JNI is kind of a pain, but it's interesting that they allow it anyway. It seems like it bypasses their whole security platform idea with having programs run in a VM. Are there C headers/libraries for all the hardware you would want to access like graphics chip, accelerometers, cameras, etc? And I think it's a good thing that at the least you have to redo the GUI for a mobile app, because the desktop application paradigms don't transfer well to a small screen.
This is a very important issue for anyone looking into nVidia chips, and I for one won't buy one until it is ascertained whether this issue has been fixed. Apparently the problem was even in a chip as low performance as the Geforce Go 6150 IGP, which is pathetic. An IGP should never have overheating problems, what the hell nVidia.
I was going to post exactly what you said, but you seem to have covered all the bases. It bears repeating though; Atom is not a wonderfully efficient chip at all, it just consumes less power compared to other x86 chips but I would guess that its performance per watt is actually lower than other recent x86 CPUs, and definitely much lower than an ARM CPU. I think it's much more feasible to go from a sensible, low power architecture like ARM and try to increase performance, than to take a complex, power-hungry architecture like x86 and try to reduce power consumption. I wouldn't be surprised if ARM chips managed to catch up and surpass Atom in both performance and ultra-low power consumption in the next few years.
Also, I think I can even find an exception to the whole Trademarks being okay thing. See the whole mess with Firefox and Debian which led to Iceweasel.
Oh right, I did mean trademarks, but I couldn't think of the proper word. But uh, the other reply to you is definitely right in that without copyright Open source wouldn't function.
Not sure why this was modded troll, since it's factually correct. Chromium is open source, yes, but Chrome itself is not. It's a fine distinction, and I'm not sure what parts of Chrome differ from Chromium, but I think the automatic updater service is not installed with Chromium, among a few other things. I think Chromium also lacks Google branding, probably for sticky copyright issues. Of course, the parts that use FFMpeg are probably open source, although we can't say for certain since the Chrome source is not available, but there's no reason why they should be different in Chrome than Chromium.
The Palm Pre is coming to other carriers though. I think Sprint has 6 month exclusivity, but Verizon announced that it's getting the Pre so I assume around December or January Verizon will get it. And I seem to recall something about AT&T getting the Pre too, but I might be wrong.
They should probably set up parental controls/ratings then, if they're going to have an evaluation process anyway. My point though is that this isn't you deciding what you want on your phone, but rather Apple deciding for you.
Right, but that's not something that flv does by default. Of course with just a little know-how you can download flv files and play them with VLC or mplayer or whatever your favorite player is, but it's not something that is really part of the design. I think at least with video tags we could see browser vendors build their own player interface around it, so that there are easy and obvious download links for videos.
Hell, by those standards they should block Safari, since it's much more likely and easier to access inappropriate content with. This is getting pretty ridiculous.
That's good. I don't understand Apple's reasons for not going with Theora, it seems like a stupid move on their part. But it would be much nicer if in the long run the browsers would just use whatever codecs are installed on the local machine rather than bundle their own.
Haha, that was not intentional. It just seems like much of the coverage around HMTL5 features ignores IE8, and I haven't seen much regarding this from Microsoft either. I downloaded IE8 the day it released and there are a few neat features from it that I really wish Firefox had. If I could edit my post to remove that bit I would, but I honestly didn't know IE was planning on adding HTML5 features. I kind of assumed based on their record of CSS feature adoption, which I guess was wrong.
That's kind of misleading, since there is no such thing as an HTML5 browser as of yet. All the upcoming versions of browsers that aren't IE are getting support for parts of HTML5, but it would be incorrect to say that they are all equivalent. Especially in the case of the tag, they seem to do different codecs right now. Firefox does Theora, Safari and I think Chrome does h264, and I have no idea what opera does. I'm honestly not sure how this is a better situation than flash video players, at least until everyone decides to standardize on a common format. I guess the idea is that once all the dust settles, we'll have lower CPU usage and maybe nice things like videos being cached and/or easily downloadable, which flv doesn't do easily, but until then this isn't much of an improvement unless you're stuck on, say, 64 bit linux and can't get the flash plugin to work, but that's a really tiny edge case. Last I checked I could play youtube videos under 64 bit linux, so I'm not really sure what the advantages are.
This is true, but when Google is complaining about lack of HIG standards across Linux, it doesn't really make much sense if they're not going to follow it in the first place.
Well, for one thing I was agreeing with your GP, but I'm not sure whether that's who you're referring to.
But uh, your car analogy kind of sucks (don't they all?). It's like, a car maker has one model of a car that at first is a bit crappy but over time it becomes pretty reliable, and eventually people really like that model. Eventually, the car maker becomes ambitious and makes a new model to replace the old one, except this one is more expensive.
