Ridiculous article, down to the "X.264" misnomer. Nobody made a squeal over the MPEG-1 Layer III "bomb", the MPEG-2 Part 2 "bomb" or the MPEG-4 ASP "bomb", all covered by the same license, but now, all of the sudden, the dangers of the H.264 "bomb" are looming over society!
The only businesses that don't accept card/chip in Sweden today are the "turk shops" - the shady little corner shops that sell old, dry pick'n'mix candy and stale bread.
As a Swede, I can't recall the last time I used cash in a normal commercial context - that is, not dealing directly with another private citizen - since I turned 18 and got my debit card 13 years ago. I can't recall the last time I used the magnetic strip either. It's all chip for me, and it's free of charge barring the 25 SEK (~2.5 EUR) per month the bank asks me for my complete account setup.
Btw., I can't stop thinking about your comment regarding iTunes, "stopped being vaguely usable around 10.4". I don't mean to pick an argument, but I really wonder what you mean by that. As far as playing music it is just as good (meaning perfectly fine) now as it was back in 10.3 when I began using OS X.
iTunes sure has grown since, and does a lot more than playing music today, but it still plays music painlessly, just as it did 7 years ago.
I have two: my ITMS account - which is also used for iCloud/AppStore etc. - and my ADC account. Not sure what else is needed, because from 7 years of being an OS X user nothing else has sprung up.
Yes, and anyone who has ever sat down infront of an LCD flatscreen watching their favorite movie on DVD/BD using gold-plated $200 HDMI cable instead of $4.99 Walmart HDMI cable see the extra sharpness immediately. This is why non-gold plated non-OFC HDMI cables are down to $4.99 a piece from their original $49.99 during introduction.
Many years of building audio equipment (in particular analog synthesizers), and equally many years of being meticulously anal with getting the best components for my circuits, reading specifications of down to every single op-amp I've ever employed, is why I think so.
I am not saying that there aren't any DACs on the planet that can't handle five millionths of a volt, but I am saying that five millionths of a volt isn't surviving through the particular DACs and the rest of the electronics used in your PC/living room hi-fi audio equipment.
You weren't just believing things. The difference between 44khz and 96khz sample rate is very noticable even with mediocre audio equipment. It's an overstatement to refer to the situation as a "hi-fi case". 16/24 bits however makes no difference at all except on the size of the material.
Same goes for 16/24 bit, however, the difference between 16 and 24 bit is actually audible
No, the difference is not audible at all. At 16 bits of depth on a normal low-level audio signal (~0.3 volts), we're talking about less than 0.000005 volts per amplitude step. This difference gets lost in the THD already at the DAC in your audio output stage. Then it gets lost again in the amplifier. And again in the cable to your speakers or headphones. And then it gets lost again in the speaker elements. What survives in a normal low-level audio signal is about 14 bits of resolution.
44100 is not a bad sampling rate, but it necessitates very sharp aliasing filters, which are audibly bad. A bit more headroom is well needed there.
44.1khz IS a bad sampling rate for accurately reproducing anything except a triangle wave or square wave above 5khz.
There is no point with going over 16 bits, but there is definitely a point with going over 44.1khz, as it allows you to actually reproduce waveforms more accurately than 44.1khz. Try reproducing f.e. a sinewave accurately over 4-5khz with a sample rate of just 44.1khz - it cannot be done, and at this point we haven't even taken into account the issue of varying slew-rate characteristics of the thousands or so different DAC output stages in use in personal audio equipment.
44.1khz gives too much aliasing distortion, but 192khz is quite the overkill. Ideally, digital audio could sit on 16 bits of depth sampled at 96khz.
It effectively solves the problem of random carpet-bombing, but obviously not the problem of planned attacks. No, it never struck me as being done solely to draw up statistics of the subject, as it has been done a million times already.
This is American news. Speeds like these, for this and smaller price tags, are not the least unheard of in Europe or Asia. I'm glad to see that some American ISPs dare to move things forward.
It should be noted that this is true only to some parts of the world, and more specifically, true only to some nationalities and cultures of immigrants. The situation with immigrants' and lacking work ethics is grave in most of Europe. Grave.
This might just be too little, too late. Flickr has been in bad need of a makeover for 5-6 years now. Sites like f.e. 500px.com - with its unfailing focus on photographers and their photography - ran past Flickr long ago.
That would be Pineview and Cedar Trail. I am not sure if the CPU portion of these cores have the same power consumption as the N270; their TDP includes the consumption of the on-die GPU as well. As far as computational power goes, they are just marginally better performers than the Diamondville core.
How can you produce such a wall of text over a little misnomer? You obviously understood that I am referring to the current incarnation of the ARMv7 ISA, a.k.a the Cortex family.
No I got your point exactly. But Diamondville, Pineview et al. represents the current available state of the art in mobile x86 cores from Intel. Medfield isn't released yet, but when it shows up I would be pleased seeing it pitted against the state of the art ARM cores.
This isn't just about computational performance. It's just as much about power consumption. Diamondville sits at about 2.5 watts per core, while the A9 sits at under 300 mW per core, totalling to some orders of magnitude better performance per watt. Should we say that the comparison is unfair because of this as well? We could maintain that stance up until the point where we compare two CPUs with identical processing power and power consumption, but somehow that would defeat the purpose of comparing at all. And for the record, they could just as well have brought the Pineview and Cedar Trail cores into the picture, as fresh as the A9, which might've been more "fair", but very little still would've changed in computational performance.
These tests are really about showing exactly how much you can get out of under a watt of power when opting out of x86.
While I am not entirely surprised, this still makes me so happy to see, and makes me even more positive about a more efficient future of computing through the ARM core and its ISA. That Atom chip was even clocked 33% higher, and if my memory serves me right the Atom Diamondville also has a higher IPC than the current ARMv7.