The punchline appears first, and I don't have to bother reading the rest of the joke;).
I don't have to scroll all the way down through crap I know already or don't think I need to know. Whereas the "crap" is still there for people to look through if they don't get it.
Also, some might be smart at stealing stuff, but not so good at getting out of the way of buses...
Just like some human geniuses who are pretty stupid in other ways and clumsy even.
Anyway, given that there are so many pigeons and gulls, after a few generations I think the number of birds that let themselves be squished will go down.
Over here my family bought some electric zapper bats for swatting mosquitoes, and after months/years the future generations of mosquitoes ended up being really fast flyers - I find them hard to track with my eyes, and when they "bite" they seem to do shallow pokes or something - somehow they can stop sucking blood and fly away really fast. Whereas at other places the mosquitoes are such slow flyers that you can practically slowly pinch them to death with your thumb and index finger:). And when those bite it takes them ages to pull out, easy to kill them.
It almost seems as if the batch of "super" mosquitoes can tell when I'm about drifting off to sleep- they only seem to start flying around my exposed face/head when I'm either asleep or just about drifting off - not alert and waiting to swat them with the zapper in hand.
What if it's not for sexual gratification but sadistic gratification? That's OK then?
Maybe we should leave the judging and punishment of thought crimes to God.
Trouble is, when virtual reality stuff becomes more and more realistic, the lines between thought crime and real crime will become blurred.
Jesus definitely had a point when he said in Matthew 5:
27"You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery.' 28 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart
After all, if you commmit virtual adultery with someone far away, good luck telling your disapproving wife- "it's not real", and "it's consensual virtual sex between two adults therefore legal".
The trouble is you can use firewire to plant evidence too.
I don't think it's just firewire. There's that server management stuff too. And USB exploits - which might be what the microsoft stuff is about (can't be bothered to RTFA).
Anyway, seems Macs allow you to turn the firewire dma stuff off, not sure if that's applicable to the Intel Macs.
Back to the "plant evidence" thing - while the Microsoft/3rd party tool could do it in a "read only" way who's to say you won't end up with evidence tampering with some other tool.
Someone could sneak in one day, plant illegal material (e.g. child porn, terrorist stuff) on your encrypted drive using similar tech, then a different bunch of people come the next day, kick down your door, and voila you are found to have illegal material.
If you have a mac laptop and firewire AND are worried about people getting at your data, then maybe you should also figure out a way to disable full firewire access to your computer.
"Firewire provides direct memory access. So I can plug in my PowerBook into an Xserve, and arbitrarily read and write to all of the Xserve's RAM, sans any logical protection."
"Paul claims enabling the Open Firmware password also automatically disables Firewire DMA, preventing tricks like Quinn's."
Go figure:).
As for your question. I'm not familiar with File Vault.
But with all such tech, it's very dependent on the details. A lot of cases the encryption is done with a "secret", and your passphrase is used to unlock that secret. If the secret is destroyed and there are no copies, even if you have your passphrase you won't be able to access the data.
With some tech, there is a way for you to create multiple keys with access to the data. So you use one key, and you store another key somewhere else safe, so if you screw up you can still go dig it out (if you can still get it;) ). Naturally that also means someone else probably could get that...
Another issue: if you or someone else ever makes a copy of the encrypted partition or container file, and stores it somewhere, then an attacker might be able to compare the two versions.
Thus if the attacker can sneak in and make copies of your drives, you may have a problem. The attacker could do a "chosen plaintext attack" on you. For example the attacker could send you contrived spam emails, and compare the changes in the drive images.
Now the other problem is backups, what do you do with backups. If you don't encrypt the backups then you have an obvious problem.
If you make copies of the encrypted containers - see the above "chosen plaintext" thing.
So you need to use backup software that does things correctly, and which can actually restore stuff;).
Crypto and security isn't easy to do right. You have to consider the costs and impact.
I believe even if you married her before doing that consensual sex thing and are still married to her, it's still evil child porn.
So maybe they should just ban all porn?
