Pretty much every DLP sold since 2007 has been "3D Ready", and it was just a feature tossed in, no extra money. I know this specifically, because I bought a 2006 model, right before they did this.
Depends on the kind of studio. TV studios, sure, but they actually wanted the HD overall -- it was largely seen as a way to increase viewership.
Most production studios were already shooting on film, and editing digitally, so adding HD to that toolchain only meant that you could shoot for more than 10 minutes continuously, and didn't have to get the film processed. Adding 3D is a new camera, probably a new lens (depending on the camera), and some changes to the existing editing. And of course, some studios still use film, others waited for video to catch up to film before they bought into the digital thing (eg, cameras with 35mm size sensors that can use traditional lenses, etc).
Like HD, too, it's not as if there's going to be an overnight jump to 3D. It might fail this time.
The linear polarizing systems are kind of on the outs, because they start to fail as soon as you tilt your head a little. Many of the theaters, including the IMAX theater where I saw "Avatar" in stereo, use the RealD system. They use circular polarization, clockwise for the right eye, counterclockwise for the left eye.
RealD-style polarizing (eg, circular polarizers) is just as effective as shutter glasses, and adaptable to some TV technologies (DLP, in particular). But you'll need a new TV.
The only reasonable add-on to existing hardware are LCD shutter glasses. They're nowhere near as cumbersome as they were back in the 80s, but yeah, still extra heavy compared to passive glasses, and you need the battery, too.
"Prismatic screens similar to 3D photos" is called lenticular 3D/stereoscopy. It's flawed for the same reason the old horizontal/vertical polarization was... it fails unless you're sitting perfectly straight. That's already pretty much failed in the theater, and is a no-go entirely for the home, I suspect.
The other modern glasses-based technology is Dolby's 3D system, which they call "wavelength multiplex visualization". Basically, they mess with the colors for left vs. right eye, but in very tiny bands, so you don't see any color shifts. Otherwise, it's the same idea as polarization: filter at the projector, filter at the eye.
If you use some of the first systems, you'll probably need LCD shutters, either over or attached to your glasses. That's the kind of 3D you can have added to existing hardware (at least some of it) right now.
It's also possible to do this using passive glasses, just like in the 3D theaters. Using circular polarizers in the display itself, you need the same on your eyes. That's a pair of something that looks just like sunglasses, or clip-ons for your existing glasses, or prescription 3D glasses (which also work as sunglasses) if you want to get serious about it. Basically, the same choices you have about sunglasses.
Unfortunately, this is an easy slam-dunk to design into a DLP TV, but, not being flat-panel, DLP has fallen out of favor recently in the home (they're used quite extensively in the digital theater world, in fact, the system I describe with polarizers is exactly what you usually see in a theater when you see a 3D film, driven by a DLP projector with a 3D add on device).
Yes... we will never be in an era in which people will regularly listen to 4+ speakers in a surround pattern. Oh wait... that happend... I actually have eight speaker sound in my media room.
Sometimes the idea is just dandy, but the implementation is stupid. That's kind of how quadraphonic was. 3D has been around since the 1950's, but it was a stupid gimmick back then. "Avatar" is one of the fist films to show that it works as just another enhancement... you still believe it's 3D, even if you don't have something shooting directly at you every five minutes. Plus, I'm not fan of shutter glasses, but the polarizer technologies (like RealD) work just dandy, and can be used at least in new DLP designs, if not LCD necessarily. Maybe this is another failed attempt, or maybe it's the time they finally get it right. We'll see.
Though I was a big fan of quadraphonic... not because of the quadraphonic thing itself, SQ LPs and all that stuff, but I was a teenager when they killed it. For a short time, you could get a quadraphonic amp for about 1/5th the price of a normal stereo amp, as they blew them all out at fire sale prices. So I had a surround sound system back in the mid 1970s. Ok, no material for it, but more loud as good (50 amps per channel into four speakers). And when, in college, I did actually blow the front channels, the unit worked just fine, back-channel only (they were fully symmetric... two sets of stereo amplifiers int he same box).
How did they look with your head tilted 45 degrees? 90 degrees? That's the big problem with glasses-free 3D technologies. I'll admit wasn't at CES this year... I have not seen the latest stuff.
Unless this is just a crazy gimmick, it's going to work something along the lines of the new Blu-Ray 3D standard(Multiview Video Coding). You need a 3D-aware player/receiver to fully realize the 3D information, older players will just see a clear 2D display, not some mess of overlapped 3D images.
This is also, wisely, done from a data centric viewpoint -- your player gets the 3D data, and does SOMETHING with it to present it to the viewer. That may be 3D shutter glasses if I want to watch 3D via my PS3 on today's DLP television (it's all technically possible using 60p output, assuming 30p per eye doesn't give me a headache). But assuming I had a new player and, say, a DLP projection TV with a circular polarizer filtering rig built-in, I could see RealD-style images, just as in the theater, using only passive glasses... like sunglasses. If someone comes up with a reasonable no-glasses 3D technology (for a TV, that's hard... what happens if I'm watching off center, head tilted, or even lying down... that's actually ok with either RealD or LCD glasses, a big problem with most non-glasses schemes in the works today).
Of course, what you don't get is a mix... if you're watching in 3D, it's going to be a mess for anyone without glasses.
Apple's real motivations on the iPhone have one common thread: to serve Apple.
