Totally agree. I don't have a TV, but I have a projector connected to a machine that can play DVDs and things from iPlayer. I watch a lot of TV shows, but I watch most of them a series at a time on rented DVDs. I'm usually in the early-adopter demographic, but the emphasis on DRM from the movie industry means that I'm sticking with DVDs at the moment.
The stupid thing about the original FreeRunner was that it only did GPRS, when everything else did UMTS. For a programmable smartphone, not having a decent speed data connection made it pointless.
I was never very good at playing FPSes with just keyboard, though I am fairly competitive with the classic keyboard and mouse.
Classic? The classic FPS games (Wolfenstein, Doom, and so on) were all keyboard-only. Only the later ones added mouse control. Even Quake and Duke3D defaulted to keyboard. Half Life was the first FPS I played that was configured for mouse and keyboard out of the box.
The BBC was expensive. It cost £400, back in the early '80s. It was an amazingly powerful machine in comparison to most home computers, but also much more expensive, so even the man on the street who did have a computer didn't usually have a BBC. The government gave schools extra funding to buy machines that had a certain feature list, and the BBC was about the only machine that qualified when this was launched, which accounted for a lot of the sales.
The BBC came with (for the time) high resolution vector graphics, a teletext display mode, easy to use analogue input and digital I/O, a BASIC dialect with full support for structured programming, a built-in assembler, and even things like a coprocessor port. In comparison with other 8-bit systems, it really was impressive.
Aged 7, my school had three BBC Model Bs and one BBC Master. The head teacher gave us one half-hour lesson each week on whatever he felt like teaching at the time. Sometimes it was classics, for a few weeks it was programming. He taught us BASIC and Logo on a BBC B connected to a big TV. In break times and after school, we could reserve one of the machines to use, if we were the first to request it. I spent a lot of time ages 7 to 11 writing little programs on them. At home I got an 8086 PC and learned PL/M86 and C.
There was a shortcut (control shift escape? Something like that - a few keys all on the left side of the keyboard) that would launch the first program on the disk or tape (depending on which was connected). You only needed to use chain for disks containing multiple programs.
Well, in theory. The cable will support it, but every peer on the chain is allowed to produce or consume up to 45W and there's no guarantee that any of them actually will produce the power. The first device I owned that had a FireWire port was a laptop with a 65W PSU - no chance of that providing 45W to the FireWire port...
Telcos use it and have very high uptime requirements. Therefore, all of the stuff available for it is designed for very high uptimes and therefore very expensive. Therefore it's cheaper for anyone who doesn't have such strict requirements to use cheap commodity crap, which isn't available in 48V DC form. Get a few big datacentres to run 48V DC and charge less to customers who use it and you'll see servers start to be available...
At 48V it isn't too bad though. I'm interested in using DC for lighting because I want to put solar panels on my roof in a few years. I'll be generating DC and storing DC and if I use LEDs for lighting then I'll be using DC as well (and I am for a lot of things anyway) so transforming it to AC in the middle seems a bit pointless. I'd love to switch the lighting circuits entirely over to DC, and maybe run a few extra wires for things that are currently using wall warts.
I'd tend to agree. Friends are usually important, work is usually urgent. Work gets a quick reply, friends get a longer more thoughtful reply. You'd need to take message length into account for this to work. I'll often put off replying to friends until I have enough time to write something longer, while colleagues get a quick 'yes, that looks fine' within a couple of minutes.
I'm not sure where they got the 2014 number from. nVidia aims to have A64 parts shipping in 2012. Possibly the 2014 number is for ARMv8 cores designed by ARM, which are expected to be a bit later.
Not really. AMD has really crap proprietary drivers, nVidia has slightly crap proprietary drivers. AMD's open source drivers are poor, nVidia's are nonexistent. If you're willing to run a blob, nVidia's support is better. If you aren't, they both suck.
ARM only will compete against Intel in cases where power consumption is more important than performance
And in places where ARM's performance is 'good enough'. I have a little machine with an 800MHz ARM Cortex A8. For light web browsing and word processing, it's just about good enough, but for anything heavier it isn't. I have another machine with a dual-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon (heavily tweaked A8), and it's fine for Flash-heavy web browsing and most other things including playing back streaming video. A quad-core 2GHz Cortex A9 is far more power than a large proportion of computer users currently need.
When the Pentium 4 came out, it was frequently called the "7th generation", but it was never called the 786 or 80786, either formally or informally
But they are all x86 compatible, because they can all run code compiled for 8086, 80186, 80286, 80386 and 486 processors.
