Semi-closed platforms like the iphone/ipod where the proprieters have turned their back on flash?
The introduction of yet another semi-functional Flash alternative is doing nothing to change this position, as it's a practical position, not one of open source ideology. Having it in Java makes this even less interesting to Apple.
Steve Jobs, like any other mobile maker, can have full access to the actual Flash player source code, if he only wanted it. Maintaining an independent port is not cheaper than simply fixing the one Adobe provides.
Adobe (back then Macromedia) used to ship Flash in two version: native binary and Java version in the days when Java applets were popular. They stopped developing it around the time Flash 4 was out, because the tables have turned: Java applets were going down, while Flash was going up.
The article never mentions any reason as to why this player was developed, and I'm struggling to come up with a reason myself, as it's easier to port the native runtime to any platform, than maintain an independent copy in a constant "catch up" mode.
When are all those ARM-based netbooks with Linux that we were promised going to show up? I'll take one with a Tegra 2 processor, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and a Pixel Qi display please!
I'll pay extra for one in a form factor more like a Macbook Air, with a little extra screen, decent sized trackpad, etc.
Hello? Anybody out there?
Shhh... Keep quiet. We're currently really busy copying Apple and failing faster than you can say "and one more thing".
Is this a good thing for creating verifiable stats on the number of users, or a bad thing because of the "phone home" behaviour.
At least it's not doing this secretly...
I'm also torn.
When people on this site are presented with information that conflicts their sanitized ideal of "FOSS vs the evil corporations", they just declare the conflict and refuse to analyze it, or reconcile it with their world view.
Seriously, I expect your kinds of responses from the fascist theocratic assholes whom we're currently fighting, but it's rather sickening to see such behavior from a supposedly educated, enlightened, and tolerant citizen of the free world. I guess every society has it's collaborators.
The supposedly educated, enlightened and tolerant citizens of the free world have been a bit too tolerant with the illegal wars crafted by their governments lately.
WikiLeaks' attempt at change may be rather clumsy and poorly thought-out. The only alternative your put on the table is the status quo. As long as these wars continue, every single day more innocent civilians are murdered, than these leaks would have contributed in total.
It may be a rather cynical thing to ask, but try to match your outrage at least roughly to the number of victims produced by a particular action.
Eveyone keeps quoting the "do not evil" mantra, but we have something a lot more solid on Google's own site:
Today the Internet is an information highway where anybody - no matter how large or small, how traditional or unconventional - has equal access. But the phone and cable monopolies, who control almost all Internet access, want the power to choose who gets access to high-speed lanes and whose content gets seen first and fastest. They want to build a two-tiered system and block the on-ramps for those who can't pay.
Creativity, innovation and a free and open marketplace are all at stake in this fight. Please call your representative (202-224-3121) and let your voice be heard.
Thanks for your time, your concern and your support.
I'm not taking sides, and the details have not been announced, but it better not go 180 on the statement above. By the way, the official press releases from the companies are set to be out on bad-news-Friday. Not a good sign...
I entirely agree with your sentiment. We've watched over the years Microsoft turn into what they hate (IBM), and now we get to watch Google turn into what they hate (Microsoft). That said, if you want Etherpad on your own server, Etherpad's full open source code is available.
It kind of goes to show how full of shit most tech blogs are. Almost all of them were talking about how Wave was the future, absolutely, after watching one indie youtube video about it explained in cute crayon drawings.
You may be hitting the wrong blogs. What I read, coincided with my own opinion: interesting technology, but little advantage over competition, and high complexity, means you won't see mainstream adoption over basics like email.
Of course, maybe I unintentionally looked for blogs to match my own opinion. So.. what were you looking for;) ?
So adding an extra 30-50% to the unit price results in a 20% increase in revenues, or an 8-20% drop in unit sales. Why would a director complain about that?
