Well, not quite... you do get Blu-ray in pretty much every $50 five-inch-round-shiny-disc-player these days. No, not the $20 ones yet. Sales of Blu-ray discs this years are up 15% over last year. They're doing ok.
Apple didn't really try to push Firewire. In fact, they did a large number of very stupid things that kind of grabbed defeat form the jaws of victory. Intel had looked into including Firewire as a standard thing in their PC chipsets. But Apple wanted too much money for licensing, so Intel pushed the USB folks to come up with a free alternative (not free to join the USB-IF, but free or very cheap to make USB chips, connectors, license logos, etc).
Apple's pushing Thunderbolt, but Intel owns it... after all, it's basically a combination of PCI Express and DisplayPort. Apple did trademark it (Intel was still calling it "LightPeak" and pushing for optical versions), but they have since transferred even the trademark over to Intel. Intel's starting to built it into systems, but there are issues. For one, you need an active cable to use Thunderbolt... that's about $50 today, and never going to drop to the level of wire-only cables. Meanwhile, a USB 3.0 port will do about the same job in practice, over a $3.00 cable.
The other problem is that, sure, Thunderbolt as implemented in Apple's all-in-ones is kind of cool. Particularly the Mac Pro. You have a cross-point switch that allows the DisplayPort outputs from each GPU to be routed to any of the six Thunderbolt ports, apparently doing the DisplayPort hub function too, so you can hook up at least four (maybe 6?) DisplayPort monitors to those connectors. Or peripherals. Thing is, it's DisplayPort going via Thunderbolt that delivers that display performance... you're not schlepping raw HD to 4K video across a PCI express bus and out the Thunderbolt connector. That's the way you want it. But once you put Thunderbolt on a PC motherboard, you'll notice that your GPUs are on a card, and their outputs: DisplayPort, DVI, HDMI, whatever, they don't route into that Thunderbolt controller. You might route motherboard graphics that way, but seriously, who wants integrated graphics? So already, Thunderbolt is far less interesting for PC desktop users.
And there's also no killer app. Camcorders were the killer app for Firewire, just as HID devices were the killer app for USB. The best Thunderbolt has going for it right now: Apple's Mac Pro has such a tiny built-in SSD, anyone actually doing "The Pro Thing" with it will have external storage. Could be USB, could be GigE NAS.. or maybe a Thunderbolt RAID, or a SAN bridged in via Thunderbolt. That's the only "must have" around for this. Most Mac laptop users will be using that Thunderbolt port to drive an external monitor... that's why it's using the mini-DisplayPort connector, after all. Don't even need to change the cable.
USB 1.0 was made to replace the various legacy I/O ports with one thing: no more PS/2 mouse or keyboard, no more RS-232 serial, no more Centronics parallel, etc. And via hubs, no more hard limits on I/O. It wasn't designed to compete with Firewire or any other high-speed interface.
USB 2.0 was designed to compete with simple uses of Firewire. It caught on because Intel knows how to promote a spec and Apple doesn't.. that's pretty much the story. Apple wanted to change $1.00 per port in royalties for Firewire. USB, like PCI, PCI Express, AC97, and pretty much any other interface Intel got involved with was given away for free... see, Intel just wants to sell chips. Making your hardware cooler sells chips. And of course, USB being free got built into every PC chipset. Firewire was pretty much always adding an extra chip (usually from TI, though NEC made some too) to your motherboard... even after Apple relented and dropped their per-port pricing, Firewire was largely relegated to things that only Firewire did well... like camcorder transfer (for those who don't know, Firewire is multi-mastered -- Apple in fact supported the whole SCSI command set over FW, to make bridging to SCSI devices trivial). A Firewire device can basically just start sending digital video to a PC, much as an analog camera would send video via a CVBS or YPrPb cable... so this was a natural for camcorder makers. And practically no one else. USB only works with computer-like things... USB on a camcorder would need either a huge RAM buffer or a computer tape-like drive with sector-level addressing of the data.
The other thing Apple did to screw it up was trademarking "Firewire" and charging lots to companies wanting to use that trademark. Which most companies didn't... so you go names like iLink or just the IEEE 1394 designation... which created market confusion.
You have two practical problems. One is simple: if you don't have USB certs, you can't use USB logos, can't say "Universal Serial Bus", and might not even be able to say "USB" anywhere on your documentation.
The other is worse... if you don't have a unique product and vendor ID, you have no assurance that your device won't collide with someone else's. Some chip companies always use their own IDs, some allow you to use their IDs but offer customization, and others require you to use your own.
So you're suggesting it's just plain old Windows RT, only for x86, no NDK allowed (is there actually an NDK for Windows RT?). Of course, Microsoft's had a completely different CLASS (sic) of programs, without a name the public either recognizes or understands, that run fully abstracted from the hardware, like 85% of Android (most iOS apps are native coded iOS Cocoa Touch, though that no longer a requirement)... some called it.NET, some called it Common Language Runtime... but whatever. Didn't seem to help them here, though it certainly might have.
Not that an X-Box x86 couldn't run native code, but to really keep in place all of the WinRT restrictions, I think they need the VM. You can't even write a compiler in WinRT!
Microsoft doesn't talk about it, but they have a fragmentation problem. They seem to have gone boldly into this new Metro era without really thinking much about what users need. They got this idea that the old Zune interface, revamped once for the Windows Phone 7, was their future direction. So now they push the phone interface onto tablets and desktops and 70" televisions. And yeah, it all looks pretty much the same, though I'm sure if I was idiot enough to use it daily, on multiple screens, I'd notice the holes, where the UI didn't translate from one to another.
But the big problem is that there's not one Metro, but four, and Microsoft won't talk about that. So you have Windows 8, which can run Metro/RT apps, Metro/Win32 apps, and real Win32 apps. Only the WinRT apps will run on Windows RT. But they don't run on Windows Phone... and so far, no indication of just what actually runs on the X-Box One. That didn't used to be much of an issue, but some kind of partial compatibility? That's maybe worse than none.
