I believe the cross licensing goes way beyond just the instruction set - that's public knowledge, you wouldn't be able to write a compiler if you didn't know what instruction did what!
I think there are all kinds of implementation details to actually processing the instructions that are involved in the patents (on both sides).
Now that I think about it, a lot of these processing details are probably infringed upon by other non-x86 chips, there are only so many ways to do things... there must be other patent licensing deals out there that don't make the news as often as the x86 lawsuits.
Since there aren't standard sizes, the only non-OEM ones are the incredibly cheap fakes. They'll probably hold a charge, but are they safe? People should not fool around when it comes to Li-On.
After a couple years, a new OEM battery costs more than the cellphone is worth... so, the only practical thing to do is get a new phone. That isn't good for the planet or my wallet.
If they could standardize on a half-dozen cellphone battery sizes, hopefully Energizer or Duracell would come out with non-OEM batteries for say, $20. I would trust them.
We spend a few hundred a month on Google Adwords (both on search results pages and the 3rd party "content" pages) on a fairly niche set of terms for our web based bingo card generator. I've noticed recently that our bids, which I haven't changed in months, have bought us both higher ad placements and lower costs per click. Similarly, the advertising revenue from the publisher side of AdSense (ads we show) on the same website have dipped a bit. All of these hint that other people have pulled out of the market. Granted, you have to take this with a grain of salt -- we're in a very niche market.
Still, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that in this economy, overall, more people are going to cut back on advertising budgets rather than expand. I think that in the case of Google, it's hidden by their growing market share and the growth of the Internet.
I noticed the VirtualBox 2.1 release a day or two ago and saw the 64 bit on 32 bit OS listed as a feature... but I couldn't figure out if it's useful to me.
Is 64/32 only useful for development and testing of 64 bit software while running 32 bit Windows? (I assume that most people running Linux would switch to 64 bit hosts...)
Or is it actually faster to run a 64 bit Linux VM on 32 Bit Windows than it would be to run a 32 bit version of the same Linux distribution on 32 bit Windows?
I don't think it's of any use to the average home user or small business. Too much weird stuff can happen on a run of the mill network. But, if you're someone like the NSA where every device is scrutinized closely and the network itself is managed tightly, an unexpected slow down at some layer of some stream of network traffic could be useful in finding a snoop... at the very least, it'll highlight potential bottlenecks in the network.
I just found out about this yesterday, and I have not tried it myself yet, but apparently, Seagate has an OEM version of TrueImage for use with Seagate hard drives. They call it "Seagate DiscWizard".
I really don't know if they've kept the cool live disc image feature or not... I'll find out later today when I try it.
To me, the critical difference between Sprint/Clearwire's WiMax and competing cellular data is that they don't care about VOIP. It's A-OK. How long until Verizon allows VOIP (or unlimited voice time) on their plans? Plus, latency is reasonable in WiMax so VOIP will actually work. This hasn't been mentioned much -- in TFA, it's covered towards the end.
Yes, CDs and DVDs have error correction built in, but they don't do much if you happen to a nice scratch that follows the spin of the disk. I.e. a moderate scratch from the outside to the inside of a CD is reasonably OK for data, but a scratch the other way will kill your data much more easily.
For a while I was using PAR2, yes, the PAR2 used on USENET, to beef up the safety of my DVD backups of my home data. Unfortunately, PAR2 never really evolved to handle subdirectories properly, which mattered when I wanted an off-site backup of my digital photos.
Eventually, I started using ICE ECC, http://www.ice-graphics.com/ICEECC/IndexE.html, free as in beer, to enhance my DVD backups of stuff like photos and data. IIRC, I tested it's ability to reconstruct missing files and it seemed OK at the time.
Anyways, that's my $0.02 on Reed-Solomon for backups.
If both companies couldn't survive, the market has a fix for it. Whoever is weakest goes bankrupt first. Then someone buys it for pennies on the dollar, and tries again. This time, without debt, it probably undercuts the survivor, and runs them into bankruptcy too.
The second time around, both companies make money. The original shareholders of both loose everything. And the debt holders loose a lot, but not quite everything.
I know that I don't like monopolies, in general. But I'm not entirely sure that I like the way bankruptcy often plays out either.
In this case, I don't really care - it's satellite radio, not a necessity. But as a share holder... I worry when competitors of companies I invest in go under, it isn't necessarily a guranteed win in the long run.
Another related demand on oil is that China is building a strategic petroleum reserve, similar to the one in the USA. Now, in theory, that build-out is still ongoing, and the fill rate is relatively slow. However, given the extreme importance of the diesel supplies during the Olympics, I would not be surprised if the Chinese SPR is being built and filled a lot quicker than publicized.
China's SPR barely gets mentioned in the media, but it's huge, though, smaller than that of the USA. They aim to store the equivalent of several weeks of their crude imports.
