Yes. 64 bit only gives you a performance boost if any one task needs more than four gigabytes of ram. Most applications on the desktop do not and will not for a while.
That "most applications on the desktop" don't need 64-bit isn't an argument that the lack of 64-bit isn't relevant to the ability of this ARM design to compete with Intel's offerings "everwhere from netbooks to servers".
(Which isn't to say that some of the other responses haven't raised some good points on that score.)
Clock for clock, the Cortex A8 is a bit faster than the Atom on most workloads (in about 10% of the power envelope). The A8, however, typically ships at about half the clock speed of an Atom (they go up to 1GHz, but 600MHz is the most common speed). The A9 is slightly faster than the A8 clock-for-clock, but goes to twice the clock speed and scales to four cores, so it's not a stretch to imagine that it's more than five times the speed of a single-core Atom.
Of course, that's kind of a silly comparison to make, since there are dual-core Atom chips like the N330. I also wonder if a 32-bit processor can really challenge a 64-bit one "everywhere from netbooks to servers".
Regardless of climate, most of the air-conditioning demand comes between 3PM and 6PM, not really peak hours for using any artificial lighting. Maybe for the basement dwellers, but their rooms are nice and cool anyway.
Also for people who have figured out that letting in sunlight also is letting in heat, and who minimize that when they want to minimize indoor heat.
Its an improvement because you can use it without interrupting the exercise, and because teaching someone the mechanics of taking their own pulse takes more time that teaching them how to read a monitor, which is undesirable considering that the mechanics of doing that are not the point of the instruction, the application of the information is.
Lest wasted time in both the teaching and the actual application is a plus.
btrfs development is funded by Oracle. They have yet to release a stable version. Will they ever do that now that they have ZFS ?
They might -- depending on how compatible the roadmap for additional features is or is not with what they have in ZFS -- if they want to have something for Linux. They might just release ZFS for Linux under the GPLv2 now that they own it. They might even do both.
This just smells of lawsuit paranoia or even flat-out overprotecting the kids. "If your heart rate goes over N, your out" for either one of those reasons.
And that just smells of baseless speculation.
When I was a kid, everyone knew their own limits. No one needed a heart monitor and whoever was coaching us could notice if someone needed water, etc.
Your own nonspecific romanticized fantasy about the universal wisdom that abounded in your youth may be interesting on some level, but not persuasive as to the facts of the time.
Everyone wasn't wiser when you were a kid, you just didn't notice the BS as much. Because you were a kid, your brain wasn't fully matured, and anyway the BS around then was the BS you were raised with and so it seemed normal.
When I was a kid, we were taught to use a watch and take our pulse to measure our heart rate while exercising; cheap portable heart monitors for exercise weren't available, if they were, the school would probably have lept at the chance to use them instead, since it would be less interruption to the exercise to check that way.
I see this as a similar thing to the medical malpractice suits resulting in doctors over-prescribing antibiotics
AFAICT, the main reason doctor's overprescribe antibiotics is: 1) There are many cases where the need is unclear (whether an infection is viral or bacterial is often not clear) and the only case where treatment will help is if antibiotics are needed, and it will most likely do no harm, and if the infection is bacterial will most likely help, the patient to prescribe and use the response to the treatment to determine the further course (if any) than to test without prescribing, 2) Doctors find that patients where antibiotics may not be clearly necessary are easier to get out of the office and leave more satisfied with an antibiotic prescription, so tend to prescribe.
While the tort reform types often attribute overprescribing antibiotics (and every other problem in the healthcare system, and even sometimes problems outside of it) to malpractice suits, there is generally little if any empirical evidence to justify those claims.
It seems like people just want to defer such responsibilities to non-accountable devices.
And it seems to me like certain people have canned rants they want to use, even if there is no clear link between the particular situation where they use them and the thing they are complaining about.
No, gasoline taxes tax gasoline consumption. Mileage taxes tax miles travelled. They aren't the same thing. If you think they are, consider this:
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the average vehicle subject to either tax has gets an average of 30 miles to the gallon, a Prius gets 50 miles to the gallon, and a Hummer gets 10 miles to the gallon (all chosen for convenience, not accuracy).
Assume further that the average vehicle subject to the tax drives 9000 miles per year, and the tax is set at a rate that costs the $30/year for the average vehicle.