And there's another side to this story. How would 2D DVD/BR copies of these movies sell? There's no significant market penetration of home 3D cinema equipment to consider otherwise, and that's a significant part of the profits of movies in the last 15 years.
The only data we have is on Avatar, which sells great regardless of the format, because it has gained vast popularity and mindshare around the fact it's the first mainstream, high budget, live-action 3D blockbuster to hit the cinema in years. There's only one "first" in a category, and no other movie would enjoy this side effect, just by being 3D.
What I really want to see is, how much would a Resident Evil 3D: The 2D DVD, and Saw 3D: The 2D DVD would sell, especially as those are built entirely around 3D gimmick shots.
I'm not implying that our current scenario is as cut and dried as World War II but how would you react if Wikileaks had been broadcasting over a magical radio station that blanketed the Earth the location of allied forces in 1942? Would you so callously respond that "maybe the Allies shouldn't be doing that in the first place?"
The problem with that "if" you're constructing is that merely a diversion from a real discussion. Anyone could easily list a number of other historical "ifs" to sharply counteract yours. And by doing so both sides of the conversation would achieve absolutely nothing, beside cheap entertainment.
We have the current situation in which WikiLeaks is acting, we see how they're acting, and we see how affected people and organisations are reacting to them, today, and in reality.
If you want to say WikiLeaks has done wrong in reality then, of course, list your concrete factual points, and we may or may not agree with you. No "ifs", time machines and historical paradoxes required.
WikiLeaks is in its essence just a Wiki site. A web site. It's clear that publishing text is in no way unique to that site, you can do it on any site. Hopefully the government isn't saying that free communication is the real threat to national security.
WikiLeaks didn't commit any of the acts in the leaked documents, it wasn't their job or responsibility for keeping those documents secret, and they didn't leak the documents from their origin: some unknown source did on their own will, and sent them to WikiLeaks.
All WikiLeaks did was take those documents, make a cursory check of authenticity, and publish them.
Of course, by doing so, they become an easy target for people who are willing to turn heads away from the actual problems that lead to projects like WikiLeaks, and instead blame the messenger.
The real problem (for certain people) is that WikiLeaks is now a vivid symbol nurturing an environment where people may not simply do something because it was ordered from above, and especially if it's in conflict with basic human rights and morals.
But by loudly blaming WikiLeaks for the created situation, they only serve to further strengthen the very symbol they want to destroy. Somewhat ironic. As long as WikiLeaks is on everyone's target, and not their anonymous sources, more and more whistle-blowers will choose to trust them with their data.
The blackhats, phishers, scammers, spammers, criminals, and other miscreants are not going to be easing up attacks anytime soon. So why deal with threats of 2010 with an OS made nine years ago?
You seem confused a little. The marketing/branding event "Windows XP" happened 9 years ago, yes. But the last time Microsoft updated Windows XP was few days ago, and they update it for today's threats, not those from 9 years ago.
Do you remember we had SP1, SP2 and SP3? SP2 was six years ago, pretty big update. SP3 is from only two years ago.
Of course, Windows Vista/7 can be more secure in some select scenarios, due to some select features it introduced. It's not as black as white as you want it to be.
P.S. Greek phalanxes and Apache helicopters are separated by about 3000 years, not 9 years, you get scores for drama, but I gotta take them back for lac of accuracy.
If only Apple would finally get around to inventing something cool for OS X to do that. It'd make it so much easier for the developer. Knowing Apple they'd probably make it so that it was really simple. Like a few lines of code.
You talk about Grand Central which helps people with parallelizable code write parallelizable code.
The GP is talking about code which is hard or impossible to make parallel since it's intrinsically linear (no pieces of it can run together with other pieces of it).
Also even if it was theoretically possible for a fraction of the software, you need to make untold number of developers invest time and resources to rewrite their already working programs to work in at least 12 busy threads.
If you don't already use software which can make good use of 12-cores, which some professional software does, but most software does not, we're at least 5-10 years away of you utilizing those. And by that period, it'll be time to buy a new Mac again.
