And Intel is promoting it heavily - the Intel chipsets all have Thunderbolt controllers built in.
Did I miss where Ivy Bridge came out a year early? All Intel chipsets are scheduled to have Thunderbolt controllers in them, beginning with Ivy Bridge. In 2012. It will also have USB 3.0 built into the chipset. That means it's at least a year too early to say much about the potential for Thunderbolt.
Actually, that's not true. Thunderbolt provides a significant win over USB 3 in nearly every way. The author just doesn't get it.
First, Thunderbolt is based on PCIe for transport. That means that it's a very lightweight protocol, unlike USB, which is very heavyweight. For things like audio interfaces, USB 3 is dead in the water because it offers no advantages over USB 2 (because throughput doesn't matter past a certain point). Thunderbolt, by contrast, should offer a significant advantage in latency over FireWire (and a huge advantage over USB 2), while requiring less CPU overhead than USB or FireWire.
Second, it's entirely unclear to me why anyone supports USB 3 at all. For hard drives and similar, USB 3 offers no advantages over eSATA. For almost all other devices, USB 3 offers no advantages over USB 2. So ignoring portable devices that only have room for one port, USB 3 is a solution in search of a problem.
Third, the author doesn't know what he's saying about copper being "crippled". It's not crippled at all. Thunderbolt is intended to eventually be supplemented with new cables that have an optical PHY (transceiver) inside the cable instead of on the logic board. Such a design provides exactly the same advantages as LP (distance), but without all the problems that optical interconnects inherently suffer. To describe thunderbolt as "crippled" because it uses wires is to fail to understand the technology at all. It's exactly as fast as Light Peak was originally intended to be for its initial rollout.
Fourth, using LP in a USB connector turns out to be a bad idea in general. USB is a great interconnect for low bandwidth devices. It's not so great for talking to displays. With desktops tending to go under the desk, and with more and more people using laptops with external displays at home, there's good reason for wanting all of your external devices to be plugged into your display. Sharing a single data connection for your display cable and your peripherals is a tremendous win—so much so that support for transport of USB data was actually built into the original DisplayPort specification. Thus, Thunderbolt shouldn't be thought of necessarily as a replacement for USB, but rather as a replacement for other display technologies. With Thunderbolt, you could trivially build a monitor that provides full-performance, low-latency FireWire, USB, and eSATA connectors on top of your desk. Try that with USB 3.0.
Finally, the cost of Thunderbolt hardware is probably greatly exaggerated. Sure, it probably does cost $90 to add TB into a motherboard design right now, but that's because A. it isn't integrated into the motherboard chipsets yet (wait for Ivy Bridge), and B. it likely requires a significant board redesign to free up enough PCIe lanes to support the metric crapton of bandwidth involved.
Thunderbolt will become a lot more interesting when Intel starts integrating it into their chipsets in Ivy Bridge. Until then, it's really not feasible to most folks to start using it yet. Thus, it's not at all a surprise that adoption has been slow. Right now, it's basically at the developer preview stage, with AFAIK exactly one working motherboard implementation (Apple's).... The author should at least wait until Ivy Bridge before making predictions about the technology....
Where is the pressing public necessity that justifies the encroachment on the 4th Amendment?
*shrugs* It's just part of California's grand plan to send more DVD fabrication jobs to China. Heck, it's not like much of the commercial piracy is being done in the U.S. anyway.
I believe that they're already at the minimum size for the contact area, and that any further reduction in size would break compatibility anyway, but I could be wrong.
The real issue is not the 2D dimensions, but rather the thickness of the card. You can only make a set of pressure contacts so thin. At some point, I suspect we'll see SIM cards that are thicker, but have their contacts running down the edge of the card instead of across the face, thus reducing the plausible device thickness from about a quarter inch to about a millimeter (if you ignore all the other components that are thicker than a SIM card tray...).
Oh, it's worse than that. The person who downloaded it might have decided that the game was really good, and might then decide to actually buy a new copy. It's safe to say that someone who buys a used copy will not buy a new copy.
So yes, used sales are a lot worse than piracy from pretty much every perspective except one: there are a limited number of used copies of a title, whereas the number of pirated copies is unbounded. To that end, piracy has the potential to be more harmful than used sales when the number of people who pirate a piece of software who would otherwise have bought it exceeds the number of people who buy it used. In practice, this means that used sales are worse than piracy across the board.
