25-30% efficiency cells have been around for a while. I've even seen some report in the 35% range under normal solar spectrum.
You can't afford them however. Warren Buffet could maybe cover his car roof, but not the hood and trunk. And then he'd be broke. The tech is easy waiting for the patents to expire is the hard part.
In 15 years, having your house roof be 33% solar shingles will cost next to nothing, but for now, don't hold your breath.
It's funny to see this discussed on Slashdot, an open source advocate, where on every other day people are focused on making sure software is free. Thus making sure you don't have to pay anyone in America, or India, or anyone at all to do software development.
Wake up.
At some point you have to pick a side, do you want free/cheap software, or do you want a day job that pays more then minimum wage to develop software? You can't have software be both free and cost lots of money at the same time.
IBM and others have figured this out before you did. Don't be mad, just pick another career, and try not to make that one free too;)
Getting a debit card and a checking account is trivial and legal for any 6yr old. That's NOT the target market.
But it's primary use will be for drug dealers to launder money. For married men(and women) to pay for hookers and strippers. For people to turn petty cash into petty lap dance...
Reality check. Girls know geeks don't pull down big money anymore, and they will likely be unemployed with the next round of outsourcing to India. The watch is babe repellant.
So if you're the type of person that wants a PDA in your watch, you will never get a date period. So just buy the "less stylish" $179 model.
It has been stated that GCC is attempting to be a 'good' solution for all architectres rather than the 'best' for any one. It's not incapable of adapting to be the best for the P970, but that would require a permanent fork from the general GCC code.
You mean, say, for example, if the Intel guys REALLY wanted a faster compiler for Intel, they could fork gcc into something else, lets call it egcs, and then, once the engine generated better (but not good compared to Intel's own compiler, or Microsoft's, or...) code just for Intel, they could suck the rest of gcc back into themselves and rename the result gcc.
Resulting in a gcc that works decent, for values of decent near bad, on Intel.
GREAT IDEA! You should patent that. Good luck with that Microsoft embrace and extend prior art;)
I love gcc for it's portability, which is the whole point, but the resulting binaries are just so slow because of it.
Yes, it is great. Unfortunately in the next couple questions he goes on to say that the underlying engine GCC uses is completely unable to deal with the complexities of the 970 and other deep and wide architectures.
So either GCC needs a serious reworking on a fundamental level, or more likely since it already exists, they will just release a separate compiler that doesn't suck.
I just hope they release the proprietary compiler for OS X sometime before the G5 hits. The 2-3x performance hit of GCC is really starting to hurt Apple, and piss off all the developers. If IBM only releases the good compiler for their OSs and Linux, they are effectively telling people that OS X is not welcome on the 970.
Noone seriously considers using gcc on x86 now that the Intel compiler is free (root beer). And frankly that alone makes AMD chips totally unattractive for a computation farm (that and the nuclear plant you need to power the things).
Unfortunately, gcc is still terrible, OS X would be at least 2x faster if they had a PPC specific compiler.
Just look at gcc vs Intel's compiler, on a bad day I can get a 2-3x speedup in code just by using the Intel compiler written for the chip, and I would expect no less from the PPC equivalent.
gcc isn't a bad compiler, but it is a generic compiler, as such it's very limited.
The bottom line is that IBM is pretty much stabbing Apple in the back on this one. Then again a large number of geeks I know have switched FROM Linux to OS X, so free doesn't always win.
*laughs* I love all you people that haven't dealt with IBM before. Let me translate:
"A base configuration of the 4U is expected to cost less than $3,500, sources said."
That means the case, a power supply, and one CPU with maybe a 128MB stick of RAM. Each additional CPU module will add to the price. And did you want a hard drive in that?...
Let us know when 2.6.18 comes out. That's one version past when 2.6.17, which is the first time someone with get the wise idea to test it on a production machine and it will go *whooooof* <- sound of a sysadmin running past your cube.
Wasn't it about 2.4.7 before you could reboot without the drive getting corrupted?
If all of these 3rd world countries keep leapfrogging 1st world countries to become 0th world countries, then soon America is just gonna be another 2nd rater.