No, Flash on the iPhone is not a matter of security, stability, or performance. It's a matter of someone alternate API being available for things that appear "application-like" rather than "web-page-like". If you can play a flash game on the iPhone, you might not want to buy a native game from the iTunes store. Apple makes no money from that flash game, they do make money from anything you buy through iTunes. So they only support as much of the web as needed to deliver a decent web browsing experience. Truthfully, when the iPhone came out, other mobiles devices were not exactly setting the world on first, web-browser-wise (I was using a Treo with Opera at the time... not too good).
Keeping out flash and java allows Apple to limit competition and control content, plain and simple. They offer a few other explanations to give fanboys some explanation they'll accept, but anyone here out to be capable of clearly seeing the truth. iPhones and their ilk as a very closed platform... we just aren't used to things being so locked up, but that's always pretty much been the truth, going back to the original iPod.
And I think there are plenty here who'd like to see Flash die. But that's not the point... Flash is required, today, to have a first class web browsing experience, since it is heavily used. Many mobile devices are working to support this. Apple won't, for nothing but their own selfish reasons.... Adobe would drop a nice, snappy Flash player on them tomorrow if Apple wanted to support Flash.
As for complaints about Flash dragging down a desktop, the only thing in a typical flash stream that can do that is a full HD AVC video running unaccelerated on a desktop PC. That's a non-issue for handhelds. They don't need to play back full HD... most are 480p or lower in resolution. And every major high-end smart phone has hardware acceleration for AVC playback. So it's not even all THAT battery draining.
Symbian OS is on more smart phones than any other operating system, world-wide, powering about 45% of all smart phones. However, it is practically unknown in the USA, I'll agree. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian_OS
Nokia has been the major proponent of Symbian OS, as well as their owner for awhile: Nokia bought Symbian Software Ltd. back in 2008, and they're still in the process of releasing it as an open source platform. Most of the other companies making Symbian powered phones also produced WinMo models; most of these are moving rapidly to include Android, some even as their now-main focus. Nokia, as well discussed here, has also been using Linux/Maemo for their high-end smart phones.
Of course, from the US perspective, the iPhone seems to be everywhere, but world-wide, Apple is behind Nokia and RIM in sales and installed base.
Your iPhone web browser don't support Flash or Java, it's not "full" in the sense of virtually every deskop browser's capabilities. Or tabs, or plug-ins, or lots of other desktop-class features. Many of the small browsers are closer to "full", many are farther away. It certainly remains to be seen whether Firefox will deliver, but that's their target.
Despite the proprietary nature of Flash and other ugliness (there's not much of a good reason for 90%+ of Flash web sites), it is a reality of the modern web, and until it's replaced by something better, not having in your web browser renders you less than a first class user of the web. Same deal with Java... if you don't have it, there are many things you can't do online (curiously, less that in the past, largely because asynchronous Javascript + CSS and Flash have both taken on some of the things Java could only do 10+ years ago). Sadly for iPhone users, Apple will neither fix the problem nor allow you to fix it by using a rival browser. Every other mobile platform allows freedom of choice in such applications.
The DROID currently has a special YouTube viewer, which supports just enough of the way flash is used in YouTube to play pretty much any YouTube video (eg, the ones that don't play on the iPhone). But full flash support is not out yet, but has been announced by Google, Motorola, Verizon, Adobe, and pretty much anyone else with a finger in that pie.
Apple will not allow Flash on their "walled garden" devices, simply because that creates a hole in the wall. Flash allows the download of things that behave "application-like", and Apple only supports the use of the browser for things that behave "web-page like". Well, except for a small but growing number of Javascript programs that also behave application-like. The reason is that Apple wants money for and control of any applications on these devices. They don't want unapproved applications, nor any possible way to sell applications without their getting paid.
Hopefully they allow the mobile version if you want it. When you have a dinky device like an iPhone... a 480x320 screen, you probably want the mobile version most of the time. By the time you're on a 1024x768 or so tablet or netbook, you definitely don't. On my DROID, at 854x480, sometimes the standard version is good, sometimes the mobile version is better. And this can be occupational, too... am I sitting somewhere, where it's easy to zoom or pan if needed, or am I walking or otherwise engaged.
The real key is that a proper mobile browser should be capable of everything a desktop browser CAN do, but optimize it for the handheld. Zooming, while supported in many desktop browsers, is critical for a mobile device. I love tabbed browsing, use it on my mobile and desktop (no frickin' idea how iPhone users get along without it and still manage to suck up for much bandwidth... oh, I guess that's the constant reloading of pages as you switch to look at something else or run a different app), but you don't want the tabs in your face on the mobile device.. they take up too much space. Dolphin on Android (at least the old version) does this right, you swipe to move between pages, and you can pop up the tabs if you want to get at them.
In short, there are GUI differences that are important. The content should not be limited, particularly given that today's modern handhelds have more screen real-estate than VGA-era PCs.
If I lived in a SyFy-Channel Movie-of-the-week, I would LOVE it if the Chinese established a permanent base on the moon, and claimed all of the moon for China. The moon is a long-term losing proposition anyway... very expensive to keep habitats habitable.
This would get everyone else in a frenzy to go claim Mars. Probably a multi-national group, including the USA, Russia, Europe, and Japan all ready to go grab a chunk of Mars for their respective countries, before China did likewise. And it would all happen over the course of two thrill-a-minute hours on Saturday night at 9E/8C.
Only problem... "we" all agreed we can't do this, back in 1967, as part of the U.N.'s Outer Space Treaty, which was signed by the US, Russia, and various others... not sure about China. Modeled after the Antarctic treaty, the Outer Space Treaty states that outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means. The Treaty establishes the exploration and use of outer space as the "province of all mankind."
