Anyway this whole "dark matter" thing sounds to me like the hypothetical "aether" - we don't know what it is so make up something to make the formulas work.
You're way off.
Aesther theories were never "place-holders". Sure, the name was conjured up to describe some unobserved material, but it was very much meant to be a viable explanation of the world, on-par with Newtonian physics.
Secondly, dark matter is not some made up theory, it is very literally a place-holder that exists to indicate that there is an unknown disparity. It's not just the formulas that don't work... scientists observe behaviors that should be impossible. Dark matter literally means that everything indicates there is matter there, but we don't know what it is. It has never been a folk theory. It's only the uninformed who think that there's literally "dark matter". After all, our knowledge of matter and energy is very extensive, and there's very few question marks remaining in fundamental physical forces. If there was a literal form of "dark matter", CERN and Fermilab would have been trying to create or otherwise observe it, instead of always the Higgs Boson.
Seriously, is anyone using/. still seeing ads? It's a non-issue.
I never bothered with that "disable ads" check box UNTIL I started reading/. on my Droid. No adblock there, I'm afraid, and that's where it's needed the most... short on screen real-estate and bandwidth both.
Today, I saw an ad at the start of a video hosted on YouTube. The ad was for IE9. Now, considering the fact that IE9 only works on Windows, and I visited it from a Mac (something quite apparent from the user agent string that my browser sent to Google), you'd have thought that it would be pretty obvious that I was not in the target market.
You've got it completely wrong! You don't advertise Toyotas to people who own Toyotas... You advertise to everyone who ISN'T.
Microsoft doesn't sell a product called IE9. They sell Windows, which has IE9 tied to it.
Microsoft desperately wants you to think that IE9 is good... Significantly better than what you're using now, and thereby giving you a bit more motivation to make your next computer a Windows PC, instead of a Mac.
So... where will the revenue come from after hundreds of thousands of people switch to electric cars or plug-in hybrids?
At that point (Less than 1/10th of 1%), don't expect any changes to the laws. The government is heavily SUBSIDIZING electric vehicles. The loss of gas taxes can just be considered a small part of that subsidy... and taxing those evil polluters more should be an easy sell.
Now, once tens of millions of electric cars are out there, expect things to change. The taxes will have to come from somewhere, so things will get shifted around. Some might try bond measures, others might cut other services as raising taxes is a political death sentence in the current climate. Still, some will increase sales tax or whatnot to pay for roads, just like other services. A bit of an adjustment, but not a big deal, really.
Probably because with that $20 thousand dollar connection, you actually get the speed. But with the home internet services, you get a burst of speed and then you get slowed down or cut off altogether.
I have over a decade of experience with both leased lines and "business" broadband, and I can safely say, you're paying a hell of a premium for those extra "9"s. "Business" broadband will have more downtime, but still only an hour a month or so, maybe more on occasion.
Yeah, I know... If you're running e-Commerce sites, and the like, the added cost of the leased line is overshadowed by the potential losses if the line goes down at peak hours. However, pretty much anything short of that, and I'd strongly recomend "business" class broadband. If necessary, from two different providers in a fail-over configuration.
In fact, it's so close in design that it shared the same optical flaw as an early KH12 design.
umm... what? You're suggesting the CIA somehow knew that Perkin-Elmer had incorrectly assembled their primary null corrector, and foolishly ignored the results of two others indicating the simple error in manufacturing the mirror?
It wasn't a design flaw... the prototype was manufactured correctly, and the backup mirror made by Eastman-Kodak was flawless as well. No design issue was involved, and their use of a similar design wouldn't have given them any magical insight into a random manufacturing flaw.
You're mistaken. The fine for killing an animal generally only equates to the cost of replacement (a few hundred dollars, depending). People who seriously abuse animals typically pay 1000$, and if you're lucky, get 6 months of probation. I certainly don't expect an average person would have gotten worse (unless they didn't pay the fine).
Right. The figures for US manufacturing alone are more than double that of China, our nearest rival these days (though I wouldn't count Japan out) is ample evidence that the US manufactures nothing.
