That is incredibly untrue even to the most ignorant. Macs had become dominant after the switch to Intel, their notebooks the most desirable portable available, and the iPods totally dominated their market. You must have endured that time in a parallel universe.
"That didn't happen overnight, and it damn near killed apple."
No it didn't. Apple problems had nothing to do with that. Apple saved itself by becoming a boutique personal electronics supplier, not by "repeatedly making good products" where they hadn't before.
"They have to make awesome products repeatedly for a period of years to decades..."
"It's more likely that this device would help broadcasters than viewers. They'd throw one of these cameras up on a cable above a stadium, running it back and forth and it would be the director who chose the most interesting angle from the 10 offered."
And that would be quite unlikely. Broadcasters would have to meet broadcast standards with their feed sources and that would limit the angle of view this device could provide. Maybe a facility may invest in some of these but they would be a gimmick-cam for broadcasters. It would end up being like the Goodyear blimp shoots, they do it because they can.
Broadcasters won't want it for that because (a) they get to plan their perspectives in advance, and (b) they need to choose their lens perspectives which this can't do. Furthermore, this would require replacement of a great deal of expensive equipment that likely provides better quality and would result in the same or even more work in post. Broadcast teams have figured out how to do the job already, they won't want the "help".
" It's like comparing a GoPro Hero and a Red EPIC..."
Not really, and nothing in the article suggests that the Omnicam is the "Red EPIC" of panoramic cameras, whatever that might mean.
Assuming each of the Omnicam's cameras is capable of broadcast HD quality,there's an order of magnitude increase in broadcast bandwidth spent on enabling the users of the least interesting platform (tablets). Combine that with the limited usefulness of 360 degree coverage (what sports event wants that?) and you'd expect limited appeal. Once you restrict the angle of view to more normal ranges other approaches make more sense.
Omnicam is more Rube Goldberg than Red EPIC. It's nothing more than a scaled up teleconferencing design with limited application.
Considering that you can network boot without a floppy at all, I'd say you *could* boot linux off a floppy and have an entire floppy's free space left over. You are clearly wrong on this.
Furthermore, the way you talk about struggling to get DOS-level function you seem to have forgotten, or never knew, that DOS would boot on a low density diskette and leave the bulk of that diskette free. Adding a network stack was no probleml. A megabyte is a lot of code.
In the old days I had Unix distributions that booted a fully functional kernel on a single floppy. That's how the installs got done. With multi-stage boot that problem got easier, not harder.
The reason it wouldn't happen is because there's no motivation to do it, not because it's impossible. No one cares about hopelessly obsolete media.
"While some companies like Apple are hooking SSD directly to the PCI E bus, I would expect that a drive made of up solid state chips to perform more like RAM rather than really just being slightly faster than HDD."
And keep in mind that Apple isn't "doing" this, they are buying this from the companies that do it. Don't give Apple credit for this.
While PCIe SSD attaches to PCIe rather than SATA or similar, it still appears to the host through a controller and communicates through a SCSi command set. It is not different than SATA attach, it's just a speed bump.
This is a load of contrived BS filled with weasel words. HDDs fail spectacularly too, and SSDs are equally capable of recovery, remapping, and SMART reporting.
Nothing like making up some facts to suit your prejudices.
Apple's computers at the time WERE significantly slower than entry level PCs. That ship had sailed long before.
PPC was very successful in embedded where developers do "hit the metal directly" so you have no idea what you're talking about. PPC was quite nice to program in assembly.
You can't license an x86 core from Intel or AMD to integrate into a larger chip design. You can do that with ARM. Power offers a "significant performance advantage" in that respect. It seems you don't get it, so it's a good thing you post as AC.;)
The irony of Lytro is that people fail to realize that depth of field is inherently a function of resolving power. When Lytro destroys resolving power to create alterable depth of field in post, all they are really doing is creating a means of artificially limiting depth of field, not a means of enhancing it in. With sufficiently good techniques for simulating OOF areas and image reduction the same ability could be offered without the immense penalties and with conventional optics (except no one would want it, just like Lytro). Lytro is truly the emperor's new clothes.
Lytro is desperate to find an application where their technology is relevant. Now they are claiming perspective shift as a feature they've "launched".
The world is really excited about 1 MP camera these days, especially one that can wiggle the perspective a few mm in each direction or reduce the depth of field, just not both at the same time.;)
"Once again this underscores the incredible luck Microsoft have been riding for decades, after big businesses opted to standardize micro computers on MS-DOS PCs. Microsoft never had to claw their way to the top, they just bundled, bought up and drove other competition to ruin by immoral business practices."