If its a mileage tax, the Hummer will also pay $30/year; the Prius will also pay $30/year.
If its a gas tax, the Hummer will pay $90/year, and the Prius will pay $18/year.
Also, a "mileage tax" that uses always-on GPS monitoring has all kinds of side effects for controlling the population that a gasoline tax collected at the pump -- or a mileage tax collected by inspecting odomoters periodically (say annually and at ownership transfer) -- lacks.
Have you never stopped to wonder how stupidly ridiculous it is to ask a child to use heart monitors while performing basic physical activities?
If you knew even a little about fitness, you wouldn't think it was stupid to have kids learn to use heart monitors to improve their exercise in PE class.
Soon they'll be outlawing sports for kids altogether as they raise the chance of physical injuries or whatever.
Actually, they started restricting sports for kids quite a while ago on that basis, but thathas nothing to do with using heart monitors in PE class, which is probably more related to learning about and practicing effective exercise. When I was in middle school back in the 1980s, we were taught to do this by taking our pulse using the second hand of a watch for timing, which is crude and inconvenient in the middle of exercise by comparison with a heart rate monitor which is both more accurate and requires less of a break in exercise, but conceptually the same thing.
And the fact that they might be doing this just to avoid lawsuits is every more disturbing.
I'm never disturbed by the fact that someone might be motivated by anything, since it is always a fact that any action might be motivated by any motivation, however outlandish. I might be disturbed by some kind of reasonable basis to believe that an action had a particular motivation, if that motivation was itself disturbing.
American society is still one of the greatest around - and I'm not an American - but it seems it's clearly entering a downward-spiral these days.
The present often seems worse then the past, frequently more because people notice the least attractive parts of the present most while tending to romanticize the past.
Except for GPS-tracked mileage taxes, we've had these since the first days of the country, and, actually, I think the complaints are somewhat redundant.
I'm betting it's not even that and it's just a heart rate monitor to improve the quality of aerobic exercise.
Probably; when I was in middle school gym class, a little over 20 years ago, we learned about proper resting and exercising heart rate and learned to check ours with by taking our own pulse timed with a watch. Using an actual monitor is a considerable improvement.
sorry, but truth is not arrived by rigors scientific study. The only thing that can offer absolute truth is religion.
Well, no.
Rigorous (not "rigors") scientific study can provide a justified belief in a reasonable approximation of truth on questions of fact, whereas non-scientific means, when applied to questions of fact, can produce only unjustified beliefs (whether the belief regards absolute truth or not.)
The GPLv2, for example, is incompatible with the Apache license, but I don't hear anything like as many complaints about Apache as I do about Solaris when it comes to licensing.
That's because, unlike ZFS -- the big component that people want to use on Linux from Solaris -- usually people don't need or want to link the Apache webserver into the kernel to use it, so the incompatibility between the Apache license and the GPLv2 used for the Linux kernel isn't an issue.
It's no worse than health insurance bought INSIDE an employer.
Yes, actually, it is.
Premiums for individual plans are, even for young, healthy people who are the lowest insurance risk, higher than the premiums in group plans, particularly large group plans.
Given that we no longer have "lifetime employment" it makes sense to focus on separating insurance from employers rather than trying to associate it with the federal government.
You say "rather than" as if these were two conflicting goals; but they are, in fact, complementary. If the government provides insurance for its citizens, then insurance is, ipso facto, separated from employers.
That can be done with small changes and a little bit of beaurocratic vigilance.
This claim needs (in addition to spellchecking) some support.
Infact, if we can't first sort out the problem of "coverage for individuals" then the goverment has no hope whatsoever of taking on the larger problem of making sure that everyone has a means of coverage.
You provide no reason to believe that "the problem of 'coverage for individuals'" is really a separate problem that needs to be solved before one can take on the supposedly "larger problem" of making sure that everyone has a means of coverage. Note, that this isn't an unexplored area where there is nothing we can look to: every other country in the developed world provides universal health coverage, and does so at a lower cost (both per capita and as a share of GDP) than the US does, and pretty much all of them have similar or better overall health outcomes as the US.
Also, "in fact" is, in fact, two words.
If you can't manage the small victories, it's quite literally insane for anyone to think that the big victories are achievable.
