Why Doesn�t Windows Phone 7 Support Dual Core CPUs?

When some one says their phone has a dual-core processor, that sounds very impressive. It means one side of the processor can be doing one thing while the other side is doing another. It's very advantageous to multitasking scenarios, provided the operating system is designed to handle the two processors well enough to take full advantage of them.

Windows Phone 7 is not designed to take full advantage of multiple processors or multi-threaded applications at this time. Dual core processors take up a lot more electricity than single core processors, and Microsoft has designed Windows Phone 7 to be very fast and fluid on lowly single core, single Ghz processors so that you'll have better battery life and won't feel as much of a need for more powerful processors.

When we asked a Microsoft representative about why Windows Phone 7 Mango didn't support dual core processors, he said that they want to do multiple cores in a big way and that they weren't ready just yet. I?m guessing what he meant could mean a move to the rumored MinWin kernel which will support scaling to any number of processors since it will be the same kernel as Windows 8 and Windows 8 Server. Since the Windows Phone 7 apps are all written using the same tools used to create Windows 8 apps, it will be easier to change architectures AND bring huge performance benefits to all apps globally without the need for specific app optimizations for specific processors. With Windows 8, it sounds like some current Windows Phone 7 apps can be modified to work on multi-processor systems with just one line of code. All of the new Metro style apps being developed for Windows 8 will also support hardware GPU acceleration with no extra effort from the developers. That means with Windows 8 you'll already have the potential for huge amounts of processing power if you want it. Microsoft just needs to bring that kind of scalability over to small smartphone devices along with a user interface that's appropriate for a phone.

Do you think Microsoft will bring the Windows 8 kernel and multi-processor support to Windows Phone 8 "Apollo" or are multi-core CPUs unnecessary on Windows Phone?

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Your Service Experience Doesn't Have to Be a Nightmare!

There seems to be an alarming amount of consumers that are generally unhappy with their service experiences in automobile dealerships, chain type retail facilities and private repair facilities. There are many reasons for this disappointment and many people that contribute to these results. You have the selling dealer or used car lot, the servicing dealer or service facility, the manufacturer who built the product and the consumer who uses the product. We have identified some of the most common causes through experiences and research. We'll take a look at these causes in three different categories; these three categories can be explained as one or all of the causes of ninety percent of customer's disappointment with their service experiences. They are, in no particular order as follows;

Expectations: Your expectations of your automobile may be higher than what the manufacturer has designed for its products.

Inability: It is possible, that the servicing facility you have chosen doesn't have the ability to properly service your automobile.

Communication: There may be some difficulty expressing your concerns about your automobile.

So who is at fault? Everyone involved would be the easy answer, but let's look at the problem from the individual categories and see how they contribute to the consumer's disappointment.

First you have the manufacturer that has advertised and touted it's product to seemingly perform like no other car you have ever seen. You remember the ads of your car being driven to the extremes in any climate doing the impossible, giving you the buyer the false pretense that this car will perform like that for anyone. Not true, you may have missed the disclaimer that the car was being operated by a professional stunt driver or that the events are for illustration purposes only, etc. etc. This is how your expectations of your service experience will not be met by the servicing facility, simply put, they cannot make your car perform in a way that it was not designed for.

You can be servicing your car in a place that was well qualified to service and repair your older car, but it may seem that the technology in your new car is just over the top for your service facility. Your new car is most likely an upgrade from your older car and the facility that is servicing your repair needs may not have adjusted to technology. Technology in today's cars is rapidly becoming overwhelming to some independent repair facilities and some chain store repair facilities, so it is no surprise that when you present your new car for servicing, they may not be equipped with the training and equipment to properly service your car. You will need to identify this before investing in repairs that your facility is unqualified to perform. For instance: If your repair facility is charging you for diagnostic fees relevant to the amount of time spent on the car, you may be being charged for the time necessary for the technician to become familiar with your cars systems. It doesn't seem fair for a consumer to pay for the facilities training of their technicians.

If you're not able to communicate your concerns of your cars behavior to the servicing facility, than you may be wasting their time as well as yours. If the people writing your concerns at your service facility don't have a clear understanding of what you expect of them, in terms of problems with your car, they may find noises or problems that are totally unrelated to your concerns or worse they may not find any problems that relate to your concerns at all. This problem can be the most disappointing because you could actually end up authorizing a repair that does nothing to address your concern. Or you may be experiencing an intermittent condition that only appears during certain driving conditions that the service facility is unaware of.

If you expect a successful service experience you will need to identify the possible problems that can prevent your success. To understand what you will have to do to overcome these problems, you must be able to identify the differences between your service expectations versus your cars specifications. Make sure that your service facility is qualified and equipped to diagnose and repair your car efficiently. And you will need to learn to communicate the details of your concerns to your servicing facility.

When your dealing with a warranty issue and the servicing dealer is unable to provide satisfactory results, you may want to step back and re-examine your approach on how to get the results you desire. You can certainly get better results by keeping a good relationship with the servicing dealer. You can also enlist the assistance of the manufacturer when all else fails. The manufacturer is the one entity that has the most to gain by satisfying their consumers who use their products because, it has been proven that satisfied consumers sell products better than any other form of advertising.

