Delayed. The problem with an IPO is that you end up with a lot of stock holders which means that you have to do things like publish financial reports. Facebook and Goldman Sachs worked out a nice scam where Facebook sold a big chunk of stock to GS for a hugely inflated bubble value, giving them a single large shareholder. GS then create a fund backed by these shares, still giving Facebook a single shareholder (because they're not selling the stock) and allowing them to sell shares in the fund. The sold these to their preferred customers (at an even more hyped price) and then hyped it even more. Their preferred customers then dumped the stock off on whoever GS chose to be patsies in this scheme.
This scam will collapse when Facebook has an IPO because GS won't be able to massively overvalue the fund when their financials are public. By that stage, GS and their friends will have sold all of their shares in the fund, so it won't matter, but it's much better for Facebook to keep funnelling stock into the overvalued fund for as long as they can get away with it.
There's a different definition of PC, and that's short for "IBM PC", and it's a personal computer with specific characteristics: x86 CPU
x86 CPU and PC-compatible BIOS. The latter is important - there have been a few other x86 systems (including some Sun 386 workstations) that did not have a PC BIOS and so could not boot any of the common x86 operating systems. The first Intel Macs also fell into this category, until they shipped a BIOS compatibility layer for EFI.
No, I'm quite sure Core2 CPUs are not being used in many embedded applications
You'd be surprised. Cash machines and other kiosk-type systems such as checkouts very often use x86 chips (and even run Windows) because they're cheap, the developer tools are cheap, the people who know how to program them are cheap, and the power budget is not really relevant.
and there's no general-purpose PCs made with ARM CPUs
You'd better tell companies like Genesi that their products don't exist...
WebOS is very much GNU/Linux. It doesn't run X (well, unless you install it), but you can take code written for any other *NIX OS and recompile it pretty easily. It took me about half a day to get the GNUstep Foundation framework running on my Touchpad, and most of that was fudging the configure script to support cross-compilation. It comes with SDL, so a lot of games that use Linux + SDL rather than using X directly will also work.
Not sure about the Pre, but Flash runs nicely on the TouchPad and was installed out of the box. It works well enough to play flash games (if you can find some that are not clunky with a touchscreen) and to watch streaming videos from iPlayer. The video appears to use accelerators in SoC rather than the ARM core, since watching an hour of video only uses a little over 10% of the battery. It does produce a higher CPU load than watching things in the movie player though, probably for the same reason as on the desktop: Adobe hasn't yet discovered that GPUs can do compositing...
Yes and no. WebOS is nice, but it's a Linux kernel, a GNU userland, a port of WebKit, and a (quite nice) JavaScript toolkit. Writing all of this from scratch would take a long time, but taking an existing Linux or BSD kernel, a GNU or BSD userland is easy. The port of WebKit and SDL is only about a month's worth of work for someone who knows what they're doing. There are some existing JavaScript toolkits that are pretty nice - maybe take the (BSD licensed) Yahoo one. Then there are the apps, but most of the ones that ship with WebOS are quite simple and, more importantly, they are independent so you can have different people working on each one. A competent software development house with experience in embedded *NIX systems could probably throw together something almost as good as WebOS in about a month. Pretty much any company that can afford to throw people at it could do it in six.
The one advantage that buying WebOS has is that there are already quite a few third-party apps for the Pre and TouchPad.
I was very surprised that theaters stayed in business after home video became commonplace
It's only been the last ten years when projectors became cheap enough to afford at home. I remember seeing DVDs for the first time at the Live '98 expo in London. One of the stands had a home cinema system (£70K, including the acoustically engineered room) with real cinema seats and a very expensive projector and sound system, all driven from the same shiny disk that people were putting in cheap (well, back then 'cheap' meant £200) DVD players and watching on their little CRTs. A few years later, you could buy a projector, surround sound system, and a DVD player for a couple of hundred quid. Meanwhile, cinemas put their prices up to close to £10 per person per film. Even at £5, it didn't take long for the home cinema to be cheaper per film - and come with a better experience.
I bought my surround sound speakers + amplifier for about £100, ten years ago. I bought my projector for about £150 four years ago. My sofa is my mother's old one, so that was free (and it's covered by a throw that I got as a moving in present when I bought this house). I was using a £25 DVD player, now I'm using a little NAS box that I built.
