Comment I'm sure I'm not the only one... (Score 0) 233
... on the edge of my seat, waiting to find out what this wondrous new device is called.
Will it be the iPad Mini? The iPod Maxi? The iTouch Macro Pad? Or what???
... on the edge of my seat, waiting to find out what this wondrous new device is called.
Will it be the iPad Mini? The iPod Maxi? The iTouch Macro Pad? Or what???
The wikipedia article is wrong. Most efuses are actually metal/Si antifuses or plain metal fuses These are not reversible. Flash MCUs may use flash bits as efuse bits, and occationally you se other floating gate designs used as efuses.
Strange... this IEEE paper describes eFuses as synonymous with laser-cut fuses, which are also used for processor binning, disabling cores, serial numbers, etc.
In any case, that also means they're one-time-programmable... which is the most significant difference from how they're described in the Wikipedia article. But it means that they're "programmable" via laser, not electrically.
Clearly there's no agreement on the terminology for these things.
You will never see 'tiny amounts of flash' embedded in CMOS logic as embedded flash requires a very significant one-off expense in Si area to enable.
You sure about that? The 2005 article that I linked, while short on details and clearly pushing a product, describes a process that's apparently economical for embedding 32-4096 bits of flash into a CMOS process.
Furthermore floating gate designs have an unknown state after manufacture so the device must have a method to clear the fuse in test, which implies it may be cleared later (It might not be easy though)
Sure, there's got to be a way to do it. I know from playing with PIC microcontrollers that most of these have a way to "permanently" disable read/write access to the onboard flash program memory. There are ways to unlock some of them, but they ain't pretty. Presumably the manufacturer has an undocumented way to do it electrically.
According to the wikipedia article, it can be tripped in a non-volatile fashion, meaning that power-cycling won't fix it. But it can also be reset electronically if an appropriate electronic interface is provided.
Does that remind you of anything? As far as I can tell, it's just marketing-speak for one bit (literally) of embedded flash memory.
While I can imagine some interesting and useful applications for flash embedded in CMOS logic, this seems like a technology that's ripe for abuse by lockdown-happy vendors. It's annoying enough to brick a computer by flashing the wrong BIOS, or to brick a router by flashing the wrong firmware, but at least in those cases the flash memory is on a separate chip. Either the chip is socketed (removable), or there are usually test points or a JTAG interface, allowing the flash to be rewritten to a correct state.
But with tiny amounts of flash deeply embedded into CMOS logic, there's no way to alter or even to find the non-volatile memory. Yech...
Whoops... I did know that. Thanks for the correction!
LG is Korean too. Panasonic, Sharp, and Sanyo are Japanese. Sony Ericsson is a Japanese-Swedish joint venture. HTC is Taiwanese. Any other major Asian phone manufacturers that I'm missing?
Agreed on the ugliness. There's a reason that phones that look like this always suck:
What's the point of making it slide out at all??? When you're using it, it's bigger, uglier, and more awkward than a regular non-sliding Slate phone. When you're fumbling for it in your pocket, it's roughly squarish, so you never know which way is up. Humans like non-square aspect ratios (photos, display screens, book pages) for a reason... what a dumb design.
Also, what does this phone do that the way-less-hyped messaging phones from Japanese makers like Samsung can't do?
I don't see Microsoft making a decent phone anytime soon because it keeps trying to emulate BlackBerry, the iPhone, Android and WebOS and failing at all of them. Microsoft will never get the reliability of BlackBerry OS, Microsoft can never reach the cult-like status of Apple, it can't just decide not to include a major feature like Flash, Multitasking, copy/paste, etc. until a future software update and expect people to buy it, Microsoft can never reach the level of appeal of the Google cloud services nor the openness of a Linux-based OS, and Microsoft will try, but fail to reach the level of ease of use of WebOS just like they tried to copy OS X and failed.
Precisely. There's no reason for anyone to want a phone OS built on the Microsoft philosophy. Their phone OSes have been bloated, buggy, with unexciting UIs, and with a tendency to be rolled out before they were really ready. In the mobile OS market, Microsoft has no head-start or brand recognition like they've had in the PC market for decades. Sure, there have been Windows Mobile phones for yeaaaaars, mostly aimed at the business market, but none of them have been exciting enough for business users to want to use at home or tell their kids about.
I have a 2-year-old Motorola Q smartphone which runs the Windows Mobile 5.0 OS. This phone is practically a microcosm of what's wrong with Microsoft's mobile offerings. It looks great on the outside, like a thinner, more angular, "edgier" Blackberry. The QWERTY keyboard, which stubbornly refuses to wear out, is better than any I have ever used on a phone. I get people asking me about it all the time, and this is a piece of hardware that's been out for 4 years.
