PS. To my Indian friends, can you please share with us how you guys can keep the budget so low?
duh, they obviously outsourced the work to ind-uhh... that is a good question.
Heh, that was quite funny!
There's very little I know about ISRO. But there are a few things that work well in India (as a government run entity) and ISRO is definitely one of them. You have to understand that for several decades, Indian organzations like ISRO had to innovate and invent even basic engineering stuff largely in isolation. The homegrown Param supercomputer was also a repsonse to this - because most high technology items (even basic things like CPUs and interconnects) could not be imported as they were banned by the US.
As such, the frugality of organizations like ISRO is more of a byproduct of the severely constrained environment in which they grew up in. So they learnt to make do with what they had, learnt to develop workarounds and become really innovative. Plus, some early successes enabled ISRO to acquire pride of place even in the mind-numbingly inefficient and corrupt bureaucracy. Due to this, they were able to largely avoid a lot of red tape that is endemic to any Indian government organization. They were able to get reasonable amounts of funding and were also able to attract some reasonable levels of talent.
In terms of talent, the situation is still quite sad as most scientists who work in ISRO either do it because of a true calling or because of patriotism or both. They still know they get paid peanuts compared to their American or Chinese counterparts. It is a near miracle that organizations like ISRO survived and even thrived in the morass that is the Indian Administration Service - an ignoble legacy of the Brits, but something that was made a hundred times worse by the Indians themselves.
Why the needlessly stringent power draw? You can get passively cooled discrete GPUs or low-noise active cooling which would give you a major bump in performance. APUs won't be able to do 4K for a loooong time for anything but video.
You make a valid point - and I don't know *all* the options that exist. It would actually be a very interesting exercise to do this kind of a comparison. Say, take some HTPC like constraints such as space and heat, identify the options available - both CPU+discrete graphics and CPU+GPU integrated, and compare the options using price and performance.
Back to your point, it is not just power draw - space and cooling are also factors. A reasonably strong integrated CPU+GPU system lets you build a cabinet that can be very slim - say, something that resembles a compact blue ray player.
I would also imagine that an integrated solution like this will allow better airflow.
Finally there's price. Undoubtedly discrete graphics will always have the performance crown. However, if you think of Moore's law, CPUs have already reached the point of diminishing returns in terms of size of individual cores or even number of cores in a chip. From now on, IMHO, Moore's law will be all about integrating as much of the motherboard as possible into a single chip or package. And GPU is the most obvious starting point.
To put it another way, in terms of price-performance-heat, discrete GPUs will not be able to compete with a highly integrated solution - over time. They will keep getting pushed into smaller and smaller niches. An integrated solution will generally be cheaper and cooler for equivalent performance. It wasn't a viable solution in many cases until now only because the performance was sub-par - but Kaveri is the first viable chip that gives you enough horsepower to play last gen games at full HD with reasonable frame rates. In two years, Kaveri will be at 2 teraflops - the same as a PS4.
So if I buy an AMD CPU, I can play games with low frame-rates at low detail settings (yeah, I know it says 'medium', but when almost all games now go at least up to 'ultra', 'medium' is the new 'low').
Or I could just buy a better CPU and a decent graphics card and play them properly.
Yes, but could you do that in a compact HTPC cabinet (breadbox sized or smaller) and have your total system draw less than 100W or so?
I'm really excited by this news - because it allows traditional desktops to reinvent themselves.
Think Steam Machines, think HTPC that lets you do full HD and 4k in the future, think HTPC that also lets you do light-weight or mid-level gaming. Think of a replacement to consoles - a computing device that gives you 90% of the convenience of a dedicated console, but gives you full freedom to download and play from the app store of your choice (Steam or anything else), gives you better control of your hardware, and lets you mix and match controllers (Steam Controller, keyboard and mouse, or something else that someone invents a year down the line).
I'm long on AMD for this reason. Maybe I'm a sucker. But there is a chance that desktops can find a place in your living room instead of your basement. And I'm quite excited about that.
Electricity is the relative flow of electrical charge so storing electricity is an absurd notion. You can store electrical charge however.
The cost of the plant works out to about 30k per home which leads to some very interesting ideas.
Every home could have footed the bill as incremental construction cost. Considering how much we pay for electricity, the initial cost would pay itself off in about 20 years which is actually not bad.
For this cost, every house could have fitted high efficiency solar panels - although I have no clue if it would be the same equivalent thing.
The govt should be investing in smart grids that encourage people to contribute to the grid efficiently, not subsidizing solar power plants.
No, but a shit ton of them died. Indian famines and starvations are on a large scale, well into the millions of people dead. Putting 2.2% of their GDP to prevent this, sounds like a wise investment.
A noble thought, and one that is bandied around by the ruling party as well (the Congress). The problem is the extent of corruption. Rajiv Gandhi, ironically the ruler of the same party, said that for every rupee spent on social welfare, only 10 paise (a tenth) reaches the poor.
That was a couple of decades ago, and arguably, corruption in India has increased 10 fold.
So the problem you state is very real. However, the solution (i.e. money spent on social welfare) is farcical. Most of the money comes back to the senior members of the ruling party so it is in their self interest to put even more money in social welfare.
Please clarify 'premium'. Marketing bullshitters have made it totally meaningless.
I know little of the Neo Geo, but I vaguely recall it was expensive.
Agree that they'll probably last a while. Valve's been going strong for a while now, and if anyone can leverage the existing world of PC gaming to make a 'console', it's them. I wonder what the uptake rate will be like.
Marketing speak aside, I would expect - a good Steam Machine (Steam Engine?) to play current gen games at 1080p with high details settings
- a mid level Steam Machine to either play current gen games at 720p or play them at 1080p with dialed down details I would also expect a mid level machine to play last gen games reasonably well at 1080p
- an entry level Steam Machine to play last gen games at 720p with mid to high level details
I'm not much of a game freak (well, I was, but I have a baby now), but I would totally buy an entry level or even mid level machine that would run Steam on top of Linux, and would let me play Counter Strike and a bunch of other games fairly well. Especially if I can get the thing up and running in a minute or so, so I can realistically play a game in an half hour time window - those precious windows of time. Maybe I will spend less time on the pot reading my tablet.
Huge bonus points if I can run this as an audio server/player when I am not gaming - run Logitech Media Server and/or Foobar or provide some other mechanism to play high bitrate mp3s, FLACs, and WAVs (and do optical/coax out). I know most people will say HTPC instead of media server but I actually think Roku does a stellar job and I find myself streaming movies and TV shows from Netflix or Amazon Prime on Roku and that's sufficient for me. Don't really need terabytes of space and the whole HTPC thing. But I guess I might be a minority.
Actually, it would be really nice if Valve made this more like a Roku - an easy to use and navigate OS that would run Steam but would also let you play other apps (say, for audio and HTPC).
If my experience with trackpad controls on phone games is anything to go by, I think it's a very bad idea.
where those phone games, "built around a new generation of super-precise haptic feedback, employing dual linear resonant actuators"?
no? then your experience is invalid.
honestly, i look at it this way. It might work. It might suck. either way, it's just a controller. i already have a system to use it with it. So, pending some horrible hands on reviews, i'll probably just pick one up and see for myself.
Thank you! For finally bringing some perspective into this conversation.
The trend nowadays seems to be to first trash and ridicule anything new or innovative that anyone does. Or better still, list out the 10 reasons why something like this should never have been built in the first place. Jeez man, maybe we should just send some people over to work in the patent office - maybe, we can harness all the negativity to solve the "stupid patent" problem.
