Last year, ARM servers were the big thing coming. There were stories of custom made servers. Marvell announced and later demonstrated a multi-core, 2+ Ghz ARM chip for servers. ARM servers were suppose to be available for the rest of us "next year". Well, it is "next year". Where are they?
Standard operating procedure is to reserve enough fuel so that the satelite can be safely deorbited or pushed up to a safe parking orbit (common for geosync) at end of life. What happened here?
This is an unreasonable expectation given that the US monetary system has inflation. Eventually they would really have to raise prices or end up losing too much money.
The inflation rate is an average. As technology improves, many things decrease in cost faster than the currency declines toward worthlessness. The cost of backhaul for a 1.5Mb service is one of those things. Cable maintence: probably not. So in the forseable future where 1.5Mb/s cable internet is actually useful and desireable, I see no reason why Comcast can not keep their promise. If the Dollar is allowed to sink to it's proper level against the Yuan and we get into hyper inflation then, of course, all bets are off.
No three register operations. This impacts pipelining because it is not possible not overwrite one of the source registers.
I wonder about this one. Adding 3 register instruction support also means adding an additional set of read ports to the register file. Is it better to execute more instructions in parallel at a higher clock rate or have 3 register instructions?
Actually, no. The number of read ports is the same. The third register is the destination. The logic required to mitigate contention to the overwritten source register is much greater than than simply decoding a third address. Three register operations easily fit into a 32 bit instruction.
Banks don't have cash on hand to pay every account holder should they all choose to cash out their accounts.
They don't have enough cash to pay every account holder if they came in to collect on same day. They do, however, have enough assets and accounts receivable (outstanding loans) to cover. It may take some time but, they could, in principle pay off all their account holders.
Full Tilt, on the other hand, doesn't have the money in any form. What they owe to their subscribers can not be paid. The money isn't on loan to another entity who is obligated to pay it back. It is "spent". That's a big difference.
I'll trade in the pharmacists for unfettered, unprotected sex for all. A world without STDs would be an awesome world, indeed. Seinfeld's dream of an intercourse hello would be realized.
Um. HIV is one that gives people the chills today but there are other STD's. Some, like genital herpes are highly contageous and incurable. Hepatitis C is less contageous but also incurable and potentially lethal. There are even antibiotic resistance forms of gonorrhea.
I've always been curious about this kind of statement. I hear it a lot. While I understand the complexities of silicon implementation (finding instruction lengths and decode are a PITA), I've always thought the ISA itself was rather elegant. Yes, there is cruft that could be dropped and AMD did some of that with X86-64, but overall, the day-to-day instruction set is mostly orthogonal and has a fairly regular encoding. GPR shifts, MUL and DIV are a bit quirky and the lack of a packed 64-bit integer multiply is an almost unforgivable sin, but overall, I rather like it.
What are the things you would like to see changed? We need specifics to have an interesting discussion.:)
Limited number of registers Instructions that require certain registers or a certain subset of the registers No three register operations. This impacts pipelining because it is not possible not overwrite one of the source registers. Variable instruction length makes decode a headache
Lots of really bad stuff that isn't used much by modern code by still must be maintained for compatiblity: segments, 286 protection, IO instructions, etc.
I've wondered sometime what attitudes would be if a more likable contemporary instruction set had won. VAX and 68000, for instance, are much more palatable to program but they have performance flaws that are probably worse than x86.
Which is why I have a CDMA Samsung Galaxy S2 from Sprint a month or so after the international launch and before AT&T and TMobile offer it..
Also, Verizon and Sprint run on the same CDMA frequencies and have a bilateral roaming agreement. And CDMA is a more efficient modulation, allowing more users per MHz of bandwidth than any other technology.
True with 2G but GSM 3G uses Wide Band CDMA so the special efficiency is essentially the same.
Isn't this a trivial consequence of Moore's law, if we interpret the latter to mean exponential growth of (computations/time), and additionally make the very reasonable assumption that users' tolerance for power consumption (energy/time) is more or less constant?