That doesn't mean that used sales are bad, mind you. Then again, in some cases, neither is piracy, but only when "I wouldn't have bought it anyway" is more than just an excuse for being a cheapskate.
Some of your information is very wrong. There's actually evidence that testosterone levels and prostate cancer risk are inversely correlated, not positively correlated. People with low testosterone levels are more likely to get prostate cancer, not less. To my knowledge, however, no study has ever definitively determined how much of that is due to the hormone itself and how much of it is due to differences in sexual activity arising out of the differences in hormone level (pun intended).
Therefore, if the correlation with alcohol were caused by decreased testosterone, alcohol would be associated with an increased risk, not a decreased risk. We can therefore conclude that the protective effects of consumption of wine (not all alcohol) must come from something other than alcohol. Indeed, this is supported by recent studies that show that heavy beer drinking increases the risk of the more deadly form of prostate cancer.
Indeed, this coffee study further supports (albeit not very precisely) a causal link between low testosterone and prostate cancer, given that coffee increases testosterone levels. It is entirely possible that the entire difference in cancer levels among these populations stems from the differences in testosterone levels. It would be nice to see a second study that repeats this, but adds a third study group that takes other substances to raise their testosterone levels comparably, thus controlling for this particularly interesting variable.
Your second point is almost on the right track. It's not the cold temperature, but rather the amount of sunlight. There's a strong correlation between all types of cancer and vitamin D levels. The amount of vitamin D your body produces is directly correlated with the amount of sunlight you receive. Therefore, the farther towards the poles you live, the greater your risk of prostate cancer (and, indeed, all forms of cancer).
Your fourth point might be true, but AFAIK there has been no conclusive correlation between HPV and male cancer risk except for penile and anal cancer.
And your fifth point might be true, but I'm sure not going to try to verify it.
I think I'd be more interested in a tabletop CNC mill, personally. They're fairly comparable price-wise, but they don't limit you to working with plastic. I'd expect them to be a lot more precise, too.
Except that those things are injection moulded in quantities of hundreds of thousands, so the cost of production setup is negligible once amortized across the production run. And you have to make those parts in order to build the device in the first place. Thus, those costs are sunk costs whether you sell a single repair part or not. This effectively means that you have to build those cost into the cost of the product, not the repair part. The repair parts are just a few hours of extra production at the end of the run, and are effectively free except for the materials cost and the negligible labor.
The products are shipped in bulk from China on a boat in runs of ten thousand or more, so the per-unit transportation cost to the U.S. is also negligible.
And sure, there's overhead from keeping stock around, but it's also mandated by law that a manufacturer keep repair parts around for a certain number of years, so that's also a sunk cost that occurs on your balance sheet whether you sell a single part, and must therefore be built into the cost of the product, not into the cost of the repair parts.
So by any reasonable means of cost accounting, repair parts are a giant screw job, with prices deliberately inflated by orders of magnitude to encourage consumers to buy new products rather than repair existing ones.
By describing the invention here, at least it should count as publication of prior art in the field, should anyone else attempt to patent it in the future.
That'll become possible once it becomes possible to set up and tear down multicast groups over the public Internet.
Or substitute a P2P stream from someone already downloading it. Either way, you shed the backbone impact.
Exactly how dramatic would it be? Are most people watching the same film, or are people watching different films in the long tail?
As I understand it, Netflix offers only about 12,000 movies for streaming. There are around 17 million Netflix users. So if everybody streams only one two-hour movie per week, assuming streaming is artificially spread out over the full two hours, that's still an average of about 17 people streaming every movie at any given moment, if I did the math right.
Anybody else read this and immediately think that it might potentially solve the problem of biologically powering medical implants that was mentioned in a story on Slashdot about a week ago?
To be fair, there's no reason you couldn't use a staggered broadcast approach for Netflix and get the same user experience if you did it right.
When a user requests a movie, begin streaming the content from the beginning.
Simultaneously add the user to the most recent multicast group for that movie.
When the per-user stream catches up with the point at which the user's machine joined the multicast stream, you no longer need to stream data to that user because the user has all of the data from that point in the stream all the way up to the current point in the multicast stream.
