Posts by coppice 22 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Mar 2010
I find it amusing that the government thinks a billion pounds over 10 years represents a meaningful investment in semiconductor manufacturing. Zero makes sense. Give up and avoid waste. 10 billion over a couple of years makes sense. Have a real go at it. 1 billion over 10 years is just money down the drain. 1 billion over 10 years to foster more ARM like companies could make sense, but if manufacturing is your goal it's a bad joke.
The public information for our village says fast internet has been available for a long time. If you go to something like comparethemarket.com it start out saying fast internet is available, and only at the final stage of signing up to a particular ISP do they say, "er, whoops, its only 1Mbps where you live". The reality is we are hoping to get 17Mbps next month. I wonder how many places like ours are in the 96% listed as having fast internet?
I had 1G up and down fibre, which could run steadily at 1G both ways all day long, for 6 years. This service was provided by G.PON equipment. Now I've moved to the UK, and I get 1Mbps up/500kbps down on a good day. Welcome to the third world.
G.PON allows for fast balanced up and down speeds. Its a matter of how it is configured. Over 6 years of use the Alcatel G.PON boxes in our 2 apartments hiccuped 2 or 3 times, and needed a power cycle. Those are the interruptions we had. G.PON seems like a very solid system.
"What dish did is wrong but I have to wonder what other oversights other bidders have been allowed."
What Dish did was right. They are a business, and should be maximising their returns. They are expected to play legal, not play nice. The fault is entirely with people who set rules which would so obviously be gamed. Its almost like they set things up for their pals in industry to be able to legally profit like this, don't you think?
I think they are referring to controlled vertical descent. Decending too fast into your own wake is a pretty bad idea. There are two solutions to faster descent - move around as you descend, so you keep moving out of your wake, or plummet. One tends to have a better outcome than the other.
"Some reptiles, such as I thing Crocodiles, can hold their breath for amazingly long periods, so is it really unthinkable that she would have that attribute?"
Reptiles can hold their breath for a long time as they are cold blooded creatures, and don't consume huge amounts of oxygen making heat. Their shared breath would not have sustained the human very long. The plot line has a hole the size of..... er..... well..... a typical plot line.
I have never been to the linked-in site, but I get spammed daily by bogus invitations to join from people I have never heard of. This has been going on since the time linked-in started. Why would anyone who considers themselves professional want to join such a cowboy outfit?
While Apple dominates the MP3 player market, nobody dominated in mini-disc players. Almost every Japanese consumer electronics maker made mini-disc players by the shed-load in their heyday. If Sony made 22m, the total number must have been impressively large. On the other hand, their heyday was only about a 5 year window at the end of the 90s. I'm amazed to find Sony didn't end production several years ago.
I wonder what percentage of mini-disc players sold in Asia? I assume is was a pretty high figure.
Satisfaction with a phone doesn't come from speed. It comes from having a reasonably low number of annoying qualities, and these are in the details.
My Nexus S, for example, gets 1 out of 10 from me when I'm being generous. It currently sits in a draw at home. I thought I would be safe from the usual Samsung bugginess with a phone where they don't control the software, but I was wrong. Its ringer is so quiet you only hear incoming calls in a quiet room. Its touch screen is buggy, so if you do hear it ring you can't swipe and answer. You have to mess around with the side button to get the touch panel back into a working state, so you can them swipe and answer a call. A phone that can't do ordinary voice calls well has limited value, even if you bought it for all the fancy stuff.
HTC are far from perfect, but their phones generally give you far fewer urges to take a hammer to them.
If you bothered looking you would see that they haven't opened up G.722. They actually use *my* G.722 code. What they have opened up and given patent grants on is iSAC and a bunch of well proven audio enhancement and echo cancellation stuff they got from GIPS. G.722 and G.711 are just part of the total bundle.
This is great news. Nobody has really produced open source versions of these functions that are world class. The speex library has some of the elements, but they are far from polished, and have specific problems. This could save a lot of work.
@Eddie Edwards,
The SpursEngine certainly is easy to come by, in the form of the card from LeadTek. Its reasonably priced (about $160 retail) and readily available in stores. However, it seems they are just pushing it as a short term video transcoding accelerator, with no planned roadmap.
It took them a while to get a Windows SDK out. It took them over a year to make Linux drivers available. The Linux drivers are binary only for a couple of specific RHEL Linux kernels, which are not up to date ones. LeadTek told me they have no intention to make 64 bit Linux drivers available at all. This doesn't sound like a product line with a bright future.
@MinionZero
Your comparison is only reasonable for a very small number of tasks. A lot of tasks can extract a large percentage of the available FLOPS from a SpursEngine. Only a very few tasks have been able to use more than a tiny percentage of the available FLOPS on GPUs. Fermi is supposed to change that somewhat, but we will still have to wait and see. Right now many applications run substantially faster when they are not offloaded to the GPU.
The LeadTek card is half the price you quoted. Are you being ripped off? :-\
Steve
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