Not within the range of 1994-2001. Yes, the curve has shifted since then. But in 1997, they bumped up the estimates from 1994, and by 2000/2001, they'd already exceeded the speeds the 1994 roadmap predicted for 2013.
But, yes, you have a point -- the further out the predictions go, the less reliable they are. The 2000/2001 map missed the GHz ceiling that we've bumped into, and it's possible that there will be a feature-size ceiling that will cut in between now and 2022. That's just not the way the industry is betting.
BTW, you may note that there isn't a row in these charts for "number of cores per chip". As one door closes, others open.
Here's a set of roadmaps generated at three-year intervals. Note that, with the exception of RAM density, each of the charted criteria outran the roadmaps' predictions.
These roadmaps are generated by a consortium of companies. They're routinely betting the future of their entire industry on these roadmaps. They're actually pretty darned conservative.
Interesting. They mention the burning-droplet hypothesis, but seem to settle on what amounts to a "fire tornado". I've seen footage of these, and they're very impressive, but I think it's a loooooong reach to propose this as an explanation for persistent and non-ballistic ball lightning.
Then again, as I said earlier, people are bad at making accurate observations of unusual events. Between burning droplets, burning vortexes, sparks, arcs, visual afterimages, and inaccurate perception and interpretation, maybe there isn't that much left unexplained.
Bouncing bits of burning metal. Some people theorize that this is behind many ball-lightning reports. Notice that it follows a ballistic trajectory -- no gliding, no hovering. It's kind of cool, but anybody who ever welds sees this all the time.
And again, if you're inside an environment that's thick with high-intensity standing waves, it's easy to generate cool plasmas. But the volume around a thunderstorm is not like the volume inside a microwave oven -- there's no easily-coupled, sustained source of hundreds of watts of high-frequency energy.
Both of these could be fake of course.
No, I think they're both perfectly legit, and the first one may well be the same mechanism as a lot of reported "ball lightning". But I'm still looking for an explanation for the floating, drifting, long-lifetime balls.
I've witnessed "ball lightning" on about three occasions now. The likely reason we have people pursuing the concept but no documentation is probably the same as the reason I never documented it; by the time you yell "Holy crap -- that's ball lightning" it is gone.
And yet, again, there's plenty of footage of meteors, car crashes, lightning strikes... these are transient phenomena, giving you little or no time to catch any single event, but there are lots of cameras out there.
Now I've heard some theory that it's supposed to be related to plasma created by tectonic stresses. But my wife and I witnessed it when just passing under a bridge in Florida, and the ball kind of floated along a power line until it hit a transformer and blew it up -- right over the heads of rush hour traffic.
There are a lot of things that can make a power line or a transformer light up, and there are a lot of things that can make your eyes (and brain) think they've seen a wandering ball. For transient, high-brightness, high-emotional-impact events, your brain can't even reliably order what it sees -- you could easily see a ball of glowing debris ejected from a transformer, and interpret it as a glowing ball that hit the transformer and blew it up. I'm not saying that's what happened in the incident you describe, but I am saying that without video evidence, any observer's ability to accurately recall and describe the event is limited.
The first time I saw it, my house had been hit by lightning, and the power went out. About a minute later, my video tape ejected from a smoking VCR, with a kind of, deep, sick-cat "meow" and instead of a tape ejecting, a 1.5" sphere of glowing plasma bounced out, and kind of slid/skipped across the rug. Needless to say, that VCR never worked again.
I work with electronics as a hobby off and on, and I tend to be absent-minded and clumsy, so I've seen a lot of glowing electrical things ejected from equipment. It's often quite impressive, and it sometimes does match some descriptions of ball lightning, but it's not going to (for example) coast smoothly along a wire, or hang motionless in midair, or boil an entire tub of water.
>> The lack of evidence for something, doesn't mean that witnesses are all hallucinating.
Of course not. But with increased prevalence of video recording, some phenomena are showing up, and some are not. If ball lightning is common enough that observer reports are widespread (see, for example, the parent post), why isn't it showing up on camera?
Given that they have actually produced them in the lab, I am going to have to say a while.
Really? A glowing ball of something, persisting for many seconds without any visible energy source, variously gliding along a conductor without affecting it or blowing a metal object to bits?
I hear a lot about shorting out rooms full of submarine batteries, and about candle flames in microwave ovens, but there's still no video of a golf-ball or tennis-ball or basketball-sized globe going for a nice, leisurely stroll around the grounds. One would think by now there would be.
