "The reason a cause of death hasn't been released yet is because an autopsy and subsequent biochemical analysis takes time." There are blood tests to run, arteries to check, stomach contents to evaluate, etc, etc, etc. A lot of that is done by the doctor performing the autopsy, but confirmation takes a little while.
So while I acknowledge that the *death* may or may not turn out to be suspicious, the fact that we don't know the *cause* is not. Not yet.
Linus is also hilarious when he flames someone. Instead of taking sides, I prefer to recognize that she's perfectly within her rights to request more polite conversation. I think we can agree, she KNEW Linus wouldn't react with kittens and happiness. But polite dialog is worth striving for.
This doesn't have to be about sexism. Is politeness good? Yes. Is Linus often hilariously bunt? Yes. I think we can leave it to the grownups -- meaning the people involved -- to decide under what guidelines their own Listsrv is going to be run.
The post answers its own question.
on
How DRM Won
·
· Score: 1
From the submission: "meaningfully relating to the creative arts as a fan or consumer depends on being able to access the material in the first place. "
But you can.
This was the Giant Fucking Issue that the RIAA/MPAA have still only dimly figured out. People were perfectly willing to pay for convenience. "How do you compete with free?" You make paying more convenient than not-paying. So in 2000, could you listen to music digitally? Not legally -- not easily -- so people pirated. Then iTunes came along, and buying got easier -- so people bought.
Now, you can listen to that Rihanna track or NiN, or Justin Bieber any time you want. If you want to grab a version to mash into something else, that's easy. The services that are winning are winning because it's become easier to pay a pittance and grab a song from "the cloud" than to carry a digital file around with you or buy a CD. All three may well be preferable to pirating a copy when you don't know what you'll get or if a threatening letter will arrive six weeks later.
I'm not sure this meets the standard criteria for a laptop these days. That doesn't mean it isn't a valid, useful device, but if you think about the things most people buy a laptop to *do*, they're going to be secondary to the function of this machine. When you say "Laptop" people think "Sophisticated operating system, wide range of available software, media player, useful for software development, gaming machine (maybe), interfaces with wide range of modern portable devices, etc).
This sounds like it's got a rather different set of capabilities in mind. Apple probably wouldn't like "HackBook", but it seems to fit better.
An AMD staffer actually came up with it as a joke about ten years ago. It's become my go-to when discussing a concept. It's clearly ridiculous (so no chance of either leaking an actual technology or sowing FUD by appearing to leak something that isn't happening), but it refers back to real technologies as an anchor.
We have partially depleted and fully depleted SOI (PD-SOI and FD-SOI respectively) so PB-SOI is a good fit.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Can't Mathematica be told to stick to an 80-bit precision output? If you can specify that in software, it shouldn't matter what code the underlying platform runs on.
Yes, absolutely an attempt to drum up false news about Tesla.
Alternately, an accurate report of new guidelines released by the NHTSA YESTERDAY. As opposed to the claims and NHTSA unhappiness over the summer.
I am honestly not familiar enough with OpenCL implementations to even judge the situation there. But I thought the emergence of a new player interesting in its own right. Obviously good driver support and long-term OpenCL integration matters, but you've got to run before you can walk, and mid-to-low-end devices aren't going to be the first targets for the kinds of users that care about broad GPGPU support and want to play with the tricks it offers.
Alright, so, I don't normally comment on this sort of thing, but I'm going to make an exception. I'm the author of the article. I've written for hardware IT sites for 12 years. I've written for Hot Hardware since 2009.
Vivante contacted us in August and asked if we'd be interested in doing an article on the architecture. I looked over the slides and data, and said I'd like to see an example of the chip in action. They arranged for us to test a Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 7.0. This was done in exactly the same fashion as any other product review.
The Galaxy Tab 3 7.0 is objectively a pretty lousy tablet relative to other products in the market. It's an 8GB device with a dual-core Cortex-A9 at $199, when you can buy a 16GB Nexus 7 for $229. But remember -- the point of the article was to talk about Vivante, not the mediocre device the GPU is currently paired with. To be clear, the major problem here is *price.* If the Tab 3 7.0 was selling at $129, I'd call it a much stronger product and it would compare passing well against the non-advertising supported version of the Kindle Fire.
If I'd had more devices to compare against, I would have compared against them, but the only iOS product I own is an iPhone 4S that I bought out of my own pocket. I wrote the article to discuss an interesting, more modular approach to the GPU market, backed it up with standard benchmarks, and noted that faster, larger versions of the core were available. If I had access to those versions of the core, I would have benchmarked them.
I will be paid at a standard rate for this work, with no additional kicker from Vivante or Hot Hardware. I was not asked to take a particular stance on the product or its performance, and I chose my own benchmarks.