I can't help but wonder whether graphic designers who had spent their entire lives in India or China would struggle with designing for American markets in the same way.
I can tell you right now: they won't struggle.
To US citizens, most other cultures are obscure and unknown, but thanks to a very successful propagation of US culture abroad, everyone is familiar with the American pop icons, fashion, style and mindframe, many even down to the little nuances.
Which is an irrelevant statistic if you are comparing equal sized factories in the US vs China. I'm not saying the GP's point was valid, but that yours is stupid.
How can you compare equal-sized factories in US and China, when US barely has any left.
He's not saying that all of China is illiterate or anything like that. He's just saying that the US has a 99% literacy rate, and China is at about 93.3%, and those factory jobs aren't always staffed by the highest-educated people, just like here in the US. There's nothing wrong with it. It's just the way things are.
Isn't it nice you can look that up on Wikipedia with your "Made in China" computer?
Also look that up: China population vs USA population. The number of literate people in China is 4 times the entire US population.
I know some people are easily confused by poor English and stereotypes. But their asm, c++ and hardware design skills are quite competitive.
1: The newer CPUs can switch between one fast core and multiple slower cores based on demand (they call it "turbo boost" / "turbo core"). This means that there isn't really any speed loss for a higher number of cores any more.
I'm talking about memory bandwidth starvation, and you tell me you solved this by overclocking the cores. What's your logic? That's what TurboBoost does: overclocks the cores on the fly.
And TurboCore is simply AMD's name for a simpler TurboBoost-like feature.
2: There would be no point in hyperthreading if it gave a guaranteed cut in performance like that. If only one of the two "virtual" (actually "hardware") threads is in use, the other one runs at full speed.
If by full speed you mean the scheduler is going missing in action while serving the other virtual core, then yes. Each virtual core still shares resources with the other core, whether the core is used or not. HT is faster with highly parallel tasks is that parallel instructions may use different execution units inside the CPU, but some units are in use the whole time and need to work in "interleaved" mode when HT is enabled.
As screens get bigger they will fill up with this feed, that feed, weather, streaming video, multiple website tabs, flash games, a few trojans, printer drivers, chat clients, etc. Lots and lots of things going on at the same time, more cores will make future computing a much more enjoyable experience.
I enjoy your exercise in naively extrapolating trends from few years ago, but I don't think the average users consults a chart in order to see how heavily he should multitask. The tehcnology has been good enough for most user scenarios for quite some time now. The current bottleneck is the user, who's simply happy with what he has on the desktop.
In fact, everyone is increasingly using mobile devices to do work that was previously done on desktops. The same mobile devices running (relative to the desktop) underpowered ARM chips, and where, apparently, multitasking as a concept itself is considered at most "nice to have, but whatever" rather than increasingly important.
Well, you have to admire that the biggest online advertising corporation on the internet didn't pull out the ad blocking feature on it's own brand of webkit browser. Yes, Google is a corporation like any other, but at least they have a little respect for not pissing it's costumers off. I think a lot of companies in the same position would have made it so their browser ADDED ads.
You say it does say something about Google, but we don't agree on what it says.
I can almost hear Steve Jobs discussing this with his colleagues at Apple "let's add adblocking hooks to Safari. If Chrome exclude them, attack them so they lose customer goodwill, if they don't exclude them, it'll help erode their advertising business."
Safari has exactly $0 to lose from adblocking plugins, while Google has everything to lose. But Google would lose everything if they don't have the goodwill of their users to sell their data mining products with no significant uproar.
hSo while I agree that buying low clocked quads are stupid just to have more cores, with nice 2.6-3.2GHz AMD quads so cheap it just seems a little nuts not to give them the extra headroom.
What I said above is the clock rate is not of your key concern here: memory starvation & cache-size is. Equivalently clocked 4 core system will have worse per-core performance than a 2-core system.
