In the late 80's RISC was an immensely poweful concept. Fabrication technology had advanced to the point where it was just barely practical to dispense with slow microcode and hardcode and entire useful instruction set. But you had to be very selective in what you implimented. Spending gates on performance rather than high level instruction handling is what allowed 12Mhz Sparc and MIPS processors to stomp on 25MHz 68K's.
In the 90's, Alpha's "RISC at any cost" allowed clock frequencies that CISC chips could only dream of.
But today's CPU are huge and obcenely complex. Instruction decoding is a tiny part of that these monster chips do. In almost doesn't matter what the user visable instruction set is. It always gets chopped up and re-ordered anyway. What does matter is market share. Huge chips require a small army of font end designers to design all the resource allocation and instruction re-ordering. They require a large army of back end engineers to create a vast array of custom cells, layout the chip, and tune the process. That means you must you must sell a very large number of parts if you want to keep those armies on staff. A superior instruction set helps only a little. Inadequately funded physical design hurts a lot. With the possible exception of PowerPC, RISC architectures just don't generate enough revenue to keep up.
What I dont understand is how they intend to protect these massive sails from being shot full of holes by meteorites and space dust as it propels its way through space.
Maybe you don't. Just make the sail big enough that to generate adequate "thrust" with a few holes in it. Solar sails are very big and very thin. Any debries that hits is just going to create hole and keep on going.
Also, seing as how it is powered by solar wind, what happens when the craft is between 2 or more stars which are all exerting equal force on the sails
For interstelar travel, you can't rely on the sun. You need big honking lasers in your home system. The light from the lasers will be much stronger than the light from the target star, at least until the probe gets rather close.
Windows existed in the 80's but no one cared. It was only with 3.0 came out that people took notice. That's because, with 3.0, Microsoft took advantage of the 386's virtual 8086 facility to multitask DOS programs in a gui environment.
At the same time, IBM shot themselves in the foot by coding OS2 for the 286, which could only support one DOS box.
In the early days of Windows 3.0 and 3.1, actual Windows applications were the exception. Most people used them to multitask DOS and *hope* that native Windows apps would be available soon.
The truth is, hardly anyone ever ran OS2 on a 286. If IBM had introduced OS2 1.0 for the 386, they would have lost very very few customers but would gain market dominence. There would be no Windows.
So why should I care? Should I want them to "differntiate, market and profit" so they can get more of my hard-earned cash for esentially the same product?
Who do you think reads EETimes? This article is not speaking to consumers. It speaks to those who make thier living designing, manufacturing, and marketing products. If there is no money to be made in cell phones and no future for portable devices that are not cell phones then companies should considder not designing new products in this area.
The cell phone companies clearly blew an opportunity when they initially treated the hardware as a loss leader.
An opportunity for what? Remember, it is the service providers that treat phones as loss leaders. They do it to ensure customer lock-in. If phone are sold instead of given away, the profit will go to the retailers. The service providers still won't make money on phones and their customers won't be willing to sign up for a 2 year contract.
The current situation is bad for manufacturers because bargaining power is concentrated in a handful of service providers. If they sold to consumers, there would be more room for product differentiation, marketing, and profit.
Is it any better to be enslaved to the market and your customers than to be enslaved to your boss?
Unless they get lucky, and hit it big, most entrepenuers seems to have a lot less freedom than those those that work for "the man".
It's even worse if your passion is not business. Working for a company means letting someone else deal with that crap. Working for "yourself" means you deal with it and have little time for your own passion.
There have been times where the best fitting equations were just like you say. They had parts that didn't correspond to any real understanding. They just made the equation work. Those are emperical results.
Much science is about taking those emperical results and coming up with theory that explains what they mean.
No offense to the anime lovers, but doesn't comcast already have other outlets for anime?
Like what? Cartoon Network? I like Anime but what Cartoon network chooses to play is not to my tastes. It's all dumbed-down and g-rated. Part of what makes good Anime so good is that it is so different from American television. Cartoon Network only likes to show Anime when it fits in well with it's American programming. The good stuff is nothing like American cartoons and, as often as not, is not considdred safe for the kiddies.
KTEH, in San Jose, used to show a lot of good stuff but Sunday Science Fictino is no more.
If you did well in school, have a good education, but can't find a job, why not start your own business and follow the advice: Compete!
