The orbital mechanics can get a bit tricky; but interplanetary distances open the possibility of reviving good, old-fashioned, delay-line memory...
Just think of how much data you could keep in-flight if you just replaced Pluto with a nice orbital mirror and told your vendor "GIVE ME AN XFP MODULE OF TERRIBLE POWER."
For real archiving, of course, you'll need to look at siting your mirror outside the solar system for a longer round trip.
I have to imagine that some sort of materials engineering geekery involving carbon allotropes and platinum group metals could be even more durable, while also having better data density and looking like they were pulled right out of some sci-fi memory core; but it's pretty hard to argue with a storage medium you can make from mud that gets more durable when the assholes one ziggurat over decide to burn your civilization down...
The designated-place concept is borrowed from aviation(though usually it's just cutouts/silouettes, no sensors) where 'losing a tool' is a minor problem; but 'leaving a tool inside the engine' is a potentially lethal problem.
It requires a certain amount of fiddliness; but it is undoubtedly better organized than a simple 'in box/not in box' arrangement.
It is actually probable that New Zealand law was broken, when their intelligence services were spying on him and possibly when they allowed the FBI to move a considerable volume of evidence back to the US without any legal process. As for New Zealand law being broken by the defendant, that hasn't been as well established.
It's not entirely unreasonable for him to have legally evaluated them as an industry actor with a potential for engaging in civil litigation as a strategic measure in order to advance their business objectives.
Being surprised that the money was only the beginning, and they had enough pull to obtain the (illegal) cooperation of New Zealand's clandestine services, a well armed raid on his residence(rather than a nasty subpoena at work), and nearly unlimited FBI access to an investigation and set of evidence in New Zealand, followed by the sort of dogged prosecution-by-any-means from Uncle Sam that you usually have to move a lot of cocaine or deal in embarassing state secrets to earn is somewhat understandable.
I suspect that the liability structure would discourage that. Old guy's brain runs out of oxygen while Proper Procedures are being followed? Tragic, really. You fuck up some of the touchy little spinal bits while providing expedited transport? Personal injury lawsuit time!
Ah; but, even though you were unconscious, I'm going to assume that you chose to consume ambulance services rather than cab services, in order to maximize your utility as a rational consumer; because the alternative would be to admit that healthcare is only sometimes a 'market' at all, much less a high-functioning one!
Was that claim actually delivered as a standalone, or did somebody pick a choice sentence out of a discussion of the false economies of diabetics having insufficient coverage for proper blood sugar monitoring; but adequate coverage for just lopping the extremity off once the damage was done?
The former would be a bit surprising(even when he's being evil, he usually has a pretty good grasp of staying on message and not providing any juicy gaffes); but the latter is something of a commonplace, and isn't so much about the cost of actually chopping the limb off; but the ongoing costs of the resultant disability, as compared to better blood sugar maintenance.
I'd be curious to know how the numbers change if you compare patients who, on arrival to the hospital, are immediately shunted off to some sort of specialist with those whose cases are deemed to need only the attention of whatever doctor happens to be on hand along with nursing staff.
All the EMTs I've known well enough to hear about their job have been knowledgeable and professional; but it's always shocked me how much less training(and how much less money) the EMTs get compared to in-hospital medical staff, especially if the patient's condition is such that they'd see a specialist in hospital.
Which, of course, makes him a gormless simpering fascist and a total moron.
Sure, in retrospect most people who end up doing something violent or otherwise alarming end up having made some choice remarks at some point before doing so. However, that's only significant because you've deliberately selected a population of scary violent subjects. Guess what, dumbass? You'll see a lot of very creative and endlessly vitriolic chatter from people too lazy to do much more than press the buttons on the remote control extra angrily or maybe get sloshed and throw a few punches at their similarly idiotic friends.
Until you look at the situation in terms of 'how many alarming-sounding comments actually end badly?' rather than 'how many situations that end badly have something that sounds alarming now that we know what happened?' you've got absolutely nothing.
