4.5 watts is enough for a low speed 2.5" hard drive. it might run some of the new "green" 3.5's or a high speed 2.5" 7200 rpm, but you're pushing the limit. and you've just tapped the entire power budget for your USB, no room for any other peripherals.
The spec does not support 1 amp. If you want to talk about manufacturers going off on their own to extend the spec in a proprietary fashion, I think you lose the usefulness of the standard USB interconnect. A good example is the Macbook Air cdrom, which works with nothing except the usb on the Macbook Air.
USB is 5v. USB2.0 maxes out at "5" units of 100mA, with USB3.0 providing a staggering "6" units of 150mA. Thats
Looking at the numbers, the whole notion that USB could ever become the dominant standard for power seems laughable to me. USB may be a convenient means of providing a trickle charge, but with batteries getting considerably higher C rates we need 10x beefier power supplies than what USB will ever be capable of.
Power Over Ethernet+ (PoE+) is targetting 24w: thats no quickcharge, but unlike USB its least enough to run a small computer.
This is really endemic of the difficulty virtual worlds are going to have gaining recognition. To an outsider, its a case of "so what," but to the virtual world people inhabit and dedicate themselves to, its as if the colonial English empire suffered a Babylonian confusion of language and was no longer able to talk or work together. All powers great and small are rushing to fill the power vaccuum left in their wake, to claim the profitable and rich bounds of space this alliance once defended.
The case is more complex than that; EVE, unlike every other program out there, is a contested world with rich rewards for those holding space. By disbanding the alliance, these people no longer hold space. The space and its wealth of resources are up for grabs and there are suddenly dozens of major parties joining the frey to claim it. Alliances who ship off to the freshly claimable Delve seeking riches fortune and fame are subject to attacks at their homelands.
EVE had been at a status quo for nearly 3 years: there was an established Northern Coallition, the southern RedSwarm Faction, and BoB. Each group has made attacks, but none have succeeded in storming the others home or ruining the other. Disbanding BoB has destabilized a perfect balance, and instilled a sense of adventure in a lot of people who'd found the universe growing boring and stale.
In closing, I can only lament how unfortunate it is that this titanic event will go unnoticed and unappreciated for so long. If this were an article about someone beating the newest boss in WoW I'd throw up my hands in disgust, but theres something fundamentally different about the limited and player driven world of EVE: the events in it are shared between all the players of EVE, and this great confusion has thrown a very interesting twist into what had become a rather stalemated game. I hope more games follow EVEs pattern of making rich and authentic universes where actions have consequences and great powers and alliances rise and fall, but I think it will be a long long time before these worlds come to domainate & the populous feels their tremors as readily as they feel the throws of power in the real world.
I cant stand it because its too attention grabbing; it overwhelms the tab-bar. I'd installed this userscript on a handful of my most used systems to revert the last blue/grey favicon to the older blue/white icon, but now that they've made it even more ugly, I've been compulsively installing the old favicon on every single system I touch.
On a decent number of systems I've been using a UserScript (aka greasemonkey script) that gives me the original white/blue G, but with this new even more hideous favicon I now compulsively install the script on every computer I touch: the new one is such an offensive eye-sore in the tab-bar.
Fantastic link, thanks.
Given that ExpressCard already has both PCIe and USB connectors, and that the spec you linked states,
Both the SuperSpeed USB and the PCIe specifications, therefore, are derived from the basic
OSI layered architecture. Both protocols look very similar in terms of layer architecture, and their physical layers share many common functions,
as well as similar concepts for other layers.
it'll be interesting to see if the confluence comes to a head and the two specs gain some kind of genuine interoperability. Afaik the current ExpressCard implementation works by having two sets of connectors; if USB 3.0 really is PCIe dervied, it would be great to collapse it to using the same PCIe interfaces.
The other two outstanding questions I have are:
1) how much the new architecture will alleviate latency?
2) is the time quantization better than the old 1ms standard?
Both of these prevent USB from being usable in real time contexts, contrary to evidence of the massive number of craptacular web cams sold.
The current obsession with consoles is monetization. Unless your game is purely multiplayer focused (where you have broad capabilities to prevent piracy) people will pirate your game. Secondly, if you do make it onto one of the commercial venues, you get exposure to a sizable audience. The console market has a higher barrier to entry, but if you can cross that threshold you're rewarded with a large & paying market (which doesnt presume success; you still have to make a compelling game). Having to pass acceptance committees of XBLA or PS3 or Wii does not infringe on this notion of "sovereignty" over ones game you seem to engender to indie developers... at least I presume as much. I rather doubt these acceptance committees put games through a full battery of gameplay critiques; my expectation is they check for game stability, whether the game is entirely crap, a reasonable test of playability, and last for some level of appropriateness. I'd be interested to hear some negative stories of people trying to get games put on these online services, as it seems like most of the big gaming companies are working hard to attract small developers.
Thats a little extreme. Monitors overhead and split keyboards require less effort.
AMD desperately needs to realize the synergy between the graphics and cpu factions. They've had plans for gpu-integrated cpus for a while and they must deliver in a good way. If they do, they'll be in a fantastic spot.
I'm confident AMD will hold up fine against NVidia. OpenCL should level the playing field that NVidia has dominated in GPGPU: AMD has >2x the double-precision fp performance; with a common spec for using it people hopefully will. AMD should do fine in the graphics space; they already have quite a lead in the mid tier with extremely cheap 4850's.
I'm really worried that AMD's given up on ATI's Imageon IP. The embedded world is adopting graphics hardware at an extrordinary pace; AMD bought themselves into one of the most important markets in the world and I'm worried they're going to squander it.
Intel's answer was to do what everyone else is doing: buy Imagation's PowerVR technology.
Yes, his cunning plan was to let oems continue to ship absolutely craptacular Intel integrated video (as opposed to the mildly craptacular Intel integrated?) with stripped down Vistas, causing an uproar 18 months down the road, inciting Windows 7 to revert to software rendering skipping the video card altogether, thereby inflating the need for powerful CPUs. What a diabolical plan!
"And remember: Evil will always prevail, because Good is dumb." -- Spaceballs