Not quite. NASA's getting more money, not less. But they're not going to be spending it on things that will be served by free market resources in the near future. Thus, they will have more money for other projects, particularly actual research. Rather than building another 1960's style heavy lift rocket.
Either the libertarians or those here in the closet (well, the Republican-but-not-gay subset of those closeted slash-dotters, of course) should actually be happy at the loss of the Constellation program. After all, rather than "socialized" space travel, it'll be open to free enterprise. Ok, sure, it already is, but now said free enterprise won't have to compete with Socialist Spaceships, and if they're really successful (and, all sarcasm aside, some claim to be about there -- and real rockets, too, not just Virgin Galactic's tourism thing), they'll have NASA as a regular customer, rather than a competitor.
This looks great to me. NASA should really be concentrating on the things only NASA can possibly do. If the free market's ready to lift things into orbit, or even close to it (given that they're not exactly stopping a Constellation launch next week, but a project not even half-way to fruition), that should NASA spent more money on actual science. Not the tractor-trailer-in-space thing.
Republicans run for office on the basis that Government is a big, evil thing that will only do you harm. Democrats run for office on the basis that Government is a representative of the people. Once elected, they keep their promises.
All the complains about cutting some of these NASA programs seem very short sighted. It wasn't all that long ago that all sorts of NASA scientists were up in arms over the Bush Administration's "return to the moon" boondoggle, which was causing all sorts of "real science" projects to be disappeared. And that's just one of the complaints. http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4245928.html
Also, right now anyway, Obama's budget is calling for an additional $1 billion for NASA... but a different set of priorities.
I'm all for manned space flight when it's a reasonable thing to do. But there's no valid scientific reason to go back to the moon right now, and commercial reasons can care for themselves. If we want to go to Mars, it's far lower cost and more reasonable in many different ways to follow the "Mars Direct" plan from Robert Zubrin and David Baker (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct).
Don't get me wrong, I want to see space science, and all other kinds, flourish in the USA. But given the limited budget, spend it where it'll do some good -- where the best science can be done. Not where some idiot Connecticut Cowboy wanted it, as yet another adventure. Of course, if NASA has the budget wasted on that guy's adventure in Iraq, we'd have Starbucks on the moon pretty soon now. If I had my 'druthers, we'd cut the military budget in half (at least) and end the US's "Empire via Military Base" strategy, part of why we're spending more than 10x on the military than any other country, and triple the money spent on science.
All of these "clone" tablets were shown at CES, before the iPad was annouced. The whole "tablet" thing has been coming on fast, from several different directions in the market, and this year's CES was kind of a perfect storm for them.
PC-based tablets have been out for nearly a decade in some forms, but like other super-small PCs, they were sold at a premium for quite some time. The advent of cheaper tiny notebooks, thanks to the popularity of the netbook, is one factor... many of the new tablets are based on Netbook-class x86 processors. There were a bunch of new ones at CES, but you can buy these today.. they're not copying Apple.
Then you have the others. Companies like Archos and Viliv have been making tablet-sized PMPs... dedicated media players with 5-10" screens, for many years now. They have been moving this form factor to run Windows on the high end, Android on the low end, rather than just some dedicated PMP OS. There are a bunch new ones at CES, but you can buy these today, they're not copying Apple.
Then there's the phone folks and technologies... the ARM processors used for phone (and some of the aforementioned PMPs) have recently become powerful enough for non-phone things. Between the Android OS and the 1GHz ARMs, these can actually take on the jobs that the netbooks do. Nokia actually started making this kind of device several years ago, the idea being easy, portable web browsing. This year, there are dozens of them.
The basic idea is that, like your PDA/Smart Phone, there are any number of PC-class applications that work well outside of Windows and/or a traditional PC. Rather than build a device to read books, a device to play media, a device to surf the net, etc. you build one general purpose application processor that do all of these things, plus new ones that come along. Android OS is one of the big movers here (and it's only been out for just over a year)... one free, consumer friendly OS that consumers actually use and OEMs don't have to pay big to license. Perhaps some other stuff built on Linux will catch on here too, such as MOBI or Google's ChromeOS.
But it's already a problem pretty much solved, and Apple's really just doing the same pretty obvious thing at the same time. In fact, if Apple had put a tablet based on iPhoneOS out a few years ago, that would have been a "first mover" thing by them. But they're kind of trailing the pack. No worries for Apple fans.. they always deliver a slick, market-friendly product, get tons of press, and everyone thinks they were first out of the gate and all these others (which were always there, but they never noticed) are now "copies".
Any Cortex A9 is going to be at 45nm or better... ARM only has it qualified at 45nm, 40nm, and 28nm.
Of course, it's conjecture right now that they're using an A9 core, also whether its a single 1GHz core or more cores.. at 40nm or 45nm, they could handle two cores without making this an overly large chip. If PA Semi took an ARM Architecture license, they could have done like Qualcomm and tweaked up the A8 to higher performance. I have heard all the rumors going around, but nothing confirmed. And, other than by investigating in software (A8s and A9s will take a different number of cycles to complete various benchmarks, and something somewhat different would show up here, too) Apple may never reveal the answer. They like to be mysterious. There's no reason they couldn't use the A9... it's fully backward code compatible with the A8 and the ARM11 (used in the 3GS and all other iPhones, respectively).