Not really. Moore's law actually says nothing about computation. It is about transistor count and cost. It is just that we have come to expect a similar relationship for end performance from the use of those transistors. It think this result may have more to do with change in how those transistors are allocated. The fraction of transistors directly involved in computation is shrinking. I expect those transistors be rather active and power hungry. Memory, which has come to dominate modern chips, uses less energy. Modern chips also have much larger and more elaborate support structures. Busses, arbitrators, control logic, etc. It is unclear how these parts contribute to power efficiency.
It is financed entirely by dedicated taxes and presently has a surplus. There is certainly trouble ahead but in the near to mid term Social Security spending does not contribute to the Federal deficit and cutting Social Security spending will not reduce the Federal deficit.
Who needs a probe that can remain electically powered for centuries? Most missions are limited by limited by fuel for maneuvering thrusters. Needing 4x the mass for electrical power likely means less fuel. You could switch to ion engines, which are thriftier but but then you need much more electrical power, which you won't have.
I am sure there is a good reason, but why are we always fusing hydrogen? Why not heavier, easier to grab - move - focus elements? Like fusing Iron or something, it'll turn into something higher up the elements ladder. Because we can shuffle iron about with magnets quite easily, compared to hydrogen that isn't magnetic. Just some very fine iron dust into the big magnet thingy and hit it with all that pressure. Or if not Iron, something else.. Why always hydrogen?
Fusing the deteurium and tritium isotopes of hydroden is the easiest form there is. Next is deuterium-deuterium which has the advantage that of being naturally available. But, if you're having trouble getting DT fusion going, you will never get DD. Proton fusion, which is what the Sun mostly uses even harder and impractically slow. But that's why the Sun continues to shine. If it were made entirely of deterium and tritium, there would have been just one big bang and that would be it.
Other elements have been proposed. Helium3 fusion has the advantage of not producing neutrons but it is much more difficult (requires more extreme heat and pressure) than DT and there is also the problem that there is negligable He3 on Earth. Boron-proton fusion is also aneurtonic and Boron is at least available but is wishful thinking to try when we still haven't managed to produce energy from DT.
As the elements get heavier, it requires more and more extreme conditions to get the nuclei to fuse and you get less and less energy out. Iron is a dead end. Fusion takes more energy than it gives. So does fision.
No one makes motherboards with Intel mobile processors for end users. Repurposing a laptop has other drawbacks.
I think it's an untapped market...perhaps a small one, but big enough more solutions should exist.
Really? Google for "atom server board". You will find several options.
Globalization distorts both socialism and capitali
on
Marx May Have Had a Point
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· Score: 3, Insightful
After a slow decade in the 1970s, we got Reagan, the "great communicator", who sold America on "unfettered" capitalism. US median per-capita real income hasn't gone up much since, after a huge rise in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The US peak was in 1973.
After WW2, the US stood essentially alone as an industrial power. Japan and Europe were in ruins. It took decades for foreign competition to return in a major way. When it did, in the 1970's, the results were catostrophic. The steel and auto industries were nearly wiped out. Reagan thought that loosening controls on capitalism would restore American competitiveness. Union wages aren't of any use if the factory shuts down.
Whether it really worked for the economy as a whole is debatable but, at least for a time, it did seem improve the competivness of American businesses.
Socialism seemed to be failing against foreign competition so policy became more laissez faire.
Unfortunately, the economy is now even more complicated. American goods don't just compete with foreign goods. American labor competes with foreign labor in service of American based companies.
American companies thrive but employees and the wider society no longer benefit.
Capitalism is supposed to harness monetary greed for the greater good of society. Unfortunately, deregulation and globalisation has permited the engine of capitlism to slip its harness.
Socialism is still not competive so I think we are stuck with some sort of capitalism. Further loosening the reigns is a non-starter. Release the horse from the wagon and it may indeed run faster but the wagon won't move at all. We need a new harness. I wish I knew what it was.