Sometimes the best way to solve one part of a problem is to solve the whole problem. Not all problems admit of piecemeal solutions; sometimes, trying to fix a small part of a problem without dealing with the bigger parts just makes thing worse.
This "insurance is supposed to cover medical devices" comes directly from government regulation. Even if an insurance company like Nationwide wanted to provide coverage to buy an Iphone for their hearing-disabled customer, they could not do it, else they'd be fined by the U.S. Congress.
(1) What regulation?, and (2) The U.S. Congress passes laws, it doesn't make regulations or fine people for breaking laws or regulations; executive branch agencies and the courts do that.
I would think the limiting factor should be getting a doctor's diagnosis. If a doctor signs-off, and says "person X has condition Y" and the policy covers condition Y, then anything that does the job of helping with condition Y should be fair game.
That might be what insurance should do, but its nothing like it does do. Heck, health insurance (in the US) doesn't even cover drugs that don't require a prescription, even when they are recommended by a doctor and the most effective means of dealing with a condition.
Also, once a PDA or SmartPhone is declared a "medical device," it will be subject to the same approvals and liabilities as medical devices, and will therefore cost 10 to 20 times as much as they do today...
Not really. While it would be subject to the same approvals and liabilities as a medical device, and would therefore need to add the cover the associated fixed costs of approvals, etc., when sold through medical device channels, the fact that there is a wider general non-medical market would still be spreading the basic development costs out across the wider market. One of the reasons that specialized medical devices may be more expensive than consumer-oriented devices with a strict superset of the medical devices functionality is economies of scale. Sure, the additional compliance/liability costs of medical devices exist, but they aren't the only source of higher per-unit cost.
Ah, but there's the alternative argument that some forms of welfare enable people to subsist comfortably without furthering themselves
Such an argument could be directed at some theoretically conceivable forms of welfare, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find an actual welfare program that exists in the US that you could credibly argue allows anyone to live "comfortably" on it without substantial personal effort, or that practical educational alternatives exist for most recipients that they could peruse if the aid program they were receiving were taken away.
For example, keeping our defense budget up ensures we maintain a large cadre of highly competent engineers.
That assumes that (1) the high defense budget is distributed in a way which favors engineering, and (2) the controls on the spending of those funds (e.g., in the procurement process) assure that "highly competent" engineering is particularly favored.
Neither of those is assured merely by "keeping our defense budget up".
Spending the money on certain welfare programs instead would not encourage intellectuality.
There is certainly at least an argument with regard to almost any social welfare program that exists currently that it would encourage this, in that addressing basic survival needs more fully enables people to engage in intellectual pursuits to which they may be inclined and capable by nature but inhibited from by economic situation.
As much as many people would like to think otherwise, public policy is set by elected officials who may take science into consideration, but also must consider economic trade offs and cultural issues.
Science is (in the realm of public policy) a method of determining the most likely answers to fact questions that cannot be answered by direct observation at the time an answer is needed.
Public policy questions are addressed by applying the decision-makers values to the decision-maker's understanding of the facts. Every consideration in public policy falls into either the fact category or the value category; if you aren't applying science to get the non-trivial results in the fact category, you are probably making poor decisions in that dimension.
Values, of course, are subjective.
Just because the Republicans did not rush headlong and unquestionably into the public policy positions championed by the James Hansons and Al Gores of the world doesn't mean they were conducting a war on science.
Insofar as a "war on science" was alleged, it was not alleged on the basis of those facts, but on the basis of, e.g., presenting non-science as science, often using public resources.
If science is unpopular today it is because of the arrogant, dogmatic and privileged folks who stand at its door.
I do understand that entering 'public' data (where roads are) is different from private data (gmail).
I think a better phrasing of the distinction is your data which is stored on Google servers (e.g., gmail) vs. data that isn't yours which is accessible to you as a consumer of Google apps.
I can see the result of an added road by user X, so why can I not access the raw data?
You can see the result of, say, Google spidering the web and applying PageRank, but they won't let you download their complete database of underlying data, either. Sure, its a more extreme example, but its part of the same continuum. I think that just by publicizing the Data Liberation effort, Google is moving the debate forward on just what the parameters of data portability can and should be.