Betcha their national pastime isn't driving around in a circle or fake combat either (Nascar and wrestling for the international reader).
The fact that IPv6 support is still seen as optional may be part of the problem, the other part is that you can't actually send an IPv6 packet anywhere except by faking it over IPv4.
Porting an application to full IPv6 support shouldn't take more then a few hours, unless you were doing multicast in which case maybe a long day.
Then converting the backbone, and all the hardware, and all the ISP's, and all the DSL/cable modems, and all the operating systems... Yea right, THAT is gonna happen.
IPv6 is great for nerds, but it's a complete joke to everyone in the real world. Long live NAT.
Well that was kinda my point;) Noone has actually done a real benchmark yet. So why are we even talking about it?
Heck the Opteron is only a 48bit chip internally according to AMD, so the Itanium 2 is really the only thing we should be talking about in relation to the G5.
Any benchmark that's not against another real 64bit chip with a flat memory space is completely and totally irrelivant. Comparing optimized (no gcc need apply) code against optimized code like in the real world.
Slashdot Mirror
25-30% efficiency cells have been around for a while. I've even seen some report in the 35% range under normal solar spectrum.
You can't afford them however. Warren Buffet could maybe cover his car roof, but not the hood and trunk. And then he'd be broke. The tech is easy waiting for the patents to expire is the hard part.
In 15 years, having your house roof be 33% solar shingles will cost next to nothing, but for now, don't hold your breath.
It's funny to see this discussed on Slashdot, an open source advocate, where on every other day people are focused on making sure software is free. Thus making sure you don't have to pay anyone in America, or India, or anyone at all to do software development.
;)
Wake up.
At some point you have to pick a side, do you want free/cheap software, or do you want a day job that pays more then minimum wage to develop software? You can't have software be both free and cost lots of money at the same time.
IBM and others have figured this out before you did. Don't be mad, just pick another career, and try not to make that one free too
Getting a debit card and a checking account is trivial and legal for any 6yr old. That's NOT the target market.
...
But it's primary use will be for drug dealers to launder money. For married men(and women) to pay for hookers and strippers. For people to turn petty cash into petty lap dance...
Big market for those things tho
Reality check. Girls know geeks don't pull down big money anymore, and they will likely be unemployed with the next round of outsourcing to India. The watch is babe repellant.
So if you're the type of person that wants a PDA in your watch, you will never get a date period. So just buy the "less stylish" $179 model.
It has been stated that GCC is attempting to be a 'good' solution for all architectres rather than the 'best' for any one. It's not incapable of adapting to be the best for the P970, but that would require a permanent fork from the general GCC code.
;)
You mean, say, for example, if the Intel guys REALLY wanted a faster compiler for Intel, they could fork gcc into something else, lets call it egcs, and then, once the engine generated better (but not good compared to Intel's own compiler, or Microsoft's, or...) code just for Intel, they could suck the rest of gcc back into themselves and rename the result gcc.
Resulting in a gcc that works decent, for values of decent near bad, on Intel.
GREAT IDEA! You should patent that. Good luck with that Microsoft embrace and extend prior art
I love gcc for it's portability, which is the whole point, but the resulting binaries are just so slow because of it.
Yes, it is great. Unfortunately in the next couple questions he goes on to say that the underlying engine GCC uses is completely unable to deal with the complexities of the 970 and other deep and wide architectures.
So either GCC needs a serious reworking on a fundamental level, or more likely since it already exists, they will just release a separate compiler that doesn't suck.
I just hope they release the proprietary compiler for OS X sometime before the G5 hits. The 2-3x performance hit of GCC is really starting to hurt Apple, and piss off all the developers. If IBM only releases the good compiler for their OSs and Linux, they are effectively telling people that OS X is not welcome on the 970.
Noone seriously considers using gcc on x86 now that the Intel compiler is free (root beer). And frankly that alone makes AMD chips totally unattractive for a computation farm (that and the nuclear plant you need to power the things).
IBM needs to step up and do the same.
CEO != geek. CTO == geek.
CEO == Business major attractive enough for TV interviews.
I have no idea how compatible Ada and ANSI C are... never had any reasons to check. But since gcc does both, it can't be that bad.
