If the laptop allows you to access information on ways of obtaining clean water, improving your health, keeping the population down and promoting peace, then it has the potential of being useful. Content, and accessibility, are the key benefits of the laptop.
I sincerely believe that you can't just skip an evolutionary step and employ "modern technology" when the social infrastructure
is lacking in many other ways. It's like using racing tires for your consumer car: even if they work, they won't work as expected.
For example, children may be tempted to sell the unit for some food, or they may actually benefit more by learning to herd
cattle or grow crops instead of learning "powerpoint" and the internet. Using a computer may appear to be a trivial skill to us,
but when basic literacy (as in reading books) is a rare privilege, then one has to wonder whether the laptop will actually
be used in practice.
After all, you will need proper software localization, maybe wireless internet, someone to fix it when (not "if")
it breaks and someone to provide useful content (in the local language---sorry, the english wikipedia doesn't count). These
are major projects even for a moderately organized government and they probably represent a very significant
effort that far surpasses the ~100-200$ cost per unit. Hell, software localization and development alone is a
huge project! Which brings us to my original point: if a country and its people can
afford such an extensive "computerization" effort, they are much better off buying COMMODITY hardware and software.
I am not against the idea of introducing cheap laptops or PCs in poor countries. It's just that I can't imagine a
significant niche where this product would actually matter or be preferable to a real computer. Really poor countries are
too poor to care about computers (and are probably unable to provide infrastructure) while relatively richer
countries (the kind where someone will live to see their fifties or sixties) should not invest on a severely
handicapped unit just to save a few percent of the overall cost.
The vast majority of people who are actually interested in owning this laptop (and who can afford 100$!)
would be far better off if they bought a REAL $400 laptop. The people who should get this laptop
are the ones that have a 30 year life expectancy and who, frankly, couldn't care less about
teh internet or online pr0n. In that sense, I don't think this is actually going to be useful.
Let me give two specific examples: poor people in Africa probably need drugs, water, sex
education and peace. On the other hand, "poor" people in countries like Argentina would
probably prefer to get a "real" laptop that can do real work (yes, and run Windows)
with a mass discount (at a final price of, say ~300-400$).
My impression is that this laptop tries to fill a non-existent (or very small)
gap between those that are so poor they die of hunger and those that are rich
enough to afford a real computer. It makes much more sense, in the second case
to reduce taxes or offer refunds as an incentive, than to force people to use
a crappy computer.
That being said, I'm sure many of us would appreciate the "geek" factor (or hack
value) of that little machine.
Athlon 2700, gf6800, 720p Quicktimes run at about 10 fps, don't know why. Pretty fresh install of WinXP and I don't use IE, but spyware never seems to outside the realm of suspects.
If possible, try saving the videos and running them from a local folder with a decent player, like VLC. The in-browser players usually
suck (performance-wise). You machine is definitely capable of running 720p content, even with relatively modern codecs.
Oh come on. I happen to like retsina, occasionally, in small quanties in the right circumstances, but how often have the French been reduced to saying "you know what would improve this wine - some pine resin"?
Retsina is a greek wine, actually. I don't think they make it in France. The resin was added as a preservative, back when
artificial preservatives were not available (most wines contain sulfur nowadays). I don't think anyone considers
retsina to be "quality wine", even those who drink it. The taste can be pleasing, with the right food.
For what it's worth, I haven't drunk retsina in years, and one of the biggest makers is ~10km from
my house.
Not true. I have a top of the line computer from 3.5 years ago, and it cannot play high def trailers. Combine this with lots of flash video, video conferencing, etc. and you have various cpu needs that need to be met. It is hard for me to believe too, but flash and quicktime are pushing the needs of people's hardware.
This is an indication that the code sucks. You should be able to play almost anything with a processor rated as 3000+ or
better. I am sure that you can find some unrealistic 1080p/MPEG4 content that can stress some modern processors, but as a general rule, I haven't encountered ANY video that stresses my athlon 3200+ with mplayer (linux). Maybe you need a better video card?