And it's not as if they ever talk about it. Microsoft has spend about a billion dollars on Surface ads, I see these constantly. And not a single one told me that a Surface RT or Surface 2 doesn't run "real" Windows programs. Of course we all know this here if we care to follow Microsoft's antics at all, but the average user? Not so much. And at least according a few developer friends, even the development environment and APIs aren't similar yet. Metro/Win32 apps will never run on Surface or Windows Phone or probably X-Box. So just what actually does? And how are they going to deal with all these different incompatible operating systems... particularly now that Windows Phone is moving to support tablets soon. It will actually be possible to find a 7" Windows 8.1, Windows RT, and Windows Phone tablet, together in a store, each with a different set of compatible applications. And no one really knows if Microsoft plans to carry Windows Phone 8 or Windows RT compatibility forward to Windows WHATEVER 9... particularly the phone. They just dumped compatibility going to 6 to 7 and 7 to 8, so why not again?
In short, they seem about as unfocused as one could imagine on dealing with this whole "move" to mobile devices. Don't get me wrong, it's entertaining as hell, but given Microsoft's near draconian enslavement to application compatibility in upgrades since the dark dank dire days of MS-DOS, it's like they're all drunk or something today... and it can't really be success they're drunk on these days. Not since Android outsold Windows last year...
GPU companies have been cheating on benchmarks for decades. Back in the PCI and AGP days, it was just pretty much expected that graphics cards would include a hack to lock themselves on the shared bus for as long as they felt they needed. Sure, this wasn't benchmark specific, but it was also destructive -- it killed the realtime performance of your PC. Specifically in those days, audio workstation software was broken by these hacks... leading a bunch of counter-hacks necessary to defeat these (and sure, the occasional GPU company savvy enough to offer a non-broken version of the driver online).
And then there was the Intel C compiler.. the one that basically had a "detect Dhrystone" function. And over the years, a whole series of cheats that either made AMD look bad or Intel amazingly good... enough to be much of the meat of AMD's suit against Intel in 2005... which lead to a court order for Intel to stop their compiler producing code that intentionally ran slower on non-Intel chips. And more recently with Intel's AnTuTu cheat, making Intel smartphones look magically better than AMD.. but only on that one benchmark.
And of course, nVidia. nVidia's been cheating at benchmarks for years... though at least some of that came in response to AMD/ATi getting caught cheaping on Quake 3 performance. And recently, too... earlier this year, they had a driver that detected 3DMark (and perhaps other benchmarks) and cheated, by switching to custom PHYSX code rather than running the DLL everyone else runs. And the various cheats on benchmarks for Tegra 2 and Tegra 3 SOCs.
I mean, this is one reason we speak of lies, damn lies, and benchmarks. Everybody cheats at this stuff. Apple used to cheat in the latter days of the PowerPC, even on published SPECmarks, as their stuff kept falling behind Intel.
Yes, Android and iOS were exploding the smartphone market in 2010, when Elop took over. Nokia wasn't growkng nearly as fast, but they were still growing. They sold over 110 million smartphones in 2010, more than iOS, more than Android, more than both combined. Nokia's profits were up over every 2009 quarter, and still into 2011. Nokia announced the exclusive move to Windows Phone late in February. That was when profits failed... they had one more profitable quarter, a small profit in fourth quarter 2012... though less than Microsoft's $250M per quarter subsidy, and that only after over 12,000 jobs had been cut.
Really, if Microsoft didn't send Elop to kill Nokia's phone business and get the devices division for a song (less than Skype), it would be hard to imagine a better result -- for Microsoft or Elop himself -- if they had. In fact, that's about the only reason to not suspect a conspiracy here: what has Microsoft done lately that's been as effective as killing off Nokia and getting that division cheap?
But how about an alternate history. In this one, Nokia rightly notices that SymbianOS won't last, and plain old Linux won't beat iOS. Given the observation that they already had more in-house Linux smartphone experience than anyone else, they jump into Android. They're already moving on it in late 2010, leveraging N series hardware, no need for the complete redesigns that Windows Phone requires. They launch new devices in Spring of 2011, and have no need to kill the SymbianOS market. SymbianOS sells 130M units in 2011, 95M in 2012... and Nokia is established as a strong player in Android, before Samsung dominates as they do today.
Keep in mind, in 2010 Apple's sales were strongly US biased, while Nokia didn't compete in the US market. So really, the competition just wasn't there yet, not the way it's seen through the 2013 lens. And Android would have provided Nokia with the perfect entre into the US market.
No.. not even close. Yeah, that's one of the side-effects, but DisplayPort is way more than that.
It's a higher level protocol than HDMI, DVI, or other video display technologies. For one, it's based on small packets -- like Ethernet and PCI Express. So it can send different kinds of data over the same interface, and in a extensible way -- new generation DisplayPort devices can add functionality without messing up compatibility with older devices. And this is how is does audio and video without having separate signals for audio and video.
And of course, DisplayPort supports DRM. And while is does support the flawed 40-bit and slightly better 56-bit HDCP, it also supports a protocol based on 128-bit AES. Hard core crypto, that last one. It also manages 17.28Gb/s mode, not much different than the 18Gb/s mode of HDMI 2.0.
Well, no.. the real reason for 3820x2160 is that it's quad HD.
But HDMI 2.0 also fully supports the DCI (Digital Cinema Initiatives format), 4096x2160, at 60p and 48bpp.. that's the prevailing standard in cinema 4K, though there are others (DCI Cinemascope, DCI flat cropped, Academy and Full Aperture 4K, the latter at 4096 x 3112), which are not necessarily intended for display on consumer gear.
I have two Westinghouse monitors, had them for about 7 years, 1920x1200, computer monitors, but designed for video. So these have CVBS, Y/C, YPrPb, VGA, and HDMi inputs -- no DVI, no DisplayPort (well, that hadn't been invented yet). And they're every bit as sharp with computer video as my newer, DisplayPort monitors (lower resolution, but just as sharp).
If you have bad computer display on an HDMI monitor, it's because you bought a cheap monitor. Or because you're expecting a $100 TV to be built to the same standard as a $100 monitor -- it might not be. Or you have "contrast enhancement" turned on, which is screwing with your computer video. But it has nothing do with HDMI. And in fact, VGA is dramatically worse on these same monitors... crap analog video is never going to look as good when you examine closely. If you have a VGA/HDMI monitor that looks better with VGA input, you have a broken device. HDMi is dramatically better on any proper display.