At the end of the transfer, the client could then re-fetch any missing chunks.
Such an approach would dramatically reduce the traffic overhead, at the expense of a little additional code running on the user's machine.
The real problem is that it's a zero sum game. Sure, to some very limited degree, they've been able to squeeze some extra dollars for the TSA, but after a point, there's nobody else to squeeze.
Thus, every dollar that they spend on these scanners is a dollar that they couldn't spend on bomb sniffing dogs that might have detected body cavity explosives, on better passenger profiling that might have identified people to be more cautious about, on stationing an agent in every restroom to listen for people crapping out bomb materials and stuffing them in their luggage (or even providing locked bins and requiring people to leave their luggage there on the way into the bathroom), etc.
For that matter, every dollar spent on air security is a dollar that can't be spent building high speed trains (which can't be steered into buildings), improving roads to allow safer driving at higher speeds, improving vehicle fuel efficiency, or any number of other alternatives to our nation's overreliance on air travel.
My bad. 11". That'll teach me to mention form factors from memory. Yeah, 4" is probably too small to be generally useful. I didn't realize it was quite *that* small. I've seen usable micro-laptops with screens down to about 7". That's about as small as makes sense, IMO.
I skimmed through some of the data that was sent through the air, and assuming the time stamps are right, there were inconsistencies that made me suspect some sort of fire in avionics (possibly due to Kapton insulation). Of course, if the time stamps were based on when the data was transmitted rather than when the event occurred, then it's useless, and I withdraw that theory.
I'm certainly interested to see what comes out of all of this, either way.
Sure, as long as one law is written that way. Ideally, all laws should have to be written that way, which would effectively bound the total size of the body of law, thus forcing lawmakers to choose which laws to keep based on their actual importance.
Or send it with a crooked employee who doesn't have to go through those scans, or toss it over the fence into the sterile area where it can be picked up by an employee who does have to go through those scans, or pack the fun bits inside the metal tubes of a piece of luggage, inside a bunch of film containers, inside a prosthetic metal leg, inside the metal tube of a cane or a pair of crutches, or in any of the other top 100 places to smuggle explosives onto a plane.
I mean, I think it's absolutely hilarious that we spent all these billions of dollars on something that only protects one relatively tiny attack surface, does so relatively poorly, invades people's civil liberties in a truly horrific way, and in spite of that, is still provably orders of magnitude less effective than bomb sniffing dogs. If you ever needed proof of why government cannot be trusted to protect its citizens, there you go. Just follow the trail of money from the manufacturers back to the crooked politicians who support this absurdity. It can't be all that hard to prove that bribes were involved. Unless, of course, they're really that dumb, in which case we're in bigger trouble than I thought.
A tiny computer that runs software designed for a much larger screen will be useful to a limited number of people.
Much the same target as the 9" MacBook Air, I'd imagine—people who need extreme portability but still need to be able to run existing apps. Think frequent fliers.
Well, I did say the next attack on airport security, not the next attack. That said, the terrorist groups seem to like airplanes, at least in the U.S. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because people don't have much choice but to fly when they need to travel long distances across the U.S., whereas people have a choice about going to a July 4th or New Year's celebration. *shrugs*
I would argue that this should only consider flash cards purchased off the shelf, not flash cards that are bundled as part of a device. Most consumers won't ever change out the latter, so those are really no different than flash parts soldered to a logic board. By contrast, most digital camera owners have multiple flash cards.
But even if you consider flash cards that are part of a device, though, digital cameras seriously outnumber Android phones. I don't have Canadian stats, but there are twice as many digital cameras sold in any given year in the U.S. as there are Android phones in all of North America, if my stats are right (projected 25M digital cameras vs. somewhere around 13M Android phones).
Also, every Android phone is also a camera, so you have to partially count them in both columns, which leads to the question of what percentage of an Android phone's storage is used for what purpose. I'd expect most folks who buy smart phones typically use a bigger portion of their flash cards for photos and apps than music.
Add all that up, and I doubt you're more than a percent or two even if you count the hardware built into the device (which as I've said before, shouldn't really be considered, as those devices should come with a tariff on their own if they don't already; it's not fair to skew the stats for consumer flash purchases based on atypical end-user use).
