Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:You Get What You Pay For (Score 1) 114

Plus the screen wasn't a touch screen! .

Sounds like his was an older and even Cheaper model. My 10" screen did not require a stylus and was definitely a capacitive touch screen. Besides being low resolution, something like 1024x800, the main issue I had with the screen was related to the poor quality of the charger. According to these guys:
http://www.arcfn.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab-apple-is.html
It's a big problem with counterfeit and low quality chargers

Comment Re:You Get What You Pay For (Score 1) 114

Notice username was also the same. Right after I posted on Ars, I saw it made Slashdot. Copy/Paste. It's China; that's how we do it here. Since I've actually spent some time playing with one of these Allwiner based tablets, I thought I'd share my experience. Sorry for the lack of originality on the repost.

Comment You Get What You Pay For (Score 2) 114

I live in Shenzhen, and here in China you can pick up these Allwiner based tablets for about $100-$125 USD. My buddy couldn't resist a bargain and bought one a few weeks ago. I was surprised how well it worked out of the box. Decent performance browsing heavy pages, and the all the 3D games I could throw at it ran smoothly. That Allwiner blows the Rasberry’s CPU out of the water.

Initially, I was tempted to get one. Then I started noticing the problems. The accelerometer hadn't been properly calibrated or mounted at the factory, meaning some racing games you have to hold the device at a 20 degree angle to drive straight. When the battery started getting low, I plugged it in to its proprietary charger only to find out the touch screen doesn't work when charging.

Then about a week later my buddy said the screen popped out after he left it charging overnight. Turns out the battery had swollen up. All these issue point to shoddy cheap components and lack of testing and QC. With only $100 to spend, suggest a used Kindle or Nexus 7.

Comment Re:Dealing with Management (Score 1) 878

Recreational drugs serve more as a device to cope with Management than they do for any other aspects of developing code.

This reminds me of one of my roommates in college, who never took or needed to take any drugs. He was top of our class, dual majoring in Astrophysics and Quantum Mechanics at an Ivy League school. One day I saw him lying in his bed throwing torn papers in the air, while laughing like something out of American Beauty. When I asked what's up, he continued and said something about the elegant beauty of the laws that govern our universe. By the end of the semester, episodes like this didn't even faze me.

Back in the stone ages or dark ages, I’m not sure this kind of mental state was good for survival, let alone his ancestor's reproductive opportunities.

Comment MIPS was doing it 12 years ago (Score 1) 116

MIPS and ARM are very similar Instruction Set Architectures. While I've only taking a cursory look at the new ARM64, it doesn't seem as clean as MIPS64. So with the same level of optimization, MIPS should be able to get a better performance per watt and higher IPC. SiByte had working MIPS64 CPUs 12 years ago. MIPS used to dominate the TOP500, but recently Intel has left them in the dust. So I don't see how Samsung is going to do any better with ARM.

Then again, if x86 can become the IPC leader, any ISA has a shot. Samsung is going to need a few Jim Keller's of their own to pull this feat off.

Comment Re:Look at who they appoint to the SCOTUS. (Score 4, Insightful) 1576

Mod Up.

We gained nothing today..

Colorado and Washington passed marijuana legalization for recreational use. We gained a little more freedom in some states.
I don’t even smoke pot or tobacco. But It's clear that prohibition does nothing but make criminals rich and overcrowd our jails with non-violent citizens.

Comment 0.005$ is not enough (Score 5, Insightful) 38

Big daring projects like the Apollo program and Mars Curiosity, is the reason why I love NASA so much. It's one of the few Federal programs I would actually like to see expanded. They do so much with so little. I hope whoever wins this next election finds a way to expand their budget.

“We tend to hear much more about the splendors returned than the ships that brought them or the shipwrights. It has always been that way. Even those history books enamored of the voyages of Christopher Columbus do not tell much about the builders of the Nina the Pinta and the Santa Maria or about the principle of the caravel. These spacecraft their designers builders navigators and controllers are examples of what science and engineering set free for well-defined peaceful purposes can accomplish. Those scientists and engineers should be role models for an America seeking excellence and international competitiveness. They should be on our stamps.” Carl Sagan,

Comment Final Cut Pro X (Score 3, Insightful) 252

Apple's dug themselves into a hole in this one. They have an app that suffers from feature creep and is a resource hog. The only way to fix both issues is a complete code rewrite and interface redesign. Best case they will successful in both areas, but people will still complain that they don't like the new UI. Worse case, they just pull a "Final Cut Pro X" and still have a memory/CPU hog that does less than before. Hopefully they chose the former, and are just taking their time to polish it up.

Comment Re:CRT's (Score 1) 358

Every heard of 2880×1800 retina displays? Like to play your games at 60FPS? Well, as someone rocking one on a 15" monitor with a mid-low end GPU, I frequently run into this issue under Linux. And let me tell you the current system is terrible. Mac OS can do it, Windows can do it, If Linux wants to get competitive, they need to fix this issue. Just a few days ago, I fired up Tux Racer for a friend to play. I think I had to reboot after that fiasco.

I don't care how it's resolved, different TTY or _NET_WM_STATE_FULLSCREEN. Both sound reasonable. But I want my apps to be able to change resolution, even if it breaks your perfect paradigm.

Slashdot Top Deals

The nation that controls magnetism controls the universe. -- Chester Gould/Dick Tracy

Working...