Slashdot Mirror
Small Supercomputer, XPC, Notebook, and Gaming Thingy
kidgenius, SpinnerBait, and anonymous readers wrote in with four fun tales of small devices doing cool things. IBM has built a supercomputer the size of a TV, using 1000 PPC-based CPUs. Shuttle
recently began shipping their
AMD Athlon 64 based XPC, the size of a breadbox. Sony has a new
0.4" thick VAIO notebook (scroll down). And a European company is about to introduce the
Gametrac,
a handheld WinCE gaming gadget with 3D, Bluetooth, SMS, MP3 playback, MPEG4 video playback, camera, and -- interestingly -- GPS tracking. "The system allows the parents to establish 'fences,' which, when entered by the child, cause a notification to be sent to the parents in the form of either an SMS message or an email." Hmmm.
The iCube was WAY smaller then this new IBM system. And Apple wouldn't lie about the iCube being a super computer now would they?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
"Alarm is sent to parents when device is carried outside of prescribed zone." Uh, won't that simply teach children to set the device down before wandering off?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
once again the battery is the limiting factor -- but this time not for uptime, but because it is 0.8" thick. :P
it's one thing to be pissed about a government tracking you, but if parents want to track their children, so be it. don't make it sound so big brotherly.
however, i don't think it would be good parenting (though, really.. who am i to judge) to use tracking like this as a first, second, or even third option. a little trust goes a long way.
I have parents. I have a love of techno gadgets. I have a real problem, however, with my parents using my techno gadget to tell where I am. Sometimes people want privacy, especialy when they're playing games.
When life gives you crap, Make Crapade.
Sluggy Freelance.
Remember the sub-notebook? It was a little bigger than a handheld but with the software of a laptop. I really thought that was going to take off but it never did.
Damn, that thing looks like a Zodiac.
BTW, Fedex says they are delivering mine this evening.
Now, we do the dance of joy! Hup! Ho! Hay!
Thank God. For a second I was a little scared. I mean, my parents need me to program their VCR to stop flashing 12. My dad thought his shift key was broken, when in reality his entire keyboard wasn't working. My guess is that the kids are going to be able to either change the "fence", disable it, make it so it doesn't notify the parents, or simply not take it with them.
Just goes to show, digital rights management isn't the only easy thing to crack, organic rights management is too.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
"The system allows the parents to establish 'fences,' which, when entered by the child, cause a notification to be sent to the parents in the form of either an SMS message or an email."
WTF? Now we even need tin foil hats for our frickin' Game Boys?
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
How is it that adults can never seem to remember just how elusive they were themselves, as children
Here's a hint to the parents - they'll leave it at home if it gets them into trouble
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
"Why don't you just shove a leash up my ass."
John Spartan, you have been charged 1 credit for violation of the verbal morality code.
The system allows the parents to establish 'fences,' which, when entered by the child, cause a notification to be sent to the parents in the form of either an SMS message or an email.
When I can shock the little tykes who violate the perimeter, they just might see some of my money.
that laptop is pretty dang sweet sweet, with one glaring exception- the placement of the keyboard. laptop designers learned a long time ago that putting the keyboard up against the front edge is no good for using the computer on your lap. it's better to have it toward the back so that your wrists have a place to rest.
could use a bigger HD, too, for my tastes...
where are the WMD's
What a fraud Bush is
Sir, are you suggesting that this and all similar WinCE handhelds are WMDs, or that microsoft software is the cause of all the world's misery?
I concur!
They should really make a SuperTV, give it the capabilities of a computer and sell it for lots of money. With people like my grandmother who must have the latest gizmos but don't know how to use them it would really sell. And the TV could be the size of a computer. Whats the difference you ask? Well.... I'll get back to you.
It should be interesting to see where this system will rank. The 22nd top 500 list will be announced this week at the Supercomputer conference. Further details on the top 500 list can be found at the Top 500 list.
Do you know how useless that tidbit of information is? Televisons come in many different sizes, from the very small to the very large. What's the size in standard 19 inch units?
