But if they weren't made in China, they would cost twice as much. That is a non-starter.
That's not true. There are countries that have the Rule of Law and are not much more expensive than China. Taiwan or Malaysia being my favorites.
Plus a lot of electronics is not labor intensive if you do it right. Most of the labor intensiveness comes from people that make stuff badly so that the failure rate is high and then employ huge numbers of people to screen out the failures. Still if you get it right and source the components from people you can sue or at least not pay if they send you bad components this won't be necessary.
In fact I've met people who manufactured PCI cards in Australia. Basically once you've got it right you end up with a machine about the size of a photocopier that you feed in boards and components and it will apply solder paste, pick and place the components and then heat the board up. He reckoned said he had one in his office and it would occasionally beep when he needed to reload supplies. This is what the factory in China did. He'd designed the ASIC and bought the boards in. Since his design was stable and the components were sourced from reputable suppliers that cared about their brands, he wasn't screening.
In the China case it seems cheap at the start. But the workers are basically serfs who don't care about quality. The suppliers don't have brands so if they can sell you fake components they will. Even if they don't the quality levels will be terrible. So you end up with things coming off the assembly line with a very high failure rate. Then you employ a load of people to screen out the failures. Go to any Chinese factory and you'll see a few people running a production line and many, many more sorting. Basically they're sorting to find the minority of machines that don't have fatal defects. In a sane world the bugs would get fixed and the sorting would not be necessary. Still China isn't really set up for this - the factory provides a load of unskilled, underpaid labor to screen and the suppliers will get leaned on to provide more.
Yes. I have Native American blood and my grandfather told me our clan had The Eagle Spirit. That means I have excellent vision. Unfortunately I have to cut my fingernails twice a day. Oh, and when I go to the pet shop to by mice to feed my raptors and hawks, all the small furry animals are terrified.
Windows alerts you about using USB 2 devices on USB 1 ports. I doubt it would be that difficult to do on any other OS.
XP used to irritate me on my (very) old laptop - every time I plugged in hard disk it would complain that my USB 2.0 device "might perform slower than expected" because I'd plugged it into a USB 1.0 port. The problem was the machine was so old it only had USB 1.0 controllers and a 16 bit PC card slot so there wasn't really a way to add a USB 2.0 controller.
Actually there's nothing inherently wrong with this idea, the flaw was not putting a "Don't show this message again" checkbox at the bottom of the dialog.
There's a Logitech G19 gaming keyboard with an LCD that can play You Tube videos. Lots of laptops have a low res OLED screen for information.
No basically.
I remember back in the old days it was really useful to run SoftIce on a mono card while you were doing full screen stuff on an SVGA one. Maybe you could use it to run a text mode console so you can fix your xorg.conf when the main display is fubar.
> Interestingly I noticed this on my laptop just a few days ago. Things weren't as fast, but not really slow either. When I happened to look at the process monitor, I found that Firefox had been hanging there for a few days taking 50% of cpu:)
On Windows you can just run task manager - it minimizes to an icon and you can see if something is wedged. Actually on a laptop it's pretty easy to tell even without looking because you can hear the fan spin up.
Yes, it looks cool, I'll give you that. But so does the 3 megabytes of xorg.conf to make them work properly, and you still don't get application support.
You could try using a windowing system where you don't need to fart around with things like xorg.conf.
Actually further back than that BABT used to insist on approving modems - i.e. testing them before you were allowed to import them. BT modems got approved and so did other expensive ones. Most modems did not and were illegal to use.
The law changed and it because legal to sell unapproved modems only if you had a big red triangle saying "NOT APPROVED" both on the modem and in the advert. Well Demon got in trouble for an advert where the big red triangle was used as the end of a cartoon Demon's tail. Basically they were offering a deal where you got a free modem if you signed up for their already cheap Internet access for a year.
Eventually BABT backed down and unapproved modems became legal to connect and to sell without the red triangle. Still I'm sure that was at least partially because Demon Internet pulled stunts like this. Otherwise we'd all have been stuck with a Prestel or a BT walled garden which only worked with their very expensive hardware and the law would prevent people from using other hardware.
They got taken over by Thus Plc and then they became much more prone to outages unfortunately. Plus back when they were really Demon £10 a month internet access/website was quite cheap. Now they're just a brand owned by an incompetent multinational and £10 a month is kind of pricey.
Especially as you don't get much in the way of scripting, just a few ancient CGI scripts. Basically ten years ago or so they were quite good and quite cheap. Now they are selling the same product without the 100% reliability and the rest of the world has moved on a long way.