Not to worry. After working 24x7 for a week or two trying to rebuild the entire spaghetti-heap of an internal IT setup that took years to get as crufty(but familiar and functional-ish) as it was; being fired and thus allowed to go home and drink yourself to sleep will seem like a hell of a perk!
It might not be much of a win for occupational safety and health; but a nuclear warhead does have a substantial chunk of conventional explosives built into it, which could be used to express displeasure at attempted tampering a bit more vehemently than bombs do today. Still not 100% foolproof; but raises the odds a bit.
What I would be curious to know about this radiation 'fingerprinting' is whether it can resist DoS attacks where beam sources, distributed radioactive dust/liquid or other means are used to push the sensors out of the 'correct' range of values and cause the PAL to fail safe.
It is certainly interesting that deciding whether or not to kill some fleshy humans can be demonstrated to be circumscribed by the halting problem; but it's always a bit irksome to see another proof-of-limitiations-of-turing-complete-system that (either by omission, or in more optimistic cases directly) ignores the distinct possibility that humans are no more than turing complete.
Humans certainly are enormously capable at approximate solutions to brutally nasty problems(eg. computational linguistics vs. the average human toddler); but that is very different from a demonstration that, say, humans possess an Oracle, or are some sort of hypercomputational system, rather than simply being enormously good at hard-but-not-theoretically-intractable problems in certain areas.
In this instance it's especially galling because we've only been philosophizing about acceptable losses, 'just war', legitimate causus belli, 'proportionality', and whatnot for about as long as we've been chucking spears at one another. It's a pure commonplace that a mixture of overkill and underkill is an effectively certain outcome when you go to war. It is interesting that, in principle, kill/no-kill is subject to the halting problem; but has anyone (aside from sleazy assholes hyping 'smart' weapons) ever asserted that kill decisions would be anything but imprecise?
I don't doubt that China could. Half the fun of being a nation state is that you can do all kinds of stuff with no more risk than a stern letter from the WTO. That said, taking action against a private company, selling at a loss out of its own pocket, would likely play differently than taking action against a company being supported by the state to sell at a loss. They could still do it; but the diplomatic angle might be less favorable.
It'd also be interesting to know if they would want to or not: Aside from some very feeble stirrings(I think some of the Loongson 3 MIPS64 stuff was supposed to have hardware assisted x86 emulation; but nobody seems to have heard from that recently), China has basically zero domestic x86 production, so they may well prefer to just get cheap silicon for themselves and more demand for (Chinese-assembled) devices built around cheap Intel silicon.
The question is whether or not you go the way of bnetd, which worked just fine; but couldn't take the legal heat.
(Also, if it's a console, or a PC title with nasty DRM or a 'warden' style thing, convincing it to connect to something that doesn't have the vendor's SSL cert could be a bit of a trick, even if you have a protocol and behavior compatible server.)
Phones, tablets, laptops, all is mobile. The days of tower rigs are over.
Given that a 'tower rig' is basically a server turned on its side, with fewer 40mm fans and some of the classy reliability features cut, that category will take a great deal of killing. On the other hand, the CPU in a server or tower is almost certainly using nearly as many of the power gating, adjustable clock speed, and various other thermal protection and power saving strategies as the mobile CPUs are. Overall efficiency is still going to be lower ('eh, we're on AC, just keep the PSU energized so a USB peripheral can wake the system!' isn't god's gift to brilliant standbye power numbers); but 'mobile' and 'desktop' have been on something of a collision course ever since the P4 flamed out, almost literally, and Pentium M derivatives took over.
It tends to be; but I think regulatory authorities only get nervous if it shows signs of being dangerously effective, or if there is reason to believe that the pockets behind it are deep enough to ignore losses almost indefinitely(as with international dumping/tariff slapfights, where a mixture of xenophobia and the fact that a nation state can typically afford to keep dumping longer than a company can afford to keep competing).
In the case of Intel trying to break into tablets, my understanding is that it's a known matter of fact that Bay Trail parts are being practically given away(along with a nontrivial amount of Intel software work, including an emulator to handle ARM NDK stuff and general porting and polishing to make the x86 Android not look like, say, the blasted hellscape that is MIPS Android); but it is less clear whether Intel has been able to dump hard enough to actually damage competition.