You were clearly not around in the 80's.
"Big businesses" did not standardize on MS-DOS, they standardized on IBM and specifically on PC-DOS. MS-DOS was not the same and PCs that couldn't run PC-DOS were failures. Ask AT&T and TI. IBM was the company, MS was a cling-on. They would have been snuffed out if they didn't earn their way elsewhere.
On the OS front, MS has to compete with several alternatives for the PC dekstop, Topview and GEM to name a couple. It created a fully virtual windows product, Windows/386, that was the first truly useful desktop 386-specific product. It created a worthy adversary (NT) to the 286-OS/2 disaster. It created a viable, portable OS that ran on RISC workstations while still running DOS apps. That countered the threat of a dominant Intel. It had to take on IBM while partnering with them and produce a truly excellent product in Windows NT while doing so. It established Win16 and Win32 as the dominant programming interfaces while IBM was pushing their own lock-in. It accomplished all this while Novell had an absolute stranglehold in networking. It sent Novell packing at the same time, not something that people might have predicted at the time. Netware was THE product, LAN Manager was a toy. How times changed.
Meanwhile, Word quickly became a technically excellent product and their office suite competed well with another huge competitor with dominant marketshare. That market wasn't gifted to MS, they earned it and put down Wordperfect in the process.
Finally, Microsoft's bread and butter comes from software for which the industry has never produced viable competition. That's not MS's fault. As the de facto sole supplier of software platforms, it's MS's job to shepherd the industry and drive standards. By and large they do a grim job of that, but MS did PnP which was revolutionary for PCs. They, more than anyone else, create the technical umbrella under which companies like Apple can pluck off-the-shelf components and pretend to be superior engineers. PCs work because of astronomical efforts by countless engineers. MS plays a big role in that.
Sure, MS was/is ruthless and unethical, but to say MS is a product of nothing more than incredible luck for decades is simply ignorant. MS was methodical and technically excellent. They made consistently the best development tools and developed viable offerings in every area that mattered. They destroyed their competition on the field even as they stabbed them in the back off of it. MS fought their way to the top in multiple simultaneous markets.
Microsoft never had the position and WinCE devices were never wanted. Prior to iOS and Android there was Blackberry and Palm (and Symbian). Microsoft was only an alternative and always a pretty crappy one. You need to get your history straight.
Fact is, Apple only had an opening in smartphones because none of the other vendors could make a product that worked. Palm had nice apps but its OS was primitive and unstable. Symbian was the opposite, good OS but terrible apps. MS was bloated and slow with bad human factors and devices with awful battery life. Apple's "innovation" was a device that didn't crash several times a day, had good human factors, and wasn't tethered to a wall outlet. Meanwhile, souped up Blackberry pagers were popular with people who needed to get work done.
The problem with MS isn't that they had the market and lost it, it's that they never made a product worth having and no one wanted it.
"Apple doesn't actually donate much to politicians at all, and their lobbying budget is exceptionally small for a company of their size, so I doubt that's the reason."
That's some deliberately flawed logic. It's not dollars proportional to company size, it's just dollars.
No doubt this should be taken entirely at face value and that you've studied this at length in making your guess. Just look at how disruptive its been to the economy already!
Only because they can't be. Don't confuse what a license doesn't do with with what it can't do.
RMS's motivation was always to get access to other people's work. It angered him that he was denied source to software that wasn't his but was free to use on a device he didn't pay for. The GPL IS about forcing others to "share", there are simply limits to its reach.
Now, it would seem that "user freedom" is somehow nicer that "forcing developers" but it is not. GPLv3 came about not because GPLv2 software isn't free but because RMS wanted to further leverage the license to restrict what hardware vendors do with their property. You can play games with the terms as you like, and FSF does, but it is what it is...further restrictions on freedom. What you can't do with GPL software is anything that RMS doesn't like.
If the GPL could also give RMS the right to take a bite out of your donut it would do that too and if you think RMS isn't that petty then you've forgotten his boycott of organizations that refuse his demand to ad hoc rename every linux product to honor GNU. Remember, RMS has never had to work for a salary. He is stuck in ivory-tower thinking and is on a crusade to deliver justice to those who'd take advantage of other people's collective work. He doesn't care about freedom so much as denying it to those who deny him. It's about his interests, not yours.