But if you're not really falling into either of these four, there's not really much of a reason to go with a desktop, unless you know it'll be fixed in one location 90% of the time. Many people don't have a dedicated "computer area", they sit down at a suitable desk, use it then afterwards pack it away. Many people want to take it places, school, work, friends, cabin, road trips, whatever.
First, I'd like to add another reason: for the same performance, desktops are way cheaper. Then, even though your reasons for buying a laptop are accurate, my estimate is very different. I think that most people will just keep their laptop on the desk for 99% of the time. I know many people with laptops, and their only reason for buying appears to be the occasional trip and the extra prestige associated with a "slicker" device. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are people constantly on the move, but these are not the majority of laptop buyers.
Me, I prefer to have a heavyweight desktop (for real work) and an ultra-cheap laptop (for music, DVD, maybe a presentation) that won't make me miserable if it breaks.
I thought one of the arguments for linux was that you didn't need to reboot - like you do with Windows
I have to agree with that. If your work session is, say, 4 hours or more, then it wouldn't matter if
the boot process takes 1-2 min. Unless your work requires rebooting all the time (which is hard to imagine).
Furthermore, as another poster noticed, windows gives the IMPRESSION of booting quickly,
but needs another 30+ seconds after you get inside the desktop. Even though the system is theoretically
available, windows keeps loading anti-viruses, firewalls etc for a while.
Don't get me wrong, the idea of improving an aspect of linux is clearly welcome. However, boot time can
easily be shortened with a few simple measures (custom kernel, removing unwanted services and
libraries) and I don't see the reason why the broad majority of users should care for more elaborate
methods.
The BIOS gets the password before booting the operating system. Any keylogger has to be installed in the BIOS.
There are hardware keyloggers out there, but I'm not sure how hard it's going to be to install them in someone's
laptop. Certainly it's feasible. The question, as always, is whether it's practically worth the hassle. If we're talking
about a product that targets a few CEOs and government executives, then I would worry about the possibility of a hardware
keylogger. If we're talking about a random user with moderate privacy requirements (hide porn, MP3s and his naughty videos,
perhaps), then full-disk encryption is already an overkill.
IMO, what is truly limiting the pharma industry is profit incentive. Big pharma researches the things that will make them the most money -- which, BTW, are not cures for diseases, but rather treatments for conditions.
This is not entirely accurate. From a business standpoint, if you sell a cure and your competitor sells a "treatment", you'll erase them from the map. So they would definitely like to "cure" things. However, most of the rich, western people do not suffer from diseases per se, but from "risk factors" like hypertension, diabetes, hypercholesterolemia etc etc. The treatments for these conditions are extremely effective but a cure is almost impossible (unless you manage to install a new pair of kidneys or a new pancreas etc).
Except the barriers to entry are mostly not regulatory in nature. As with most advanced R&D-based industries, the barriers are brainpower and equipment. There's plenty of capital out there to handle the hit-and-miss nature of drug design, and the regulatory restrictions on drug production and marketing are not barriers to entry for research.
FDA approval is a regulatory barrier and demands very lengthy, very expensive and time consuming pre-clinical and clinical testing. You can't just stab someone with a syringe full of X just because the computer said it works. You need to go through all proper procedures, including testing in mice, primates, healthy volunteers, otherwise healthy patients (i.e. patients that don't have anything else than the disease you want to treat) and the general patient population. You also have to determine lethal doses, drug interactions with a billion other things (foods? additives? common drugs?), allergic reactions etc etc.
My point is that the "hit and miss" process is not just a wasted stack of paper or some CPU cycles but a process involving real patients, possible deaths, legal battles. After that you'll need a host of research publications to persuade the medical community, marketing exposure etc. A "miss" is a very, very costly thing. Take Merck and Vioxx for example.
