Yes and no. Lower priced scanners have CCD sensors, one for each color component. This development will put drum scanner quality (think prices greater than $10,000) into scanners at much lower prices (less than $5,000 and dropping as innovation continues). Many current CCD image scanners often use separate CCD's and color filters to first scan each color channel, and then reassemble the composite image in software. This innovation will hopefully lead to much better color balancing as well as higher resolution.
Thank you for beating me to it. You did a much better job than I could have done, and still covered all the points I was thinking of. OK so I guess I would be in the 1/10th that would cope without technology, but only if I were not stuck in a crowded urban area surrounded by the other 9/10ths going mad. =)
600-800 BTU's for an entire computer, yes. For just the CPU, no. But the conversion factor is:
BTU = Watt-hours x 3.414
BTU/hour = Watts x 3.414
A 500MHz PowerMac G4 is rated for about 752.4 BTU/hr. A processor that uses 50W average would be rated for 170.7 BTU/hr if all of the power was lost to heat. The typical thermal power of an Athlon XP 2000+ is 62.5W or 213.4BTU/hr.
At my office we have a bunch of Mac Classics on bookshelves that start the old fish screen saver after booting up. They have no keyboard or mouse, just the built in monitor.
You never mentioned it, so I thought I'd ask. If you don't need something easily removable, you can still have the data backed up to the other side of the data center, or even possibly they other side of the campus. With a storge array on a fibre loop you can back data up hourly, all 100GB in a full backup. Even a Gbit ethernet link could do this in under an hour, provided the link is not shared too much. Then you could run daily or twice daily tape backups off of that archive to send to you offsite safe archive location.
I don't think any of this kept them from being successful. Very little of PalmOS is open source, and WinCE is about as closed as it gets. What kept you from "going any further into it" was probably that you just didn't need it. It did not meet your needs, at least not to a level to justify it's price. However, I would guess the number of people who passed on the Agenda VR3 because it wasn't totally open, though it met all of their needs otherwise, is less then 5. OK, it is probably 0 because there are no alternatives other than a home made solution.
Actually I think a big reason for the Agenda VR3's failure is marketing and product focus. To be profitable you have to sell the product in number great enough to offset initial research and development costs as well as current production costs. If no one knows about the product (outside of a relatively small market of Slashdot readers) it is hard to meet those numbers. Further, if the people who do know about the product don't see advantages big enough to justify the price or don't have the discretionary income to buy the product, the product just cannot be profitable.
Part of the reason Motorol continues to suppor these customers is for brand recognition. "I heared the Motorola Power PC processor blows away the Pentium." Those consumers will then view Motorola consumer products in a favorable way. And hopefully, they some of those consumers will also be influential in the design of someone's next embedded project, and might select a Motorol chip for that project. So the reasoning goes anyway.
A law like this would benefit two camps. One would be large software companies, since the smaller competetition would be squashed as the cost of doing business reaches prohibitive levels. The other benefactor would be the insurance agency. They would increase premiums for software businesses greatly, since this would be the best way for businesses to protect themselves. Consumers would only suffer.
I completely agree. I saw a woman who was probably about 5ft tall driving one in downtown Nashville today. She couldn't see to change lanes, but it didn't matter much since no one really wanted to be beside the beast as it spilled out across the lane anyway due to its huge width. I don't understand the point of having one of those in a suburban or especially in an urban setting.
I imagine it also has something to do with the fact that those disks were single sided (some of the disks double sided, with a notch on it near the label, but the Apple//c original drives only read one side at a time) and could only store 140KB per side. I remember drooling over the thought of getting 800KB on a 3.5" floppy. Just think how many Dazzle Draw pictures that would store!
Anyway, I had similar results with my//c disks a few years back, they all seemed to be in perfect reading order except for one that looked like it had something spilled on it (didn't even try that one).