The one product line that they definitely helped bury was Windows RT (which was mostly an unloved bastard child anyway, even before you could cram an x86 into the same chassis, and definitely had no reason to exist afterwards); but that didn't hurt MS much, since the quality of Windows tablets went up. In the wider ARM ecosystem, ARM Ltd, themselves seem to be riding high and unbelievably cheap SoCs continue to pop out of the woodwork.
Their Bay Trail pricing has definitely made x86 Android something you might actually see in the wild, and tablet-Windows something you might actually consider at a sub-Windows Surface price point; but it doesn't seem to have crushed the ARM market very much.
The part that worries me was: "The hardest challenge was explaining the language of the test to a five-year-old. But he seemed to pick it up and has a very good memory."
Sounds like the kid is pretty bright, might well be pretty impressive in a few years; but 'explaining the language of the test' is pretty much a (much easier) equivalent to 'identifying the problem to be solved'.
As an exercise in mental capacity, I'm definitely not going to knock the kid, I certainly wouldn't have managed it at 5, and those capabilities will likely come in handy, I hope for him that they do.
For the MCP, on the other hand, it seems pretty dire that it can be passed by somebody with an excellent memory; but a need to be coached on what the questions mean. Real life is an open book (and/or google) test; but it is notably unsympathetic about telling you what the questions mean, what sort of answer a given question requires, which questions are actually on the test, which answers trigger a surprise exam about disaster recovery 18 months from now...
If somebody is a 'Certified Professional' I'd much rather seem them have an elegant grasp of what the problem is and what the solution should look like; but check the manual for some registry settings, than be conceptually befuddled but have a perfect grasp of the details.
It reminds me of how they used to disable any built-in CD recording features on systems that CD burners; but not Apple-blessed CD burners.
Given the teething issues of SSDs, I don't doubt that an example could be provided of some drives where 'TRIM support' means 'the intern tested it all day on his win7 box and nothing bad happened' and It Would Be Bad if OSX tried to interact with the feature. Aside from that, though, you don't make profits like Apple does without providing a little encouragement to buy high-margin upgrades.
I'm deeply underqualified to tell you how DC-DC converters do work; but only the simplest and nastiest ('linear regulators') step down voltages resistively. Those ones are nice and simple, so they do still show up in low power applications; but their inefficiency rules them out in cases like this. I don't know exactly how it is achieved; but the more sophisticated designs are capable of 90% or greater efficiency, which keeps heat related issues at bay.
As for quoted amperages, high end graphics cards get most of their power from the 12v rail (via one or two 6 or 8 pin auxiliary power connectors, plus what the PCIe slot provides). 12v is the highest voltage easily available inside a standard PC, so is the best choice for feeding a high powered component without too much loss in the cabling between the PSU and the card. However, the only things on a graphics card that actually uses 12v are the fans. The actual GPU chip, the memory, and all the various support components use substantially lower voltages( core voltage for recent GPUs is ~1.1v, GDDR5 is ~1.5v).
Because it would be brutally impractical to transfer substantial power at such low voltages, the conversion from 12v happens on the card, as close to the actual GPU chip as possible. The amperage for the card as a whole is expressed without paying attention to the amperage after this step-down step, since only the 12v draw is externally visible; but with such low vCores, the GPU chip, rather than the card, necessarily draws almost an amp for every watt it dissipates. 200A would definitely be on the high side; but not outrageously so.
Modern core voltages. In the suitably...enthusiastic... segments, a GPU that pulls 180-200 watts isn't hard to find (even without any overclocking, just off the shelf values) and the core voltage is around 1.1v, so there will be a pretty significant current involved. That's why the DC-DC converter tends to be so close to the chip it feeds, resistive losses would be brutal.
My mistake, misread as 'macbook' pro. Still likely to be stuffed full of DC/DC converters. It's been ages since the PSU actually directly powered much of the more demanding silicon.
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The orbital mechanics can get a bit tricky; but interplanetary distances open the possibility of reviving good, old-fashioned, delay-line memory...
