Ah, sorry, I missed the part at the end. I was replying to the 'I am under the impression there is only going to be ONE "Windows 8", and everyone will run it.' - the ARM version, as you say, will be a different version, aimed at tablets / phones.
Kettle, microwave, and toaster, sure (although I actually only own one of those). I was thinking of fridge, freezer, washing machine. The new fridge and freezer have better insulation and more efficient compressors, so they draw less power. The washing machine is also more efficient. Actually, the oven in my new house is also better insulated, so I use less electricity heating my kitchen and more heating my food - I couldn't put anything plastic in the cupboard next to the oven in my old house because it got too hot.
At best, all the petition will do is prove what everyone should already know: Democrats and Republicans are the servants of big businesses and not the American public
If it actually proves that, to the majority of the US population, then it will have done more good for politics in the USA than anything else in the last 50 years...
I'm not sure how you get from the first three to the fourth one. For example, I took out a mortgage a little under two years ago to buy a house. As a result, I am now paying in mortgage interest less than a third of what I was paying in rent. Because the house I bought has better insulation than the place I was renting, my gas bill has gone down. Because I bought new appliances when I moved, rather than using the old ones that came with my rented flat, my electricity bill is also down. And yet, I am quite clearly not avoiding all debt - I have more debt now than I have ever had, yet my monthly cost of living is much lower and, as a result, I am paying back the mortgage quite quickly. In a few years, it should be fully paid off. At that point, my cost of living will be even lower. In contrast, if I'd avoided all debt, I'd still be slowly saving up to buy a house, while paying someone else for the privilege of living in a property that they owned.
My credit card charges no fees (to me - it does charge them to the merchants). It charges me no interest as long as I pay the bill within 14 days of the statement, which happens automatically via direct debit. This means that every payment I make on it actually leave my bank account 14-35 days after I make the purchase. For example, when I travel somewhere that is paying expenses, I can often get claim them back and have the repayment money entering my account before the original payment actually leaves. My mortgage has an offset facility, so any money in my current account is subtracted from the mortgage total before I pay interest. That means that, effectively, anything currently on my credit card is paying me interest at the rate of my mortgage. Oh, plus I get 1% back from everything I spend on the credit card.
In theory, when a politician is bribed, he is paid to hold a particular opinion. When he is lobbied, he is paid (indirectly) for someone to be allowed to present their case. In practice, when you have two sides to an argument and one is paying to make its case and the other is not, then the politician does not hear from the other side and so ends up holding whatever opinion the lobbyist presents.
Lobbying wouldn't be such a problem if politicians were less lazy. If they heard from lobbyists and then did some real research on the topic, then lobbying would just do what it was meant to: bring issues to the attention of elected representatives.
Lisp? SBCL keeps pushing out new releases and the code it generates for x86-64 is pretty fast. Pascal? Well the Free Pascal Compiler supports the dialects used by Borland Turbo Pascal and Delphi, so your investment in Pascal code is probably quite safe. The latest release adds some improvements to ARM floating point code, so it will run faster on Android and iOS devices (for example). Looks safe to me. BASIC? Not sure - I've not really been keeping up with who ships BASIC these days, although PowerBASIC did just start using LLVM on the back end so it's probably seen some nice speedups recently...
I'm not sure about WordPerfect, but VisiCalc for DOS, which I ran on my 8086 PC and was originally released in 1979, still works in DOSBox. In fact, I can still open spreadsheets that I created in the '90s on my Psion Series 3 by running a Psion Series 3A emulator in DOSBox.
Perhaps more interestingly, I have a lot of files lying around from the '90s that I've just copied from one machine to another without really paying attention to what they were. When I went from a 60MB hard disk to a 1GB one, there was no point seeing what was worth copying - I could fit all of my files, important and unimportant, in a tiny fraction of my new disk. This happened when again I went to a 20GB, then 40GB, 80GB, and 256GB disk. Now I also have a 4TB NAS, so I even keep snapshotted copies of things. I may have to dig a bit to find applications that can open these files, but they're preserved. If they were one some cloud service that I'd abandoned, then after six months (or some years) of inactivity, my account would have been disabled and the data deleted.