I'll miss FoxNews, but I get most of my news online anyway. I'll miss The History Channel, but I can learn more and better by *reading a book* on the subject during the time I would have been watching "History vs. Hollywood"
And you can buy a fair number of books for $50/month. Some big thick history books with charts and nice pictures. And for news, I agree, I just get that online without having to put up with the local news full of "we think there might be a scandal" headlines. I gave my TV to my little brother almost a year ago and haven't missed it much since. The only time I miss it is when I want to watch a movie... And I never would pay anywhere near $230/month on movies, books and phone services.
Actually that is not entirely true. Sun first got in to the x86 market with some hardware believe it or not. They made an x86 line of workstations with a 80386 processors (386i/150 and 386i/250) and even a few 486's right before ditching the x86 line of workstations. This was around the time when Sun was still using Motorola 68020 and 68030 processors for their Sun-3 line. See more about this in the Sun Hardware Reference.
Occaisionally an older generation of sun equipment shows up for sale (on eBay even) that uses 48VDC. They usually get few bids so the price never goes high, but unfortunately this often means the reserve is not met. Still worth looking in to.
I think it would be really cool if you could get more RAM into the DC, but I think you will see pretty diminished returns. If you only run an X server and run X apps from a machine across the room, those apps are using RAM from their host machines, not the X terminal's RAM. Unless you've set up a swap file on an NFS mount, swapping isn't much of a problem. Memory buffering and caching suffers, but once the X server is loaded and running, that shouldn't be much of a problem. The problem is a 200MHz processor, which I would imagine current versions of gcc for SH4 make things comparable to a Pentium 200 or slightly faster.
Two things I noticed: they use the term "practical random" which I presume means much less than perfect random, such as a photograph. Also, they mention they have only applied the compression to small strings.
For all we know, this chip could have a few registers that just mark which file it is compressing so they can spit out a single byte representation of a 100 byte file.
Does anyone else think this site is catering towards corprate and private venture capitalists more than anything?
Repeating strings do occur, but he said "long repeating strings". In perfectly random 8 bit text, the chance of 3 of the same character appearing consecutively is 1/(256^3) or 1 in 16777216. That isn't going to help much towards 1:100 compression.
Think about who plays the GBA right now. I see them mostly in the hands of kids between 7 and 12 years old. These kids are not going to care enough about the extra features Microsoft wants to have in this device. If Microsoft sells them at huge losses to compete with the $90 price of a GBA, they can do that. But even then, they will have to recover the cost somehow, which means game costs will be higher than the $20-40 for GBA games. Sure, some spoiled brats can afford that or whine enough to get their parents to buy it. But most parents are going to put their foot down. Older kids might steel some market share from Nintendo, but as it stands right now, Microsoft isn't likely to steal the portable audience from Nintendo.
Unfortainately that means Windows, and "if
we build it they will come" doesn't necessary
work if they is no competition.
Luckily, Microsoft has abandonned Windows 9x/ME based kernels for Windows NT based kernels for all of their desktops. Microsoft has been developing 64bit versions of Windows NT for some time now, originally for Alpha, then (using Alphas for development and testing even) for IA-64. If there is sufficient demand, we may see an x86-64 version of Windows XP (or whatever the next version will be called). I doubt it will be a lower cost "Home" version, but more likely a "Professional" version. All Microsoft has to do is realize that x86-64 owners will use Linux/BSD if they are limited to a 32bit version of Windows, and suddenly they will be scrambling to make a port.
Note that mailing is different from shipping. UPS and FedEx will gladly ship your New Castle, Jack Daniels, or whatever your juice of choice is. However, there are restrictions about sales of liquor from state to state, since states like to collect their sin taxes.
No VC is going to give you money if you haven't already invested in your own business. Most VC's won't even touch a business that doesn't have a large amount of angel (family, friends and associates) funding already either.
Slashdot Mirror
We want to see pictures of her reaction.