These guys aren't interested in emails from the unwashed Slashdot masses lecturing them about law and morality. And Apple are not under any obligation to support Palm hardware, or even refrain from deliberately stopping their software from supporting it. The USB-IF is for technically discussions, not politics and morality.
Don't get me wrong, Apple's policy of locking their hardware and software together irritates me and I won't buy their stuff. But spamming an engineering working group to try to get them to condemn that policy as being technically wrong misses the point. You're far better off just not buying their stuff.
Back in the Dos days video hardware was originally a register level standard. Then the accelerator companies all invented their own solutions to line drawing, BitBlts and so on. Now in Dos each programmers used Vesa Bios calls to get into high res modes but they had to write a driver themselves for anything more complex. Windows came along and acted like a software motherboard - application programmers wrote to user mode API and the graphics card manufacturers wrote drivers to a kernel level API.
At this point WinG was a better platform to port games to than Dos because you didn't need to write your own graphics driver. As 3D became more popular things became even more clear cut. Each 3D company invented their own standard, and none were keen to document it. 3DFX had a driver layer for Dos and quite a lot of games supported it. Still it was not an abstraction layer - it would only work with 3DFX cards.
Now Microsoft spotted an opportunity and launched DirectX. This was Windows only of course but it was graphics card independent. Now all the other graphics card manufacturers could implement a DirectX driver and all the games could use that API. And from what I've read DX was actually designed to be as thin a wrapper as possible to hide the differences between graphics cards. NVidia got started at this point - they had no hope of competing with 3DFX in terms of getting people to write code to their own API or hardware. In Windows they didn't have to.
I don't really see any chance of getting ATI/AMD, NVidia and Intel to agree on a common register spec for graphics at this point. Well, not one that would support high performance games at any rate. And Microsoft obviously have no interest in doing anything that would commoditize the OS. Even Apple seems to do OK with the current setup - they can just ask NVidia and ATI/AMD to both supply drivers if they want their hardware to be used.
Of course you have to wonder about Larrabee. If it's as good as this, why haven't Intel launched it as a hybrid CPU/GPU? I think it's one of those ideas like Itanium which are great at the academic paper level but seriously flawed in terms of real world performance - i.e. there are couple of use cases that it fails miserably at.
A 10% boost is not really worthing bothering about to be honest. Discrete graphics is so much faster than integrated you might as well turn off the integrated graphics completely.
Actually I think a better solution would be to put a PCI Express slot in a docking station and integrated graphics in the laptop. Then you could disable the integrated GFX when you dock and use discrete instead. Even better you could use a relatively cheap desktop card.
Mind you Asus have tried that and it didn't exactly catch on
Probably the reason is only a vanishingly small percentage of people care about gaming performance on a laptops. Oh, and at the moment docking stations use a proprietary connector so the market for things like this is even more limited.
Not always but sometimes. I've worked on software projects where we were forced to stop working on the fun new stuff and fix bugs in the old code because customers were screaming. Or spend huge amounts of time fixing bugs that were almost impossible to reproduce for the same reason.
I know for a fact if it was an open source project we would have stayed working on the fun stuff and just ignored the boring stuff. And in most open source projects I can see people make exactly that choice - they have a plan to rewrite things and they work hard on that. If users get hit by bugs or incompatibilities on the way, screw 'em.
How does that work? In a proprietary project if your boss says "do this" you either do it or find another job. In an open source project you could just flame the hell out of the guy that told you on the public mailing list and carry on working on something else.
And in a proprietary project if customers want something fixed they can threaten to not pay which in even the most incompetent company will tend to make your boss tell you to fix it. In open source that mechanism does not exist.
So you're saying the marketing people don't know what the hell they are talking about but are good at telling upper management what to tell the developers what to do. Is it any wonder that developers are skeptical about them?
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But there is no special relationship between this bios and Windows 7, meaning that Linux can't also start-to-boot in 1 second!
Somewhere in Redmond a troll just snorted battery acid and gasoline all over its keyboard.
He's not a Chink, he's Taiwanese. What you're doing is like calling an American a limey.
But if they weren't made in China, they would cost twice as much. That is a non-starter.
That's not true. There are countries that have the Rule of Law and are not much more expensive than China. Taiwan or Malaysia being my favorites.
Plus a lot of electronics is not labor intensive if you do it right. Most of the labor intensiveness comes from people that make stuff badly so that the failure rate is high and then employ huge numbers of people to screen out the failures. Still if you get it right and source the components from people you can sue or at least not pay if they send you bad components this won't be necessary.