I maintain that it's interesting to see a new GPU vendor come on the scene, that building midrange parts that are designed for modest products is a viable strategy, and that a company doesn't need to deliver the fastest performance to build an acceptable product for a given price point. Vivante's work is still relatively new and so I am not surprised that its driver stack or OpenCL support is still in early stages.
Anyone claiming that this chip is automatically a Kepler, or PowerVR, or Adreno killer is mistaken. I did not evaluate the chip under such criteria and feel no obligation to rate it against chips it was not designed to face.
As the author: No, they weren't. I don't own them.
But furthermore, the iPhone 4S is the best comparison against the Galaxy Tab 3 7.0. Both are Cortex-A9. Both are dual-core. The Tab 3 7.0 has a faster chip. The two displays have *exactly* the same number of pixels. And the iPhone 4S generally wins.
While I'd have included the additional devices if I *owned* those devices, the point was not to simply dogpile a new chip by dumping far more powerful chips at it, particularly when the focus was on the GPU architecture itself and not the Tab 3 7.0 as a device.
As the author of the article:
In 2000 - 2001, the Athlon / Athlon XP were far ahead of the P4. But from Jan 2002 to March 2003, Intel increased the P4's clock speed by 60% and introduced Hyper-Threading. SSE2 became more popular during the same time. As a result, the P4 was far ahead of Athlon XP by the spring of the year in most content creation, business, and definitely 3D rendering workloads. Now it's true that an awful lot of benchmark shenanigans were going on at the same time, and the difference between the two cores was much smaller in high-end gaming. But if you wanted the best 'all around' CPU, the P4 Northwood + HT at 2.8 - 3.2GHz was the way to go. Northwoods were also good overclockers -- it was common to pick up a 2.4GHz P4 and clock it to 3 - 3.2GHz with HT.
Athlon 64 kicked off the process of changing that, but what really did the trick was 1). Prescott's slide backwards as far as IPC and thermals and 2) The introduction of dual-core. It really was a one-two punch -- Intel couldn't put two Pentium 4 3.8GHz chips on a die together, so the 820 Prescott was just 3.2GHz. AMD, meanwhile, *could* put a pair of 2.4GHz Athlon 64's on a single chip. Combine that with Prescott's terrible efficiency, and suddenly the Athlon 64 was hammering into the P4 in every workload.
HPAA, from what I've seen, is taken pretty seriously. And the rules about what you can and can't disclose because of it are pretty strong. But how does this not flagrantly violate the protections it's supposed to offer? I'm not saying HPAA is perfect or implemented perfectly, but if you know what someone is taking, you know far more about them than if they simply see a doctor.
Seeing a general physician could mean you've got the flu, an infected cut, a torn muscle, or be the first step towards a cancer diagnosis. But if you're on Flexeril, you've probably got a muscle problem. If you're taking Enalapril, you've got a heart condition. If you're on Adderall, or Vicodin, or Cymbalta, you're being treated for ADD, pain, or depression. Some of those meds have off-label uses (Cymbalta is also used for fibromyalgia), but a quick check of Wikipedia against a script list will give you a darned good idea what someone is using a medication for.
I really want to know who asked for this feature.
There's no such thing as a half-citizen of a country. You are a citizen, a permanent legal immigrant, a temporary visitor with a visa, or an illegal immigrant. Taxation varies accordingly. There may even be a category or two in between those, like dual citizenship, but if you're a dual citizen, you aren't automatically assessed taxes in both locations -- other factors come into play.
What I suspect actually occurred was this: Almost all games report latency as an averaged value over n period of time. It's entirely possible that Dotcom's *average* latency went up 20-30ms because the network grabbing introduced substantially higher spikes. If a game takes one measure a second and reports the averaged value over 10 seconds, you can end up with a series like this:
100
100
180
100
150
100
100
180
100
100
Average Latency = 121ms.
So if his old latency was "100ms" and now it's "121ms" then Dotcom says "I immediately noticed a 20ms difference. But he didn't. What he actually noticed were the spikes up to 150 - 180ms that were then averaged out to produce a 20ms reported difference.
Sure, plenty of boards ship with a header. But *no* consumer board I'm aware of ships with the *chip.* Typical price looks like $65-$75 for the module itself.
So the answer to the question, I think, remains "All of them."
As the poster above explained, there's a requirement to meet an FCC-approved whitelist, but not a Dell-specific lockout. Every instance listed is an example of an issue that's created by technical incompatibility (PCIe over USB, for example) or FCC regulation, but not an example of Dell trying to force you to buy a Dell-branded product.
When did Dell ever build a system with a chip-based lockout on non-branded batteries?
pieces that prevent users from replacing things like the wifi in what is otherwise a standard slot. As a result if you get a system with a unsupported wifi card you can't replace it.
[Citation fucking needed]
Please, show me the special proprietary WiFi slot in Dell's latest $299 standardized-to-an-inch-of-existence system that only sends and receives electrical signals from Magical Dell WiFi.