Sometimes your best efforts and attempts to help the servicing facility to solve your concerns still yield little results. When the manufacturer is involved and you are still not seeing the results you require for your satisfaction your state laws may lead you to what's called "Lemon Law" or the manufacturer can allow the case to be decided by an independent arbitrator. An arbitrator will examine all of the service history, review all repair attempts to date and gather information from the manufacturer about the specifications of the car. At this time your education about your responsibilities will have to be polished because the way that you have gone about the repair attempts will also be weighed on the decision to reimburse or even buy back the automobile from you with little to no cost to the consumer. Manufacturers have chosen this sort of remedy to help solve habitual problem cars with cooperative consumers. This process helps to alleviate the consumers concerns in a timely fashion and to eliminate a long and costly court battle. Check your state laws about your warranty coverage as this option is usually only available while the car is under the manufacturer's original warranty, not an extended warranty policy.

When you're having difficulty achieving results for your repair or service needs and your car is not under warranty, you will learn that the same procedures and practices will help you to achieve the results you're looking for. And you will need to keep track of your costs and methods used to achieve satisfactory results for specific repair attempts and you will need to learn how your repair orders accuracy will play a vital role for your case if it has to go so far as your States Office of Consumer Affairs. There are some very specific guidelines that your repair facility should be following to ensure their customers satisfaction with their services. Your service facility should be qualified in training and equipment necessary to service your car and they should be verifying your concerns.

We have identified the need for an education regarding your service experiences, you will learn how the skills in the later chapters can benefit you when dealing with any repair facility and any repair problem. Whether your car is under warranty by the manufacturer or if it's covered by an extended warranty policy. It could be a recurring problem that you just can't seem to get solved or, the simplest of annoying noises that your service facility just can't seem to identify or repair to your satisfaction.

Learn your rights as a consumer so you don't end up paying twice for the same repair attempt. Know the difference's between a car that operates at specifications and your own expectations of your car. Find out what's written in the owner's manual that came with your car. Take note of your concerns and learn how to communicate these notes to your service facility so everybody is on the same page when trying to guarantee "Your Next Successful Service Experience".

This article in its entirety is chapter 1 of our up-coming release "Your Next Successful Service Experience" and it promises to deliver on all of these points for your successful service experiences.

Find this and many helpful tips at [http://www.creativeautomobileinformation.com] or visit our publishers storefront at http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=1640008

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What it means if Yahoo Hadoop spinoff doesn’t do distribution

It looks like all the speculation about how Yahoo’s Hadoop spinoff company, Hortonworks, will affect Cloudera and other companies providing Hadoop-based products might have been overblown. During a phone call earlier this week, Hortonworks CEO Eric Baldeschwieler told me the company is still figuring out its strategy around offering a Hadoop distribution, which could be good news for presumed competitors such as Cloudera.

The ambivalence appears tied to the company’s narrow focus on improving Apache Hadoop and making it the go-to distribution. Baldeschwieler said that Hortonworks’ core business model will be around offering support and services, as well as helping drive Apache to “bridge the gap between what [Hadoop] is and what it can be.” The latter goal, of course, means working hard to improve the core Apache Hadoop distribution to make it more scalable, reliable and generally flexible.

If Hortonworks doesn’t offer a distribution, it might be because it doesn’t want to waste resources. It would have to build its own distribution and then work within Apache to get any improvements built into that code, resulting in a doubling up of effort and a somewhat unnatural split of allegiances given Hortonworks’ professed support for Apache Hadoop. This is the same issue Yahoo was trying to avoid earlier this year when it discontinued its own distribution and recommited all its efforts into Apache Hadoop. It looks now like that move was just setting the stage for the Hortonworks launch.

Already, Baldeschwieler said, a number of key features from Yahoo are slated to be included in upcoming Apache Hadoop releases. These features include a new MapReduce engine, federated storage for HDFS and a major improvement for how HBase interacts with HDFS. What all the work means, he explained, is that Apache Hadoop will be more stable, more scalable and more dynamic. In fact, he said, with the next scheduled release, developers will be able to use alternative processing frameworks beside Hadoop MapReduce.

Good news for some, bad for others

A Hortonworks focused entirely on Apache could be good news for Cloudera. In that case, it’s still very much in its current position of integrating and hardening the suite of Apache Hadoop products into its own open source distribution, then selling services and management software on top of it. The big difference will be that Apache Hadoop will look a lot more appealing because it will have Hortonworks providing expert service. But Cloudera doesn’t really have to change its story.

A service-focused Hortonworks might not be so good for companies such as MapR, which are pushing proprietary or semi-proprietary Hadoop distributions. The fewer distributions and the more focused they are around Apache Hadoop, the less appealing outliers might look to users concerned about being locked into their vendor. Baldeschwieler says he thinks the market will be big enough for value-added distributions like what MapR offers, but noted that Apache Hadoop has already proven itself within large enterprise and will continue to get better.

For example, he explained, Apache has been working hard to integrate some of the code that Facebook has introduced from its Hadoop deployment. At the time it announced its Hadoop distributions in May, EMC said its Community edition is based on Facebook’s code, but now Baldeschwieler has heard EMC is reconsidering that decision and might support the core Apache code instead. That hardly constitutes hard evidence, but it’s noteworthy because EMC is integrating MapR’s proprietary storage technology in its Enterprise edition release.

“What we don’t want to see happen,” Baldeschwieler said, “is the Hadoop market start to look like the Unix market in the ‘80s.” The more support there is around Apache Hadoop, he explained, the less chance there is for a Unix-like lost decade of competing distributions before Linux came around in the ’90s and became the center of the non-Windows universe. He thinks Apache Hadoop is and should be the Linux of big data.

Whatever path Hortonworks takes, though, Baldeschwieler thinks all the action around Hadoop will make it very difficult for alternative technologies, such as Microsoft Dryad and LexisNexis’s HPCC Systems to catch. “I think they’ve got their work cut out for them if they want to compete with the Hadoop community,” he said. Because even if the companies involved are at odds, they’re still a very big community.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user miheco.

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