Sure, if you heavily multitask and your tasks are all CPU-bound (some of which you mentioned, are not, by the way), then you'll have overall better system "snappiness" on a 4-core system. But each of those tasks will be running slower than otherwise.
Yeah, but once you see through his deceptions and manipulations, the guy has about as much appeal as Stalin.
If trying to swing things in your interests by means of crafty presentation makes you a "Stalin", what's to be said of the media who spun the entire issue exactly as much, but in the opposite direction?
It's almost impossible to find an objective source of information these days. It's all well-tuned to someone's very specific interests.
Would you want to have a 4 inch penis? Don't you think a healthy 6 or 8 inches might be better? I have a quad core, which I'm confident will soon become the equivalent of a 4 inch penis. I'll have to upgrade my e-peen when it become affordable. Seriously though, if you like to game on your computer there is no such thing as too much power.
I admire the depth if your technical knowledge on the matter.
The irony here is that with most CPUs on sale right now, 4-6 cores have worse individual performance than a 2-core system. Many games need strong core-individual performance.
For example, a typical 4-core system performs 25% slower than 2-core.
If you enable hyperthreading you lose another 40% of your single-thread performance, as each core is split into two virtual threads (without optimization you'd lose 50% but thankfully CPUs are smarter than this).
So to recap, 4-cores: 25%. Hyperthreading: 40%. Total loss compared to a two-core system with no hyperhtreading: 55%
If you bought a 6-core system for gaming, the numbers would be even funnier.
The average consumer just thinks "bigger is better" and by creating a mess of hard to understand sequence numbers they can make it harder for the semi-knowledgable customer to pick the right CPU.
Semi-knowledgable sounds like "knowing enough to be dangerous". I have counted at least four people who are friends, or I work with, who think more cores is better, without any regard for the type of task they'd use the machine for. Then surprise when their older machine runs their browser twice faster than their new expensive 4-core machine.
For most desktop tasks, which by their nature depend mostly on strong linear performance, two cores is the line, that, if crossed, you start to lose performance, rather than win one. Not everything can be parallelized. The problem is these cores still need to share access to your RAM. With 2 cores that works great, but 4-6 cores means you starve each core for memory bandwidth.
The rule is: do you plan to heavily crunch numbers in parallel, i.e. use the machine for: 1) a server 2) or encode/edit plenty of video 3) render 3D (GPU-driven games not counting, I mean professional rendering software that pushes the CPU)? Then you will benefit from 4/6 cores. Otherwise, you'll pay more and be hurt in performance.
Cores and clock speed are just two factors of CPU performance, and you need to consider also the cache size, core interconnect architecture, memory bus performance and so on. You may as well have a meaningless number as your model.
Your best best is to browse around for good benchmarks and see where the best price/performance ratio is, according to the types of tasks you need.
I just want to let the quotes say few things first:
However, customizing and navigating the screen can sometimes be a cumbersome task.
More importantly, we're just not sold on the layout.
Now, some might complain that this type of navigation requires too much scrolling and can be overly complicated and admittedly, when compared to iOS and Android, this is true we fear this will be a turnoff to consumers.
I had the same exact observations few months ago when they demonstrated their new mobile OS for the first time. Looks like Microsoft's attempt at making an interface that's easier and more innovative than Android/iPhone ends up "complicated" and "cumbersome".
If their goal was to make a complex post-modern interface targeted to a small niche of geeks willing to get involved with such a taxing concepts as their scrolling clipped hub views, that'd be fine.
But they're achieving exactly the opposite of what they want, which is tragic. It means very likely their marketing will go "mainstream" and it'll be largely ignored, just like their Kin series (which, by the way have mostly the same GUI as Win 7 Mobile).
Slashdot Mirror
Semi-closed platforms like the iphone/ipod where the proprieters have turned their back on flash?
The introduction of yet another semi-functional Flash alternative is doing nothing to change this position, as it's a practical position, not one of open source ideology. Having it in Java makes this even less interesting to Apple.
