There's nothing legal or technical preventing someone from buying a handful chips from any of a half-dozen ARM licensees and fabricating the rest of a system around it, either for personal or commercial use. Etching and populating a multi-layer board with SMT components has been a bit of a stumbling block in the past, but there's several rapid-turn, small-order board fabricators online now that can handle that.
There's no 300 MHz ARM system with 128 MB of RAM being mass-produced and marketed, because there's historically no market for one as an Intel competitor. Raspberry Pi seems to think that ARM has matured enough and there's a large enough niche market to give it a go though.
You claim that the Raspberry Pi proves Doctorow wrong. Well, tablet computers prove him right. And smartphones, too. These are the two personal computer forms which dominate today's market, and will continue to dominate in the future. The market for laptops is shrinking while the market for tablets has increased 42%, according to some estimates Apple is becoming the world's dominant computer platform, with the dominant product being a closed, locked-down, walled garden of a personal computer.
No, it doesn't prove his point. What would prove his point is someone proposing legislation that made manufacturing, selling, or owning a device that allowed the user to compile and run their own code illegal.
That space is dominated by ARM chips, and there's no general-purpose PCs made with ARM CPUs.
That's what the Raspberry Pi is. The whole point is we're at the point now you can grab an "embedded" chip off the shelf and make a half decent general purpose Linux box out of it now. ARM is finally to the point where it's got the horsepower to run some GP workloads comparable to what you had on the desktop from Intel a few years ago.
I've never seen an x86-64 used in an embedded system; they're too power-hungry and expensive for anything other than things like >$100k test instruments.
You aren't looking in the right markets. It's nowhere near the volume of ARM and PPC, but there are companies that need x86 power for appliance workloads that aren't "General Purpose" in the sense that they run customer code, generally running BSD derivatives. My employer is one of them.
And the computers used in data centers aren't "embedded", they're servers.
Didn't say they were. They are largely running custom enterprise code to support a business, or somebody's SaaS code on the web. It's a market that's not going to take kindly to any apocalyptic scenario being discussed here.
Only in the short term. In the long term devices such as this, and the tools needed to work with them will be strictly controlled and only licensed individuals will get access
.
You couldn't even get MS and Apple to back that bill.
The app store did at least $2 Billion in direct revenue for Apple this year, and that's not including $80 Billion for the devices it actually sold. Is anyone really going to argue they wouldn't understand that destroying the hobbyiest programmer wouldn't be slitting their own throat? Without guys willing to write apps, none of these guys make any money, and if you kill the garage hacker, you kill most of the software engineering profession. There aren't going to be that many kids going into CS if the first time they touch a compiler is when they're 19 in CS 103 after a government background check and a license, and the ones that do, probably aren't going to be any good.
Dumb as most congressional representatives are, there can't be that many that wouldn't understand any bill like that would be economic suicide.
Except nobody's proposed it, it's a paranoid delusional end game that is economically impossible.
Point me to any piece of legislation on THOMAS that would prohibit selling or possessing CPUs that can run arbitrary code, or requires a license to own a compiler, or any other of these dystopian futures that would put every software developer on the planet in the unemployment line or prison overnight, or require every functioning Intel CPU currently installed to go to the crusher.
At best, the content industry is saying we're going to build content protection into hardware, and if you want access to our properties, you'll use hardware that respects that.
Most processors sold today (by individual units shipped) aren't used in a general purpose computer or even an appliance that would be considered one. They're used in embedded applications, but it's the same processor (or very closely related) to the ones that are used for general purposes.
Most of those embedded users are squeezing every dime they can out of component costs, and those companies put together are far bigger than big content is. Nobody, including the chip fabs themselves, would stand for adding features to anything that looks like a CPU that would get in the way and drive up prices for the majority of their consumers. The latest x86-64 is used fairly heavily by embedded systems these days, plus the millions of them churning away in data centers around the globe on general purpose servers running every flavor of OS ever ported to it, making billions for their owners.