My new hobby will be referring to processors as having x87 architecture, as a distinction to indicate they support floating point instructions.
People do refer to x87 when talking about the FPU on x86 chips. It's commonly used when differentiating it from SSE - modern compilers will emit SSE instructions instead of x87 ones unless you specify a backwards compatible target architecture (PII or earlier).
It's something of an oddity these days that there are so many tech companies that, instead of growing larger, are instead being bought out
Not really. In the '90s, a lot of tech companies were hoping for 'the phone call from Microsoft', where they'd be told that Microsoft had become interested in the market and wanted to buy the company (with the unspoken assumption that they'd be competing directly with Microsoft within a year it they didn't take the offer).
If you're from India, then you may have a very pessimistic view of the education system. My experience with students coming from India to the UK for their degree is that, while the locals arrive at university not having been taught to think, the Indians arrive having been taught not to think. I don't know what you do in schools, but intelligent people seem to end up conditioned to believe that thinking is an absolute last resort.
Most publisher don't own the presses. They contract out the actual printing to other companies. However, if they can't shift a certain volume of the printed version then their prices are going to be very high...
But why put the flash on the hard drive instead of on the motherboard or on an mSATA slot. Flash chips are tiny - a mobile phone can fit 64GB of flash in and still be thin. And why hide it behind a block interface when you'll get better performance by letting the OS control the flash directly?
The surface problems are usually caused by the fact that it has moving parts. A tiny bit of dust hitting the surface of a spinning platter can do a lot of damage. If it gets stuck under the head then it's game over for the disk.
HD video editing on the other hand is LARGE. My camera spits out 25Mb/s, an hour of video is a little over 11 gigs
That's pretty good compression. The last time I did any video editing, miniDV was state of the art for consumer-grade stuff, and an SD video camera spat out... 11GB/hour. So, in the transition to HD we've seen the quality improve but the storage requirements remain pretty constant. The (expensive!) external FireWire drive that I was using back then is not much bigger than the SSD on my new laptop and probably much smaller than the SSD in the one I'll replace it with in 3-4 years.
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Totally agree. I don't have a TV, but I have a projector connected to a machine that can play DVDs and things from iPlayer. I watch a lot of TV shows, but I watch most of them a series at a time on rented DVDs. I'm usually in the early-adopter demographic, but the emphasis on DRM from the movie industry means that I'm sticking with DVDs at the moment.
The stupid thing about the original FreeRunner was that it only did GPRS, when everything else did UMTS. For a programmable smartphone, not having a decent speed data connection made it pointless.
I was never very good at playing FPSes with just keyboard, though I am fairly competitive with the classic keyboard and mouse.
Classic? The classic FPS games (Wolfenstein, Doom, and so on) were all keyboard-only. Only the later ones added mouse control. Even Quake and Duke3D defaulted to keyboard. Half Life was the first FPS I played that was configured for mouse and keyboard out of the box.
The BBC was expensive. It cost £400, back in the early '80s. It was an amazingly powerful machine in comparison to most home computers, but also much more expensive, so even the man on the street who did have a computer didn't usually have a BBC. The government gave schools extra funding to buy machines that had a certain feature list, and the BBC was about the only machine that qualified when this was launched, which accounted for a lot of the sales.
The BBC came with (for the time) high resolution vector graphics, a teletext display mode, easy to use analogue input and digital I/O, a BASIC dialect with full support for structured programming, a built-in assembler, and even things like a coprocessor port. In comparison with other 8-bit systems, it really was impressive.
Ah, thank you. I realised after I'd posted that the user manual was about 1.5m away from me, but I was too lazy to look it up.
Aged 7, my school had three BBC Model Bs and one BBC Master. The head teacher gave us one half-hour lesson each week on whatever he felt like teaching at the time. Sometimes it was classics, for a few weeks it was programming. He taught us BASIC and Logo on a BBC B connected to a big TV. In break times and after school, we could reserve one of the machines to use, if we were the first to request it. I spent a lot of time ages 7 to 11 writing little programs on them. At home I got an 8086 PC and learned PL/M86 and C.
There was a shortcut (control shift escape? Something like that - a few keys all on the left side of the keyboard) that would launch the first program on the disk or tape (depending on which was connected). You only needed to use chain for disks containing multiple programs.
you can pull 45W of power over a firewire cable
Well, in theory. The cable will support it, but every peer on the chain is allowed to produce or consume up to 45W and there's no guarantee that any of them actually will produce the power. The first device I owned that had a FireWire port was a laptop with a 65W PSU - no chance of that providing 45W to the FireWire port...