For natural video rather than computer video, you tend to loose the impact of individual pixels... when I'm typing this, I'm looking at a tiny number of pixels on a 2Mpixel screen (yeah, I'm actually typing this on the HDM monitor, the other two have work on them). When I look at television, my attention is generally on the whole screen. Plus, if you have a cheaper TV, you probably have a lower physical resolution that's scaled up or down to the one you're trying to display (eg, TVs take 1920x1080 or 1280x720 inputs, but their screens don't always match).
If you need any more proof, look up the spec. HDMI was created as a superset of DVI -- it uses exactly the same protocol as DVI; you can take a DVI output and run it to HDMI with an adapter cable. HDM supports higher pixel rates, that's the main difference, originally. The two have diverged -- HDMI adding formats and specs, DVI pretty much just waiting for HDMI and DisplayPort to replace it.
Actually, no.. gold does have a low resistance/high conductivity... 5th best, after Graphene, Silver, Copper, and Annealed Copper. But pretty much every gold plated conductor is plated over nickel (for connectors) or copper (on PCB fingers). The point of the gold plating is only corrosion resistance.. particularly on circuit boards. Bare copper forms copper oxide -- an insulator. A very thin coating of gold solves that problems.
We're also very good at plating gold in sub-micron thicknesses, so it's actually a cheaper solution than some of the alternatives, particularly on connections with very light contact force and a very short plug/unplug life cycle. Thin, soft gold plating is good for under 100 cycles, given typical plating thickness. That can be improved a bit using alloys, like gold-nickel or gold-cobalt, but it does get expensive.
Professional cables use nickel or other corrosion resistant hard metals (these days, you do see a little "hard gold" in there too, but I think that's more marketing than anything).. because you're going to have thousands of plug/unplug cycles, and can't afford to have the plating wear off.
Conduction really has nothing to do with it. Of course, there may be some audiophooles out there telling you different, but just think about it -- these guys never see the whole system. That audio cable is going to a connector somewhere. That may have gold contracts, but more likely some kind of hard nickel plating, since you're got going to see what's inside anyway. That's connected to the unit's PCB by copper wires, or directly on the PCB.. but either way, it's actually connected with solder. Older solder is tin/lead, newer solder is tin with maybe a tiny bit of copper.. either one much worse than nickel, copper, gold, silver, graphene, etc.
Not at all.. HDMI is a method for clean transmissions to a visual display. That's pretty much it. It's not for backing up data, it's for displaying visual data for your eyes in realtime. Same as DVI... in fact, literally so, since HDMI is a superset of DVI.
In any kind of media processing for human consumption, realtime error correcting works fine.. but there's no time for re-transmit -- this isn't a network protocol, it's a one-way transmission. Because there would be no time for a correction, anyway.
In practice, rounded up to the nearest 0.01%, HDM errors never happen. It's robust enough to be commonly used as a transmission medium between camcorder and professional video recorder... if errors were remotely an issue, this wouldn't be done anymore. And in fact, most short range, very tightly controlled interfaces haven't had error checking or correcting, even for computer hardware. This really first showed up on the PCI bus, and even at that, it's a single parity bit for a 32-bit address or data cycle. And yet, never a problem in the real world.
Networking's an entirely different situation -- you assume that the transmission medium is unreliable, but also, that something can be done in the event of a failure.
Hardly.. I couldn't go to 1920x1080; haven't had resolution that low in any of my multiple monitors since the mid 2000s. These days, it's 2640x1440 on two, 1920x1200 on the other... but I'm working, not gaming. No need for anything beyond 60p (the fastest video I generally shoot).
4K doesn't support "better color"... or rather, better color is already in there. 48-bits/pixel color has been in HDMI since 1.3. The big change is that HDMI 1.4a can support a max of 4096x2160p24 at 24bpp, while HDM 2.0 supports 4096x2160p60 at 48bpp. But HDMI 1.3/1.4 has always supported 1920×1200p60 at 48bpp.
They needs to scale the GPU part of the APU to deliver a decent level of OpenCL performance. But AMD has one big advantage -- a bit problem with OpenCL is latency -- there's overhead in compiling the OpenCL code, overhead in communicating with the GPU, etc. So you typically see CPU use drop in OpenCL applications, and some of the CPU being used is "wasted" in OpenCL overhead. SO in short, as the CPU speed increases, you need a much faster or better architected GPU to make that extra processing worthwhile.
But between the tight integration and shared memory, that overhead is much lower in APU systems. This is clearly no accident, I believe AMD sees GPGPU as having a big future for them.
Presumably the console chips are already in production. AMD's been fabless for quite some time, so there shouldn't be any reason production is an issue -- and looking at console sales over the years, it's not as if they're ramping up for a new iPhone, even given that both new consoles are using AMD chips.
They ought to have plenty of resources available for new chips if they have a rationale for making them. Low end users rarely clamor for a hot new processor, only a cheaper chip with the same hotness. And AMD can't challenge Intel at the higher ends these days. Some professionals and gamers buy new systems these days, but the average PC user is well served by their existing system.
You actually can max out an X6 doing PC-DAW processing, if you're lazy. But if you're building for an actual studio, they probably learned on physical boards, and will buses properly, plug-ins more sparingly, and find that if anything, the HDD is the bottleneck.
And yeah, it's the constant price pressure that had made most laptops pretty disposable. My son's only 22, and he's managed to go through four laptops... the current AMD-A8 based unit is dandy for grad school. Previously, he had pushed for gaming performance on laptops, but it was always a compromise. Last summer I built him a gaming-class desktop that'll be good -- and working -- for years. That really is the way to go, if you need a laptop at all these days.
I just swapped out my AMD 1090T system for an Intel i7 socket 2011 system. I also put my AMD systemtogether in 2009, and I was getting tired of waiting... 6 AMD cores at 3.2GHz ain't what it used to be (or, perhaps, the work I'm doing has grown in size), and the new AMD architecture still has issues, as well as not nearly matching Intel on critical things like media processing. I mean, I can get better-than-realtime rendering on AVC video now, at least for some purposes. Also got me up to 64GB of RAM, which is necessary for the photo projects I've been doing lately. My other work, EE-CAD, not really a problem on the AMD.
And yeah, I think anyone's mad to get a laptop for real work... no choice of components, tiny screens (I have two 27" 2560x1440 screens, one 24" 1920x1200, and optional 32" 1920x1080 TV for video previews), etc. My wife got my old laptop... most of the stuff that did well can be done on my Android tablet, the stuff it didn't do well, I don't bother trying to do mobile mush anymore, just a waste of time, really.
