But only in one direction. Like ADSL, it's high-bandwidth only from the "content source". Video travels only in one direction; the reverse direction is 100Mb/s Ethernet packets.
They don't propose to power displays via this cable. The idea is to power disk players, cable boxes and such from the big-screen display.
Control them from there, too. "PC-based media servers are no longer required and CE devices are once again the emperors of the living room."
If they can get the inter-device control issues figured out (something the consumer device people have a history of botching), that could accelerate acceptance.
The problem for Microsoft is that IE6 really is part of Windows XP. The code of IE was split up amongst various DLLs which also do other things. IE was tied into other functions and deliberately made difficult to remove. And, of course, the "File" menu on IE6 has no "Exit" option.
While IE is less integrated into Microsoft's OS than it used to be, Microsoft's Media Player is now tied into the OS even more tightly. Microsoft is no longer afraid of Netscape. They're afraid of Apple iTunes.
In Silicon Valley, you take stuff like that to Weird Stuff Warehouse, which handles both surplus and electronics recycling. They're more into commercial gear, though; if you want previous-generation 1U servers, they have plenty.
Enzymes for conversion of cellulose into something more useful as a fuel have been around for years. The problem is that the enzymes tend to cost too much. This outfit at least has a plan to grow the enzymes at the refinery, rather than shipping them in. The costs of these processes have dropped substantially in recent years.
Fuels are very cheap per unit volume. Any input to the process has to be even cheaper.
"London", as a keyword, is a heavy spam target.
I used to use "London Hotels" as a test case for SiteTruth's web spam detector. Google used to do badly on that search. (Since they started handling travel destinations as a special case, the first 10 Google results are now either paid ads or results from the business search engine.)
This is a known problem, and there are known solutions. There are simulators which can simulate the RF properties of a cell phone in a hand: "Since the human hand has a significant effect on mobile phone antenna radiation or OTA performance, the study on the impact of a hand on the antenna performance is quickly growing in importance. SEMCAD-X provides a unique set of different hand phantoms (right and left) which are fully posable. The user can import the CAD file consisting of the fully-posable human hand, including skin, muscle and bones and then to change its grip to fit a mobile phone using powerful poser engine."
Deciding what hand poses to use, though, is up to the user of the program.
This is very similar to the Inmos Transputer, a mid-1980s system. It's the same idea: many processors, no shared memory, message passing over fast serial links. The Transputer suffered from a slow development cycle; by the time it shipped, each new part was behind mainstream CPUs.
This new thing has more potential, though. There's enough memory per CPU to get something done. Each Cell processor, with only 256K per CPU, didn't have enough memory to do much on its own. 20 CPUs sharing 1GB gives 50MB per CPU, which has more promise. Each machine is big enough that this can be viewed as a cluster, something that's reasonably well understood. Cell CPUs are too tiny for that; they tend to be used as DSPs processing streaming data.
As usual, the problem will be to figure out how to program it. The original article talks about "neurons" too much. That hasn't historically been a really useful concept in computing.
No, like most modern high-powered variable speed motors, they're synchronous polyphase AC motors driven by a variable frequency drive.
One of the confusing issues in this area is that small motors of this type are referred to as "brushless DC" motors, while
larger ones are called AC motors driven by variable speed AC drives.
There are now YoVille gummi bears and brownies. There's a Mafia Wars Slurpee. Farmville ice cream. At your nearby 7-11 now. Really. Each comes with a Secret Code which, when typed into the game, unlocks some game item.
You have to admire Facebook from scaling up from a college photo book. It's also impressive that they can actually make their back end systems work, once you realize what's going on in there.
Just let Google take their StreetView trike, the one for paths too small for a car, down every row in Arlington Cemetery. Then the whole thing would be in StreetView.
Having had to write just such code for a DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle, I'd question whether a new algorithm developed without looking at the literature is likely to be new. There were high-precision GPS systems with 15cm accuracy seven years ago, and the new ones are even better. Novatel is now offering 1cm repeatability.