FSF is Animal Farm and RMS is the head pig. Sure, we are all equal but RMS is "more equal". Other open source licenses focus on what's really important and other groups put egos where they belong. The FSF is about the "freedom" agenda and is willing to sacrifice actual freedom to further it.
Seems to me that choppy response is a standard Android complaint, particularly from those who do not have quad core. Those weren't Apple customers complaining about lag, either, they were older device customers complaining about performance after iOS upgrades. Cores are not the problem there.
Of course, quad core means worse battery life as well, along with slower recharge times that come with the larger batteries.
Funny how people seek out information to confirm their prejudices.
The "SATA consortium" was far-sighted enough to know that pushing beyond SATA-3 speeds would simply be duplication of effort. The desktop market is not suffering from single pipes limited by 6Gb speeds and the eventual successor will be PCIe-based. The future of desktop storage is not obligated to be SATA and they know that. Apparently you don't.
SAS is doing a 12Gb PHY, so if SATA turns out to want it, which they won't, it will be there to take. SATA3 will be fine for hard drives, SSD is better off on Express.
No they didn't. OS/2 1.x was primarily done by IBM using IBM's tools. Many portions were so poorly understood by MS that they wouldn't change any of it or release its source to OEMs.
OS/2, from the very beginning, was by IBM for IBM. It was an OS designed for the 286, a processor designed by IBM for IBM, and it was defeated by Intel who took ownership of the 32-bit follow-on processor and by MS, who took ownership of the 32-bit follow-on OS. IBM was solely responsible for the trash that was OS/2 and the 286. MS was on the good side of that fight and we are better off for it.
As an engineer that had to fly to Redmond to work on pre-1.0 OS/2 ports, I am quite familiar with who wrote it and what MS thought of it. It's quite clear that you are not.
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That is incredibly untrue even to the most ignorant. Macs had become dominant after the switch to Intel, their notebooks the most desirable portable available, and the iPods totally dominated their market. You must have endured that time in a parallel universe.
"That didn't happen overnight, and it damn near killed apple."
No it didn't. Apple problems had nothing to do with that. Apple saved itself by becoming a boutique personal electronics supplier, not by "repeatedly making good products" where they hadn't before.
"They have to make awesome products repeatedly for a period of years to decades..."
You are a delusional fanboy.
"Why would a company or a consumer go with Microsoft when Android already works well and is established in the market?"
Why would a company or a consumer go with Linux when Windows already works well and is established in the market?
Because your viewpoint is overly simplistic and meaningless.
"It's more likely that this device would help broadcasters than viewers. They'd throw one of these cameras up on a cable above a stadium, running it back and forth and it would be the director who chose the most interesting angle from the 10 offered."
And that would be quite unlikely. Broadcasters would have to meet broadcast standards with their feed sources and that would limit the angle of view this device could provide. Maybe a facility may invest in some of these but they would be a gimmick-cam for broadcasters. It would end up being like the Goodyear blimp shoots, they do it because they can.
Broadcasters won't want it for that because (a) they get to plan their perspectives in advance, and (b) they need to choose their lens perspectives which this can't do. Furthermore, this would require replacement of a great deal of expensive equipment that likely provides better quality and would result in the same or even more work in post. Broadcast teams have figured out how to do the job already, they won't want the "help".
" It's like comparing a GoPro Hero and a Red EPIC..."
Not really, and nothing in the article suggests that the Omnicam is the "Red EPIC" of panoramic cameras, whatever that might mean.
Assuming each of the Omnicam's cameras is capable of broadcast HD quality,there's an order of magnitude increase in broadcast bandwidth spent on enabling the users of the least interesting platform (tablets). Combine that with the limited usefulness of 360 degree coverage (what sports event wants that?) and you'd expect limited appeal. Once you restrict the angle of view to more normal ranges other approaches make more sense.
Omnicam is more Rube Goldberg than Red EPIC. It's nothing more than a scaled up teleconferencing design with limited application.
Modded Insightful even though it is incredibly wrong and contrived. Nice job, /.
100% of users care about how structurally sound a bridge is. Open source Android is nothing like a bridge.
Considering that you can network boot without a floppy at all, I'd say you *could* boot linux off a floppy and have an entire floppy's free space left over. You are clearly wrong on this.
Furthermore, the way you talk about struggling to get DOS-level function you seem to have forgotten, or never knew, that DOS would boot on a low density diskette and leave the bulk of that diskette free. Adding a network stack was no probleml. A megabyte is a lot of code.