Does anyone really think Intel would stand by and watch 75% of their market get either obliterated overnight or priced out the market, that Amazon would let AWS become illegal, that any congressman on the planet wouldn't have hundreds of constituents explaining how they built businesses around writing software?
As long as they are legal. That was the point of the speech.
Which is a law nobody's remotely proposing, nor one that would fly.
There's about a dozen mainstream CPUs on the market today that can be integrated into a workable computer by practically anybody with a Newark catalog and a overnight board fab in their bookmarks, which the Raspberry Pi guys are proving. The reason there's so many is precisely because they are used everywhere; there's thousands of companies now that integrate them into their own appliances and more starting every day. Prohibiting the sale of general purpose CPUs or imposing mandatory content control features in anything that smells like a processor would bring the economy to a halt overnight.
You think Intel would be stupid enough to not lobby every dime they had against such a bill? The alternative would be the death of the company.
Note that Apple only sold XCode 4 to Snow Leopard users who weren't otherwise paying members of either the OS X or the iOS developer programs, ostensibly for SOX compliance reasons. Previously, major releases of XCode always coincided with major OS X releases and simply weren't available for earlier releases, and even after they started selling XCode 4, XCode 3.foo was still on the Snow Leopard discs.
XCode 4 is again free in the app store, as long as you've already bought Lion either as an upgrade or via new hardware.
XCode is still free with OS X today, long after Apple absorbed NeXT. Plus, Apple has dumped plenty of resources into XCode and Cocoa every year to make it easier and easier to do simple programming tasks of the sort which is being discussed, things like Core Data and Bindings on top of Interface Builder.
Nobody is selling music with DRM on it anymore. The cds that I bought over the years have long been ripped and sit in a crate in the garage that hasn't been opened in in a long time.
As for the rest, of course there's still a need for optical drives for a lot of people and will be for some time to come. What there isnt anymore, is the need for every computer sold to have one permanently attached. Nobody's going to stop offering them on all of their desktop lines anytime soon. A lot of laptop users may keep an external in the drawer a home, but there's no good reason to cary the weight and bulk on a real portable every day for most of us.
Slot loaders make pretty terrible coffee cup holders, and I doubt there's too many laptop manufacturers shipping tray loading optical drives anymore. Even on desktops I think a lot of vendors are using slot loaders thes days.
I would posit that for the majority of people who spend enough time on commercial airplanes in a year that staying entertained is a problem, the cost of a tablet is not that prohibitive; but ripping to a hard drive makes just as much sense for laptop use too.
Not only can I carry enough ripped DVDs in 32GB to stay entertained on a round trip cross country flight and a day or two in the hotel, but it's a he'll of a lot more convenient than lugging around a box set or two of DVDs, particularly now that a i5 or i7 series machine can encode a hour of DVD quality video in about 15 minutes or less. And iTunes rentals is actually a fairly viable option sometimes for some people.
Handbrake it to MP4 before I leave. And more likely than not, copy it over to a tablet that's easier to hold and watch in cattle class than breaking out a full blown laptop.
Why would I want to waste battery spinning a DVD around?
Re:Hey, that guy smells funny! Let's get him!
on
The RMS Tour Rider
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· Score: 1
Umm, yes. When the only notable accomplishments he's done are 30 years old at this point, and all he does now is go on tour telling people that anything anyone's done with computers since then, that actually enable the common person to use them and do things they enjoy, are evil?
emacs and gcc aren't a usable computer system for 99.9999% of the population. Stop telling me my iPhone is evil, and go find an actual productive way to create a world where free software is just as usable for the day-to-day tasks commercial authors have figured out how to provide, and can be an innovative force in the future. Just doing a half-assed job copying Apple and Microsoft 5 - 10 years after they ship isn't useful to the rest of us.
There's no company on the planet that can guarantee they have a 0% mortality rate within the warranty period of something as complex as a modern laptop. That's why there's a warranty.