We've discovered, documented, and explained a major new form of lightning that, previous poster notwithstanding, hadn't even really been rumored until recently. So where are the videos and large-scale studies and quantitative models for ball lightning, which has been "generally accepted as real" for well over a hundred years?
Seriously, come on. We've got millions of hours of footage of lightning, tornadoes, meteors, and even rarer and more transient phenomena. But, as far as I know, there isn't one single unambiguous high-quality video of ball lightning "in the wild". So why are we still giving it the benefit of the doubt? How many years will it have to evade our ubiquitous cameras before we just stop believing in it?
What happens if you shoot a bullet at a sailboat's sail? You get a tiny hole in the sail. Now imagine the bullet is a million times less massive, and traveling a thousand times as fast. Same kinetic energy, but it's going to punch a much smaller and neater hole.
Any space debris at the relative velocity of a solar sail will punch right through any imaginable sail material, vaporizing the tiny bit that it contacts. The surrounding material won't even feel a tug.
And, yeah, I was more than a bit surprised at the way it panned out. I also didn't know that you could recall a shipment; it was certainly lucky for us that you could.
I honestly don't know what would've happened if we hadn't done the recall. Maybe it was a legitimate buyer, and everything would have been fine. But here's one more "interesting" observation:
I searched to see who else this buyer had dealt with recently, and found one seller. I emailed that seller (through eBay, very official and everything) asking if he'd had any trouble. He said "Yeah, they tried to reverse the charge and claim that they hadn't received the merchandise, but I sent PayPal the tracking info showing that it had been delivered, and PayPal restored the money to my account."
Now, on the old eBay, each of us would have negged the buyer, and anyone else getting a bid from her would have seen the recent negative feedback. But, of course, if sellers can leave negative feedback, they can blackmail buyers, or some damn thing. So not only can we not leave negative feedback, warning other potential sellers about this scammer -- we can't even leave NEUTRAL feedback. We're offered the choice of leaving positive feedback, or none at all.
When eBay supported an open feedback process, it was a great place to buy AND sell. Now, it's pretty much a place for big sellers to move loads of crap, and that's it. There's no way in hell I'd think of using it to sell a popular, high-value item as an individual seller. They've systematically taken away what little buyer protection there used to be, and they've castrated the seller's feedback mechanism -- there's no way to identify problem buyers, and no protection against negative feedback from them.
If the only feedback you can leave is "good job", what's the damn point?
I sold an expensive (~$1800) camera package for a friend on eBay. Got an instant PayPal payment, with a confirmed shipping address, but no other communication from the buyer.
Shipped the package to the Texas address via UPS Ground. Followed the tracking info as it hit various points, and eventually made it to the destination...
...where it bounced, launching an exception that the "recipient had moved", and that it was being "redirected to the new address". An address which happened to be within 50 miles of my own address. The "buyer" continued to ignore emails.
Called up PayPal, explained that I'd shipped the package to a confirmed address. They said, "Yes, you should be covered under Seller Protection." I then explained that it had been bounced to an unconfirmed address, without any action or agreement on my part. "Oh," they said. "If you can't provide proof that the package has been delivered to a confirmed address, you aren't protected."
"So," I ask, "you mean that I can send a package using your approved shipper, with your approved tracking, to an address that you've confirmed -- and if the "recipient" redirects the shipment somewhere else, they can then claim that they never received the package, and I'll lose my payment with no recourse?"
"Well, I'm afraid so."
"So I guess I'd better recall the shipment and eat the shipping fee." "Yes, if I were you, that's what I'd do."
And that's why my eBay/PayPal annual sales volume has gone from five figures to one figure (0).
...my conventional keyboard/mouse arrangement had been stabbing my wrist for years, and the near-instant relief from that pain leaves me feeling more charitable.
It's a multitouch keyboard that does dynamic spelling correction based on what you've already typed, what you type next (it issues backspaces to correct prior keystrokes), and the fractional location of a finger-tap within or between key areas. It's slick beyond words. Apple bought the tech, and is ever-so-slowly dribbling it out in their iPhone/iPod Touch and trackpads.
The probability of it getting all the way there without one single part of the 1 KM sail getting hit by any single piece of space rock or other debris: 0%
And the consequence of a blowing a few 1cm^2 holes in a 1km^2 sail is...? It's not like a perforation will let all the sun leak out.