Besides, distance between two GPS points is straightforward. The high-precision receivers give you ECEF (earth-centered, earth fixed,; 3 axes centered at the center of the earth) coordinates, which are Cartesian. There, it's trivial. If all you have is latitude and longitude, the GPS device has already converted from ECEF to latitude and longitude using some standard geoid (a standard formula for the pair-shaped earth correction, like WGS-84). You use the appropriate geoid for the GPS device to convert back to ECEF, then compute the distance.
Most real-world page load delay today seems to be associated with advertising. Merely loading the initial content usually isn't too bad, although "content-management systems" can make it much worse, as overloaded databases struggle to "customize" the content.
"Web 2.0" wasn't a win; pulling in all those big CSS and JavaScript libraries doesn't help load times.
We do some measurement in this area, as SiteTruth reads through sites trying to find a street address on each site rated. We never read more than 21 pages from a site, and for most sites, we can find a street address within 45 seconds, following links likely to lead to contact information. Only a few percent of sites go over 45 seconds for all those pages. Excessively slow sites tried recently include "directserv.org" (a link farm full of ads), "www.w3.org" (embarrassing), and "religioustolerance.org" (an underfunded nonprofit). We're not loading images, ads, Javascript, or CSS; that's pure page load delay. It's not that much of a problem, and we're seeing less of it than we did two years ago.
Right. If you actually read the announcement, it's not that they want yet more boondoggle supercomputing centers. What they want is more crunch power in small boxes. Read the actual announcement (PDF). See page 17. What they want is 1 petaflop (peak) in one rack, including cooling gear. The rack gets to draw up to 57 kilowatts (!).
The current versions of all the major browsers can now dynamically download fonts. We can finally stop putting display text in images. Opera, Safari, Chrome, Firefox (3.6 or greater) and IE are all on board with this. By IE 9, they'll even be using the same font format, Web Open Font Format. (Except for the iPad, which, for some weird reason, currently requires fonts in SVG format. But even the iPad understands "@font-face")
Few sites are using this capability yet. We are, as a demo. Try our steampunk search engine with authentic Victorian fonts.
Reality check: Microsoft is quite profitable. So is IBM. They make the wheels go around, and that's a solid business. That's what matters, not how much commentary the company gets on Gizmodo and Techcrunch.
There are other big companies like that. Consider Consolidated Edison, the power company for New York City. They've been selling electricity since 1882, and they made $14 billion last year. General Electric is still around, and with about the same product line they had a century ago - power station equipment, appliances, lamps, and turbines. (Along the way, GE entered and left semiconductors and computers.)
Google, on the other hand, is quite vulnerable. They've never had a second profitable product. Google has whole lines of money-losers, from YouTube to GMail. 97% of Google's revenue is still from search ads.
Google Voice still needs work. They seem to have a terrible time getting some cell phone operators to recognize Google Voice numbers, and there are constant complaints about SMS messages not getting through to some numbers. Part of the problem is that Google isn't a real telco, and they don't participate as a carrier in the North American Numbering Plan. They rent their blocks of numbers from third party small carriers, which sort of works most of the time.
Does this mean that Hulu is some kind of ongoing criminal enterprise? How can you tell? They don't have any MPAA seal of approval or anything like that.
It's going to be interesting to see how "tablets" go. Will they come downward from Windows PCs, as Microsoft wants, or up from phones, as Apple is doing? Or will an accepted interface not from either world be developed for them?
It's going to be interesting to see how tablets develop as business tools. Tablet machines for special purposes, like the one every UPS delivery person has, have been around for decades. Tablets for doctors, cops, and others who need info in the field are coming along. The tablet as the general business tool for those who primarily consume, rather than create, information may be the future.
If Intel was holding everyone back with your proposed CPU and Chipset conspiracy, don't you think that would just prime the market for AMD to pair up with VIA or someone and just wreck Intel?
AMD tried hard. They introduced 64-bit x86-compatible CPUs. And Microsoft wouldn't support them until Intel caught up.
On the other hand, Microsoft supported the Inanium until 2004.
As Brandon demonstrated when he was head of the NYPD, what really works is detailed, fast-turnaround monitoring of what cops are doing by top management of the department. Brandon introduced COMPSTAT, which is a combination of a statistical quality control system and a map-based event tracking system, with meetings every morning to discuss what happened in the last 24 hours.