Have half a dozen friends over four or five times, and you've paid less than you would have done if you'd all gone to the cinema, and had a much better time because you can eat and drink what you want, pause if someone needs to use the toilet, and so on. For best results, encourage your guests to bring your-beverage-of-choice...
The thing is, if you're into a nice high-def picture and surround sound, the cinema offers better quality than your old CRT.
That depends a lot on the cinema (compared to a decentish cheap home cinema setup, rather than his CRT specifically). The ones near me always manage to set their equaliser stupidly so that high-frequency audio is distorted, the midrange is almost completely absent, and the bass is so loud that you feel it rather than hear it. At home, it's nicely balanced and the sound is loud enough to be immersive but not not loud enough to be deafening (or too silent to hear).
The picture quality is also quite variable. If we're in an old screen then we usually get prints that have been used in the USA and then shipped across, so the quality is often visually worse than a DVD. For the digital screens, their projectors are perfectly in focus, so you can see every pixel if you sit near the front (at home, I leave mine very slightly out of focus so the pixels overlap a tiny bit), or if you sit at the back then the screen is (subjectively) smaller.
So take them out for a meal, go for a walk along the beach, or do something else for the first date? Sitting in a dark room where you aren't supposed to talk to anyone around you and are not looking at each other never seemed like a great plan for a date to me anyway...
More importantly, there is a selection of 70+ years of studio output to watch at home. There is a selection of about 1 month of studio output to watch in the cinema. Which has the greater probability of containing something good?
You're correct, if you only count legal options. However, it's usually available for illegal download within a day or two of the cinema release. In the UK, the timeline for US movies is usually: film becomes available on file sharing networks, a month or so later it becomes available in cinemas, then 4-6 months later it's available to on DVD. I only watch things on DVD or iPlayer these days and I don't mind waiting 6 months (for one thing, it means lots of people have seen it first and can tell me if it's worth bothering with), but the studios are intentionally delaying DVD / BluRay releases 'to avoid cannibalising cinema ticket sales'. That means that they believe that, given the choice, people would rather buy / rent the movie and watch it at home than go to the cinema. Knowing this, they intentionally don't give their customers what they want. They then have the gall to complain that their profits are lower than they want.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit was on TV this christmas and I saw it for the first time since being absolutely terrified by the final confrontation with the villain as a small child. I was surprised by how good most of the effects still looked today, aside from a couple of scenes. In contrast, the sets in the purely live-action parts looked very dated (and not because they were set in the '40s). A modern version would probably ruin the toons by making them look like 3D Homer, but would have sets that looked like they'd had real dirt on them and brick walls that didn't look like they were wallpaper...
combined with the fact that the modern generation of Parents and their children have probably never heard of Tintin
Really? I'm not yet 30, and I remember there being a Tintin cartoon series on television when I was a teenager (in the UK) and the books being prominently displayed in bookshops when I was younger (although I preferred Asterix). Schools usually had a few of them in the original French, because they were simple enough to be understood by people who had only been learning the language for a little while, so quite a few teenagers read them too.
I watched it on DVD and enjoyed it. It wasn't an amazing movie (and showed that blue people make good soldiers, when led by white officers...) and I don't think adding clunky 3D effects would have done much to improve it.
3D is like colour. If the film is good, people don't notice its absence - I've had conversations with people about black and white movies where we've both been convinced that we saw it in colour, even though no colour version was ever made, because you fill in the colour in your memory. If 3D can be completely unobtrusive (i.e. no need to wear special glasses, no headache and motion-sickness inducing contradictory visual feedback) then it's great. If it costs extra and makes the film-watching experience less comfortable, then I'll live without it...
WINE implements the same APIs as Windows and several commercial products have shipped non-Windows versions by either compiling against winelib or just shipping a WINE wrapper. The idea in US copyright law that you can't copyright an interface means that any API is freely reimplementable (unless it is covered by patents, although patents cover implementations so are more likely to affect ABIs than APIs).
The advantage of owning the API (which really just means owning the most popular implementation of the API, i.e. the one developers regard as authoritative) is that you have first-move advantage all of the time. Any changes to the API happen in your product first, then developers use them, then everyone else implements them. In between the second and third steps, you have complementary third-party products that only work with your system (or work best with your system).