So, let me get this straight - I buy one of those things for myself, set up a fence at some appropriate distance from my house, and it'll automatically notify my house when I'm at a certain distance away on my way home?
So, for example, a PC at home could switch on lights/heating/whatever, or my gf would know I'm nearly home (so she can start dinner, or knows that I'll be there soon to take our daughter off her hands and/or will be able to go out soon, whatever).
It's official. Most of you are morons.
1000 CPUs in a little box?
That thing could cause a China Syndrome if not cooled correctly.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Please think of the children, and purchase one immediately!
Signed,
Cindy Lou Anderson, High Screamer
There's more to the story than the simple Reuters blurb that the CNN/Money article above shows ... internetnews.com has got a more in-depth article about this.
... but I thought that wasn't gonna happen ...?
Also interesting to note is that IBM says this is the same processors that will be in next-gen consoles from Nintendo and Sony that are due out next year
topreacher@signature.slashdot.org 1% rm -rf sig
"Little joey was last seen at the bus stop, but his Gametrac somehow made it to the basement of St Paul's Church down the street."
Now everything goes smaller.
BUT... Where the f* is my pocket watch with 22" screen??? @#$@$@
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
I'm generally against this type of thing, but any parent who has been enjoying some late afternoon intercourse on the living room floor only to be surprised by their child coming home early from a friends house will see this for the godsend it truly is.
And no, that's not a hypothetical situation above.
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
Anyone who's used a GPS knows you have to work with it for it to work. If you walk around with a GPS in your pocket, well, it won't get a signal and you won't be able to track anything.
So you'll have to teach litte Johnny to walk around outdoors with a clear view of the sky for it to work.
That's the next desktop right there. Back in 1981 or so, IBM came out with a big, clunky supercomputer called the PC. It was so freaking expensive, but so useful. Now, the desktop machines we have kill that old thing... in 20 years, we'll all have at least 1000 chips on our desks thanks to technology like this.
stuff |
When I was growing up, my family had a (somewhat tacky) large breadbox, wooden, with a roll-top like you see on old desks. It was pretty durable, but it was also a whole lot bigger (in terms of total volume) than the average desktop tower.
Needless to say I'm not too impressed at the breadbox-sized computer.
Could we at least use relatively standardized-ish sized objects for our impossibly vague comparisons??
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
I could use the tracking so that next time I lose my phone, at least I'll know who's house it's at, so I can rip *their* house apart looking for it.
Kid Trackers
"International Business Machines Corp. said Friday that it has built a supercomputer the size of a television based on microchip technology to be used in gaming consoles due out next year."
This is FANTASTIC! I wonder how much a gaming console that has one of those 1000-processor supercomputers inside it will cost?
It is also the technology that will be the foundation of the next generation of gaming consoles from Nintendo Co. and Sony Corp., which IBM is working on, he said.
So is Sony & Nintendo's usage of this chip the reason why Microsoft is switching away from Intel? With such vast speed improvements and the portability of Linux, could we see a paradigm shift in computer hardware soon?
Ruby on Rails Screencast
Insightful? Funny how THE ARTICLE SAYS THE EXACT SAME GODDAMN THING!!!!!!!!!!!!
Interestingly, while the PXG-X505's internals are modern, it's design is something of a throwback. Like laptops of yore, the Sony's keyboard is mounted at the front of the base rather than the rear.
Mercury (www.mc.com) crams about 256 to 360
MPC74xx "G4" processors into 9U (19" cube).
That's air cooled.
You get a rack of 9 or 16 fans on top, and
another rack on the bottom. Cards go in the
middle, with aerodynamic heat sinks and
dummy cards to fill any empty slots. It works.
...Now I don't have to log off spankdatass.com while downloading mp3's and cracked progz off of KazAa to fulfill my parental responsibilites. Most convenient.
I can just program a fucking toy to watch my children - much as the parents of my generation did with television - so I can go about ignoring them without having to worry about looking responsible if one of my sons walks in front of Mack truck.