I have no clue if this controller will really work well in real life or not. But we can definitely say
- This is indeed very innovative. For the first time, someone truly thought out of the box and redesigned a game controller from the ground up, instead of just adding more haptics. Well.. the Wii controller notwithstanding.
- Love the attempt at how they've translated the "keyboard WASD + mouse" way of navigation in an FPS to a controller. Might *just* work. More power to you, Valve!
- Sure, it will have a fairly steep learning curve and people will complain like hell, but hey, so does any other control mechanism.
- For me, the litmus test will be playing Counter Strike using these controllers. Or maybe I'm getting old, but it still remains the benchmark game for me as far as an FPS is concerned.
P.S. Isn't Steam Engine a better name than Steam Box?
The roomie I just moved in with was appalled when I discovered for her that her newly purchased notebook was actually a slower and worse-off computer than the laptop she was hoping to "upgrade" from. So we sent it back and now she has the credit and wants me to shop for her.
She kept mentioning the RT and liking it, but I warned her away and told her that tablets are still a developing technology, that it's in its awkward stages and next year she'll have something worth picking up. She said "okay, maybe next year it would be a good idea" but still seemed lost.
I'd like to say she has some good news when she gets home today, but the tablet isn't much better than the notebook. There's no removable media, not even a full-size SD slot?
I see these things as glorified palmtops. They're just slightly larger, but they fit the same niche -- something to pull out of your backpack or Euro-wallet at the airport or cafe and use within serious constraints on time and space. It's a useful gadget to complement a fully functioning PC at home, but IMHO it doesn't really qualify as a principal or "base" PC.
But oh, look: it's priced like a PC.
Scratching my head / not catching on.
Very interesting - the way you put it. If you read Anand and Brian's analysis of Baytrail / Silivermont performance, it pretty much lands up at half the CPU and a third of the GPU performance of a typical Core i5 that you would find in a slim notebook (Ultrabook). The crucial difference is of course that Baytrail consumes dramatically less power - about 2-3 watts (compared to 10-15 watts for a regular notebook CPU/GPU).
This power difference is crucial as it is low enough to be realistically used in a slate or iPad form factor. However, where it gets tricky is to determine if the performance tradeoff is worth it, especially if you are trying to do something meaningful - i.e. beyond simple surfing and answering emails.
There are two ways to look at this - firstly, Silvermont is about three times more powerful compared to the older Atom. So, if you are looking to replace an old Atom based Netbook, the answer is obvious - Silvermont will most certainly not suck in terms of netbook style usage, while still not heating up and keeping your family jewels safe. Personally, I think the best solution is a dual boot Silvermont that will boot Android and Windows 8.1 - it will let you use Android as a true tablet, and will let you use Windows 8.1 in a limited notebook way.
However, if you are looking at this as your primary computer replacement, I don't think Silvermont is going to cut it. You are better off with a Haswell. The dramatic power reduction in Haswell means that you can get a slim notebook that will still get you 8+ hours of battery life, almost rivaling an iPad. That is actually a game changer in itself if you think about it. This means that you can carry around a fairly lightweight and compact notebook with you and not bother lugging around chargers. In other words, you can carry it around like an iPad. Getting battery to last an entire work day or an entire school day is pretty cool! Something like the Macbook Air 13.
It would be super interesting if Intel came out with a version of Silvermont with beefier graphics (say, HD3000). I suspect that would be enough to support full HD meaningfully and to be a true viable notebook replacement.
I don't get the part of the article, where the author is complaining about the spending on the Athletics??
I mean, the football programs like where I went to school, MORE than pay for themselves, they prop up all the other non-revenue generating sports.
It isn't like student tuition is going to college athletics, in fact from the schools I know. the athletics are subsidizing the rest of the school...
I grew up in the south, I'm talking about schools like U of AL, LSU, the schools in MS...etc.
Is that not the way it is in other school conferences?
I'm not actually a huge sports fan myself, but c'mon if you're going to bitch, at least get the fact right on who is spending who's money where.
I agree it is atrocious what colleges are doing today...but let's be fair about the money accusations.
That's because everyone has forgotten the basic reason for colleges and universities. Places where people can go and learn, get an education, and/or research. Instead it has become a circus for sports - with its attendant media coverage, fan following, controversies, and what not.
I absolutely respect the need for entertainment and sports. I love it myself. But why the heck are colleges even involved in this racket? And it IS a racket. A racket that media houses and "the suits" that own sport franchises and clubs do extremely well.
So while you say sports should not be brought up in this discussion because it pays for itself, I say that is precisely the problem. Colleges now fancy themselves to be big businesses, sport franchises, media houses, and what not. And it should not be this way. And it is the students and their families that pay the price - literally.
Heck, this whole notion of profit and loss should not even be the primary point of discussion when you talk about colleges and hospitals. I'm an ardent believe in free markets and capitalism, but damn, these two things are so massively screwed up. If any organization's duty (in a capitalistic setup) is to its stakeholders, then these idiots needs to realize that when it comes to colleges and hospitals, their primary stakeholders are the people who patronize their services. Not frickin sport fans and beer bars.
Sorry for the rant. I'm terrified to think how horrible the system is going to be when my kid grows up.
Ummm... how am I supposed to take notes if I skip the class alltogether?
Take someone else's? How about the teacher's? Surely you realize he already has notes and could make copies of all he is going to write to all students. As a matter of fact, a lot of teachers do it, it's called duplicated notes.
You must've missed the part where I talked about writing my notes. See, it's not reading them that ingrains the information, but writing it down for myself. Otherwise, yea, fuck paying for class, I'd just buy the teacher's edition of the book.
That makes no sense. Whatsoever.
I'm sorry, there is nothing I can do if you can't understand simple English.
Says the guy who completely misinterpreted my plainly written post. Pot, kettle.
Word of advice, dude - try to actually understand what people say in their responses, before you get all butthurt and reactive. Not everyone who replies to your posts is taking a shot at you.
I would mod you up if I had points. I completely agree with you (and I'm not even sure why the previous commenter even got pissed!).
The purpose of taking notes is to distil what we are reading or listening or observing, and then noting it down on paper in a way that makes sense to us. The act itself has merit as lack of speed (and even laziness) forces us to quickly assimilate what we are hearing or seeing, and write it down as efficiently and quickly as we can so we don't fall behind in a lecture. More importantly, it forces us to think through the topic and formally defining it in our own terms.
I even argue that the best note taking happens when we are constrained by limited amounts of note paper. If I have only one page for an hour long lecture, I will really try hard to note down what I think are the important bits or the bits I would most likely forget.
The point really is not to compress the content from say, a hundred pages into one page - I really see the act of note taking as the act of learning itself.
Sure, I'm sure others have different and probably better ways of learning. However, this works for me and I haven't discovered a better way.
I Welched on my bet and it led to a Mexican standoff with another guy who was an Indian giver. In the end we settled it with a game of Russian Roulette. It was chaos, a real Polish Parliament. In the end, the gun didn't go off and we all felt like we were Gypped and the Canadians were sorry about the whole mess even though they were not involved at all.
That whole post was Double-Dutch to me. As confusing as a game of Chinese whispers.
That's because the game being played by the big boys is like Chicago style politics. They give you the illusion of choice but in reality, it is a Kansas City Shuffle. You work hard, you work the system, you work the work, if you catch my drift, and you feel like you have a leg up on everyone else. You hear everyone laughing, you laugh along making fun of the other suckers, but the reality is that you are the one that was getting conned all this time.