Becuase I don't have the millions required to start a semiconductor company. Those that, do, venture capitalists, will insist that all the R&D in my new company be outsourced.
So, in the best case scenario, I end up doing work that I am neither trained for, nor well suited for. How is that any different than if I don't start my own company?
Nanotech, by it's original defintion is *not* merely "very small technology". It is nano assemblers.
The "nanotech" that you see in trade rags would not have been conciddered nanotech 10, maybe even 5 years ago. But now, everyone doing nanometer scale physical chemistry is calling their stuff "nanotech".
Why are they abusing the term? Because it makes their research sound much cooler than it is. That means more recognition and more funding.
By the original definition, the nano conveyer belt is not nanotech, though it is a lot closer than most of what gets called nanotech today.
PRC and Taiwan are the easy ones but Singapore is 76% Chinese
*Genuine* nanotech *is* the stuff of gray goo
on
Nanotech or Nano-Not?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Nanotechnology *now* means any process for determining structure or composition at a molecular scale.
It didn't used to. The problem isn't that the public doesn't understand what nanotech is. The problem is that the chemist have redefined it and are catching flack because public conciousness hasn't caught up.
Nanotech, as originally defined, really does mean nanoscale universal assemblers. Grey goo, of course, is universal assemblers gone amock. Neither is of great concern right now as actuall implimentation is far, far off and may always be.
Researchers started labling physical chemistry "nanotech", probably because it sounded cool and got people excited. That helps for getting funding, recognition, etc but it also creates fear in the public.
If the "new nanotech" community is concerned about negative publiciy, then I really have no sympathy. If you co-opt a pre-existing sci-fi'esc term, you take the good with the bad.
I have a film scanner. The nearest equivilent which *might* have linux drivers is over $1000 more. So, you can see why I don't just buy a different scanner.
So, why not just boot into windows, do my scanning and get out?
Because scanning a roll of film can take hours of off and on work. I don't want to to be stuck with Windows that whole time.
Wine (when it works at all) is of no help. It runs only apps, not drivers. Even VMware, when the host OS is Linux, is of no help.
Africa doesn't have the education levels, yet. But when they do, we'll be there.
That's a long way off. If you ever travel in Africa for a more than a couple of weeks at a time, you will surely encounter the concept of "Africa Time". It is essentially the idea that time doesn't matter much. Africans don't punch clocks. They don't quibble out an hour or two plus or minus. As a result, it best not to schedule more than one, maybe two things in a day. You never know when they are going to happen. It is actually a very relxing viewpoint once you get used to it, but it is no way to run a business.
In East Africa, commerce is virtually controlled by Indians. There is much resentment that the Indians are hoarding the wealth for themselves. Some of it is likely deserved. Personally, though, I think it is the Indians that hold economy together, such that it is. Idi Amin found this out. When he expelled the Indians from Uganda, the economy virtually collapsed.
The Southern African countries are more properous but that prosperity is propped up by mineral wealth and mostly administered by Westerners.
Among the Africans themselves, you have the problems of corruption, tribleism and a worldview that just doesn't see efficiency as a priority. The Chineese are poor but they work really hard to push themselves, their family, their nation forward. Africa has nothing like that. Until it does, Africa will continue to be a basket case and no threat whatsoever to Western economies.
Not quite. Big chips almost never work right the first time. Minor design changes are always required. Best case, Ultrasparc V was months and millions of dollars away from done. Each "spin" throught he fab is.5Million just for the mask set.
I suspect the situation for Ultrasparc V was worse than that. If they had truly taped out then the chip would already be in the fab. More likely, the database was in condition that it could have been fabed but it was not meeting performance targets.
Slashdot Mirror
In the late 80's RISC was an immensely poweful concept. Fabrication technology had advanced to the point where it was just barely practical to dispense with slow microcode and hardcode and entire useful instruction set. But you had to be very selective in what you implimented. Spending gates on performance rather than high level instruction handling is what allowed 12Mhz Sparc and MIPS processors to stomp on 25MHz 68K's.
In the 90's, Alpha's "RISC at any cost" allowed clock frequencies that CISC chips could only dream of.