The whole point of statistics is that some "streaks" are very improbable if they are coming from a really random source. In that sense, if a random number generator displays such a tendency, it is rather probable that it isn't really random. So, yes, the statistical power (ability to discriminate between small differences) increases with huge sample sizes, but a really random source should fail such tests with probability p=0.95 regardless of sample size. That is because the tests ALWAYS compare the sample with one coming from a truly (theoretically) random source. This is the way those things work.
I would also like to remind (not to you, personally) the difference between statistically significant and meaningful. Even if an absurdly small difference can be inferred with certainty, it remains to be seen whether it matters in actual practice. This is a common cause of confusion, especially when medical epidemiological studies demonstrate a.001% reduction in risk for heart attack in those who eat cucumber every day. The.001% may be true, but it doesn't really matter.
Processor info can be obtained with the "cpuid" command since Pentium classic, if I remember correctly. There is absolutely no need to read the BIOS for this. As a matter of fact, the BIOS itself uses "cpuid" to determine which CPU is present. I am not sure whether executing cpuid requires kernel privileges, but I think it doesn't (information is stored in the registers without accessing memory at all). This looks suspicious.
Wikipedia should be banned not because it contains inaccurate information (it's often highly accurate), but because it does not function in a similar way with most scholarly publications. It's a matter of methodology, not one of actual content. Students need to understand and respect the scientific method of publishing/citing etc, at least until there is a consensus that science should abandon it's current publishing practices. In that sense, wikipedia does not belong to the system.
Enough discussion about wikipedia, already. It's just a web encyclopedia. We've had some great encyclopedias 20 years ago and nobody obsessed about them.
It all depends on whether you think it's more likely to lose email through your fault or through GMail's fault. Generally speaking, I'd prefer Gmail because most people lose data very often and don't even care to implement decent security/backup practices. If you're part of a military installation or an uber-hacker then go ahead and use RAID-10, remote backups etc. Most people don't do that and to them, GMail's security/backup policies are an improvement.
In that sense, remote desktop could be an improvement for most users that need to format every 3 months or so. (don't get me started on control of your data/privacy/confidentiality etc... this is another issue)
I wonder, If it was the PS3 that had a similar problem, would people defend it in the same way? Nintendo seems to have an ungodly amount of good karma. Admittedly, you'd have to be an idiot to throw your remote at the TV, but then again failure of the material seems to be a real issue.
For what it's worth, the lawsuit doesn't sound ridiculous to me, especially compared to the "hot coffee" warning on starbuck and macdonalds cups (THAT does make me laugh!).
Glucosamine is quite effective for osteoarthritis, especially if you start it early. Have you discussed this with your doctor? My father had arthritis in his fingers and with the help of appropriate drugs he no longer suffers (much) from it. Note that my father is over 60, so you could benefit even more. Do visit a good doctor...
This is clearly an exact integer operation. However, for speed, they use Fast Fourier Transforms to do the big squaring operation with floating point. Obviously, they need an exact result.
All serious bignum libraries use (or should use!) the FFT to multiply very big numbers. This has been studied extensively (see Knuth The Art of Programming vol 2, for example) and is the fastest way to multiply. The general idea is that after the transform you can multiply in O(N), which is much faster than the naive O(N*N) one would expect from a simplistic digit-by-digit approach.
Another, less obvious, problem is hidden underneath the way the IEEE754 works: Your error grows as your numbers grow. This might seem obvious, but it is interesting how many people overlook this flaw and problem in everyday life. Since according to the IEEE754 standard, real numbers are stored as exponent and mantissa, if you're dealing with BIG numbers, a fair deal of your mantissa is spent on the "pre-comma" part of your number, so you're losing precision.
This is not entirely accurate. The length of the mantissa (and the exponent) is constant for both doubles and floats. Furthermore, the point of using an exponent is so that there is no difference whether you calculate 2x10^9 * 2x10^9 or 2*2 or 0.0002*0.0002. In all these cases the mantissa is the same (the example is in decimal, but you get the point). You always get N bits of mantissa whether your number is small or big.