My wife has taught the lower grades in a moderate middle class school since the 80s. And you're spot on here: kids with supportive parents have a very high rate of success, kids who don't, do not fare well. Supportive parents augment the teacher; unsupportive parents often hinder the educational process, expecting the school to be entirely responsible for their kids' education (not them, not the kids themselves, just the educational system).
As for computers in schools, that's been evolving, but the big problem in most middle class schools isn't a lack of computers... the computers they got 10 years ago are perfectly adequate, they don't need iPads. What they need are actual applications, and the training to use them. So many schools buy all this hardware and leave little to no money for software, then expect teachers -- many of whom, like my wife, are non-techies -- to just figure it all out.
Corn is used for Ethanol because the corn lobby is huge and managed to get subsidies for it. Nothing wrong with Ethanol as a renewable fuel, but corn to Ethanol is only marginally more energy efficient than tar sands to gasoline (if you're still using the starch for animal feed -- over 50% of all US corn is for meat production -- the efficiency rises considerably, but that's not always done). So this should be a slam-dunk. Sugar cane is about 6x as efficient, but so far, my house in South Jersey is still surrounded by corn.
Microsoft has one Windows RT tablet. They sold about one million, have another six million in-stock and not selling (based on their write-down). So the solution to thie problem is to make MORE Windows RT tablets?
Ok, they have solved one problem already. In the original plan, there's no way Microsoft could sell a $200 Surface RT to compete with the Nexus 7, simply because of the $100 additional pricetag for Windows RT + Office. But since nearly all of the OEMs have dropped RT, and it's pretty likely Dell will as well once they've sold out their stock, it's now quite possible for Microsoft to stop worrying about protecting OEM's ability to deliver RT hardware (ok, sure, they could also price RT + Office at $20, but that's unlikely, too). That's an option, but only one presented out of the current failure.
What Microsoft needs is to really stress that RT isn't Windows. Consumers don't know. We techies, sure, but I have seen Surface ads out the wazoo -- $900 million ad budgets have that effect -- and nothing to tell me that I can't run Photoshop or other real Windows apps on an RT system. Next, they have to present a reason that regular consumers would actually want one of these. Office ain't it.
Apple folks I've spoke with, even interviewed with once, would say the same thing: there was one ego at Apple, SJ. He could come up with a product, see it through his way -- whatever idea he had, that's what you'd get. And it didn't always work, but often enough to have made Apple the most valuable tech company on Earth.
Without Steve, I don' t believe there will or even can be anyone else driving products like that. It simply doesn't happen in big companies, ever... only startups. And Steve was the Apple guy from the beginning of the company. From now on, it's committees like some big companies, more about doing what's safe and more like what they did last year. Or what Google or someone else did last year... there's evidence of both of these things in Apple's more recent producte.
Worse yet, you get someone in the driver's seat without that real vision, as seems to be plaguing Microsoft lately... leading without the right understanding of the market.
Neither of these means Apple's doomed. After all, General Electric survived Edison's demise. But they're certain to be a very different company -- I doubt they have the drive or the right kind of people to be "the old Apple" ever again.
Part of the problem with the Surface RT -- not the big one (eg, it doesn't actually run Windows software) was Microsoft wanting their cake, wanting to eat it too, and thinking too highly of themselves. So they priced against Apple, just like so many other tablet makers did on their first go. Apple has worked from the 1970s to establish themselves (right or wrong) as a luxury brand. That's why they sold 90% of the PCs over $1,000 in 2011 and 2012, even with only about 5% of the world market in PCs. Microsoft had no reputation in the hardware business aside from the X-Box (perhaps MS's most-loved product, but also considered a lower-end unit versus the PS3, and not particularly reliable hardware either, red-ring-of-death and all). So MS was just bonkers going head to head with Apple.
The were even more bonkers selling a tablet that's roughly the same as the Asus Transformer TF300 -- a $300-$350 tablet -- as a $600 product. But they had another agenda -- that cake and eating it thing. They wanted to sell their own brand, but leave room for OEMs to make an RT tablet too. In short, they want to be Apple and to be the old Microsoft of the 80s and 90s. Not sure those can ever coexist, but that was clearly the intention. With everyone but Dell out of the RT market, and Dell probably leaving soon, though... well, at least that decision's made for them.
And yeah, that $99 surcharge for Windows RT + Office (and I believe that's about the right price, from what I've heard) is put up against tablets with little or no per-unit costs. Apple and the Android guys are paying patent royalties, probably per unit, but unlikely to be more than $10 or so, company dependent. If you're on Android and include the Google suite, that's another $10. This was a limited moon-shot anyway, given that WIndows 8 tablets with newer Atom processors will more or less match RT devices on price, power, and performance... enough performance for RT apps, and well, they can at least try to run real Windows applications.
And finally.. real Windows on a tablet... dicey at best, anyway. I've been setting up a new "primary" PC at home this week, installing all MY essential Windows tools. I noticed I'm already 1/4 full on my 940GB SSD boot drive, and that's even with much of the Users/Dave stuff living on the 5TB RAID5 partition. Now, I do different things with my PC: electronics CAD, video, music, photography. But I don't yet have everything I need for ANY of these jobs complete on my PC. What's one to do with a 64GB or 128GB PC, given that Windows is taking the first 30GB or so? Sure, that's a problem that'll fix itself in a few NAND Flash chip iterations, but for now, I don't find any Windows tablet useful for real Windows work anyway. And given that, Android's doing it much better -- I have over 64GB free on my 128GB Transformer Infinity, and that's including 30GB+ of music, a bunch of games (none on my work PC), etc. And in not doing some of the heavy lifting, I don't need room for huge media files on the Transformer... those alone would kill the Windows tablet for any mobile video or photo work, even if you had room for the tools themselves.
So who are these really for? I can write code on Android, even run full Emacs. You can't on Windows RT. Consumers want games and custom apps; Windows isn't getting enough of those... I can get an Android or iOS guide at any trade show or music festival I attend, not so for Windows Phone or Windows RT. It just doesn't seem to have things anyone needs.
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Well, not quite... you do get Blu-ray in pretty much every $50 five-inch-round-shiny-disc-player these days. No, not the $20 ones yet. Sales of Blu-ray discs this years are up 15% over last year. They're doing ok.