But today's CPU are huge and obcenely complex. Instruction decoding is a tiny part of that these monster chips do. In almost doesn't matter what the user visable instruction set is. It always gets chopped up and re-ordered anyway. What does matter is market share. Huge chips require a small army of font end designers to design all the resource allocation and instruction re-ordering. They require a large army of back end engineers to create a vast array of custom cells, layout the chip, and tune the process. That means you must you must sell a very large number of parts if you want to keep those armies on staff. A superior instruction set helps only a little. Inadequately funded physical design hurts a lot. With the possible exception of PowerPC, RISC architectures just don't generate enough revenue to keep up.
If your game console is going to make breakfast, it is going to have to have a cereal port.
What I dont understand is how they intend to protect these massive sails from being shot full of holes by meteorites and space dust as it propels its way through space.
Maybe you don't. Just make the sail big enough that to generate adequate "thrust" with a few holes in it. Solar sails are very big and very thin. Any debries that hits is just going to create hole and keep on going.
Also, seing as how it is powered by solar wind, what happens when the craft is between 2 or more stars which are all exerting equal force on the sails
For interstelar travel, you can't rely on the sun. You need big honking lasers in your home system. The light from the lasers will be much stronger than the light from the target star, at least until the probe gets rather close.
Windows existed in the 80's but no one cared. It was only with 3.0 came out that people took notice. That's because, with 3.0, Microsoft took advantage of the 386's virtual 8086 facility to multitask DOS programs in a gui environment.
At the same time, IBM shot themselves in the foot by coding OS2 for the 286, which could only support one DOS box.
In the early days of Windows 3.0 and 3.1, actual Windows applications were the exception. Most people used them to multitask DOS and *hope* that native Windows apps would be available soon.
The truth is, hardly anyone ever ran OS2 on a 286. If IBM had introduced OS2 1.0 for the 386, they would have lost very very few customers but would gain market dominence. There would be no Windows.
So why should I care? Should I want them to "differntiate, market and profit" so they can get more of my hard-earned cash for esentially the same product?
Who do you think reads EETimes? This article is not speaking to consumers. It speaks to those who make thier living designing, manufacturing, and marketing products. If there is no money to be made in cell phones and no future for portable devices that are not cell phones then companies should considder not designing new products in this area.
The cell phone companies clearly blew an opportunity when they initially treated the hardware as a loss leader.
An opportunity for what? Remember, it is the service providers that treat phones as loss leaders. They do it to ensure customer lock-in. If phone are sold instead of given away, the profit will go to the retailers. The service providers still won't make money on phones and their customers won't be willing to sign up for a 2 year contract.
The current situation is bad for manufacturers because bargaining power is concentrated in a handful of service providers. If they sold to consumers, there would be more room for product differentiation, marketing, and profit.
The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant, next to the power of the Slashdot effect.
Sure, how many are Ethernet? Probably none. The "10Gb" telco standard is OC192.
For distributing intermediate results, I don't imagine there is such a thing as too fast.
While there are certainly applications that don't need to communicate that fast, more bandwidth means more alogrithms can become practical.
It's not like you can use it download porn, unless the action is happening in the next room. This is not a WAN technology.
Until you click the mouse and collapse the wave form, your Windows box will be crashed and not crashed simultaneously.
The virus is already on the inside with "root". It would be trivial for the virus to simply disable the firewall before spewing.
No, for a "reverse" firewall to make any sense, the firewall must be on a different machine.
Is it any better to be enslaved to the market and your customers than to be enslaved to your boss?
Unless they get lucky, and hit it big, most entrepenuers seems to have a lot less freedom than those those that work for "the man".
It's even worse if your passion is not business. Working for a company means letting someone else deal with that crap. Working for "yourself" means you deal with it and have little time for your own passion.
There have been times where the best fitting equations were just like you say. They had parts that didn't correspond to any real understanding. They just made the equation work. Those are emperical results.
Much science is about taking those emperical results and coming up with theory that explains what they mean.
I thought it was rather obvious that BASIC was derived from Fortran. But it is not on the chart that way.
hi2u want big penis message back plz
That might explain where the extra "thumb" came from.
No offense to the anime lovers, but doesn't comcast already have other outlets for anime?