In my opinion, the IEEE754 float types are really good provided that (a) you use algorithms that are numerically stable and (b) you treat them as floats and not as integers. A useful addition to C99 has been the inclusion of isless(), isunordered() isgreater() etc macros for this purpose. With sufficient care a bignum library is rarely needed.
IANAD (Doctor) but I guess cells and stuff are not that complicated, we evolved out of a single cell organism and some energy a few thousands of years ago or were we designed intelligently after all? We are intelligent enough (single cell organism) to create machines (energy) that can do this, right...
IAAD and I can tell you that the proper analogy to a living cell is a soup of molecules, reacting in numerous unpredictable ways. Let's put this in perspective: (a) protein folding has been proven to be (theoretically) NP complete for a single protein, (b) a cell contains N (where N can be VERY large) molecules that may interact, and obviously (c) you need to test N*(N-1)/2 protein interactions in order to get a complete view of the system. Also, note that many scientists (including Penrose) seriously think that some cellular processes are sensitive at a quantum mechanical level (don't ask details, I am not a physicist).
Complicated enough?
Now take into account that cells rarely act alone and will influence or be influenced by nearby cells or hormones or drugs or million other things. Even if you know what an individual cell will do, it's really hard to predict how a tissue or an organ or an organism will eventually react.
The bottom line is that this is fantastically complicated. Nevertheless, predictive computational models can be very useful by screening for obvious failures and dangers. Even if a mega computer manages to improve the drug testing process by 1% (which is a load of money) that will probably easily offset its price. Don't expect it to get 100% computerized anytime soon.
The 65nm process from AMD will give us another interesting animal: a 35 W desktop processor. 100% passive cooling without a ridiculously expensive case would be pretty nice, eh?
Personally, I sure hope technology can do something about the high price of medicine in the US. It is really becoming burdensome, and shifting demographics make it even moreso.
The only way to lower the cost of medicine in the US is through political decisions and different health care policies. The exact same procedures AND the exact same medications AND the exact same equipment can be found in many countries (including european countries) at a fraction of the cost.
Maybe it has to do with the fact that in the US doctors go to extreme lengths to avoid being sued (producing a lot of excess costs in the process). Maybe it has to do with the nature of a capitalistic society and the lack of a really competitive "free" health care system. Whatever the cause, technology is not going to lower the prices of medicine. I wouldn't expect a virtual colonoscopy to be "cheaper" than the real thing, for example. You will pay more for the convenience of not having to endure the hassle of an endoscopic procedure (it's not a matter of cost, it's a matter of demand).
As an example, a relative of a friend of mine came to visit from the US. She forgot her pills and was forced to buy equivalent ones from here. The price here was ~3 euros (per box) while the price in the US was ~100 $ (per box, again). She was so surprised that she asked me whether the ones she got here were for real people because she thought they might be intended for animals. She even considered buying a whole year's supplies before leaving. The substance is the same, why does the drug cost much more in the US? (much more than the difference in per capita GDP between countries, if you want to take that into account)
My impression is that americans go to great lengths to avoid visiting doctors because of the immense costs (the exact opposite could be said here, where health care is not as good but is free--excess usage of health care is a problem). The public health problem in the US is one of access to health care (i.e. having to pay for it), not one of quality. I would guess that, for many things, 90% of the quality at 10% of the price would probably improve the overall health of the population.
Once more, don't rest your hopes on technology. High-tech medicine costs more, not less.
Basically, DirectX is meant as an Interface between Windows and (Video) hardware. It says "if you call my function xxx, I will translate that to a certain call to the hardware". It is terribly easy to make DirectX 10 compatible with XP. You just take DirectX 9, add the new calls, and let them return "sorry, I cannot do that". Then game developers will simply add an option "activate advanced DirectX 10 features" to show off the cool stuff, but any XP user will still be able to play the game. So there is no good reason to exclude XP from the new games market, as Microsoft is trying to do.