The grandparent's point, I think, is that scalability in the server is not necessarily the same as scalability in the system. If my mail server is running a simple SMTP daemon that can only handle one connection at once then it doesn't matter because the scalability of the email system is not dependent on any single node. If my mail server goes down, then people trying to communicate with me or a few other people will notice, but no one else will (and even then they may not - if it's only down for an hour or two then mails will just be slightly delayed). The system as a whole has scaled from a few hundred users up to billions of users, but no one expects any single implementation of the SMTP or IMAP protocols (for example) to scale to more than a few tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of users.
Conversely, the guy on the other end was WAY overboard on wanting that controller by Christmas (must be a helluva controller).
Or, like many other people buying stuff before Christmas, it was intended as a gift. It is traditional to give Christmas presents at Christmas, so having something turn up in late January is a problem. This is presumably why he checked before ordering that the expected delivery date was early December...
Probably. I have no idea what OEM pricing on Atom is but I bet it is pretty dang cheap.
There are several knock-on cost savings in using a SoC instead of Atom + chipset. Atom needs a second chip, it needs motherboard traces run for connecting the two, and it needs motherboard traces run for connecting the RAM, while ARM chips often come in package-on-package configurations so the RAM chip just slots on top of the SoC. All of this adds to the complexity of the Atom board, which adds to its cost.
It's pretty common with corporations - especially US corporations - in the EU. There are quite strong consumer protection laws that mean that a lot of 'extended warranties' are just promises to honour the terms required by law. They just offer the same service that they offer in the USA, where there are much weaker minimum standards.
I live in a costal region, but the thing about coasts is that they're often quite steep. I'm about a mile inland, but even if all of the ice in the world melted the sea level wouldn't be anywhere near my house. In contrast, there are places in south east England that are below sea level yet many miles inland that would be in trouble if the sea level rose enough to cause flooding.
Slashdot Mirror
So where's that Facebook IPO?
Delayed. The problem with an IPO is that you end up with a lot of stock holders which means that you have to do things like publish financial reports. Facebook and Goldman Sachs worked out a nice scam where Facebook sold a big chunk of stock to GS for a hugely inflated bubble value, giving them a single large shareholder. GS then create a fund backed by these shares, still giving Facebook a single shareholder (because they're not selling the stock) and allowing them to sell shares in the fund. The sold these to their preferred customers (at an even more hyped price) and then hyped it even more. Their preferred customers then dumped the stock off on whoever GS chose to be patsies in this scheme.
This scam will collapse when Facebook has an IPO because GS won't be able to massively overvalue the fund when their financials are public. By that stage, GS and their friends will have sold all of their shares in the fund, so it won't matter, but it's much better for Facebook to keep funnelling stock into the overvalued fund for as long as they can get away with it.
There's a different definition of PC, and that's short for "IBM PC", and it's a personal computer with specific characteristics: x86 CPU
x86 CPU and PC-compatible BIOS. The latter is important - there have been a few other x86 systems (including some Sun 386 workstations) that did not have a PC BIOS and so could not boot any of the common x86 operating systems. The first Intel Macs also fell into this category, until they shipped a BIOS compatibility layer for EFI.
No, I'm quite sure Core2 CPUs are not being used in many embedded applications
You'd be surprised. Cash machines and other kiosk-type systems such as checkouts very often use x86 chips (and even run Windows) because they're cheap, the developer tools are cheap, the people who know how to program them are cheap, and the power budget is not really relevant.
and there's no general-purpose PCs made with ARM CPUs
You'd better tell companies like Genesi that their products don't exist...
WebOS is very much GNU/Linux. It doesn't run X (well, unless you install it), but you can take code written for any other *NIX OS and recompile it pretty easily. It took me about half a day to get the GNUstep Foundation framework running on my Touchpad, and most of that was fudging the configure script to support cross-compilation. It comes with SDL, so a lot of games that use Linux + SDL rather than using X directly will also work.