What if they use computers to generate very realistic child porn without the involvement of actual minors? How about "violent porn"? Is that still illegal?
If that is still illegal, then all those popular films depicting fictional murders should be illegal as well. And given adultery is illegal in many countries, perhaps films depicting fictional adultery should be illegal too.
Or is it only illegal if you enjoy watching such sections, whereas if you get disgusted or disapprove then you are OK, and not guilty?
Thought Crime:).
And you know what I think is unjust? That public "sex offender list" bullshit. It effectively means they never ever finish serving their time. Why not go all the way and execute them or give them a life sentence? It seems rather hypocritical to only pretend to let them go "free". The last I checked, there's no public "was jailed for being a violent criminal" list.
Option 3. You not knowing better use the same password for most stuff (including dialling up to the ISP). Government then gains access to your laptop (or steals it).
Option 4. You not knowing better use the same key for both talking to clients and for doing "allegedly illegal" stuff. Government then subpoena's your passphrase+key for that "allegedly illegal" stuff.
Option 5. You knowing better, use different PGP keys for different cases and scenarios. But of course you're then unlikely to be a lawyer, much less a lawyer who has rich Saudi clients accused of financing terrorism.
Don't forget the client also has similar problems, why should the client jump through hoops (e.g. use PGP)?
The client pays the bills, if clients require lawyers to use PGP, the lawyers then use PGP. This client requires the lawyer to fly halfway round the world, so the lawyer does that.
Just listen to your keyboard as you type. Not all the keys on your keyboard sound the same. It's trivial to tell if someone is using the backspace, spacebar and enter. Even the shift keys sound different.
If the person logs in to their computer using a known (or guessable) keyboard, username and operating system (so you know the sequence of events), you will have a high chance of guessing the keys used.
As for using PGP instead of flying. How in the world would you exchange PGP keys securely assuming a very "hostile" scenario?
If you already are going to fly there to securely exchange keys you might as well talk to the person.
The "Desktop Linux" developers tend to downplay usability stuff;). For example: Kmail closes an email you are working on, just because you decide to save while still working on it (so you have to save, reopen the draft). And the KDE task bar orders tasks by top to bottom then left to right, rather than left to right then top to bottom. With KDE's approach, if you close one task in the middle, ALL remaining tasks to its left suddenly shift their relative vertical positions! Whereas with Window's approach, only the leftmost (and rightmost) tasks change relative horizontal positions (lot fewer affected tasks). Then there's Linux sound, have they finally got that working properly - all popular apps working with each other at the same time?
Of course with Vista and MS Office 2007, there's now a chance for Desktop Linux.
That's only good for the poor if: 1) They are farmers 2) They farm significantly more than they (+their friends+relatives) can eat. 3) The stuff they want to buy with the "doubled" income, does not itself increase in price (due to other people having to pay more for food and thus charging more for their goods+services).
What we have here is an increase in energy/resource costs coupled with the dollar losing its value.
To guess what happens when energy and resource costs go up, all you have to do is compare the ecosystem of a tropical rain forest, with that of a temperate rain forest, and also the ecosystem of the Arctic.
So on the whole, I don't think it is good for the poor.
I'm rather lazy. I prefer to write code with as few bugs as possible.
So in addition to the normal cases I usually think about the boundary and potential future cases, and try to write code that will better handle them.
While it's not a 100% substitute for unit tests, it does take a lot less time (since you don't have to write hundreds of different tests for each module), and the resulting code is similar to what it should be in the first place;).
Unit tests are a good idea (esp for regression testing). But finding the time, resources and will to write them is hard.
A number of changes to my programs are to workaround bugs in other people's code (e.g. 3rd party vendor's box that's not working as "advertised" but not going to be fixed/changed anytime soon, or bugs in programs originally written by some programmers from an Indian software company... ).
Unit testing doesn't help for that.
It's a lot less work and time to write the stuff, release a decent version and then find the bugs in other people's stuff.
I'm far from a top programmer, but thank goodness for the crap out there that makes me look good in comparison:).