Only humans paint using RGB/CYMK. Almost all natural scenes are going to come out with the wrong colors under pure RGB lighting even if very few are fully black.
"Smearing" isn't necessary. Laser televisions works with just 3 lasers, RGB, to fool the eye into seeing white (and all the other colors in whatever ISO gamut the HDTV spec calls out). So all you need is a phosphor with 3 multipliers that work out to have enough coverage in the red, green and blue parts of the spectrum.
Reality check: the world is not RGB. Objects that reflect pure violet light do not reflect any red or blue light. Shine and RGB light on them and they show up black.
We know the capacity. We know the transfer rate. But how quickly do disks need to be moved in and out of the system in order to keep it running?
200,000 is a lot of disks. I assume they are all hot swap with a great deal of redundancy because I would expect multiple drive failures every day. A raid0 with that many disks might never boot.
On average, there are somewhat more men than women but it varies a great deal from region to region. In the Northeast, there are more single women than men. In Nothern California, there are far more single men than women. Back when I bothered with online dating, I found ratios in the Bay Area to be between 1:3 and 1:7. It is trivially easy to check for yourself if you have an account on one of these sites. Just search for single women, note the total, and then search for single men given the same parameters.
... it also means you can print it if you so desire, so all the "whaaa give me paper" assholes can be happy too.
You have a printer that will produce a full color, bound magazine that doesn't smuge for cheap? All I have is a crappy inkjet that smudges and cost a fortune to print in full color. Or I can get a color lazer printer that doesn't smudge and cost less per page but the images are garbage. In both I still end up with a bunch of pages that I have to hold together by stapling the corners. It looks and handles nothing like a published magazine.
They've been saying 6 degrees of seperation since the earth had 5bill people (probably before that). Surely with 2 billion more people on the planet now it has to eventually go up to 7 degrees (although, I know it will be exponential how population would need to go up per degree).
Not necessarily. International communciations and travel and increased substantially since the population was 5 Billion. China and India are quite well connected now. They didn't use to be.
Re:We have ideas, we just can't exploit them
on
The Post-Idea World
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· Score: 1
Patents expire after 20 years. Were you thinking of trademarks, which can be renewed indefinitely, or copyrights, which can be legislatively extended indefinitely on the installment plan?
*A patent* expires after 20 years. *Patents* are filed all the time, just about guaranteeing that some ill-conceived patents will be around to cause trouble no matter when you go to market. Also, many fields move fast enough that, even if you can still apply a twenty year old idea, the impact is minimal and so is the profit.
The Fastpack 350 is a good pack. I used it on a six month trip to India and a four month trip of mostly Madagascar. It does, however, have some significant issues:
1) Like virtually every other camera pack, security is a non-thought. Before I left on the first trip with it, I had a luggage repair shop replace all the zippers with metal lockable kinds.
2) The waist pack is a great, in theory, but it is not adjustable. Unless *you* are just the right size, all weight will be on your back rather than on your hips. With heavy gear and a laptop, this is important. My solution was to wear a large water bottle carying waist pack under the Fastpack 350. With just a little filling to puff it out, it acted as a detachable and adjustable waist pack for the camera bag. For me it was the difference between having to to put the pack down after less than an and hiking through the woods all day.
I'm actually thinking a better solution might be to reverse the arrangement. Carry a good photo waist pack topped by a general purpose day pack. But I haven't actually tested this theory. That's the problem, there seems to be no fully functional solution. Anything you choose will have issues and you won't know what they all are until you actually buy it and use it for a substantial trip.
Being warm-blooded isn't that much of a surprise- we've known birds descended from warm-blooded dinosaurs for decades.
Yes, but plesiosaurs are not dinosaurs so it means yet another branch of reptiles were warm-blodded. There is also evidence that Pterosaurs were warm blooded. Given how far back these branches had a common ascestor, the question becomes: why are crocodiles not?
Thorium, by itself, does not fission. You need a neutron source to breed Uranium from Thorium which you can then fission. Just shooting a lazer at Thorium isn't going to do anything. Thorium is radioactive but you will need much more than a few grams to power you car that way.
