Posts by John 172 47 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Jul 2009
Intel chips have been RISC for years now. The x86 instruction set is decoded into RISC "micro ops" which are executed out-of-order by the RISC core; a retirement unit then sequences completion to maintain coherency. Interesting discussion about if here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5806589/why-does-intel-hide-internal-risc-core-in-their-processors
Just yesterday I had Linux (Ubuntu 10 LTS distro) completely fail to boot. Did it's mini boot text then just hung, repeatedly on every reboot, in recovery mode too. The cause, a new GPU. The BIOS had mapped the GPU into a 64-address space, the 32-bit OS decided that it would try and use it anyway with disastrous results. A warning that the device was misconfigured would have been nice but this is Linux, a hard lockup of the kernel is much nicer! Until tatty stuff like this doesn't happen anymore regular users don't stand a chance.
@Pete 47 - HDMI connectors are crap, Put your face real close to the monitor and see if you can see a very fine white snow moving and sprinkled around the image. If you can you have connector issues; the same issue will also cause lipsync errors if you have a AV amp with HDMI inputs. Try some bluetac or chewing gum to hold them in until the snow goes away. You'll also find it depends on the content, never used to get issues playing blurays back but had real problems playing DVDs; that turned out to be the following: bluray->1080p24, DVD upscaled->1080p50; DVD playback was running with a much higher pixel clock and made the connector issues much more of a problem!
RISC Vs CISC is almost irrelevant in modern devices. A modern CISC device has an instruction set decoder producing a stream of RISC micro-ops; that's really not that different to running a java/c# byte code interpreter/JIT compiler producing a stream of native instructions.
Looks like Nintendo have heard the call about it being your account and not the consoles. Was setting up ours yesterday and the guide explicitly said if you have a 3DS use the same account details and link them to the WiiU rather than have two different ones. Don't know about cross play but that certain goes for the virtual console purchases.
I really wonder how many of the people posting comments here have actually ever played a game on the WiiU or are judging a book by the cover? I keep hearing that the WiiU is underpowered, compared to what? The WiiU is a more powerful console than either the PS3 or the XBox360 and the numerous graphics comparisons now floating around on the web confirm this. The WiiU premium package is now half the price of the PS4 and XBoxOne and frankly, the WiiU has better games available than either of those machines. The gamepad is marvellous, mostly as an alternate screen for the console, the screen on the gamepad is very large, high resolution and pin sharp and there's no lag between it and the TV at all; plus you can switch the TV off and keep playing if you so desire, very useful if someone else wants to use the TV. Making it a universal remote was also genius.
I think Nintendo are right to be focussing on releasing quality software for their machine, after all, we don't buy these things for the spec sheets, we buy them to run software on! Maybe Sony and Microsoft should be focussing on quality and enjoyable game play rather than their current focus on processing power and rendering ever more detailed murder and killing scenes in games.
Why is it that the old fashioned concept of broadcasting linear channels is being applied to the internet and being kept alive? Netflix have it right, a true on demand service with no adverts. It's a liberation not having adverts being forced down your throat all the time and having an on demand only service forces you to think a little and often the choice is to switch the TV off (or put the fireplace on since Netflix added that). If network bandwidth needs to increase for this to apply widely then so be it, let that happen!
My PC boots in about 4 seconds now Windows 8.1 is installed on it and is usable immediately; Windows 7 didn't come anywhere near close to that on exactly the same hardware. After a few bits of customisation, after login it goes to the desktop, files open in desktop applications and links open in desktop browsers. Learning a few of the mouse gestures makes it more usable too (such a mouse top left, pull the mouse down). Instead of a clunky start screen or the often 'desktop full of icons' I have a start screen containing only the shortcuts I use with most other application win+S away. Shutdown/restart is a single right click away. It creates a cleaner, more productive environment and the OS is considerably faster and chunters much less than Windows 7. All the traditional config snapins/dialogs are still there as they were in Win7.
Actually try 8.1 for a few days after customising it then comment...
@Joe Montana "You don't sell or rent ip addresses of either the v4 or v6 variety, doing so is explicitly against the ripe rules... You can only charge a one off "admin fee" for provisioning the addresses to the customer."
Tell that to BT, they charge a monthly fee for a static IP address.
Since switching to a combination of Netflix and iTunes we're certainly not missing the many hours of adverts or fast forwarding though adverts or being told a recording failed due to the puny small HDD in the sky box being full. Not having advert breaks in shows in one of the best parts of Netflix.