Agreed. Would it really be so bad for them to fix the algorithm, use that to randomly select a second batch of winners this year, and add those to the first batch rather than invalidating their wins?
So since probably at most 0.01% of flash cards are used for anything other than photography, this tax will be measured in thousandths of a cent, right?
Slashdot Mirror
Did I miss where Ivy Bridge came out a year early? All Intel chipsets are scheduled to have Thunderbolt controllers in them, beginning with Ivy Bridge. In 2012. It will also have USB 3.0 built into the chipset. That means it's at least a year too early to say much about the potential for Thunderbolt.
Actually, that's not true. Thunderbolt provides a significant win over USB 3 in nearly every way. The author just doesn't get it.
First, Thunderbolt is based on PCIe for transport. That means that it's a very lightweight protocol, unlike USB, which is very heavyweight. For things like audio interfaces, USB 3 is dead in the water because it offers no advantages over USB 2 (because throughput doesn't matter past a certain point). Thunderbolt, by contrast, should offer a significant advantage in latency over FireWire (and a huge advantage over USB 2), while requiring less CPU overhead than USB or FireWire.
Second, it's entirely unclear to me why anyone supports USB 3 at all. For hard drives and similar, USB 3 offers no advantages over eSATA. For almost all other devices, USB 3 offers no advantages over USB 2. So ignoring portable devices that only have room for one port, USB 3 is a solution in search of a problem.
Third, the author doesn't know what he's saying about copper being "crippled". It's not crippled at all. Thunderbolt is intended to eventually be supplemented with new cables that have an optical PHY (transceiver) inside the cable instead of on the logic board. Such a design provides exactly the same advantages as LP (distance), but without all the problems that optical interconnects inherently suffer. To describe thunderbolt as "crippled" because it uses wires is to fail to understand the technology at all. It's exactly as fast as Light Peak was originally intended to be for its initial rollout.
Fourth, using LP in a USB connector turns out to be a bad idea in general. USB is a great interconnect for low bandwidth devices. It's not so great for talking to displays. With desktops tending to go under the desk, and with more and more people using laptops with external displays at home, there's good reason for wanting all of your external devices to be plugged into your display. Sharing a single data connection for your display cable and your peripherals is a tremendous win—so much so that support for transport of USB data was actually built into the original DisplayPort specification. Thus, Thunderbolt shouldn't be thought of necessarily as a replacement for USB, but rather as a replacement for other display technologies. With Thunderbolt, you could trivially build a monitor that provides full-performance, low-latency FireWire, USB, and eSATA connectors on top of your desk. Try that with USB 3.0.
Finally, the cost of Thunderbolt hardware is probably greatly exaggerated. Sure, it probably does cost $90 to add TB into a motherboard design right now, but that's because A. it isn't integrated into the motherboard chipsets yet (wait for Ivy Bridge), and B. it likely requires a significant board redesign to free up enough PCIe lanes to support the metric crapton of bandwidth involved.
Thunderbolt will become a lot more interesting when Intel starts integrating it into their chipsets in Ivy Bridge. Until then, it's really not feasible to most folks to start using it yet. Thus, it's not at all a surprise that adoption has been slow. Right now, it's basically at the developer preview stage, with AFAIK exactly one working motherboard implementation (Apple's).... The author should at least wait until Ivy Bridge before making predictions about the technology....
All things being equal, an external eSATA SSD drive should utterly smoke any USB 3.0 device, even if you ignore all the CPU overhead with USB....
*shrugs* It's just part of California's grand plan to send more DVD fabrication jobs to China. Heck, it's not like much of the commercial piracy is being done in the U.S. anyway.
I believe that they're already at the minimum size for the contact area, and that any further reduction in size would break compatibility anyway, but I could be wrong.
The real issue is not the 2D dimensions, but rather the thickness of the card. You can only make a set of pressure contacts so thin. At some point, I suspect we'll see SIM cards that are thicker, but have their contacts running down the edge of the card instead of across the face, thus reducing the plausible device thickness from about a quarter inch to about a millimeter (if you ignore all the other components that are thicker than a SIM card tray...).
