Hundreds of years ago there really weren't any of what we would call scientists or a scientific community
Sure there was... They were just wealthy land owners, whom were often considered 'eccentric'; In other words: people who could afford to play around with science. This is in a stark contrast to say, the peasants whom had to work like dogs just to keep themselves malnourished. I'll try to avaoid 'rant mode', but it's frequently forgotten that the whole concept of intellectual property is what has allowed many of us modern-day 'peasants' to feed our children by pursuing science.
Before that, nearly all the notable scientists were aristocracy-- the highest of the upper-class. Newton, Laplace, Fourrier-- all upper-class, wealthy men. And they are more modern examples. Benjamin Franklin, whom many of the/. crowd seems to love quoting (because he gave his inventions away) was also quite wealthy -- he gave away his inventions because, quite simply, he could afford to. It's amazing how easy altruism comes when you don't have to worry about feeding a family; it's also quite interesting to note that most of the hardcore anti-intellectual property advocates are single. Sure, there's the rare exception like Gregor Mendel, whom was a monk; how he escaped not being burned as a heretic is something I'm quite curious about.
Linus may be married -- but he's also not a rabid enemy of the concept of intellectual property.
The same is true of thousands of other free software & open-source developers.
You just can't afford to give away all your work for free when you have children to feed.
Seriously tho, what if we are losing our high frequency hearing because of all these irritating CRTs blasting out 15+KHz over the years?
We are losing our high frequency hearing... but it is certainly not because of the frequency emitted by CRT's.
Case in point: The majority of the world's population isn't around a CRT enough (if ever) to get any kind of ear damage because of a CRT. People who are also well-nourished enough and live in a rural enough areas to discount environmental damage.
It's still quite possible to test these people for the range of frequencies they can hear. And it has happened, and is well documented.
The findings are relatively conclusive: As you get older, the maximum audible frequency decreases with age.
The rate of degradation is fairly constant, however there are factors which do increase the degradation.
For instance, an American who:
* doesn't listen to loud music
* has never been to a dance club or rock concert
* doesn't work at an airport, etc...
* but is frequently exposed to 'normal' noise
* (ie. Ned Flanders)
Will have a lower rate of hearing degradation.
However, when an American attends his/her first rock concert or other prolonged exposure to that level of volume, s\he will show a measurable (and permanent) decrease in the maximum frequency that s\he can hear.
The reason that many MP3 encoders filter out anything above 16 kHz is that around 25-30 years old, that is the maximum frequency the average human can hear. Why retain information that all but the most golden of adult ears will be unable to hear? That is an example of how most such engineering works -- fitting the solution to 99.999% of the problem.
Its also why the developers of the CD figured that a maximum reproduceable frequency above 20kHz would be sufficient -- They went for the maximum possible (at the time, which was 22. kHz) in a failed attempt to satisfy the audiophiles.
(Disclaimer: I have a scientific disdain for audiophinles: Audiophiles will pay $4000 for a *power cable* which they believe will give them better sound -- when the electrical utility's wiring is (far and away) the weakest link. Who cares how clean the power is from your house to the audio equipment -- the vast majority of any noise is going to come in from the miles of wire from the power plant to their home-- not from the feet of wire from the power plug to their equipment... or their house's wiring...)
Certainly didn't dissapoint me, toasting my bread with an Athlon...
I've seen an Athlon physically melt the solder connections of a motherboard (mine, sadly). Something must've caused the fan to seize momentarily -- then the building I was in had a fire drill -- nothing wrong at all, just a test of the system... I was away about 5 minutes. Walk back to my computer, and notice the odd smell. Turn off the power immediately; open the case... The heat from the Athlon had melted the CPU fan into the CPU heatsink. The (copper) heatsink was quite discolored due to heat. I made the mistake of brushing my hand against the heatsink after I powered the thing off... (but before noticing that it was the melted fan that smelled so awful). It took weeks for the burn to heal; the act of pulling my hand away jarred the case slightly, and a couple of the toroidal cores slid out of their holes (the solder had melted) And, what's more: There were all these surface-mount components oozing downward (with gravity).
Absolutely no overclocking or tweaking was involved.
The thing I couldn't help but think was how close the fire 'drill' had come to being an actual fire... At least everyone was out of the building... All thanks to the nice, cool-running nature of the AMD Athlon.
Interesting note: The AMD Athlon pulls ~75 W of power. The average soldering iron pulls 15-30W. Pentiums aren't much better than the Athlon... Is it any wonder that many people are using these tornado cases, or liquid cooling? That's a lot of heat to be dissipating!
Interesting note II: I replaced that first Athlon with a second one.
Interesting note III: The second Athlon died (not by heat, however) under a year later.
Interesting note IV: I have yet another Athlon, which is getting close to the 6-month mark... Here's hoping it makes it to a full year!!!
Interesting note V: My next computer is going to be a Mac.
You forgot to mention that This is VMS we are talking about: It doesn't need to be shut down-- Ever. The only time it does shut down is in the event of a power failure... and its UPS has drained itself before the backup generator is brought on-line.
Too many people have been ruined by cheap PC's that have to be rebooted; I still remember the amazement I felt when I learned that mainframes (which is what OpenVMS runs on anyway), just dont' crash-- ever. It took me months to get used to the fact that you didn't have to reboot the thing-- ever, for any reason whatsoever. Entire CPU upgrades, OS upgrades, entirely new OS kernels / system builds -- nothing brought it down.