This is only possible if the changes are minor and a 1-1 mapping between functions is available. Reading the article, it seems that you can't just map DX10 to DX9 because they are too different, you need to emulate DX10 using DX9, which is another deal altogether. Put simply, it won't work.
Enforcing DX10 doesn't just promote Vista upgrades, it also enables immediate cross-portability of PC titles to the XBOX360, which is probably another strategic goal (PS3 draws upon PS2, XBOX360 draws upon the PC). On the other hand, the solution of OpenAL + OpenGL and possibly DX9 or SDL for other services is now a more attractive alternative. Also, bear in mind that the development cycles are relatively long and don't expect upcoming hit titles to be designed for DX10. The first "true" DX10 games should appear in the market at least 6 months after Vista launch and they aren't likely to be hit titles (say Unreal 3).
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil" --- D. E. Knuth
Too many coders rush for the "cheap" optimizations and tricks that make code unreadable and forget about the grand scheme of things (algorithms, data structures, overall design) that matter most in the end.
The next year belongs to Intel, but AMD is likely to catch up very fast. First of all, the transition to 65nm is quite close and it will definitely allow a decent speed boost. Even if that isn't enough, a new "improved" Athlon64 rev. G core is just around the corner (and I'm not talking about K8L).
The advantage of Core 2 Duo is indeed spectacular (which is a good thing) but the competition from AMD will be fierce. I don't think AMD will soon surpass Core 2 (at least not before the K8L or K9 has matured) but the difference won't be as prononouced as it is expected to be right now. In the long run, Hypertransport and the headroom allowed by socket AM2 (current Athlon generation is definitely not memory speed limited, which has been a rare occurence in the processor world for as long as I can remember) will be an important strategical advantage. Other AMD technologies like "accelerator" CPUs linked via Hypertransport or Z-RAM may or may not prove to be significant in the real marketplace. The Core 2 processor definitely has higher IPC but at the cost of huge caches, to keep him running. Furthermore, the Core 2 is already at a 65nm technology, so don't expect power consumption gains in the immediate future. If the Core 2 is already at 2.93 GHz (P4 stuck at 4 GHz), I wonder how far it can scale with the current process technology.
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I sincerely believe that you can't just skip an evolutionary step and employ "modern technology" when the social infrastructure is lacking in many other ways. It's like using racing tires for your consumer car: even if they work, they won't work as expected. For example, children may be tempted to sell the unit for some food, or they may actually benefit more by learning to herd cattle or grow crops instead of learning "powerpoint" and the internet. Using a computer may appear to be a trivial skill to us, but when basic literacy (as in reading books) is a rare privilege, then one has to wonder whether the laptop will actually be used in practice.
After all, you will need proper software localization, maybe wireless internet, someone to fix it when (not "if") it breaks and someone to provide useful content (in the local language---sorry, the english wikipedia doesn't count). These are major projects even for a moderately organized government and they probably represent a very significant effort that far surpasses the ~100-200$ cost per unit. Hell, software localization and development alone is a huge project! Which brings us to my original point: if a country and its people can afford such an extensive "computerization" effort, they are much better off buying COMMODITY hardware and software.
I am not against the idea of introducing cheap laptops or PCs in poor countries. It's just that I can't imagine a significant niche where this product would actually matter or be preferable to a real computer. Really poor countries are too poor to care about computers (and are probably unable to provide infrastructure) while relatively richer countries (the kind where someone will live to see their fifties or sixties) should not invest on a severely handicapped unit just to save a few percent of the overall cost.
P.
The vast majority of people who are actually interested in owning this laptop (and who can afford 100$!) would be far better off if they bought a REAL $400 laptop. The people who should get this laptop are the ones that have a 30 year life expectancy and who, frankly, couldn't care less about teh internet or online pr0n. In that sense, I don't think this is actually going to be useful.