Not sure about the Pre, but Flash runs nicely on the TouchPad and was installed out of the box. It works well enough to play flash games (if you can find some that are not clunky with a touchscreen) and to watch streaming videos from iPlayer. The video appears to use accelerators in SoC rather than the ARM core, since watching an hour of video only uses a little over 10% of the battery. It does produce a higher CPU load than watching things in the movie player though, probably for the same reason as on the desktop: Adobe hasn't yet discovered that GPUs can do compositing...
Yes and no. WebOS is nice, but it's a Linux kernel, a GNU userland, a port of WebKit, and a (quite nice) JavaScript toolkit. Writing all of this from scratch would take a long time, but taking an existing Linux or BSD kernel, a GNU or BSD userland is easy. The port of WebKit and SDL is only about a month's worth of work for someone who knows what they're doing. There are some existing JavaScript toolkits that are pretty nice - maybe take the (BSD licensed) Yahoo one. Then there are the apps, but most of the ones that ship with WebOS are quite simple and, more importantly, they are independent so you can have different people working on each one. A competent software development house with experience in embedded *NIX systems could probably throw together something almost as good as WebOS in about a month. Pretty much any company that can afford to throw people at it could do it in six.
The one advantage that buying WebOS has is that there are already quite a few third-party apps for the Pre and TouchPad.
I was very surprised that theaters stayed in business after home video became commonplace
It's only been the last ten years when projectors became cheap enough to afford at home. I remember seeing DVDs for the first time at the Live '98 expo in London. One of the stands had a home cinema system (£70K, including the acoustically engineered room) with real cinema seats and a very expensive projector and sound system, all driven from the same shiny disk that people were putting in cheap (well, back then 'cheap' meant £200) DVD players and watching on their little CRTs. A few years later, you could buy a projector, surround sound system, and a DVD player for a couple of hundred quid. Meanwhile, cinemas put their prices up to close to £10 per person per film. Even at £5, it didn't take long for the home cinema to be cheaper per film - and come with a better experience.
Moon was 2009 and was easily one of the best science fiction films of the last 20 years...
I bought my surround sound speakers + amplifier for about £100, ten years ago. I bought my projector for about £150 four years ago. My sofa is my mother's old one, so that was free (and it's covered by a throw that I got as a moving in present when I bought this house). I was using a £25 DVD player, now I'm using a little NAS box that I built.
Have half a dozen friends over four or five times, and you've paid less than you would have done if you'd all gone to the cinema, and had a much better time because you can eat and drink what you want, pause if someone needs to use the toilet, and so on. For best results, encourage your guests to bring your-beverage-of-choice...
The thing is, if you're into a nice high-def picture and surround sound, the cinema offers better quality than your old CRT.
That depends a lot on the cinema (compared to a decentish cheap home cinema setup, rather than his CRT specifically). The ones near me always manage to set their equaliser stupidly so that high-frequency audio is distorted, the midrange is almost completely absent, and the bass is so loud that you feel it rather than hear it. At home, it's nicely balanced and the sound is loud enough to be immersive but not not loud enough to be deafening (or too silent to hear).
The picture quality is also quite variable. If we're in an old screen then we usually get prints that have been used in the USA and then shipped across, so the quality is often visually worse than a DVD. For the digital screens, their projectors are perfectly in focus, so you can see every pixel if you sit near the front (at home, I leave mine very slightly out of focus so the pixels overlap a tiny bit), or if you sit at the back then the screen is (subjectively) smaller.
So take them out for a meal, go for a walk along the beach, or do something else for the first date? Sitting in a dark room where you aren't supposed to talk to anyone around you and are not looking at each other never seemed like a great plan for a date to me anyway...
More importantly, there is a selection of 70+ years of studio output to watch at home. There is a selection of about 1 month of studio output to watch in the cinema. Which has the greater probability of containing something good?