People are used to the old model, and plus it's cheaper, so they don't really care that the new model is flashier or perhaps is internally more reliable. The car maker doesn't want to keep supporting the old model, because there are still flaws in the old one, and it's more work supporting both models. Mechanics and technicians have to be trained, and of course the way the old model was designed doesn't take advantage of any advances from the past 8 or so years.
Instead of keeping the older, cheaper model, the car maker decides to take the new model and cripple it, and then sell it to the people who want a cheaper car. It still sucks, but from the car maker's perspective, at least all the technicians only have to learn the newer model and not the old one. Replace car for operating system in the story, and maybe it will make a little more sense.
I'm a bit confused though, since I was talking about Atom and why it sucks, not Windows starter editions. Obviously, from a consumer's perspective, the best solution would be to make one version of Windows 7, and make it cheaper, but for obvious reasons that's not going to happen because Microsoft is a company, just like any other, and in particular Microsoft seems to like market segmentation and doesn't particularly learn well from its mistakes. Personally, I am of the opinion that XP and Office 2003 suck compared to Vista/7 and Office 2007, but I might be a minority here. I can understand people who have legitimate concerns with the newer programs, but a lot of it seems like knee-jerk reactions.
At some point you have to move on and try to learn something new; hell, as I type this I'm also learning vim, and I'm an emacs guy.
Meh, does Chrome even follow Microsoft HIG? The tabs being almost part of the title bar, and the lack of an actual window title in the title bar, as well as the random Google logo next to the buttons, all seem to be completely contrary to what I expect on Windows. As do the Vista style buttons even on XP, but then Microsoft did that too with Windows Media Player in some version.
Oh yeah, this video also makes me drool. Damn, Nintendo should throw that into the next-gen DS. That would be phenomenal. Or hell, they should just snap up Pandora and sell it as the DS2, or something. ARM is awesome.
I did some more searching and I kind of realized more of what you mean. I had forgotten for a while that netbooks existed before the EeePC, except they called them ultraportables and charged 2 grand or more for them. I'm sure Intel would much rather you buy something like this than an Atom. Even this probably has a higher margin than the Atom. Initially when I saw the price of the Atom I was comparing it to desktop CPUs, but I can see how power consumption is a large factor in the price of x86 CPUs.
Personally, I'm in favor of ARM shaking up the netbook market, because I think with a well-designed RISC core they can do much better than Atom in terms of power consumption and still provide ample performance. This thing makes me drool every time I think about it... haha. Dual core, superscalar architecture with out of order execution consuming less than a watt under load... now THAT is a mobile CPU.
Huh, that is really interesting. I never bothered to look into it myself, and just assumed it was a larger physical die but apparently that isn't the case. Personally, I think the Atom is a horrible architecture and would have preferred attempts to make a more efficient processor without sacrificing out of order execution, but that's just me.
And I can see your point about artificial segmentation, except in this case they're sort of creating a new market segment or fueling an emerging one, which is a little different. In both cases I guess there's a market that neither was really prepared to supply, so they just started taking things out of their normal products until the price was low enough for them to sell them at a lower price, but still at a profit. I guess the point is that both are for really cheap, sub $400 netbooks, but if you want a full sized notebook, you should probably be getting full versions of the processor and the OS rather than cut-down versions. It *might* be interesting to have 14" or 15" notebooks with a dual-core Atom, but I think at that point it isn't really worth it to go with Atom vs. a Core 2, which is why Intel has that restriction.
I guess it's sort of the like the Vista capable debacle, people would go out and see these really cheap 15" laptops, and then when they get home they realize they've just got a large laptop with the power of a netbook, which isn't what they really wanted. Of course, that's probably not why Intel/MS did it, but I could see it happening.
Another data point to mention is that it's actually worse than the 900mhz Celeron (Dothan core I believe) that was in the original EeePC in terms of performance.
comparing Mhz between different processors is often like comparing apples to oranges.
In fact, it really should be ALWAYS, because anyone who knows a little about computer hardware design knows that there are a huge number of factors besides clock rate and in fact clock rate is really meaningless by itself. Things like length of the pipeline, in-order vs out-of-order execution, cache size and associativity, etc, are all probably as or more important than clock rate. For example, if you have a tiny cache or a badly designed one, your processor is going to keep hitting main memory, which wastes a ton of cycles, so most of the clock cycles will be wasted waiting for memory to respond anyway. I would expect someone on slashdot at the least to know that you can't just compare clock rates like that, and possibly even understand why the Atom does much less per clock than other architectures.
Also, with CEDET you get pretty nice autocomplete in Emacs. And on the matter of opening large files, I'm not sure why you had that problem but you might want to try a pager like less instead of a text editor, at least if you just want to view the log files. I find that less works best for opening huge random files.
