So do you really believe that both companies are going to all of this effort and expense is just for the sake of marketing hype, or is it just possible that the two companies with the most experience with smartphone development know more than you do about the advantages of 64 bit architecture for this type of device?
What about a fallacy. Just because they doubled the performance doesn't mean that it's because of 64 bit. It's more likely a better architecture and increased clock speed.
It's more likely the whole combination of features. Apple has gotten very good at optimizing performance for mobile devices by cleverly matching the capabilities of their chips to their software. I doubt if going to 64 bit is solely responsible for the increased performance, but I also doubt if it's irrelevant. A doubling of effective performance is a big change for going from one generation to the next of a chip. Apple certainly didn't double clock speed--that would be too expensive in terms of battery usage.
I think that the notion that 64-bit offers little per formance improvement aside from a larger address space comes from people who are more familiar with PCs, which have loads of RAM to play with. But RAM is power-hungry, so cell phones are RAM-constrained. As a result, cell phones are constantly shuffling data back and forth between RAM and Flash memory, and it needs to do this very fast, because users are impatient with lag in a mobile device. And moving data is one place where wider registers yields a big benefit.
Yes, we all know that Apple, like other for-profit companies, is in business to make money. Different companies have different strategies to do that. Apple clearly believes that making premium-quality products will bring them more money. So far, it's been working.
If you've never heard anybody touting the number of cores in their GPU, you haven't been paying attention to marketing of graphics cards. Because graphics calculations are highly parallelizable, and because the parallelizing can be handled by the OS, without requiring extra effort from app developers, GPU performance particularly benefits from a multi-core architecture.
Apple's phones have always exhibited performance that is competitive or better at the time of introduction, and the user experience is always very snappy, with lag nearly absent. Historically, Apple's reports of speed increase over previous generations have proved pretty accurate when people got around to benchmarking them, so it is likely that will prove true once again. A doubling of speed is a quite respectable performance increase over a year. So maybe Apple was not mistaken in thinking that the 64 bit architecture offers real advantages given the design of their phones and iOS. But it required substantial extra investment on Apple's part, because Apple's developer package had to be revised to create 64 bit apps, so that app developers would be able rapidly update their apps to take advantage of the new architecture. If Apple just wanted bragging rights, more processor cores would have been much cheaper.
You miss the point. This is not for people who are "security conscious." No matter how reliable and secure the fingerprint sensor turns out to be, it is axiomatic that adding a second way of unlocking your phone in addition to the PIN cannot possibly make it more secure than PIN alone. And who is going to trust the fingerprint method without a PIN?
This is for the people who currently aren't using a PIN at all, because it's too inconvenient.
With Apple's buying power, they could have any cpu they wanted. If they've chosen this one, it's because they think it has distinct performance advantages for the way their products are used. If anything, Apple has avoided playing the features game, sticking with a dual-core architecture rather than the sexy-sounding quad core. And the general experience of Apple devices is that they are very snappy.
It's pretty unlikely that Apple would go to the expense of transitioning to a 64 bit architecture unless it gave them a meaningful performance benefit. Smartphones have relatively small RAM, yet they are expected to respond to user commands nearly instantaneously. It is clear that iOS devices are constantly moving data around to economize on memory space. And moving data around certainly benefits from wider registers.
A 64 bit processor processes information in larger "chunks," which speeds things up. So this is probably a big part of the rather dramatic claimed increase in speed.
If you are like most people, you trust your trash pickup service with your fingerprints (and all of them, not just one) every week. Not to mention the waiter at every restaurant you visit.
So in an occasional rare situation, you have to enter the unlock code. Still a lot more convenient than having to enter the code every time. I don't use an unlock code because it's too much of a pain, but I'll use this.
May be a battery life issue. Unlike some of its competitors, Apple has historically been very reluctant to compromise battery life, and if it's a choice between more power and more memory, they'll go for more power.