In the old days I had Unix distributions that booted a fully functional kernel on a single floppy. That's how the installs got done. With multi-stage boot that problem got easier, not harder.
The reason it wouldn't happen is because there's no motivation to do it, not because it's impossible. No one cares about hopelessly obsolete media.
"While some companies like Apple are hooking SSD directly to the PCI E bus, I would expect that a drive made of up solid state chips to perform more like RAM rather than really just being slightly faster than HDD."
And keep in mind that Apple isn't "doing" this, they are buying this from the companies that do it. Don't give Apple credit for this.
While PCIe SSD attaches to PCIe rather than SATA or similar, it still appears to the host through a controller and communicates through a SCSi command set. It is not different than SATA attach, it's just a speed bump.
This is a load of contrived BS filled with weasel words. HDDs fail spectacularly too, and SSDs are equally capable of recovery, remapping, and SMART reporting.
Nothing like making up some facts to suit your prejudices.
The used parts are proof the work was done on YOUR car. People don't care enough to prevent fraud that occurs to someone else.
Apple's computers at the time WERE significantly slower than entry level PCs. That ship had sailed long before.
PPC was very successful in embedded where developers do "hit the metal directly" so you have no idea what you're talking about. PPC was quite nice to program in assembly.
You can't license an x86 core from Intel or AMD to integrate into a larger chip design. You can do that with ARM. Power offers a "significant performance advantage" in that respect. It seems you don't get it, so it's a good thing you post as AC. ;)
Who says "boxen" any more and why did they ever?
The irony of Lytro is that people fail to realize that depth of field is inherently a function of resolving power. When Lytro destroys resolving power to create alterable depth of field in post, all they are really doing is creating a means of artificially limiting depth of field, not a means of enhancing it in. With sufficiently good techniques for simulating OOF areas and image reduction the same ability could be offered without the immense penalties and with conventional optics (except no one would want it, just like Lytro). Lytro is truly the emperor's new clothes.
Lytro is a colossal waste of VC funding.
Not true. http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/11/lytro-3d-feature/
Lytro is desperate to find an application where their technology is relevant. Now they are claiming perspective shift as a feature they've "launched".
The world is really excited about 1 MP camera these days, especially one that can wiggle the perspective a few mm in each direction or reduce the depth of field, just not both at the same time. ;)
"Once again this underscores the incredible luck Microsoft have been riding for decades, after big businesses opted to standardize micro computers on MS-DOS PCs. Microsoft never had to claw their way to the top, they just bundled, bought up and drove other competition to ruin by immoral business practices."
You were clearly not around in the 80's.
"Big businesses" did not standardize on MS-DOS, they standardized on IBM and specifically on PC-DOS. MS-DOS was not the same and PCs that couldn't run PC-DOS were failures. Ask AT&T and TI. IBM was the company, MS was a cling-on. They would have been snuffed out if they didn't earn their way elsewhere.
On the OS front, MS has to compete with several alternatives for the PC dekstop, Topview and GEM to name a couple. It created a fully virtual windows product, Windows/386, that was the first truly useful desktop 386-specific product. It created a worthy adversary (NT) to the 286-OS/2 disaster. It created a viable, portable OS that ran on RISC workstations while still running DOS apps. That countered the threat of a dominant Intel. It had to take on IBM while partnering with them and produce a truly excellent product in Windows NT while doing so. It established Win16 and Win32 as the dominant programming interfaces while IBM was pushing their own lock-in. It accomplished all this while Novell had an absolute stranglehold in networking. It sent Novell packing at the same time, not something that people might have predicted at the time. Netware was THE product, LAN Manager was a toy. How times changed.
Meanwhile, Word quickly became a technically excellent product and their office suite competed well with another huge competitor with dominant marketshare. That market wasn't gifted to MS, they earned it and put down Wordperfect in the process.
Finally, Microsoft's bread and butter comes from software for which the industry has never produced viable competition. That's not MS's fault. As the de facto sole supplier of software platforms, it's MS's job to shepherd the industry and drive standards. By and large they do a grim job of that, but MS did PnP which was revolutionary for PCs. They, more than anyone else, create the technical umbrella under which companies like Apple can pluck off-the-shelf components and pretend to be superior engineers. PCs work because of astronomical efforts by countless engineers. MS plays a big role in that.
Sure, MS was/is ruthless and unethical, but to say MS is a product of nothing more than incredible luck for decades is simply ignorant. MS was methodical and technically excellent. They made consistently the best development tools and developed viable offerings in every area that mattered. They destroyed their competition on the field even as they stabbed them in the back off of it. MS fought their way to the top in multiple simultaneous markets.