ARM's designs are very well established in the field now, with many manufacturers commited to using chips based on them.
ARM has some very talented chip designers, but interestingly the company is no longer relying on them for the success of the ecosystem. The ARMv8 ISA is now finalised, but ARM is letting other companies take the lead in bringing implementations to market. This is quite an interesting strategy. The main criticism for ARMv7 is that there is no second source at the top of the supply chain. The closest is Qualcomm, but their Snapdragon is based on the ARM Cortex A8 (just heavily modified). Complete third-party designs are things like Marvell's (crappy) ARMv5 implementations. With ARMv8, companies like AMC and nVidia are going to produce their own independent implementations and ARM is going to work with them to ensure that they are compatible. ARM is then going to start licensing their own design to SoC makers, but by then they will be competing with other implementations. The future of ARM is likely to shift towards overseeing interoperability, with less emphasis on providing the implementation that everyone uses (although they'll probably own the huge volume, low margin, market for a long time). I can't see Intel following this strategy.
Add to that, Intel was recently boasting that Atom chips only use 2W... idle. In contrast, the A8 SoCs that you cite won't even use 2W under full load, including full GPU load, and they'll use something like 15mW when idle. Clock for clock, Atom doesn't tend to do as well as even a Cortex A8, so Intel is selling lower performance and higher power consumption at a much higher price. About the only advantage that they have is backwards compatibility with legacy x86 software, but that's only really useful when you're talking about the desktop / laptop. Tablets and phones tend to be people's second or third computers, so they can still keep running their old x86 software on their desktop, but buy new software for their phone / tablet that is compiled for ARM. Eventually they'll find that more of their legacy software runs on ARM than x86...
Competition is good, yes, and that's part of the reason why everyone is so down on Intel: they have a history of anticompetitive behaviour. In contrast, the ARM ecosystem is actively fostering competition. In the ARMv7 world, most companies license core designs from ARM and then just add things like GPUs and DSPs for differentiation. In the ARMv8 world, this is going to change: at least two companies (including nVidia) are planning on bringing their own independent implementations of the ISA to market before ARM has an IP core available to license. ARM guarantees that they are compatible, and any userspace software for one will work on any other (operating systems may need a bit of porting as things like interrupt controllers may be different even between SoCs based on the same ARM core).
In x86 world, there is Intel, and a token amount of AMD to satisfy antitrust concerns. Companies like IDT and Cyrix gave up, and VIA is just clinging on to the sidelines. In the ARM world, there are about a dozen companies actively competing and no clear winner among them (although Qualcomm is doing pretty well at the moment).
The Newton sucked initially too. The software was great, but it needed a processor at least twice as powerful as they could build. The later models were much better, but by then the image of the Newton had stuck. The Palm Pilot was the PDA to buy because it was far less ambitious and so actually managed to deliver what it attempted.
There's a Psion 3A Emulator that you can probably find online, which runs nicely in DOSBox. I actually still use the spreadsheet occasionally. It's pretty impressive to see what they did on an 8086 clocked at under 8MHz with 512KB of RAM (shared between application memory and RAM disk). I had a 3 (3.84MHz CPU, 256KB of RAM), and it could happily have a few instances of the word processor (no spell check - that was only in the 3A), the address book, the spreadsheet, and a few other applications all open at once and instantly switch between them. It even came with a little development environment (OPL - a structured BASIC-like language, which could compile into stand-alone binaries).
The problem with genocide (well, aside from the moral issues) is that it only really works if you can make sure that you've got everyone. That means everyone in iran, and the transitive closure of anyone either related or sympathetic to anyone there. Otherwise, you kill a lot of people and leave a small group who passionately hate you and feel that they have nothing to lose. And, once you've worked out who you need to kill, it's generally everyone except a few thousand sociopaths who don't care what happens to anyone else.