The internal specs aren't bad for its age, either: CDMA/EV-DO, Bluetooth 2.0, 1.3 megapixel camera, 312 MHz XScale (ARM) processor, MiniSD card slot, very bright QVGA screen, good sound quality. So far, so good, right?
The problem is the OS: it's static and half-open and half-locked-down and Microsoft-centric in every imaginable way. Almost everything you could want to do is possible, but almost everything is also a huge pain in the ass. Some examples:
By far the worst thing about the OS is that it's totally static. After launch, there were only a few minor updates, and nothing at all since 2007. WTF? iPhones keep getting new OS updates (even the original model), Android phones have been upgraded from 1.5 to 1.6 to 2.1 and soon 2.2, but as soon as Microsoft releases an OS it's practically set in stone. There's no way to upgrade the Moto Q to Windows Mobile 6+, though the hardware could probably handle it.
Microsoft's big problems in the mobile arena are fragmentation and lack of follow-through. If you poke around WIndows Mobile forums, you'll find massive confusion between different versions of the OS (5, 6, 6.1, etc.), different variants (WM, Smartphone, Windows CE, etc.), and different development frameworks (.NET?
Overall, I get the picture that Microsoft is frantic about mobile. They have no idea how to regain a foothold, so they keep throwing out new stuff, and hoping it sticks. When they don't get the desired result quickly, like with the Kin, they abandon it straightaway. Somehow, Microsoft seems to realize that this strategy is entirely part of the problem rather than the solution. They seem to have absolutely no coherent picture of what a Microsoft mobile OS should be. Apple has a vision of tightly-integrated, tightly-controlled, user-friendly devices with lots of eye candy from a single manufacturer. Google has a vision of an open source OS, easily to upgrade, easy to develop for, easy to customize, with devices from many vendors but a core of killer apps from Google (Search, Maps, Voice, Contacts, Picasa, etc.).
If I were in charge of mobile OS development at Microsoft, here's what I'd do: I'd stop worrying about our rapidly-eroding market share, and stop looking for ways to plug the leaks. Instead, I'd take things back to the drawing board to develop a completely new OS totally unconnected to the desktop products, but instead integrated with some of Microsoft's better online offerings (Hotmail, Bing... anything else that doesn't totally suck?). I'd give it as long as it takes to come up with a good product. If Microsoft's mobile market share falls to zero before they get a new good OS out the door... so be it. Their current offerings in the mobile space are of absolutely zero advantage, and in fact a detriment, to building future market share. I don't know how they can't see that.
Hey, nice! I'm really glad to see that feature included in HTML5.
Now I can't wait until Costco's photo printing website supports it or zip file upload... they have incredibly good and fast and cheap photo printing, but with a sucky website that only works properly with Internet Explorer. >:-(
"As long as Flash and its cousins Flex and Shockwave remain the simplest tools for producing drop-dead gorgeous Websites, they'll keep their place on the Internet."
Who cares about "drop-dead gorgeous"? Can someone show me a site using Flash for its major content, that isn't totally f@#($ing God-awful?
Major uses of Flash today, as I see them:
Anything else? As soon as HTML5 is well-supported, I can't see any good use of Flash besides games, and even there I imagine that HTML5 will make inroads.
other than Sun hardware being cheap... perhaps it was a bargain compared to other commercial Unix vendors back in the 90s, but by the time it became plausible to choose between Linux-on-x86 and Solaris-on-Sun, Sun was really way more expensive.
Try the 80s too. You date yourself by glazing over this time period and giving an anecdote from 2001.
Is this supposed to be a criticism of me? I was too young and my family didn't own a computer until 1992.
Sun *was* the defacto desktop and server platform for affordable UNIX for a very very long time, when Linux was just a glimmer in Linus' eye, and while the project was gaining any sort of enterprise stability and seriousness... which was a period of more than 15 years. Not something to be just written off as a blip in history.
I gotta disagree with the 15 year timespan. Linux 0.01 came out in 1991, and my medium-sized company was using it for serious work by 2001.
Budding hacker me was playing with it by 1995, and running it exclusively for all my browsing, homework, etc. by 2000.
This just in: "Vendor lock-in makes it harder to switch to a competitor's products!"
Wow!!!! Story at 10!!!
Sun actually had really good software that did things that Linux can still only dream of.
Like what? (Serious question.)
I remember in 2001-2002, Solaris was better at multitasking, and CDE was marginally better than GNOME as a GUI (but they both sucked and GNOME actually got better).
Of course I worked a lot with their High End stuff... and it sounds like you worked with their low end stuff. Having a big difference in usefulness of the software to the hardware.