If you're aware of one that guarantees anything above and beyond replacement in the off chance you happen to be in the unlucky 1%, I'd love to know who it is.
most importantly the SSMEs were routinely used well past their rated thrust efficiency (you hear shuttle pilots being ordered to go to "104%" or higher on most launches)
It's not quite that simple. 100% was the original design spec, which they can exceed safely once they started testing real hardware, but they didn't want to invalidate all the prior test data: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSME#Thrust_specifications
They would have to be torn down and re-built after every flight pretty much regardless, simply because of the conditions they operate under. They also aren't tied to a particular orbiter, and NASA has more than 9 in inventory. They generally remove them as soon as the orbiter gets into the OPF, reinstall a different set that's already been inspected and tested for the next flight, and prep the used ones for a later mission.
With more and more cars moving to run flats in lieu of carrying a spare, that's not as true as it use to be. A set of run flats for a Mini Cooper can cost significantly more than a new set for a larger car or truck that can carry a spare, and the run flats tend to wear out faster as well.
NeXT has evolved into one of the top two mobile OSes on the planet. It's also one of the few desktop UNIX OSes left on the market, and probably the largest in terms of current sales volume in recent quarters. Most companies would love to have failures like that.
Reports are it's in the beta. There's no API for it (as with most of the system configuration settings); it wasn't highlighted in the release notes since these betas are aimed at third-party developers getting their hands on things to integrate into their apps.
Even the original iPhone could pull up another app in the foreground while on a call, though you had to be on WiFi for remote data access until the 3G came out. Multitasking in 4.0 only applies to 3rd-party apps.
The people in this thread "struggling to find the utility" of simultaneous voice and data seem more like existing Verizon customers who have never had the ability than the poor misguided existing iphone users you're trying to defame.
One of the guidelines for submitting to the app store is x86 / x86_64 binaries only. Fat binaries with PPC code segments aren't allowed.
There doesn't appear to be any intent from Apple to backport it into anything older than Snow Leopard, and even if they did add it to Leopard, it would be Intel only.
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There's nothing legal or technical preventing someone from buying a handful chips from any of a half-dozen ARM licensees and fabricating the rest of a system around it, either for personal or commercial use. Etching and populating a multi-layer board with SMT components has been a bit of a stumbling block in the past, but there's several rapid-turn, small-order board fabricators online now that can handle that.
There's no 300 MHz ARM system with 128 MB of RAM being mass-produced and marketed, because there's historically no market for one as an Intel competitor. Raspberry Pi seems to think that ARM has matured enough and there's a large enough niche market to give it a go though.
You claim that the Raspberry Pi proves Doctorow wrong. Well, tablet computers prove him right. And smartphones, too. These are the two personal computer forms which dominate today's market, and will continue to dominate in the future. The market for laptops is shrinking while the market for tablets has increased 42%, according to some estimates Apple is becoming the world's dominant computer platform, with the dominant product being a closed, locked-down, walled garden of a personal computer.
No, it doesn't prove his point. What would prove his point is someone proposing legislation that made manufacturing, selling, or owning a device that allowed the user to compile and run their own code illegal.
That space is dominated by ARM chips, and there's no general-purpose PCs made with ARM CPUs.
That's what the Raspberry Pi is. The whole point is we're at the point now you can grab an "embedded" chip off the shelf and make a half decent general purpose Linux box out of it now. ARM is finally to the point where it's got the horsepower to run some GP workloads comparable to what you had on the desktop from Intel a few years ago.
I've never seen an x86-64 used in an embedded system; they're too power-hungry and expensive for anything other than things like >$100k test instruments.
You aren't looking in the right markets. It's nowhere near the volume of ARM and PPC, but there are companies that need x86 power for appliance workloads that aren't "General Purpose" in the sense that they run customer code, generally running BSD derivatives. My employer is one of them.
And the computers used in data centers aren't "embedded", they're servers.
Didn't say they were. They are largely running custom enterprise code to support a business, or somebody's SaaS code on the web. It's a market that's not going to take kindly to any apocalyptic scenario being discussed here.
Only in the short term. In the long term devices such as this, and the tools needed to work with them will be strictly controlled and only licensed individuals will get access
.