Actually, the screen is larger than on the iPhone 4, although as is expected with the alternate-year "s" models, it is the same size as on the iPhone 5.
Sorry, but this is idiotic.The global temperature is nowhere near "deep freeze." (Water freezes at 0 C; average global temperature is well above that) What we have are temperatures where the most fertile areas of the globe have temperatures and rainfall consistent with highly productive agriculture. What we have are temperatures where immense numbers of people living near the coasts are reasonably safe from catastrophic flooding What we have are temperatures where only a few isolated areas of the global get too hot for human beings to survive without air conditioning.
But I do not see the AGW crowd trying to prevent ocean waves from crashing into the coast, releasing water vapor into the atmosphere.
That's because it wouldn't affect the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere.
The key difference is that if you put extra CO2 into the atmosphere it just stays there for a long period of time. But if you put extra water vapor into the atmosphere, it pretty quickly condenses right back out.
No, it wasn't "the same so-called scientists," it was a couple of guys who were out of the mainstream, although it got some sensationalist play in the mainstream media. Even back then, the consensus favored warming due to CO2 release, although there was a lot more uncertainty about how much. Anybody who cares about facts rather than propaganda can easily verify this for themselves--the original scientific literature of the time is available in any major university library and much of it, or at least the abstracts, is available online.
More like, by adopting Intel's process technology they could save 20% or more of the power used by all of their mobile devices, not to mention the billions of dollars they contribute to Intel's profit margin currently. If Apple owned Intel, they could even resume manufacturing Flash RAM in-house.
...and as compared to simply paying Intel to do this for them, they are going to save...more than the purchase price of the entire company? Really?
I very much doubt that Apple will buy a business which would force Apple to get into an entirely new industry that is only marginally connected with Apple's core business. Intel's value is primarily due to supplying chips to an entire industry. So what would Apple get in turn for buying Intel? Cheaper pricing? The savings would hardly make up for the cost of purchasing Intel. Make Intel exclusively an Apple supplier? Even leaving aside the question of Intel's current obligations, this would mean throwing much of Intel's market value down the toilet. But if Intel vanishes as a supplier of silicon to the industry, this would simply create a huge incentive and opportunity for other firms to step into the gap--and to offer Intel's engineers sky-high-premiums to induce them to jump ship. The only reason for Apple to buy Intel would be if there were some sort of synergy. But could Apple improve on what Intel is already doing? Intel is the industry leader, and Apple's strength is in consumer design, not chip fabrication. Perhaps Apple could push Intel to develop superior products for mobile devices--but the guys at Intel aren't stupid, which means they are probably already doing this as best they can. Apple is a huge market, and Intel would love to sell them more chips.
As somebody who does research on autism, I can tell you that a huge amount of serious research is being done, but it is being ignored by people who are so obsessed with the vaccine notion that they are unable to consider any other possibilities. Study after study has been done on vaccines and mercury, and it has been a blind alley. We don't know what causes autism, but we do know that it isn't vaccines and it isn't mercury.
I know that many people would like to blame it on something that we are exposed to. Nobody is dismissing the possibility, but so far the evidence does not support the idea that there is some simple cause. I can tell you for certain that if there were anything as simple as the relationship between smoking and cancer (which was strongly suspected by scientists years before it became widely accepted), it would have been found by now. Best evidence at this point points toward a genetic vulnerability perhaps complicated or triggered by environmental factors, which may be nonspecific things like prenatal maternal stress or viral infections.
And no, diagnostic criteria for autism have broadened, not narrowed. And there is far more incentive to diagnose it, since there are now therapies that are helpful in some cases. Many of the kids diagnosed with autism today would have simply been dismissed as mentally retarded a few decades ago (Temple Grandin's mother's doctor advised that she simply be institutionalized). Indeed, as autism diagnoses have risen, diagnoses of mental retardation have declined.