Just think of how much data you could keep in-flight if you just replaced Pluto with a nice orbital mirror and told your vendor "GIVE ME AN XFP MODULE OF TERRIBLE POWER."
For real archiving, of course, you'll need to look at siting your mirror outside the solar system for a longer round trip.
I have to imagine that some sort of materials engineering geekery involving carbon allotropes and platinum group metals could be even more durable, while also having better data density and looking like they were pulled right out of some sci-fi memory core; but it's pretty hard to argue with a storage medium you can make from mud that gets more durable when the assholes one ziggurat over decide to burn your civilization down...
But what if the first tool they walk off with is my favorite set of joint snapping pliers? Sure, there are alternatives; but it just isn't the same.
The designated-place concept is borrowed from aviation(though usually it's just cutouts/silouettes, no sensors) where 'losing a tool' is a minor problem; but 'leaving a tool inside the engine' is a potentially lethal problem.
It requires a certain amount of fiddliness; but it is undoubtedly better organized than a simple 'in box/not in box' arrangement.
It is actually probable that New Zealand law was broken, when their intelligence services were spying on him and possibly when they allowed the FBI to move a considerable volume of evidence back to the US without any legal process. As for New Zealand law being broken by the defendant, that hasn't been as well established.
It's not entirely unreasonable for him to have legally evaluated them as an industry actor with a potential for engaging in civil litigation as a strategic measure in order to advance their business objectives.
Being surprised that the money was only the beginning, and they had enough pull to obtain the (illegal) cooperation of New Zealand's clandestine services, a well armed raid on his residence(rather than a nasty subpoena at work), and nearly unlimited FBI access to an investigation and set of evidence in New Zealand, followed by the sort of dogged prosecution-by-any-means from Uncle Sam that you usually have to move a lot of cocaine or deal in embarassing state secrets to earn is somewhat understandable.
I suspect that the liability structure would discourage that. Old guy's brain runs out of oxygen while Proper Procedures are being followed? Tragic, really. You fuck up some of the touchy little spinal bits while providing expedited transport? Personal injury lawsuit time!
Ah; but, even though you were unconscious, I'm going to assume that you chose to consume ambulance services rather than cab services, in order to maximize your utility as a rational consumer; because the alternative would be to admit that healthcare is only sometimes a 'market' at all, much less a high-functioning one!
Was that claim actually delivered as a standalone, or did somebody pick a choice sentence out of a discussion of the false economies of diabetics having insufficient coverage for proper blood sugar monitoring; but adequate coverage for just lopping the extremity off once the damage was done?
The former would be a bit surprising(even when he's being evil, he usually has a pretty good grasp of staying on message and not providing any juicy gaffes); but the latter is something of a commonplace, and isn't so much about the cost of actually chopping the limb off; but the ongoing costs of the resultant disability, as compared to better blood sugar maintenance.
I'd be curious to know how the numbers change if you compare patients who, on arrival to the hospital, are immediately shunted off to some sort of specialist with those whose cases are deemed to need only the attention of whatever doctor happens to be on hand along with nursing staff.
All the EMTs I've known well enough to hear about their job have been knowledgeable and professional; but it's always shocked me how much less training(and how much less money) the EMTs get compared to in-hospital medical staff, especially if the patient's condition is such that they'd see a specialist in hospital.
Which, of course, makes him a gormless simpering fascist and a total moron.
Sure, in retrospect most people who end up doing something violent or otherwise alarming end up having made some choice remarks at some point before doing so. However, that's only significant because you've deliberately selected a population of scary violent subjects. Guess what, dumbass? You'll see a lot of very creative and endlessly vitriolic chatter from people too lazy to do much more than press the buttons on the remote control extra angrily or maybe get sloshed and throw a few punches at their similarly idiotic friends. Until you look at the situation in terms of 'how many alarming-sounding comments actually end badly?' rather than 'how many situations that end badly have something that sounds alarming now that we know what happened?' you've got absolutely nothing.
Not to worry. After working 24x7 for a week or two trying to rebuild the entire spaghetti-heap of an internal IT setup that took years to get as crufty(but familiar and functional-ish) as it was; being fired and thus allowed to go home and drink yourself to sleep will seem like a hell of a perk!