Let me give two specific examples: poor people in Africa probably need drugs, water, sex education and peace. On the other hand, "poor" people in countries like Argentina would probably prefer to get a "real" laptop that can do real work (yes, and run Windows) with a mass discount (at a final price of, say ~300-400$).
My impression is that this laptop tries to fill a non-existent (or very small) gap between those that are so poor they die of hunger and those that are rich enough to afford a real computer. It makes much more sense, in the second case to reduce taxes or offer refunds as an incentive, than to force people to use a crappy computer.
That being said, I'm sure many of us would appreciate the "geek" factor (or hack value) of that little machine.
P.P.
If possible, try saving the videos and running them from a local folder with a decent player, like VLC. The in-browser players usually suck (performance-wise). You machine is definitely capable of running 720p content, even with relatively modern codecs.
P.
I am under the impression that chips are not allowed in the production of French wines. I could be wrong, but I think that French law requires this.
P
Retsina is a greek wine, actually. I don't think they make it in France. The resin was added as a preservative, back when artificial preservatives were not available (most wines contain sulfur nowadays). I don't think anyone considers retsina to be "quality wine", even those who drink it. The taste can be pleasing, with the right food.
For what it's worth, I haven't drunk retsina in years, and one of the biggest makers is ~10km from my house.
P.This is an indication that the code sucks. You should be able to play almost anything with a processor rated as 3000+ or better. I am sure that you can find some unrealistic 1080p/MPEG4 content that can stress some modern processors, but as a general rule, I haven't encountered ANY video that stresses my athlon 3200+ with mplayer (linux). Maybe you need a better video card?
P.
First, I'd like to add another reason: for the same performance, desktops are way cheaper. Then, even though your reasons for buying a laptop are accurate, my estimate is very different. I think that most people will just keep their laptop on the desk for 99% of the time. I know many people with laptops, and their only reason for buying appears to be the occasional trip and the extra prestige associated with a "slicker" device. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are people constantly on the move, but these are not the majority of laptop buyers.
Me, I prefer to have a heavyweight desktop (for real work) and an ultra-cheap laptop (for music, DVD, maybe a presentation) that won't make me miserable if it breaks.
P.
I have to agree with that. If your work session is, say, 4 hours or more, then it wouldn't matter if the boot process takes 1-2 min. Unless your work requires rebooting all the time (which is hard to imagine). Furthermore, as another poster noticed, windows gives the IMPRESSION of booting quickly, but needs another 30+ seconds after you get inside the desktop. Even though the system is theoretically available, windows keeps loading anti-viruses, firewalls etc for a while.
Don't get me wrong, the idea of improving an aspect of linux is clearly welcome. However, boot time can easily be shortened with a few simple measures (custom kernel, removing unwanted services and libraries) and I don't see the reason why the broad majority of users should care for more elaborate methods.
P.
P.
FDA approval is a regulatory barrier and demands very lengthy, very expensive and time consuming pre-clinical and clinical testing. You can't just stab someone with a syringe full of X just because the computer said it works. You need to go through all proper procedures, including testing in mice, primates, healthy volunteers, otherwise healthy patients (i.e. patients that don't have anything else than the disease you want to treat) and the general patient population. You also have to determine lethal doses, drug interactions with a billion other things (foods? additives? common drugs?), allergic reactions etc etc.
My point is that the "hit and miss" process is not just a wasted stack of paper or some CPU cycles but a process involving real patients, possible deaths, legal battles. After that you'll need a host of research publications to persuade the medical community, marketing exposure etc. A "miss" is a very, very costly thing. Take Merck and Vioxx for example.
P.
The whole point of statistics is that some "streaks" are very improbable if they are coming from a really random source. In that sense, if a random number generator displays such a tendency, it is rather probable that it isn't really random. So, yes, the statistical power (ability to discriminate between small differences) increases with huge sample sizes, but a really random source should fail such tests with probability p=0.95 regardless of sample size. That is because the tests ALWAYS compare the sample with one coming from a truly (theoretically) random source. This is the way those things work.