I agree. And with the "marvels of modern technology" we shouldn't have to create functions for the sole reason to make it easier to figure out stuff ends.
The editor or IDE you are using should be able to do that for you.
"spacecraft pilots can go a bit higher because of more favorable seating positions"
Spacecraft "pilots" aren't usually expected to pilot their aircraft during that high G period. So it is not such a big deal if they black out as long as they don't sustain significant permanent damage. It's all on "auto".
That is related to a more important criteria of elections.
Elections don't just have to be fair.
They have to be _seen_ by enough people as fair. Otherwise what's the point?
Hand counted paper ballots satisfy this criteria. Even a half drunk Joe Schmoe has a chance of understanding it. Compare with invisibly counted electronic ballots.
Paper ballots are harder to mass tamper with. Electronic votes can be switched in less than a millisecond.
Cost is a red herring. The US is willing to throw billions into Iraq to select a government there.
It's really funny to hear the USA always talking about democracy but somehow they can't afford it for themselves, and prefer diebolded elections.
It's obvious that the US Gov doesn't really care about democracy (I suspect they've "regime changed" more democratically elected governments of other countries, than they've successfully "regime changed" dictatorships;) too lazy to do a count at the moment).
So do the US voters actually care? If you all are really fed up with the "WWE" style politics, then you should get together in advance and maybe vote in independents in enough constituencies just to shake them up.
Wrong. The main point of an SSL cert that's by one of those CAs is for the very reason he said:
So _public_ users don't get a pop up prompt.
Nobody really gives a damn about the "other stuff" (e.g. real security, and even if users get a pop up, more than half the time they'll just click through;) ).
After all when CAs like Verisign issue "Microsoft" certs to nonmicrosoft people[1], and lots of sites still use Verisign (who are already known for _intentionally_ doing very dubious stuff), where's the security?
If you actually want security you're better off deleting most CA root certs and stick to getting the browser to recognize certs for sites that you really trust on a per site basis.
You shouldn't be depending on CAs that don't really care. Because some random CA will sign some cert they shouldn't and then you're screwed since your browser has their cert built in, and so you don't get a prompt when you get MITM'ed at some WiFi + Latte place. Instead of your bank site, you end up passing your credentials to some hacker.
Whereas if you recognized the bank site just because of the bank's usual cert, and not because some evil/incompetent CA signed it, if a hacker presents a different cert, you will get a prompt. Naturally when the cert expires you get a prompt, but that's really not a big deal in practice.
Well seems like it really is still 25W for worst case, the 5-13 are for "typical scenarios".
From a doc on their site: "Dynamic power management on the PWRficient 1682M results in a worst-case total power dissipation of only 25W with both CPUs running at 2GHz and memory and I/O interfaces active at their maximum rate. Typical power dissipation ranges from 5W in portable applications to 13W in high-performance applications that require 10 Gigabit Ethernet interfacing; in power-saving modes, power dissipation drops to around 1W (typical). "
Assuming their worst case scenario is similar to Intel's worst case, then their 25W for dual core + "chipset" vs Intel's 40W for quad CPU only, is "blah".
From what I see their chip trashed Intel's offerings in 2005. 25W, 8Gflops (2 x 2GHz cores) vs 73W 5Gflops 2.5GHz (their figures).
But it's now 2008, and it looks like they're still bragging about the same old chip, while Intel is already moving to 45nm chips (and I daresay the 2008 Intel chips can do more ops per clock than their 2005 ones).
In 2009, Intel most certainly will have better offerings than today, but what will PA Semi have to show?
"I could argue that the mass-published bible, in its various forms of incompletion, editing, omissions and linguistic adjustments, has done more to hurt the purity of the Judeo-Christian faith than to help it. "
You'd love Islam then. Their purists say there should not be translations and it all has to stay in Arabic. So teachers are mandatory to interpret stuff and tell followers what to do, rather than followers being able to just read stuff "without the spiritual guidance of a proper teacher".