Slashdot Mirror
Last year, ARM servers were the big thing coming. There were stories of custom made servers. Marvell announced and later demonstrated a multi-core, 2+ Ghz ARM chip for servers. ARM servers were suppose to be available for the rest of us "next year". Well, it is "next year". Where are they?
With a high powered hand held lazer conveniently latched next to the roll. What could go wrong?
Standard operating procedure is to reserve enough fuel so that the satelite can be safely deorbited or pushed up to a safe parking orbit (common for geosync) at end of life. What happened here?
Comcast guarantees that it won't raise the price
This is an unreasonable expectation given that the US monetary system has inflation. Eventually they would really have to raise prices or end up losing too much money.
The inflation rate is an average. As technology improves, many things decrease in cost faster than the currency declines toward worthlessness. The cost of backhaul for a 1.5Mb service is one of those things. Cable maintence: probably not. So in the forseable future where 1.5Mb/s cable internet is actually useful and desireable, I see no reason why Comcast can not keep their promise. If the Dollar is allowed to sink to it's proper level against the Yuan and we get into hyper inflation then, of course, all bets are off.
I wonder about this one. Adding 3 register instruction support also means adding an additional set of read ports to the register file. Is it better to execute more instructions in parallel at a higher clock rate or have 3 register instructions?
Actually, no. The number of read ports is the same. The third register is the destination. The logic required to mitigate contention to the overwritten source register is much greater than than simply decoding a third address. Three register operations easily fit into a 32 bit instruction.
Banks don't have cash on hand to pay every account holder should they all choose to cash out their accounts.
They don't have enough cash to pay every account holder if they came in to collect on same day. They do, however, have enough assets and accounts receivable (outstanding loans) to cover. It may take some time but, they could, in principle pay off all their account holders.
Full Tilt, on the other hand, doesn't have the money in any form. What they owe to their subscribers can not be paid. The money isn't on loan to another entity who is obligated to pay it back. It is "spent". That's a big difference.
I'll trade in the pharmacists for unfettered, unprotected sex for all. A world without STDs would be an awesome world, indeed. Seinfeld's dream of an intercourse hello would be realized.
Um. HIV is one that gives people the chills today but there are other STD's. Some, like genital herpes are highly contageous and incurable. Hepatitis C is less contageous but also incurable and potentially lethal. There are even antibiotic resistance forms of gonorrhea.
I've always been curious about this kind of statement. I hear it a lot. While I understand the complexities of silicon implementation (finding instruction lengths and decode are a PITA), I've always thought the ISA itself was rather elegant. Yes, there is cruft that could be dropped and AMD did some of that with X86-64, but overall, the day-to-day instruction set is mostly orthogonal and has a fairly regular encoding. GPR shifts, MUL and DIV are a bit quirky and the lack of a packed 64-bit integer multiply is an almost unforgivable sin, but overall, I rather like it.
What are the things you would like to see changed? We need specifics to have an interesting discussion. :)
Limited number of registers
Instructions that require certain registers or a certain subset of the registers
No three register operations. This impacts pipelining because it is not possible not overwrite one of the source registers.
Variable instruction length makes decode a headache
Lots of really bad stuff that isn't used much by modern code by still must be maintained for compatiblity: segments, 286 protection, IO instructions, etc.
I've wondered sometime what attitudes would be if a more likable contemporary instruction set had won. VAX and 68000, for instance, are much more palatable to program but they have performance flaws that are probably worse than x86.
Which is why I have a CDMA Samsung Galaxy S2 from Sprint a month or so after the international launch and before AT&T and TMobile offer it. .
Also, Verizon and Sprint run on the same CDMA frequencies and have a bilateral roaming agreement. And CDMA is a more efficient modulation, allowing more users per MHz of bandwidth than any other technology.
True with 2G but GSM 3G uses Wide Band CDMA so the special efficiency is essentially the same.