I know you're just saying that to screw with pedants... but I hate you anyway.
If you're going to talk about pedantry, I don't understand the experiment to begin with. My concern is probably naive, but consider the fact that over a hundred detectable earthquakes occur every days, and thousands more occur that are too mild to detect.
Aren't earthquakes introducing massive errors in this experiement - considering how long it has been running? If this concern is valid, they should have used a good vibration isolation mechanism, and I'm not sure if they did.
Wowser, do these same ideas also apply to programmers?? I can easily make the connection between programmers and your statement: "if someone is doing good work in a creative field, they should at least have some level of trust in the fact that they can circumvent the established system with its attendant bloodsucking leeches, and still feel like they are getting the same level of respect, exposure, and money. In fact, it should be a lot more."
Of course it does - and in fact this is happening all the time. What makes you think that certain dotcoms or even mobile phone apps are worth the hundreds of millions of dollars as compared to certain other apps that are worth a thousand times less?
I see no reason why a Monet should be worth a hundred mill, just as I fail to see why Instagram should be worth a billion. But I don't begrudge them whatever they are earning or are considered to be worth. If we are going to support "free enterprise" in the truest sense, we should support the big guys as much as the small guys. In fact, the big guys arguably need more help because they have a lot more to lose.
And most importantly, it sends a signal to all the others that this system works even if you get really big or semi-big. Otherwise, you are simply destroying the incentive, the goal post, that people strive for.
They are busy protecting our civil liberties and trying to prevent our country from turning into a police state. Some millionaires making tens of millions instead of hundreds of millions of dollars because of the greed of their corporate owners may not be "just" but I'm betting it's not a real high priority for the EFF.
And there's a huge problem with precisely this type of thinking. Bands like Radiohead are trying extremely hard to "do the right thing" - i.e. what they consider fair to themselves and to their audience. We, the listeners, should be trying to prop them up instead of calling sour grapes on them because they happen to be millionaires or whatever. If you like Joe No-Name band that has sold all of 50 albums so far, good for you.
Do remember though that your (and my) media consumption largely consists of authors, bands, movie directors, and artists that have attained some level of commercial success. It is really sad to see initiatives like Radiohead's honor based payment scheme - not be wildly successful. I would actually have loved to see Radiohead make 10 times the money from this experiment than they would have from the record label. Just imagine the message that would have sent - not just to Radiohead but to every other artist and even to us.
Honestly, if Radiohead makes a hundred mil instead of ten mil, I wish him all the very best. Thom Yorke's talent, consistency, and hard work deserves all the money he can get. The concept of money is completely nonsensical when it comes to creative works anyway. Heck, even manufactured products nowadays cost what they cost because of factors that have little to do with their manufacturing cost.
But at the very least, if someone is doing good work in a creative field, they should at least have some level of trust in the fact that they can circumvent the established system with its attendant bloodsucking leeches, and still feel like they are getting the same level of respect, exposure, and money. In fact, it should be a lot more.
Remember when Intel took the MacBook air design and turned it into the Ultrabook reference design for its Wintel PC OEMs? Why would Apple not want that to happen again, only faster?
I disagree. Copying a form factor is not really copying design. That's a bit like saying that every hatchback car today is a copy of the original Japanese hatchbacks or whoever first produced the design. While it is true at one level, it is too simplistic a statement to make.
Anyway - I think the biggest challenge for Intel is not its process technology (process shrinks are going to get a lot harder in every iteration, but that holds true for everyone - including Intel and probably more so for TSMC, Samsung, and others). It is actually not even an x86 vs ARM architecture thing - ARM architecture superiority has pretty much been debunked since Medfield's release.
The biggest challenge for Intel, IMHO, is that it is simply not used to (and not geared for) SOCs. Intel has always designed and manufactured discrete chips whereas the entire mobile industry prefers, nay wants, highly integrated SOCs. This is the one aspect where Qualcomm kicks everyone's butt. To put it another way, Intel's fight is not with ARM or TSMC or AMD. Intel's fight today is with Qualcomm. Intel *needs* to get the same level of integration in its SOCs as Qualcomm - otherwise no one will want a bunch of discrete chips from Intel even if Intel shouts itself hoarse about how much better its chips are. And this goes for Apple as well. If Intel can give Apple an SOC that integrates the CPU, GPU, modems and other chips (I'm actually not an expert here but I would say things like DAC, GPS, etc. - anything that is not MEMS), I have a feeling that Apple will find it very hard to say "no".
I don't mean to sound grand but I honestly feel that the future of semiconductors will be highly integrated one-chip SOC based solutions that are "cheap as chips".
It is also worth noting that Salesforce bought Heroku, which was turning out to be a very viable platform in itself. My bet is on Salesforce extending itself to cover finance and supply chain as well.
It would be an interesting twist in the long running Benioff vs Ellison drama.
So who does Salesforce outsource to? At some point there has to be servers in racks, it can't be cloud all the way down.
IT today is about configuration management, deployment and managing virtual and real infrastructure, scripting automation etc. You just described my day.
Oh, absolutely. I was only referring to IT departments in large and medium sized companies.
To put it another way, I was trying to say that these corporate IT departments will start looking more and more like the IT departments in dotcoms.
No movement to outsource the management of the machines to outside cloud services? That may or may not happen where you are, but there's a lot of it going on, and it invalidates much of your list.
Your statement is a tad Naive. Do you truly think that the majority of services are going to the cloud? Only an idiot would trust the cloud with their corporate crown jewels. My opinion is that most companies will end up with a mix of services. But... Hey... What's new?
Where I work we are building our own internal cloud services, not outsourcing. Part of that may have to do with the fact that we are a large Biotech company and have various regulations that we have to comply with. Most cloud services, in my opinion, are being used by small to mid-size companies who do not have the economies of scale to run an IT department. Most large companies will use some cloud services but it's highly unlikely that they will trust cloud services with their crown jewels.
The point is that there will be a mixture of services that will need to be supported by IT....
I used to think so too, but don't any more. Look at Salesforce.com. If most of Fortune 500 companies are willing to trust their front-end business - i.e. sales - i.e. the stuff that brings in money and runs the rest of the company - to Salesforce.com, I'm not sure why they would have an issue with other data that is piddly in comparison.
The *real* reason why the entire IT backend has not gone the cloud way is simply that other cloud based providers have not been able to create a platform like Salesforce. A platform that is customizable, extensible, scalable, can give good performance, has good security in place, has ready-made and relevant tools, has a good developer base. And I'm talking about corporate functions like HR, finance, payroll, supply chain, manufacturing, internal communication, marketing, etc.
I know it is a buzzword but I see PaaS as the future. Generic platforms like Azure can be made to work, yes, but the killer platforms are ones that are focused on solving specific problems. Once this starts happening, and it will, IT as you know it, will no longer exist.
Corporate IT will become more like IT in web shops - it will be about configuration management, deployment, managing virtual infrastructure, scripting and automation, monitoring, etc. And it will be about development and scripting.
Blackberry Enterprise is one of those products that I really just have to scratch my head at. It has always seemed to me that encouraging users to treat as secure something which is easily lost, stolen, or damaged is a fundamentally flawed concept for a business model. Sure, there are users out there who have a genuine need for such a concept, but the problem that really needs to be addressed is user understanding of data security practices, not giving them technology that encourages continuing bad practices in ignorance.
