Posts by lurker 401 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2010
You could accuse the developers of Gnome and Ubuntu's unity of making many of the same mistakes which MS are making. It seems that in their rush to get up-to-speed with mobile devices everyone is forgetting that most of the actual work is still being done on desktop PCs with large TFT screens.
As you say, in Linux there are at least many alternative desktops, however.
Well, they should have 'some' of the speed benefits, because they include a small flash cache which is effectively an internal mini SSD. So frequently used data should be retrieved at near-SSD speeds assuming the drive's firmware correctly anticipates usage.
That being said, I would still go for the real SSD every day of the week.
Not really, I don't need to see it to know that I would rather it was not my sole viable option.
And you may be right about their market demographics. But given their total, dismal lack of success in the touchscreen phone/tablet markets to date, alienating even a small proportion of their potential customer base may not be the smartest move.
My understanding is that actually current mechanical hard drives NEED air, because they rely on the air pressure to support the heads at the required height above the platter. As such I think they would require a pretty major redesign to work in a vacuum as per. the gyroscopes.
I'm not an overclocking fanmyself, but there's no denying that a CPU running at 20% higher MHz can do 20% more calculations in a given time, which is after all the core purpose of a processor.
Whether or not you can actually make use of this depends what you do with your PC. For gaming the bottleneck is almost always the graphics card rather than the CPU, but for more 'workstation' type loads such as rendering or video encoding upping the multiplier will most definitely result in more stuff getting done in the same time.
Not sure what you're on about when you're talking about 'how fast you can feed the CPU', you seem to be suggesting there is some sort of motherboard/bus-related bottleneck which is just plain wrong.
I might be missing it, but I couldn't actually see any graphs, data, or references to studies which actually show a decline in the teenage usage of Facebook? Only the author's personal experience, details growth of teen use of twitter and others - but no actual evidence to support the headline.
Not saying that it isn't happening, just that it would be nice to have some supporting data. Growth of competitor products, which is the main focus of the article, does not necessarily equate to a a reduction in Facebook use - most people I know that use Twitter also use Facebook.
Spot on. No (sensible) person thinks that nature is going to 'die', although it is beyond doubt that humanity is capable of (and has had great success at) 'weakening it' by reducing biodiversity.
It is however quite plausible that we could alter it sufficiently to cause ourselves as a high-in-the-food-chain species major problems.
And that's assuming you don't consider the loss of species at a shocking rate as an innately bad thing - whereas I suspect that most people do consider this bad, and would rather not have to explain to their grandchildren why there are no more tigers, whales or bees.
Sure we may be able to survive in an ecosystem without tigers, whales or bees. But if we can avoid it, surely it's better not to find out.
I'm sorry, I live in the UK. It seems that Amazon don't really want my money, or care enough about me to even bother hinting at when they might get around to remembering that there is a world outside the US of A.
As for the report, fully in agreement with 'Gordon 10', this is the usual mixture random statistics and the bleeding obvious.
"can do 18mph all day"
Only while there's a bloke with what would need to be a very long power cable running along side.
Fill the robot with batteries, and the cheetah with a gazelle, and see which one lasts longer.
My money is on the cheetah winning that particular endurance contest - I suspect that robot requires a lot of juice.
Not without it's flaws, but it's nice to see someone in the industry at least trying to adapt their business model in some way, instead of just bribing politicians or litigating against teenagers.
I wonder if we'll have to sit through the frustrating FBI "we're going to punish you for being a paying customer" trailers on the 'cloud' versions too?
As someone naturally inclined towards linux, I don't like the walled gardens created by either Apple or Microsoft.
But at least when Microsoft build the walls they don't tell you that living inside the newly created garden will make you a unique, creative snowflake of a person, brimming with imagination and individuality. It's the insidious doublethink marketing of Apple which some find offensive. Myself included, as you may have gathered.
"Hence, the 240GB capacity, which, when the drive is formatted, drops even further to 224GB"
Actually the capacity doesn't drop when formatted, rather you change from using the hard disk drive manufacturer's standard decimal-based measurement of 1 GB = 10 to the power 9 bytes, to using the more widely used (at least, by filesystems) binary-based measurement of 1GB as 1024 to the power 3.
So, a company which earns revenue by providing compatibility services for old browsers is providing 'data' which says that everywhere is still using 80% IE6 in the environment. Why exactly would anyone trust them on that? They are hardly going to say "nobody uses IE6 anymore, don't buy our product!", are they?
Quite likely 80% of their customers still have IE6. But then that's pretty much stating the obvious, given the nature of their business.
Unconvinced.
RAID-0 works the same for SSDs as HDDs. You're right that internally SSDs already work in a manner similar to RAID0 by simultaneously reading/writing to NAND, but there's nothing stopping a RAID controller running reading/writing data to three SSDs simultaneously and thereby getting close to triple the seq. read and write rates.
You could of course get similar results by having triple the number of NAND chips in a single drive and an internal controller handling them, but they simply wouldn't fit in a standard form-factor drive at the moment, and you're looking at a very custom SSD there, much more expensive than using standard SSDs and a raid controller.
Sequential read/writes are to some extent just epeen numbers anyway really, the major benefit is the near-zero latency and the massive increase in IOPs vs a mechanical drive.
Guessing that iPad cost a fair bit more than £150 to £200 though, right?
Strictly, I guess that if your chauffeur drives you to work in a gold-plated Bentley it's probably not "necessary", no. Bot those for those with more constrained resources a toddler-centric and reasonably affordable "real" tablet is actually quite a good option compared to the 'vtech' type things which are very limited and can only run their own, expensive, software.
Except that won't work for tablets in the way it did for PCs, because their killer App is and always has been office, and nobody really gives a damn about office for tablets, which are largely media consumption devices and facetwatter clients.
I agree that they will try though, I just think that this time they'll fail.
"Apple has never dominated smartphone planned buying to this extent"
Last time I checked, you need to actually be in the lead to be "dominating".
Given that even those carefully cherry-picked graphs (US only, showing only "Recent Smartphone Acquirers) show more sales of Android than iOS, I'd say that was a pretty biased view of the situation.
Yahoo was not the first (remember Excite?) and was never a particularly good search engine, it was more of a directory really, and it certainly never held anything like the dominant position now occupied by 'big G'.
My recollection is that Alta Vista was the best choice generally until Google popped up and crushed the competition. Ironically, Alta Vista is now just a dessicated appendage of the increasingly irrelevant Yahoo.
The whole point is to make them as cheap as possible.
If they'd had to design and manufacture injection molded cases then they'd be more than £23.
There will be enclosures on offer not long after they start selling I suspect, based on discussions people have been having over on the raspberry pi forums.
At a pinch, just make something out of lego :).
People already have Ice Cream Sandwich running on Kindle Fires in the US.
And Amazon basically came out and said they don't really care about people rooting the device. So I don't think they need to release a more open firmware of their own, they will keep shipping the 'shop Amazon' versions to the general public and techy types will be able to root them if they want. I know I will be, if they finally get around to releasing it at a reasonable price on this side of the pond...
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