The same thing happened with math coprocessors. I once had an AMD Am386 chip with an Intel 80387 floating point chip. With the 486 CPU series Intel fully integrated the floating point functions in the same chip as the CPU.
I don't think the market for separate graphics chips will last much longer. The only way to get more performance out of CPUs now is by adding cores and it makes sense to let the CPU use the GPU cores. Integrating graphic functions in the CPU seems inevitable by now.
we have a maximum length of about 1.7cm. Sounds like we can go up to 9Ghz, at least if we are just using the speed of light in vacuum.
Assuming the signals travel in a straight line. If you look at current motherboards and video cards, you'll notice that many of the copper traces are "wiggly", not straight. That is done in order to get bits in parallel buses to arrive at the same time, and conductor traces on the chips must be designed similarly, it's the longest distance that any of the bits must travel that limits the others.
Besides, there are capacitance and inductance effects to be considered. Transitions from one to zero and vice-versa aren't instantaneous and that must be taken into account.
One could say that 9 GHz would be the absolute physical limit for a 1.7 cm chip and the technical limit is somewhat lower than that.
For a set of chips on a board, the absolute physical limit is much lower, and that's the reason why on-chip cache memory has become so important lately.
With a 3 GHz clock, a signal at the speed of light travels 10 cm during one clock cycle. This means that if a chip needs data from another and there's a distance of five centimeters or more between both chips the data will not arrive in the same clock cycle.
"The move has a lot to do with the incoming arrival of products like Ontario and Llano, which will combine AMD processing and graphics in single slabs of silicon."
Good. Getting rid of the PCI-e bus between CPU and GPU is one important step in getting massive parallelism to work well.
Since we hit the 3 GHz barrier, where the speed of light itself becomes a limit, putting the processing elements physically closer is essential to get better performance. Now let's see them put 4 GB or so of fast RAM on the same chip.
The proof that the number of at least two digits in the decimal expansion of pi is unbounded is trivial, because otherwise we would come to a point where there would be just one digit repeating endlessly and pi would be rational.
My math skills aren't good enough to prove that all of the ten digits must be unbounded, but I suspect this must be the case.
Why can't they spend as much effort on learning the simple and effective tools that exist to work with text files as they spend learning Excel tricks?
I have seen people pay for "Advanced Excel" training in order to do what I can do with a few lines of Unix utilities. The cost/benefit ratio of Excel is very poor.
Plain text has another advantage in that it's the most universal standard for data that exists. I can read text files from the start of the computing age without too much problem. I can even scan punched cards or punched tape to recover the data. I can scan and OCR text from printed pages.
The only advantage Excel has is familiarity for people in the corporate environment. A familiarity that has come through a large spending in training and software purchases.
maybe a local condition for creating planets exceptionally happened in the neighborhood. I don't believe it, but that is still a possibility.
Given that we can see stars very similar to those near us even in other galaxies, I don't think it's likely that the conditions in our neighborhood are so special. The planets are formed in the same process that formed the star, a star similar to ours should also have planets.
So people in the 1800s were stupid for thinking that reaching escape velocity was impossible given their current and foreseeable technology at the time? How is that any different than you saying reaching other star systems in a timely fashion is impossible given current and foreseeable technology?
The only limits in the 1800s were technological. Given enough development in stronger and lighter materials, escape velocity became possible.
The light of speed limit is an ultimate physical limit of the universe. The first hint of this limitation was found in 1887 and has been confirmed many times in many different ways. Simply put, given all the experimental data we have, if faster than light travel were possible time would be bidirectional; causality would be violated.
This does not mean FTL is absolutely impossible, maybe we will one day find a flaw in our current understanding of physics that will let us travel faster than light. However, the resultant implications would be so huge that travelling to distant stars would perhaps be one of the least interesting things to do with our new physics.
Imagine what the day will be like when we find something like that. We'll know it's there, we'll know it's the right size and at the right distance from its star, but we'll know little else.
We know very little about exoplanets right now because they are detected by indirect means. When we find an earth-like planet in the habitable zone that will be a strong incentive to build a telescope capable of observing it directly.
The moment we start direct optical observations of a planet we will be able to analyze the spectrum of its reflected light. The spectrum will tell us something about its atmosphere, if there's free oxygen there the planet is almost certain to have life.
That, my friend, will be the greatest incentive for developing science the earth could have.
the attack that led to the banning of USB drives on government computers.
This reminds me of the joke of the man that, having learned that his wife was fucking other men in the couch in the living room, moved the couch to the garage.