You couldn't even get MS and Apple to back that bill.
The app store did at least $2 Billion in direct revenue for Apple this year, and that's not including $80 Billion for the devices it actually sold. Is anyone really going to argue they wouldn't understand that destroying the hobbyiest programmer wouldn't be slitting their own throat? Without guys willing to write apps, none of these guys make any money, and if you kill the garage hacker, you kill most of the software engineering profession. There aren't going to be that many kids going into CS if the first time they touch a compiler is when they're 19 in CS 103 after a government background check and a license, and the ones that do, probably aren't going to be any good.
Dumb as most congressional representatives are, there can't be that many that wouldn't understand any bill like that would be economic suicide.
Except nobody's proposed it, it's a paranoid delusional end game that is economically impossible.
Point me to any piece of legislation on THOMAS that would prohibit selling or possessing CPUs that can run arbitrary code, or requires a license to own a compiler, or any other of these dystopian futures that would put every software developer on the planet in the unemployment line or prison overnight, or require every functioning Intel CPU currently installed to go to the crusher.
At best, the content industry is saying we're going to build content protection into hardware, and if you want access to our properties, you'll use hardware that respects that.
Most processors sold today (by individual units shipped) aren't used in a general purpose computer or even an appliance that would be considered one. They're used in embedded applications, but it's the same processor (or very closely related) to the ones that are used for general purposes.
Most of those embedded users are squeezing every dime they can out of component costs, and those companies put together are far bigger than big content is. Nobody, including the chip fabs themselves, would stand for adding features to anything that looks like a CPU that would get in the way and drive up prices for the majority of their consumers. The latest x86-64 is used fairly heavily by embedded systems these days, plus the millions of them churning away in data centers around the globe on general purpose servers running every flavor of OS ever ported to it, making billions for their owners.
Does anyone really think Intel would stand by and watch 75% of their market get either obliterated overnight or priced out the market, that Amazon would let AWS become illegal, that any congressman on the planet wouldn't have hundreds of constituents explaining how they built businesses around writing software?
As long as they are legal. That was the point of the speech.
Which is a law nobody's remotely proposing, nor one that would fly.
There's about a dozen mainstream CPUs on the market today that can be integrated into a workable computer by practically anybody with a Newark catalog and a overnight board fab in their bookmarks, which the Raspberry Pi guys are proving. The reason there's so many is precisely because they are used everywhere; there's thousands of companies now that integrate them into their own appliances and more starting every day. Prohibiting the sale of general purpose CPUs or imposing mandatory content control features in anything that smells like a processor would bring the economy to a halt overnight.
You think Intel would be stupid enough to not lobby every dime they had against such a bill? The alternative would be the death of the company.
Note that Apple only sold XCode 4 to Snow Leopard users who weren't otherwise paying members of either the OS X or the iOS developer programs, ostensibly for SOX compliance reasons. Previously, major releases of XCode always coincided with major OS X releases and simply weren't available for earlier releases, and even after they started selling XCode 4, XCode 3.foo was still on the Snow Leopard discs.
XCode 4 is again free in the app store, as long as you've already bought Lion either as an upgrade or via new hardware.
XCode is still free with OS X today, long after Apple absorbed NeXT. Plus, Apple has dumped plenty of resources into XCode and Cocoa every year to make it easier and easier to do simple programming tasks of the sort which is being discussed, things like Core Data and Bindings on top of Interface Builder.
In the US, the Consumer Products Safety Commission has been waging a war fireworks precursors for over half a decade now.
Nobody is selling music with DRM on it anymore. The cds that I bought over the years have long been ripped and sit in a crate in the garage that hasn't been opened in in a long time.
As for the rest, of course there's still a need for optical drives for a lot of people and will be for some time to come. What there isnt anymore, is the need for every computer sold to have one permanently attached. Nobody's going to stop offering them on all of their desktop lines anytime soon. A lot of laptop users may keep an external in the drawer a home, but there's no good reason to cary the weight and bulk on a real portable every day for most of us.