Unless you can arrange for that 1km^2 solar sail to also be a solar cell, in which case you'd still be intercepting around a hundred watts. Good luck making a 1km^2 solar cell that masses less than 100kg, though.
Aliens of said planet are now patrolling the galaxy looking for the next M class planet to colonize.
I first read this as "colorize", and I think I like it better that way. Somewhere out there is a super-advanced race that couldn't care less about biospheres and intelligent races and such, but just really likes blues and greens a lot better than browns and reds.
I respect your wife's "normal" self-image, but I can't wrap my head around her refusal to accept a treatment like this. If I could get a simple treatment that would give me extended spectral perception or better night vision or even better-than-"normal" acuity, I'd be all over it.
In the US there are industries where most employees have 12 weeks vacation every year.
I hope, I really hope, that this isn't a clueless swing at teachers who "only work a few hours a day and get the whole summer off".
I suppose the question is, what if you preferred to have less than three weeks of vacation time in your job in exchange for some other benefit the company was willing to give you?
Back in the late 90's, as a newly-minted computer-science Ph.D. who was also a hot coder, I quickly worked my way up to a very nice salary, but my employers expected programmers to put in ridiculous overtime on a regular basis. I would gladly have accepted a 50% pay cut in exchange for a 50% cut in actual hours, which realistically would probably have involved only a 25% reduction in net productivity -- indeed, toward the end, it would have increased my net productivity considerably. Oddly, though, this sort of option was never, ever on the table. It was assumed that if you weren't willing to put in the 80-hour weeks, you were an inferior specimen.
I've been lucky -- yes, lucky -- enough to fall into a position where I'm expected to work sane hours, albeit at a much lower salary, on intrinsically interesting problems. But if you're imagining some perfect market where I can easily find and choose an employer like this, and most of my peers continue to do the unpaid overtime simply because they like it, well, I admire your imagination.
Slashdot Mirror
Not within the range of 1994-2001. Yes, the curve has shifted since then. But in 1997, they bumped up the estimates from 1994, and by 2000/2001, they'd already exceeded the speeds the 1994 roadmap predicted for 2013.
But, yes, you have a point -- the further out the predictions go, the less reliable they are. The 2000/2001 map missed the GHz ceiling that we've bumped into, and it's possible that there will be a feature-size ceiling that will cut in between now and 2022. That's just not the way the industry is betting.
BTW, you may note that there isn't a row in these charts for "number of cores per chip". As one door closes, others open.
Here's a set of roadmaps generated at three-year intervals. Note that, with the exception of RAM density, each of the charted criteria outran the roadmaps' predictions.
These roadmaps are generated by a consortium of companies. They're routinely betting the future of their entire industry on these roadmaps. They're actually pretty darned conservative.
Interesting. They mention the burning-droplet hypothesis, but seem to settle on what amounts to a "fire tornado". I've seen footage of these, and they're very impressive, but I think it's a loooooong reach to propose this as an explanation for persistent and non-ballistic ball lightning.
Then again, as I said earlier, people are bad at making accurate observations of unusual events. Between burning droplets, burning vortexes, sparks, arcs, visual afterimages, and inaccurate perception and interpretation, maybe there isn't that much left unexplained.
Here is one of the videos from the lab experiment.
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/401413/ball_lightning_created_in_a_laboratory_very_cool_stuff
Bouncing bits of burning metal. Some people theorize that this is behind many ball-lightning reports. Notice that it follows a ballistic trajectory -- no gliding, no hovering. It's kind of cool, but anybody who ever welds sees this all the time.
This one seems to be inside a domestic oven. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgMnsdqHwew&feature=related
And again, if you're inside an environment that's thick with high-intensity standing waves, it's easy to generate cool plasmas. But the volume around a thunderstorm is not like the volume inside a microwave oven -- there's no easily-coupled, sustained source of hundreds of watts of high-frequency energy.
Both of these could be fake of course.
No, I think they're both perfectly legit, and the first one may well be the same mechanism as a lot of reported "ball lightning". But I'm still looking for an explanation for the floating, drifting, long-lifetime balls.
No shiat.
I've witnessed "ball lightning" on about three occasions now. The likely reason we have people pursuing the concept but no documentation is probably the same as the reason I never documented it; by the time you yell "Holy crap -- that's ball lightning" it is gone.
And yet, again, there's plenty of footage of meteors, car crashes, lightning strikes... these are transient phenomena, giving you little or no time to catch any single event, but there are lots of cameras out there.