It might not be much of a win for occupational safety and health; but a nuclear warhead does have a substantial chunk of conventional explosives built into it, which could be used to express displeasure at attempted tampering a bit more vehemently than bombs do today. Still not 100% foolproof; but raises the odds a bit.
What I would be curious to know about this radiation 'fingerprinting' is whether it can resist DoS attacks where beam sources, distributed radioactive dust/liquid or other means are used to push the sensors out of the 'correct' range of values and cause the PAL to fail safe.
Just remember that 'one or two millimetres long' falls well into 'trivially inhale-able by accident' territory.
Think of all those little spider feet tickling in your sinuses!
If you want to be a filthy marxist about it, geeks are nearly perfect petite bourgeoisie.
It is certainly interesting that deciding whether or not to kill some fleshy humans can be demonstrated to be circumscribed by the halting problem; but it's always a bit irksome to see another proof-of-limitiations-of-turing-complete-system that (either by omission, or in more optimistic cases directly) ignores the distinct possibility that humans are no more than turing complete.
Humans certainly are enormously capable at approximate solutions to brutally nasty problems(eg. computational linguistics vs. the average human toddler); but that is very different from a demonstration that, say, humans possess an Oracle, or are some sort of hypercomputational system, rather than simply being enormously good at hard-but-not-theoretically-intractable problems in certain areas.
In this instance it's especially galling because we've only been philosophizing about acceptable losses, 'just war', legitimate causus belli, 'proportionality', and whatnot for about as long as we've been chucking spears at one another. It's a pure commonplace that a mixture of overkill and underkill is an effectively certain outcome when you go to war. It is interesting that, in principle, kill/no-kill is subject to the halting problem; but has anyone (aside from sleazy assholes hyping 'smart' weapons) ever asserted that kill decisions would be anything but imprecise?
I don't doubt that China could. Half the fun of being a nation state is that you can do all kinds of stuff with no more risk than a stern letter from the WTO. That said, taking action against a private company, selling at a loss out of its own pocket, would likely play differently than taking action against a company being supported by the state to sell at a loss. They could still do it; but the diplomatic angle might be less favorable.
It'd also be interesting to know if they would want to or not: Aside from some very feeble stirrings(I think some of the Loongson 3 MIPS64 stuff was supposed to have hardware assisted x86 emulation; but nobody seems to have heard from that recently), China has basically zero domestic x86 production, so they may well prefer to just get cheap silicon for themselves and more demand for (Chinese-assembled) devices built around cheap Intel silicon.
The question is whether or not you go the way of bnetd, which worked just fine; but couldn't take the legal heat.
(Also, if it's a console, or a PC title with nasty DRM or a 'warden' style thing, convincing it to connect to something that doesn't have the vendor's SSL cert could be a bit of a trick, even if you have a protocol and behavior compatible server.)
Phones, tablets, laptops, all is mobile. The days of tower rigs are over.
Given that a 'tower rig' is basically a server turned on its side, with fewer 40mm fans and some of the classy reliability features cut, that category will take a great deal of killing. On the other hand, the CPU in a server or tower is almost certainly using nearly as many of the power gating, adjustable clock speed, and various other thermal protection and power saving strategies as the mobile CPUs are. Overall efficiency is still going to be lower ('eh, we're on AC, just keep the PSU energized so a USB peripheral can wake the system!' isn't god's gift to brilliant standbye power numbers); but 'mobile' and 'desktop' have been on something of a collision course ever since the P4 flamed out, almost literally, and Pentium M derivatives took over.
It tends to be; but I think regulatory authorities only get nervous if it shows signs of being dangerously effective, or if there is reason to believe that the pockets behind it are deep enough to ignore losses almost indefinitely(as with international dumping/tariff slapfights, where a mixture of xenophobia and the fact that a nation state can typically afford to keep dumping longer than a company can afford to keep competing).