Isn't this a trivial consequence of Moore's law, if we interpret the latter to mean exponential growth of (computations/time), and additionally make the very reasonable assumption that users' tolerance for power consumption (energy/time) is more or less constant?
Not really. Moore's law actually says nothing about computation. It is about transistor count and cost. It is just that we have come to expect a similar relationship for end performance from the use of those transistors. It think this result may have more to do with change in how those transistors are allocated. The fraction of transistors directly involved in computation is shrinking. I expect those transistors be rather active and power hungry. Memory, which has come to dominate modern chips, uses less energy. Modern chips also have much larger and more elaborate support structures. Busses, arbitrators, control logic, etc. It is unclear how these parts contribute to power efficiency.
It is financed entirely by dedicated taxes and presently has a surplus. There is certainly trouble ahead but in the near to mid term Social Security spending does not contribute to the Federal deficit and cutting Social Security spending will not reduce the Federal deficit.
On Defence, I agree with you.
Who needs a probe that can remain electically powered for centuries? Most missions are limited by limited by fuel for maneuvering thrusters. Needing 4x the mass for electrical power likely means less fuel. You could switch to ion engines, which are thriftier but but then you need much more electrical power, which you won't have.
I am sure there is a good reason, but why are we always fusing hydrogen? Why not heavier, easier to grab - move - focus elements? Like fusing Iron or something, it'll turn into something higher up the elements ladder. Because we can shuffle iron about with magnets quite easily, compared to hydrogen that isn't magnetic. Just some very fine iron dust into the big magnet thingy and hit it with all that pressure. Or if not Iron, something else.. Why always hydrogen?
Fusing the deteurium and tritium isotopes of hydroden is the easiest form there is. Next is deuterium-deuterium which has the advantage that of being naturally available. But, if you're having trouble getting DT fusion going, you will never get DD. Proton fusion, which is what the Sun mostly uses even harder and impractically slow. But that's why the Sun continues to shine. If it were made entirely of deterium and tritium, there would have been just one big bang and that would be it.
Other elements have been proposed. Helium3 fusion has the advantage of not producing neutrons but it is much more difficult (requires more extreme heat and pressure) than DT and there is also the problem that there is negligable He3 on Earth. Boron-proton fusion is also aneurtonic and Boron is at least available but is wishful thinking to try when we still haven't managed to produce energy from DT.
As the elements get heavier, it requires more and more extreme conditions to get the nuclei to fuse and you get less and less energy out. Iron is a dead end. Fusion takes more energy than it gives. So does fision.
No one makes motherboards with Intel mobile processors for end users. Repurposing a laptop has other drawbacks.
I think it's an untapped market...perhaps a small one, but big enough more solutions should exist.
Really? Google for "atom server board". You will find several options.
After a slow decade in the 1970s, we got Reagan, the "great communicator", who sold America on "unfettered" capitalism. US median per-capita real income hasn't gone up much since, after a huge rise in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The US peak was in 1973.
After WW2, the US stood essentially alone as an industrial power. Japan and Europe were in ruins. It took decades for foreign competition to return in a major way. When it did, in the 1970's, the results were catostrophic. The steel and auto industries were nearly wiped out.
Reagan thought that loosening controls on capitalism would restore American competitiveness. Union wages aren't of any use if the factory shuts down.
Whether it really worked for the economy as a whole is debatable but, at least for a time, it did seem improve the competivness of American businesses.
Socialism seemed to be failing against foreign competition so policy became more laissez faire.
Unfortunately, the economy is now even more complicated. American goods don't just compete with foreign goods. American labor competes with foreign labor in service of American based companies.
American companies thrive but employees and the wider society no longer benefit.
Capitalism is supposed to harness monetary greed for the greater good of society. Unfortunately, deregulation and globalisation has permited the engine of capitlism to slip its harness.
Socialism is still not competive so I think we are stuck with some sort of capitalism. Further loosening the reigns is a non-starter. Release the horse from the wagon and it may indeed run faster but the wagon won't move at all. We need a new harness. I wish I knew what it was.