Same with the rumors that they're using an ARM MALI 50 for the GPU... that actually looks weaker than the PowerVR core used in the iPhone 3GS. Apple has already admitted that they see iPhone gaming as a big market (no joke... there are more games for the iPhone than for Sony PSP or Nintendo GS)... this ought to translate to the iPad, too. Maybe a MALI 400 or one of the higher-end PowerVR cores (like the one Intel uses in their low-end PC chipsets... weak for a PC, but still an upgrade from the iPhone). None of these are Nintendo class, though.
What we do know: the iPad battery is 25Whr. If they're claiming "up to 10 hours" of life, then one must assume the minimum power draw for useful work is 2.5W.. otherwise they'd be claiming more. The CPU is only a small bit of that power consumption.
The Tegra2 pulls an average 500mW running its two dual 1GHz ARM Cortex A9s, on a 40nm SOC. Considerably less power just playing back full 1080p high def video, somewhere around 200mW. Current tablet/phone chipsets can draw over a watt playing back high-def video, because there so much more CPU involvement.. that kind of tracks Apple's numbers here for battery life. The nVidia releases all say things like "12+ hours of HD video playback", but obviously, this depends on the whole system... the LCD display can use much more power, if you're not careful. The demo unit nVidia was showing off claimed 16 hours of HD playback, 140 hours of music playback, on a single charge. At least some of the various companies showing off Tegra 2 tablet computers at CES were making similar claims, but I don't know for certain if MSI was one of them.
So yeah, it's very, very believable that the MSI unit, or any Tegra2 based tablet, will dramatically outlast the iPad doing the same kind of things. It's also quite possible that some will not. If you push it (it's fast enough to run the Unreal 3 engine at the typical 1280x768 resolutions you find on tablet computers), it's going to eat power much faster than just reading a book or playing a movie. This GPU is similar to the GeForce 6000 series, the claim is that it's 2x-3x as fast as the unit in the orginal Tegra chipset.
I'll be shocked if Apple's annual iPhone upgrade doesn't include at least one model running the A4 CPU, perhaps at a slightly lower clock speed. NVidia is also working to put the Tegra 2 into this years smart phones. Pretty cool stuff.
I agree. My stupid car GPS device (Pioneer) can use an SDHC card or an attached USB memory stick (or anything that looks like one) for audio/video playback. My cheaper camcorder can access a USB stick, play video from it or offload video from the SDHC card in the camcorder. My TV can play photos from a USB stick, and it's over three years old.. the new ones can play video. My Blu-Ray player can play photos or videos or music from an SDHC card or USB stick.
This is S.O.P. now on consumer devices. If a far more general purpose computing device like a table can't, that's pretty lame tablet.
Given the cost of that iPad, I think they can fork over the $1.00 or so for the GPS chip (hooks in via a serial port on the SOC, antenna is a PCB antenna, so the chip is the only substantial cost). These things got insanely cheap once US law required one in every cell phone.
No, multitasking is the natural way to use a computer.
Back in the mid 1980s, I was working at Commodore, and had a very early Amiga computer. It was pretty advanced compared to, well, most anything else people had at home, and I really did wonder about the whole multitasking thing on "small" hardware. So I let a number of people, friends and family, play with it.
So, to start, I'd pop up the "Demos" directory, which contained a bunch of programs that did graphic demos: boxes or lines, in a window, drawn using the hardware bit-blitter, so they were really fast. I'd open the "drawer" and fire up one of the demos. Not a single person, once given the mouse, failed to go and start up a bunch of other demos.
Multitasking is the natural way to use a computer. You have to be taught to not use it that way. Some user interfaces, in particular the iPod/iPhone, do exactly that... they remove the question from the user's mind, by taking over the whole screen once you start the app, and offering you no avenue to try to launch another app. If you let your phone train your mind long enough, maybe you won't think about multitasking so much anymore. It was easy to find people who didn't use computers back in '85... not so much today. Some have been taught very bad habits.
The iPhone 3GS has a 600MHz ARM Cortex A8 processor. It can support multitasking just as well as the other smart phones that do it without the slightest flinch, also based on that CPU, like the Motorola DROID and the Palm Pre.
I mean, a little context... multitasking worked just dandy on 8MHz 68000s with 256KB of RAM in a GUI environment. The OSs that didn't multitask in the mid-80s didn't because they were not designed to, not because the hardware prevented it. Windows did fake multitasking in the days of Windows 3.1, on only slightly faster machines. I first ran UNIX System V r4.1 on a 25MHz 68030 system with 4MB of main memory and a 20MB hard drive... and yeah, with a GUI (not X in those days).
It is totally insane to claim a computer, pocket or otherwise, with 10x+ the performance of your average early 1990s desktop Pentium PC, can't multitask just fine.
Apple absolutely could allow multitasking. They don't because of their view of the iPhone world. They want the only ability to create on-going, multitasking applications. So only the iPhone music player can play while you do something else. Only Apple can create a daemon to check things in the background, etc. That's a level of power, and they don't want others to have it. It's an extension of their protection of other things in the system. You can't replace the browser.. many things in the system are "special" and Apple-only. They have absolutely no incentive to remove these restrictions.
They didn't do multitasking on the original Mac, either. That was fine as long as Windows didn't either, and other OSs were indignificant, even if they did multitask. Once Windows did fake, er, cooperative multitasking, Apple hacked it in, too.
So once Android hits 50-75% of the portable Market, there's every reason to believe Apple will suddenly have a revelation and introduce app-level multitasking. Most Apple users, and much of the press, will herald it as a whole new innovation in portable computing.
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty much every DLP sold since 2007 has been "3D Ready", and it was just a feature tossed in, no extra money. I know this specifically, because I bought a 2006 model, right before they did this.