Yes and no. Lower priced scanners have CCD sensors, one for each color component. This development will put drum scanner quality (think prices greater than $10,000) into scanners at much lower prices (less than $5,000 and dropping as innovation continues). Many current CCD image scanners often use separate CCD's and color filters to first scan each color channel, and then reassemble the composite image in software. This innovation will hopefully lead to much better color balancing as well as higher resolution.
Thank you for beating me to it. You did a much better job than I could have done, and still covered all the points I was thinking of. OK so I guess I would be in the 1/10th that would cope without technology, but only if I were not stuck in a crowded urban area surrounded by the other 9/10ths going mad. =)
600-800 BTU's for an entire computer, yes. For just the CPU, no. But the conversion factor is:
BTU = Watt-hours x 3.414
BTU/hour = Watts x 3.414
A 500MHz PowerMac G4 is rated for about 752.4 BTU/hr. A processor that uses 50W average would be rated for 170.7 BTU/hr if all of the power was lost to heat. The typical thermal power of an Athlon XP 2000+ is 62.5W or 213.4BTU/hr.
At my office we have a bunch of Mac Classics on bookshelves that start the old fish screen saver after booting up. They have no keyboard or mouse, just the built in monitor.
You never mentioned it, so I thought I'd ask. If you don't need something easily removable, you can still have the data backed up to the other side of the data center, or even possibly they other side of the campus. With a storge array on a fibre loop you can back data up hourly, all 100GB in a full backup. Even a Gbit ethernet link could do this in under an hour, provided the link is not shared too much. Then you could run daily or twice daily tape backups off of that archive to send to you offsite safe archive location.
I don't think any of this kept them from being successful. Very little of PalmOS is open source, and WinCE is about as closed as it gets. What kept you from "going any further into it" was probably that you just didn't need it. It did not meet your needs, at least not to a level to justify it's price. However, I would guess the number of people who passed on the Agenda VR3 because it wasn't totally open, though it met all of their needs otherwise, is less then 5. OK, it is probably 0 because there are no alternatives other than a home made solution.
Actually I think a big reason for the Agenda VR3's failure is marketing and product focus. To be profitable you have to sell the product in number great enough to offset initial research and development costs as well as current production costs. If no one knows about the product (outside of a relatively small market of Slashdot readers) it is hard to meet those numbers. Further, if the people who do know about the product don't see advantages big enough to justify the price or don't have the discretionary income to buy the product, the product just cannot be profitable.
The fab division makes the embedded parts that are their cash cows.
Part of the reason Motorol continues to suppor these customers is for brand recognition. "I heared the Motorola Power PC processor blows away the Pentium." Those consumers will then view Motorola consumer products in a favorable way. And hopefully, they some of those consumers will also be influential in the design of someone's next embedded project, and might select a Motorol chip for that project. So the reasoning goes anyway.
A law like this would benefit two camps. One would be large software companies, since the smaller competetition would be squashed as the cost of doing business reaches prohibitive levels. The other benefactor would be the insurance agency. They would increase premiums for software businesses greatly, since this would be the best way for businesses to protect themselves. Consumers would only suffer.
I completely agree. I saw a woman who was probably about 5ft tall driving one in downtown Nashville today. She couldn't see to change lanes, but it didn't matter much since no one really wanted to be beside the beast as it spilled out across the lane anyway due to its huge width. I don't understand the point of having one of those in a suburban or especially in an urban setting.
I imagine it also has something to do with the fact that those disks were single sided (some of the disks double sided, with a notch on it near the label, but the Apple //c original drives only read one side at a time) and could only store 140KB per side. I remember drooling over the thought of getting 800KB on a 3.5" floppy. Just think how many Dazzle Draw pictures that would store!
//c disks a few years back, they all seemed to be in perfect reading order except for one that looked like it had something spilled on it (didn't even try that one).
