You don't think Oracle would allow something to be designed which didn't maximize license revenue, do you?
Why, yes, we'll sell you this CPU for $800
Oracle is all about maximizing license revenues.
One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison. It costs a lot of money to maintain private islands and yachts.
And besides, nobody is forcing you to buy it, hey - there are cars that cost millions, are you complaining about that too? And why would you? How does this product or its cost affect you? Isn't its ownership entirely up to you? Surely nobody would need a car like that?
And when the fuck did I say anybody was forcing me to own it or your choice to have one impacted me? I don't give an elephants arse what you buy for your own machine. I think that such stuff exists is cool, but the overwhelming majority of people will never need it.
I said "wow, you wacky people and your crazy stuff", followed by "this is what I have and is entirely suited for my needs".
I'm entirely aware there are legitimate reasons for all of this stuff. But knowing I don't need it, nonetheless I continue to be wowed by these crazy high end stuff.
Get over your fucking self, and read what I wrote.
I'm not saying there aren't reasons for this kind of stuff. I'm saying for those of us who don't need it and know we don't need it, we can get the performance we want with entirely different hardware.
Because when I rip a CD to MP3, and the same fucking CPU stays pegged until that is done, I can pretty much tell that processor affinity in the scheduler means that, yes, for all intents and purpose, while it is running that task gets a mostly dedicated CPU. Which allows everything else I'm doing to keep running smoothly.
If you truly need the performance, buy any damned thing you can afford and justify.
So in other words, like many, many things sold under the guise of being healthful,
It's pure marketing, and not necessarily true.
As a general rule, I usually treat most marketing claims as if they're either lies, or a creative interpretation of the truth.
Because they probably are.
It'd be interesting to know what Sharp plans for the power input. I would suspect the market starts to shrink dramatically for input voltages over 48V because pretty much all battery arrays are 48V or lower and AFAIK (which isn't very far) only the newest solar installs run at high DC voltages.
I'd guess that this would be a 24-48V system (highest common DC voltage in battery arrays) and lets say you have 6 hours runtime after dark (pure battery load), you're burning 4000 watt hours of power or 80+ amps @ 48V and 160+ amps at 24v.
The daily use PowerWall is only 7kw and I'd guess a summer of that kind of use would put a serious dent in its lifespan.
The only thing I can think of is that the Sharp DC A/C is designed for sucking direct from larger solar panel installs during the sunny days and really isn't practical to use for night cooling without some kind of other prime energy source (generator, grid, etc).
That is not a DC air conditioner. Note that it comes with a 2kw inverter. It's just a regular 220V AC air conditioner. Also, that whole package is sketchy. The stated BTUs don't match throughout the page (title and description says one thing, specs say another). It comes with 4 solar panels, but there are absolutely no specs on them - not even the wattage. Anyway, that package is solar panels, batteries, huge inverter and a regular air conditioner. The efficiency would have to be very low.
Those would be 8 lousy AMD cores which probably cannot stand to an i5... seeing how the cheapest Intel 8 core chip is 650+$
Yes, they're AMD, no, they're not "lousy". (And, I guess technically it's 4 cores with hyperthreading, I'm not sure)
They are entirely adequate for my needs, are not called upon to run the most computationally intense stuff on the planet
There will always be people who truly do need the absolute most speed achievable by technology. You are probably one of them.
But for many of us, we can achieve some pretty damned fine performance by doing this stuff with cheaper hardware. Most people for most tasks will never be truly CPU bound
For me, those 'lousy' AMD 8 cores are a big pile of awesome. Because it means when I do run a long-running task which wants some CPU time, nothing else really notices.
You wacky gamers
That's getting close to what I paid for the CPU, motherboard, and RAM in my 8-core 16GB machine.
Of course, my video card was $40 because I don't need crazy graphics.
For many software patents, I'd agree with you.
The problem with video compression is that many of the patents involved do represent real research, the expensive kind. They aren't one-click shopping patents. They're fundamentally pushing forward the state of the art. The people who do that work are expensive and need a lot of time, so, there has to be some way to pay for their efforts. Google's approach of subsidising all research via search ads is perhaps not as robust as one might hope for, even though it's convenient at the moment.
I don't know if DASH specifically is complex enough to deserve patent protection, but if you look at the massive efforts that go into the development of codecs like h.264, h.265 etc, the picture gets more complex. It's not pharmaceutical level research budgets but it's probably the closest the software world gets.
Is this not just a change in power input but a substantially more energy efficient air conditioner, too?
I've seen small A/C systems for cars and marine applications that can run off DC power, but they're usually pretty small which helps cut the overall power consumption. In marine applications they also have the advantage of being able to use sea water to move the heat versus a fan and coils in open air.
One of Sharp's smallest split system units has 8500 BTU of cooling with an EER of 13 which is roughly 650 watts. That's about 14 amps @ 48v, 27 @ 24, and a battery sucking 54 amps at 12v (run with welding cable).
8500 BTU might cool a room reasonably well, but its not going to provide whole-house cooling, either, and would require a pretty large battery array to run off battery. It might make sense for some kind of supplemental cooling setup where it ran direct off solar panels.
No, the issue is that it's open source and carriers customise the components. Android had a working online update infrastructure since day one, actually since before Apple did. But that's no use when the first thing OEMs do is repoint those mechanisms at their own servers and make huge changes to the code.
The comparisons with Linux are especially strange. Guess what? Upstreams who develop software for Linux and see it get repackaged by distributors are in exactly the same boat as Google. They see their software get packaged up, distributed, bugs possibly introduced and then upgrades may or may not make it to users. Yeah yeah, Debian say they backport security fixes. That's great when it's a popular package and a one liner. When the security fix in question is a major architectural upgrade, like adding a sandbox to an app, then users just get left behind on old versions without the upgrades because that's the "stable" version.
And of course many users are on Linux distros that stop being supported pretty quick. Then you're in the same boat as Android: old versions don't get updates.
Change for changes sake is not a valid reason for it.
"What?!?! No! No one EVER made them like this!!"
This is the mentality that's made modern software easier to use for very simple tasks at the expense of making it a lot harder to do complex tasks (or simple tasks with different options). Today's answer to 'the customer doesn't know what he wants' is to strip out all the advanced settings and flexibility and give the user a fisher price turd. Fuck that.
That's true, especially in GUI land. Another example is an insane customer who read about some bullshit paradigm on the net and wants his project to use it, even though it makes no sense, will cost more, and kill performance.
Kinda hard to do at this point since, as you say, they're all the same. Finding a job where you can 'do what you love' is also bullshit. Employers want to turn creative endeavors into life sucking factory work that can be done by migrants for pennies. I suspect we're already suffering from it considering all the stupidly designed software coming from the big players. I remember a time where software from the giants might have had bugs, and the occasional design blunder, but otherwise worked well enough for the most part. A lot of today's software is HARDER to use than it was in 1998. That's retarded.
Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith. - Paul Tillich, German theologian and historian