In the case of Intel trying to break into tablets, my understanding is that it's a known matter of fact that Bay Trail parts are being practically given away(along with a nontrivial amount of Intel software work, including an emulator to handle ARM NDK stuff and general porting and polishing to make the x86 Android not look like, say, the blasted hellscape that is MIPS Android); but it is less clear whether Intel has been able to dump hard enough to actually damage competition.
The one product line that they definitely helped bury was Windows RT (which was mostly an unloved bastard child anyway, even before you could cram an x86 into the same chassis, and definitely had no reason to exist afterwards); but that didn't hurt MS much, since the quality of Windows tablets went up. In the wider ARM ecosystem, ARM Ltd, themselves seem to be riding high and unbelievably cheap SoCs continue to pop out of the woodwork.
Their Bay Trail pricing has definitely made x86 Android something you might actually see in the wild, and tablet-Windows something you might actually consider at a sub-Windows Surface price point; but it doesn't seem to have crushed the ARM market very much.
The part that worries me was: "The hardest challenge was explaining the language of the test to a five-year-old. But he seemed to pick it up and has a very good memory."
Sounds like the kid is pretty bright, might well be pretty impressive in a few years; but 'explaining the language of the test' is pretty much a (much easier) equivalent to 'identifying the problem to be solved'.
As an exercise in mental capacity, I'm definitely not going to knock the kid, I certainly wouldn't have managed it at 5, and those capabilities will likely come in handy, I hope for him that they do.
For the MCP, on the other hand, it seems pretty dire that it can be passed by somebody with an excellent memory; but a need to be coached on what the questions mean. Real life is an open book (and/or google) test; but it is notably unsympathetic about telling you what the questions mean, what sort of answer a given question requires, which questions are actually on the test, which answers trigger a surprise exam about disaster recovery 18 months from now...
If somebody is a 'Certified Professional' I'd much rather seem them have an elegant grasp of what the problem is and what the solution should look like; but check the manual for some registry settings, than be conceptually befuddled but have a perfect grasp of the details.
It reminds me of how they used to disable any built-in CD recording features on systems that CD burners; but not Apple-blessed CD burners.
Given the teething issues of SSDs, I don't doubt that an example could be provided of some drives where 'TRIM support' means 'the intern tested it all day on his win7 box and nothing bad happened' and It Would Be Bad if OSX tried to interact with the feature. Aside from that, though, you don't make profits like Apple does without providing a little encouragement to buy high-margin upgrades.
I'm deeply underqualified to tell you how DC-DC converters do work; but only the simplest and nastiest ('linear regulators') step down voltages resistively. Those ones are nice and simple, so they do still show up in low power applications; but their inefficiency rules them out in cases like this. I don't know exactly how it is achieved; but the more sophisticated designs are capable of 90% or greater efficiency, which keeps heat related issues at bay.
As for quoted amperages, high end graphics cards get most of their power from the 12v rail (via one or two 6 or 8 pin auxiliary power connectors, plus what the PCIe slot provides). 12v is the highest voltage easily available inside a standard PC, so is the best choice for feeding a high powered component without too much loss in the cabling between the PSU and the card. However, the only things on a graphics card that actually uses 12v are the fans. The actual GPU chip, the memory, and all the various support components use substantially lower voltages( core voltage for recent GPUs is ~1.1v, GDDR5 is ~1.5v).
Because it would be brutally impractical to transfer substantial power at such low voltages, the conversion from 12v happens on the card, as close to the actual GPU chip as possible. The amperage for the card as a whole is expressed without paying attention to the amperage after this step-down step, since only the 12v draw is externally visible; but with such low vCores, the GPU chip, rather than the card, necessarily draws almost an amp for every watt it dissipates. 200A would definitely be on the high side; but not outrageously so.
Modern core voltages. In the suitably...enthusiastic... segments, a GPU that pulls 180-200 watts isn't hard to find (even without any overclocking, just off the shelf values) and the core voltage is around 1.1v, so there will be a pretty significant current involved. That's why the DC-DC converter tends to be so close to the chip it feeds, resistive losses would be brutal.
My mistake, misread as 'macbook' pro. Still likely to be stuffed full of DC/DC converters. It's been ages since the PSU actually directly powered much of the more demanding silicon.