Anyway, I had similar results with my
Its the Excursion (because you have to go out on an excursion just to find enough adjacent parking spaces to park the damn thing)
I'll miss FoxNews, but I get most of my news online anyway. I'll miss The History Channel, but I can learn more and better by *reading a book* on the subject during the time I would have been watching "History vs. Hollywood"
And you can buy a fair number of books for $50/month. Some big thick history books with charts and nice pictures. And for news, I agree, I just get that online without having to put up with the local news full of "we think there might be a scandal" headlines. I gave my TV to my little brother almost a year ago and haven't missed it much since. The only time I miss it is when I want to watch a movie... And I never would pay anywhere near $230/month on movies, books and phone services.
you guys need to get out more!
Actually that is not entirely true. Sun first got in to the x86 market with some hardware believe it or not. They made an x86 line of workstations with a 80386 processors (386i/150 and 386i/250) and even a few 486's right before ditching the x86 line of workstations. This was around the time when Sun was still using Motorola 68020 and 68030 processors for their Sun-3 line. See more about this in the Sun Hardware Reference.
Occaisionally an older generation of sun equipment shows up for sale (on eBay even) that uses 48VDC. They usually get few bids so the price never goes high, but unfortunately this often means the reserve is not met. Still worth looking in to.
I think it would be really cool if you could get more RAM into the DC, but I think you will see pretty diminished returns. If you only run an X server and run X apps from a machine across the room, those apps are using RAM from their host machines, not the X terminal's RAM. Unless you've set up a swap file on an NFS mount, swapping isn't much of a problem. Memory buffering and caching suffers, but once the X server is loaded and running, that shouldn't be much of a problem. The problem is a 200MHz processor, which I would imagine current versions of gcc for SH4 make things comparable to a Pentium 200 or slightly faster.
Two things I noticed: they use the term "practical random" which I presume means much less than perfect random, such as a photograph. Also, they mention they have only applied the compression to small strings.
For all we know, this chip could have a few registers that just mark which file it is compressing so they can spit out a single byte representation of a 100 byte file.
Does anyone else think this site is catering towards corprate and private venture capitalists more than anything?
Repeating strings do occur, but he said "long repeating strings". In perfectly random 8 bit text, the chance of 3 of the same character appearing consecutively is 1/(256^3) or 1 in 16777216. That isn't going to help much towards 1:100 compression.
Think about who plays the GBA right now. I see them mostly in the hands of kids between 7 and 12 years old. These kids are not going to care enough about the extra features Microsoft wants to have in this device. If Microsoft sells them at huge losses to compete with the $90 price of a GBA, they can do that. But even then, they will have to recover the cost somehow, which means game costs will be higher than the $20-40 for GBA games. Sure, some spoiled brats can afford that or whine enough to get their parents to buy it. But most parents are going to put their foot down. Older kids might steel some market share from Nintendo, but as it stands right now, Microsoft isn't likely to steal the portable audience from Nintendo.
Rumor has it there will be a dual-banking feature, effectively doubling the memory bus size and bandwidth to 128bit, but still PC-133 (SDR).
Unfortainately that means Windows, and "if
we build it they will come" doesn't necessary
work if they is no competition.
Luckily, Microsoft has abandonned Windows 9x/ME based kernels for Windows NT based kernels for all of their desktops. Microsoft has been developing 64bit versions of Windows NT for some time now, originally for Alpha, then (using Alphas for development and testing even) for IA-64. If there is sufficient demand, we may see an x86-64 version of Windows XP (or whatever the next version will be called). I doubt it will be a lower cost "Home" version, but more likely a "Professional" version. All Microsoft has to do is realize that x86-64 owners will use Linux/BSD if they are limited to a 32bit version of Windows, and suddenly they will be scrambling to make a port.
Note that mailing is different from shipping. UPS and FedEx will gladly ship your New Castle, Jack Daniels, or whatever your juice of choice is. However, there are restrictions about sales of liquor from state to state, since states like to collect their sin taxes.
No VC is going to give you money if you haven't already invested in your own business. Most VC's won't even touch a business that doesn't have a large amount of angel (family, friends and associates) funding already either.