@DropBear "Then again, there's the teeny tiny inconvenience that you CAN'T make an octa-core processor from eight discrete ones and expect it to work as the integrated one - nuisances like "signal propagation time" and such sees to that."
Actually you can, look at the latest high end Xilinx FPGAs; they're composed of multiple die mounted on a silicon interconnect layer that permits many thousands of etched interconnects to be formed between the die. They've done it to reduce costs and increase yields of the high end devices. The same technology could be applied to CPUs as they stand now for the same reasons.
You know, if someone stole you're iphone or any nice glossy phone they could probably lift your finger prints off the case anyway so why bother trying to crack into the security chip in the first place! The cops have been getting finger prints in that way for decades!!! It does also beg one question, how secure is a finger print scanner when the finger prints to unlock the device are probably all over the device in question?
So you've never used a 64 bit CPU then? If you had you'd know what's useful about it. It's not just about address space and I've yet to see a 64 bit CPU that can actually address a 64 bit address space, the physical addressability is often only in the 40+ bit ball park. Native 64 bit general purpose registers, often more general purpose registers, wider internal pathways, wider deeper write combining buffers, etc. If you're code is packed full of pointers you want to re-think it with a more implicit data layout so pointers aren't used so heavily, you'll find the end result runs faster too due to less de-referencing and possibly better data->cache line locality.
It would be identical, it's a standard! Even a single bit difference would cause a cascade failure in the block chain resulting in a garbage decryption. Just because it's encoded using one type of hardware doesn't necessarily mean an identical implementation is operating at the other end if the link.
Sure there are a handful of decent games on tablets but their scope is limited and the download size has to be kept to a minimum. Freemium games are not even games, there are carefully designed annoyance designed to get you to pay for skipping over the game play becuase lets face it, how many of us like games that nag continuously to be picked up every half an hour and need that method of play because when you do pick it up there's only about 30 seconds of game play available, unless you pay...
Death to the freemium format!!!
Long live the dedicated gaming machine!!!
@Robert Long 1:
"Quite the opposite. The public is demanding that their taxation be reduced by collecting the missing billions from multi-nationals using fraudulent companies. Every penny Vodafone avoids is a penny we have to pay in their place."
So where does vodafone get it's money from? Oh yes, that's right, you! So is taxing companies more a good thing? NO, it'll just result in more inflation.
No, each platter density increase, increases the density of the data on the platter... i.e. denser platters being spun at the same speed as less dense platters equal more data being written/read from the denser platters compared the the less dense platters. i.e. fewer but denser platters are faster and more less dense platters. Check the disk data sheets out for confirmation.
This fella wrote an application that was slow and actually did crash. Microsoft were right to reject his application so many times. Yes, the feedback could have been much more helpful but ultimately this was down to coding errors on the devs part. Time for him to be a bit more humble and put his hand up and say this wasn't down to Microsoft being difficult or harsh, it was faulty code! Based on this I'll be avoiding his apps, he only improved it because they kept rejecting it, otherwise I suspect he'd have been cramming more unstable slow features into it.
BTW: Upgraded to Windows 8 pro on the release day (at £24.99 for burn your own ISO it was worth a look). My SSD based laptop now boots in less than 4 seconds from a cold boot, after BIOS post (so about 8 seconds from pressing the power button). So amazingly fast I had to keep doing it to make sure it was real! Win7 boot took about 22 seconds (differed quite a bit from boot to boot). You know, that's faster than my iPad boots from a cold boot (not that I ever do that)!
Modern digital cable signalling standards aren't '1's or '0's at all, they're generally some form of differential signalling and some of them are not even binary (ethernet was ternary last time I looked). Furthermore the clock is encoded with the data, so generally, you either receive the signal entact, or you don't.
Hmmm, I must not be people, I buy Microsoft products because they work well for me. Not like that crap Linux, I like spending time with my family not debugging code because I something to work. I also don't buy Apple because I don't like paying 4x the reasonable cost of the hardware because it looks pretty and to be honest, shiny isn't really that nice looking once it's got very visible usage marks all over it (form over function as ever).
The days of proper channel flicking were killed by digital TV, gone are the days where channels changed instantly; On the old analogue systems the channels changed instantly, on Freeview, Sky digital and Virgin digital the change takes up to a second, on IPTV, buffering...................... It takes the fun out of channel flicking and means you can't scan the channels very quickly at all.
I think your review shows up a limitation in PCMark rather than triple channel memory not providing much benefit over dual; I agree that the average user wouldn't see the benefit but then again the average user isn't going to be building a high spec Nehalem based system and worrying about overclocking are they?
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