Steve Jobs, like any other mobile maker, can have full access to the actual Flash player source code, if he only wanted it. Maintaining an independent port is not cheaper than simply fixing the one Adobe provides.
Adobe (back then Macromedia) used to ship Flash in two version: native binary and Java version in the days when Java applets were popular. They stopped developing it around the time Flash 4 was out, because the tables have turned: Java applets were going down, while Flash was going up.
The article never mentions any reason as to why this player was developed, and I'm struggling to come up with a reason myself, as it's easier to port the native runtime to any platform, than maintain an independent copy in a constant "catch up" mode.
Just imagine what the the headline "Android phones can now maintain battery capacity at greater than 80% after an average day of use" would create.
The handset design might have to change a little to accomodate the bigger batteries, but it seems perfectly doable.
When are all those ARM-based netbooks with Linux that we were promised going to show up? I'll take one with a Tegra 2 processor, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and a Pixel Qi display please!
I'll pay extra for one in a form factor more like a Macbook Air, with a little extra screen, decent sized trackpad, etc.
Hello? Anybody out there?
Shhh... Keep quiet. We're currently really busy copying Apple and failing faster than you can say "and one more thing".
I'm torn.
Is this a good thing for creating verifiable stats on the number of users, or a bad thing because of the "phone home" behaviour.
At least it's not doing this secretly...
I'm also torn.
When people on this site are presented with information that conflicts their sanitized ideal of "FOSS vs the evil corporations", they just declare the conflict and refuse to analyze it, or reconcile it with their world view.
At least they're saying something.
Seriously, I expect your kinds of responses from the fascist theocratic assholes whom we're currently fighting, but it's rather sickening to see such behavior from a supposedly educated, enlightened, and tolerant citizen of the free world. I guess every society has it's collaborators.
The supposedly educated, enlightened and tolerant citizens of the free world have been a bit too tolerant with the illegal wars crafted by their governments lately.
WikiLeaks' attempt at change may be rather clumsy and poorly thought-out. The only alternative your put on the table is the status quo. As long as these wars continue, every single day more innocent civilians are murdered, than these leaks would have contributed in total.
It may be a rather cynical thing to ask, but try to match your outrage at least roughly to the number of victims produced by a particular action.
Eveyone keeps quoting the "do not evil" mantra, but we have something a lot more solid on Google's own site:
Today the Internet is an information highway where anybody - no matter how large or small, how traditional or unconventional - has equal access. But the phone and cable monopolies, who control almost all Internet access, want the power to choose who gets access to high-speed lanes and whose content gets seen first and fastest. They want to build a two-tiered system and block the on-ramps for those who can't pay.
Creativity, innovation and a free and open marketplace are all at stake in this fight. Please call your representative (202-224-3121) and let your voice be heard.
Thanks for your time, your concern and your support.
Eric Schmidt
Source: http://www.google.com/help/netneutrality_letter.html
I'm not taking sides, and the details have not been announced, but it better not go 180 on the statement above.
By the way, the official press releases from the companies are set to be out on bad-news-Friday. Not a good sign...
Thanks Google for aquiring and killing!
I entirely agree with your sentiment. We've watched over the years Microsoft turn into what they hate (IBM), and now we get to watch Google turn into what they hate (Microsoft). That said, if you want Etherpad on your own server, Etherpad's full open source code is available.
It kind of goes to show how full of shit most tech blogs are. Almost all of them were talking about how Wave was the future, absolutely, after watching one indie youtube video about it explained in cute crayon drawings.
You may be hitting the wrong blogs. What I read, coincided with my own opinion: interesting technology, but little advantage over competition, and high complexity, means you won't see mainstream adoption over basics like email.
Of course, maybe I unintentionally looked for blogs to match my own opinion. So.. what were you looking for ;) ?
So adding an extra 30-50% to the unit price results in a 20% increase in revenues, or an 8-20% drop in unit sales.