Yes, as are all of the applications... and it only costs 100x as much for a slower CPU. The point is that x86-64 will bring 64-bit computing to an entirely new price point - you'll be able to build a fast 64-bit PC for less than the price of a single 64-bit chip from Sun, IBM, Intel, or HP. That's pretty significant.
Of course, in the case of Sun, IBM, HP, and to a lesser extent, the IA-64, CPU speed isn't where the cost is. It's all about the bus. Some of these Sun and IBM boxes toss data around the bus as if it were nothing... where x86-64 would choke outright on the same load. So who cares how fast you can process the data -- what good is it if your bus is so slow the CPU has to wait for the bus to catch up 20-30% of the time? The faster CPU is quickly eaten by the slower bus speed; and you end up with a slower computer than the Sun, IBM, or HP -- Even though your CPU is faster.
It depends on what AMD chipsets you're looking at.
AMD's own chipsets are actually quite excellent -- fast, rock solid, robust. But they cost more than the SiS and Via chipsets, and many people are too cheap to care.
And, let's not forget a somewhat more interesting point:
Ever heard of WindowBlinds? It's a GUI theming engine for Win32. And there are probably 3-4 different themes that look like the original QNX Photon.
I can, quite easily, run AA on Windows, and make a screenshot. Then I can take it, GIMP it, and put it into a themed window. Or, I can take the screenshot from within AA on windows, and if I'm running WindowBlinds, it will look like it's running on linux.
Not to say I doubt that it could be true; I imagine it really wouldn't be too difficult to hack it to work as a UT2003 mod. But in any event, a screen in a window means little; espescially an opening menu!
This sounds like a great but increasingly rare achievement - scientists getting somewhere that actually benefits the world
It's precicely that kind of attitude that gives science a bad name.
It's also rubbish. Science has done more to help humanity than you realize, and in more ways than you choose to believe. Scientists are not about destroying the world, but they are about discovering as much as possible about it, in as inobtrusively as possible.
Then, if somebody finds a use for whatever they discover, so be it. But that's the business end of the deal, and has little to do with science, or understanding.
It is almost a guaranteed thing that the image is an artifact from the imaging device used to take the picture. Even in the absolute absence of all light, CCD's, and to a much larger extent CMOS imagers, have pixels register light when there is none there. It is impossible to observe any light without effecting the picture in some way or another; it's a scientific fact. Toss enough photons at a non-film camera, and there will be ghosting, and there will be 'erratic non-smooth' tails. It's interesting how often people point at a 'right angle' in a photograph, and say "see that right-angle blur? That can't happen in nature." And yet these people are the same ones who conveniently forget that the camera used to take the picture has (gasp!) right-angles in its mechanism. Or the hexagonal lights (can you say 'camera iris' or 'lens flare'?).
The sad fact is that all too often, people in general (and Americans in particular), believe that they really 'know science', when the reality is that much of what we see is based on an incomplete understanding. We Americans are particularly bad about believing pseudo-science, and its supporters. For that matter, there is a famous test (I don't recall whom did it; please feel free to elaborate), in which test subjects were told to turn a knob which would inflict pain on another person. The 'real' scientists who were performing the test were observing how the average American tends to believe anyone who looks like they are educated about something. The test subjects were told that turning the knob would do no harm, in spite of the actor in the next room screaming in 'agony' and begging for mercy. Basically, there are a lot of human sheep who just want to believe a liar because it's easier than educating oneself, and trusting his/her own judgement-- so they trust the judgement of someone else, often con artists.
It's this lack of understanding of science that enables groups to claim that the Apollo moon landings were faked. Con artists found some loopholes in what people believe about physics, and exploited them. It doesn't even take a degree in physics to show they're lying, or at least mistaken. But too many people do not know the real nature of how light works, how it is percieved, and how our machines translate and process light into data we like to believe is useful. The fact is simple: Light is extremely complex, and its behavior is still extremely difficult to understand. There is so much about the nature of light that isn't taught in even a mid-level college physics class, that people just think that it must be simple, when in fact it is very, very complex. So when a lie is presented to them, they believe it fully, because it 'makes sense', even though it is pure rubbish.
I wish I had a digital camera, so I could include a pic for you.
I have an ASUS A7M266 mobo. Right above the AGP slot, there are the following, which would make it impossible to have a top-mounted chip/fan:
1.) Integrated sound card: While the external speaker out, line in, etc are in the standard ATX positions, the internal cables (such as CD-ROM drive (audio)->sound card, aux_input (from DVD/TV decoder), TAD input, etc.) is exactly in the path such a fan would take. 2.) Chipset (and fan): Within 1/2" of the top of the AGP slot.
And, of course,let's not forget the real reason: 3.) Standardization. There is a standard distance 'above' the AGP slot, which card makers must conform to. If the card is too big 'above' the AGP slot (and above any other slots), it is breaking the spec. However, 'below' the slot, doesn't break the spec, because the space is reserved for a PCI card anyway. The motherboard manufacturer knows that if they put a chipset fan or CPU there, it's asking for trouble. Same goes for cards: If they break the spec, they know there's gonna be trouble.
You can't just take a current chip design, shrink it from the 180nm to the 130nm process, and expect it to run. If it does, it would be a miracle of a cosmic sort. As far as changing processes go, it's somewhat reminiscent of taking an SUV, and pulling out the engine, and putting in an electric motor-- and expecing everything to work fine, except 'faster' or 'better'. Ain't gonna happen
Most chips are written in a HDL (Hardware Descriptor Language); ATI and nVIDIA use, among others, VeriLog and VHDL. Both of these languages have their behavioral-level code, which is somewhat reminiscent of a traditional C program. (Make no mistake, HDL's are a totally different ballgame to a programming language). Then, after you have the behavioral code working (meets timings, etc.), you synthesize (compile) it.