Oh, it's worse than that. The person who downloaded it might have decided that the game was really good, and might then decide to actually buy a new copy. It's safe to say that someone who buys a used copy will not buy a new copy.
So yes, used sales are a lot worse than piracy from pretty much every perspective except one: there are a limited number of used copies of a title, whereas the number of pirated copies is unbounded. To that end, piracy has the potential to be more harmful than used sales when the number of people who pirate a piece of software who would otherwise have bought it exceeds the number of people who buy it used. In practice, this means that used sales are worse than piracy across the board.
That doesn't mean that used sales are bad, mind you. Then again, in some cases, neither is piracy, but only when "I wouldn't have bought it anyway" is more than just an excuse for being a cheapskate.
Some of your information is very wrong. There's actually evidence that testosterone levels and prostate cancer risk are inversely correlated, not positively correlated. People with low testosterone levels are more likely to get prostate cancer, not less. To my knowledge, however, no study has ever definitively determined how much of that is due to the hormone itself and how much of it is due to differences in sexual activity arising out of the differences in hormone level (pun intended).
Therefore, if the correlation with alcohol were caused by decreased testosterone, alcohol would be associated with an increased risk, not a decreased risk. We can therefore conclude that the protective effects of consumption of wine (not all alcohol) must come from something other than alcohol. Indeed, this is supported by recent studies that show that heavy beer drinking increases the risk of the more deadly form of prostate cancer.
Indeed, this coffee study further supports (albeit not very precisely) a causal link between low testosterone and prostate cancer, given that coffee increases testosterone levels. It is entirely possible that the entire difference in cancer levels among these populations stems from the differences in testosterone levels. It would be nice to see a second study that repeats this, but adds a third study group that takes other substances to raise their testosterone levels comparably, thus controlling for this particularly interesting variable.
Your second point is almost on the right track. It's not the cold temperature, but rather the amount of sunlight. There's a strong correlation between all types of cancer and vitamin D levels. The amount of vitamin D your body produces is directly correlated with the amount of sunlight you receive. Therefore, the farther towards the poles you live, the greater your risk of prostate cancer (and, indeed, all forms of cancer).
Your fourth point might be true, but AFAIK there has been no conclusive correlation between HPV and male cancer risk except for penile and anal cancer.
And your fifth point might be true, but I'm sure not going to try to verify it.
I think I'd be more interested in a tabletop CNC mill, personally. They're fairly comparable price-wise, but they don't limit you to working with plastic. I'd expect them to be a lot more precise, too.
Except that those things are injection moulded in quantities of hundreds of thousands, so the cost of production setup is negligible once amortized across the production run. And you have to make those parts in order to build the device in the first place. Thus, those costs are sunk costs whether you sell a single repair part or not. This effectively means that you have to build those cost into the cost of the product, not the repair part. The repair parts are just a few hours of extra production at the end of the run, and are effectively free except for the materials cost and the negligible labor.
The products are shipped in bulk from China on a boat in runs of ten thousand or more, so the per-unit transportation cost to the U.S. is also negligible.
And sure, there's overhead from keeping stock around, but it's also mandated by law that a manufacturer keep repair parts around for a certain number of years, so that's also a sunk cost that occurs on your balance sheet whether you sell a single part, and must therefore be built into the cost of the product, not into the cost of the repair parts.
So by any reasonable means of cost accounting, repair parts are a giant screw job, with prices deliberately inflated by orders of magnitude to encourage consumers to buy new products rather than repair existing ones.
By describing the invention here, at least it should count as publication of prior art in the field, should anyone else attempt to patent it in the future.
Or substitute a P2P stream from someone already downloading it. Either way, you shed the backbone impact.
As I understand it, Netflix offers only about 12,000 movies for streaming. There are around 17 million Netflix users. So if everybody streams only one two-hour movie per week, assuming streaming is artificially spread out over the full two hours, that's still an average of about 17 people streaming every movie at any given moment, if I did the math right.
Anybody else read this and immediately think that it might potentially solve the problem of biologically powering medical implants that was mentioned in a story on Slashdot about a week ago?
To be fair, there's no reason you couldn't use a staggered broadcast approach for Netflix and get the same user experience if you did it right.
Such an approach would dramatically reduce the traffic overhead, at the expense of a little additional code running on the user's machine.