Why would a director complain about that?
And there's another side to this story. How would 2D DVD/BR copies of these movies sell? There's no significant market penetration of home 3D cinema equipment to consider otherwise, and that's a significant part of the profits of movies in the last 15 years.
The only data we have is on Avatar, which sells great regardless of the format, because it has gained vast popularity and mindshare around the fact it's the first mainstream, high budget, live-action 3D blockbuster to hit the cinema in years. There's only one "first" in a category, and no other movie would enjoy this side effect, just by being 3D.
What I really want to see is, how much would a Resident Evil 3D: The 2D DVD, and Saw 3D: The 2D DVD would sell, especially as those are built entirely around 3D gimmick shots.
I'm not implying that our current scenario is as cut and dried as World War II but how would you react if Wikileaks had been broadcasting over a magical radio station that blanketed the Earth the location of allied forces in 1942? Would you so callously respond that "maybe the Allies shouldn't be doing that in the first place?"
The problem with that "if" you're constructing is that merely a diversion from a real discussion. Anyone could easily list a number of other historical "ifs" to sharply counteract yours. And by doing so both sides of the conversation would achieve absolutely nothing, beside cheap entertainment.
We have the current situation in which WikiLeaks is acting, we see how they're acting, and we see how affected people and organisations are reacting to them, today, and in reality.
If you want to say WikiLeaks has done wrong in reality then, of course, list your concrete factual points, and we may or may not agree with you. No "ifs", time machines and historical paradoxes required.
WikiLeaks is in its essence just a Wiki site. A web site. It's clear that publishing text is in no way unique to that site, you can do it on any site. Hopefully the government isn't saying that free communication is the real threat to national security.
WikiLeaks didn't commit any of the acts in the leaked documents, it wasn't their job or responsibility for keeping those documents secret, and they didn't leak the documents from their origin: some unknown source did on their own will, and sent them to WikiLeaks.
All WikiLeaks did was take those documents, make a cursory check of authenticity, and publish them.
Of course, by doing so, they become an easy target for people who are willing to turn heads away from the actual problems that lead to projects like WikiLeaks, and instead blame the messenger.
The real problem (for certain people) is that WikiLeaks is now a vivid symbol nurturing an environment where people may not simply do something because it was ordered from above, and especially if it's in conflict with basic human rights and morals.
But by loudly blaming WikiLeaks for the created situation, they only serve to further strengthen the very symbol they want to destroy. Somewhat ironic. As long as WikiLeaks is on everyone's target, and not their anonymous sources, more and more whistle-blowers will choose to trust them with their data.
The blackhats, phishers, scammers, spammers, criminals, and other miscreants are not going to be easing up attacks anytime soon. So why deal with threats of 2010 with an OS made nine years ago?
You seem confused a little. The marketing/branding event "Windows XP" happened 9 years ago, yes. But the last time Microsoft updated Windows XP was few days ago, and they update it for today's threats, not those from 9 years ago.
Do you remember we had SP1, SP2 and SP3? SP2 was six years ago, pretty big update. SP3 is from only two years ago.
Of course, Windows Vista/7 can be more secure in some select scenarios, due to some select features it introduced. It's not as black as white as you want it to be.
P.S. Greek phalanxes and Apache helicopters are separated by about 3000 years, not 9 years, you get scores for drama, but I gotta take them back for lac of accuracy.
If only Apple would finally get around to inventing something cool for OS X to do that. It'd make it so much easier for the developer. Knowing Apple they'd probably make it so that it was really simple. Like a few lines of code.
You talk about Grand Central which helps people with parallelizable code write parallelizable code.
The GP is talking about code which is hard or impossible to make parallel since it's intrinsically linear (no pieces of it can run together with other pieces of it).
Also even if it was theoretically possible for a fraction of the software, you need to make untold number of developers invest time and resources to rewrite their already working programs to work in at least 12 busy threads.