Is it really enough to affect the world price? Who knows, certainly not I.
It's easy to say XML is slow... no one ever planned it to be fast! The reason for XML's existence is to be human readable (especially by people who are used to reading HTML). That's it. People expecting it to be fast are using the wrong tool for the job.
Interesting idea, but IMHO, these will be obsolete fairly soon. Plug-in hybrid cars are right around the corner, and they're going to use up a lot of off-peak power - I think. I've never seen the math, but I imagine that moving a car 20 miles on batteries is equivalent to a whole lot of light bulbs, computers, and TV hours.
That's the exact same target power that compressed air, and gravity storage (i.e. pump water uphill) are meant to store for peak time.
Also, solar power, the other power plant of the future doesn't work very well at night. So, for the overall grid, the peak aren't going to be as dramatic.
Sure, it doesn't show up on servers or workstations anymore, but FAT is alive and kicking on every digital camera, most Flash drives, and many cell phones and PDA's. I'm waiting for the day when the FAT table gets screwed up on one of these devices. I know it'll happen some day... but when and where...
AFAIK, Sprint and Clearwire and other WiMax wannabees are providing an alternative to cable and DSL and also cellphones. Sprint doesn't care about undercutting DSL prices, because they don't really do that anyway, (at least in most markets)?
Don't take this as a strong recommendation, though, I'm generally satisfied and would get the kit again. Mind you, I'm biased. It's better for me to support fewer products.
I've setup three retail stores with security cameras for a small retail chain. At the first store we tried a camera at, almost as an experiment, we used a TCP/IP one from D-Link. About $200. It was OK as a deterrent, but not really all that useful if we actually had to use the footage for identifying people.
The next stores used a kit which bundled 4 analog cameras with a PCI DVR card. Think TV tuner with 4 inputs. The whole kit was about $500. It's great but "only" 640x480. The newer ones have modest IR support for night-time recording. The DVR software provides remote TCP/IP access, though, via a proprietary client.
From my admittedly limited experience, you get better value from analog cameras -- the market is much bigger for them, so they're higher volume, and therefore cheaper. Plus, the camera's are interchangeable (it's just analog, afterall). You can mix and match easily and get standardized lenses and filters, etc.
This reminds me of the c:\program files\ as a default install folder. I think it started with Windows 95. I read somewhere, years after the launch, that it was specifically chosen to force programmers to handle long file names properly.
Funny, even now, I usually create a c:\programs\ directory for everything that doesn't have a proper installer. 10 years and counting.
IMO, the UAC did not have to be as annoying as it is. All they needed was a "allow admin stuff to happen for 5 minutes" dialog so that installing a program would only take one prompt. Too smart for their own good...
IMHO, Nvidia is stuck as the odd-man out. When integrated chipsets and GPU-CPU hybrids can easily handle full-HD playback, the market for discrete GPUs falls and falls some more. Sure, discrete will always be faster, just like a Porsche is faster than a Toyota, but who makes more money (by a mile)?
Is Creative still around? Last I heard, they were making MP3 players...
Out here we've sunken many ships to make underwater habitats for fish. The boats are stripped of oils, paints, and hazardous stuff before sinking -- well, nowadays, anyway. Great for scuba divers to look at, so I've been told.
I think Amazon wins here with EC2. It sounds like Google's option might be easier to start up, but it greatly limits the buyout options down the line. VC's will prefer Amazon's EC2. If venture capitalists prefer Amazon's web services, then startups will prefer Amazon.
Besides, persistent storage and redundancies will eventually become "easy" as following a tutorial for EC2 + S3 + SimpleDB. I haven't looked, but I expect they're out there already.
To me, the ATI thing is a long term piece of the puzzle. AMD needed a Centrino competitor, a CPU + Chipset that they alone owned and could optimize. Laptop sales as a percentage of computer sales are only going to go up and it's very very hard for AMD to compete there without the whole package.
IMHO, the platform for laptops of chipset + CPU are going to make the ATI purchase look real smart this year. Much further down the line, the GPU and CPU are inevitablly going to be linked much more closely than they are now. AMD needed some baseline components to make sure they were in the game in 5 years.*
But, they paid cash for the ATi shares. In hindsight, that was incredibly bad. Now, on top of poor sales from the CPU side, they've got a lot more interest expenses. But hindsight is 20/20...
* Off-topic, look out NVidia, you're getting squeezed out of the game from all angles.
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I believe the cross licensing goes way beyond just the instruction set - that's public knowledge, you wouldn't be able to write a compiler if you didn't know what instruction did what!
I think there are all kinds of implementation details to actually processing the instructions that are involved in the patents (on both sides).
Now that I think about it, a lot of these processing details are probably infringed upon by other non-x86 chips, there are only so many ways to do things... there must be other patent licensing deals out there that don't make the news as often as the x86 lawsuits.