You're correct, if you only count legal options. However, it's usually available for illegal download within a day or two of the cinema release. In the UK, the timeline for US movies is usually: film becomes available on file sharing networks, a month or so later it becomes available in cinemas, then 4-6 months later it's available to on DVD. I only watch things on DVD or iPlayer these days and I don't mind waiting 6 months (for one thing, it means lots of people have seen it first and can tell me if it's worth bothering with), but the studios are intentionally delaying DVD / BluRay releases 'to avoid cannibalising cinema ticket sales'. That means that they believe that, given the choice, people would rather buy / rent the movie and watch it at home than go to the cinema. Knowing this, they intentionally don't give their customers what they want. They then have the gall to complain that their profits are lower than they want.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit was on TV this christmas and I saw it for the first time since being absolutely terrified by the final confrontation with the villain as a small child. I was surprised by how good most of the effects still looked today, aside from a couple of scenes. In contrast, the sets in the purely live-action parts looked very dated (and not because they were set in the '40s). A modern version would probably ruin the toons by making them look like 3D Homer, but would have sets that looked like they'd had real dirt on them and brick walls that didn't look like they were wallpaper...
combined with the fact that the modern generation of Parents and their children have probably never heard of Tintin
Really? I'm not yet 30, and I remember there being a Tintin cartoon series on television when I was a teenager (in the UK) and the books being prominently displayed in bookshops when I was younger (although I preferred Asterix). Schools usually had a few of them in the original French, because they were simple enough to be understood by people who had only been learning the language for a little while, so quite a few teenagers read them too.
I watched it on DVD and enjoyed it. It wasn't an amazing movie (and showed that blue people make good soldiers, when led by white officers...) and I don't think adding clunky 3D effects would have done much to improve it.
3D is like colour. If the film is good, people don't notice its absence - I've had conversations with people about black and white movies where we've both been convinced that we saw it in colour, even though no colour version was ever made, because you fill in the colour in your memory. If 3D can be completely unobtrusive (i.e. no need to wear special glasses, no headache and motion-sickness inducing contradictory visual feedback) then it's great. If it costs extra and makes the film-watching experience less comfortable, then I'll live without it...
Some people believe that copyright infringement is the sincerest form of flattery
WINE implements the same APIs as Windows and several commercial products have shipped non-Windows versions by either compiling against winelib or just shipping a WINE wrapper. The idea in US copyright law that you can't copyright an interface means that any API is freely reimplementable (unless it is covered by patents, although patents cover implementations so are more likely to affect ABIs than APIs).
The advantage of owning the API (which really just means owning the most popular implementation of the API, i.e. the one developers regard as authoritative) is that you have first-move advantage all of the time. Any changes to the API happen in your product first, then developers use them, then everyone else implements them. In between the second and third steps, you have complementary third-party products that only work with your system (or work best with your system).
The grandparent's point, I think, is that scalability in the server is not necessarily the same as scalability in the system. If my mail server is running a simple SMTP daemon that can only handle one connection at once then it doesn't matter because the scalability of the email system is not dependent on any single node. If my mail server goes down, then people trying to communicate with me or a few other people will notice, but no one else will (and even then they may not - if it's only down for an hour or two then mails will just be slightly delayed). The system as a whole has scaled from a few hundred users up to billions of users, but no one expects any single implementation of the SMTP or IMAP protocols (for example) to scale to more than a few tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of users.
Conversely, the guy on the other end was WAY overboard on wanting that controller by Christmas (must be a helluva controller).
Or, like many other people buying stuff before Christmas, it was intended as a gift. It is traditional to give Christmas presents at Christmas, so having something turn up in late January is a problem. This is presumably why he checked before ordering that the expected delivery date was early December...
It's the Christian message: be nice to people, because the father of the person you just crucified might turn out to be God...
Probably. I have no idea what OEM pricing on Atom is but I bet it is pretty dang cheap.
There are several knock-on cost savings in using a SoC instead of Atom + chipset. Atom needs a second chip, it needs motherboard traces run for connecting the two, and it needs motherboard traces run for connecting the RAM, while ARM chips often come in package-on-package configurations so the RAM chip just slots on top of the SoC. All of this adds to the complexity of the Atom board, which adds to its cost.
It's pretty common with corporations - especially US corporations - in the EU. There are quite strong consumer protection laws that mean that a lot of 'extended warranties' are just promises to honour the terms required by law. They just offer the same service that they offer in the USA, where there are much weaker minimum standards.
We have deserts in America, we just don't live in them
Whoever said this has clearly never strayed far from the coasts...
I live in a costal region, but the thing about coasts is that they're often quite steep. I'm about a mile inland, but even if all of the ice in the world melted the sea level wouldn't be anywhere near my house. In contrast, there are places in south east England that are below sea level yet many miles inland that would be in trouble if the sea level rose enough to cause flooding.