Depends on the kind of studio. TV studios, sure, but they actually wanted the HD overall -- it was largely seen as a way to increase viewership.
Most production studios were already shooting on film, and editing digitally, so adding HD to that toolchain only meant that you could shoot for more than 10 minutes continuously, and didn't have to get the film processed. Adding 3D is a new camera, probably a new lens (depending on the camera), and some changes to the existing editing. And of course, some studios still use film, others waited for video to catch up to film before they bought into the digital thing (eg, cameras with 35mm size sensors that can use traditional lenses, etc).
Like HD, too, it's not as if there's going to be an overnight jump to 3D. It might fail this time.
The linear polarizing systems are kind of on the outs, because they start to fail as soon as you tilt your head a little. Many of the theaters, including the IMAX theater where I saw "Avatar" in stereo, use the RealD system. They use circular polarization, clockwise for the right eye, counterclockwise for the left eye.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealD_Cinema
RealD-style polarizing (eg, circular polarizers) is just as effective as shutter glasses, and adaptable to some TV technologies (DLP, in particular). But you'll need a new TV.
The only reasonable add-on to existing hardware are LCD shutter glasses. They're nowhere near as cumbersome as they were back in the 80s, but yeah, still extra heavy compared to passive glasses, and you need the battery, too.
"Prismatic screens similar to 3D photos" is called lenticular 3D/stereoscopy. It's flawed for the same reason the old horizontal/vertical polarization was... it fails unless you're sitting perfectly straight. That's already pretty much failed in the theater, and is a no-go entirely for the home, I suspect.
The other modern glasses-based technology is Dolby's 3D system, which they call "wavelength multiplex visualization". Basically, they mess with the colors for left vs. right eye, but in very tiny bands, so you don't see any color shifts. Otherwise, it's the same idea as polarization: filter at the projector, filter at the eye.
No, that's just the stench of the NBC programming you're getting there...
If you use some of the first systems, you'll probably need LCD shutters, either over or attached to your glasses. That's the kind of 3D you can have added to existing hardware (at least some of it) right now.
It's also possible to do this using passive glasses, just like in the 3D theaters. Using circular polarizers in the display itself, you need the same on your eyes. That's a pair of something that looks just like sunglasses, or clip-ons for your existing glasses, or prescription 3D glasses (which also work as sunglasses) if you want to get serious about it. Basically, the same choices you have about sunglasses.
Unfortunately, this is an easy slam-dunk to design into a DLP TV, but, not being flat-panel, DLP has fallen out of favor recently in the home (they're used quite extensively in the digital theater world, in fact, the system I describe with polarizers is exactly what you usually see in a theater when you see a 3D film, driven by a DLP projector with a 3D add on device).
Yes... we will never be in an era in which people will regularly listen to 4+ speakers in a surround pattern. Oh wait... that happend... I actually have eight speaker sound in my media room.
Sometimes the idea is just dandy, but the implementation is stupid. That's kind of how quadraphonic was. 3D has been around since the 1950's, but it was a stupid gimmick back then. "Avatar" is one of the fist films to show that it works as just another enhancement... you still believe it's 3D, even if you don't have something shooting directly at you every five minutes. Plus, I'm not fan of shutter glasses, but the polarizer technologies (like RealD) work just dandy, and can be used at least in new DLP designs, if not LCD necessarily. Maybe this is another failed attempt, or maybe it's the time they finally get it right. We'll see.
Though I was a big fan of quadraphonic... not because of the quadraphonic thing itself, SQ LPs and all that stuff, but I was a teenager when they killed it. For a short time, you could get a quadraphonic amp for about 1/5th the price of a normal stereo amp, as they blew them all out at fire sale prices. So I had a surround sound system back in the mid 1970s. Ok, no material for it, but more loud as good (50 amps per channel into four speakers). And when, in college, I did actually blow the front channels, the unit worked just fine, back-channel only (they were fully symmetric... two sets of stereo amplifiers int he same box).
How did they look with your head tilted 45 degrees? 90 degrees? That's the big problem with glasses-free 3D technologies. I'll admit wasn't at CES this year... I have not seen the latest stuff.
Unless this is just a crazy gimmick, it's going to work something along the lines of the new Blu-Ray 3D standard(Multiview Video Coding). You need a 3D-aware player/receiver to fully realize the 3D information, older players will just see a clear 2D display, not some mess of overlapped 3D images.
This is also, wisely, done from a data centric viewpoint -- your player gets the 3D data, and does SOMETHING with it to present it to the viewer. That may be 3D shutter glasses if I want to watch 3D via my PS3 on today's DLP television (it's all technically possible using 60p output, assuming 30p per eye doesn't give me a headache). But assuming I had a new player and, say, a DLP projection TV with a circular polarizer filtering rig built-in, I could see RealD-style images, just as in the theater, using only passive glasses... like sunglasses. If someone comes up with a reasonable no-glasses 3D technology (for a TV, that's hard... what happens if I'm watching off center, head tilted, or even lying down... that's actually ok with either RealD or LCD glasses, a big problem with most non-glasses schemes in the works today).
Of course, what you don't get is a mix... if you're watching in 3D, it's going to be a mess for anyone without glasses.
Apple's real motivations on the iPhone have one common thread: to serve Apple.