Honestly, I've felt for a long time that Blackberry should have done a better job with their enterprise dominance - instead of doing this half assed job of trying to appeal to every market segment. A few years ago, almost all company issued phones were blackberries. Imagine if blackberry had focused on letting you do more with your blackberry - like teleconferencing, video conferencing, virtual workspaces, screensharing, collaboration etc. They had the software, the network, the hardware presence. Their competitors should always have been Cisco, Avaya, WebEx, Netmeeting, Sharepoint, gtalk, heck even Google hangout - *not* Apple and Samsung.
I see the same story with Intel and Microsoft. The amount of hubris these companies have shown - - just beggars the imagination. I mean, we're talking about common sense stuff, not some fancy "blue sky strategy" or whatever. I can understand that big behemoths like these can get blind-sided by other innovative products - stuff like the iPhone - but these companies have literally let it slide for not just a year or a couple of years, but for 5, 6, 7 years. It is ridiculous.
What is even more ridiculous is that the moment these guys come up with a big successful product, they stop innovating. It is all incremental feature creep from there on. I mean, look at even companies that are supposedly engineering driven as opposed to management driven. Look at yahoo messenger. They've been around for donkey's years, nailed chat, supported offline messages years ago when gtalk still doesn't, but just stopped innovating besides adding some silly emoticon crapware. I haven't used it in years, but I'm pretty sure that they still don't do video chat properly, especially video group chat./rant
I think what's most important is now we have the mathematical models in place that allow us to simulate convincing sounds rather than "sample and include". For the creative types, this will save a ton of effort and money. It also has implications for games, e.g. with the given environment model, be able to produce convincing sounds in real-time rather than taking sound samples mixing them with reverb, attenuation, positioning, etc.
Yes, absolutely! I see it as analogous to vector graphics vs bitmapped graphics. Vector audio is THE holy grail of accurate sound reproduction.
If these guys can pull this off, it will be the literal (digital) equivalent of having your own live performance - every time! You will have software based models of various instruments that will play music for you by playing their respective instruments for you real-time. The possibilities of this are actually astounding. You would record or store music not as digital samples (lossy, lossless, notwithstanding) but in terms of *how* each instrument is played. You have now turned the problem on its head - you are constrained by the accuracy of your software/mathematical model of each instrument, and by how well you are able to control it to become more nuanced. At a hardware level, if you assume infinite processing power, the challenge would be to accurately play these software instruments. You could again take a completely different approach - you could for example have an array of speakers where each speaker is dedicated to playing a specific instrument, and all the speakers are fed separate audio signals.
Contrast this to the currently audio setup - which would be a 2.0 or 2.1 or 5.1 or 7.1 stereo/HT setup - where each speaker tries (and fails) to accurately reproduce the entire audible frequency spectrum, or you have a mish-mash setup where different speakers divvy up the frequency spectrum between themselves (think sub-woofer and satellite speakers) so they can do a marginally better half-assed job.
If you look at the entire chain in a traditional setup, you have the speaker driver's mechanicals, the speaker crossover electronics, the speaker wire, the power amp, the pre-amp, the DAC, the player, the source audio signal (mp3, flac, redbook CD etc.), the recording mike, and the recording room - all of these links in the chain distort the music in their own way.
What I mentioned above is only my interpretation of how this technique can be used -there are a huge number of other possibilities - software defined objects, such as in games, can now have their own (genuine) sound, and that will sound different depending on how you interact with them. You could also have virtual instruments, unconstrained by the laws of physics, define their own physics and their own unique sound. You could even program room acoustics and have the instruments play sounds as if it was being played in open space, a large hall, a studio, on a beach etc.
You can see the Antutu benchmark of the Clovertrail+ Atom chip that is in the process of being launched. Clovertrail+ gets a benchmark score of 25k. To put this in perspective, Galaxy S3 gets a score of 16k, and a decent mid-level phone like the HTC One S gets a score of 10k, and Tegra3 in the HTC One X gets 14k.
Galaxy S4 might beat the Clovertrail+ (it is supposed to be 28k), but not by much. They are pretty much head to head, and in both cases, you are talking about the latest and greatest from Intel and ARM.
Caveat: This is quite obviously not a comprehensive review done by a website with a solid reputation like Anandtech. Nonetheless, it looks reasonable to me.
In my humble opinion, this old hoary debate will always remain a debate for several reasons. As you right mentioned, the reproduction environment in most cases is woeful at best. Most speakers are not even full-range to begin with, their cabinets resonate, their drivers cannot often keep up in complex multi-layered music, their passive crossovers do a half-assed job in distributing the sound to the various drivers, and so on. Then, the amps are weak so they start bottoming out and start clipping when the speaker impedance and phase dips sharply in certain frequency bands. Then the electronics, especially the capacitors and power supply cannot keep up. Then the cables are not fat enough or are not shielded enough so they load up the power amp even more. Then the pre-amp adds its own coloration to the already feeble signal coming from the source. Then the DAC does its own thing and further colors or degrades the source signal even more. Then the source adds its own share of noise and jitter to the audio signal that screws up not just the signal quality (bad enough) but even the timing of the music.
On top of it, the room comes into play. The room adds its own coloration and effect that is often a far bigger factor that the audio system itself - boosting certain frequencies while muddying and deadening others, and even adding echoes, reflections, etc.
Then there is the human being at the end of the chain. I personally can't even listen above 16KHz, and I have average ears. I suspect many people are like me too, at either end of our audible spectrum. On top of it, we humans hear music very differently - while our audio range may be fairly similar (20hz to 20khz by popular definition), our sensitivity to *variations* in tone and timing varies drastically - many often have off the charts sensitivity to even slightly off-key music (I do) or slightly off-beat music (I do not at all).
All in all, a decent headphone setup is far far more revealing than a decent audio setup. At a thousand dollars, you can probably assemble a decent headphone, but an audio system will sound atrocious, unless you are willing to spend a whole lot more effort and research in second hand discrete gear OR are willing to do serious DIY.
Anyway - I also wanted to say one thing - the thing that gets neglected the most in all this is actually the quality of the source recording - or what people call "mastering".
Most people who say something like "SACDs sound far better than redbook CD" or "vinyl sounds far better than CD" are most likely saying this because a whole lot more care went into recording the SACD or vinyl compared to the cheaper mass market CD or mp3.
If I look back at all the albums I have purchased or listened to (in whatever format), the one thing that stands out to me personally is that I have found less than 10% of them to be "recorded with care". And I'm not even being picky! Across the board, I can say that recording quality sucks when it comes to rock (which is what I listen to most often) - and I mean all kinds of rock.
If Neil Young's initiative (and even his Pono device) and Dave Grohl's initiatives are successful in improving the audio quality of music in general, I strongly suspect it will be because recording quality will be done with greater care, not because they decided to use a fancier digital format or use higher number of bits and samples to store their music. While everything becomes a factor by the time the music reaches your ears (heck, by the time it is processed by your brain, you even have to factor in psychoacoustics and gear bias and the "burn-in" syndrome) - the recording quality in general needs to improve (except for the jazz and classical pieces that audiophiles love to love, and are hence recorded with care), and this improvement will arguably make the biggest difference in audio quality.
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This is as oppsed to the physical +1 Insightful atomicxblue would be sending you in the mail on a normal day.
Do you think that keyboard you are holding is ... real?
Hmmm.
PS. To my Indian friends, can you please share with us how you guys can keep the budget so low?
duh, they obviously outsourced the work to ind-uhh... that is a good question.
Heh, that was quite funny!