It's usually much cheaper to spread evidence that the demagogues are child molesters (or idolators or whatever the culture demands).
Why? Most people in both countries can live quite happily without ever being involved with the legal system (I've not been to Iran, but I have a few friends from there, so admittedly I'm only speaking based on second-hand information). In both cases, you can be imprisoned for quite ludicrous things (e.g. owning a specific quantity of a certain kind of plant in the USA). In both places, the state reserves the right to kill its citizens.
No. The thing about a carbon cycle is that it's, uh, a cycle. If you take a plant and burn it, then grow another plant that absorbs the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, then you end up with no net increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. The problem is that we are mostly burning things like coal and oil that have not been atmospheric carbon for several million years. This is, in theory, the point of carbon offsets - they grow some new plants to absorb the carbon that you release from burning fossil fuels.
The problem is that this is really only talking about moving the final assembly to the USA. Where are all of the components made? Does Samsung produce the CPU in Korea, or do they do build their factories in China and take advantage of the cheap labour (serious question - I have no idea). What about the screens?
Entitled? Hell yes! The question is not whether you feel that you are entitled not to work like a slave, it's whether you feel that this entitlement should also extend to the workers in China.
Ah, nice. I saw they were hiring people for that about 6-8 months ago, and followed some of the progress. I didn't see the code had actually made it in. It's the first DSP back end to be contributed to LLVM, so it will probably be quite useful to other DSP makers as a reference. It will also be interesting to see if TI follows with a C64x back end - currently the only compilers for this DSP family (present in most of the OMAP series) are proprietary.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, sorry, I missed the part at the end. I was replying to the 'I am under the impression there is only going to be ONE "Windows 8", and everyone will run it.' - the ARM version, as you say, will be a different version, aimed at tablets / phones.
Kettle, microwave, and toaster, sure (although I actually only own one of those). I was thinking of fridge, freezer, washing machine. The new fridge and freezer have better insulation and more efficient compressors, so they draw less power. The washing machine is also more efficient. Actually, the oven in my new house is also better insulated, so I use less electricity heating my kitchen and more heating my food - I couldn't put anything plastic in the cupboard next to the oven in my old house because it got too hot.
At best, all the petition will do is prove what everyone should already know: Democrats and Republicans are the servants of big businesses and not the American public
If it actually proves that, to the majority of the US population, then it will have done more good for politics in the USA than anything else in the last 50 years...
How is he indirectly paid?
Jobs for family members and positions on the board once he retires from politics are the two big ones.
I'm not sure how you get from the first three to the fourth one. For example, I took out a mortgage a little under two years ago to buy a house. As a result, I am now paying in mortgage interest less than a third of what I was paying in rent. Because the house I bought has better insulation than the place I was renting, my gas bill has gone down. Because I bought new appliances when I moved, rather than using the old ones that came with my rented flat, my electricity bill is also down. And yet, I am quite clearly not avoiding all debt - I have more debt now than I have ever had, yet my monthly cost of living is much lower and, as a result, I am paying back the mortgage quite quickly. In a few years, it should be fully paid off. At that point, my cost of living will be even lower. In contrast, if I'd avoided all debt, I'd still be slowly saving up to buy a house, while paying someone else for the privilege of living in a property that they owned.
My credit card charges no fees (to me - it does charge them to the merchants). It charges me no interest as long as I pay the bill within 14 days of the statement, which happens automatically via direct debit. This means that every payment I make on it actually leave my bank account 14-35 days after I make the purchase. For example, when I travel somewhere that is paying expenses, I can often get claim them back and have the repayment money entering my account before the original payment actually leaves. My mortgage has an offset facility, so any money in my current account is subtracted from the mortgage total before I pay interest. That means that, effectively, anything currently on my credit card is paying me interest at the rate of my mortgage. Oh, plus I get 1% back from everything I spend on the credit card.