Apple didn't really try to push Firewire. In fact, they did a large number of very stupid things that kind of grabbed defeat form the jaws of victory. Intel had looked into including Firewire as a standard thing in their PC chipsets. But Apple wanted too much money for licensing, so Intel pushed the USB folks to come up with a free alternative (not free to join the USB-IF, but free or very cheap to make USB chips, connectors, license logos, etc).
Apple's pushing Thunderbolt, but Intel owns it... after all, it's basically a combination of PCI Express and DisplayPort. Apple did trademark it (Intel was still calling it "LightPeak" and pushing for optical versions), but they have since transferred even the trademark over to Intel. Intel's starting to built it into systems, but there are issues. For one, you need an active cable to use Thunderbolt ... that's about $50 today, and never going to drop to the level of wire-only cables. Meanwhile, a USB 3.0 port will do about the same job in practice, over a $3.00 cable.
The other problem is that, sure, Thunderbolt as implemented in Apple's all-in-ones is kind of cool. Particularly the Mac Pro. You have a cross-point switch that allows the DisplayPort outputs from each GPU to be routed to any of the six Thunderbolt ports, apparently doing the DisplayPort hub function too, so you can hook up at least four (maybe 6?) DisplayPort monitors to those connectors. Or peripherals. Thing is, it's DisplayPort going via Thunderbolt that delivers that display performance... you're not schlepping raw HD to 4K video across a PCI express bus and out the Thunderbolt connector. That's the way you want it. But once you put Thunderbolt on a PC motherboard, you'll notice that your GPUs are on a card, and their outputs: DisplayPort, DVI, HDMI, whatever, they don't route into that Thunderbolt controller. You might route motherboard graphics that way, but seriously, who wants integrated graphics? So already, Thunderbolt is far less interesting for PC desktop users.
And there's also no killer app. Camcorders were the killer app for Firewire, just as HID devices were the killer app for USB. The best Thunderbolt has going for it right now: Apple's Mac Pro has such a tiny built-in SSD, anyone actually doing "The Pro Thing" with it will have external storage. Could be USB, could be GigE NAS.. or maybe a Thunderbolt RAID, or a SAN bridged in via Thunderbolt. That's the only "must have" around for this. Most Mac laptop users will be using that Thunderbolt port to drive an external monitor... that's why it's using the mini-DisplayPort connector, after all. Don't even need to change the cable.
USB 1.0 was made to replace the various legacy I/O ports with one thing: no more PS/2 mouse or keyboard, no more RS-232 serial, no more Centronics parallel, etc. And via hubs, no more hard limits on I/O. It wasn't designed to compete with Firewire or any other high-speed interface.
USB 2.0 was designed to compete with simple uses of Firewire. It caught on because Intel knows how to promote a spec and Apple doesn't .. that's pretty much the story. Apple wanted to change $1.00 per port in royalties for Firewire. USB, like PCI, PCI Express, AC97, and pretty much any other interface Intel got involved with was given away for free... see, Intel just wants to sell chips. Making your hardware cooler sells chips. And of course, USB being free got built into every PC chipset. Firewire was pretty much always adding an extra chip (usually from TI, though NEC made some too) to your motherboard... even after Apple relented and dropped their per-port pricing, Firewire was largely relegated to things that only Firewire did well... like camcorder transfer (for those who don't know, Firewire is multi-mastered -- Apple in fact supported the whole SCSI command set over FW, to make bridging to SCSI devices trivial). A Firewire device can basically just start sending digital video to a PC, much as an analog camera would send video via a CVBS or YPrPb cable... so this was a natural for camcorder makers. And practically no one else. USB only works with computer-like things... USB on a camcorder would need either a huge RAM buffer or a computer tape-like drive with sector-level addressing of the data.
The other thing Apple did to screw it up was trademarking "Firewire" and charging lots to companies wanting to use that trademark. Which most companies didn't... so you go names like iLink or just the IEEE 1394 designation... which created market confusion.
You have two practical problems. One is simple: if you don't have USB certs, you can't use USB logos, can't say "Universal Serial Bus", and might not even be able to say "USB" anywhere on your documentation.
The other is worse... if you don't have a unique product and vendor ID, you have no assurance that your device won't collide with someone else's. Some chip companies always use their own IDs, some allow you to use their IDs but offer customization, and others require you to use your own.
So you're suggesting it's just plain old Windows RT, only for x86, no NDK allowed (is there actually an NDK for Windows RT?). Of course, Microsoft's had a completely different CLASS (sic) of programs, without a name the public either recognizes or understands, that run fully abstracted from the hardware, like 85% of Android (most iOS apps are native coded iOS Cocoa Touch, though that no longer a requirement)... some called it .NET, some called it Common Language Runtime... but whatever. Didn't seem to help them here, though it certainly might have.
Not that an X-Box x86 couldn't run native code, but to really keep in place all of the WinRT restrictions, I think they need the VM. You can't even write a compiler in WinRT!
Microsoft doesn't talk about it, but they have a fragmentation problem. They seem to have gone boldly into this new Metro era without really thinking much about what users need. They got this idea that the old Zune interface, revamped once for the Windows Phone 7, was their future direction. So now they push the phone interface onto tablets and desktops and 70" televisions. And yeah, it all looks pretty much the same, though I'm sure if I was idiot enough to use it daily, on multiple screens, I'd notice the holes, where the UI didn't translate from one to another.
But the big problem is that there's not one Metro, but four, and Microsoft won't talk about that. So you have Windows 8, which can run Metro/RT apps, Metro/Win32 apps, and real Win32 apps. Only the WinRT apps will run on Windows RT. But they don't run on Windows Phone... and so far, no indication of just what actually runs on the X-Box One. That didn't used to be much of an issue, but some kind of partial compatibility? That's maybe worse than none.