There's very little I know about ISRO. But there are a few things that work well in India (as a government run entity) and ISRO is definitely one of them. You have to understand that for several decades, Indian organzations like ISRO had to innovate and invent even basic engineering stuff largely in isolation. The homegrown Param supercomputer was also a repsonse to this - because most high technology items (even basic things like CPUs and interconnects) could not be imported as they were banned by the US.
As such, the frugality of organizations like ISRO is more of a byproduct of the severely constrained environment in which they grew up in. So they learnt to make do with what they had, learnt to develop workarounds and become really innovative. Plus, some early successes enabled ISRO to acquire pride of place even in the mind-numbingly inefficient and corrupt bureaucracy. Due to this, they were able to largely avoid a lot of red tape that is endemic to any Indian government organization. They were able to get reasonable amounts of funding and were also able to attract some reasonable levels of talent.
In terms of talent, the situation is still quite sad as most scientists who work in ISRO either do it because of a true calling or because of patriotism or both. They still know they get paid peanuts compared to their American or Chinese counterparts. It is a near miracle that organizations like ISRO survived and even thrived in the morass that is the Indian Administration Service - an ignoble legacy of the Brits, but something that was made a hundred times worse by the Indians themselves.
Why the needlessly stringent power draw? You can get passively cooled discrete GPUs or low-noise active cooling which would give you a major bump in performance. APUs won't be able to do 4K for a loooong time for anything but video.
You make a valid point - and I don't know *all* the options that exist.
It would actually be a very interesting exercise to do this kind of a comparison. Say, take some HTPC like constraints such as space and heat, identify the options available - both CPU+discrete graphics and CPU+GPU integrated, and compare the options using price and performance.
Back to your point, it is not just power draw - space and cooling are also factors. A reasonably strong integrated CPU+GPU system lets you build a cabinet that can be very slim - say, something that resembles a compact blue ray player.
I would also imagine that an integrated solution like this will allow better airflow.
Finally there's price. Undoubtedly discrete graphics will always have the performance crown. However, if you think of Moore's law, CPUs have already reached the point of diminishing returns in terms of size of individual cores or even number of cores in a chip. From now on, IMHO, Moore's law will be all about integrating as much of the motherboard as possible into a single chip or package. And GPU is the most obvious starting point.
To put it another way, in terms of price-performance-heat, discrete GPUs will not be able to compete with a highly integrated solution - over time. They will keep getting pushed into smaller and smaller niches. An integrated solution will generally be cheaper and cooler for equivalent performance. It wasn't a viable solution in many cases until now only because the performance was sub-par - but Kaveri is the first viable chip that gives you enough horsepower to play last gen games at full HD with reasonable frame rates. In two years, Kaveri will be at 2 teraflops - the same as a PS4.
So if I buy an AMD CPU, I can play games with low frame-rates at low detail settings (yeah, I know it says 'medium', but when almost all games now go at least up to 'ultra', 'medium' is the new 'low').
Or I could just buy a better CPU and a decent graphics card and play them properly.
Yes, but could you do that in a compact HTPC cabinet (breadbox sized or smaller) and have your total system draw less than 100W or so?
I'm really excited by this news - because it allows traditional desktops to reinvent themselves.
Think Steam Machines, think HTPC that lets you do full HD and 4k in the future, think HTPC that also lets you do light-weight or mid-level gaming.
Think of a replacement to consoles - a computing device that gives you 90% of the convenience of a dedicated console, but gives you full freedom to download and play from the app store of your choice (Steam or anything else), gives you better control of your hardware, and lets you mix and match controllers (Steam Controller, keyboard and mouse, or something else that someone invents a year down the line).
I'm long on AMD for this reason. Maybe I'm a sucker. But there is a chance that desktops can find a place in your living room instead of your basement. And I'm quite excited about that.
Electricity is the relative flow of electrical charge so storing electricity is an absurd notion. You can store electrical charge however.
The cost of the plant works out to about 30k per home which leads to some very interesting ideas.
Every home could have footed the bill as incremental construction cost. Considering how much we pay for electricity, the initial cost would pay itself off in about 20 years which is actually not bad.
For this cost, every house could have fitted high efficiency solar panels - although I have no clue if it would be the same equivalent thing.
The govt should be investing in smart grids that encourage people to contribute to the grid efficiently, not subsidizing solar power plants.
Just some thoughts. I'm not an expert though.
No, but a shit ton of them died. Indian famines and starvations are on a large scale, well into the millions of people dead. Putting 2.2% of their GDP to prevent this, sounds like a wise investment.
A noble thought, and one that is bandied around by the ruling party as well (the Congress). The problem is the extent of corruption. Rajiv Gandhi, ironically the ruler of the same party, said that for every rupee spent on social welfare, only 10 paise (a tenth) reaches the poor.
That was a couple of decades ago, and arguably, corruption in India has increased 10 fold.
So the problem you state is very real. However, the solution (i.e. money spent on social welfare) is farcical.
Most of the money comes back to the senior members of the ruling party so it is in their self interest to put even more money in social welfare.
Please clarify 'premium'. Marketing bullshitters have made it totally meaningless.
I know little of the Neo Geo, but I vaguely recall it was expensive.
Agree that they'll probably last a while. Valve's been going strong for a while now, and if anyone can leverage the existing world of PC gaming to make a 'console', it's them. I wonder what the uptake rate will be like.
Marketing speak aside, I would expect
- a good Steam Machine (Steam Engine?) to play current gen games at 1080p with high details settings
- a mid level Steam Machine to either play current gen games at 720p or play them at 1080p with dialed down details
I would also expect a mid level machine to play last gen games reasonably well at 1080p
- an entry level Steam Machine to play last gen games at 720p with mid to high level details
I'm not much of a game freak (well, I was, but I have a baby now), but I would totally buy an entry level or even mid level machine that would run Steam on top of Linux, and would let me play Counter Strike and a bunch of other games fairly well. Especially if I can get the thing up and running in a minute or so, so I can realistically play a game in an half hour time window - those precious windows of time. Maybe I will spend less time on the pot reading my tablet.
Huge bonus points if I can run this as an audio server/player when I am not gaming - run Logitech Media Server and/or Foobar or provide some other mechanism to play high bitrate mp3s, FLACs, and WAVs (and do optical/coax out). I know most people will say HTPC instead of media server but I actually think Roku does a stellar job and I find myself streaming movies and TV shows from Netflix or Amazon Prime on Roku and that's sufficient for me. Don't really need terabytes of space and the whole HTPC thing. But I guess I might be a minority.
Actually, it would be really nice if Valve made this more like a Roku - an easy to use and navigate OS that would run Steam but would also let you play other apps (say, for audio and HTPC).
If my experience with trackpad controls on phone games is anything to go by, I think it's a very bad idea.
where those phone games, "built around a new generation of super-precise haptic feedback, employing dual linear resonant actuators"?
no? then your experience is invalid.
honestly, i look at it this way. It might work. It might suck. either way, it's just a controller. i already have a system to use it with it. So, pending some horrible hands on reviews, i'll probably just pick one up and see for myself.
Thank you! For finally bringing some perspective into this conversation.
The trend nowadays seems to be to first trash and ridicule anything new or innovative that anyone does. Or better still, list out the 10 reasons why something like this should never have been built in the first place. Jeez man, maybe we should just send some people over to work in the patent office - maybe, we can harness all the negativity to solve the "stupid patent" problem.