There is an interesting discussion going on on Ed Parsons (google) blog
Yeah, I think the social nature of web applications mean that these kinds of issues are important, and hopefully the attention this is getting will produce a community-friendly result.
but ideally google would have designed their products to cross like that in the first place
And, ideally, every GMail account would come with a free pony.
instead of pinning their data into an inescapable hole
Most of the apps at issue weren't "inescapable holes" before this project was announced. Improving the export and import features of the services (and awareness of them) doesn't mean that those features haven't existed for a long time.
But there's not a lot point exporting the data if you don't have the rights to use it.
Maybe its just me, but I'd much rather be able to get the data out of the system even if there was some dispute over the parameters of the legal right to use the data, then to not have any means to export the data but to nonetheless have an undisputed right to use the data if, somehow, I could get it in the first place.
It raises risks, though: not only do you have to think your product is better than everyone else's, but that it'll stay that way indefinitely.
Or, it requires you to believe that your target market will view portability itself as having value; if its easier to move off Google than any competing platform, that inherently makes adopting any other platform (all other things being equal) riskier than adopting or continuing to use Google. The absence of lock-in isn't just a reflection of confidence in quality, its a competitive selling point in and of itself.
Google is pretty keen on staying on the good side of the industry, but there is another aspect to consider. By focusing on making the data mobile you can go both ways.
That's not really "another aspect to consider", its right there in the announcement. "The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products." (emphasis added)
The only reason the discussion focusses on the "out" portion is that a company trying to make it easier for people to move onto their platform is nothing special.
What about getting your data out if Google decides to stop the site/app, decides to stop the "Liberation Group", decides to delete your data from it's systems or somehow has to stop business.
If Google gives you the tools to export your data on demand (which is what most of this amounts to, on the export side), then you can decide how frequently you want to archive it to protect against that kind of eventuality, just as you would with local storage. Yes, you run some risk of catastrophic, no-warning failure/cancelation of Google as a whole or the particular service, but you do that with most forms of storage under your own control as well, and, in either case, you can backup your data to mitigate the risk.
This "Liberation Group" thing simply ensures you can get your data only when you least need to.
That seems to require accepting a particularly odd definition of "when you least need to".
Slashdot Mirror
That "most applications on the desktop" don't need 64-bit isn't an argument that the lack of 64-bit isn't relevant to the ability of this ARM design to compete with Intel's offerings "everwhere from netbooks to servers".
(Which isn't to say that some of the other responses haven't raised some good points on that score.)
Of course, that's kind of a silly comparison to make, since there are dual-core Atom chips like the N330. I also wonder if a 32-bit processor can really challenge a 64-bit one "everywhere from netbooks to servers".
Also for people who have figured out that letting in sunlight also is letting in heat, and who minimize that when they want to minimize indoor heat.
Really? With a 19 year lifespan?
$23/year * 19 years = $437
$437 / $40 = 10.925
19th root of 10.925 = 1.1341
13.41% annual return is pretty good.
Its an improvement because you can use it without interrupting the exercise, and because teaching someone the mechanics of taking their own pulse takes more time that teaching them how to read a monitor, which is undesirable considering that the mechanics of doing that are not the point of the instruction, the application of the information is.
Lest wasted time in both the teaching and the actual application is a plus.
They might -- depending on how compatible the roadmap for additional features is or is not with what they have in ZFS -- if they want to have something for Linux. They might just release ZFS for Linux under the GPLv2 now that they own it. They might even do both.
And that just smells of baseless speculation.
Your own nonspecific romanticized fantasy about the universal wisdom that abounded in your youth may be interesting on some level, but not persuasive as to the facts of the time.
Everyone wasn't wiser when you were a kid, you just didn't notice the BS as much. Because you were a kid, your brain wasn't fully matured, and anyway the BS around then was the BS you were raised with and so it seemed normal.
When I was a kid, we were taught to use a watch and take our pulse to measure our heart rate while exercising; cheap portable heart monitors for exercise weren't available, if they were, the school would probably have lept at the chance to use them instead, since it would be less interruption to the exercise to check that way.