On a related note, Yusman Roy (a muslim preacher in Indonesia) got jailed after "praying" (worshipping) in Indonesian. Yusman Roy thought it was only right that people should understand what he was saying.
From one of the links: "The PA6T-1682SM is dual-core, 64-bit system on a chip (SoC) that consumes only 25 watts of power when running at 2GHz. PA Semi achieved this remarkable combination of clockspeed, features, and power efficiency through a number of techniques."
The PA Semi's site says 5-13W _typical_.
Intel already has a 2.13GHz _quad_ core at 40W TDP, it's called the L5408.
And Intel are coming up with even lower power chips soon (Intel Atom). 1.6GHz - TDP = 2.3W. Naturally these won't benchmark as well, but how well do the PA Semi chips do?
So lets see some SPEC benchmarks - especially comparing FPU and integer performance. Because there are already low watt x86 CPUs with crap FPU performance (e.g. Via's stuff). AMD also has low power stuff too - Sempron, Geode etc.
"Bacteria acidify their media as they grow, and eventually that halts the growth. The "high efficiency" growth stocks don't add more "feed", they have buffers for pH. I'm sure that this is taken care of in large-scale production runs"
Instead of doing things in batches, you could have a continuous process - like an assembly line or "conveyer belt".
You keep putting feed in at the start/head (replenishing the bacteria at the "gut" section from time to time), and get "waste" right at the end of the line/pipe/whatever. And somewhere in between, you get the fuel.
But anyway I don't think that's the biggest problem.
Assuming the efficiencies are actually good. The problems are it's still going to require a LOT of feed and lots of infrastructure ($$$), and even more political will to actually do it.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't find top posting annoying actually.
;).
As a reader and writer it saves time.
The punchline appears first, and I don't have to bother reading the rest of the joke
I don't have to scroll all the way down through crap I know already or don't think I need to know. Whereas the "crap" is still there for people to look through if they don't get it.
There are smart ones and there are stupid ones.
:). And when those bite it takes them ages to pull out, easy to kill them.
Also, some might be smart at stealing stuff, but not so good at getting out of the way of buses...
Just like some human geniuses who are pretty stupid in other ways and clumsy even.
Anyway, given that there are so many pigeons and gulls, after a few generations I think the number of birds that let themselves be squished will go down.
Over here my family bought some electric zapper bats for swatting mosquitoes, and after months/years the future generations of mosquitoes ended up being really fast flyers - I find them hard to track with my eyes, and when they "bite" they seem to do shallow pokes or something - somehow they can stop sucking blood and fly away really fast. Whereas at other places the mosquitoes are such slow flyers that you can practically slowly pinch them to death with your thumb and index finger
It almost seems as if the batch of "super" mosquitoes can tell when I'm about drifting off to sleep- they only seem to start flying around my exposed face/head when I'm either asleep or just about drifting off - not alert and waiting to swat them with the zapper in hand.
What would stop Hans from working on ReiserFS while in prison?
What's there to stop Hans from waging a public battle with you over his pet project from prison?
What if it's not for sexual gratification but sadistic gratification? That's OK then?
Maybe we should leave the judging and punishment of thought crimes to God.
Trouble is, when virtual reality stuff becomes more and more realistic, the lines between thought crime and real crime will become blurred.
Jesus definitely had a point when he said in Matthew 5:
27"You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery.'
28 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart
After all, if you commmit virtual adultery with someone far away, good luck telling your disapproving wife- "it's not real", and "it's consensual virtual sex between two adults therefore legal".
The trouble is you can use firewire to plant evidence too.
I don't think it's just firewire. There's that server management stuff too. And USB exploits - which might be what the microsoft stuff is about (can't be bothered to RTFA).
Anyway, seems Macs allow you to turn the firewire dma stuff off, not sure if that's applicable to the Intel Macs.
Back to the "plant evidence" thing - while the Microsoft/3rd party tool could do it in a "read only" way who's to say you won't end up with evidence tampering with some other tool.