It's not so much about technology as it is about not dropping the ball. COMPSTAT is about top management noticing that there's been a burst in complaints in some area, but arrests haven't gone up to match. It's about making sure that information about gang activity developed on second shift gets passed on to third shift. It's about noticing that some crook went free because the officer who was supposed to testify didn't show up in court. Police departments without strong management tend to do the same thing every day rather than responding to shifts in what the opposition is doing. That means they have a lot of guys driving around but not accomplishing much.
Cops tend to hate that kind of management at first. But after a while, the better cope get to like the feeling that they're on top of things and winning.
"Child pornography" is the current excuse for oppression in the US. "Communist infiltration" stopped being a serious concern around 1975 or so. Terrorism has been slow lately. Militant Islam isn't getting any significant traction in the US. (Some European countries have real problems there, but the US doesn't seem to.) The "war on drugs" had a good run, but it's turning into a real war in Mexican border cities, and that focuses attention on real problems, not rhetoric.
The excuse has to be for something that doesn't have complaining parties who want their cases solved. Where law enforcement has to deal with victims who report crimes, law enforcement performance is measured by the percentage of crimes solved. This keeps cops focused, and they don't get to set their own agenda.
It's significant that the FBI's "child pornography" enforcement operation hasn't been involved in the Catholic child abuse scandals. There don't seem to have been any cases where the FBI actually caught a priest abusing a child. Yet, given the statistics, that's an obvious place to look.
Note what we don't have. There's no "war on financial fraud". There's no "war on tax cheats". There's no "war on polluters".
There's no "war on employers of underage kids".
And then some app sends those pictures somewhere? Some apps (including Facebook's) have enough permissions to access those images and send them to a remote site.
Slashdot Mirror
The spec claims that this approach can pump 10.2Gb/s over unshielded twisted pair. So this is really 10Gb/s "Ethernet" technology.
But only in one direction. Like ADSL, it's high-bandwidth only from the "content source". Video travels only in one direction; the reverse direction is 100Mb/s Ethernet packets.
They don't propose to power displays via this cable. The idea is to power disk players, cable boxes and such from the big-screen display. Control them from there, too. "PC-based media servers are no longer required and CE devices are once again the emperors of the living room." If they can get the inter-device control issues figured out (something the consumer device people have a history of botching), that could accelerate acceptance.
The problem for Microsoft is that IE6 really is part of Windows XP. The code of IE was split up amongst various DLLs which also do other things. IE was tied into other functions and deliberately made difficult to remove. And, of course, the "File" menu on IE6 has no "Exit" option.
While IE is less integrated into Microsoft's OS than it used to be, Microsoft's Media Player is now tied into the OS even more tightly. Microsoft is no longer afraid of Netscape. They're afraid of Apple iTunes.
In Silicon Valley, you take stuff like that to Weird Stuff Warehouse, which handles both surplus and electronics recycling. They're more into commercial gear, though; if you want previous-generation 1U servers, they have plenty.
Perhaps there's a market for a real-name-only, must post your address discussions site, but it'll be largely unused in this world.
Like, maybe, this one? Or this one?
I hadn't heard that site mentioned in years.
If Politico or the New Republic or the Huffington Post said that, they might have a point. Any anonymous site is going to have low-quality comments.
Enzymes for conversion of cellulose into something more useful as a fuel have been around for years. The problem is that the enzymes tend to cost too much. This outfit at least has a plan to grow the enzymes at the refinery, rather than shipping them in. The costs of these processes have dropped substantially in recent years.
Fuels are very cheap per unit volume. Any input to the process has to be even cheaper.
"London", as a keyword, is a heavy spam target. I used to use "London Hotels" as a test case for SiteTruth's web spam detector. Google used to do badly on that search. (Since they started handling travel destinations as a special case, the first 10 Google results are now either paid ads or results from the business search engine.)