Here's where it gets tricky:
Synthesis involves taking your process (fab size, power, material, and other characteristics), and create an optimized layout of gates to perform the tasks described by the behavioral code. The synthesized code almost definately does not behave exactly like the behavioral code-- but the synthesized code is close enough -- just barely, to meet the critical timings, and the whole thing works.
Quite often, the synthesized code will utterly fail, and the offending part will have to be identified, diagnosed, and fixed. But the fix will probably break something else. It's like putting carpet in your bedroom, and suddenly the ceiling caves in. Fix the ceiling, and the walls turn pink. Repaint the walls, and the bed becomes sentient.
The thing to remember is you get used to the 'personality' of a given fab process, and begin to pre-emptively put in fixes to avoid seeing them at all. But the instant you change fab processes, the entire 'personality' of the synthesis changes, and all bets are off. The entire design will have to be re-synthesized, re-simulated, and re-debugged. And that's before it hits silicon.
ATi doesn't ship lots of chips to be sold to OEMs on the cheap. nVidia does, and will still do. This was 3dfx's problem, and this will be what keeps nVidia alive. Whether or not it'll keep them competative or have them go the way of the Trident or not is another story.
Patently false
ATI ships more chips than nVIDIA by a long shot; ATI has long been considered the 'King' of OEM chipsets. It's their OEM volume that has kept ATI alive in spite of nVIDIA's onslaught. It is only recently that nVIDIA has begun to ship anywhere near the volume of what ATI has done in the past.
It is about competition; It takes far less effort to stand on the shoulders of giants than it is to do it all yourself. So while Microsoft is herniating their spleen trying to lift the boulder by hand, they could have just borrowed the BSD guy's front-end loader. It's redundant, wasted effort.
It just doesn't make sense to keep a refrigerator running on the south pole.
Just stick it outside. It just doesn't make sense to start a campfire within 2 feet of a lava flow.
It's already hot enough to melt lead, what do you want? It just doesn't make sense to carry a bag of sand in the sahara.
Just bend over and pick some up. It doesn't make sense to re-write an entire VM, process stack, and network stack.
When BSD gives it to you for free with no strings attatched.
bs, it also really depends on what you're doing. If you're in a driving game going straight ahead and you get 30fps, you *might* not notice the difference between your 30 and 90fps. In a shooter or other game where the screen moves around quite a bit, I'm sorry but I can see the difference between 30fps and 70fps quite easily...
It's interesting to note that the US military has done extensive testing in this area, specifically so that they can build simulators as absolutely 'real' as possible, and not produce any extra frames (and the increased cost involved in delivering them). According to a few engineers from Evans and Sutherland, who at least used to build the image generators for them, the vast majority of fighter pilots were unable to distinguish between framerates above 60fps.
Of course, then there's the whole 'aliasing' you get whenever you actually have a 'frame-based' video, compared with 'real life'. Case in point: Ever notice how helicopter blades, propellors, wheels, etc. seem to spin 'backwards' on TV? It's sample aliasing. Even your own eyes see this whenever your light source 'blinks', which is the case in nearly all artificial light. Take a bicycle tire, put it between your eyes and a flourescent light, and spin it; you'll see the aliasing artifacts with no problems. Take the same bicycle tire outside (in sunlight), and do the same thing-- no more aliasing!
To realistically remove all aliasing, we'd have to have much higher framerates than 60fps; however, it's generally considered a 'normal' thing, since we grew up seeing it, and nobody fusses about it.
MS: Has spent a boatload of money copying and building there own versions of what everyone else already had. They are finally starting to get it right, and are making money hand over fist doing it (at least in the OS sphere which is what we are talking about). Moving to a Linux base would be a HUGE investment, and MS software would go back to the stability of Win98 for 3 generations as they worked out all the bugs. As much as the Linux gurus on Slashdot would love to see MS sabotage themselves like that, they aren't that stupid.
Of course, the actual logic of spending this money to build their own version of what everyone else already had is the troublesome part; There are major parts of the OS that have been quite literally 'carbon copied' from the Free/Open/Net BSD code, with a zero licence cost of any kind at all. Why they go about re-inventing the wheel when somebody is giving away a far better wheel (Such as the process scheduler, VM, file system, and network stack, to name a few) 'no strings attatched*', is beyond me... however it does reek of the NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome. Of course that may not be the case, but Microsoft's apparent refusal to adopt larger portions of the BSD code seems like a bad business decision to me. There is just a lot less money that would have to have been spent, and the end result would have been a more flexible, stable, and secure system than what Microsoft developed in-house, and yet they get to keep all of the BSD-licenced code as tightly-controlled as the Windows source currently is. It seems like Microsoft shot themselves in the foot by not taking advantage of what amounts to thousands of man-hours of free (non-cost, no-strings attatched) work and research; passing up a free lunch is a very un-Microsoft like behavior.
And I agree that it's crap to say that they would build the OS on top of Linux. Some people may idolize the GPL, and that's fine. Many feel the BSD licence is a more 'free' licence, again that's fine. Given the choice between the two, however, and Microsoft would almost certainly choose the 'no strings attached*' BSD code.
*No strings attached meaning that there is zero cost to licence the code, and there are no terms on redistribution other than to give credit to the original authors; The GPL stipulates that any changes of the code must be redistributed, the BSD licence does not. This modified code redistribution is the disinguishing feature of the GPL to which Microsoft objects-- they do not wish to allow anyone access to their code (not without working out some scheme whereby Microsoft will recieve monetary 'compensation' for access to their modifications, at a minimum.)