Those Boeing jets with GE/Pratt&Whitney engines are certainly not made in the USA, because we don't manufacture anything, you see...
And Catepillar? That's some Chinese brand, right? Surely china doesn't purchas its jets and heavy machinery from the US, because we don't manufacture anything, of course.
It's impossible to guarantee that you have met all the requirements of DSS Section 8 without some system of central account management, which typically implies central AAA.
nonsense. Login to a random box and show that account expiration and lockout have been set below the 90 day limit, and show that no users have passwords older than that. It takes more time to write it up here than it does to do it. That's as much as an auditor would want.
So what? Buy two servers and hire a competent admin...it sounds like someone has already got the job so your point is moot.
10% of their network dedicated to authentication? You're clearly missing the forrest for the trees. And a competent admin for a 20 person company? Not likely. The guy in question sounds very much like he's got a 6mo contract, then he's out the door.
DR planning (or really any type of IT planning) necessitates that you try to anticipate problems before they occur. Some of the questions on my list may be outlandish, but they deserve to be asked in the planning process since any one of them could be a real concern.
there are a million questions that need to be asked, but you've assumed the answer that suits you, and used it to justify your position, with no evidence at all.
Mac Minis offer pretty decent performance and take up a lot desk estate than PCs of comparable quality,
In a decade in the business, I can barely ever remember seeing a PC on someone's desk. They are PERFECT for putting on the floor, out of the way. It's a non-issue.
Why OS X? You can escape the insanity of malware/virus/trojan horse breakouts, maintenance is a heck of a lot easier, and backup and restore is far easier on a Mac than it is on Windows.
That sounds like a great reason to use CentOS on the desktops as well, with some window manager that is sufficiently restricted to disallow users making it unusable (Blackbox, XFce, and others are very good for this). And you avoid the extra cost of Apple hardware and software. Not to mention how immensely easy Linux is to admin remotely, and the much wider pool of IT talent for Linux versus OS X (connecting to Linux servers).
My god, did you actually just recomend a CentOS server running Samba connecting serving OS X clients? It burns!
This is why I so rarely read Ask Slashdot stories.
What if they ever need to be PCI compliant? What if they already need to be compliant with government security policies?...or compliant with security policies of private-sector affiliates?
PCI-DSS doesn't require central authentication, and I doubt most government security policies do, either. What it does require is password expiration restrictions be in-place, but those are one-off settings. Central authentication makes it easy for one user to be setup in one place, and able to login to any random system... Sometimes, that's a BAD THING, and while restrictions can be put in place, that's making things massively complex. And with some automated tools, it isn't very difficult to add/delete/modify user accounts to 20 machines.
And the GP is correct that the central auth server is a nasty single point of failure if you don't have competent IT support. You seriously risk bankrupting the company if the single server goes down at the wrong time and suddenly NOBODY can use any of the computers... (Note that the same thing is true of thin clients).
What if they need to apply for business continuity insurance? How do we know that poor security isn't the reason they are scrapping their old network?
How do we know that magic pixie dust (clogging the heatsinks and causing computer failure) isn't the reason? Clearly, fanless systems is the answer! (To the problem I just pulled out of my ass.)
I don't care what the threat is any more. I have more than enough government, and I want less! The biggest threat by far is our government, and it's time to de-fund the whole stinking mess.
Ah yes, the Republican mantra. Government isn't perfect, so we should kill off all those good things it does first and foremost...
The TSA overreaching is a serious problem, but it's now getting public attention, which will likely lead to forcing them to step back.
As for every other major problem we've had in the past deacde... its pretty well all corporations behaving like criminals wherever government oversight hasn't yet reached, or has been rolled-back. It certainly wasn't the government causing the housing bubble, or forcing huge financial firms to fully leverage themselves in subprime mortages. In fact its government regulations dating from the 1940s that kept us from having problems like this in a good 60 years.
The government didn't create Enron, they just stopped regulating the industry and them run wild and manipulate the market. The government didn't create BP, or tell them to fuck-up their offshore drillingoperations, it just dropped the ball on the authority it had to monitor them for safety violations.