This is a known problem, and there are known solutions. There are simulators which can simulate the RF properties of a cell phone in a hand: "Since the human hand has a significant effect on mobile phone antenna radiation or OTA performance, the study on the impact of a hand on the antenna performance is quickly growing in importance. SEMCAD-X provides a unique set of different hand phantoms (right and left) which are fully posable. The user can import the CAD file consisting of the fully-posable human hand, including skin, muscle and bones and then to change its grip to fit a mobile phone using powerful poser engine."
Deciding what hand poses to use, though, is up to the user of the program.
This is very similar to the Inmos Transputer, a mid-1980s system. It's the same idea: many processors, no shared memory, message passing over fast serial links. The Transputer suffered from a slow development cycle; by the time it shipped, each new part was behind mainstream CPUs.
This new thing has more potential, though. There's enough memory per CPU to get something done. Each Cell processor, with only 256K per CPU, didn't have enough memory to do much on its own. 20 CPUs sharing 1GB gives 50MB per CPU, which has more promise. Each machine is big enough that this can be viewed as a cluster, something that's reasonably well understood. Cell CPUs are too tiny for that; they tend to be used as DSPs processing streaming data.
As usual, the problem will be to figure out how to program it. The original article talks about "neurons" too much. That hasn't historically been a really useful concept in computing.
Their cars run on DC motors...
No, like most modern high-powered variable speed motors, they're synchronous polyphase AC motors driven by a variable frequency drive. One of the confusing issues in this area is that small motors of this type are referred to as "brushless DC" motors, while larger ones are called AC motors driven by variable speed AC drives.
There are now YoVille gummi bears and brownies. There's a Mafia Wars Slurpee. Farmville ice cream. At your nearby 7-11 now. Really. Each comes with a Secret Code which, when typed into the game, unlocks some game item.
You have to admire Facebook from scaling up from a college photo book. It's also impressive that they can actually make their back end systems work, once you realize what's going on in there.
Just let Google take their StreetView trike, the one for paths too small for a car, down every row in Arlington Cemetery. Then the whole thing would be in StreetView.
Having had to write just such code for a DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle, I'd question whether a new algorithm developed without looking at the literature is likely to be new. There were high-precision GPS systems with 15cm accuracy seven years ago, and the new ones are even better. Novatel is now offering 1cm repeatability.
Besides, distance between two GPS points is straightforward. The high-precision receivers give you ECEF (earth-centered, earth fixed,; 3 axes centered at the center of the earth) coordinates, which are Cartesian. There, it's trivial. If all you have is latitude and longitude, the GPS device has already converted from ECEF to latitude and longitude using some standard geoid (a standard formula for the pair-shaped earth correction, like WGS-84). You use the appropriate geoid for the GPS device to convert back to ECEF, then compute the distance.
Most real-world page load delay today seems to be associated with advertising. Merely loading the initial content usually isn't too bad, although "content-management systems" can make it much worse, as overloaded databases struggle to "customize" the content. "Web 2.0" wasn't a win; pulling in all those big CSS and JavaScript libraries doesn't help load times.
We do some measurement in this area, as SiteTruth reads through sites trying to find a street address on each site rated. We never read more than 21 pages from a site, and for most sites, we can find a street address within 45 seconds, following links likely to lead to contact information. Only a few percent of sites go over 45 seconds for all those pages. Excessively slow sites tried recently include "directserv.org" (a link farm full of ads), "www.w3.org" (embarrassing), and "religioustolerance.org" (an underfunded nonprofit). We're not loading images, ads, Javascript, or CSS; that's pure page load delay. It's not that much of a problem, and we're seeing less of it than we did two years ago.
Right. If you actually read the announcement, it's not that they want yet more boondoggle supercomputing centers. What they want is more crunch power in small boxes. Read the actual announcement (PDF). See page 17. What they want is 1 petaflop (peak) in one rack, including cooling gear. The rack gets to draw up to 57 kilowatts (!).
The current versions of all the major browsers can now dynamically download fonts. We can finally stop putting display text in images. Opera, Safari, Chrome, Firefox (3.6 or greater) and IE are all on board with this. By IE 9, they'll even be using the same font format, Web Open Font Format. (Except for the iPad, which, for some weird reason, currently requires fonts in SVG format. But even the iPad understands "@font-face")
Few sites are using this capability yet. We are, as a demo. Try our steampunk search engine with authentic Victorian fonts.