Of course they don't. That's why they like the BSD licence (and hate GPL): With the BSD licence, they can take all they want, have some obscure reference to the original authors in the documentation, and re-sell the work as if it were their own. The BSD licence doesn't ask anything more than to give credit where credit is due-- it's worth noting, however, that Microsoft has even violated that licence in the past. (They ripped off some fairly large chunks of BSD code, and never gave credit to the original authors).
However, the GPL licence: It requires that Microsoft give back; the thing to remember is that Microsoft is like a roach motel for source code -- it checks in, but it doesn't check out. The GPL would require Microsoft to make available any code they change under the GPL; it takes away their absolute control over the code, and takes away their ability to (over)charge for said code. Plus, a good roach motel doesn't let anything escape.
Not just where america grants its rewards -- but also look at where it has done so over time.
In the past, there were far more rewards given to scientists than are given now. Part of the problem is that business management tends to grossly overvalue themselves, and undervalue their engineers and scientists. (Or their laborers, for that matter). Hell, for the most part, this overvaluation of themselves is probably *the* key problem with corporate america today. It certainly seems to have been the cause of such fiascos such as Enron and WorldCom.
Which is not to say that there isn't a place for business management -- just that there are many who feel themselves indespensible who are in fact quite irrelevant to the company's operation.
The only bright side is that for every few thousand such pointy-hairs, there are a few people like Steve Jobs, who managed to ressurect a nearly dead company.
Another problem frequently ignored is the effect of atmosphere on photovoltaics.
In space, the PV cells are far more efficient than here on Earth.
Reason: The atmosphere is mostly opaque to most frequencies of EM radiation; the visible spectrum is one rather small exception to the rule. So on Earth, PV's can only gather light on a 'notch' of wavelenghts, where a much wider spectrum is available in space.
Which builds an interesting case for a space elevator: Have a large PV array in orbit, collecting energy, and run that energy back down the length of the space elevator's cable (in a superconductor).
Of course, there's always the flying solar-powered cars while I'm dreaming...
And, as you seem to know a bit of photovoltaics, what do you thing of the possibilities of other semiconductors than Si or GaAs? (I remember reading that Galium Nitride in particular is looking particularly promising in other semiconductor applications -- are they as promising in a photovoltaic situation as they are in transistors?
Like their automobiles? Wow. I had no idea French technology was so advanced.
The fact of the matter is that in the USA, the cost of a nuclear plant is much, much higher than it is in France.
Points to consider:
France's power is primarily nuclear.
In the USA, reprocessing of nuclear waste into nuclear fuel is not done at all. This makes about as much sense as filling a 100-liter tank of fuel, then dumping the rest after 2 liters have been burned. If the USA were to reprocess its fuel, the amount of high-level 'nuclear waste' that is laying in storage throuhout the country could be reprocessed into fuel, and last for many centuries.
The American public is probably about the most paranoid group of people in the world with respect to anything 'nuclear'. The whole reason an MRI scan is named 'MRI' is to remove the word 'Nuclear' from the original name, NMR -- nuclear magnetic resonance.
In California, for example, leagal costs account for 3/4 of the cost of building a new nuclear power plant. The most recent one (1970's) was slated to cost somewhere around $3 billion to build -- including all leagal costs such as permits, red tape, etc.
The plant ended up costing around $12 billion, all due to litigation by various groups. (NIMBY -- Not in my back yard, overly-zealous environmentalists who didn't know the facts, etc.)
And, lastly, the entire population of France is smaller than the population of New England, which is also mostly nuclear powered.
Your experience is fairly atypical. I typically budget for a replacement IDE drive every three years on the machines I admin, because that's about how often they go south in my experience. For anything I consider critical, it's going to be stored on the SCSI drive(s). Peroid. Then the already ultra-reliable SCSI drives will be backed up to tape and/or CD-R/DVD-R. But for cheap non-critical storage that is easily replaced (like games, Office, or Windows in general), IDE's awfully tempting.
The problem is not in the fact that plastic is 'overused'
The problem is, in you r own words "plastic stuff you trash immediately after purchase"
I would say that having all that plastic is fine -- even needed. In fact, if done properly, plastic is the ideal material for most of the products we use. This helps solve a major problem on the horizon: Most of the plastics we use are based on oil, which we are burning as fuel, rather than a more productive use for it. Oil has many useful compounds in it that are either difficult or expensive to obtain from any other source. So being able to create plastic from a renewable source is a boon.
This is the real waste; plastic is easily and cheaply recycleable. It can be re-used nearly ad-infinitum. The problem is that while plastic is cheap to recycle, it isn't profitable enough. (Blame this one on cheap oil; this will change in due time).
Which is not at all surprising. It seems to me that nearly every study seems to be favorable towards the interests of whomever funds it. This is not limited to Microsoft/Computing or anything else. People who pay a geologist to study moon rocks, in the interest of 'proving' that the moon landings are a hoax generally get results that justify their claim. The opposite is also true. The same goes for global warming, deforestation, and even political campaigns. (As a general rule, I look to the BBC for what I believe to be a more unbiased view of American politics; American newsgroups often seem more concerned with whatever issue/candidate will help their bottom line most.)