Recently, the CDC put up and then removed a page linking polio vaccines to cancer-causing viruses (http://healthimpactnews.com/2013/cdc-disappears-page-linking-polio-vaccines-to-cancer-causing-viruses/).
You've got it slightly wrong. First, it does not appear that the virus in question (SV40) ever caused cancer in man, and the problem was fixed long ago. Considering the danger presented by polio at the time, even with the SV40, you were better off getting the vaccine than not getting it. (I'm pretty sure that I got that vaccine myself). And anyway, this applies only to live-virus oral polio vaccine. Injected polio vaccine is treated so that there can be no live viruses of any kind in it.
1. Too many vaccinations for a little body to handle is a problem. I know they space them out already, but it's a problem for many kids because they aren't getting good enough nutrition to support a healthy immune system. After all, vaccinations RELY on a healthy immune system. If they aren't ready, it's either useless, a problem or both.
This is one of those things that sounds reasonable, but is nevertheless nonsense. Vaccines are given at a stage when the immune system has been found to be mature enough to respond. If it did not, the worst that would happen with most vaccines (the ones that have no live organism) would be that the vaccine would be ineffective. And the "too many" notion simply doesn't make sense. Every little scratch, scrape, or rash exposes a child to a huge number of microorganisms, which are present in the environment and on the skin in huge numbers. Not to mention in microorganisms in food or transmitted by coughs and sneezes. Compared to this, vaccines are a small drop in a very large bucket.
The autism rates are still climbing. It's now like 1 in 50
This seems to be mostly (maybe entirely) increased diagnosis. There was a recent survey of adults in the UK that applied modern diagnostic criteria and found an incidence close to 1% for people up to their 70's, indicating that there has been little if any change in incidence of autism over time. And the nature of the survey was such that it would not have picked up nonverbal autistic adults, so that is surely an underestimate of the true incidence.
Autism is a developmental disorder. It manifests at a particular stage of development. This is around the time when children normally receive their vaccinations, and unvaccinated children also tend to manifest autism around this time. Given the huge number of vaccinated children, many will be diagnosed with autism around the time of their vaccinations, just purely by chance. It is natural to see causality in such an association, particularly if the child had a common vaccine reaction, such as a fever, even if it is coincidental.
I imagine that if we gave vaccinations in the teen years, there would be people just as convinced that the vaccination caused their child to be schizophrenic, because that is the age when schizophrenia typically manifests.
Nazi's executed people with genetic defects and diseases in the "public interest", and while you may think it is fine to forcibly inject people with vaccines that are morally objectionable, I am sure you would hate it if they forced their beliefs on you
And wouldn't you agree that it is also wrong to force your beliefs upon others by exposing them against their will to an unvaccinated child who could be a carrier for numerous dangerous diseases? In a society, we all impose our beliefs upon one other to some extent. So we are dependent upon reason and evidence to minimize the harm that results.
Science can be wrong, it has happened many times in the past
As with so many things in life, you have to play the odds. Nobody knows everything, and anybody can be wrong. But choices based upon the best evidence are less likely to be wrong. As the saying goes, "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong--but that's the way to bet."
If they don't get vaccinated are they a hazard to you who is vaccinated? The answer is no
Sorry but this is really ignorant. Vaccines reduce the risk of infection from an encounter with an infected individual, but they don't reduce it to zero. If the exposure is high enough, a vaccinated person can still contract the disease. In addition, part of the protection provided by vaccines is due to the fact that mass vaccination reduces the probability that you will encounter in infected individual. If enough people are vaccinated so each infected person passes the disease on to less than one other person on average, then the disease cannot propagate, and dies out.
On top of that, there are people who are unvaccinated, not because they have irrational fears of vaccines, but because they are immunocompromised or allergic to some component of a vaccine. These people are completely dependent upon the vaccination of others for their protection
Thimerosal was introduced as a preservative in multi-dose vaccine vials after bacterial contamination incidents resulting in fatal infections. Thimerosal prevents this from happening. That sounds like a pretty good idea.