Open Source... Quality Assurance... I didn't know you could use those 4 words together in a sentence...
:)
"51% projects have one developer" - Now we have proof geeks really can't work well with others
Unfortunately, gcc is still terrible, OS X would be at least 2x faster if they had a PPC specific compiler.
Just look at gcc vs Intel's compiler, on a bad day I can get a 2-3x speedup in code just by using the Intel compiler written for the chip, and I would expect no less from the PPC equivalent.
gcc isn't a bad compiler, but it is a generic compiler, as such it's very limited.
The bottom line is that IBM is pretty much stabbing Apple in the back on this one. Then again a large number of geeks I know have switched FROM Linux to OS X, so free doesn't always win.
Nope, it means you can plug up to 4 CPUs into the board(s).
It means nothing about how many are in the stripped down bare configuration.
Go to any vendor that sells dual systems, there is always a selection box for if you want just one for now, or both right away.
*laughs* I love all you people that haven't dealt with IBM before. Let me translate:
"A base configuration of the 4U is expected to cost less than $3,500, sources said."
That means the case, a power supply, and one CPU with maybe a 128MB stick of RAM. Each additional CPU module will add to the price. And did you want a hard drive in that?...
What's really important is if we see IBM release a real compiler for the 970. gcc is a complete joke on PPC.
Already has. Almost every RIAA/MPAA article now mentions bittorrent.
This is AWESOME, a revolution in technology! World Hunger is fixed and AIDS is wiped out, all because...
1960's timesharing has been reinvented!!!! Woohoo!!!
Oh wait. *yawn*
They renamed it GRID computing and you all fell for it, *points and laughs* hahahahahahhahahahaha
Let us know when 2.6.18 comes out. That's one version past when 2.6.17, which is the first time someone with get the wise idea to test it on a production machine and it will go *whooooof* <- sound of a sysadmin running past your cube.
Wasn't it about 2.4.7 before you could reboot without the drive getting corrupted?
2.6.x will rock, for high values of x.
So do we charge the NYT $1,000 to explain robots.txt or $10,000 because they are so stupid...
Is IT still a viable field to get into and if so will it last?
No. Absolutely not.
Alice spends 40 hours a week at work developing databases, and 40 hours a week working on OpenOffice.
Bob spends 40 hours a week at work writing an office suite, and 40 hours a week working on PostgreSQL.
I will use Alice's office suite, and Bob's database.
Think hard: Did you all expect your open source project to put everyone else out of a job but not you?
Sounds like it's about time to try out 2.5.
Is there a "the mile long list of things to update before trying to boot 2.5.x" list?
I remember the "fun" of updating 2.2...
Of course not, the violence is provided by the sport, so the fans need not make their own :)
If all of these 3rd world countries keep leapfrogging 1st world countries to become 0th world countries, then soon America is just gonna be another 2nd rater.
Betcha their national pastime isn't driving around in a circle or fake combat either (Nascar and wrestling for the international reader).
Wow, a bug, who would have guessed software has bugs, oh, the horror.
It's only news becasue OS X doesn't have heaps of bugs like everything else.
I'd paste the list of current problems with glibc, but I only have DSL and it would take too long.
The fact that IPv6 support is still seen as optional may be part of the problem, the other part is that you can't actually send an IPv6 packet anywhere except by faking it over IPv4.
Porting an application to full IPv6 support shouldn't take more then a few hours, unless you were doing multicast in which case maybe a long day.
Then converting the backbone, and all the hardware, and all the ISP's, and all the DSL/cable modems, and all the operating systems... Yea right, THAT is gonna happen.
IPv6 is great for nerds, but it's a complete joke to everyone in the real world. Long live NAT.
Well that was kinda my point ;) Noone has actually done a real benchmark yet. So why are we even talking about it?
Heck the Opteron is only a 48bit chip internally according to AMD, so the Itanium 2 is really the only thing we should be talking about in relation to the G5.
Any benchmark that's not against another real 64bit chip with a flat memory space is completely and totally irrelivant. Comparing optimized (no gcc need apply) code against optimized code like in the real world.
Has anyone seen any such relivant benchmarks?