The real problem is that it's a zero sum game. Sure, to some very limited degree, they've been able to squeeze some extra dollars for the TSA, but after a point, there's nobody else to squeeze.
Thus, every dollar that they spend on these scanners is a dollar that they couldn't spend on bomb sniffing dogs that might have detected body cavity explosives, on better passenger profiling that might have identified people to be more cautious about, on stationing an agent in every restroom to listen for people crapping out bomb materials and stuffing them in their luggage (or even providing locked bins and requiring people to leave their luggage there on the way into the bathroom), etc.
For that matter, every dollar spent on air security is a dollar that can't be spent building high speed trains (which can't be steered into buildings), improving roads to allow safer driving at higher speeds, improving vehicle fuel efficiency, or any number of other alternatives to our nation's overreliance on air travel.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
My bad. 11". That'll teach me to mention form factors from memory. Yeah, 4" is probably too small to be generally useful. I didn't realize it was quite *that* small. I've seen usable micro-laptops with screens down to about 7". That's about as small as makes sense, IMO.
I skimmed through some of the data that was sent through the air, and assuming the time stamps are right, there were inconsistencies that made me suspect some sort of fire in avionics (possibly due to Kapton insulation). Of course, if the time stamps were based on when the data was transmitted rather than when the event occurred, then it's useless, and I withdraw that theory.
I'm certainly interested to see what comes out of all of this, either way.
Sure, as long as one law is written that way. Ideally, all laws should have to be written that way, which would effectively bound the total size of the body of law, thus forcing lawmakers to choose which laws to keep based on their actual importance.
Or send it with a crooked employee who doesn't have to go through those scans, or toss it over the fence into the sterile area where it can be picked up by an employee who does have to go through those scans, or pack the fun bits inside the metal tubes of a piece of luggage, inside a bunch of film containers, inside a prosthetic metal leg, inside the metal tube of a cane or a pair of crutches, or in any of the other top 100 places to smuggle explosives onto a plane.
I mean, I think it's absolutely hilarious that we spent all these billions of dollars on something that only protects one relatively tiny attack surface, does so relatively poorly, invades people's civil liberties in a truly horrific way, and in spite of that, is still provably orders of magnitude less effective than bomb sniffing dogs. If you ever needed proof of why government cannot be trusted to protect its citizens, there you go. Just follow the trail of money from the manufacturers back to the crooked politicians who support this absurdity. It can't be all that hard to prove that bribes were involved. Unless, of course, they're really that dumb, in which case we're in bigger trouble than I thought.
Much the same target as the 9" MacBook Air, I'd imagine—people who need extreme portability but still need to be able to run existing apps. Think frequent fliers.
Well, I did say the next attack on airport security, not the next attack. That said, the terrorist groups seem to like airplanes, at least in the U.S. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because people don't have much choice but to fly when they need to travel long distances across the U.S., whereas people have a choice about going to a July 4th or New Year's celebration. *shrugs*
I would argue that this should only consider flash cards purchased off the shelf, not flash cards that are bundled as part of a device. Most consumers won't ever change out the latter, so those are really no different than flash parts soldered to a logic board. By contrast, most digital camera owners have multiple flash cards.
But even if you consider flash cards that are part of a device, though, digital cameras seriously outnumber Android phones. I don't have Canadian stats, but there are twice as many digital cameras sold in any given year in the U.S. as there are Android phones in all of North America, if my stats are right (projected 25M digital cameras vs. somewhere around 13M Android phones).
Also, every Android phone is also a camera, so you have to partially count them in both columns, which leads to the question of what percentage of an Android phone's storage is used for what purpose. I'd expect most folks who buy smart phones typically use a bigger portion of their flash cards for photos and apps than music.
Add all that up, and I doubt you're more than a percent or two even if you count the hardware built into the device (which as I've said before, shouldn't really be considered, as those devices should come with a tariff on their own if they don't already; it's not fair to skew the stats for consumer flash purchases based on atypical end-user use).
Agreed. Would it really be so bad for them to fix the algorithm, use that to randomly select a second batch of winners this year, and add those to the first batch rather than invalidating their wins?
So since probably at most 0.01% of flash cards are used for anything other than photography, this tax will be measured in thousandths of a cent, right?