And what are the names of the "other preservatives" with evidence of safety and efficacy comparable to thimerosal which was used for decades on millions of people with no evidence that it ever hurt anybody? How were these studies done? Where, specifically, is the evidence for the safety of these "other preservatives" published?
Yeah, right--a complicated system of radiators and heat pipes, instead of a simple, elegant design in which all boards face onto, and radiate into, a big chimney with a fan at one end
Slashdot Mirror
Samsung is also moving to 64 bit on their phones.
So do you really believe that both companies are going to all of this effort and expense is just for the sake of marketing hype, or is it just possible that the two companies with the most experience with smartphone development know more than you do about the advantages of 64 bit architecture for this type of device?
Nobody did market "cores", as in a small number of parts of a GPU.
Here's one example
Here's another.
Here's another
Sure seem to be a lot of nobody's around.
It's more likely the whole combination of features. Apple has gotten very good at optimizing performance for mobile devices by cleverly matching the capabilities of their chips to their software. I doubt if going to 64 bit is solely responsible for the increased performance, but I also doubt if it's irrelevant. A doubling of effective performance is a big change for going from one generation to the next of a chip. Apple certainly didn't double clock speed--that would be too expensive in terms of battery usage.
I think that the notion that 64-bit offers little per formance improvement aside from a larger address space comes from people who are more familiar with PCs, which have loads of RAM to play with. But RAM is power-hungry, so cell phones are RAM-constrained. As a result, cell phones are constantly shuffling data back and forth between RAM and Flash memory, and it needs to do this very fast, because users are impatient with lag in a mobile device. And moving data is one place where wider registers yields a big benefit.
Yes, we all know that Apple, like other for-profit companies, is in business to make money. Different companies have different strategies to do that. Apple clearly believes that making premium-quality products will bring them more money. So far, it's been working.
If you've never heard anybody touting the number of cores in their GPU, you haven't been paying attention to marketing of graphics cards. Because graphics calculations are highly parallelizable, and because the parallelizing can be handled by the OS, without requiring extra effort from app developers, GPU performance particularly benefits from a multi-core architecture.
Apple's phones have always exhibited performance that is competitive or better at the time of introduction, and the user experience is always very snappy, with lag nearly absent. Historically, Apple's reports of speed increase over previous generations have proved pretty accurate when people got around to benchmarking them, so it is likely that will prove true once again. A doubling of speed is a quite respectable performance increase over a year. So maybe Apple was not mistaken in thinking that the 64 bit architecture offers real advantages given the design of their phones and iOS. But it required substantial extra investment on Apple's part, because Apple's developer package had to be revised to create 64 bit apps, so that app developers would be able rapidly update their apps to take advantage of the new architecture. If Apple just wanted bragging rights, more processor cores would have been much cheaper.
You miss the point. This is not for people who are "security conscious." No matter how reliable and secure the fingerprint sensor turns out to be, it is axiomatic that adding a second way of unlocking your phone in addition to the PIN cannot possibly make it more secure than PIN alone. And who is going to trust the fingerprint method without a PIN?
This is for the people who currently aren't using a PIN at all, because it's too inconvenient.
With Apple's buying power, they could have any cpu they wanted. If they've chosen this one, it's because they think it has distinct performance advantages for the way their products are used. If anything, Apple has avoided playing the features game, sticking with a dual-core architecture rather than the sexy-sounding quad core. And the general experience of Apple devices is that they are very snappy.
It's pretty unlikely that Apple would go to the expense of transitioning to a 64 bit architecture unless it gave them a meaningful performance benefit. Smartphones have relatively small RAM, yet they are expected to respond to user commands nearly instantaneously. It is clear that iOS devices are constantly moving data around to economize on memory space. And moving data around certainly benefits from wider registers.