I have no clue if this controller will really work well in real life or not. But we can definitely say
- This is indeed very innovative. For the first time, someone truly thought out of the box and redesigned a game controller from the ground up, instead of just adding more haptics. Well.. the Wii controller notwithstanding.
- Love the attempt at how they've translated the "keyboard WASD + mouse" way of navigation in an FPS to a controller. Might *just* work. More power to you, Valve!
- Sure, it will have a fairly steep learning curve and people will complain like hell, but hey, so does any other control mechanism.
- For me, the litmus test will be playing Counter Strike using these controllers. Or maybe I'm getting old, but it still remains the benchmark game for me as far as an FPS is concerned.
P.S. Isn't Steam Engine a better name than Steam Box?
The roomie I just moved in with was appalled when I discovered for her that her newly purchased notebook was actually a slower and worse-off computer than the laptop she was hoping to "upgrade" from. So we sent it back and now she has the credit and wants me to shop for her.
She kept mentioning the RT and liking it, but I warned her away and told her that tablets are still a developing technology, that it's in its awkward stages and next year she'll have something worth picking up. She said "okay, maybe next year it would be a good idea" but still seemed lost.
I'd like to say she has some good news when she gets home today, but the tablet isn't much better than the notebook. There's no removable media, not even a full-size SD slot?
I see these things as glorified palmtops. They're just slightly larger, but they fit the same niche -- something to pull out of your backpack or Euro-wallet at the airport or cafe and use within serious constraints on time and space. It's a useful gadget to complement a fully functioning PC at home, but IMHO it doesn't really qualify as a principal or "base" PC.
But oh, look: it's priced like a PC.
Scratching my head / not catching on.
Very interesting - the way you put it. If you read Anand and Brian's analysis of Baytrail / Silivermont performance, it pretty much lands up at half the CPU and a third of the GPU performance of a typical Core i5 that you would find in a slim notebook (Ultrabook). The crucial difference is of course that Baytrail consumes dramatically less power - about 2-3 watts (compared to 10-15 watts for a regular notebook CPU/GPU).
Reference: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7314/intel-baytrail-preview-intel-atom-z3770-tested/2
This power difference is crucial as it is low enough to be realistically used in a slate or iPad form factor. However, where it gets tricky is to determine if the performance tradeoff is worth it, especially if you are trying to do something meaningful - i.e. beyond simple surfing and answering emails.
There are two ways to look at this - firstly, Silvermont is about three times more powerful compared to the older Atom. So, if you are looking to replace an old Atom based Netbook, the answer is obvious - Silvermont will most certainly not suck in terms of netbook style usage, while still not heating up and keeping your family jewels safe. Personally, I think the best solution is a dual boot Silvermont that will boot Android and Windows 8.1 - it will let you use Android as a true tablet, and will let you use Windows 8.1 in a limited notebook way.
However, if you are looking at this as your primary computer replacement, I don't think Silvermont is going to cut it. You are better off with a Haswell. The dramatic power reduction in Haswell means that you can get a slim notebook that will still get you 8+ hours of battery life, almost rivaling an iPad. That is actually a game changer in itself if you think about it. This means that you can carry around a fairly lightweight and compact notebook with you and not bother lugging around chargers. In other words, you can carry it around like an iPad. Getting battery to last an entire work day or an entire school day is pretty cool! Something like the Macbook Air 13.
It would be super interesting if Intel came out with a version of Silvermont with beefier graphics (say, HD3000). I suspect that would be enough to support full HD meaningfully and to be a true viable notebook replacement.
Actually, I feel a Stephen Baxter book coming. If only he would stop writing about dang mammoths.
Sorry for the OT.
I don't get the part of the article, where the author is complaining about the spending on the Athletics??
I mean, the football programs like where I went to school, MORE than pay for themselves, they prop up all the other non-revenue generating sports.
It isn't like student tuition is going to college athletics, in fact from the schools I know. the athletics are subsidizing the rest of the school...
I grew up in the south, I'm talking about schools like U of AL, LSU, the schools in MS...etc.
Is that not the way it is in other school conferences?
I'm not actually a huge sports fan myself, but c'mon if you're going to bitch, at least get the fact right on who is spending who's money where.
I agree it is atrocious what colleges are doing today...but let's be fair about the money accusations.
That's because everyone has forgotten the basic reason for colleges and universities. Places where people can go and learn, get an education, and/or research. Instead it has become a circus for sports - with its attendant media coverage, fan following, controversies, and what not.
I absolutely respect the need for entertainment and sports. I love it myself. But why the heck are colleges even involved in this racket? And it IS a racket. A racket that media houses and "the suits" that own sport franchises and clubs do extremely well.
So while you say sports should not be brought up in this discussion because it pays for itself, I say that is precisely the problem. Colleges now fancy themselves to be big businesses, sport franchises, media houses, and what not. And it should not be this way. And it is the students and their families that pay the price - literally.
Heck, this whole notion of profit and loss should not even be the primary point of discussion when you talk about colleges and hospitals. I'm an ardent believe in free markets and capitalism, but damn, these two things are so massively screwed up. If any organization's duty (in a capitalistic setup) is to its stakeholders, then these idiots needs to realize that when it comes to colleges and hospitals, their primary stakeholders are the people who patronize their services. Not frickin sport fans and beer bars.
Sorry for the rant. I'm terrified to think how horrible the system is going to be when my kid grows up.
Take someone else's?
How about the teacher's? Surely you realize he already has notes and could make copies of all he is going to write to all students. As a matter of fact, a lot of teachers do it, it's called duplicated notes.
You must've missed the part where I talked about writing my notes. See, it's not reading them that ingrains the information, but writing it down for myself. Otherwise, yea, fuck paying for class, I'd just buy the teacher's edition of the book.
I'm sorry, there is nothing I can do if you can't understand simple English.
Says the guy who completely misinterpreted my plainly written post. Pot, kettle.
Word of advice, dude - try to actually understand what people say in their responses, before you get all butthurt and reactive. Not everyone who replies to your posts is taking a shot at you.
I would mod you up if I had points. I completely agree with you (and I'm not even sure why the previous commenter even got pissed!).
The purpose of taking notes is to distil what we are reading or listening or observing, and then noting it down on paper in a way that makes sense to us. The act itself has merit as lack of speed (and even laziness) forces us to quickly assimilate what we are hearing or seeing, and write it down as efficiently and quickly as we can so we don't fall behind in a lecture. More importantly, it forces us to think through the topic and formally defining it in our own terms.
I even argue that the best note taking happens when we are constrained by limited amounts of note paper. If I have only one page for an hour long lecture, I will really try hard to note down what I think are the important bits or the bits I would most likely forget.
The point really is not to compress the content from say, a hundred pages into one page - I really see the act of note taking as the act of learning itself.
Sure, I'm sure others have different and probably better ways of learning. However, this works for me and I haven't discovered a better way.
I Welched on my bet and it led to a Mexican standoff with another guy who was an Indian giver. In the end we settled it with a game of Russian Roulette. It was chaos, a real Polish Parliament. In the end, the gun didn't go off and we all felt like we were Gypped and the Canadians were sorry about the whole mess even though they were not involved at all.
That whole post was Double-Dutch to me. As confusing as a game of Chinese whispers.
That's because the game being played by the big boys is like Chicago style politics. They give you the illusion of choice but in reality, it is a Kansas City Shuffle. You work hard, you work the system, you work the work, if you catch my drift, and you feel like you have a leg up on everyone else. You hear everyone laughing, you laugh along making fun of the other suckers, but the reality is that you are the one that was getting conned all this time.