I don't know the server side of things much, but I know that Sun does have some very fault-tolerant and massively parallel server hardware.
But in terms of bread-and-butter workstations? Inertia and slightly more reliable hardware (at a big price premium) were the only things keeping developers on Solaris by 2001, as far as I could tell.
I was using Sun workstations for a long time. Their hardware was decent and cheap. As for the software, the best thing about it was that you could remove most of the Sun crap and replace it with GNU software. And when the Linux kernel was reasonably stable and we got cheap PC hardware, it was time to ditch the Sun hardware too. That's the history of Sun and Sun software R&D in a nutshell (except for Java, which is another sad story).
I agree with this assessment, other than Sun hardware being cheap... perhaps it was a bargain compared to other commercial Unix vendors back in the 90s, but by the time it became plausible to choose between Linux-on-x86 and Solaris-on-Sun, Sun was really way more expensive.
Here's my historical perspective...
In 2001-2002, I worked at a small company making speech synthesis software. Our products had been developed on Sun workstations, and most of us developers used them still. They were very reliable once set up correctly, and they had nice, big, clear CRT monitors, nice optical mice, nice keyboards with extra programmable function keys, and fast SCSI hard drives. They ran the CDE GUI desktop, which was ugly and clunky, but worked out-of-the-box. We relied on the proprietary XWave software for audio waveform analysis, but otherwise used GNU tools almost exclusively.
Developers, especially the young-uns like myself, were rapidly acquiring enthusiasm for Linux. I was 19 and had been using Linux for years and got a lot of my older coworkers enthused, although I liked Solaris too.
Solaris still had a few key advantages:
Linux was building up a lot of advantages though, and fast:
Basically, Linux was fixing its deficiencies (audio, reliability, GUI) a lot faster than Sun was fixing theirs. Performance comparison was exacerbated by Sun's hardware: it was expensive and hard to upgrade, so we resisted upgrading it, so it started to seem slower and slower and even less appealing.
Sun had built its business on reliable hardware coupled with a highly-regarded, reliable UNIX OS that only had to support a small range of hardware (not unlike Apple's Mac model). They seem to have been completely blindsided by Linux's ability to support an incredible range of commodity hardware, and they seemed utterly ignorant of the fact that their proprietary development tools sucked, and everyone wanted to use GNU tools.
Thank you! Good to know
Maybe the footnote is just some cover-your-ass legal BS, with the photos tacitly intended to identify the vehicle?
So much ignorance in this post I'm not sure where to start...
Why can't we just move on and apply the sweet R&D money on the SSDs?
Have you compared the R&D budgets of the semiconductor and magnetic storage industries recently?
I guess that the "classic" hard drives will reach some sort of physical limit sometime in the (not so distant) future.
Hard drives employing perpendicular recording and granular magnetic media have astonishingly low costs per bit, and are quite a robust design.
Here's what holds them back: To make magnetic bits smaller and smaller without killing the signal-to-noise ratio, you have to make individual magnetic grains smaller. They get more and more thermally unstable, and you don't want bits flipping randomly. The way to fix this is to make the media more and more anisotropic, which means it takes a larger and larger magnetic field to write them. But there are no suitable materials that can produce fields bigger than about 2.45 T. (A slightly outdated but excellent summary of this issue by Seagate: pdf)
All that sounds intimidating, but there are very serious challenges facing further miniaturization of Flash memory as well. The bigger R&D budget helps, of course, but HDDs have a big head start and some cost and structural advantages.
Why won't the big boys start to work hard on the SSDs?
What... Intel? Samsung? Micron? SanDisk? They already are!
As for the magnetic storage companies, others have already pointed out that magnetic and flash drives are extremely different designs and there is very little low-level overlap. I have personally worked in both industries.
It's almost as reading a headline like this "New awesome floppies will be released in a new 10 MB size! - 'USB flash disks are overrated and expensive, nothing beats a good old floppy disk' a spokesperson for a floppy disk manufacturer said"
Um... what? More like "new awesome floppies will be released in 10 TB size."
Magnetic drives are still waaaay ahead of flash drives in terms of cost-per-GB. You can get a 1 TB drive for $70... that's about 7/GB, still 20× cheaper than flash which typically runs $1.50-$2/GB in bulk.
Also, optimal controller and filesystem design for Flash hasn't really been worked out like it has been for magnetic drives. The "big boys" are working on these issues though, as are lots of smart OS hackers.
It's waaay premature to announce the demise of magnetic drives. They're still very cost-effective for 2.5" and 3.5" form factors.
Hmmm... any more details on this?
One small step for man, one giant stumble for mankind.