In theory, when a politician is bribed, he is paid to hold a particular opinion. When he is lobbied, he is paid (indirectly) for someone to be allowed to present their case. In practice, when you have two sides to an argument and one is paying to make its case and the other is not, then the politician does not hear from the other side and so ends up holding whatever opinion the lobbyist presents.
Lobbying wouldn't be such a problem if politicians were less lazy. If they heard from lobbyists and then did some real research on the topic, then lobbying would just do what it was meant to: bring issues to the attention of elected representatives.
Lisp? SBCL keeps pushing out new releases and the code it generates for x86-64 is pretty fast. Pascal? Well the Free Pascal Compiler supports the dialects used by Borland Turbo Pascal and Delphi, so your investment in Pascal code is probably quite safe. The latest release adds some improvements to ARM floating point code, so it will run faster on Android and iOS devices (for example). Looks safe to me. BASIC? Not sure - I've not really been keeping up with who ships BASIC these days, although PowerBASIC did just start using LLVM on the back end so it's probably seen some nice speedups recently...
I'm not sure about WordPerfect, but VisiCalc for DOS, which I ran on my 8086 PC and was originally released in 1979, still works in DOSBox. In fact, I can still open spreadsheets that I created in the '90s on my Psion Series 3 by running a Psion Series 3A emulator in DOSBox.
Perhaps more interestingly, I have a lot of files lying around from the '90s that I've just copied from one machine to another without really paying attention to what they were. When I went from a 60MB hard disk to a 1GB one, there was no point seeing what was worth copying - I could fit all of my files, important and unimportant, in a tiny fraction of my new disk. This happened when again I went to a 20GB, then 40GB, 80GB, and 256GB disk. Now I also have a 4TB NAS, so I even keep snapshotted copies of things. I may have to dig a bit to find applications that can open these files, but they're preserved. If they were one some cloud service that I'd abandoned, then after six months (or some years) of inactivity, my account would have been disabled and the data deleted.
Depends. How rich are you?
ARM's designs are very well established in the field now, with many manufacturers commited to using chips based on them.
ARM has some very talented chip designers, but interestingly the company is no longer relying on them for the success of the ecosystem. The ARMv8 ISA is now finalised, but ARM is letting other companies take the lead in bringing implementations to market. This is quite an interesting strategy. The main criticism for ARMv7 is that there is no second source at the top of the supply chain. The closest is Qualcomm, but their Snapdragon is based on the ARM Cortex A8 (just heavily modified). Complete third-party designs are things like Marvell's (crappy) ARMv5 implementations. With ARMv8, companies like AMC and nVidia are going to produce their own independent implementations and ARM is going to work with them to ensure that they are compatible. ARM is then going to start licensing their own design to SoC makers, but by then they will be competing with other implementations. The future of ARM is likely to shift towards overseeing interoperability, with less emphasis on providing the implementation that everyone uses (although they'll probably own the huge volume, low margin, market for a long time). I can't see Intel following this strategy.
Add to that, Intel was recently boasting that Atom chips only use 2W... idle. In contrast, the A8 SoCs that you cite won't even use 2W under full load, including full GPU load, and they'll use something like 15mW when idle. Clock for clock, Atom doesn't tend to do as well as even a Cortex A8, so Intel is selling lower performance and higher power consumption at a much higher price. About the only advantage that they have is backwards compatibility with legacy x86 software, but that's only really useful when you're talking about the desktop / laptop. Tablets and phones tend to be people's second or third computers, so they can still keep running their old x86 software on their desktop, but buy new software for their phone / tablet that is compiled for ARM. Eventually they'll find that more of their legacy software runs on ARM than x86...