Slashdot Mirror
JNI is kind of a pain, but it's interesting that they allow it anyway. It seems like it bypasses their whole security platform idea with having programs run in a VM. Are there C headers/libraries for all the hardware you would want to access like graphics chip, accelerometers, cameras, etc? And I think it's a good thing that at the least you have to redo the GUI for a mobile app, because the desktop application paradigms don't transfer well to a small screen.
This is a very important issue for anyone looking into nVidia chips, and I for one won't buy one until it is ascertained whether this issue has been fixed. Apparently the problem was even in a chip as low performance as the Geforce Go 6150 IGP, which is pathetic. An IGP should never have overheating problems, what the hell nVidia.
I was going to post exactly what you said, but you seem to have covered all the bases. It bears repeating though; Atom is not a wonderfully efficient chip at all, it just consumes less power compared to other x86 chips but I would guess that its performance per watt is actually lower than other recent x86 CPUs, and definitely much lower than an ARM CPU. I think it's much more feasible to go from a sensible, low power architecture like ARM and try to increase performance, than to take a complex, power-hungry architecture like x86 and try to reduce power consumption. I wouldn't be surprised if ARM chips managed to catch up and surpass Atom in both performance and ultra-low power consumption in the next few years.
Also, I think I can even find an exception to the whole Trademarks being okay thing. See the whole mess with Firefox and Debian which led to Iceweasel.
Oh right, I did mean trademarks, but I couldn't think of the proper word. But uh, the other reply to you is definitely right in that without copyright Open source wouldn't function.
Not sure why this was modded troll, since it's factually correct. Chromium is open source, yes, but Chrome itself is not. It's a fine distinction, and I'm not sure what parts of Chrome differ from Chromium, but I think the automatic updater service is not installed with Chromium, among a few other things. I think Chromium also lacks Google branding, probably for sticky copyright issues. Of course, the parts that use FFMpeg are probably open source, although we can't say for certain since the Chrome source is not available, but there's no reason why they should be different in Chrome than Chromium.
Oh hey. Another one. http://gizmodo.com/5280184/palm-pre-wont-be-coming-to-verizon-or-att-within-six-months So really, it's up in the air, and only Palm knows for sure.
A quick google search seems to prove you wrong, although CEOs do have a tendency to bluff sometimes. http://gizmodo.com/5272022/verizon-ceo-were-getting-the-palm-pre-storm-2-within-6-months
The Palm Pre is coming to other carriers though. I think Sprint has 6 month exclusivity, but Verizon announced that it's getting the Pre so I assume around December or January Verizon will get it. And I seem to recall something about AT&T getting the Pre too, but I might be wrong.
They should probably set up parental controls/ratings then, if they're going to have an evaluation process anyway. My point though is that this isn't you deciding what you want on your phone, but rather Apple deciding for you.
Right, but that's not something that flv does by default. Of course with just a little know-how you can download flv files and play them with VLC or mplayer or whatever your favorite player is, but it's not something that is really part of the design. I think at least with video tags we could see browser vendors build their own player interface around it, so that there are easy and obvious download links for videos.
Hell, by those standards they should block Safari, since it's much more likely and easier to access inappropriate content with. This is getting pretty ridiculous.
That's good. I don't understand Apple's reasons for not going with Theora, it seems like a stupid move on their part. But it would be much nicer if in the long run the browsers would just use whatever codecs are installed on the local machine rather than bundle their own.
Haha, that was not intentional. It just seems like much of the coverage around HMTL5 features ignores IE8, and I haven't seen much regarding this from Microsoft either. I downloaded IE8 the day it released and there are a few neat features from it that I really wish Firefox had. If I could edit my post to remove that bit I would, but I honestly didn't know IE was planning on adding HTML5 features. I kind of assumed based on their record of CSS feature adoption, which I guess was wrong.
That's kind of misleading, since there is no such thing as an HTML5 browser as of yet. All the upcoming versions of browsers that aren't IE are getting support for parts of HTML5, but it would be incorrect to say that they are all equivalent. Especially in the case of the tag, they seem to do different codecs right now. Firefox does Theora, Safari and I think Chrome does h264, and I have no idea what opera does. I'm honestly not sure how this is a better situation than flash video players, at least until everyone decides to standardize on a common format. I guess the idea is that once all the dust settles, we'll have lower CPU usage and maybe nice things like videos being cached and/or easily downloadable, which flv doesn't do easily, but until then this isn't much of an improvement unless you're stuck on, say, 64 bit linux and can't get the flash plugin to work, but that's a really tiny edge case. Last I checked I could play youtube videos under 64 bit linux, so I'm not really sure what the advantages are.
This is true, but when Google is complaining about lack of HIG standards across Linux, it doesn't really make much sense if they're not going to follow it in the first place.
Well, for one thing I was agreeing with your GP, but I'm not sure whether that's who you're referring to.