Like what? Cartoon Network? I like Anime but what Cartoon network chooses to play is not to my tastes. It's all dumbed-down and g-rated. Part of what makes good Anime so good is that it is so different from American television. Cartoon Network only likes to show Anime when it fits in well with it's American programming. The good stuff is nothing like American cartoons and, as often as not, is not considdred safe for the kiddies.
KTEH, in San Jose, used to show a lot of good stuff but Sunday Science Fictino is no more.
If you did well in school, have a good education, but can't find a job, why not start your own business and follow the advice: Compete!
Becuase I don't have the millions required to start a semiconductor company. Those that, do, venture capitalists, will insist that all the R&D in my new company be outsourced.
So, in the best case scenario, I end up doing work that I am neither trained for, nor well suited for. How is that any different than if I don't start my own company?
Nanotech, by it's original defintion is *not* merely "very small technology". It is nano assemblers.
The "nanotech" that you see in trade rags would not have been conciddered nanotech 10, maybe even 5 years ago. But now, everyone doing nanometer scale physical chemistry is calling their stuff "nanotech".
Why are they abusing the term? Because it makes their research sound much cooler than it is. That means more recognition and more funding.
By the original definition, the nano conveyer belt is not nanotech, though it is a lot closer than most of what gets called nanotech today.
PRC and Taiwan are the easy ones but Singapore is 76% Chinese
Nanotechnology *now* means any process for determining structure or composition at a molecular scale.
It didn't used to. The problem isn't that the public doesn't understand what nanotech is. The problem is that the chemist have redefined it and are catching flack because public conciousness hasn't caught up.
Nanotech, as originally defined, really does mean nanoscale universal assemblers. Grey goo, of course, is universal assemblers gone amock. Neither is of great concern right now as actuall implimentation is far, far off and may always be.
Researchers started labling physical chemistry "nanotech", probably because it sounded cool and got people excited. That helps for getting funding, recognition, etc but it also creates fear in the public.
If the "new nanotech" community is concerned about negative publiciy, then I really have no sympathy. If you co-opt a pre-existing sci-fi'esc term, you take the good with the bad.
I have a film scanner. The nearest equivilent which *might* have linux drivers is over $1000 more. So, you can see why I don't just buy a different scanner.
So, why not just boot into windows, do my scanning and get out?
Because scanning a roll of film can take hours of off and on work. I don't want to to be stuck with Windows that whole time.
Wine (when it works at all) is of no help. It runs only apps, not drivers. Even VMware, when the host OS is Linux, is of no help.
Africa doesn't have the education levels, yet. But when they do, we'll be there.
That's a long way off. If you ever travel in Africa for a more than a couple of weeks at a time, you will surely encounter the concept of "Africa Time". It is essentially the idea that time doesn't matter much. Africans don't punch clocks. They don't quibble out an hour or two plus or minus. As a result, it best not to schedule more than one, maybe two things in a day. You never know when they are going to happen. It is actually a very relxing viewpoint once you get used to it, but it is no way to run a business.
In East Africa, commerce is virtually controlled by Indians. There is much resentment that the Indians are hoarding the wealth for themselves. Some of it is likely deserved. Personally, though, I think it is the Indians that hold economy together, such that it is. Idi Amin found this out. When he expelled the Indians from Uganda, the economy virtually collapsed.
The Southern African countries are more properous but that prosperity is propped up by mineral wealth and mostly administered by Westerners.
Among the Africans themselves, you have the problems of corruption, tribleism and a worldview that just doesn't see efficiency as a priority. The Chineese are poor but they work really hard to push themselves, their family, their nation forward. Africa has nothing like that. Until it does, Africa will continue to be a basket case and no threat whatsoever to Western economies.
Is there something special about Nextel's allocation? Or it the same story with Verizon and co.? For what it's worth, I have an 800Mhz Verizon phone.
the ultrasparc V did tape out, and the chip was in the fab. they pulled wafers off the line last week.
Ouch. So, did it wiggle? Or is that something we will never know?
They didn't give up on it... they finished it.
.5Million just for the mask set.
Not quite. Big chips almost never work right the first time. Minor design changes are always required. Best case, Ultrasparc V was months and millions of dollars away from done. Each "spin" throught he fab is
I suspect the situation for Ultrasparc V was worse than that. If they had truly taped out then the chip would already be in the fab. More likely, the database was in condition that it could have been fabed but it was not meeting performance targets.