Reality check: Microsoft is quite profitable. So is IBM. They make the wheels go around, and that's a solid business. That's what matters, not how much commentary the company gets on Gizmodo and Techcrunch.
There are other big companies like that. Consider Consolidated Edison, the power company for New York City. They've been selling electricity since 1882, and they made $14 billion last year. General Electric is still around, and with about the same product line they had a century ago - power station equipment, appliances, lamps, and turbines. (Along the way, GE entered and left semiconductors and computers.)
Google, on the other hand, is quite vulnerable. They've never had a second profitable product. Google has whole lines of money-losers, from YouTube to GMail. 97% of Google's revenue is still from search ads.
Google Voice still needs work. They seem to have a terrible time getting some cell phone operators to recognize Google Voice numbers, and there are constant complaints about SMS messages not getting through to some numbers. Part of the problem is that Google isn't a real telco, and they don't participate as a carrier in the North American Numbering Plan. They rent their blocks of numbers from third party small carriers, which sort of works most of the time.
Does this mean that Hulu is some kind of ongoing criminal enterprise? How can you tell? They don't have any MPAA seal of approval or anything like that.
It's going to be interesting to see how "tablets" go. Will they come downward from Windows PCs, as Microsoft wants, or up from phones, as Apple is doing? Or will an accepted interface not from either world be developed for them?
It's going to be interesting to see how tablets develop as business tools. Tablet machines for special purposes, like the one every UPS delivery person has, have been around for decades. Tablets for doctors, cops, and others who need info in the field are coming along. The tablet as the general business tool for those who primarily consume, rather than create, information may be the future.
If Intel was holding everyone back with your proposed CPU and Chipset conspiracy, don't you think that would just prime the market for AMD to pair up with VIA or someone and just wreck Intel?
AMD tried hard. They introduced 64-bit x86-compatible CPUs. And Microsoft wouldn't support them until Intel caught up. On the other hand, Microsoft supported the Inanium until 2004.
It's a bit late to be publishing a Blender 2.5 book, especially since the Blender plug-in interface changes drastically in 2.5.
As Brandon demonstrated when he was head of the NYPD, what really works is detailed, fast-turnaround monitoring of what cops are doing by top management of the department. Brandon introduced COMPSTAT, which is a combination of a statistical quality control system and a map-based event tracking system, with meetings every morning to discuss what happened in the last 24 hours.
It's not so much about technology as it is about not dropping the ball. COMPSTAT is about top management noticing that there's been a burst in complaints in some area, but arrests haven't gone up to match. It's about making sure that information about gang activity developed on second shift gets passed on to third shift. It's about noticing that some crook went free because the officer who was supposed to testify didn't show up in court. Police departments without strong management tend to do the same thing every day rather than responding to shifts in what the opposition is doing. That means they have a lot of guys driving around but not accomplishing much.
Cops tend to hate that kind of management at first. But after a while, the better cope get to like the feeling that they're on top of things and winning.
"Child pornography" is the current excuse for oppression in the US. "Communist infiltration" stopped being a serious concern around 1975 or so. Terrorism has been slow lately. Militant Islam isn't getting any significant traction in the US. (Some European countries have real problems there, but the US doesn't seem to.) The "war on drugs" had a good run, but it's turning into a real war in Mexican border cities, and that focuses attention on real problems, not rhetoric.
The excuse has to be for something that doesn't have complaining parties who want their cases solved. Where law enforcement has to deal with victims who report crimes, law enforcement performance is measured by the percentage of crimes solved. This keeps cops focused, and they don't get to set their own agenda.
It's significant that the FBI's "child pornography" enforcement operation hasn't been involved in the Catholic child abuse scandals. There don't seem to have been any cases where the FBI actually caught a priest abusing a child. Yet, given the statistics, that's an obvious place to look.
Note what we don't have. There's no "war on financial fraud". There's no "war on tax cheats". There's no "war on polluters". There's no "war on employers of underage kids".
And then some app sends those pictures somewhere? Some apps (including Facebook's) have enough permissions to access those images and send them to a remote site.