A 64 bit processor processes information in larger "chunks," which speeds things up. So this is probably a big part of the rather dramatic claimed increase in speed.
If you are like most people, you trust your trash pickup service with your fingerprints (and all of them, not just one) every week. Not to mention the waiter at every restaurant you visit.
So in an occasional rare situation, you have to enter the unlock code. Still a lot more convenient than having to enter the code every time. I don't use an unlock code because it's too much of a pain, but I'll use this.
May be a battery life issue. Unlike some of its competitors, Apple has historically been very reluctant to compromise battery life, and if it's a choice between more power and more memory, they'll go for more power.
Actually, the screen is larger than on the iPhone 4, although as is expected with the alternate-year "s" models, it is the same size as on the iPhone 5.
Yes, Apple would never make a plastic iPhone...except the very first one...and the one after that...and the one after that.
Sorry, but this is idiotic.The global temperature is nowhere near "deep freeze." (Water freezes at 0 C; average global temperature is well above that)
What we have are temperatures where the most fertile areas of the globe have temperatures and rainfall consistent with highly productive agriculture.
What we have are temperatures where immense numbers of people living near the coasts are reasonably safe from catastrophic flooding
What we have are temperatures where only a few isolated areas of the global get too hot for human beings to survive without air conditioning.
That's because it wouldn't affect the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere.
The key difference is that if you put extra CO2 into the atmosphere it just stays there for a long period of time.
But if you put extra water vapor into the atmosphere, it pretty quickly condenses right back out.
No, it wasn't "the same so-called scientists," it was a couple of guys who were out of the mainstream, although it got some sensationalist play in the mainstream media. Even back then, the consensus favored warming due to CO2 release, although there was a lot more uncertainty about how much. Anybody who cares about facts rather than propaganda can easily verify this for themselves--the original scientific literature of the time is available in any major university library and much of it, or at least the abstracts, is available online.
I very much doubt that Apple will buy a business which would force Apple to get into an entirely new industry that is only marginally connected with Apple's core business. Intel's value is primarily due to supplying chips to an entire industry. So what would Apple get in turn for buying Intel? Cheaper pricing? The savings would hardly make up for the cost of purchasing Intel. Make Intel exclusively an Apple supplier? Even leaving aside the question of Intel's current obligations, this would mean throwing much of Intel's market value down the toilet. But if Intel vanishes as a supplier of silicon to the industry, this would simply create a huge incentive and opportunity for other firms to step into the gap--and to offer Intel's engineers sky-high-premiums to induce them to jump ship. The only reason for Apple to buy Intel would be if there were some sort of synergy. But could Apple improve on what Intel is already doing? Intel is the industry leader, and Apple's strength is in consumer design, not chip fabrication. Perhaps Apple could push Intel to develop superior products for mobile devices--but the guys at Intel aren't stupid, which means they are probably already doing this as best they can. Apple is a huge market, and Intel would love to sell them more chips.
If you compare a quarter just after a new iPad model was introduced to a quarter where the last new iPad model is anticipated in the near future.
How could it be otherwise? What is interesting or meaningful about that?
As somebody who does research on autism, I can tell you that a huge amount of serious research is being done, but it is being ignored by people who are so obsessed with the vaccine notion that they are unable to consider any other possibilities. Study after study has been done on vaccines and mercury, and it has been a blind alley. We don't know what causes autism, but we do know that it isn't vaccines and it isn't mercury.
I know that many people would like to blame it on something that we are exposed to. Nobody is dismissing the possibility, but so far the evidence does not support the idea that there is some simple cause. I can tell you for certain that if there were anything as simple as the relationship between smoking and cancer (which was strongly suspected by scientists years before it became widely accepted), it would have been found by now. Best evidence at this point points toward a genetic vulnerability perhaps complicated or triggered by environmental factors, which may be nonspecific things like prenatal maternal stress or viral infections.