And it's not as if they ever talk about it. Microsoft has spend about a billion dollars on Surface ads, I see these constantly. And not a single one told me that a Surface RT or Surface 2 doesn't run "real" Windows programs. Of course we all know this here if we care to follow Microsoft's antics at all, but the average user? Not so much. And at least according a few developer friends, even the development environment and APIs aren't similar yet. Metro/Win32 apps will never run on Surface or Windows Phone or probably X-Box. So just what actually does? And how are they going to deal with all these different incompatible operating systems... particularly now that Windows Phone is moving to support tablets soon. It will actually be possible to find a 7" Windows 8.1, Windows RT, and Windows Phone tablet, together in a store, each with a different set of compatible applications. And no one really knows if Microsoft plans to carry Windows Phone 8 or Windows RT compatibility forward to Windows WHATEVER 9... particularly the phone. They just dumped compatibility going to 6 to 7 and 7 to 8, so why not again?
In short, they seem about as unfocused as one could imagine on dealing with this whole "move" to mobile devices. Don't get me wrong, it's entertaining as hell, but given Microsoft's near draconian enslavement to application compatibility in upgrades since the dark dank dire days of MS-DOS, it's like they're all drunk or something today... and it can't really be success they're drunk on these days. Not since Android outsold Windows last year...
GPU companies have been cheating on benchmarks for decades. Back in the PCI and AGP days, it was just pretty much expected that graphics cards would include a hack to lock themselves on the shared bus for as long as they felt they needed. Sure, this wasn't benchmark specific, but it was also destructive -- it killed the realtime performance of your PC. Specifically in those days, audio workstation software was broken by these hacks... leading a bunch of counter-hacks necessary to defeat these (and sure, the occasional GPU company savvy enough to offer a non-broken version of the driver online).
And then there was the Intel C compiler.. the one that basically had a "detect Dhrystone" function. And over the years, a whole series of cheats that either made AMD look bad or Intel amazingly good... enough to be much of the meat of AMD's suit against Intel in 2005... which lead to a court order for Intel to stop their compiler producing code that intentionally ran slower on non-Intel chips. And more recently with Intel's AnTuTu cheat, making Intel smartphones look magically better than AMD.. but only on that one benchmark.
And of course, nVidia. nVidia's been cheating at benchmarks for years... though at least some of that came in response to AMD/ATi getting caught cheaping on Quake 3 performance. And recently, too... earlier this year, they had a driver that detected 3DMark (and perhaps other benchmarks) and cheated, by switching to custom PHYSX code rather than running the DLL everyone else runs. And the various cheats on benchmarks for Tegra 2 and Tegra 3 SOCs.
I mean, this is one reason we speak of lies, damn lies, and benchmarks. Everybody cheats at this stuff. Apple used to cheat in the latter days of the PowerPC, even on published SPECmarks, as their stuff kept falling behind Intel.
Yes, Android and iOS were exploding the smartphone market in 2010, when Elop took over. Nokia wasn't growkng nearly as fast, but they were still growing. They sold over 110 million smartphones in 2010, more than iOS, more than Android, more than both combined. Nokia's profits were up over every 2009 quarter, and still into 2011. Nokia announced the exclusive move to Windows Phone late in February. That was when profits failed... they had one more profitable quarter, a small profit in fourth quarter 2012... though less than Microsoft's $250M per quarter subsidy, and that only after over 12,000 jobs had been cut.
Really, if Microsoft didn't send Elop to kill Nokia's phone business and get the devices division for a song (less than Skype), it would be hard to imagine a better result -- for Microsoft or Elop himself -- if they had. In fact, that's about the only reason to not suspect a conspiracy here: what has Microsoft done lately that's been as effective as killing off Nokia and getting that division cheap?
But how about an alternate history. In this one, Nokia rightly notices that SymbianOS won't last, and plain old Linux won't beat iOS. Given the observation that they already had more in-house Linux smartphone experience than anyone else, they jump into Android. They're already moving on it in late 2010, leveraging N series hardware, no need for the complete redesigns that Windows Phone requires. They launch new devices in Spring of 2011, and have no need to kill the SymbianOS market. SymbianOS sells 130M units in 2011, 95M in 2012... and Nokia is established as a strong player in Android, before Samsung dominates as they do today.
Keep in mind, in 2010 Apple's sales were strongly US biased, while Nokia didn't compete in the US market. So really, the competition just wasn't there yet, not the way it's seen through the 2013 lens. And Android would have provided Nokia with the perfect entre into the US market.
No.. not even close. Yeah, that's one of the side-effects, but DisplayPort is way more than that.
It's a higher level protocol than HDMI, DVI, or other video display technologies. For one, it's based on small packets -- like Ethernet and PCI Express. So it can send different kinds of data over the same interface, and in a extensible way -- new generation DisplayPort devices can add functionality without messing up compatibility with older devices. And this is how is does audio and video without having separate signals for audio and video.
And of course, DisplayPort supports DRM. And while is does support the flawed 40-bit and slightly better 56-bit HDCP, it also supports a protocol based on 128-bit AES. Hard core crypto, that last one. It also manages 17.28Gb/s mode, not much different than the 18Gb/s mode of HDMI 2.0.
Well, no.. the real reason for 3820x2160 is that it's quad HD.
But HDMI 2.0 also fully supports the DCI (Digital Cinema Initiatives format), 4096x2160, at 60p and 48bpp.. that's the prevailing standard in cinema 4K, though there are others (DCI Cinemascope, DCI flat cropped, Academy and Full Aperture 4K, the latter at 4096 x 3112), which are not necessarily intended for display on consumer gear.
Nope. HDMI is electrically identical to DVI. Not a "known problem with HDMI". Just the usual incorrect crap you read on the internet.
That's incorrect.
I have two Westinghouse monitors, had them for about 7 years, 1920x1200, computer monitors, but designed for video. So these have CVBS, Y/C, YPrPb, VGA, and HDMi inputs -- no DVI, no DisplayPort (well, that hadn't been invented yet). And they're every bit as sharp with computer video as my newer, DisplayPort monitors (lower resolution, but just as sharp).
If you have bad computer display on an HDMI monitor, it's because you bought a cheap monitor. Or because you're expecting a $100 TV to be built to the same standard as a $100 monitor -- it might not be. Or you have "contrast enhancement" turned on, which is screwing with your computer video. But it has nothing do with HDMI. And in fact, VGA is dramatically worse on these same monitors... crap analog video is never going to look as good when you examine closely. If you have a VGA/HDMI monitor that looks better with VGA input, you have a broken device. HDMi is dramatically better on any proper display.