But uh, your car analogy kind of sucks (don't they all?). It's like, a car maker has one model of a car that at first is a bit crappy but over time it becomes pretty reliable, and eventually people really like that model. Eventually, the car maker becomes ambitious and makes a new model to replace the old one, except this one is more expensive.
People are used to the old model, and plus it's cheaper, so they don't really care that the new model is flashier or perhaps is internally more reliable. The car maker doesn't want to keep supporting the old model, because there are still flaws in the old one, and it's more work supporting both models. Mechanics and technicians have to be trained, and of course the way the old model was designed doesn't take advantage of any advances from the past 8 or so years.
Instead of keeping the older, cheaper model, the car maker decides to take the new model and cripple it, and then sell it to the people who want a cheaper car. It still sucks, but from the car maker's perspective, at least all the technicians only have to learn the newer model and not the old one. Replace car for operating system in the story, and maybe it will make a little more sense.
I'm a bit confused though, since I was talking about Atom and why it sucks, not Windows starter editions. Obviously, from a consumer's perspective, the best solution would be to make one version of Windows 7, and make it cheaper, but for obvious reasons that's not going to happen because Microsoft is a company, just like any other, and in particular Microsoft seems to like market segmentation and doesn't particularly learn well from its mistakes. Personally, I am of the opinion that XP and Office 2003 suck compared to Vista/7 and Office 2007, but I might be a minority here. I can understand people who have legitimate concerns with the newer programs, but a lot of it seems like knee-jerk reactions.
At some point you have to move on and try to learn something new; hell, as I type this I'm also learning vim, and I'm an emacs guy.
Meh, does Chrome even follow Microsoft HIG? The tabs being almost part of the title bar, and the lack of an actual window title in the title bar, as well as the random Google logo next to the buttons, all seem to be completely contrary to what I expect on Windows. As do the Vista style buttons even on XP, but then Microsoft did that too with Windows Media Player in some version.
Oh yeah, this video also makes me drool. Damn, Nintendo should throw that into the next-gen DS. That would be phenomenal. Or hell, they should just snap up Pandora and sell it as the DS2, or something. ARM is awesome.
I did some more searching and I kind of realized more of what you mean. I had forgotten for a while that netbooks existed before the EeePC, except they called them ultraportables and charged 2 grand or more for them. I'm sure Intel would much rather you buy something like this than an Atom. Even this probably has a higher margin than the Atom. Initially when I saw the price of the Atom I was comparing it to desktop CPUs, but I can see how power consumption is a large factor in the price of x86 CPUs.
Personally, I'm in favor of ARM shaking up the netbook market, because I think with a well-designed RISC core they can do much better than Atom in terms of power consumption and still provide ample performance. This thing makes me drool every time I think about it... haha. Dual core, superscalar architecture with out of order execution consuming less than a watt under load... now THAT is a mobile CPU.
Huh, that is really interesting. I never bothered to look into it myself, and just assumed it was a larger physical die but apparently that isn't the case. Personally, I think the Atom is a horrible architecture and would have preferred attempts to make a more efficient processor without sacrificing out of order execution, but that's just me.
And I can see your point about artificial segmentation, except in this case they're sort of creating a new market segment or fueling an emerging one, which is a little different. In both cases I guess there's a market that neither was really prepared to supply, so they just started taking things out of their normal products until the price was low enough for them to sell them at a lower price, but still at a profit. I guess the point is that both are for really cheap, sub $400 netbooks, but if you want a full sized notebook, you should probably be getting full versions of the processor and the OS rather than cut-down versions. It *might* be interesting to have 14" or 15" notebooks with a dual-core Atom, but I think at that point it isn't really worth it to go with Atom vs. a Core 2, which is why Intel has that restriction.
I guess it's sort of the like the Vista capable debacle, people would go out and see these really cheap 15" laptops, and then when they get home they realize they've just got a large laptop with the power of a netbook, which isn't what they really wanted. Of course, that's probably not why Intel/MS did it, but I could see it happening.
Erm, that's the desktop variant. All the notebook Atoms are single core.
Atom has one (crappy) core, actually.
In fact, it really should be ALWAYS, because anyone who knows a little about computer hardware design knows that there are a huge number of factors besides clock rate and in fact clock rate is really meaningless by itself. Things like length of the pipeline, in-order vs out-of-order execution, cache size and associativity, etc, are all probably as or more important than clock rate. For example, if you have a tiny cache or a badly designed one, your processor is going to keep hitting main memory, which wastes a ton of cycles, so most of the clock cycles will be wasted waiting for memory to respond anyway. I would expect someone on slashdot at the least to know that you can't just compare clock rates like that, and possibly even understand why the Atom does much less per clock than other architectures.
Also, with CEDET you get pretty nice autocomplete in Emacs. And on the matter of opening large files, I'm not sure why you had that problem but you might want to try a pager like less instead of a text editor, at least if you just want to view the log files. I find that less works best for opening huge random files.