If you don't already use software which can make good use of 12-cores, which some professional software does, but most software does not, we're at least 5-10 years away of you utilizing those. And by that period, it'll be time to buy a new Mac again.
I can't help but wonder whether graphic designers who had spent their entire lives in India or China would struggle with designing for American markets in the same way.
I can tell you right now: they won't struggle.
To US citizens, most other cultures are obscure and unknown, but thanks to a very successful propagation of US culture abroad, everyone is familiar with the American pop icons, fashion, style and mindframe, many even down to the little nuances.
Which is an irrelevant statistic if you are comparing equal sized factories in the US vs China. I'm not saying the GP's point was valid, but that yours is stupid.
How can you compare equal-sized factories in US and China, when US barely has any left.
He's not saying that all of China is illiterate or anything like that. He's just saying that the US has a 99% literacy rate, and China is at about 93.3%, and those factory jobs aren't always staffed by the highest-educated people, just like here in the US. There's nothing wrong with it. It's just the way things are.
Isn't it nice you can look that up on Wikipedia with your "Made in China" computer?
Also look that up: China population vs USA population. The number of literate people in China is 4 times the entire US population.
I know some people are easily confused by poor English and stereotypes. But their asm, c++ and hardware design skills are quite competitive.
Talking about it, how's your Chinese?
1: The newer CPUs can switch between one fast core and multiple slower cores based on demand (they call it "turbo boost" / "turbo core"). This means that there isn't really any speed loss for a higher number of cores any more.
I'm talking about memory bandwidth starvation, and you tell me you solved this by overclocking the cores. What's your logic? That's what TurboBoost does: overclocks the cores on the fly.
And TurboCore is simply AMD's name for a simpler TurboBoost-like feature.
2: There would be no point in hyperthreading if it gave a guaranteed cut in performance like that. If only one of the two "virtual" (actually "hardware") threads is in use, the other one runs at full speed.
If by full speed you mean the scheduler is going missing in action while serving the other virtual core, then yes. Each virtual core still shares resources with the other core, whether the core is used or not. HT is faster with highly parallel tasks is that parallel instructions may use different execution units inside the CPU, but some units are in use the whole time and need to work in "interleaved" mode when HT is enabled.
As screens get bigger they will fill up with this feed, that feed, weather, streaming video, multiple website tabs, flash games, a few trojans, printer drivers, chat clients, etc. Lots and lots of things going on at the same time, more cores will make future computing a much more enjoyable experience.
I enjoy your exercise in naively extrapolating trends from few years ago, but I don't think the average users consults a chart in order to see how heavily he should multitask. The tehcnology has been good enough for most user scenarios for quite some time now. The current bottleneck is the user, who's simply happy with what he has on the desktop.
In fact, everyone is increasingly using mobile devices to do work that was previously done on desktops. The same mobile devices running (relative to the desktop) underpowered ARM chips, and where, apparently, multitasking as a concept itself is considered at most "nice to have, but whatever" rather than increasingly important.
Well, you have to admire that the biggest online advertising corporation on the internet didn't pull out the ad blocking feature on it's own brand of webkit browser. Yes, Google is a corporation like any other, but at least they have a little respect for not pissing it's costumers off. I think a lot of companies in the same position would have made it so their browser ADDED ads.
You say it does say something about Google, but we don't agree on what it says.
I can almost hear Steve Jobs discussing this with his colleagues at Apple "let's add adblocking hooks to Safari. If Chrome exclude them, attack them so they lose customer goodwill, if they don't exclude them, it'll help erode their advertising business."
Safari has exactly $0 to lose from adblocking plugins, while Google has everything to lose. But Google would lose everything if they don't have the goodwill of their users to sell their data mining products with no significant uproar.
Good one from the WebKit team.
hSo while I agree that buying low clocked quads are stupid just to have more cores, with nice 2.6-3.2GHz AMD quads so cheap it just seems a little nuts not to give them the extra headroom.