USB drives have a purpose for legal uses. Wouldn't it be better to improve their systems so that USB drives couldn't be used in harmful ways?
Hmmm, let's say "for sufficiently large values of one".
There are instances of stories where the author needs to have a few more impossibilities in order to build a story. For example, in the Foundation series, the Galactic Empire would be impossible without faster than light travel, yet FTL is not the focus of the story.
So, yes, there may be a need for a second or third impossibility as an accessory to the main theme of the story. But SF still remains as a theme where the story revolves around a "what if" question.
In the case I cited above the question was "what if there existed a mathematical method to analyze human behavior such that you could predict how a large number of people would act but not what any individual would do under some circumstances". In order to have a large enough number of people, Asimov postulated a galactic empire with millions of planets and trillions of citizens, for which faster than light travel was a necessity.
This is different from a story like Star Wars, where the main theme is the existence of a mythical "force" that gives superhuman powers to the people who have it. Controlling the "force" a Jedi seems to be able to do anything, if he has enough faith. The impossibilities are unlimited.
isn't the claim that decay rates are constant and unaffected by anything else extraordinary in itself?
Not really. There are four known forces in the universe: gravitational, electromagnetic, weak nuclear, and strong nuclear.
The forces we deal outside of nuclear physics are gravitational and electromagnetic, of which the electromagnetic is the strongest. The forces that act in radioactive decay are the weak and strong nuclear forces. The weak nuclear force is 10^40 times (that is the number one followed by forty zeros for the non-scientists among us) stronger than the electromagnetic force.
It only stands to reason that nuclear decay should be totally unaffected by anything that happens outside the atomic nucleus.
The difference doesn't exist. Science fiction is fantasy
Absolutely wrong, at least for connoisseurs. "Hard" science fiction, or SF for short, is very different from fantasy.
SF is a genre written with a "what if" question. Suppose *one* and only one thing that's impossible today were possible, what then? Examples of authors in this genre are Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Arthur Clarke. There's very little true SF in movies and TV, it's too cerebral for visual consumption. A magazine that specializes in SF is Analog, published since 1930, when it was named "Astounding".
Fantasy is a genre where anything goes. You could say that SF and, as a matter of fact, all fiction is a sub-genre of fantasy. Star Trek and Star Wars are fantasy but not true SF, they have too many impossible things to qualify as true Science Fiction.
Why must every technology always be for soldiers? Because who else would pay $500 for a hi-tech toilet seat.
And you should be glad of that. For instance, if it weren't for militaryapplications civilian jet transport would have come much later than it did. The very first jet plane designed primarily for civilian service was a failure suffering from severe design flaws.
If you are going to spend a shitload of money on the military, at least let them iron out the flaws in new technology.
So if me and some fellow chefs where to start a community called cookbook we are stepping on some sizzy tones?
Considering that the url would be http://cookbook./ you are in serious trouble.
If part of a site's name may not be used if that part has been used elsewhere, then no url can contain a slash or a dot without violating Slashdot's trademark.
Python, at least, has the philosophy of "do the most expected thing"
And it fails miserably in the example I mentioned.
When I write a = b; a = 3; b = 5 the end result will be that variable a will contain the value 3 and variable b will contain the value 5, which is the "most expected thing".
When I write a = b; a[1] = 3; b[1] = 5 the end result will be that both a[1] and b[1] will contain the value 5, while the "most expected thing" would be that a[1] had the value 3 and b[1] had the value 5.
This is even more confusing when one uses multi dimensional arrays. An exercise for the student: without running the code, can you tell just by looking what's the difference between these two declarations:
>>> a = [[0] * 5] * 3 >>> b = [[0] * 5 for i in range(3)]
It would take an experienced Python programmer to know, just by inspection of the code above, to know that the result would be:
In C it's very clear the difference between { b = malloc(5); a = b } and { b = malloc(5); a = malloc(5) }
In Python it's not always clear to the neophyte where malloc is being called, because the call to malloc is disguised deep into a library written in C that's called by the Python interpreter.
If I found one of these on my vehicle, then I can take possession of it?
If I found something attached to my vehicle and I don't know what it was, I'd throw it into the trash can.
Then no one could accuse me of stealing property. All the owner would need to do to recover his property would be to track it to whatever trash dump it ended in.
I wonder how long it would take to the police detectives to analyze the data. There was my car, not moving for several days. Then, suddenly, on Tuesday morning I started going through all the streets in the neighborhood stopping at each address.