Now I've heard some theory that it's supposed to be related to plasma created by tectonic stresses. But my wife and I witnessed it when just passing under a bridge in Florida, and the ball kind of floated along a power line until it hit a transformer and blew it up -- right over the heads of rush hour traffic.
There are a lot of things that can make a power line or a transformer light up, and there are a lot of things that can make your eyes (and brain) think they've seen a wandering ball. For transient, high-brightness, high-emotional-impact events, your brain can't even reliably order what it sees -- you could easily see a ball of glowing debris ejected from a transformer, and interpret it as a glowing ball that hit the transformer and blew it up. I'm not saying that's what happened in the incident you describe, but I am saying that without video evidence, any observer's ability to accurately recall and describe the event is limited.
The first time I saw it, my house had been hit by lightning, and the power went out. About a minute later, my video tape ejected from a smoking VCR, with a kind of, deep, sick-cat "meow" and instead of a tape ejecting, a 1.5" sphere of glowing plasma bounced out, and kind of slid/skipped across the rug. Needless to say, that VCR never worked again.
I work with electronics as a hobby off and on, and I tend to be absent-minded and clumsy, so I've seen a lot of glowing electrical things ejected from equipment. It's often quite impressive, and it sometimes does match some descriptions of ball lightning, but it's not going to (for example) coast smoothly along a wire, or hang motionless in midair, or boil an entire tub of water.
>> The lack of evidence for something, doesn't mean that witnesses are all hallucinating.
Of course not. But with increased prevalence of video recording, some phenomena are showing up, and some are not. If ball lightning is common enough that observer reports are widespread (see, for example, the parent post), why isn't it showing up on camera?
Given that they have actually produced them in the lab, I am going to have to say a while.
Really? A glowing ball of something, persisting for many seconds without any visible energy source, variously gliding along a conductor without affecting it or blowing a metal object to bits?
I hear a lot about shorting out rooms full of submarine batteries, and about candle flames in microwave ovens, but there's still no video of a golf-ball or tennis-ball or basketball-sized globe going for a nice, leisurely stroll around the grounds. One would think by now there would be.
We've discovered, documented, and explained a major new form of lightning that, previous poster notwithstanding, hadn't even really been rumored until recently. So where are the videos and large-scale studies and quantitative models for ball lightning, which has been "generally accepted as real" for well over a hundred years?
Seriously, come on. We've got millions of hours of footage of lightning, tornadoes, meteors, and even rarer and more transient phenomena. But, as far as I know, there isn't one single unambiguous high-quality video of ball lightning "in the wild". So why are we still giving it the benefit of the doubt? How many years will it have to evade our ubiquitous cameras before we just stop believing in it?
only if it accidentally the whole thing.
...you combine object-oriented and aspect-oriented development?
<deep sigh/>
What happens if you shoot a bullet at a sailboat's sail? You get a tiny hole in the sail. Now imagine the bullet is a million times less massive, and traveling a thousand times as fast. Same kinetic energy, but it's going to punch a much smaller and neater hole.
Any space debris at the relative velocity of a solar sail will punch right through any imaginable sail material, vaporizing the tiny bit that it contacts. The surrounding material won't even feel a tug.
And, yeah, I was more than a bit surprised at the way it panned out. I also didn't know that you could recall a shipment; it was certainly lucky for us that you could.
I honestly don't know what would've happened if we hadn't done the recall. Maybe it was a legitimate buyer, and everything would have been fine. But here's one more "interesting" observation:
I searched to see who else this buyer had dealt with recently, and found one seller. I emailed that seller (through eBay, very official and everything) asking if he'd had any trouble. He said "Yeah, they tried to reverse the charge and claim that they hadn't received the merchandise, but I sent PayPal the tracking info showing that it had been delivered, and PayPal restored the money to my account."
Now, on the old eBay, each of us would have negged the buyer, and anyone else getting a bid from her would have seen the recent negative feedback. But, of course, if sellers can leave negative feedback, they can blackmail buyers, or some damn thing. So not only can we not leave negative feedback, warning other potential sellers about this scammer -- we can't even leave NEUTRAL feedback. We're offered the choice of leaving positive feedback, or none at all.
When eBay supported an open feedback process, it was a great place to buy AND sell. Now, it's pretty much a place for big sellers to move loads of crap, and that's it. There's no way in hell I'd think of using it to sell a popular, high-value item as an individual seller. They've systematically taken away what little buyer protection there used to be, and they've castrated the seller's feedback mechanism -- there's no way to identify problem buyers, and no protection against negative feedback from them.