Sure Bill Gates' hair is fugly, but give his barber some credit! At least he managed to cover the horns on his forehead.
It seems that the speculation of Nintendo releasing a console next year could be true?
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
These are PPC 440's - beautiful little embedded type chips from IBM. Their aim is to create a supercomputer at approx 180Tflops (Earth simulator is what...36 Tflops?).
from the article: "it will be air-cooled, as opposed to many high-performance machines that use water and refrigeration, and it will use no more power than the average home, the executives said. Computer scientists and industry analysts said the Blue Gene/L represented a radical departure from the industry's obsession with ever-faster microprocessor chips. Instead, I.B.M. designers chose to balance computing speed and energy consumption to create a far denser data processing system than had previously been possible."
The 440 is similar to the 970 used by the G5 (essentially just a lower clock speed...not sure).
It erks me just a little bit that almost everyone these days expects to need expensive cooling systems to just run their latest wintel box. There are quite a few really good low power/high performance chips out there - and people (like Apple) who are interested in using them.
When Myrias computers was talking aout building a 1000 processor super computer back in 1982, I joked that it might be able to generate real-time holograms and pop popcorn at the same time..
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
SMS Message or email? Couldn't it just shock my kid into compliance w/o bothering me about it?
Pity the SN85G4 (the AMD64 box) is so fugly. Shuttle should've stuck with their G2 case design.
Oh, and gigabit ethernet would've been nice, even if I couldn't get more than 200-300Mbps out of it in actual use.
Computing doesn't like decimal.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
Good effort, but 400 isn't a power of 2. Maybe 512.
2
4
8
16
32
64
128
256
512...
http://www.drewbradford.com/
Now we can find these expensive toys when the kids "loan" it to a friend...or worse sell it for some quarters! The fact that the KID is actually attached seems secondary to most parents.
better?
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
1000 processors is 3E8h.
Computers dont like C, C++, or even assembly for that matter. All they understand is 1s and 0s. Languages are created for the ease of the human programmers. It is the job of the compiler/assembler to translate them to binary.
Computers dont understand hex either, that is just convenient shorthand for programmers. Decimal is as well. Both are a simple conversion for the compiler. Incidentally, if you ever write a math library, I'd suggest you use decimal constants, as it will make it easier for someone else to modify or improve the library.
Computers, programming languages, decimal, hexidecimal are all created for humans, to make things easier. You are arguing for the reverse scenario, and don't even get that right. If you want to be a machine, talk only in binary.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
A 1000 processor supercomputer in a box? Imagine a bewulf cluster of those.
We're just arguing semantics here.
Now that would be a big TV!
1. Where can I buy one? I already have an SN41G2 and am blissfully happy with it. I was going to buy another one, but now I want the Athlon64 version.
2. Does all the hardware built into the SN85G4 have driver support under Linux? Good driver support? Radeon driver for X11? TV-Out? How is the ALSA driver for the sound? Even the SP/DIF IO? How about the network chipset? SATA?
Without knowing ahead of time that there's 100% Linux support for this thing, I can't buy it. On the other hand, I'd order one right now if I knew that Linux fully supports it. ("Fully supports" means *everything*, including SP/DIF audio, Framebuffer console as well as X-accel and tv-out, plus SATA. (Does Linux really work with *any* SATA yet?)
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Man, SCO is going to have a field day with this one. $699,000 per computer and they dont even have to touch it.
No, it's not. They've come out and said that whatever they're releasing next year, it's not a console and not a handheld. Probably an accessory for the Gamecube or something.
Look here.
I just reread the news item... so yeah now your comment makes more sense. I'll post something intelligent after getting a few hours of sleep.
Hmmm... Pie...
...but thank you for reinforcing the argument for licensed breeding.
I say, let the soccer moms legislate away societal rights to make the world "safe for kids"-- all I want in return is the elimination of the "right" to unrestricted breeding. It's quite reasonable, really: if society used discretion in the selection of the parent of the next generation, we would have more sanity.
Thanks. <sarcasm>Now, leave me to my privacy and guns.</sarcasm>