No, Flash on the iPhone is not a matter of security, stability, or performance. It's a matter of someone alternate API being available for things that appear "application-like" rather than "web-page-like". If you can play a flash game on the iPhone, you might not want to buy a native game from the iTunes store. Apple makes no money from that flash game, they do make money from anything you buy through iTunes. So they only support as much of the web as needed to deliver a decent web browsing experience. Truthfully, when the iPhone came out, other mobiles devices were not exactly setting the world on first, web-browser-wise (I was using a Treo with Opera at the time... not too good).
Keeping out flash and java allows Apple to limit competition and control content, plain and simple. They offer a few other explanations to give fanboys some explanation they'll accept, but anyone here out to be capable of clearly seeing the truth. iPhones and their ilk as a very closed platform... we just aren't used to things being so locked up, but that's always pretty much been the truth, going back to the original iPod.
And I think there are plenty here who'd like to see Flash die. But that's not the point... Flash is required, today, to have a first class web browsing experience, since it is heavily used. Many mobile devices are working to support this. Apple won't, for nothing but their own selfish reasons.... Adobe would drop a nice, snappy Flash player on them tomorrow if Apple wanted to support Flash.
As for complaints about Flash dragging down a desktop, the only thing in a typical flash stream that can do that is a full HD AVC video running unaccelerated on a desktop PC. That's a non-issue for handhelds. They don't need to play back full HD... most are 480p or lower in resolution. And every major high-end smart phone has hardware acceleration for AVC playback. So it's not even all THAT battery draining.
Symbian OS is on more smart phones than any other operating system, world-wide, powering about 45% of all smart phones. However, it is practically unknown in the USA, I'll agree.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian_OS
Nokia has been the major proponent of Symbian OS, as well as their owner for awhile: Nokia bought Symbian Software Ltd. back in 2008, and they're still in the process of releasing it as an open source platform. Most of the other companies making Symbian powered phones also produced WinMo models; most of these are moving rapidly to include Android, some even as their now-main focus. Nokia, as well discussed here, has also been using Linux/Maemo for their high-end smart phones.
Of course, from the US perspective, the iPhone seems to be everywhere, but world-wide, Apple is behind Nokia and RIM in sales and installed base.
Your iPhone web browser don't support Flash or Java, it's not "full" in the sense of virtually every deskop browser's capabilities. Or tabs, or plug-ins, or lots of other desktop-class features. Many of the small browsers are closer to "full", many are farther away. It certainly remains to be seen whether Firefox will deliver, but that's their target.
Despite the proprietary nature of Flash and other ugliness (there's not much of a good reason for 90%+ of Flash web sites), it is a reality of the modern web, and until it's replaced by something better, not having in your web browser renders you less than a first class user of the web. Same deal with Java... if you don't have it, there are many things you can't do online (curiously, less that in the past, largely because asynchronous Javascript + CSS and Flash have both taken on some of the things Java could only do 10+ years ago). Sadly for iPhone users, Apple will neither fix the problem nor allow you to fix it by using a rival browser. Every other mobile platform allows freedom of choice in such applications.
The DROID currently has a special YouTube viewer, which supports just enough of the way flash is used in YouTube to play pretty much any YouTube video (eg, the ones that don't play on the iPhone). But full flash support is not out yet, but has been announced by Google, Motorola, Verizon, Adobe, and pretty much anyone else with a finger in that pie.
Apple will not allow Flash on their "walled garden" devices, simply because that creates a hole in the wall. Flash allows the download of things that behave "application-like", and Apple only supports the use of the browser for things that behave "web-page like". Well, except for a small but growing number of Javascript programs that also behave application-like. The reason is that Apple wants money for and control of any applications on these devices. They don't want unapproved applications, nor any possible way to sell applications without their getting paid.
Hopefully they allow the mobile version if you want it. When you have a dinky device like an iPhone... a 480x320 screen, you probably want the mobile version most of the time. By the time you're on a 1024x768 or so tablet or netbook, you definitely don't. On my DROID, at 854x480, sometimes the standard version is good, sometimes the mobile version is better. And this can be occupational, too... am I sitting somewhere, where it's easy to zoom or pan if needed, or am I walking or otherwise engaged.
The real key is that a proper mobile browser should be capable of everything a desktop browser CAN do, but optimize it for the handheld. Zooming, while supported in many desktop browsers, is critical for a mobile device. I love tabbed browsing, use it on my mobile and desktop (no frickin' idea how iPhone users get along without it and still manage to suck up for much bandwidth... oh, I guess that's the constant reloading of pages as you switch to look at something else or run a different app), but you don't want the tabs in your face on the mobile device.. they take up too much space. Dolphin on Android (at least the old version) does this right, you swipe to move between pages, and you can pop up the tabs if you want to get at them.
In short, there are GUI differences that are important. The content should not be limited, particularly given that today's modern handhelds have more screen real-estate than VGA-era PCs.
If I lived in a SyFy-Channel Movie-of-the-week, I would LOVE it if the Chinese established a permanent base on the moon, and claimed all of the moon for China. The moon is a long-term losing proposition anyway... very expensive to keep habitats habitable.
This would get everyone else in a frenzy to go claim Mars. Probably a multi-national group, including the USA, Russia, Europe, and Japan all ready to go grab a chunk of Mars for their respective countries, before China did likewise. And it would all happen over the course of two thrill-a-minute hours on Saturday night at 9E/8C.
Only problem... "we" all agreed we can't do this, back in 1967, as part of the U.N.'s Outer Space Treaty, which was signed by the US, Russia, and various others... not sure about China. Modeled after the Antarctic treaty, the Outer Space Treaty states that outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means. The Treaty establishes the exploration and use of outer space as the "province of all mankind."