Telcos use it and have very high uptime requirements. Therefore, all of the stuff available for it is designed for very high uptimes and therefore very expensive. Therefore it's cheaper for anyone who doesn't have such strict requirements to use cheap commodity crap, which isn't available in 48V DC form. Get a few big datacentres to run 48V DC and charge less to customers who use it and you'll see servers start to be available...
Or you have it running at 48V inside the walls and then step it down to 12 or 5V in the sockets...
At 48V it isn't too bad though. I'm interested in using DC for lighting because I want to put solar panels on my roof in a few years. I'll be generating DC and storing DC and if I use LEDs for lighting then I'll be using DC as well (and I am for a lot of things anyway) so transforming it to AC in the middle seems a bit pointless. I'd love to switch the lighting circuits entirely over to DC, and maybe run a few extra wires for things that are currently using wall warts.
I'd tend to agree. Friends are usually important, work is usually urgent. Work gets a quick reply, friends get a longer more thoughtful reply. You'd need to take message length into account for this to work. I'll often put off replying to friends until I have enough time to write something longer, while colleagues get a quick 'yes, that looks fine' within a couple of minutes.
I'm not sure where they got the 2014 number from. nVidia aims to have A64 parts shipping in 2012. Possibly the 2014 number is for ARMv8 cores designed by ARM, which are expected to be a bit later.
Not really. AMD has really crap proprietary drivers, nVidia has slightly crap proprietary drivers. AMD's open source drivers are poor, nVidia's are nonexistent. If you're willing to run a blob, nVidia's support is better. If you aren't, they both suck.
ARM only will compete against Intel in cases where power consumption is more important than performance
And in places where ARM's performance is 'good enough'. I have a little machine with an 800MHz ARM Cortex A8. For light web browsing and word processing, it's just about good enough, but for anything heavier it isn't. I have another machine with a dual-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon (heavily tweaked A8), and it's fine for Flash-heavy web browsing and most other things including playing back streaming video. A quad-core 2GHz Cortex A9 is far more power than a large proportion of computer users currently need.
When the Pentium 4 came out, it was frequently called the "7th generation", but it was never called the 786 or 80786, either formally or informally
But they are all x86 compatible, because they can all run code compiled for 8086, 80186, 80286, 80386 and 486 processors.
My new hobby will be referring to processors as having x87 architecture, as a distinction to indicate they support floating point instructions.
People do refer to x87 when talking about the FPU on x86 chips. It's commonly used when differentiating it from SSE - modern compilers will emit SSE instructions instead of x87 ones unless you specify a backwards compatible target architecture (PII or earlier).
It's something of an oddity these days that there are so many tech companies that, instead of growing larger, are instead being bought out
Not really. In the '90s, a lot of tech companies were hoping for 'the phone call from Microsoft', where they'd be told that Microsoft had become interested in the market and wanted to buy the company (with the unspoken assumption that they'd be competing directly with Microsoft within a year it they didn't take the offer).
If you're from India, then you may have a very pessimistic view of the education system. My experience with students coming from India to the UK for their degree is that, while the locals arrive at university not having been taught to think, the Indians arrive having been taught not to think. I don't know what you do in schools, but intelligent people seem to end up conditioned to believe that thinking is an absolute last resort.
You don't have to capitalise your errors, we can spot them just fine without the extra hint.
Most publisher don't own the presses. They contract out the actual printing to other companies. However, if they can't shift a certain volume of the printed version then their prices are going to be very high...
Those are closely related. If you make it cheap enough, then I won't want to lend it to anyone - I'll just buy them a copy.
But why put the flash on the hard drive instead of on the motherboard or on an mSATA slot. Flash chips are tiny - a mobile phone can fit 64GB of flash in and still be thin. And why hide it behind a block interface when you'll get better performance by letting the OS control the flash directly?
The surface problems are usually caused by the fact that it has moving parts. A tiny bit of dust hitting the surface of a spinning platter can do a lot of damage. If it gets stuck under the head then it's game over for the disk.
HD video editing on the other hand is LARGE. My camera spits out 25Mb/s, an hour of video is a little over 11 gigs
That's pretty good compression. The last time I did any video editing, miniDV was state of the art for consumer-grade stuff, and an SD video camera spat out... 11GB/hour. So, in the transition to HD we've seen the quality improve but the storage requirements remain pretty constant. The (expensive!) external FireWire drive that I was using back then is not much bigger than the SSD on my new laptop and probably much smaller than the SSD in the one I'll replace it with in 3-4 years.
Or on IRC, depending on the company...