Slashdot Mirror
Hundreds of years ago there really weren't any of what we would call scientists or a scientific community
/. crowd seems to love quoting (because he gave his inventions away) was also quite wealthy -- he gave away his inventions because, quite simply, he could afford to. It's amazing how easy altruism comes when you don't have to worry about feeding a family; it's also quite interesting to note that most of the hardcore anti-intellectual property advocates are single. Sure, there's the rare exception like Gregor Mendel, whom was a monk; how he escaped not being burned as a heretic is something I'm quite curious about.
Sure there was... They were just wealthy land owners, whom were often considered 'eccentric'; In other words: people who could afford to play around with science. This is in a stark contrast to say, the peasants whom had to work like dogs just to keep themselves malnourished. I'll try to avaoid 'rant mode', but it's frequently forgotten that the whole concept of intellectual property is what has allowed many of us modern-day 'peasants' to feed our children by pursuing science.
Before that, nearly all the notable scientists were aristocracy-- the highest of the upper-class. Newton, Laplace, Fourrier-- all upper-class, wealthy men. And they are more modern examples. Benjamin Franklin, whom many of the
Linus may be married -- but he's also not a rabid enemy of the concept of intellectual property.
The same is true of thousands of other free software & open-source developers.
You just can't afford to give away all your work for free when you have children to feed.
Seriously tho, what if we are losing our high frequency hearing because of all these irritating CRTs blasting out 15+KHz over the years?
We are losing our high frequency hearing... but it is certainly not because of the frequency emitted by CRT's.
Case in point: The majority of the world's population isn't around a CRT enough (if ever) to get any kind of ear damage because of a CRT. People who are also well-nourished enough and live in a rural enough areas to discount environmental damage.
It's still quite possible to test these people for the range of frequencies they can hear. And it has happened, and is well documented.
The findings are relatively conclusive: As you get older, the maximum audible frequency decreases with age.
The rate of degradation is fairly constant, however there are factors which do increase the degradation.
For instance, an American who:
* doesn't listen to loud music
* has never been to a dance club or rock concert
* doesn't work at an airport, etc...
* but is frequently exposed to 'normal' noise
* (ie. Ned Flanders)
Will have a lower rate of hearing degradation.
However, when an American attends his/her first rock concert or other prolonged exposure to that level of volume, s\he will show a measurable (and permanent) decrease in the maximum frequency that s\he can hear.
The reason that many MP3 encoders filter out anything above 16 kHz is that around 25-30 years old, that is the maximum frequency the average human can hear. Why retain information that all but the most golden of adult ears will be unable to hear? That is an example of how most such engineering works -- fitting the solution to 99.999% of the problem.
Its also why the developers of the CD figured that a maximum reproduceable frequency above 20kHz would be sufficient -- They went for the maximum possible (at the time, which was 22. kHz) in a failed attempt to satisfy the audiophiles.
(Disclaimer: I have a scientific disdain for audiophinles: Audiophiles will pay $4000 for a *power cable* which they believe will give them better sound -- when the electrical utility's wiring is (far and away) the weakest link. Who cares how clean the power is from your house to the audio equipment -- the vast majority of any noise is going to come in from the miles of wire from the power plant to their home-- not from the feet of wire from the power plug to their equipment... or their house's wiring...)
No, it was actually a fire drill; either that or the fire marshall got to the first floor of my building before I did (~30 seconds).
Certainly didn't dissapoint me, toasting my bread with an Athlon...
I've seen an Athlon physically melt the solder connections of a motherboard (mine, sadly). Something must've caused the fan to seize momentarily -- then the building I was in had a fire drill -- nothing wrong at all, just a test of the system... I was away about 5 minutes. Walk back to my computer, and notice the odd smell. Turn off the power immediately; open the case... The heat from the Athlon had melted the CPU fan into the CPU heatsink. The (copper) heatsink was quite discolored due to heat. I made the mistake of brushing my hand against the heatsink after I powered the thing off... (but before noticing that it was the melted fan that smelled so awful). It took weeks for the burn to heal; the act of pulling my hand away jarred the case slightly, and a couple of the toroidal cores slid out of their holes (the solder had melted) And, what's more: There were all these surface-mount components oozing downward (with gravity).
Absolutely no overclocking or tweaking was involved.
The thing I couldn't help but think was how close the fire 'drill' had come to being an actual fire... At least everyone was out of the building... All thanks to the nice, cool-running nature of the AMD Athlon.
Interesting note: The AMD Athlon pulls ~75 W of power. The average soldering iron pulls 15-30W. Pentiums aren't much better than the Athlon... Is it any wonder that many people are using these tornado cases, or liquid cooling? That's a lot of heat to be dissipating!
Interesting note II: I replaced that first Athlon with a second one.
Interesting note III: The second Athlon died (not by heat, however) under a year later.
Interesting note IV: I have yet another Athlon, which is getting close to the 6-month mark... Here's hoping it makes it to a full year!!!
Interesting note V: My next computer is going to be a Mac.
You forgot to mention that This is VMS we are talking about: It doesn't need to be shut down-- Ever. The only time it does shut down is in the event of a power failure... and its UPS has drained itself before the backup generator is brought on-line.
Too many people have been ruined by cheap PC's that have to be rebooted; I still remember the amazement I felt when I learned that mainframes (which is what OpenVMS runs on anyway), just dont' crash-- ever. It took me months to get used to the fact that you didn't have to reboot the thing-- ever, for any reason whatsoever. Entire CPU upgrades, OS upgrades, entirely new OS kernels / system builds -- nothing brought it down.
What, like the latest crop of Windows? Which owes its heritage to VMS as much as Mac OS X owes to Unix?
VMS is a modern OS. It had features decades ago that are considered 'bleeding edge' to the Windows & Unix world.