So yeah, everyone pretty much does expect that a Chinese moon base is just a moon base, not a Chinese grab for all of the moon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty
Not quite. NASA's getting more money, not less. But they're not going to be spending it on things that will be served by free market resources in the near future. Thus, they will have more money for other projects, particularly actual research. Rather than building another 1960's style heavy lift rocket.
Either the libertarians or those here in the closet (well, the Republican-but-not-gay subset of those closeted slash-dotters, of course) should actually be happy at the loss of the Constellation program. After all, rather than "socialized" space travel, it'll be open to free enterprise. Ok, sure, it already is, but now said free enterprise won't have to compete with Socialist Spaceships, and if they're really successful (and, all sarcasm aside, some claim to be about there -- and real rockets, too, not just Virgin Galactic's tourism thing), they'll have NASA as a regular customer, rather than a competitor.
This looks great to me. NASA should really be concentrating on the things only NASA can possibly do. If the free market's ready to lift things into orbit, or even close to it (given that they're not exactly stopping a Constellation launch next week, but a project not even half-way to fruition), that should NASA spent more money on actual science. Not the tractor-trailer-in-space thing.
Republicans run for office on the basis that Government is a big, evil thing that will only do you harm. Democrats run for office on the basis that Government is a representative of the people. Once elected, they keep their promises.
All the complains about cutting some of these NASA programs seem very short sighted. It wasn't all that long ago that all sorts of NASA scientists were up in arms over the Bush Administration's "return to the moon" boondoggle, which was causing all sorts of "real science" projects to be disappeared. And that's just one of the complaints.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4245928.html
Also, right now anyway, Obama's budget is calling for an additional $1 billion for NASA... but a different set of priorities.
I'm all for manned space flight when it's a reasonable thing to do. But there's no valid scientific reason to go back to the moon right now, and commercial reasons can care for themselves. If we want to go to Mars, it's far lower cost and more reasonable in many different ways to follow the "Mars Direct" plan from Robert Zubrin and David Baker (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct).
Don't get me wrong, I want to see space science, and all other kinds, flourish in the USA. But given the limited budget, spend it where it'll do some good -- where the best science can be done. Not where some idiot Connecticut Cowboy wanted it, as yet another adventure. Of course, if NASA has the budget wasted on that guy's adventure in Iraq, we'd have Starbucks on the moon pretty soon now. If I had my 'druthers, we'd cut the military budget in half (at least) and end the US's "Empire via Military Base" strategy, part of why we're spending more than 10x on the military than any other country, and triple the money spent on science.
All of these "clone" tablets were shown at CES, before the iPad was annouced. The whole "tablet" thing has been coming on fast, from several different directions in the market, and this year's CES was kind of a perfect storm for them.
PC-based tablets have been out for nearly a decade in some forms, but like other super-small PCs, they were sold at a premium for quite some time. The advent of cheaper tiny notebooks, thanks to the popularity of the netbook, is one factor... many of the new tablets are based on Netbook-class x86 processors. There were a bunch of new ones at CES, but you can buy these today.. they're not copying Apple.
Then you have the others. Companies like Archos and Viliv have been making tablet-sized PMPs... dedicated media players with 5-10" screens, for many years now. They have been moving this form factor to run Windows on the high end, Android on the low end, rather than just some dedicated PMP OS. There are a bunch new ones at CES, but you can buy these today, they're not copying Apple.
Then there's the phone folks and technologies... the ARM processors used for phone (and some of the aforementioned PMPs) have recently become powerful enough for non-phone things. Between the Android OS and the 1GHz ARMs, these can actually take on the jobs that the netbooks do. Nokia actually started making this kind of device several years ago, the idea being easy, portable web browsing. This year, there are dozens of them.
The basic idea is that, like your PDA/Smart Phone, there are any number of PC-class applications that work well outside of Windows and/or a traditional PC. Rather than build a device to read books, a device to play media, a device to surf the net, etc. you build one general purpose application processor that do all of these things, plus new ones that come along. Android OS is one of the big movers here (and it's only been out for just over a year)... one free, consumer friendly OS that consumers actually use and OEMs don't have to pay big to license. Perhaps some other stuff built on Linux will catch on here too, such as MOBI or Google's ChromeOS.
But it's already a problem pretty much solved, and Apple's really just doing the same pretty obvious thing at the same time. In fact, if Apple had put a tablet based on iPhoneOS out a few years ago, that would have been a "first mover" thing by them. But they're kind of trailing the pack. No worries for Apple fans.. they always deliver a slick, market-friendly product, get tons of press, and everyone thinks they were first out of the gate and all these others (which were always there, but they never noticed) are now "copies".
Any Cortex A9 is going to be at 45nm or better... ARM only has it qualified at 45nm, 40nm, and 28nm.
Of course, it's conjecture right now that they're using an A9 core, also whether its a single 1GHz core or more cores.. at 40nm or 45nm, they could handle two cores without making this an overly large chip. If PA Semi took an ARM Architecture license, they could have done like Qualcomm and tweaked up the A8 to higher performance. I have heard all the rumors going around, but nothing confirmed. And, other than by investigating in software (A8s and A9s will take a different number of cycles to complete various benchmarks, and something somewhat different would show up here, too) Apple may never reveal the answer. They like to be mysterious. There's no reason they couldn't use the A9... it's fully backward code compatible with the A8 and the ARM11 (used in the 3GS and all other iPhones, respectively).