Microsoft never had the position and WinCE devices were never wanted. Prior to iOS and Android there was Blackberry and Palm (and Symbian). Microsoft was only an alternative and always a pretty crappy one. You need to get your history straight.
Fact is, Apple only had an opening in smartphones because none of the other vendors could make a product that worked. Palm had nice apps but its OS was primitive and unstable. Symbian was the opposite, good OS but terrible apps. MS was bloated and slow with bad human factors and devices with awful battery life. Apple's "innovation" was a device that didn't crash several times a day, had good human factors, and wasn't tethered to a wall outlet. Meanwhile, souped up Blackberry pagers were popular with people who needed to get work done.
The problem with MS isn't that they had the market and lost it, it's that they never made a product worth having and no one wanted it.
"Apple doesn't actually donate much to politicians at all, and their lobbying budget is exceptionally small for a company of their size, so I doubt that's the reason."
That's some deliberately flawed logic. It's not dollars proportional to company size, it's just dollars.
No doubt this should be taken entirely at face value and that you've studied this at length in making your guess. Just look at how disruptive its been to the economy already!
No, it is for stupid people.
Only because they can't be. Don't confuse what a license doesn't do with with what it can't do.
RMS's motivation was always to get access to other people's work. It angered him that he was denied source to software that wasn't his but was free to use on a device he didn't pay for. The GPL IS about forcing others to "share", there are simply limits to its reach.
Now, it would seem that "user freedom" is somehow nicer that "forcing developers" but it is not. GPLv3 came about not because GPLv2 software isn't free but because RMS wanted to further leverage the license to restrict what hardware vendors do with their property. You can play games with the terms as you like, and FSF does, but it is what it is...further restrictions on freedom. What you can't do with GPL software is anything that RMS doesn't like.
If the GPL could also give RMS the right to take a bite out of your donut it would do that too and if you think RMS isn't that petty then you've forgotten his boycott of organizations that refuse his demand to ad hoc rename every linux product to honor GNU. Remember, RMS has never had to work for a salary. He is stuck in ivory-tower thinking and is on a crusade to deliver justice to those who'd take advantage of other people's collective work. He doesn't care about freedom so much as denying it to those who deny him. It's about his interests, not yours.
FSF is Animal Farm and RMS is the head pig. Sure, we are all equal but RMS is "more equal". Other open source licenses focus on what's really important and other groups put egos where they belong. The FSF is about the "freedom" agenda and is willing to sacrifice actual freedom to further it.
The ignorance on /. is astounding.
11MB and 5 MP, not 5MB.
Their reduction algorithm is matched to their hardware.
Seems to me that choppy response is a standard Android complaint, particularly from those who do not have quad core. Those weren't Apple customers complaining about lag, either, they were older device customers complaining about performance after iOS upgrades. Cores are not the problem there.
Of course, quad core means worse battery life as well, along with slower recharge times that come with the larger batteries.
Funny how people seek out information to confirm their prejudices.
The "SATA consortium" was far-sighted enough to know that pushing beyond SATA-3 speeds would simply be duplication of effort. The desktop market is not suffering from single pipes limited by 6Gb speeds and the eventual successor will be PCIe-based. The future of desktop storage is not obligated to be SATA and they know that. Apparently you don't.
SAS is doing a 12Gb PHY, so if SATA turns out to want it, which they won't, it will be there to take. SATA3 will be fine for hard drives, SSD is better off on Express.
"Remember, the desired result here is not a set of identical numbers everywhere. It is an accurate simulation."
*An* accurate simulation is not the desired result either, an accurate model is. Without reproducibility you don't have a model.
Reproducibility is important always.
No they didn't. OS/2 1.x was primarily done by IBM using IBM's tools. Many portions were so poorly understood by MS that they wouldn't change any of it or release its source to OEMs.
OS/2, from the very beginning, was by IBM for IBM. It was an OS designed for the 286, a processor designed by IBM for IBM, and it was defeated by Intel who took ownership of the 32-bit follow-on processor and by MS, who took ownership of the 32-bit follow-on OS. IBM was solely responsible for the trash that was OS/2 and the 286. MS was on the good side of that fight and we are better off for it.
As an engineer that had to fly to Redmond to work on pre-1.0 OS/2 ports, I am quite familiar with who wrote it and what MS thought of it. It's quite clear that you are not.