AFAICT, the main reason doctor's overprescribe antibiotics is:
1) There are many cases where the need is unclear (whether an infection is viral or bacterial is often not clear) and the only case where treatment will help is if antibiotics are needed, and it will most likely do no harm, and if the infection is bacterial will most likely help, the patient to prescribe and use the response to the treatment to determine the further course (if any) than to test without prescribing,
2) Doctors find that patients where antibiotics may not be clearly necessary are easier to get out of the office and leave more satisfied with an antibiotic prescription, so tend to prescribe.
While the tort reform types often attribute overprescribing antibiotics (and every other problem in the healthcare system, and even sometimes problems outside of it) to malpractice suits, there is generally little if any empirical evidence to justify those claims.
And it seems to me like certain people have canned rants they want to use, even if there is no clear link between the particular situation where they use them and the thing they are complaining about.
No, gasoline taxes tax gasoline consumption. Mileage taxes tax miles travelled. They aren't the same thing. If you think they are, consider this:
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the average vehicle subject to either tax has gets an average of 30 miles to the gallon, a Prius gets 50 miles to the gallon, and a Hummer gets 10 miles to the gallon (all chosen for convenience, not accuracy).
Assume further that the average vehicle subject to the tax drives 9000 miles per year, and the tax is set at a rate that costs the $30/year for the average vehicle.
If its a mileage tax, the Hummer will also pay $30/year; the Prius will also pay $30/year.
If its a gas tax, the Hummer will pay $90/year, and the Prius will pay $18/year.
Also, a "mileage tax" that uses always-on GPS monitoring has all kinds of side effects for controlling the population that a gasoline tax collected at the pump -- or a mileage tax collected by inspecting odomoters periodically (say annually and at ownership transfer) -- lacks.
If you knew even a little about fitness, you wouldn't think it was stupid to have kids learn to use heart monitors to improve their exercise in PE class.
Actually, they started restricting sports for kids quite a while ago on that basis, but thathas nothing to do with using heart monitors in PE class, which is probably more related to learning about and practicing effective exercise. When I was in middle school back in the 1980s, we were taught to do this by taking our pulse using the second hand of a watch for timing, which is crude and inconvenient in the middle of exercise by comparison with a heart rate monitor which is both more accurate and requires less of a break in exercise, but conceptually the same thing.
I'm never disturbed by the fact that someone might be motivated by anything, since it is always a fact that any action might be motivated by any motivation, however outlandish. I might be disturbed by some kind of reasonable basis to believe that an action had a particular motivation, if that motivation was itself disturbing.
The present often seems worse then the past, frequently more because people notice the least attractive parts of the present most while tending to romanticize the past.
Except for GPS-tracked mileage taxes, we've had these since the first days of the country, and, actually, I think the complaints are somewhat redundant.
Probably; when I was in middle school gym class, a little over 20 years ago, we learned about proper resting and exercising heart rate and learned to check ours with by taking our own pulse timed with a watch. Using an actual monitor is a considerable improvement.
Well, no.
Rigorous (not "rigors") scientific study can provide a justified belief in a reasonable approximation of truth on questions of fact, whereas non-scientific means, when applied to questions of fact, can produce only unjustified beliefs (whether the belief regards absolute truth or not.)
That's because, unlike ZFS -- the big component that people want to use on Linux from Solaris -- usually people don't need or want to link the Apache webserver into the kernel to use it, so the incompatibility between the Apache license and the GPLv2 used for the Linux kernel isn't an issue.
Yes, actually, it is.
Premiums for individual plans are, even for young, healthy people who are the lowest insurance risk, higher than the premiums in group plans, particularly large group plans.
You say "rather than" as if these were two conflicting goals; but they are, in fact, complementary. If the government provides insurance for its citizens, then insurance is, ipso facto, separated from employers.
This claim needs (in addition to spellchecking) some support.
You provide no reason to believe that "the problem of 'coverage for individuals'" is really a separate problem that needs to be solved before one can take on the supposedly "larger problem" of making sure that everyone has a means of coverage. Note, that this isn't an unexplored area where there is nothing we can look to: every other country in the developed world provides universal health coverage, and does so at a lower cost (both per capita and as a share of GDP) than the US does, and pretty much all of them have similar or better overall health outcomes as the US.
Also, "in fact" is, in fact, two words.
Sometimes the best way to solve one part of a problem is to solve the whole problem. Not all problems admit of piecemeal solutions; sometimes, trying to fix a small part of a problem without dealing with the bigger parts just makes thing worse.