If you want to cut down the government, don't try vague, nebulous crap. Say what you're actually going to do. The two huge money sinks in the us government are medicare/social security and defense spending. The rest is a relatively tiny fraction. Which would you like to eliminated? And don't do the typical republican thing and pretend that we can drastically reduce spending eliminating some nebulous "waste" you're only going to do it by cutting real, actual services. So talk about what you want to get rid of, and you might be able to form a real, intelligent conversation about the best direction for the country.
Seriously, who TF came to the idea that all WANs are to be extinguished and only the Internet can be used for site-to-site networks?
Private links still exist. I manage several. However, you're an idiot if you think that somehow a leased line is magically more secure than two sites that use an IPSec VPN over the internet. Both are IP networks with an that might or might not have internet access.
Once you have an IP network, all it takes is a single infected executable, or laptop, to get onto your private network and infect all others. Security requires extensive network access controls, not just barracading the front door. Stuxnet is a prime example, as it doesn't require internet access to spread, but will then use whatever network access it gets on the infected machines...
gpu's have been growing in transistor count relative to cpu's for quite some time.
Cause and effect. Because they aren't integrated, more and more tasks are being fully offloaded to the GPUs, requiring more power. Also, do you really not think there's an upper limit, where the GPU can render more polygons at a higher resolution than anyone is going to care about? It happens. It's the natural progression of high technology.
so, assuming you're going to stick a modern six core die to a 480 die, would you care to explain how you are going to dissipate enough heat before they fry eachother from being in such close proximity?
I can't imagine what I wrote that would lead you to believe that. Of course there's too much heat. With a couple process shrinks, or maybe just one shrink and a CPU redesign, it'll be fine. The simple option for the high-end right now is to give the GPU it's own CPU socket, which AMD has discussed repeatedly.
Your mistake is you think advances in process won't be used to make better gpu's, they will.
China is resource-poor, while the US is rather flush with natural resources of most desirable kinds... Consider that the US produced more oil than Saudia Arabia has, while China has to import an overwheliming percentage of what it consumes. This fact alone is going to make it more difficult for China to compete, once the bubble burts, and leave it more vulnerable.
High-tech industries have been fairly well anchored... you don't find every country in the world turning out turbot-jet engines. US based Catepillar heavy machinery continues to be immensely successful despite competition. Outsourcing of IT, while putting some downward pressure on wages, has not remotely lived-up to expectations, and in-sourcing has become a hot trend.
You will NOT be seeing a gtx480 equivalent in your cpu die any time soon.
No you won't. AMD's original idea was to have an SMP motherboard, with an Opteron in one socket, and a GPU in another. This would be eminently doable with a GTX 480, and anything else you can name. FPUs had their own sockets to start with, too.
These days, having a GPU as a seperate core on a chip would be the expected way to go, and there's no reason that couldn't happen. Sure, it's a lot of transistors, but with entirely separate dies glued together, it really doesn't matter. Power consumption would be more of a problem, so your 480 will have to get a die shrink or two first.
In the end, after several years, it'll end up in the die, though. Yes, the transistor count on CPUs will grow faster than GPUs, until it won't be so big of a leap. We're obviously not there yet, but we're headed that direction.
If it was like once every other month, though, renting a car for that occasion might be a viable option.
I would call any solution that involves renting a vehicle more than once a year, non-viable. They're immensely expensive either per-day or per-mile (hence, people own vehicles rather than using rentals), and the processes of renting and returning (and loading and unloading) is terribly inconvenient and quite time-consuming, sucking up several extra hours.
But 10% market penetration is still tens of millions of cars in the US alone, and the situation only seems to get better with time.
I count 10% as the maximum potential market, and perhaps 1% as real sales. Yes, that's still a respectable number, that should be good enough to start getting some charging stations to appear, but we're looking at upwards of a decade for even that to happen.
Serial hybrids like the Volt, OTOH, aren't limited to that 1%. They could be adopted far more quickly as they make short trips inexpensive, and reduce trips to the gas station, while also making long trips possible and practical. I expect adoption of plug-in hybrids will far outshadow fully electric vehicles for the foreseeable future, and will be the impetus for electric charging stations, rather than the all-electric vehicles which are actually more dependent on them.