Only humans paint using RGB/CYMK. Almost all natural scenes are going to come out with the wrong colors under pure RGB lighting even if very few are fully black.
"Smearing" isn't necessary. Laser televisions works with just 3 lasers, RGB, to fool the eye into seeing white (and all the other colors in whatever ISO gamut the HDTV spec calls out). So all you need is a phosphor with 3 multipliers that work out to have enough coverage in the red, green and blue parts of the spectrum.
Reality check: the world is not RGB. Objects that reflect pure violet light do not reflect any red or blue light. Shine and RGB light on them and they show up black.
We know the capacity. We know the transfer rate. But how quickly do disks need to be moved in and out of the system in order to keep it running?
200,000 is a lot of disks. I assume they are all hot swap with a great deal of redundancy because I would expect multiple drive failures every day. A raid0 with that many disks might never boot.
On average, there are somewhat more men than women but it varies a great deal from region to region. In the Northeast, there are more single women than men. In Nothern California, there are far more single men than women. Back when I bothered with online dating, I found ratios in the Bay Area to be between 1:3 and 1:7. It is trivially easy to check for yourself if you have an account on one of these sites. Just search for single women, note the total, and then search for single men given the same parameters.
... it also means you can print it if you so desire, so all the "whaaa give me paper" assholes can be happy too.
You have a printer that will produce a full color, bound magazine that doesn't smuge for cheap? All I have is a crappy inkjet that smudges and cost a fortune to print in full color. Or I can get a color lazer printer that doesn't smudge and cost less per page but the images are garbage. In both I still end up with a bunch of pages that I have to hold together by stapling the corners. It looks and handles nothing like a published magazine.
They've been saying 6 degrees of seperation since the earth had 5bill people (probably before that). Surely with 2 billion more people on the planet now it has to eventually go up to 7 degrees (although, I know it will be exponential how population would need to go up per degree).
Not necessarily. International communciations and travel and increased substantially since the population was 5 Billion. China and India are quite well connected now. They didn't use to be.
Patents expire after 20 years. Were you thinking of trademarks, which can be renewed indefinitely, or copyrights, which can be legislatively extended indefinitely on the installment plan?
*A patent* expires after 20 years. *Patents* are filed all the time, just about guaranteeing that some ill-conceived patents will be around to cause trouble no matter when you go to market. Also, many fields move fast enough that, even if you can still apply a twenty year old idea, the impact is minimal and so is the profit.
The Fastpack 350 is a good pack. I used it on a six month trip to India and a four month trip of mostly Madagascar. It does, however, have some significant issues:
1) Like virtually every other camera pack, security is a non-thought. Before I left on the first trip with it, I had a luggage repair shop replace all the zippers with metal lockable kinds.
2) The waist pack is a great, in theory, but it is not adjustable. Unless *you* are just the right size, all weight will be on your back rather than on your hips. With heavy gear and a laptop, this is important. My solution was to wear a large water bottle carying waist pack under the Fastpack 350. With just a little filling to puff it out, it acted as a detachable and adjustable waist pack for the camera bag. For me it was the difference between having to to put the pack down after less than an and hiking through the woods all day.
I'm actually thinking a better solution might be to reverse the arrangement. Carry a good photo waist pack topped by a general purpose day pack. But I haven't actually tested this theory. That's the problem, there seems to be no fully functional solution. Anything you choose will have issues and you won't know what they all are until you actually buy it and use it for a substantial trip.
Being warm-blooded isn't that much of a surprise- we've known birds descended from warm-blooded dinosaurs for decades.
Yes, but plesiosaurs are not dinosaurs so it means yet another branch of reptiles were warm-blodded. There is also evidence that Pterosaurs were warm blooded. Given how far back these branches had a common ascestor, the question becomes: why are crocodiles not?
Thorium, by itself, does not fission. You need a neutron source to breed Uranium from Thorium which you can then fission. Just shooting a lazer at Thorium isn't going to do anything. Thorium is radioactive but you will need much more than a few grams to power you car that way.