Yes, as are all of the applications... and it only costs 100x as much for a slower CPU. The point is that x86-64 will bring 64-bit computing to an entirely new price point - you'll be able to build a fast 64-bit PC for less than the price of a single 64-bit chip from Sun, IBM, Intel, or HP. That's pretty significant.
Of course, in the case of Sun, IBM, HP, and to a lesser extent, the IA-64, CPU speed isn't where the cost is. It's all about the bus. Some of these Sun and IBM boxes toss data around the bus as if it were nothing... where x86-64 would choke outright on the same load. So who cares how fast you can process the data -- what good is it if your bus is so slow the CPU has to wait for the bus to catch up 20-30% of the time? The faster CPU is quickly eaten by the slower bus speed; and you end up with a slower computer than the Sun, IBM, or HP -- Even though your CPU is faster.
It depends on what AMD chipsets you're looking at.
AMD's own chipsets are actually quite excellent -- fast, rock solid, robust. But they cost more than the SiS and Via chipsets, and many people are too cheap to care.
And, let's not forget a somewhat more interesting point:
Ever heard of WindowBlinds? It's a GUI theming engine for Win32. And there are probably 3-4 different themes that look like the original QNX Photon.
I can, quite easily, run AA on Windows, and make a screenshot. Then I can take it, GIMP it, and put it into a themed window. Or, I can take the screenshot from within AA on windows, and if I'm running WindowBlinds, it will look like it's running on linux.
Not to say I doubt that it could be true; I imagine it really wouldn't be too difficult to hack it to work as a UT2003 mod. But in any event, a screen in a window means little; espescially an opening menu!
This sounds like a great but increasingly rare achievement - scientists getting somewhere that actually benefits the world
It's precicely that kind of attitude that gives science a bad name.
It's also rubbish. Science has done more to help humanity than you realize, and in more ways than you choose to believe. Scientists are not about destroying the world, but they are about discovering as much as possible about it, in as inobtrusively as possible.
Then, if somebody finds a use for whatever they discover, so be it. But that's the business end of the deal, and has little to do with science, or understanding.
It is almost a guaranteed thing that the image is an artifact from the imaging device used to take the picture. Even in the absolute absence of all light, CCD's, and to a much larger extent CMOS imagers, have pixels register light when there is none there. It is impossible to observe any light without effecting the picture in some way or another; it's a scientific fact. Toss enough photons at a non-film camera, and there will be ghosting, and there will be 'erratic non-smooth' tails. It's interesting how often people point at a 'right angle' in a photograph, and say "see that right-angle blur? That can't happen in nature." And yet these people are the same ones who conveniently forget that the camera used to take the picture has (gasp!) right-angles in its mechanism. Or the hexagonal lights (can you say 'camera iris' or 'lens flare'?).
The sad fact is that all too often, people in general (and Americans in particular), believe that they really 'know science', when the reality is that much of what we see is based on an incomplete understanding. We Americans are particularly bad about believing pseudo-science, and its supporters. For that matter, there is a famous test (I don't recall whom did it; please feel free to elaborate), in which test subjects were told to turn a knob which would inflict pain on another person. The 'real' scientists who were performing the test were observing how the average American tends to believe anyone who looks like they are educated about something. The test subjects were told that turning the knob would do no harm, in spite of the actor in the next room screaming in 'agony' and begging for mercy. Basically, there are a lot of human sheep who just want to believe a liar because it's easier than educating oneself, and trusting his/her own judgement-- so they trust the judgement of someone else, often con artists.
It's this lack of understanding of science that enables groups to claim that the Apollo moon landings were faked. Con artists found some loopholes in what people believe about physics, and exploited them. It doesn't even take a degree in physics to show they're lying, or at least mistaken. But too many people do not know the real nature of how light works, how it is percieved, and how our machines translate and process light into data we like to believe is useful. The fact is simple: Light is extremely complex, and its behavior is still extremely difficult to understand. There is so much about the nature of light that isn't taught in even a mid-level college physics class, that people just think that it must be simple, when in fact it is very, very complex. So when a lie is presented to them, they believe it fully, because it 'makes sense', even though it is pure rubbish.
That's why we get the big bucks.
I wish I had a digital camera, so I could include a pic for you.
I have an ASUS A7M266 mobo. Right above the AGP slot, there are the following, which would make it impossible to have a top-mounted chip/fan:
1.) Integrated sound card: While the external speaker out, line in, etc are in the standard ATX positions, the internal cables (such as CD-ROM drive (audio)->sound card, aux_input (from DVD/TV decoder), TAD input, etc.) is exactly in the path such a fan would take.
2.) Chipset (and fan): Within 1/2" of the top of the AGP slot.
And, of course,let's not forget the real reason:
3.) Standardization. There is a standard distance 'above' the AGP slot, which card makers must conform to. If the card is too big 'above' the AGP slot (and above any other slots), it is breaking the spec. However, 'below' the slot, doesn't break the spec, because the space is reserved for a PCI card anyway. The motherboard manufacturer knows that if they put a chipset fan or CPU there, it's asking for trouble. Same goes for cards: If they break the spec, they know there's gonna be trouble.
There's a bit more to this as well:
You can't just take a current chip design, shrink it from the 180nm to the 130nm process, and expect it to run. If it does, it would be a miracle of a cosmic sort. As far as changing processes go, it's somewhat reminiscent of taking an SUV, and pulling out the engine, and putting in an electric motor-- and expecing everything to work fine, except 'faster' or 'better'. Ain't gonna happen
Most chips are written in a HDL (Hardware Descriptor Language); ATI and nVIDIA use, among others, VeriLog and VHDL. Both of these languages have their behavioral-level code, which is somewhat reminiscent of a traditional C program. (Make no mistake, HDL's are a totally different ballgame to a programming language). Then, after you have the behavioral code working (meets timings, etc.), you synthesize (compile) it.