In fact I've met people who manufactured PCI cards in Australia. Basically once you've got it right you end up with a machine about the size of a photocopier that you feed in boards and components and it will apply solder paste, pick and place the components and then heat the board up. He reckoned said he had one in his office and it would occasionally beep when he needed to reload supplies. This is what the factory in China did. He'd designed the ASIC and bought the boards in. Since his design was stable and the components were sourced from reputable suppliers that cared about their brands, he wasn't screening.
In the China case it seems cheap at the start. But the workers are basically serfs who don't care about quality. The suppliers don't have brands so if they can sell you fake components they will. Even if they don't the quality levels will be terrible. So you end up with things coming off the assembly line with a very high failure rate. Then you employ a load of people to screen out the failures. Go to any Chinese factory and you'll see a few people running a production line and many, many more sorting. Basically they're sorting to find the minority of machines that don't have fatal defects. In a sane world the bugs would get fixed and the sorting would not be necessary. Still China isn't really set up for this - the factory provides a load of unskilled, underpaid labor to screen and the suppliers will get leaned on to provide more.
I bet you ate a lot of leaded paint in school too, right?
That reminds me of this classic, hivemind confusing post
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6823&cid=886346
Yes. I have Native American blood and my grandfather told me our clan had The Eagle Spirit. That means I have excellent vision. Unfortunately I have to cut my fingernails twice a day. Oh, and when I go to the pet shop to by mice to feed my raptors and hawks, all the small furry animals are terrified.
Windows alerts you about using USB 2 devices on USB 1 ports. I doubt it would be that difficult to do on any other OS.
XP used to irritate me on my (very) old laptop - every time I plugged in hard disk it would complain that my USB 2.0 device "might perform slower than expected" because I'd plugged it into a USB 1.0 port. The problem was the machine was so old it only had USB 1.0 controllers and a 16 bit PC card slot so there wasn't really a way to add a USB 2.0 controller.
Actually there's nothing inherently wrong with this idea, the flaw was not putting a "Don't show this message again" checkbox at the bottom of the dialog.
If your CPU usage is 50% and you're on a dual core system, one core is running at 100%.
Same with quad core - if it stays pegged at 25%, something process is stuck.
There's a Logitech G19 gaming keyboard with an LCD that can play You Tube videos. Lots of laptops have a low res OLED screen for information.
No basically.
I remember back in the old days it was really useful to run SoftIce on a mono card while you were doing full screen stuff on an SVGA one. Maybe you could use it to run a text mode console so you can fix your xorg.conf when the main display is fubar.
Yo dawg we heard you like posting played out memes so we killed your family.
> Interestingly I noticed this on my laptop just a few days ago. Things weren't as fast, but not really slow either. When I happened to look at the process monitor, I found that Firefox had been hanging there for a few days taking 50% of cpu :)
On Windows you can just run task manager - it minimizes to an icon and you can see if something is wedged. Actually on a laptop it's pretty easy to tell even without looking because you can hear the fan spin up.
Yes, it looks cool, I'll give you that. But so does the 3 megabytes of xorg.conf to make them work properly, and you still don't get application support.
You could try using a windowing system where you don't need to fart around with things like xorg.conf.
Actually further back than that BABT used to insist on approving modems - i.e. testing them before you were allowed to import them. BT modems got approved and so did other expensive ones. Most modems did not and were illegal to use.
The law changed and it because legal to sell unapproved modems only if you had a big red triangle saying "NOT APPROVED" both on the modem and in the advert. Well Demon got in trouble for an advert where the big red triangle was used as the end of a cartoon Demon's tail. Basically they were offering a deal where you got a free modem if you signed up for their already cheap Internet access for a year.
Eventually BABT backed down and unapproved modems became legal to connect and to sell without the red triangle. Still I'm sure that was at least partially because Demon Internet pulled stunts like this. Otherwise we'd all have been stuck with a Prestel or a BT walled garden which only worked with their very expensive hardware and the law would prevent people from using other hardware.
They got taken over by Thus Plc and then they became much more prone to outages unfortunately. Plus back when they were really Demon £10 a month internet access/website was quite cheap. Now they're just a brand owned by an incompetent multinational and £10 a month is kind of pricey.
Especially as you don't get much in the way of scripting, just a few ancient CGI scripts. Basically ten years ago or so they were quite good and quite cheap. Now they are selling the same product without the 100% reliability and the rest of the world has moved on a long way.