I know you're just saying that to screw with pedants... but I hate you anyway.
If you're going to talk about pedantry, I don't understand the experiment to begin with. My concern is probably naive, but consider the fact that over a hundred detectable earthquakes occur every days, and thousands more occur that are too mild to detect.
Aren't earthquakes introducing massive errors in this experiement - considering how long it has been running?
If this concern is valid, they should have used a good vibration isolation mechanism, and I'm not sure if they did.
Wowser, do these same ideas also apply to programmers??
I can easily make the connection between programmers and your statement:
"if someone is doing good work in a creative field, they should at least have some level of trust in the fact that they can circumvent the established system with its attendant bloodsucking leeches, and still feel like they are getting the same level of respect, exposure, and money. In fact, it should be a lot more."
Of course it does - and in fact this is happening all the time. What makes you think that certain dotcoms or even mobile phone apps are worth the hundreds of millions of dollars as compared to certain other apps that are worth a thousand times less?
I see no reason why a Monet should be worth a hundred mill, just as I fail to see why Instagram should be worth a billion. But I don't begrudge them whatever they are earning or are considered to be worth. If we are going to support "free enterprise" in the truest sense, we should support the big guys as much as the small guys. In fact, the big guys arguably need more help because they have a lot more to lose.
And most importantly, it sends a signal to all the others that this system works even if you get really big or semi-big. Otherwise, you are simply destroying the incentive, the goal post, that people strive for.
Where is the EFF is fighting all of this??
They are busy protecting our civil liberties and trying to prevent our country from turning into a police state. Some millionaires making tens of millions instead of hundreds of millions of dollars because of the greed of their corporate owners may not be "just" but I'm betting it's not a real high priority for the EFF.
And there's a huge problem with precisely this type of thinking. Bands like Radiohead are trying extremely hard to "do the right thing" - i.e. what they consider fair to themselves and to their audience. We, the listeners, should be trying to prop them up instead of calling sour grapes on them because they happen to be millionaires or whatever. If you like Joe No-Name band that has sold all of 50 albums so far, good for you.
Do remember though that your (and my) media consumption largely consists of authors, bands, movie directors, and artists that have attained some level of commercial success. It is really sad to see initiatives like Radiohead's honor based payment scheme - not be wildly successful. I would actually have loved to see Radiohead make 10 times the money from this experiment than they would have from the record label. Just imagine the message that would have sent - not just to Radiohead but to every other artist and even to us.
Honestly, if Radiohead makes a hundred mil instead of ten mil, I wish him all the very best. Thom Yorke's talent, consistency, and hard work deserves all the money he can get. The concept of money is completely nonsensical when it comes to creative works anyway. Heck, even manufactured products nowadays cost what they cost because of factors that have little to do with their manufacturing cost.
But at the very least, if someone is doing good work in a creative field, they should at least have some level of trust in the fact that they can circumvent the established system with its attendant bloodsucking leeches, and still feel like they are getting the same level of respect, exposure, and money. In fact, it should be a lot more.
Remember when Intel took the MacBook air design and turned it into the Ultrabook reference design for its Wintel PC OEMs? Why would Apple not want that to happen again, only faster?
I disagree. Copying a form factor is not really copying design. That's a bit like saying that every hatchback car today is a copy of the original Japanese hatchbacks or whoever first produced the design. While it is true at one level, it is too simplistic a statement to make.
Anyway - I think the biggest challenge for Intel is not its process technology (process shrinks are going to get a lot harder in every iteration, but that holds true for everyone - including Intel and probably more so for TSMC, Samsung, and others). It is actually not even an x86 vs ARM architecture thing - ARM architecture superiority has pretty much been debunked since Medfield's release.
The biggest challenge for Intel, IMHO, is that it is simply not used to (and not geared for) SOCs. Intel has always designed and manufactured discrete chips whereas the entire mobile industry prefers, nay wants, highly integrated SOCs. This is the one aspect where Qualcomm kicks everyone's butt. To put it another way, Intel's fight is not with ARM or TSMC or AMD. Intel's fight today is with Qualcomm. Intel *needs* to get the same level of integration in its SOCs as Qualcomm - otherwise no one will want a bunch of discrete chips from Intel even if Intel shouts itself hoarse about how much better its chips are. And this goes for Apple as well. If Intel can give Apple an SOC that integrates the CPU, GPU, modems and other chips (I'm actually not an expert here but I would say things like DAC, GPS, etc. - anything that is not MEMS), I have a feeling that Apple will find it very hard to say "no".
I don't mean to sound grand but I honestly feel that the future of semiconductors will be highly integrated one-chip SOC based solutions that are "cheap as chips".
+1
Didn't know about Workday. Interesting stuff.
It is also worth noting that Salesforce bought Heroku, which was turning out to be a very viable platform in itself.
My bet is on Salesforce extending itself to cover finance and supply chain as well.
It would be an interesting twist in the long running Benioff vs Ellison drama.
So who does Salesforce outsource to?
At some point there has to be servers in racks, it can't be cloud all the way down.
IT today is about configuration management, deployment and managing virtual and real infrastructure, scripting automation etc. You just described my day.
Oh, absolutely. I was only referring to IT departments in large and medium sized companies.
To put it another way, I was trying to say that these corporate IT departments will start looking more and more like the IT departments in dotcoms.
No movement to outsource the management of the machines to outside cloud services? That may or may not happen where you are, but there's a lot of it going on, and it invalidates much of your list.
Your statement is a tad Naive. Do you truly think that the majority of services are going to the cloud? Only an idiot would trust the cloud with their corporate crown jewels. My opinion is that most companies will end up with a mix of services. But... Hey... What's new?
Where I work we are building our own internal cloud services, not outsourcing. Part of that may have to do with the fact that we are a large Biotech company and have various regulations that we have to comply with. Most cloud services, in my opinion, are being used by small to mid-size companies who do not have the economies of scale to run an IT department. Most large companies will use some cloud services but it's highly unlikely that they will trust cloud services with their crown jewels.
The point is that there will be a mixture of services that will need to be supported by IT....
I used to think so too, but don't any more. Look at Salesforce.com. If most of Fortune 500 companies are willing to trust their front-end business - i.e. sales - i.e. the stuff that brings in money and runs the rest of the company - to Salesforce.com, I'm not sure why they would have an issue with other data that is piddly in comparison.
The *real* reason why the entire IT backend has not gone the cloud way is simply that other cloud based providers have not been able to create a platform like Salesforce. A platform that is customizable, extensible, scalable, can give good performance, has good security in place, has ready-made and relevant tools, has a good developer base. And I'm talking about corporate functions like HR, finance, payroll, supply chain, manufacturing, internal communication, marketing, etc.
I know it is a buzzword but I see PaaS as the future. Generic platforms like Azure can be made to work, yes, but the killer platforms are ones that are focused on solving specific problems. Once this starts happening, and it will, IT as you know it, will no longer exist.
Corporate IT will become more like IT in web shops - it will be about configuration management, deployment, managing virtual infrastructure, scripting and automation, monitoring, etc. And it will be about development and scripting.
Just my thoughts though. I could be wrong.
Blackberry Enterprise is one of those products that I really just have to scratch my head at. It has always seemed to me that encouraging users to treat as secure something which is easily lost, stolen, or damaged is a fundamentally flawed concept for a business model. Sure, there are users out there who have a genuine need for such a concept, but the problem that really needs to be addressed is user understanding of data security practices, not giving them technology that encourages continuing bad practices in ignorance.