(1) What regulation?, and
(2) The U.S. Congress passes laws, it doesn't make regulations or fine people for breaking laws or regulations; executive branch agencies and the courts do that.
That might be what insurance should do, but its nothing like it does do. Heck, health insurance (in the US) doesn't even cover drugs that don't require a prescription, even when they are recommended by a doctor and the most effective means of dealing with a condition.
Not really. While it would be subject to the same approvals and liabilities as a medical device, and would therefore need to add the cover the associated fixed costs of approvals, etc., when sold through medical device channels, the fact that there is a wider general non-medical market would still be spreading the basic development costs out across the wider market. One of the reasons that specialized medical devices may be more expensive than consumer-oriented devices with a strict superset of the medical devices functionality is economies of scale. Sure, the additional compliance/liability costs of medical devices exist, but they aren't the only source of higher per-unit cost.
Such an argument could be directed at some theoretically conceivable forms of welfare, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find an actual welfare program that exists in the US that you could credibly argue allows anyone to live "comfortably" on it without substantial personal effort, or that practical educational alternatives exist for most recipients that they could peruse if the aid program they were receiving were taken away.
That assumes that (1) the high defense budget is distributed in a way which favors engineering, and (2) the controls on the spending of those funds (e.g., in the procurement process) assure that "highly competent" engineering is particularly favored.
Neither of those is assured merely by "keeping our defense budget up".
There is certainly at least an argument with regard to almost any social welfare program that exists currently that it would encourage this, in that addressing basic survival needs more fully enables people to engage in intellectual pursuits to which they may be inclined and capable by nature but inhibited from by economic situation.
Science is (in the realm of public policy) a method of determining the most likely answers to fact questions that cannot be answered by direct observation at the time an answer is needed.
Public policy questions are addressed by applying the decision-makers values to the decision-maker's understanding of the facts. Every consideration in public policy falls into either the fact category or the value category; if you aren't applying science to get the non-trivial results in the fact category, you are probably making poor decisions in that dimension.
Values, of course, are subjective.
Insofar as a "war on science" was alleged, it was not alleged on the basis of those facts, but on the basis of, e.g., presenting non-science as science, often using public resources.
Science doesn't have a door to stand at.
I think a better phrasing of the distinction is your data which is stored on Google servers (e.g., gmail) vs. data that isn't yours which is accessible to you as a consumer of Google apps.
You can see the result of, say, Google spidering the web and applying PageRank, but they won't let you download their complete database of underlying data, either. Sure, its a more extreme example, but its part of the same continuum. I think that just by publicizing the Data Liberation effort, Google is moving the debate forward on just what the parameters of data portability can and should be.
Yeah, I think the social nature of web applications mean that these kinds of issues are important, and hopefully the attention this is getting will produce a community-friendly result.
And, ideally, every GMail account would come with a free pony.
Most of the apps at issue weren't "inescapable holes" before this project was announced. Improving the export and import features of the services (and awareness of them) doesn't mean that those features haven't existed for a long time.
Maybe its just me, but I'd much rather be able to get the data out of the system even if there was some dispute over the parameters of the legal right to use the data, then to not have any means to export the data but to nonetheless have an undisputed right to use the data if, somehow, I could get it in the first place.
Or, it requires you to believe that your target market will view portability itself as having value; if its easier to move off Google than any competing platform, that inherently makes adopting any other platform (all other things being equal) riskier than adopting or continuing to use Google. The absence of lock-in isn't just a reflection of confidence in quality, its a competitive selling point in and of itself.
That's not really "another aspect to consider", its right there in the announcement. "The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products." (emphasis added)
The only reason the discussion focusses on the "out" portion is that a company trying to make it easier for people to move onto their platform is nothing special.
If Google gives you the tools to export your data on demand (which is what most of this amounts to, on the export side), then you can decide how frequently you want to archive it to protect against that kind of eventuality, just as you would with local storage. Yes, you run some risk of catastrophic, no-warning failure/cancelation of Google as a whole or the particular service, but you do that with most forms of storage under your own control as well, and, in either case, you can backup your data to mitigate the risk.
That seems to require accepting a particularly odd definition of "when you least need to".