These guys aren't interested in emails from the unwashed Slashdot masses lecturing them about law and morality. And Apple are not under any obligation to support Palm hardware, or even refrain from deliberately stopping their software from supporting it. The USB-IF is for technically discussions, not politics and morality.
Don't get me wrong, Apple's policy of locking their hardware and software together irritates me and I won't buy their stuff. But spamming an engineering working group to try to get them to condemn that policy as being technically wrong misses the point. You're far better off just not buying their stuff.
Back in the Dos days video hardware was originally a register level standard. Then the accelerator companies all invented their own solutions to line drawing, BitBlts and so on. Now in Dos each programmers used Vesa Bios calls to get into high res modes but they had to write a driver themselves for anything more complex. Windows came along and acted like a software motherboard - application programmers wrote to user mode API and the graphics card manufacturers wrote drivers to a kernel level API.
At this point WinG was a better platform to port games to than Dos because you didn't need to write your own graphics driver. As 3D became more popular things became even more clear cut. Each 3D company invented their own standard, and none were keen to document it. 3DFX had a driver layer for Dos and quite a lot of games supported it. Still it was not an abstraction layer - it would only work with 3DFX cards.
Now Microsoft spotted an opportunity and launched DirectX. This was Windows only of course but it was graphics card independent. Now all the other graphics card manufacturers could implement a DirectX driver and all the games could use that API. And from what I've read DX was actually designed to be as thin a wrapper as possible to hide the differences between graphics cards. NVidia got started at this point - they had no hope of competing with 3DFX in terms of getting people to write code to their own API or hardware. In Windows they didn't have to.
I don't really see any chance of getting ATI/AMD, NVidia and Intel to agree on a common register spec for graphics at this point. Well, not one that would support high performance games at any rate. And Microsoft obviously have no interest in doing anything that would commoditize the OS. Even Apple seems to do OK with the current setup - they can just ask NVidia and ATI/AMD to both supply drivers if they want their hardware to be used.
I think you could do tile based rendering. If you look at the Larrabee paper by Intel they managed to get very impressive scaling by doing this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(GPU)#Preliminary_performance_data
Of course you have to wonder about Larrabee. If it's as good as this, why haven't Intel launched it as a hybrid CPU/GPU? I think it's one of those ideas like Itanium which are great at the academic paper level but seriously flawed in terms of real world performance - i.e. there are couple of use cases that it fails miserably at.
It's a slippery slope though
1) You can't read the source code to your graphics driver.
2) ???
3) You are being herded into a gas chamber.
A 10% boost is not really worthing bothering about to be honest. Discrete graphics is so much faster than integrated you might as well turn off the integrated graphics completely.
Sony have done that. It required a reboot unfortunately.
http://www.cnet.com.au/sony-vaio-vgn-sz483n-339284061.htm
Actually I think a better solution would be to put a PCI Express slot in a docking station and integrated graphics in the laptop. Then you could disable the integrated GFX when you dock and use discrete instead. Even better you could use a relatively cheap desktop card.
Mind you Asus have tried that and it didn't exactly catch on
http://www.techspot.com/news/24044-asus-introduces-xg-modular-laptop-docking-station.html
Probably the reason is only a vanishingly small percentage of people care about gaming performance on a laptops. Oh, and at the moment docking stations use a proprietary connector so the market for things like this is even more limited.
Not always but sometimes. I've worked on software projects where we were forced to stop working on the fun new stuff and fix bugs in the old code because customers were screaming. Or spend huge amounts of time fixing bugs that were almost impossible to reproduce for the same reason.
I know for a fact if it was an open source project we would have stayed working on the fun stuff and just ignored the boring stuff. And in most open source projects I can see people make exactly that choice - they have a plan to rewrite things and they work hard on that. If users get hit by bugs or incompatibilities on the way, screw 'em.
People can walk away from volunteer 'jobs' anytime they want without losing money though. That's very different from a paid job.
It's not the same though. If people don't perform in a commercial environment they lose their jobs. With open source they don't.
How does that work? In a proprietary project if your boss says "do this" you either do it or find another job. In an open source project you could just flame the hell out of the guy that told you on the public mailing list and carry on working on something else.
And in a proprietary project if customers want something fixed they can threaten to not pay which in even the most incompetent company will tend to make your boss tell you to fix it. In open source that mechanism does not exist.
So you're saying the marketing people don't know what the hell they are talking about but are good at telling upper management what to tell the developers what to do. Is it any wonder that developers are skeptical about them?