Someone could sneak in one day, plant illegal material (e.g. child porn, terrorist stuff) on your encrypted drive using similar tech, then a different bunch of people come the next day, kick down your door, and voila you are found to have illegal material.
If you have a mac laptop and firewire AND are worried about people getting at your data, then maybe you should also figure out a way to disable full firewire access to your computer.
:).
;) ). Naturally that also means someone else probably could get that...
;).
See: http://rentzsch.com/macosx/securingFirewire
"Firewire provides direct memory access. So I can plug in my PowerBook into an Xserve, and arbitrarily read and write to all of the Xserve's RAM, sans any logical protection."
"Paul claims enabling the Open Firmware password also automatically disables Firewire DMA, preventing tricks like Quinn's."
Go figure
As for your question. I'm not familiar with File Vault.
But with all such tech, it's very dependent on the details. A lot of cases the encryption is done with a "secret", and your passphrase is used to unlock that secret. If the secret is destroyed and there are no copies, even if you have your passphrase you won't be able to access the data.
With some tech, there is a way for you to create multiple keys with access to the data. So you use one key, and you store another key somewhere else safe, so if you screw up you can still go dig it out (if you can still get it
Another issue: if you or someone else ever makes a copy of the encrypted partition or container file, and stores it somewhere, then an attacker might be able to compare the two versions.
Thus if the attacker can sneak in and make copies of your drives, you may have a problem. The attacker could do a "chosen plaintext attack" on you. For example the attacker could send you contrived spam emails, and compare the changes in the drive images.
Now the other problem is backups, what do you do with backups. If you don't encrypt the backups then you have an obvious problem.
If you make copies of the encrypted containers - see the above "chosen plaintext" thing.
So you need to use backup software that does things correctly, and which can actually restore stuff
Crypto and security isn't easy to do right. You have to consider the costs and impact.
I believe even if you married her before doing that consensual sex thing and are still married to her, it's still evil child porn.
:).
So maybe they should just ban all porn?
What if they use computers to generate very realistic child porn without the involvement of actual minors? How about "violent porn"? Is that still illegal?
If that is still illegal, then all those popular films depicting fictional murders should be illegal as well. And given adultery is illegal in many countries, perhaps films depicting fictional adultery should be illegal too.
Or is it only illegal if you enjoy watching such sections, whereas if you get disgusted or disapprove then you are OK, and not guilty?
Thought Crime
And you know what I think is unjust? That public "sex offender list" bullshit. It effectively means they never ever finish serving their time. Why not go all the way and execute them or give them a life sentence? It seems rather hypocritical to only pretend to let them go "free". The last I checked, there's no public "was jailed for being a violent criminal" list.
Option 3. You not knowing better use the same password for most stuff (including dialling up to the ISP). Government then gains access to your laptop (or steals it).
Option 4. You not knowing better use the same key for both talking to clients and for doing "allegedly illegal" stuff. Government then subpoena's your passphrase+key for that "allegedly illegal" stuff.
Option 5. You knowing better, use different PGP keys for different cases and scenarios. But of course you're then unlikely to be a lawyer, much less a lawyer who has rich Saudi clients accused of financing terrorism.
Don't forget the client also has similar problems, why should the client jump through hoops (e.g. use PGP)?
The client pays the bills, if clients require lawyers to use PGP, the lawyers then use PGP. This client requires the lawyer to fly halfway round the world, so the lawyer does that.
Just listen to your keyboard as you type. Not all the keys on your keyboard sound the same. It's trivial to tell if someone is using the backspace, spacebar and enter. Even the shift keys sound different.
If the person logs in to their computer using a known (or guessable) keyboard, username and operating system (so you know the sequence of events), you will have a high chance of guessing the keys used.
As for using PGP instead of flying. How in the world would you exchange PGP keys securely assuming a very "hostile" scenario?
If you already are going to fly there to securely exchange keys you might as well talk to the person.
Microsoft downplays security stuff.