I would also like to remind (not to you, personally) the difference between statistically significant and meaningful. Even if an absurdly small difference can be inferred with certainty, it remains to be seen whether it matters in actual practice. This is a common cause of confusion, especially when medical epidemiological studies demonstrate a .001% reduction in risk for heart attack in those who eat cucumber every day. The .001% may be true, but it doesn't really matter.
P.
Processor info can be obtained with the "cpuid" command since Pentium classic, if I remember correctly. There is absolutely no need to read the BIOS for this. As a matter of fact, the BIOS itself uses "cpuid" to determine which CPU is present. I am not sure whether executing cpuid requires kernel privileges, but I think it doesn't (information is stored in the registers without accessing memory at all). This looks suspicious.
Wikipedia should be banned not because it contains inaccurate information (it's often highly accurate), but because it does not function in a similar way with most scholarly publications. It's a matter of methodology, not one of actual content. Students need to understand and respect the scientific method of publishing/citing etc, at least until there is a consensus that science should abandon it's current publishing practices. In that sense, wikipedia does not belong to the system. Enough discussion about wikipedia, already. It's just a web encyclopedia. We've had some great encyclopedias 20 years ago and nobody obsessed about them.
In that sense, remote desktop could be an improvement for most users that need to format every 3 months or so. (don't get me started on control of your data/privacy/confidentiality etc... this is another issue)
P.
I wonder, If it was the PS3 that had a similar problem, would people defend it in the same way? Nintendo seems to have an ungodly amount of good karma. Admittedly, you'd have to be an idiot to throw your remote at the TV, but then again failure of the material seems to be a real issue.
For what it's worth, the lawsuit doesn't sound ridiculous to me, especially compared to the "hot coffee" warning on starbuck and macdonalds cups (THAT does make me laugh!).
PS3=T3h r0x0rz, while Wii=T3h Sux0rZ
Glucosamine is quite effective for osteoarthritis, especially if you start it early. Have you discussed this with your doctor? My father had arthritis in his fingers and with the help of appropriate drugs he no longer suffers (much) from it. Note that my father is over 60, so you could benefit even more. Do visit a good doctor...
P.
This is not entirely accurate. The length of the mantissa (and the exponent) is constant for both doubles and floats. Furthermore, the point of using an exponent is so that there is no difference whether you calculate 2x10^9 * 2x10^9 or 2*2 or 0.0002*0.0002. In all these cases the mantissa is the same (the example is in decimal, but you get the point). You always get N bits of mantissa whether your number is small or big.
In my opinion, the IEEE754 float types are really good provided that (a) you use algorithms that are numerically stable and (b) you treat them as floats and not as integers. A useful addition to C99 has been the inclusion of isless(), isunordered() isgreater() etc macros for this purpose. With sufficient care a bignum library is rarely needed.
P.
IAAD and I can tell you that the proper analogy to a living cell is a soup of molecules, reacting in numerous unpredictable ways. Let's put this in perspective: (a) protein folding has been proven to be (theoretically) NP complete for a single protein, (b) a cell contains N (where N can be VERY large) molecules that may interact, and obviously (c) you need to test N*(N-1)/2 protein interactions in order to get a complete view of the system. Also, note that many scientists (including Penrose) seriously think that some cellular processes are sensitive at a quantum mechanical level (don't ask details, I am not a physicist).
Complicated enough?
Now take into account that cells rarely act alone and will influence or be influenced by nearby cells or hormones or drugs or million other things. Even if you know what an individual cell will do, it's really hard to predict how a tissue or an organ or an organism will eventually react.
The bottom line is that this is fantastically complicated. Nevertheless, predictive computational models can be very useful by screening for obvious failures and dangers. Even if a mega computer manages to improve the drug testing process by 1% (which is a load of money) that will probably easily offset its price. Don't expect it to get 100% computerized anytime soon.
