The first page of AudioQuest's North America November 2011 pricelist has a beautiful painting of a bunch of wolves staring right at you. A bit on the nose metaphor for AudioQuest's intent to wear you down and consume every last dollar on your carcass.
This company has to be a put-on, right? "Air-Tube Dielectric"?
Other than by using that menu, I mean.
Hey, back in the day, we used TWM and liked it!
Can you guess from that screenshot how you'd go about resizing those windows?
Bet you can't guess!
You do get used to it, though. I've been using Unix since before there was a Linux and I'm not at the point where the 'slap the left command button' instinct is so ingrained in my fingers I find myself doing it on my Mac systems at home.
Hah. I *am* at the point where the instinct is heavily ingrained, I mean to say.
You do get used to it, though. I've been using Unix since before there was a Linux and I'm not at the point where the 'slap the left command button' instinct is so ingrained in my fingers I find myself doing it on my Mac systems at home.
I don't care for the Adwaita theme much, but the hardware accelerated window manager features are very nice indeed, and I'm now pretty happy with Gnome 3.
Still, it would be nice to have some of the customization features back. Gnome Shell is a
Hm, or do they? http://www.java.com/en/about/ seems to suggest that they're not counting Android.
It's hard to believe that "31 times more Java phones ship every year than Apple and Android combined" these days. Maybe a couple of years ago?
Looked at Clojure yet?
They're counting Android in that '3 billion', of course.
Cheeky monkeys.
Sony later re-bought those foundries, actually.
Sony to Buy Back Semiconductor Fab from Toshiba
That doesn't mean those foundries will be used to produce Cell chips, but then the initial sale of those foundries didn't mean that Sony was going to stop using Cell either.
Sony spent a lot on developing Cell, and especially on developing Blu-Ray. They can use both of those technologies in a new console without suffering anything like PS3 development costs.
Sony has been paying for die shrinks of Cell and RSX this entire generation, as they've been lowering the cost of the PS3s they are selling. Cell itself was designed to be a scalable architecture, with support for multiprocessing (i.e., multiple Cells) from the beginning. They could put a 28nm next gen Cell chip with 2 PPEs and 16 SPEs and have something decent, or they could do 4 PPEs and 8 SPEs (for backwards compatibility), or perhaps they could even take handful of Power 7 cores along with the 8 SPEs to get good branchy behavior along with the vector processing of the SPEs for backwards compatibility.
None of that should cost anything like what it cost to develop the first Cell chip.
As far as Blu-Ray, that was *expensive* when the PS3 launched. Those 405nm laser diodes were hard to come by, with really poor yield, and they cost a *lot*. Nowadays, they could put in an 8x BD drive "off the shelf", and get better performance with far, far lower costs than they had to come up with Blu-Ray in the first place.
With such a system, they could bring forward all of the software they developed in coming up with the PS3, as well. PS2 had basically no operating system, so Sony had a lot of software development costs to bring PS3 out. All that is paid for and ready to go if they wanted to go with a next gen Cell and Blu-Ray.
The GPU is going to be something modern and fast from AMD or Nvidia, so that's not development costs they'll have to incur, either. And remember that consoles don't have to worry about driving 4k monitors at higher than 60hz or anything crazy like that. Just a nice, simple 1920x1080 x 60 frames. That's easy for modern GPUs.
All in all, Sony should be able to spend far less on development costs while still fielding a very powerful next gen system. They just have to take advantage of the very significant investments they have already sunk developing PS3.
So when you look back, you discover the Cell was actually intended to be the GPU for the PS3. They thought it would be so good at stream processing that it would do the graphics. I don't know if that was wishful thinking or willful blindness but either way, we all know it didn't work out.
This. Is. Not. True.
Kutaragi wanted Cell to be a far out next generation Emotion Engine style chip, a custom designed extreme vector processing chip. The PS2 also had the Graphics Synthesizer, provided by Toshiba. In the very early stages of PS3 development, Sony was working with Toshiba to design a next generation GPU, but they abandoned that and went with a very nearly off the shelf Nvidia part.
In no event was Cell intended to be the GPU. Clues to this include the fact that Cell has no video output capability, nor any ROPs, or anything like that. Cell was designed to do what Cell is doing in the PS3.
That doesn't mean the RSX has held up its side of the deal.. Nvidia delivered a part to Sony just before they made the transition to unified shaders. ATI got there first with Xenos, and made a very much better GPU than Nvidia could deliver, even a year later. That has hurt the PS3 a lot this entire generation.
But that's *not* because Sony had insane dreams of using Cell as a GPU.
Oh, Michio Kaku is going to be talking about science in Firefly? Guh.
I wish Discovery would have the guts to rename the damn channel, for all the shit they care about the science on it.
As always, The Onion put it best: Science Channel Refuses To Dumb Down Science Any Further
The key elements in human thinking are not numbers but labels of fuzzy sets. -- L. Zadeh