Even more interesting is the fact that GPGPU accelerated supercomputers are clearly outclassing classical supercomputers such as Cray. I suspect we might be seeing something like a paradigm shift, such as when people moved from custom interconnect to GbE and infiniband. Or when custom processors began to be replaced by Commercial Off The Shelf processors.
Nope. GPUs are just today's version of the FPUs in the 90s. Right now, they're a feature omitted in most systems, with software emulation taking up the slack but at a performance penalty. In newer and higher-end system, they're available as an add-on that can be coupled with the CPU, though the system can run fine without it for those who wish to omit it. And soon, all systems will come with it integrated right into the CPU silicon, just another footnote as to why your CPU die has to be so large...
This doesn't bode well for embedded CPUs, of course. They weren't taken seriously in the high-end due to missing FPUs for over a decade, while all non-embedded processors had them. And with GPUs, AMD is quite far down the road of integration. Intel has enough money to play catch-up without anyone really noticing they missed a beat. But embedded CPU designers like ARM aren't even in the ballpark, and could well fall behind and stay behind for the next decade just as soon as the benefits of a CPU-GPU are realized by mainstream software. It looks a whole lot like history repeating.
Statistics released by the federal transportation department show that 80% of people rarely drive more than 40 miles per day.
My primary point, above, is that most people have just one vehicle, so even a 95% suitable vehicle won't work for most people. In short, give me the figures for those people who NEVER drive more than 80 miles per day, and I'll use those numbers. 10% sounds about right to me.
there is surely a number of people for whom a 100 mile range is perfectly adequate - somewhere between 1% and 80%.
I agree. That's why I set that number at a firm 10%.
Surely you don't think that EVERYONE who can possibly get by with an electric car will run right out and buy one??? I think 1 in 10 of the potential market buying an EV is rather optimistic, hence the 1% figure.
If you think electric heat is expensive just wait until you start charging an EV every night...
The added cost to your electric bill will be far, far less than you pay for gasoline currently. Something like 1 cent/mi. Sure, it sounds worse because you get it all down on paper at the end of the month, rather than some nebulous recollection that you dropped $20 here, and $20 there, several times over during the course of the month..
Charging stations external to that are a bonus but not strictly required.
Wrong. To get out of a tiny niche market, recharging stations will be quite important. Most people don't have multiple vehicles, and yet, they at least occasionally need to travel more than the 100 miles nearly all electric vehicles max-out at... Many people commute more than 100 miles, every single day. Even those that do not, have a need to do so often enough. And the fact that an electric vehicle can't do that at all, eliminates it from consideration as their sole vehicle.
I'd love to get an electric car like the Nissan Leaf, despite the high prices, but I've got two strikes against me...
1) I'm currently living in an apartment complex where I'm a good 100 feet away from my car, and stringing electric lines is sure to be frowned upon 2) I live more than 100 miles (each way) from my niece, whom I regularly visit. In fact between family and work I'd say I drive over 100 miles at least twice a month on average (and it's not always something I can plan well in advance). Hell, I've got a 400mi trip coming up next week.
You can complain that I'm just not the the target customer for an electric vehicle, but I'd bet I'm in the overwhelming majority. Maybe 10% of people are in a position where they could get by with an electric vehicle... Now you're reducing your potential market by an order of magnitude. You've got to CONVINCE that small minority they want an electric vehicle, and that's no easy task. I don't believe all-electric vehicles will be able to breach the 1% mark until a substantial number of charging stations are available. Yes, the nice thing is that "stations" consist of a $10,000 box connected to the electrical grid, and can be easily dropped-in to any high-traffic parking-lot without trouble, but until it happens, there's a lot of truth to the claim that a gas engine is a strict requirement, because it is, to open up the market to that other 99%.
A) You may just be over-generalizing, but yes, full CC#s do need to be stored for a decent bit of time to handle any number of order processing issues that may occur.
B) Even if you as a company may not want to keep CC#s lying around forever, your lawyers may well tell you it is required. Though I dont deal with the lawyers myself and cant give specifics, I can tell you that my employer treats CC info the same as all other business info that might possibly be needed by the IRS up to 7 years down the line...