P.
The X2 3800+ EE (35W) is already available for socket AM2 and it's made with a 90nm technology. I suspect that the shrink to 65nm will enable even faster processors at the same TDP. Check these sites: (although I have to admit it is currently out of stock) http://www.pcmicrostore.com/PartDetail.aspx?q=p:10 05329;c:36124 and http://www.lagoom.com/AMD_Athlon_64_X2_3800_2.0GHz _Winsdor/ADD3800CUBOX/partinfo-id-552125.html
P.
The only way to lower the cost of medicine in the US is through political decisions and different health care policies. The exact same procedures AND the exact same medications AND the exact same equipment can be found in many countries (including european countries) at a fraction of the cost.
Maybe it has to do with the fact that in the US doctors go to extreme lengths to avoid being sued (producing a lot of excess costs in the process). Maybe it has to do with the nature of a capitalistic society and the lack of a really competitive "free" health care system. Whatever the cause, technology is not going to lower the prices of medicine. I wouldn't expect a virtual colonoscopy to be "cheaper" than the real thing, for example. You will pay more for the convenience of not having to endure the hassle of an endoscopic procedure (it's not a matter of cost, it's a matter of demand).
As an example, a relative of a friend of mine came to visit from the US. She forgot her pills and was forced to buy equivalent ones from here. The price here was ~3 euros (per box) while the price in the US was ~100 $ (per box, again). She was so surprised that she asked me whether the ones she got here were for real people because she thought they might be intended for animals. She even considered buying a whole year's supplies before leaving. The substance is the same, why does the drug cost much more in the US? (much more than the difference in per capita GDP between countries, if you want to take that into account)
My impression is that americans go to great lengths to avoid visiting doctors because of the immense costs (the exact opposite could be said here, where health care is not as good but is free--excess usage of health care is a problem). The public health problem in the US is one of access to health care (i.e. having to pay for it), not one of quality. I would guess that, for many things, 90% of the quality at 10% of the price would probably improve the overall health of the population.
Once more, don't rest your hopes on technology. High-tech medicine costs more, not less.
P.
This is only possible if the changes are minor and a 1-1 mapping between functions is available. Reading the article, it seems that you can't just map DX10 to DX9 because they are too different, you need to emulate DX10 using DX9, which is another deal altogether. Put simply, it won't work.
Enforcing DX10 doesn't just promote Vista upgrades, it also enables immediate cross-portability of PC titles to the XBOX360, which is probably another strategic goal (PS3 draws upon PS2, XBOX360 draws upon the PC). On the other hand, the solution of OpenAL + OpenGL and possibly DX9 or SDL for other services is now a more attractive alternative. Also, bear in mind that the development cycles are relatively long and don't expect upcoming hit titles to be designed for DX10. The first "true" DX10 games should appear in the market at least 6 months after Vista launch and they aren't likely to be hit titles (say Unreal 3).
P.The advantage of Core 2 Duo is indeed spectacular (which is a good thing) but the competition from AMD will be fierce. I don't think AMD will soon surpass Core 2 (at least not before the K8L or K9 has matured) but the difference won't be as prononouced as it is expected to be right now. In the long run, Hypertransport and the headroom allowed by socket AM2 (current Athlon generation is definitely not memory speed limited, which has been a rare occurence in the processor world for as long as I can remember) will be an important strategical advantage. Other AMD technologies like "accelerator" CPUs linked via Hypertransport or Z-RAM may or may not prove to be significant in the real marketplace. The Core 2 processor definitely has higher IPC but at the cost of huge caches, to keep him running. Furthermore, the Core 2 is already at a 65nm technology, so don't expect power consumption gains in the immediate future. If the Core 2 is already at 2.93 GHz (P4 stuck at 4 GHz), I wonder how far it can scale with the current process technology.
P.