Honestly, I've felt for a long time that Blackberry should have done a better job with their enterprise dominance - instead of doing this half assed job of trying to appeal to every market segment. A few years ago, almost all company issued phones were blackberries. Imagine if blackberry had focused on letting you do more with your blackberry - like teleconferencing, video conferencing, virtual workspaces, screensharing, collaboration etc. They had the software, the network, the hardware presence. Their competitors should always have been Cisco, Avaya, WebEx, Netmeeting, Sharepoint, gtalk, heck even Google hangout - *not* Apple and Samsung.
I see the same story with Intel and Microsoft. The amount of hubris these companies have shown - - just beggars the imagination. I mean, we're talking about common sense stuff, not some fancy "blue sky strategy" or whatever. I can understand that big behemoths like these can get blind-sided by other innovative products - stuff like the iPhone - but these companies have literally let it slide for not just a year or a couple of years, but for 5, 6, 7 years. It is ridiculous.
What is even more ridiculous is that the moment these guys come up with a big successful product, they stop innovating. It is all incremental feature creep from there on. I mean, look at even companies that are supposedly engineering driven as opposed to management driven. Look at yahoo messenger. They've been around for donkey's years, nailed chat, supported offline messages years ago when gtalk still doesn't, but just stopped innovating besides adding some silly emoticon crapware. I haven't used it in years, but I'm pretty sure that they still don't do video chat properly, especially video group chat. /rant
I think what's most important is now we have the mathematical models in place that allow us to simulate convincing sounds rather than "sample and include". For the creative types, this will save a ton of effort and money. It also has implications for games, e.g. with the given environment model, be able to produce convincing sounds in real-time rather than taking sound samples mixing them with reverb, attenuation, positioning, etc.
Yes, absolutely! I see it as analogous to vector graphics vs bitmapped graphics. Vector audio is THE holy grail of accurate sound reproduction.
If these guys can pull this off, it will be the literal (digital) equivalent of having your own live performance - every time! You will have software based models of various instruments that will play music for you by playing their respective instruments for you real-time. The possibilities of this are actually astounding. You would record or store music not as digital samples (lossy, lossless, notwithstanding) but in terms of *how* each instrument is played. You have now turned the problem on its head - you are constrained by the accuracy of your software/mathematical model of each instrument, and by how well you are able to control it to become more nuanced. At a hardware level, if you assume infinite processing power, the challenge would be to accurately play these software instruments. You could again take a completely different approach - you could for example have an array of speakers where each speaker is dedicated to playing a specific instrument, and all the speakers are fed separate audio signals.
Contrast this to the currently audio setup - which would be a 2.0 or 2.1 or 5.1 or 7.1 stereo/HT setup - where each speaker tries (and fails) to accurately reproduce the entire audible frequency spectrum, or you have a mish-mash setup where different speakers divvy up the frequency spectrum between themselves (think sub-woofer and satellite speakers) so they can do a marginally better half-assed job.
If you look at the entire chain in a traditional setup, you have the speaker driver's mechanicals, the speaker crossover electronics, the speaker wire, the power amp, the pre-amp, the DAC, the player, the source audio signal (mp3, flac, redbook CD etc.), the recording mike, and the recording room - all of these links in the chain distort the music in their own way.
What I mentioned above is only my interpretation of how this technique can be used -there are a huge number of other possibilities - software defined objects, such as in games, can now have their own (genuine) sound, and that will sound different depending on how you interact with them. You could also have virtual instruments, unconstrained by the laws of physics, define their own physics and their own unique sound. You could even program room acoustics and have the instruments play sounds as if it was being played in open space, a large hall, a studio, on a beach etc.
Sigh.
Is there hope for humanity?
You can see the Antutu benchmark of the Clovertrail+ Atom chip that is in the process of being launched.
Clovertrail+ gets a benchmark score of 25k. To put this in perspective, Galaxy S3 gets a score of 16k, and a decent mid-level phone like the HTC One S gets a score of 10k, and Tegra3 in the HTC One X gets 14k.
Galaxy S4 might beat the Clovertrail+ (it is supposed to be 28k), but not by much. They are pretty much head to head, and in both cases, you are talking about the latest and greatest from Intel and ARM.
Reference:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fbm1agvXzI
http://www.antutu.com/Ranking.shtml
http://vr-zone.com/articles/antutu-benchmark-indicate-exynos-5-octa-galaxy-s-iv-is-faster-than-qualcomm-600-variant/19612.html
Caveat: This is quite obviously not a comprehensive review done by a website with a solid reputation like Anandtech. Nonetheless, it looks reasonable to me.
In my humble opinion, this old hoary debate will always remain a debate for several reasons. As you right mentioned, the reproduction environment in most cases is woeful at best. Most speakers are not even full-range to begin with, their cabinets resonate, their drivers cannot often keep up in complex multi-layered music, their passive crossovers do a half-assed job in distributing the sound to the various drivers, and so on. Then, the amps are weak so they start bottoming out and start clipping when the speaker impedance and phase dips sharply in certain frequency bands. Then the electronics, especially the capacitors and power supply cannot keep up. Then the cables are not fat enough or are not shielded enough so they load up the power amp even more. Then the pre-amp adds its own coloration to the already feeble signal coming from the source. Then the DAC does its own thing and further colors or degrades the source signal even more. Then the source adds its own share of noise and jitter to the audio signal that screws up not just the signal quality (bad enough) but even the timing of the music.
On top of it, the room comes into play. The room adds its own coloration and effect that is often a far bigger factor that the audio system itself - boosting certain frequencies while muddying and deadening others, and even adding echoes, reflections, etc.
Then there is the human being at the end of the chain. I personally can't even listen above 16KHz, and I have average ears. I suspect many people are like me too, at either end of our audible spectrum. On top of it, we humans hear music very differently - while our audio range may be fairly similar (20hz to 20khz by popular definition), our sensitivity to *variations* in tone and timing varies drastically - many often have off the charts sensitivity to even slightly off-key music (I do) or slightly off-beat music (I do not at all).
All in all, a decent headphone setup is far far more revealing than a decent audio setup. At a thousand dollars, you can probably assemble a decent headphone, but an audio system will sound atrocious, unless you are willing to spend a whole lot more effort and research in second hand discrete gear OR are willing to do serious DIY.
Anyway - I also wanted to say one thing - the thing that gets neglected the most in all this is actually the quality of the source recording - or what people call "mastering".
Most people who say something like "SACDs sound far better than redbook CD" or "vinyl sounds far better than CD" are most likely saying this because a whole lot more care went into recording the SACD or vinyl compared to the cheaper mass market CD or mp3.
If I look back at all the albums I have purchased or listened to (in whatever format), the one thing that stands out to me personally is that I have found less than 10% of them to be "recorded with care". And I'm not even being picky! Across the board, I can say that recording quality sucks when it comes to rock (which is what I listen to most often) - and I mean all kinds of rock.
If Neil Young's initiative (and even his Pono device) and Dave Grohl's initiatives are successful in improving the audio quality of music in general, I strongly suspect it will be because recording quality will be done with greater care, not because they decided to use a fancier digital format or use higher number of bits and samples to store their music. While everything becomes a factor by the time the music reaches your ears (heck, by the time it is processed by your brain, you even have to factor in psychoacoustics and gear bias and the "burn-in" syndrome) - the recording quality in general needs to improve (except for the jazz and classical pieces that audiophiles love to love, and are hence recorded with care), and this improvement will arguably make the biggest difference in audio quality.