;). For example: Kmail closes an email you are working on, just because you decide to save while still working on it (so you have to save, reopen the draft). And the KDE task bar orders tasks by top to bottom then left to right, rather than left to right then top to bottom. With KDE's approach, if you close one task in the middle, ALL remaining tasks to its left suddenly shift their relative vertical positions! Whereas with Window's approach, only the leftmost (and rightmost) tasks change relative horizontal positions (lot fewer affected tasks). Then there's Linux sound, have they finally got that working properly - all popular apps working with each other at the same time?
The "Desktop Linux" developers tend to downplay usability stuff
Of course with Vista and MS Office 2007, there's now a chance for Desktop Linux.
That's only good for the poor if:
1) They are farmers
2) They farm significantly more than they (+their friends+relatives) can eat.
3) The stuff they want to buy with the "doubled" income, does not itself increase in price (due to other people having to pay more for food and thus charging more for their goods+services).
What we have here is an increase in energy/resource costs coupled with the dollar losing its value.
To guess what happens when energy and resource costs go up, all you have to do is compare the ecosystem of a tropical rain forest, with that of a temperate rain forest, and also the ecosystem of the Arctic.
So on the whole, I don't think it is good for the poor.
I'm rather lazy. I prefer to write code with as few bugs as possible.
;).
:).
So in addition to the normal cases I usually think about the boundary and potential future cases, and try to write code that will better handle them.
While it's not a 100% substitute for unit tests, it does take a lot less time (since you don't have to write hundreds of different tests for each module), and the resulting code is similar to what it should be in the first place
Unit tests are a good idea (esp for regression testing). But finding the time, resources and will to write them is hard.
A number of changes to my programs are to workaround bugs in other people's code (e.g. 3rd party vendor's box that's not working as "advertised" but not going to be fixed/changed anytime soon, or bugs in programs originally written by some programmers from an Indian software company... ).
Unit testing doesn't help for that.
It's a lot less work and time to write the stuff, release a decent version and then find the bugs in other people's stuff.
I'm far from a top programmer, but thank goodness for the crap out there that makes me look good in comparison
Function calling: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=535586&cid=23209756
I agree. And with the "marvels of modern technology" we shouldn't have to create functions for the sole reason to make it easier to figure out stuff ends.
The editor or IDE you are using should be able to do that for you.
"spacecraft pilots can go a bit higher because of more favorable seating positions"
Spacecraft "pilots" aren't usually expected to pilot their aircraft during that high G period. So it is not such a big deal if they black out as long as they don't sustain significant permanent damage. It's all on "auto".
I'm very attached to my brain you insensitive clod!
That is related to a more important criteria of elections.
;) too lazy to do a count at the moment).
Elections don't just have to be fair.
They have to be _seen_ by enough people as fair. Otherwise what's the point?
Hand counted paper ballots satisfy this criteria. Even a half drunk Joe Schmoe has a chance of understanding it. Compare with invisibly counted electronic ballots.
Paper ballots are harder to mass tamper with. Electronic votes can be switched in less than a millisecond.
Cost is a red herring. The US is willing to throw billions into Iraq to select a government there.
It's really funny to hear the USA always talking about democracy but somehow they can't afford it for themselves, and prefer diebolded elections.
It's obvious that the US Gov doesn't really care about democracy (I suspect they've "regime changed" more democratically elected governments of other countries, than they've successfully "regime changed" dictatorships
So do the US voters actually care? If you all are really fed up with the "WWE" style politics, then you should get together in advance and maybe vote in independents in enough constituencies just to shake them up.
Wrong. The main point of an SSL cert that's by one of those CAs is for the very reason he said:
;) ).
So _public_ users don't get a pop up prompt.
Nobody really gives a damn about the "other stuff" (e.g. real security, and even if users get a pop up, more than half the time they'll just click through
After all when CAs like Verisign issue "Microsoft" certs to nonmicrosoft people[1], and lots of sites still use Verisign (who are already known for _intentionally_ doing very dubious stuff), where's the security?
If you actually want security you're better off deleting most CA root certs and stick to getting the browser to recognize certs for sites that you really trust on a per site basis.