Same with the rumors that they're using an ARM MALI 50 for the GPU... that actually looks weaker than the PowerVR core used in the iPhone 3GS. Apple has already admitted that they see iPhone gaming as a big market (no joke... there are more games for the iPhone than for Sony PSP or Nintendo GS)... this ought to translate to the iPad, too. Maybe a MALI 400 or one of the higher-end PowerVR cores (like the one Intel uses in their low-end PC chipsets... weak for a PC, but still an upgrade from the iPhone). None of these are Nintendo class, though.
What we do know: the iPad battery is 25Whr. If they're claiming "up to 10 hours" of life, then one must assume the minimum power draw for useful work is 2.5W.. otherwise they'd be claiming more. The CPU is only a small bit of that power consumption.
The Tegra2 pulls an average 500mW running its two dual 1GHz ARM Cortex A9s, on a 40nm SOC. Considerably less power just playing back full 1080p high def video, somewhere around 200mW. Current tablet/phone chipsets can draw over a watt playing back high-def video, because there so much more CPU involvement.. that kind of tracks Apple's numbers here for battery life. The nVidia releases all say things like "12+ hours of HD video playback", but obviously, this depends on the whole system... the LCD display can use much more power, if you're not careful. The demo unit nVidia was showing off claimed 16 hours of HD playback, 140 hours of music playback, on a single charge. At least some of the various companies showing off Tegra 2 tablet computers at CES were making similar claims, but I don't know for certain if MSI was one of them.
So yeah, it's very, very believable that the MSI unit, or any Tegra2 based tablet, will dramatically outlast the iPad doing the same kind of things. It's also quite possible that some will not. If you push it (it's fast enough to run the Unreal 3 engine at the typical 1280x768 resolutions you find on tablet computers), it's going to eat power much faster than just reading a book or playing a movie. This GPU is similar to the GeForce 6000 series, the claim is that it's 2x-3x as fast as the unit in the orginal Tegra chipset.
I'll be shocked if Apple's annual iPhone upgrade doesn't include at least one model running the A4 CPU, perhaps at a slightly lower clock speed. NVidia is also working to put the Tegra 2 into this years smart phones. Pretty cool stuff.
I agree. My stupid car GPS device (Pioneer) can use an SDHC card or an attached USB memory stick (or anything that looks like one) for audio/video playback. My cheaper camcorder can access a USB stick, play video from it or offload video from the SDHC card in the camcorder. My TV can play photos from a USB stick, and it's over three years old.. the new ones can play video. My Blu-Ray player can play photos or videos or music from an SDHC card or USB stick.
This is S.O.P. now on consumer devices. If a far more general purpose computing device like a table can't, that's pretty lame tablet.
Given the cost of that iPad, I think they can fork over the $1.00 or so for the GPS chip (hooks in via a serial port on the SOC, antenna is a PCB antenna, so the chip is the only substantial cost). These things got insanely cheap once US law required one in every cell phone.
No, multitasking is the natural way to use a computer.
Back in the mid 1980s, I was working at Commodore, and had a very early Amiga computer. It was pretty advanced compared to, well, most anything else people had at home, and I really did wonder about the whole multitasking thing on "small" hardware. So I let a number of people, friends and family, play with it.
So, to start, I'd pop up the "Demos" directory, which contained a bunch of programs that did graphic demos: boxes or lines, in a window, drawn using the hardware bit-blitter, so they were really fast. I'd open the "drawer" and fire up one of the demos. Not a single person, once given the mouse, failed to go and start up a bunch of other demos.
Multitasking is the natural way to use a computer. You have to be taught to not use it that way. Some user interfaces, in particular the iPod/iPhone, do exactly that... they remove the question from the user's mind, by taking over the whole screen once you start the app, and offering you no avenue to try to launch another app. If you let your phone train your mind long enough, maybe you won't think about multitasking so much anymore. It was easy to find people who didn't use computers back in '85... not so much today. Some have been taught very bad habits.
The iPhone 3GS has a 600MHz ARM Cortex A8 processor. It can support multitasking just as well as the other smart phones that do it without the slightest flinch, also based on that CPU, like the Motorola DROID and the Palm Pre.
I mean, a little context... multitasking worked just dandy on 8MHz 68000s with 256KB of RAM in a GUI environment. The OSs that didn't multitask in the mid-80s didn't because they were not designed to, not because the hardware prevented it. Windows did fake multitasking in the days of Windows 3.1, on only slightly faster machines. I first ran UNIX System V r4.1 on a 25MHz 68030 system with 4MB of main memory and a 20MB hard drive... and yeah, with a GUI (not X in those days).
It is totally insane to claim a computer, pocket or otherwise, with 10x+ the performance of your average early 1990s desktop Pentium PC, can't multitask just fine.
Apple absolutely could allow multitasking. They don't because of their view of the iPhone world. They want the only ability to create on-going, multitasking applications. So only the iPhone music player can play while you do something else. Only Apple can create a daemon to check things in the background, etc. That's a level of power, and they don't want others to have it. It's an extension of their protection of other things in the system. You can't replace the browser.. many things in the system are "special" and Apple-only. They have absolutely no incentive to remove these restrictions.
They didn't do multitasking on the original Mac, either. That was fine as long as Windows didn't either, and other OSs were indignificant, even if they did multitask. Once Windows did fake, er, cooperative multitasking, Apple hacked it in, too.
So once Android hits 50-75% of the portable Market, there's every reason to believe Apple will suddenly have a revelation and introduce app-level multitasking. Most Apple users, and much of the press, will herald it as a whole new innovation in portable computing.