Competition is good, yes, and that's part of the reason why everyone is so down on Intel: they have a history of anticompetitive behaviour. In contrast, the ARM ecosystem is actively fostering competition. In the ARMv7 world, most companies license core designs from ARM and then just add things like GPUs and DSPs for differentiation. In the ARMv8 world, this is going to change: at least two companies (including nVidia) are planning on bringing their own independent implementations of the ISA to market before ARM has an IP core available to license. ARM guarantees that they are compatible, and any userspace software for one will work on any other (operating systems may need a bit of porting as things like interrupt controllers may be different even between SoCs based on the same ARM core).
In x86 world, there is Intel, and a token amount of AMD to satisfy antitrust concerns. Companies like IDT and Cyrix gave up, and VIA is just clinging on to the sidelines. In the ARM world, there are about a dozen companies actively competing and no clear winner among them (although Qualcomm is doing pretty well at the moment).
The ARM version will only support the Metro part, not the full system. Unless they've changed their mind again...
The Newton sucked initially too. The software was great, but it needed a processor at least twice as powerful as they could build. The later models were much better, but by then the image of the Newton had stuck. The Palm Pilot was the PDA to buy because it was far less ambitious and so actually managed to deliver what it attempted.
There's a Psion 3A Emulator that you can probably find online, which runs nicely in DOSBox. I actually still use the spreadsheet occasionally. It's pretty impressive to see what they did on an 8086 clocked at under 8MHz with 512KB of RAM (shared between application memory and RAM disk). I had a 3 (3.84MHz CPU, 256KB of RAM), and it could happily have a few instances of the word processor (no spell check - that was only in the 3A), the address book, the spreadsheet, and a few other applications all open at once and instantly switch between them. It even came with a little development environment (OPL - a structured BASIC-like language, which could compile into stand-alone binaries).
The problem with genocide (well, aside from the moral issues) is that it only really works if you can make sure that you've got everyone. That means everyone in iran, and the transitive closure of anyone either related or sympathetic to anyone there. Otherwise, you kill a lot of people and leave a small group who passionately hate you and feel that they have nothing to lose. And, once you've worked out who you need to kill, it's generally everyone except a few thousand sociopaths who don't care what happens to anyone else.
It's usually much cheaper to spread evidence that the demagogues are child molesters (or idolators or whatever the culture demands).
Why? Most people in both countries can live quite happily without ever being involved with the legal system (I've not been to Iran, but I have a few friends from there, so admittedly I'm only speaking based on second-hand information). In both cases, you can be imprisoned for quite ludicrous things (e.g. owning a specific quantity of a certain kind of plant in the USA). In both places, the state reserves the right to kill its citizens.
No. The thing about a carbon cycle is that it's, uh, a cycle. If you take a plant and burn it, then grow another plant that absorbs the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, then you end up with no net increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. The problem is that we are mostly burning things like coal and oil that have not been atmospheric carbon for several million years. This is, in theory, the point of carbon offsets - they grow some new plants to absorb the carbon that you release from burning fossil fuels.
Clearly they hired English managers...
The problem is that this is really only talking about moving the final assembly to the USA. Where are all of the components made? Does Samsung produce the CPU in Korea, or do they do build their factories in China and take advantage of the cheap labour (serious question - I have no idea). What about the screens?
Entitled? Hell yes! The question is not whether you feel that you are entitled not to work like a slave, it's whether you feel that this entitlement should also extend to the workers in China.
Ah, nice. I saw they were hiring people for that about 6-8 months ago, and followed some of the progress. I didn't see the code had actually made it in. It's the first DSP back end to be contributed to LLVM, so it will probably be quite useful to other DSP makers as a reference. It will also be interesting to see if TI follows with a C64x back end - currently the only compilers for this DSP family (present in most of the OMAP series) are proprietary.
Watch the video - it's a claim that she made. If she is wrong, then you should correct her.
Both of these are fairly difficult to discover if you happen to have evolved on a gas giant around a first-generation star...