If the only feedback you can leave is "good job", what's the damn point?
I sold an expensive (~$1800) camera package for a friend on eBay. Got an instant PayPal payment, with a confirmed shipping address, but no other communication from the buyer.
Shipped the package to the Texas address via UPS Ground. Followed the tracking info as it hit various points, and eventually made it to the destination...
...where it bounced, launching an exception that the "recipient had moved", and that it was being "redirected to the new address". An address which happened to be within 50 miles of my own address. The "buyer" continued to ignore emails.
Called up PayPal, explained that I'd shipped the package to a confirmed address. They said, "Yes, you should be covered under Seller Protection." I then explained that it had been bounced to an unconfirmed address, without any action or agreement on my part. "Oh," they said. "If you can't provide proof that the package has been delivered to a confirmed address, you aren't protected."
"So," I ask, "you mean that I can send a package using your approved shipper, with your approved tracking, to an address that you've confirmed -- and if the "recipient" redirects the shipment somewhere else, they can then claim that they never received the package, and I'll lose my payment with no recourse?"
"Well, I'm afraid so."
"So I guess I'd better recall the shipment and eat the shipping fee." "Yes, if I were you, that's what I'd do."
And that's why my eBay/PayPal annual sales volume has gone from five figures to one figure (0).
...my conventional keyboard/mouse arrangement had been stabbing my wrist for years, and the near-instant relief from that pain leaves me feeling more charitable.
It's a multitouch keyboard that does dynamic spelling correction based on what you've already typed, what you type next (it issues backspaces to correct prior keystrokes), and the fractional location of a finger-tap within or between key areas. It's slick beyond words. Apple bought the tech, and is ever-so-slowly dribbling it out in their iPhone/iPod Touch and trackpads.
No, that would be up to ln -s /usr/bin/vim /usr/bin/vi.
...using a spelling-correcting keyboard has made my typing skills deteriorate noticeably. It's especially noticeable when I'm trying to use vi.
The probability of it getting all the way there without one single part of the 1 KM sail getting hit by any single piece of space rock or other debris: 0%
And the consequence of a blowing a few 1cm^2 holes in a 1km^2 sail is...? It's not like a perforation will let all the sun leak out.
There are ways.
Unless you can arrange for that 1km^2 solar sail to also be a solar cell, in which case you'd still be intercepting around a hundred watts. Good luck making a 1km^2 solar cell that masses less than 100kg, though.
Aliens of said planet are now patrolling the galaxy looking for the next M class planet to colonize.
I first read this as "colorize", and I think I like it better that way. Somewhere out there is a super-advanced race that couldn't care less about biospheres and intelligent races and such, but just really likes blues and greens a lot better than browns and reds.
Call them the Turnerites.
I respect your wife's "normal" self-image, but I can't wrap my head around her refusal to accept a treatment like this. If I could get a simple treatment that would give me extended spectral perception or better night vision or even better-than-"normal" acuity, I'd be all over it.
...watching it in Opera.
In the US there are industries where most employees have 12 weeks vacation every year.
I hope, I really hope, that this isn't a clueless swing at teachers who "only work a few hours a day and get the whole summer off".
I suppose the question is, what if you preferred to have less than three weeks of vacation time in your job in exchange for some other benefit the company was willing to give you?
Back in the late 90's, as a newly-minted computer-science Ph.D. who was also a hot coder, I quickly worked my way up to a very nice salary, but my employers expected programmers to put in ridiculous overtime on a regular basis. I would gladly have accepted a 50% pay cut in exchange for a 50% cut in actual hours, which realistically would probably have involved only a 25% reduction in net productivity -- indeed, toward the end, it would have increased my net productivity considerably. Oddly, though, this sort of option was never, ever on the table. It was assumed that if you weren't willing to put in the 80-hour weeks, you were an inferior specimen.
I've been lucky -- yes, lucky -- enough to fall into a position where I'm expected to work sane hours, albeit at a much lower salary, on intrinsically interesting problems. But if you're imagining some perfect market where I can easily find and choose an employer like this, and most of my peers continue to do the unpaid overtime simply because they like it, well, I admire your imagination.
Don't worry, the terms of use will be altered by Apple's megalomaniacal support team
Pray we do not alter them further.