And no, diagnostic criteria for autism have broadened, not narrowed. And there is far more incentive to diagnose it, since there are now therapies that are helpful in some cases. Many of the kids diagnosed with autism today would have simply been dismissed as mentally retarded a few decades ago (Temple Grandin's mother's doctor advised that she simply be institutionalized). Indeed, as autism diagnoses have risen, diagnoses of mental retardation have declined.
You've got it slightly wrong. First, it does not appear that the virus in question (SV40) ever caused cancer in man, and the problem was fixed long ago. Considering the danger presented by polio at the time, even with the SV40, you were better off getting the vaccine than not getting it. (I'm pretty sure that I got that vaccine myself). And anyway, this applies only to live-virus oral polio vaccine. Injected polio vaccine is treated so that there can be no live viruses of any kind in it.
This is one of those things that sounds reasonable, but is nevertheless nonsense. Vaccines are given at a stage when the immune system has been found to be mature enough to respond. If it did not, the worst that would happen with most vaccines (the ones that have no live organism) would be that the vaccine would be ineffective. And the "too many" notion simply doesn't make sense. Every little scratch, scrape, or rash exposes a child to a huge number of microorganisms, which are present in the environment and on the skin in huge numbers. Not to mention in microorganisms in food or transmitted by coughs and sneezes. Compared to this, vaccines are a small drop in a very large bucket.
This seems to be mostly (maybe entirely) increased diagnosis. There was a recent survey of adults in the UK that applied modern diagnostic criteria and found an incidence close to 1% for people up to their 70's, indicating that there has been little if any change in incidence of autism over time. And the nature of the survey was such that it would not have picked up nonverbal autistic adults, so that is surely an underestimate of the true incidence.
Autism is a developmental disorder. It manifests at a particular stage of development. This is around the time when children normally receive their vaccinations, and unvaccinated children also tend to manifest autism around this time. Given the huge number of vaccinated children, many will be diagnosed with autism around the time of their vaccinations, just purely by chance. It is natural to see causality in such an association, particularly if the child had a common vaccine reaction, such as a fever, even if it is coincidental.
I imagine that if we gave vaccinations in the teen years, there would be people just as convinced that the vaccination caused their child to be schizophrenic, because that is the age when schizophrenia typically manifests.
And wouldn't you agree that it is also wrong to force your beliefs upon others by exposing them against their will to an unvaccinated child who could be a carrier for numerous dangerous diseases? In a society, we all impose our beliefs upon one other to some extent. So we are dependent upon reason and evidence to minimize the harm that results.
As with so many things in life, you have to play the odds. Nobody knows everything, and anybody can be wrong. But choices based upon the best evidence are less likely to be wrong. As the saying goes, "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong--but that's the way to bet."
Sorry but this is really ignorant. Vaccines reduce the risk of infection from an encounter with an infected individual, but they don't reduce it to zero. If the exposure is high enough, a vaccinated person can still contract the disease. In addition, part of the protection provided by vaccines is due to the fact that mass vaccination reduces the probability that you will encounter in infected individual. If enough people are vaccinated so each infected person passes the disease on to less than one other person on average, then the disease cannot propagate, and dies out.
On top of that, there are people who are unvaccinated, not because they have irrational fears of vaccines, but because they are immunocompromised or allergic to some component of a vaccine. These people are completely dependent upon the vaccination of others for their protection
Thimerosal was introduced as a preservative in multi-dose vaccine vials after bacterial contamination incidents resulting in fatal infections. Thimerosal prevents this from happening. That sounds like a pretty good idea.
And what are the names of the "other preservatives" with evidence of safety and efficacy comparable to thimerosal which was used for decades on millions of people with no evidence that it ever hurt anybody? How were these studies done? Where, specifically, is the evidence for the safety of these "other preservatives" published?
Yeah, right--a complicated system of radiators and heat pipes, instead of a simple, elegant design in which all boards face onto, and radiate into, a big chimney with a fan at one end