You shouldn't be depending on CAs that don't really care. Because some random CA will sign some cert they shouldn't and then you're screwed since your browser has their cert built in, and so you don't get a prompt when you get MITM'ed at some WiFi + Latte place. Instead of your bank site, you end up passing your credentials to some hacker.
Whereas if you recognized the bank site just because of the bank's usual cert, and not because some evil/incompetent CA signed it, if a hacker presents a different cert, you will get a prompt. Naturally when the cert expires you get a prompt, but that's really not a big deal in practice.
[1] http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS01-017.mspx
Well seems like it really is still 25W for worst case, the 5-13 are for "typical scenarios".
From a doc on their site:
"Dynamic power management on the PWRficient 1682M results in a worst-case total power
dissipation of only 25W with both CPUs running at 2GHz and memory and I/O interfaces active at
their maximum rate. Typical power dissipation ranges from 5W in portable applications to 13W in
high-performance applications that require 10 Gigabit Ethernet interfacing; in power-saving modes,
power dissipation drops to around 1W (typical). "
Assuming their worst case scenario is similar to Intel's worst case, then their 25W for dual core + "chipset" vs Intel's 40W for quad CPU only, is "blah".
From what I see their chip trashed Intel's offerings in 2005. 25W, 8Gflops (2 x 2GHz cores) vs 73W 5Gflops 2.5GHz (their figures).
But it's now 2008, and it looks like they're still bragging about the same old chip, while Intel is already moving to 45nm chips (and I daresay the 2008 Intel chips can do more ops per clock than their 2005 ones).
In 2009, Intel most certainly will have better offerings than today, but what will PA Semi have to show?
"I could argue that the mass-published bible, in its various forms of incompletion, editing, omissions and linguistic adjustments, has done more to hurt the purity of the Judeo-Christian faith than to help it. "
You'd love Islam then. Their purists say there should not be translations and it all has to stay in Arabic. So teachers are mandatory to interpret stuff and tell followers what to do, rather than followers being able to just read stuff "without the spiritual guidance of a proper teacher".
On a related note, Yusman Roy (a muslim preacher in Indonesia) got jailed after "praying" (worshipping) in Indonesian. Yusman Roy thought it was only right that people should understand what he was saying.
http://indonesianow.blogspot.com/2006/11/yusman-roy.html
That clay tablet stuff works better.
Easier than writing on stone and lasts pretty long.
From one of the links: "The PA6T-1682SM is dual-core, 64-bit system on a chip (SoC) that consumes only 25 watts of power when running at 2GHz. PA Semi achieved this remarkable combination of clockspeed, features, and power efficiency through a number of techniques."
;).
The PA Semi's site says 5-13W _typical_.
Intel already has a 2.13GHz _quad_ core at 40W TDP, it's called the L5408.
And Intel are coming up with even lower power chips soon (Intel Atom). 1.6GHz - TDP = 2.3W. Naturally these won't benchmark as well, but how well do the PA Semi chips do?
So lets see some SPEC benchmarks - especially comparing FPU and integer performance. Because there are already low watt x86 CPUs with crap FPU performance (e.g. Via's stuff). AMD also has low power stuff too - Sempron, Geode etc.
I'm glad I'm not competing against Intel
"Bacteria acidify their media as they grow, and eventually that halts the growth. The "high efficiency" growth stocks don't add more "feed", they have buffers for pH. I'm sure that this is taken care of in large-scale production runs"
Instead of doing things in batches, you could have a continuous process - like an assembly line or "conveyer belt".
You keep putting feed in at the start/head (replenishing the bacteria at the "gut" section from time to time), and get "waste" right at the end of the line/pipe/whatever. And somewhere in between, you get the fuel.
But anyway I don't think that's the biggest problem.
Assuming the efficiencies are actually good. The problems are it's still going to require a LOT of feed and lots of infrastructure ($$$), and even more political will to actually do it.
Some countries just collect all the garbage and ship it to China, which then sorts and recycles the trash. And sends it back ;).