TCM/TPM is often a business only feature. Consumer motherboards *frequently* don't support it. But full disk encryption programs can, and some do.
In other words, yes, you can totally opt out of buying a motherboard with TPM, including a top-of-the-line Haswell motherboard or an AMD chip, if that's your fancy. But if you buy one, you can also use it as a layer of security for a product like TrueCrypt (I do not know if TrueCrypt specifically supports it, that's just an example). And if you don't want it, you can turn it off.
Right, but the solar panels *are* the selling point. And don't forget, this is supposedly ruggedized.
For just $350, you can buy a laptop with implausible capabilities at an improbable price point! But does it clean with the power of lemon?
Yes. Yes it does.
"Show many ANY time in nature where plants have modified themselves with ANIMALS and FISH and then and ONLY then will I buy your bullshit, because in case you ain't been keeping up on current events they have been mixing everything from starfish to grasshopper into plants to increase yields and make them grow larger."
Challenge Accepted.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23166508
Bdelloids!
Of ~29,000 matched transcripts, ~10% were inferred from blastx matches to be horizontally acquired, mainly from eubacteria but also from fungi, protists, and algae. After allowing for possible sources of error, the rate of HGT is at least 8%-9%, a level significantly higher than other invertebrates.
They haven't had sex in 80 million years. 8-9% of their genome is made up of sequences captured from all of the above sources. They've got plant DNA right in the middle of their animal DNA, and they've got the DNA of multiple other microinvertebrates mixed up in there, too. They're also enormously resistant to radiation.
I believe this satisfies your criteria. But speaking to the larger point, you need to get over the idea that your DNA is some kind of pristine paradise. It's more like a hoarder's paradise shot through with fragments of viruses, bits and pieces from other species, and vast swaths of code that don't actually *do* anything -- they're just there. The degree of genetic bloat in a species varies enormously, the Norway Spruce has a genome of some 20 billion base pairs (we have just 3 billion). We both have the same number of protein-encoding genes -- about 30,000.
My point is not "There's no way this death COULD have been suspicious."
My point is "The reason a cause of death hasn't been released yet is because an autopsy and subsequent biochemical analysis takes time." There are blood tests to run, arteries to check, stomach contents to evaluate, etc, etc, etc. A lot of that is done by the doctor performing the autopsy, but confirmation takes a little while.
So while I acknowledge that the *death* may or may not turn out to be suspicious, the fact that we don't know the *cause* is not. Not yet.
It doesn't sound suspicious at all if you think about it. It takes an autopsy to determine cause of death, and that takes a few days at least.
California weather isn't actually good for Alaska.
She was outed, and she's pissed about it.
Linus is also hilarious when he flames someone. Instead of taking sides, I prefer to recognize that she's perfectly within her rights to request more polite conversation. I think we can agree, she KNEW Linus wouldn't react with kittens and happiness. But polite dialog is worth striving for.
This doesn't have to be about sexism. Is politeness good? Yes. Is Linus often hilariously bunt? Yes. I think we can leave it to the grownups -- meaning the people involved -- to decide under what guidelines their own Listsrv is going to be run.
From the submission: "meaningfully relating to the creative arts as a fan or consumer depends on being able to access the material in the first place. "
But you can.
This was the Giant Fucking Issue that the RIAA/MPAA have still only dimly figured out. People were perfectly willing to pay for convenience. "How do you compete with free?" You make paying more convenient than not-paying. So in 2000, could you listen to music digitally? Not legally -- not easily -- so people pirated. Then iTunes came along, and buying got easier -- so people bought.
Now, you can listen to that Rihanna track or NiN, or Justin Bieber any time you want. If you want to grab a version to mash into something else, that's easy. The services that are winning are winning because it's become easier to pay a pittance and grab a song from "the cloud" than to carry a digital file around with you or buy a CD. All three may well be preferable to pirating a copy when you don't know what you'll get or if a threatening letter will arrive six weeks later.
I'm not sure this meets the standard criteria for a laptop these days. That doesn't mean it isn't a valid, useful device, but if you think about the things most people buy a laptop to *do*, they're going to be secondary to the function of this machine. When you say "Laptop" people think "Sophisticated operating system, wide range of available software, media player, useful for software development, gaming machine (maybe), interfaces with wide range of modern portable devices, etc).
This sounds like it's got a rather different set of capabilities in mind. Apple probably wouldn't like "HackBook", but it seems to fit better.
An AMD staffer actually came up with it as a joke about ten years ago. It's become my go-to when discussing a concept. It's clearly ridiculous (so no chance of either leaking an actual technology or sowing FUD by appearing to leak something that isn't happening), but it refers back to real technologies as an anchor.
We have partially depleted and fully depleted SOI (PD-SOI and FD-SOI respectively) so PB-SOI is a good fit. ;)