I hate the battery situation for cell phones.
Since there aren't standard sizes, the only non-OEM ones are the incredibly cheap fakes. They'll probably hold a charge, but are they safe? People should not fool around when it comes to Li-On.
After a couple years, a new OEM battery costs more than the cellphone is worth... so, the only practical thing to do is get a new phone. That isn't good for the planet or my wallet.
If they could standardize on a half-dozen cellphone battery sizes, hopefully Energizer or Duracell would come out with non-OEM batteries for say, $20. I would trust them.
It's not a new concept... labeling media goes all the way back to cassette tapes. (Eight tracks are before my time, were they writeable?)
We spend a few hundred a month on Google Adwords (both on search results pages and the 3rd party "content" pages) on a fairly niche set of terms for our web based bingo card generator. I've noticed recently that our bids, which I haven't changed in months, have bought us both higher ad placements and lower costs per click. Similarly, the advertising revenue from the publisher side of AdSense (ads we show) on the same website have dipped a bit. All of these hint that other people have pulled out of the market. Granted, you have to take this with a grain of salt -- we're in a very niche market.
Still, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that in this economy, overall, more people are going to cut back on advertising budgets rather than expand. I think that in the case of Google, it's hidden by their growing market share and the growth of the Internet.
I noticed the VirtualBox 2.1 release a day or two ago and saw the 64 bit on 32 bit OS listed as a feature... but I couldn't figure out if it's useful to me.
Is 64/32 only useful for development and testing of 64 bit software while running 32 bit Windows? (I assume that most people running Linux would switch to 64 bit hosts...)
Or is it actually faster to run a 64 bit Linux VM on 32 Bit Windows than it would be to run a 32 bit version of the same Linux distribution on 32 bit Windows?
I don't think it's of any use to the average home user or small business. Too much weird stuff can happen on a run of the mill network. But, if you're someone like the NSA where every device is scrutinized closely and the network itself is managed tightly, an unexpected slow down at some layer of some stream of network traffic could be useful in finding a snoop... at the very least, it'll highlight potential bottlenecks in the network.
I just found out about this yesterday, and I have not tried it myself yet, but apparently, Seagate has an OEM version of TrueImage for use with Seagate hard drives. They call it "Seagate DiscWizard". I really don't know if they've kept the cool live disc image feature or not... I'll find out later today when I try it.
To me, the critical difference between Sprint/Clearwire's WiMax and competing cellular data is that they don't care about VOIP. It's A-OK. How long until Verizon allows VOIP (or unlimited voice time) on their plans? Plus, latency is reasonable in WiMax so VOIP will actually work. This hasn't been mentioned much -- in TFA, it's covered towards the end.
Yes, CDs and DVDs have error correction built in, but they don't do much if you happen to a nice scratch that follows the spin of the disk. I.e. a moderate scratch from the outside to the inside of a CD is reasonably OK for data, but a scratch the other way will kill your data much more easily.
For a while I was using PAR2, yes, the PAR2 used on USENET, to beef up the safety of my DVD backups of my home data. Unfortunately, PAR2 never really evolved to handle subdirectories properly, which mattered when I wanted an off-site backup of my digital photos.
Eventually, I started using ICE ECC, http://www.ice-graphics.com/ICEECC/IndexE.html, free as in beer, to enhance my DVD backups of stuff like photos and data. IIRC, I tested it's ability to reconstruct missing files and it seemed OK at the time.
Anyways, that's my $0.02 on Reed-Solomon for backups.
If both companies couldn't survive, the market has a fix for it. Whoever is weakest goes bankrupt first. Then someone buys it for pennies on the dollar, and tries again. This time, without debt, it probably undercuts the survivor, and runs them into bankruptcy too.
The second time around, both companies make money. The original shareholders of both loose everything. And the debt holders loose a lot, but not quite everything.
I know that I don't like monopolies, in general. But I'm not entirely sure that I like the way bankruptcy often plays out either.
In this case, I don't really care - it's satellite radio, not a necessity. But as a share holder... I worry when competitors of companies I invest in go under, it isn't necessarily a guranteed win in the long run.
Another related demand on oil is that China is building a strategic petroleum reserve, similar to the one in the USA. Now, in theory, that build-out is still ongoing, and the fill rate is relatively slow. However, given the extreme importance of the diesel supplies during the Olympics, I would not be surprised if the Chinese SPR is being built and filled a lot quicker than publicized.
China's SPR barely gets mentioned in the media, but it's huge, though, smaller than that of the USA. They aim to store the equivalent of several weeks of their crude imports.
Is it really enough to affect the world price? Who knows, certainly not I.
It's easy to say XML is slow... no one ever planned it to be fast! The reason for XML's existence is to be human readable (especially by people who are used to reading HTML). That's it. People expecting it to be fast are using the wrong tool for the job.