Slot loaders make pretty terrible coffee cup holders, and I doubt there's too many laptop manufacturers shipping tray loading optical drives anymore. Even on desktops I think a lot of vendors are using slot loaders thes days.
I would posit that for the majority of people who spend enough time on commercial airplanes in a year that staying entertained is a problem, the cost of a tablet is not that prohibitive; but ripping to a hard drive makes just as much sense for laptop use too.
Not only can I carry enough ripped DVDs in 32GB to stay entertained on a round trip cross country flight and a day or two in the hotel, but it's a he'll of a lot more convenient than lugging around a box set or two of DVDs, particularly now that a i5 or i7 series machine can encode a hour of DVD quality video in about 15 minutes or less. And iTunes rentals is actually a fairly viable option sometimes for some people.
Handbrake it to MP4 before I leave. And more likely than not, copy it over to a tablet that's easier to hold and watch in cattle class than breaking out a full blown laptop.
Why would I want to waste battery spinning a DVD around?
Umm, yes. When the only notable accomplishments he's done are 30 years old at this point, and all he does now is go on tour telling people that anything anyone's done with computers since then, that actually enable the common person to use them and do things they enjoy, are evil?
emacs and gcc aren't a usable computer system for 99.9999% of the population. Stop telling me my iPhone is evil, and go find an actual productive way to create a world where free software is just as usable for the day-to-day tasks commercial authors have figured out how to provide, and can be an innovative force in the future. Just doing a half-assed job copying Apple and Microsoft 5 - 10 years after they ship isn't useful to the rest of us.
Brakes. A device that stops the motion of a moving part is called a brake.
What about those of us with poor neglected VLB slots? Huh? Who's going to give us an upgrade?
There's no company on the planet that can guarantee they have a 0% mortality rate within the warranty period of something as complex as a modern laptop. That's why there's a warranty.
If you're aware of one that guarantees anything above and beyond replacement in the off chance you happen to be in the unlucky 1%, I'd love to know who it is.
most importantly the SSMEs were routinely used well past their rated thrust efficiency (you hear shuttle pilots being ordered to go to "104%" or higher on most launches)
It's not quite that simple. 100% was the original design spec, which they can exceed safely once they started testing real hardware, but they didn't want to invalidate all the prior test data: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSME#Thrust_specifications
They would have to be torn down and re-built after every flight pretty much regardless, simply because of the conditions they operate under. They also aren't tied to a particular orbiter, and NASA has more than 9 in inventory. They generally remove them as soon as the orbiter gets into the OPF, reinstall a different set that's already been inspected and tested for the next flight, and prep the used ones for a later mission.
With more and more cars moving to run flats in lieu of carrying a spare, that's not as true as it use to be. A set of run flats for a Mini Cooper can cost significantly more than a new set for a larger car or truck that can carry a spare, and the run flats tend to wear out faster as well.
OS X has been the top selling Unix-based workstation OS for half a decade now.
They already moved into the market IRIX and SunOS left behind a long time ago.
NeXT has evolved into one of the top two mobile OSes on the planet. It's also one of the few desktop UNIX OSes left on the market, and probably the largest in terms of current sales volume in recent quarters. Most companies would love to have failures like that.
Reports are it's in the beta. There's no API for it (as with most of the system configuration settings); it wasn't highlighted in the release notes since these betas are aimed at third-party developers getting their hands on things to integrate into their apps.
Even the original iPhone could pull up another app in the foreground while on a call, though you had to be on WiFi for remote data access until the 3G came out. Multitasking in 4.0 only applies to 3rd-party apps.
The people in this thread "struggling to find the utility" of simultaneous voice and data seem more like existing Verizon customers who have never had the ability than the poor misguided existing iphone users you're trying to defame.
One of the guidelines for submitting to the app store is x86 / x86_64 binaries only. Fat binaries with PPC code segments aren't allowed.
There doesn't appear to be any intent from Apple to backport it into anything older than Snow Leopard, and even if they did add it to Leopard, it would be Intel only.