For natural video rather than computer video, you tend to loose the impact of individual pixels... when I'm typing this, I'm looking at a tiny number of pixels on a 2Mpixel screen (yeah, I'm actually typing this on the HDM monitor, the other two have work on them). When I look at television, my attention is generally on the whole screen. Plus, if you have a cheaper TV, you probably have a lower physical resolution that's scaled up or down to the one you're trying to display (eg, TVs take 1920x1080 or 1280x720 inputs, but their screens don't always match).
If you need any more proof, look up the spec. HDMI was created as a superset of DVI -- it uses exactly the same protocol as DVI; you can take a DVI output and run it to HDMI with an adapter cable. HDM supports higher pixel rates, that's the main difference, originally. The two have diverged -- HDMI adding formats and specs, DVI pretty much just waiting for HDMI and DisplayPort to replace it.
Actually, no.. gold does have a low resistance/high conductivity ... 5th best, after Graphene, Silver, Copper, and Annealed Copper. But pretty much every gold plated conductor is plated over nickel (for connectors) or copper (on PCB fingers). The point of the gold plating is only corrosion resistance.. particularly on circuit boards. Bare copper forms copper oxide -- an insulator. A very thin coating of gold solves that problems.
We're also very good at plating gold in sub-micron thicknesses, so it's actually a cheaper solution than some of the alternatives, particularly on connections with very light contact force and a very short plug/unplug life cycle. Thin, soft gold plating is good for under 100 cycles, given typical plating thickness. That can be improved a bit using alloys, like gold-nickel or gold-cobalt, but it does get expensive.
Professional cables use nickel or other corrosion resistant hard metals (these days, you do see a little "hard gold" in there too, but I think that's more marketing than anything).. because you're going to have thousands of plug/unplug cycles, and can't afford to have the plating wear off.
Conduction really has nothing to do with it. Of course, there may be some audiophooles out there telling you different, but just think about it -- these guys never see the whole system. That audio cable is going to a connector somewhere. That may have gold contracts, but more likely some kind of hard nickel plating, since you're got going to see what's inside anyway. That's connected to the unit's PCB by copper wires, or directly on the PCB.. but either way, it's actually connected with solder. Older solder is tin/lead, newer solder is tin with maybe a tiny bit of copper.. either one much worse than nickel, copper, gold, silver, graphene, etc.
Not at all.. HDMI is a method for clean transmissions to a visual display. That's pretty much it. It's not for backing up data, it's for displaying visual data for your eyes in realtime. Same as DVI... in fact, literally so, since HDMI is a superset of DVI.
In any kind of media processing for human consumption, realtime error correcting works fine.. but there's no time for re-transmit -- this isn't a network protocol, it's a one-way transmission. Because there would be no time for a correction, anyway.
In practice, rounded up to the nearest 0.01%, HDM errors never happen. It's robust enough to be commonly used as a transmission medium between camcorder and professional video recorder... if errors were remotely an issue, this wouldn't be done anymore. And in fact, most short range, very tightly controlled interfaces haven't had error checking or correcting, even for computer hardware. This really first showed up on the PCI bus, and even at that, it's a single parity bit for a 32-bit address or data cycle. And yet, never a problem in the real world.
Networking's an entirely different situation -- you assume that the transmission medium is unreliable, but also, that something can be done in the event of a failure.
Hardly.. I couldn't go to 1920x1080; haven't had resolution that low in any of my multiple monitors since the mid 2000s. These days, it's 2640x1440 on two, 1920x1200 on the other... but I'm working, not gaming. No need for anything beyond 60p (the fastest video I generally shoot).
4K doesn't support "better color"... or rather, better color is already in there. 48-bits/pixel color has been in HDMI since 1.3. The big change is that HDMI 1.4a can support a max of 4096x2160p24 at 24bpp, while HDM 2.0 supports 4096x2160p60 at 48bpp. But HDMI 1.3/1.4 has always supported 1920×1200p60 at 48bpp.
They needs to scale the GPU part of the APU to deliver a decent level of OpenCL performance. But AMD has one big advantage -- a bit problem with OpenCL is latency -- there's overhead in compiling the OpenCL code, overhead in communicating with the GPU, etc. So you typically see CPU use drop in OpenCL applications, and some of the CPU being used is "wasted" in OpenCL overhead. SO in short, as the CPU speed increases, you need a much faster or better architected GPU to make that extra processing worthwhile.
But between the tight integration and shared memory, that overhead is much lower in APU systems. This is clearly no accident, I believe AMD sees GPGPU as having a big future for them.
Presumably the console chips are already in production. AMD's been fabless for quite some time, so there shouldn't be any reason production is an issue -- and looking at console sales over the years, it's not as if they're ramping up for a new iPhone, even given that both new consoles are using AMD chips.
They ought to have plenty of resources available for new chips if they have a rationale for making them. Low end users rarely clamor for a hot new processor, only a cheaper chip with the same hotness. And AMD can't challenge Intel at the higher ends these days. Some professionals and gamers buy new systems these days, but the average PC user is well served by their existing system.
You actually can max out an X6 doing PC-DAW processing, if you're lazy. But if you're building for an actual studio, they probably learned on physical boards, and will buses properly, plug-ins more sparingly, and find that if anything, the HDD is the bottleneck.
And yeah, it's the constant price pressure that had made most laptops pretty disposable. My son's only 22, and he's managed to go through four laptops... the current AMD-A8 based unit is dandy for grad school. Previously, he had pushed for gaming performance on laptops, but it was always a compromise. Last summer I built him a gaming-class desktop that'll be good -- and working -- for years. That really is the way to go, if you need a laptop at all these days.
I just swapped out my AMD 1090T system for an Intel i7 socket 2011 system. I also put my AMD systemtogether in 2009, and I was getting tired of waiting... 6 AMD cores at 3.2GHz ain't what it used to be (or, perhaps, the work I'm doing has grown in size), and the new AMD architecture still has issues, as well as not nearly matching Intel on critical things like media processing. I mean, I can get better-than-realtime rendering on AVC video now, at least for some purposes. Also got me up to 64GB of RAM, which is necessary for the photo projects I've been doing lately. My other work, EE-CAD, not really a problem on the AMD.
And yeah, I think anyone's mad to get a laptop for real work... no choice of components, tiny screens (I have two 27" 2560x1440 screens, one 24" 1920x1200, and optional 32" 1920x1080 TV for video previews), etc. My wife got my old laptop... most of the stuff that did well can be done on my Android tablet, the stuff it didn't do well, I don't bother trying to do mobile mush anymore, just a waste of time, really.