Interesting idea, but IMHO, these will be obsolete fairly soon. Plug-in hybrid cars are right around the corner, and they're going to use up a lot of off-peak power - I think. I've never seen the math, but I imagine that moving a car 20 miles on batteries is equivalent to a whole lot of light bulbs, computers, and TV hours. That's the exact same target power that compressed air, and gravity storage (i.e. pump water uphill) are meant to store for peak time. Also, solar power, the other power plant of the future doesn't work very well at night. So, for the overall grid, the peak aren't going to be as dramatic.
Sure, it doesn't show up on servers or workstations anymore, but FAT is alive and kicking on every digital camera, most Flash drives, and many cell phones and PDA's. I'm waiting for the day when the FAT table gets screwed up on one of these devices. I know it'll happen some day... but when and where...
AFAIK, Sprint and Clearwire and other WiMax wannabees are providing an alternative to cable and DSL and also cellphones. Sprint doesn't care about undercutting DSL prices, because they don't really do that anyway, (at least in most markets)?
The lack of updates has me concerned as well. ESVA just doesn't have the developer community working for it... hopefully it gets going again.
The software came with the kit.
The package was similar to this one: http://lorexstore.lorextechnology.com/product.aspx?id=772 - this is the brand, the bundle changes slightly every year. The software installs as "VistaPro", I think it's OEM'd.
Don't take this as a strong recommendation, though, I'm generally satisfied and would get the kit again. Mind you, I'm biased. It's better for me to support fewer products.
I've setup three retail stores with security cameras for a small retail chain. At the first store we tried a camera at, almost as an experiment, we used a TCP/IP one from D-Link. About $200. It was OK as a deterrent, but not really all that useful if we actually had to use the footage for identifying people.
The next stores used a kit which bundled 4 analog cameras with a PCI DVR card. Think TV tuner with 4 inputs. The whole kit was about $500. It's great but "only" 640x480. The newer ones have modest IR support for night-time recording. The DVR software provides remote TCP/IP access, though, via a proprietary client.
From my admittedly limited experience, you get better value from analog cameras -- the market is much bigger for them, so they're higher volume, and therefore cheaper. Plus, the camera's are interchangeable (it's just analog, afterall). You can mix and match easily and get standardized lenses and filters, etc.
Yep. I had to type that in thousands of times over the years. The problem is that I can't count to 8-2 in my head. And Progra~1 looks ugly....
This reminds me of the c:\program files\ as a default install folder. I think it started with Windows 95. I read somewhere, years after the launch, that it was specifically chosen to force programmers to handle long file names properly.
Funny, even now, I usually create a c:\programs\ directory for everything that doesn't have a proper installer. 10 years and counting.
IMO, the UAC did not have to be as annoying as it is. All they needed was a "allow admin stuff to happen for 5 minutes" dialog so that installing a program would only take one prompt. Too smart for their own good...
Wow, point taken. I guess that wasn't the best example! I knew I should have said Ferrari.
I wonder what portion of Porche's profit comes from Volkswagon?
IMHO, Nvidia is stuck as the odd-man out. When integrated chipsets and GPU-CPU hybrids can easily handle full-HD playback, the market for discrete GPUs falls and falls some more. Sure, discrete will always be faster, just like a Porsche is faster than a Toyota, but who makes more money (by a mile)?
Is Creative still around? Last I heard, they were making MP3 players...
Out here we've sunken many ships to make underwater habitats for fish. The boats are stripped of oils, paints, and hazardous stuff before sinking -- well, nowadays, anyway. Great for scuba divers to look at, so I've been told.
I can't find a great link in 10s of searching, but this is a start:
http://www.divingbc.com/
I think Amazon wins here with EC2. It sounds like Google's option might be easier to start up, but it greatly limits the buyout options down the line. VC's will prefer Amazon's EC2. If venture capitalists prefer Amazon's web services, then startups will prefer Amazon.
Besides, persistent storage and redundancies will eventually become "easy" as following a tutorial for EC2 + S3 + SimpleDB. I haven't looked, but I expect they're out there already.
To me, the ATI thing is a long term piece of the puzzle. AMD needed a Centrino competitor, a CPU + Chipset that they alone owned and could optimize. Laptop sales as a percentage of computer sales are only going to go up and it's very very hard for AMD to compete there without the whole package.
IMHO, the platform for laptops of chipset + CPU are going to make the ATI purchase look real smart this year. Much further down the line, the GPU and CPU are inevitablly going to be linked much more closely than they are now. AMD needed some baseline components to make sure they were in the game in 5 years.*
But, they paid cash for the ATi shares. In hindsight, that was incredibly bad. Now, on top of poor sales from the CPU side, they've got a lot more interest expenses. But hindsight is 20/20...
* Off-topic, look out NVidia, you're getting squeezed out of the game from all angles.