Slashdot Mirror
The same thing happened with math coprocessors. I once had an AMD Am386 chip with an Intel 80387 floating point chip. With the 486 CPU series Intel fully integrated the floating point functions in the same chip as the CPU.
I don't think the market for separate graphics chips will last much longer. The only way to get more performance out of CPUs now is by adding cores and it makes sense to let the CPU use the GPU cores. Integrating graphic functions in the CPU seems inevitable by now.
Assuming the signals travel in a straight line. If you look at current motherboards and video cards, you'll notice that many of the copper traces are "wiggly", not straight. That is done in order to get bits in parallel buses to arrive at the same time, and conductor traces on the chips must be designed similarly, it's the longest distance that any of the bits must travel that limits the others.
Besides, there are capacitance and inductance effects to be considered. Transitions from one to zero and vice-versa aren't instantaneous and that must be taken into account.
One could say that 9 GHz would be the absolute physical limit for a 1.7 cm chip and the technical limit is somewhat lower than that.
For a set of chips on a board, the absolute physical limit is much lower, and that's the reason why on-chip cache memory has become so important lately.
With a 3 GHz clock, a signal at the speed of light travels 10 cm during one clock cycle. This means that if a chip needs data from another and there's a distance of five centimeters or more between both chips the data will not arrive in the same clock cycle.
Good. Getting rid of the PCI-e bus between CPU and GPU is one important step in getting massive parallelism to work well.
Since we hit the 3 GHz barrier, where the speed of light itself becomes a limit, putting the processing elements physically closer is essential to get better performance. Now let's see them put 4 GB or so of fast RAM on the same chip.
The proof that the number of at least two digits in the decimal expansion of pi is unbounded is trivial, because otherwise we would come to a point where there would be just one digit repeating endlessly and pi would be rational.
My math skills aren't good enough to prove that all of the ten digits must be unbounded, but I suspect this must be the case.
Why can't they spend as much effort on learning the simple and effective tools that exist to work with text files as they spend learning Excel tricks?
I have seen people pay for "Advanced Excel" training in order to do what I can do with a few lines of Unix utilities. The cost/benefit ratio of Excel is very poor.
Plain text has another advantage in that it's the most universal standard for data that exists. I can read text files from the start of the computing age without too much problem. I can even scan punched cards or punched tape to recover the data. I can scan and OCR text from printed pages.
The only advantage Excel has is familiarity for people in the corporate environment. A familiarity that has come through a large spending in training and software purchases.
Having the answers pinpointed by GPS doesn't seem too good. A census contains lots of data that's better kept to a somewhat generic location.
Sorry, that was the OLD Testament. According to the NEW Testament, only Jesus saves.
You can have evaporation ponds, using wind power to pump the sea water.
The big problem then is separating the more valuable compounds from the sodium chloride
Then the proper method would be to change those parts of the Constitution that have become obsolete, not to violate them.
Civilized society needs to follow established rules, not let a bunch of petty dictators act as they see fit.
The way I would do that is with three lasers, red, green, and blue, and some movable mirrors.
Given that we can see stars very similar to those near us even in other galaxies, I don't think it's likely that the conditions in our neighborhood are so special. The planets are formed in the same process that formed the star, a star similar to ours should also have planets.
The only limits in the 1800s were technological. Given enough development in stronger and lighter materials, escape velocity became possible.
The light of speed limit is an ultimate physical limit of the universe. The first hint of this limitation was found in 1887 and has been confirmed many times in many different ways. Simply put, given all the experimental data we have, if faster than light travel were possible time would be bidirectional; causality would be violated.
This does not mean FTL is absolutely impossible, maybe we will one day find a flaw in our current understanding of physics that will let us travel faster than light. However, the resultant implications would be so huge that travelling to distant stars would perhaps be one of the least interesting things to do with our new physics.
We know very little about exoplanets right now because they are detected by indirect means. When we find an earth-like planet in the habitable zone that will be a strong incentive to build a telescope capable of observing it directly.
The moment we start direct optical observations of a planet we will be able to analyze the spectrum of its reflected light. The spectrum will tell us something about its atmosphere, if there's free oxygen there the planet is almost certain to have life.
That, my friend, will be the greatest incentive for developing science the earth could have.
According to Wikipedia, there are about 3.5 billion women who never died versus some 45 to 55 billion women who died
Therefore, the answer to your question is 93%
Well, not everyone has died yet, you know...
I, for one, hope that immortality will be one of medical science's accomplishments during my lifetime.
This reminds me of the joke of the man that, having learned that his wife was fucking other men in the couch in the living room, moved the couch to the garage.