My wife has taught the lower grades in a moderate middle class school since the 80s. And you're spot on here: kids with supportive parents have a very high rate of success, kids who don't, do not fare well. Supportive parents augment the teacher; unsupportive parents often hinder the educational process, expecting the school to be entirely responsible for their kids' education (not them, not the kids themselves, just the educational system).
As for computers in schools, that's been evolving, but the big problem in most middle class schools isn't a lack of computers... the computers they got 10 years ago are perfectly adequate, they don't need iPads. What they need are actual applications, and the training to use them. So many schools buy all this hardware and leave little to no money for software, then expect teachers -- many of whom, like my wife, are non-techies -- to just figure it all out.
I note the resemblance, but don't Manatees have enough problems these days!
Corn is used for Ethanol because the corn lobby is huge and managed to get subsidies for it. Nothing wrong with Ethanol as a renewable fuel, but corn to Ethanol is only marginally more energy efficient than tar sands to gasoline (if you're still using the starch for animal feed -- over 50% of all US corn is for meat production -- the efficiency rises considerably, but that's not always done). So this should be a slam-dunk. Sugar cane is about 6x as efficient, but so far, my house in South Jersey is still surrounded by corn.
Microsoft has one Windows RT tablet. They sold about one million, have another six million in-stock and not selling (based on their write-down). So the solution to thie problem is to make MORE Windows RT tablets?
Ok, they have solved one problem already. In the original plan, there's no way Microsoft could sell a $200 Surface RT to compete with the Nexus 7, simply because of the $100 additional pricetag for Windows RT + Office. But since nearly all of the OEMs have dropped RT, and it's pretty likely Dell will as well once they've sold out their stock, it's now quite possible for Microsoft to stop worrying about protecting OEM's ability to deliver RT hardware (ok, sure, they could also price RT + Office at $20, but that's unlikely, too). That's an option, but only one presented out of the current failure.
What Microsoft needs is to really stress that RT isn't Windows. Consumers don't know. We techies, sure, but I have seen Surface ads out the wazoo -- $900 million ad budgets have that effect -- and nothing to tell me that I can't run Photoshop or other real Windows apps on an RT system. Next, they have to present a reason that regular consumers would actually want one of these. Office ain't it.
I kind of agree, and here's why.
Apple folks I've spoke with, even interviewed with once, would say the same thing: there was one ego at Apple, SJ. He could come up with a product, see it through his way -- whatever idea he had, that's what you'd get. And it didn't always work, but often enough to have made Apple the most valuable tech company on Earth.
Without Steve, I don' t believe there will or even can be anyone else driving products like that. It simply doesn't happen in big companies, ever... only startups. And Steve was the Apple guy from the beginning of the company. From now on, it's committees like some big companies, more about doing what's safe and more like what they did last year. Or what Google or someone else did last year... there's evidence of both of these things in Apple's more recent producte.
Worse yet, you get someone in the driver's seat without that real vision, as seems to be plaguing Microsoft lately... leading without the right understanding of the market.
Neither of these means Apple's doomed. After all, General Electric survived Edison's demise. But they're certain to be a very different company -- I doubt they have the drive or the right kind of people to be "the old Apple" ever again.
Part of the problem with the Surface RT -- not the big one (eg, it doesn't actually run Windows software) was Microsoft wanting their cake, wanting to eat it too, and thinking too highly of themselves. So they priced against Apple, just like so many other tablet makers did on their first go. Apple has worked from the 1970s to establish themselves (right or wrong) as a luxury brand. That's why they sold 90% of the PCs over $1,000 in 2011 and 2012, even with only about 5% of the world market in PCs. Microsoft had no reputation in the hardware business aside from the X-Box (perhaps MS's most-loved product, but also considered a lower-end unit versus the PS3, and not particularly reliable hardware either, red-ring-of-death and all). So MS was just bonkers going head to head with Apple.
The were even more bonkers selling a tablet that's roughly the same as the Asus Transformer TF300 -- a $300-$350 tablet -- as a $600 product. But they had another agenda -- that cake and eating it thing. They wanted to sell their own brand, but leave room for OEMs to make an RT tablet too. In short, they want to be Apple and to be the old Microsoft of the 80s and 90s. Not sure those can ever coexist, but that was clearly the intention. With everyone but Dell out of the RT market, and Dell probably leaving soon, though... well, at least that decision's made for them.
And yeah, that $99 surcharge for Windows RT + Office (and I believe that's about the right price, from what I've heard) is put up against tablets with little or no per-unit costs. Apple and the Android guys are paying patent royalties, probably per unit, but unlikely to be more than $10 or so, company dependent. If you're on Android and include the Google suite, that's another $10. This was a limited moon-shot anyway, given that WIndows 8 tablets with newer Atom processors will more or less match RT devices on price, power, and performance... enough performance for RT apps, and well, they can at least try to run real Windows applications.
And finally.. real Windows on a tablet... dicey at best, anyway. I've been setting up a new "primary" PC at home this week, installing all MY essential Windows tools. I noticed I'm already 1/4 full on my 940GB SSD boot drive, and that's even with much of the Users/Dave stuff living on the 5TB RAID5 partition. Now, I do different things with my PC: electronics CAD, video, music, photography. But I don't yet have everything I need for ANY of these jobs complete on my PC. What's one to do with a 64GB or 128GB PC, given that Windows is taking the first 30GB or so? Sure, that's a problem that'll fix itself in a few NAND Flash chip iterations, but for now, I don't find any Windows tablet useful for real Windows work anyway. And given that, Android's doing it much better -- I have over 64GB free on my 128GB Transformer Infinity, and that's including 30GB+ of music, a bunch of games (none on my work PC), etc. And in not doing some of the heavy lifting, I don't need room for huge media files on the Transformer... those alone would kill the Windows tablet for any mobile video or photo work, even if you had room for the tools themselves.
So who are these really for? I can write code on Android, even run full Emacs. You can't on Windows RT. Consumers want games and custom apps; Windows isn't getting enough of those ... I can get an Android or iOS guide at any trade show or music festival I attend, not so for Windows Phone or Windows RT. It just doesn't seem to have things anyone needs.