Here's where it gets tricky:
Synthesis involves taking your process (fab size, power, material, and other characteristics), and create an optimized layout of gates to perform the tasks described by the behavioral code. The synthesized code almost definately does not behave exactly like the behavioral code-- but the synthesized code is close enough -- just barely, to meet the critical timings, and the whole thing works.
Quite often, the synthesized code will utterly fail, and the offending part will have to be identified, diagnosed, and fixed. But the fix will probably break something else. It's like putting carpet in your bedroom, and suddenly the ceiling caves in. Fix the ceiling, and the walls turn pink. Repaint the walls, and the bed becomes sentient.
The thing to remember is you get used to the 'personality' of a given fab process, and begin to pre-emptively put in fixes to avoid seeing them at all. But the instant you change fab processes, the entire 'personality' of the synthesis changes, and all bets are off. The entire design will have to be re-synthesized, re-simulated, and re-debugged. And that's before it hits silicon.
ATi doesn't ship lots of chips to be sold to OEMs on the cheap. nVidia does, and will still do. This was 3dfx's problem, and this will be what keeps nVidia alive. Whether or not it'll keep them competative or have them go the way of the Trident or not is another story.
Patently false
ATI ships more chips than nVIDIA by a long shot; ATI has long been considered the 'King' of OEM chipsets. It's their OEM volume that has kept ATI alive in spite of nVIDIA's onslaught. It is only recently that nVIDIA has begun to ship anywhere near the volume of what ATI has done in the past.
It is about competition; It takes far less effort to stand on the shoulders of giants than it is to do it all yourself. So while Microsoft is herniating their spleen trying to lift the boulder by hand, they could have just borrowed the BSD guy's front-end loader. It's redundant, wasted effort.
It just doesn't make sense to keep a refrigerator running on the south pole.
Just stick it outside.
It just doesn't make sense to start a campfire within 2 feet of a lava flow.
It's already hot enough to melt lead, what do you want?
It just doesn't make sense to carry a bag of sand in the sahara.
Just bend over and pick some up.
It doesn't make sense to re-write an entire VM, process stack, and network stack.
When BSD gives it to you for free with no strings attatched.
bs, it also really depends on what you're doing. If you're in a driving game going straight ahead and you get 30fps, you *might* not notice the difference between your 30 and 90fps. In a shooter or other game where the screen moves around quite a bit, I'm sorry but I can see the difference between 30fps and 70fps quite easily...
It's interesting to note that the US military has done extensive testing in this area, specifically so that they can build simulators as absolutely 'real' as possible, and not produce any extra frames (and the increased cost involved in delivering them). According to a few engineers from Evans and Sutherland, who at least used to build the image generators for them, the vast majority of fighter pilots were unable to distinguish between framerates above 60fps.
Of course, then there's the whole 'aliasing' you get whenever you actually have a 'frame-based' video, compared with 'real life'. Case in point: Ever notice how helicopter blades, propellors, wheels, etc. seem to spin 'backwards' on TV? It's sample aliasing. Even your own eyes see this whenever your light source 'blinks', which is the case in nearly all artificial light. Take a bicycle tire, put it between your eyes and a flourescent light, and spin it; you'll see the aliasing artifacts with no problems. Take the same bicycle tire outside (in sunlight), and do the same thing-- no more aliasing!
To realistically remove all aliasing, we'd have to have much higher framerates than 60fps; however, it's generally considered a 'normal' thing, since we grew up seeing it, and nobody fusses about it.
MS: Has spent a boatload of money copying and building there own versions of what everyone else already had. They are finally starting to get it right, and are making money hand over fist doing it (at least in the OS sphere which is what we are talking about). Moving to a Linux base would be a HUGE investment, and MS software would go back to the stability of Win98 for 3 generations as they worked out all the bugs. As much as the Linux gurus on Slashdot would love to see MS sabotage themselves like that, they aren't that stupid.
Of course, the actual logic of spending this money to build their own version of what everyone else already had is the troublesome part; There are major parts of the OS that have been quite literally 'carbon copied' from the Free/Open/Net BSD code, with a zero licence cost of any kind at all. Why they go about re-inventing the wheel when somebody is giving away a far better wheel (Such as the process scheduler, VM, file system, and network stack, to name a few) 'no strings attatched*', is beyond me... however it does reek of the NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome. Of course that may not be the case, but Microsoft's apparent refusal to adopt larger portions of the BSD code seems like a bad business decision to me. There is just a lot less money that would have to have been spent, and the end result would have been a more flexible, stable, and secure system than what Microsoft developed in-house, and yet they get to keep all of the BSD-licenced code as tightly-controlled as the Windows source currently is. It seems like Microsoft shot themselves in the foot by not taking advantage of what amounts to thousands of man-hours of free (non-cost, no-strings attatched) work and research; passing up a free lunch is a very un-Microsoft like behavior.
And I agree that it's crap to say that they would build the OS on top of Linux. Some people may idolize the GPL, and that's fine. Many feel the BSD licence is a more 'free' licence, again that's fine. Given the choice between the two, however, and Microsoft would almost certainly choose the 'no strings attached*' BSD code.