USB drives have a purpose for legal uses. Wouldn't it be better to improve their systems so that USB drives couldn't be used in harmful ways?
Hmmm, let's say "for sufficiently large values of one".
There are instances of stories where the author needs to have a few more impossibilities in order to build a story. For example, in the Foundation series, the Galactic Empire would be impossible without faster than light travel, yet FTL is not the focus of the story.
So, yes, there may be a need for a second or third impossibility as an accessory to the main theme of the story. But SF still remains as a theme where the story revolves around a "what if" question.
In the case I cited above the question was "what if there existed a mathematical method to analyze human behavior such that you could predict how a large number of people would act but not what any individual would do under some circumstances". In order to have a large enough number of people, Asimov postulated a galactic empire with millions of planets and trillions of citizens, for which faster than light travel was a necessity.
This is different from a story like Star Wars, where the main theme is the existence of a mythical "force" that gives superhuman powers to the people who have it. Controlling the "force" a Jedi seems to be able to do anything, if he has enough faith. The impossibilities are unlimited.
Not really. There are four known forces in the universe: gravitational, electromagnetic, weak nuclear, and strong nuclear.
The forces we deal outside of nuclear physics are gravitational and electromagnetic, of which the electromagnetic is the strongest. The forces that act in radioactive decay are the weak and strong nuclear forces. The weak nuclear force is 10^40 times (that is the number one followed by forty zeros for the non-scientists among us) stronger than the electromagnetic force.
It only stands to reason that nuclear decay should be totally unaffected by anything that happens outside the atomic nucleus.
Absolutely wrong, at least for connoisseurs. "Hard" science fiction, or SF for short, is very different from fantasy.
SF is a genre written with a "what if" question. Suppose *one* and only one thing that's impossible today were possible, what then? Examples of authors in this genre are Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Arthur Clarke. There's very little true SF in movies and TV, it's too cerebral for visual consumption. A magazine that specializes in SF is Analog, published since 1930, when it was named "Astounding".
Fantasy is a genre where anything goes. You could say that SF and, as a matter of fact, all fiction is a sub-genre of fantasy. Star Trek and Star Wars are fantasy but not true SF, they have too many impossible things to qualify as true Science Fiction.
So, why don't they mount the gun backwards? The pilot could aim through a rear facing camera.
Why must every technology always be for soldiers? Because who else would pay $500 for a hi-tech toilet seat.
And you should be glad of that. For instance, if it weren't for military applications civilian jet transport would have come much later than it did. The very first jet plane designed primarily for civilian service was a failure suffering from severe design flaws.
If you are going to spend a shitload of money on the military, at least let them iron out the flaws in new technology.
Considering that the url would be http://cookbook./ you are in serious trouble.
If part of a site's name may not be used if that part has been used elsewhere, then no url can contain a slash or a dot without violating Slashdot's trademark.
And it fails miserably in the example I mentioned.
When I write a = b; a = 3; b = 5 the end result will be that variable a will contain the value 3 and variable b will contain the value 5, which is the "most expected thing".
When I write a = b; a[1] = 3; b[1] = 5 the end result will be that both a[1] and b[1] will contain the value 5, while the "most expected thing" would be that a[1] had the value 3 and b[1] had the value 5.
This is even more confusing when one uses multi dimensional arrays. An exercise for the student: without running the code, can you tell just by looking what's the difference between these two declarations:
>>> a = [[0] * 5] * 3
>>> b = [[0] * 5 for i in range(3)]
It would take an experienced Python programmer to know, just by inspection of the code above, to know that the result would be:
>>> a[0][1] = 3
>>> a
[[0, 3, 0, 0, 0], [0, 3, 0, 0, 0], [0, 3, 0, 0, 0]]
>>> b[0][1] = 3
>>> b
[[0, 3, 0, 0, 0], [0, 0, 0, 0, 0], [0, 0, 0, 0, 0]]
In C it's very clear the difference between { b = malloc(5); a = b } and { b = malloc(5); a = malloc(5) }
In Python it's not always clear to the neophyte where malloc is being called, because the call to malloc is disguised deep into a library written in C that's called by the Python interpreter.
If I found something attached to my vehicle and I don't know what it was, I'd throw it into the trash can.
Then no one could accuse me of stealing property. All the owner would need to do to recover his property would be to track it to whatever trash dump it ended in.
I wonder how long it would take to the police detectives to analyze the data. There was my car, not moving for several days. Then, suddenly, on Tuesday morning I started going through all the streets in the neighborhood stopping at each address.