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My only worry is with the AMD/ATi video, but it's been a long time since I had been burned by the ATi 7500 All-in-Wonder...

That stopped being a worry a few years back. I've been running Radeon graphcs exclusively and continuously now for years. I switched from fglrx to exclusively Xorg drivers a few years back, at first with some noticeable loss of functionality and performance, but now... no worries, it is way past good enough. BTW, that is not just normal desktop loads but a lot of serious OpenGL hacking. For a coulple of years I put up with jaggies... no antialiasing support (though I hacked some myself with buffer accumulation, only applicable to my own code.) Now the Xorg drivers have MSAA antialising for all recent hardware and MLAA up to Evergreen with the last few generations apparently just needing testing. (MLAA is full screen smoothing just of detectable edges, slightly crappier but way faster than multisampling.)

By way of illustration:

lspci | grep Radeon
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Park [Mobility Radeon HD 5430]
01:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Cedar HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 5400/6300 Series]

$ uptime
  18:17:28 up 169 days, 4:44, 25 users, load average: 0.62, 1.18, 1.40

The 25 users are all me, last reboot was a power failure that outlasted my UPS. I guess you could call that stable :) I know, I know, 5430, the machine beside it has a much better card. But the 5430 is surprisingly good and - most important to me - completely, utterly silent. And I can push a million triangles per frame through it at video rates, not bad for an ancient card that set me back all of $50.

I haven't tried many 3D games, but I can report that Civ V works just fine with Xorg drivers, the only serious problem being the risk of getting permantly sucked into the game and losing touch with real life.

Agreed 100% about CUDA and OpenMP! Already invented a new multi-core string searching algorithm and having a load of fun playing around with my GTX Titan combing CUDA + OpenMP. You can even do printf() from the GPU. :-)

The most _painless_ way to learn CUDA is to install CUDA on a Linux (Ubuntu) box or Windows box.
https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads

On Linux, at the command line fire up 'nsight' open the CUDA SDK samples and start exploring! And by exploring I mean single-stepping through the code. The NSight IDE is pretty darn good considering it is free.

Another really good doc is the CUDA C Programming Guide.
http://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-c-programming-guide/

Oh and don't pay attention to the Intel Propaganda - there are numerous inaccuracies:
Debunking the 100X GPU vs CPU Myth: An Evaluation of Throughput Computing on CPU and GPU
http://pcl.intel-research.net/publications/isca319-lee.pdf

Actually, even if you can distinguish, is no way to prevent any host of the Internet from sending traffic to you. If you gather enough upstream bandwidth, you can clog any pipe you want. Some research works have proposed ways to amend this, for example this.

There is no "game" to make sure everyone is breaking the law so they can rubberstamp harrassment. Take off your tin foil hat.

Is that the best you can do? Conspiracies are the norm, not the exception. That you believe different only proves that you are typically naive and also that you do not own a dictionary.

*checks tinfoil hat placement*

Just gonna leave this here... http://berkeley.intel-research.net/arahimi/helmet/

http://berkeley.intel-research.net/arahimi/helmet/

~Bottom line: tin foil hats amplify microwave radiation, not block it.

Just so you know.

Have you seen that study that suggests that tinfoil hats actually attenuate radio signals? I'll just leave this out here.

Are you sure? http://berkeley.intel-research.net/arahimi/helmet/

I have a really awesome aluminum hat that protects me from the meters as well as other government mind control efforts. Everyone should have one.
http://zapatopi.net/afdb/

Fail, fail.

I wear a foil hat all the time. It seems to disable the mind reading abilities of the satellites that the United States government uses.

That's really the only thing you need to worry about. I'm thinking of having foil implanted on the inside of my skull for a more permanent solution. I just hope the person performing the surgery isn't a reptile. He or she or it might kill me on the operating table. You know how They are. They are always plotting against us, and they have been slithering around in the highest offices for so long...

You fool, you've fallen right into their trap! They've fed you the line that a foil hat will block the government's mind reading satellites, but this is just what they want you to think. Wake up! The truth is out there, but you have to do your own research. Trust no one!

Here's what the government doesn't want you to see: researchers from MIT have proven that foil hats actually amplify the government's mind control rays.

Do tinfoil hats cause cancer?

Most certainly!

If your brain overheats, it increases the risk of cancer and all kinds of degenerative diseases. On top of that, studies show that a tinfoil hat might actually work as a parabolic dish and increase radiation.

At the very least, wear an ice-pack and don't look at your wifi router while wearing a tinfoil hat

No some MIT students did a study of various tin foil hats and discovered that they may actually make the problem worse.

Thanks to an elaborate government conspiracy, it's difficult to find actual tinfoil these days. Most people fall into the trap of making aluminum foil hats instead. Of course, aluminum foil hats have been scientifically proven to amplify, rather than block, the government's mind control rays.

Who's laughing now?

I am

Intel (the company) is interested in real robotics. Yes, it may ultimately be a way to sell more processors, but they do serious research into robotics. See this page for example, or this page. They have also been heavily involved in image processing (for robotics and other things) for many years, for example with OpenCV.

Who knows what the marketing department is really interested in besides making Intel look cool.

The dude behind this (Rob Ennals) worked for SCO after training in a lab funded by Microsoft. http://berkeley.intel-research.net/rennals/

You mean like nvidia making nvidia drivers for linux?

Revisiting IP Multicast provides an alternate multicast protocol whereby the source precomputes the AS-level distribution tree and encodes it in the packet, which makes determining the fanout (and thus the cost to the ISP) simple. If multicast ever gets enabled, it will look more like this than any of the original proposals (e.g. Deering's DVMRP or a rendezvous based method).

Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) are scalable peer-to-peer systems that support exact match lookups. This paper describes the construction and use of a Prefix Hash Tree (PHT) -- a distributed data structure that supports range queries over DHTs. PHTs use the hash-table interface of DHTs to construct a search tree that is efficient (insertions/lookups take O(log log |D|) DHT lookups, where D is the data domain being indexed) and robust (the failure of any given node in the search tree does not affect the availability of data stored at other nodes in the PHT).

have to be the biggest story in storage in 2004. We're talking a new product category that has been so successful, it is now multiplatform and multi-vendor and has spawned a related line of flash-based products (iShuffle).

1.8" drives, followed by flash ram eating into the hard drive market, there's progress in 2004.

Combined with PC virtualization (VMware, UML, Virtuozzo), it's just a matter of app integration before we start using widespread standby/resume that saves our virtual machines to iPod-scale media.

Compared to Internet Suspend/Resume, this would be more secure.

http://info.pittsburgh.intel-research.net/project/ isr/
I think their work has been reported on /. a while ago.

So you might not see it soon, but there are already research projects out there that are looking at exactly what you mention.

For example, look at Intel's Diamond project. I am sure others will point you to more related work.

I think a better link would have been to the Intel Research Paper. This paper describes an intergration of VMware, the Coda Distributed File System and a USB storage dongle.

One of the scenarios describes a guy who uses his device to check if a group strangers are familiar to eachother. How does this work? Does his device send a query to tell ask them if they know eachother? Would it be easy for the strangers in the room to send an untrue response to such a query?

To judge from their sample scenarios they're building a doohickey that tells you whether you a) have seen people before or else b) feel socially awkward in a given situation - but only if everyone else is wearing the same doohickey.

Intel must have a lot of cash to burn. They're paying these people to reinvent what the human brain already does better than anything else in order to solve the first problem. For the second problem, the fancy social type events they're hoping to hock this to have already had a well-functioning solution in place for some time now.

As in Ghostbusters (except at the end) this is a classic case of don't cross the beams. French-style social theory and American-style sociology do make a tasty pie together. And throwing McLuhan into it makes things even worse. They could've got the same results by hiring a bunch of popular tech journalists from ~15 years ago

To judge from their sample scenarios they're building a doohickey that tells you whether you a) have seen people before or else b) feel socially awkward in a given situation - but only if everyone else is wearing the same doohickey.

Intel must have a lot of cash to burn. They're paying these people to reinvent what the human brain already does better than anything else in order to solve the first problem. For the second problem, the fancy social type events they're hoping to hock this to have already had a well-functioning solution in place for some time now.

As in Ghostbusters (except at the end) this is a classic case of don't cross the beams. French-style social theory and American-style sociology do make a tasty pie together. And throwing McLuhan into it makes things even worse. They could've got the same results by hiring a bunch of popular tech journalists from ~15 years ago

To judge from their sample scenarios they're building a doohickey that tells you whether you a) have seen people before or else b) feel socially awkward in a given situation - but only if everyone else is wearing the same doohickey.

Intel must have a lot of cash to burn. They're paying these people to reinvent what the human brain already does better than anything else in order to solve the first problem. For the second problem, the fancy social type events they're hoping to hock this to have already had a well-functioning solution in place for some time now.

As in Ghostbusters (except at the end) this is a classic case of don't cross the beams. French-style social theory and American-style sociology do make a tasty pie together. And throwing McLuhan into it makes things even worse. They could've got the same results by hiring a bunch of popular tech journalists from ~15 years ago

... they don't know there's no planets between Earth and Mars Intel@Berkeley

From the Intel at Berkeley site, the page about e-mailing Mars. Tt says planets getting in the way is one problem. As far as I know, no planets come between Earth and Mars!

Internet suspend/resume at Intel Research in pittsburgh is another: paper HERE. They also had an article in scientific america awhile back.

One big advantage of managing with VM's is a complete system is just like a file, and thus can be copied and migrated easily. For example, if you have a production server with some faulty hardware, you can migrate the machine to a new host by simply copying the VM files, then repair the hardware, and copy it back.

Of course the efficiency is degraded somewhat do to the VM overhead, but the main argument is cycles are cheap, peopel are expensive. It's cheaper to by a P4 2.4 GHZ for $500 than buy a new sysadmin for $60,000. If you are performance-limited, just replicate instead of buying some fancy hardware (or look into better VM technology like VMware ESX server).

Intel has always held a very conservative line regarding research into far-out new technologies. The vast majority of Intel's research money goes into fab/mount/production technologies.

For stuff like nano-tubes and quantum computing, Intel usually helps fund academia to let them take the high-risk endeavors. And then take the benefits as they are produced.

I'm not sure what Intel's current plan is now, but it seems that they're putting more R&D dollars into the mobile/ubiquitous computing market, to try and branch out their chip options, instead of being forever racing against Moore's Law.

Intel-research.net, for some info on Intel and partnerships with academia on this type of research.

So just how does Coda support High Availability? While yes, that are its features and it does support server replication, disconnected operation, low bandwith connections, etc, it is technically STILL in developement and can thus have crashes and buggy behavior in many instances. I know.... I have worked with Coda, developed software (CodaVis) for it and am at Carnegie Mellon right now.

Now that said, Coda is GREAT! IT supports a number of features that no other Open FS does and it works pretty well for the research purposes I need it for (look up Internet Suspend/Resume here).

What I think this person is really aiming at is something that is being actively pursued in the research arena in colleges all over the US. For example, Carnegie Mellon together with Intel is pursuing a project called Internet Suspend and Resume. To quote:

...the user is able to suspend execution on a workstation in New York and resume execution on another workstation in San Francisco without carrying any hardware. This OS-independent capability is realized through the combination of virtual machine technology and distributed file systems.