*No strings attached meaning that there is zero cost to licence the code, and there are no terms on redistribution other than to give credit to the original authors; The GPL stipulates that any changes of the code must be redistributed, the BSD licence does not. This modified code redistribution is the disinguishing feature of the GPL to which Microsoft objects-- they do not wish to allow anyone access to their code (not without working out some scheme whereby Microsoft will recieve monetary 'compensation' for access to their modifications, at a minimum.)
Of course they don't. That's why they like the BSD licence (and hate GPL): With the BSD licence, they can take all they want, have some obscure reference to the original authors in the documentation, and re-sell the work as if it were their own. The BSD licence doesn't ask anything more than to give credit where credit is due-- it's worth noting, however, that Microsoft has even violated that licence in the past. (They ripped off some fairly large chunks of BSD code, and never gave credit to the original authors).
However, the GPL licence: It requires that Microsoft give back; the thing to remember is that Microsoft is like a roach motel for source code -- it checks in, but it doesn't check out. The GPL would require Microsoft to make available any code they change under the GPL; it takes away their absolute control over the code, and takes away their ability to (over)charge for said code. Plus, a good roach motel doesn't let anything escape.
Not just where america grants its rewards -- but also look at where it has done so over time.
In the past, there were far more rewards given to scientists than are given now. Part of the problem is that business management tends to grossly overvalue themselves, and undervalue their engineers and scientists. (Or their laborers, for that matter). Hell, for the most part, this overvaluation of themselves is probably *the* key problem with corporate america today. It certainly seems to have been the cause of such fiascos such as Enron and WorldCom.
Which is not to say that there isn't a place for business management -- just that there are many who feel themselves indespensible who are in fact quite irrelevant to the company's operation.
The only bright side is that for every few thousand such pointy-hairs, there are a few people like Steve Jobs, who managed to ressurect a nearly dead company.
Another problem frequently ignored is the effect of atmosphere on photovoltaics.
In space, the PV cells are far more efficient than here on Earth.
Reason: The atmosphere is mostly opaque to most frequencies of EM radiation; the visible spectrum is one rather small exception to the rule. So on Earth, PV's can only gather light on a 'notch' of wavelenghts, where a much wider spectrum is available in space.
Which builds an interesting case for a space elevator: Have a large PV array in orbit, collecting energy, and run that energy back down the length of the space elevator's cable (in a superconductor).
Of course, there's always the flying solar-powered cars while I'm dreaming...
And, as you seem to know a bit of photovoltaics, what do you thing of the possibilities of other semiconductors than Si or GaAs? (I remember reading that Galium Nitride in particular is looking particularly promising in other semiconductor applications -- are they as promising in a photovoltaic situation as they are in transistors?
Like their automobiles? Wow. I had no idea French technology was so advanced.
The fact of the matter is that in the USA, the cost of a nuclear plant is much, much higher than it is in France.
Points to consider:
France's power is primarily nuclear.
In the USA, reprocessing of nuclear waste into nuclear fuel is not done at all. This makes about as much sense as filling a 100-liter tank of fuel, then dumping the rest after 2 liters have been burned. If the USA were to reprocess its fuel, the amount of high-level 'nuclear waste' that is laying in storage throuhout the country could be reprocessed into fuel, and last for many centuries.
The American public is probably about the most paranoid group of people in the world with respect to anything 'nuclear'. The whole reason an MRI scan is named 'MRI' is to remove the word 'Nuclear' from the original name, NMR -- nuclear magnetic resonance.
In California, for example, leagal costs account for 3/4 of the cost of building a new nuclear power plant. The most recent one (1970's) was slated to cost somewhere around $3 billion to build -- including all leagal costs such as permits, red tape, etc.
The plant ended up costing around $12 billion, all due to litigation by various groups. (NIMBY -- Not in my back yard, overly-zealous environmentalists who didn't know the facts, etc.)
And, lastly, the entire population of France is smaller than the population of New England, which is also mostly nuclear powered.
Your experience is fairly atypical. I typically budget for a replacement IDE drive every three years on the machines I admin, because that's about how often they go south in my experience. For anything I consider critical, it's going to be stored on the SCSI drive(s). Peroid. Then the already ultra-reliable SCSI drives will be backed up to tape and/or CD-R/DVD-R. But for cheap non-critical storage that is easily replaced (like games, Office, or Windows in general), IDE's awfully tempting.
The problem is not in the fact that plastic is 'overused'
The problem is, in you r own words "plastic stuff you trash immediately after purchase"
I would say that having all that plastic is fine -- even needed. In fact, if done properly, plastic is the ideal material for most of the products we use. This helps solve a major problem on the horizon: Most of the plastics we use are based on oil, which we are burning as fuel, rather than a more productive use for it. Oil has many useful compounds in it that are either difficult or expensive to obtain from any other source. So being able to create plastic from a renewable source is a boon.
This is the real waste; plastic is easily and cheaply recycleable. It can be re-used nearly ad-infinitum. The problem is that while plastic is cheap to recycle, it isn't profitable enough. (Blame this one on cheap oil; this will change in due time).
Which is not at all surprising. It seems to me that nearly every study seems to be favorable towards the interests of whomever funds it. This is not limited to Microsoft/Computing or anything else. People who pay a geologist to study moon rocks, in the interest of 'proving' that the moon landings are a hoax generally get results that justify their claim. The opposite is also true. The same goes for global warming, deforestation, and even political campaigns. (As a general rule, I look to the BBC for what I believe to be a more unbiased view of American politics; American newsgroups often seem more concerned with whatever issue/candidate will help their bottom line most.)