What I said above is the clock rate is not of your key concern here: memory starvation & cache-size is. Equivalently clocked 4 core system will have worse per-core performance than a 2-core system.
Sure, if you heavily multitask and your tasks are all CPU-bound (some of which you mentioned, are not, by the way), then you'll have overall better system "snappiness" on a 4-core system. But each of those tasks will be running slower than otherwise.
Yeah, but once you see through his deceptions and manipulations, the guy has about as much appeal as Stalin.
If trying to swing things in your interests by means of crafty presentation makes you a "Stalin", what's to be said of the media who spun the entire issue exactly as much, but in the opposite direction?
It's almost impossible to find an objective source of information these days. It's all well-tuned to someone's very specific interests.
Would you want to have a 4 inch penis? Don't you think a healthy 6 or 8 inches might be better?
I have a quad core, which I'm confident will soon become the equivalent of a 4 inch penis. I'll have to upgrade my e-peen when it become affordable.
Seriously though, if you like to game on your computer there is no such thing as too much power.
I admire the depth if your technical knowledge on the matter.
The irony here is that with most CPUs on sale right now, 4-6 cores have worse individual performance than a 2-core system. Many games need strong core-individual performance.
For example, a typical 4-core system performs 25% slower than 2-core.
If you enable hyperthreading you lose another 40% of your single-thread performance, as each core is split into two virtual threads (without optimization you'd lose 50% but thankfully CPUs are smarter than this).
So to recap, 4-cores: 25%. Hyperthreading: 40%. Total loss compared to a two-core system with no hyperhtreading: 55%
If you bought a 6-core system for gaming, the numbers would be even funnier.
The average consumer just thinks "bigger is better" and by creating a mess of hard to understand sequence numbers they can make it harder for the semi-knowledgable customer to pick the right CPU.
Semi-knowledgable sounds like "knowing enough to be dangerous". I have counted at least four people who are friends, or I work with, who think more cores is better, without any regard for the type of task they'd use the machine for. Then surprise when their older machine runs their browser twice faster than their new expensive 4-core machine.
For most desktop tasks, which by their nature depend mostly on strong linear performance, two cores is the line, that, if crossed, you start to lose performance, rather than win one. Not everything can be parallelized. The problem is these cores still need to share access to your RAM. With 2 cores that works great, but 4-6 cores means you starve each core for memory bandwidth.
The rule is: do you plan to heavily crunch numbers in parallel, i.e. use the machine for: 1) a server 2) or encode/edit plenty of video 3) render 3D (GPU-driven games not counting, I mean professional rendering software that pushes the CPU)? Then you will benefit from 4/6 cores. Otherwise, you'll pay more and be hurt in performance.
Cores and clock speed are just two factors of CPU performance, and you need to consider also the cache size, core interconnect architecture, memory bus performance and so on. You may as well have a meaningless number as your model.
Your best best is to browse around for good benchmarks and see where the best price/performance ratio is, according to the types of tasks you need.
I just want to let the quotes say few things first:
However, customizing and navigating the screen can sometimes be a cumbersome task.
More importantly, we're just not sold on the layout.
Now, some might complain that this type of navigation requires too much scrolling and can be overly complicated and admittedly, when compared to iOS and Android, this is true we fear this will be a turnoff to consumers.
I had the same exact observations few months ago when they demonstrated their new mobile OS for the first time. Looks like Microsoft's attempt at making an interface that's easier and more innovative than Android/iPhone ends up "complicated" and "cumbersome".
If their goal was to make a complex post-modern interface targeted to a small niche of geeks willing to get involved with such a taxing concepts as their scrolling clipped hub views, that'd be fine.
But they're achieving exactly the opposite of what they want, which is tragic. It means very likely their marketing will go "mainstream" and it'll be largely ignored, just like their Kin series (which, by the way have mostly the same GUI as Win 7 Mobile).