C) PCI-DSS is the (publically available) standard that the CC companies set on businesses who need to process credit cards. They can pretty well dictate any terms they want. However, they most certainly arent strict by any stretch. They do not set a length of time after which you must erase full CC#s from your records. They do, however, dictate that any such info being stored must be protected, essentially requiring encryption, and dictating annual key changes as well.
D) If retailers aren't abiding by PCI-DSS standards, and passing their audits, they're liable to get their right to process CCs revoked, and, may be open to lawsuits by the CC companies. If the standards aren't tough enought, they can easily add more restrictions that retailers must follow. However, if CC companies wish to choose to allow retailers to be in violation, and choose not to improve their security standards, then they've decided it's better to take these kind of losses, and that's hard to argue with... There's a question of a moral hazard, as letting criminals make billions is a bad thing in itself, and how much money police and courts are wasting on prosecuting criminals that need not have been able to get anything in the first place, but if they've decided lack of security is more profitable, they deserve to pay out every fraudulent dollar, and we shouldn't give it a second thought, until they start asking to be bailed out...
Just, saying that to claim, that not helping someone who can't pay for healthcare, is an idealistic attitude, is far away from the kind of idealism I'm familiar with...
Just because something is not charitable, doesn't make it cease to be idealistic. I suggest you buy a dictionary, and start making sense...
Slashdot Mirror
You're way off.
Aesther theories were never "place-holders". Sure, the name was conjured up to describe some unobserved material, but it was very much meant to be a viable explanation of the world, on-par with Newtonian physics.
Secondly, dark matter is not some made up theory, it is very literally a place-holder that exists to indicate that there is an unknown disparity. It's not just the formulas that don't work... scientists observe behaviors that should be impossible. Dark matter literally means that everything indicates there is matter there, but we don't know what it is. It has never been a folk theory. It's only the uninformed who think that there's literally "dark matter". After all, our knowledge of matter and energy is very extensive, and there's very few question marks remaining in fundamental physical forces. If there was a literal form of "dark matter", CERN and Fermilab would have been trying to create or otherwise observe it, instead of always the Higgs Boson.
I never bothered with that "disable ads" check box UNTIL I started reading /. on my Droid. No adblock there, I'm afraid, and that's where it's needed the most... short on screen real-estate and bandwidth both.
You've got it completely wrong! You don't advertise Toyotas to people who own Toyotas... You advertise to everyone who ISN'T.
Microsoft doesn't sell a product called IE9. They sell Windows, which has IE9 tied to it.
Microsoft desperately wants you to think that IE9 is good... Significantly better than what you're using now, and thereby giving you a bit more motivation to make your next computer a Windows PC, instead of a Mac.
At that point (Less than 1/10th of 1%), don't expect any changes to the laws. The government is heavily SUBSIDIZING electric vehicles. The loss of gas taxes can just be considered a small part of that subsidy... and taxing those evil polluters more should be an easy sell.
Now, once tens of millions of electric cars are out there, expect things to change. The taxes will have to come from somewhere, so things will get shifted around. Some might try bond measures, others might cut other services as raising taxes is a political death sentence in the current climate. Still, some will increase sales tax or whatnot to pay for roads, just like other services. A bit of an adjustment, but not a big deal, really.
I have over a decade of experience with both leased lines and "business" broadband, and I can safely say, you're paying a hell of a premium for those extra "9"s. "Business" broadband will have more downtime, but still only an hour a month or so, maybe more on occasion.
Yeah, I know... If you're running e-Commerce sites, and the like, the added cost of the leased line is overshadowed by the potential losses if the line goes down at peak hours. However, pretty much anything short of that, and I'd strongly recomend "business" class broadband. If necessary, from two different providers in a fail-over configuration.
In fact, it's so close in design that it shared the same optical flaw as an early KH12 design.
umm... what? You're suggesting the CIA somehow knew that Perkin-Elmer had incorrectly assembled their primary null corrector, and foolishly ignored the results of two others indicating the simple error in manufacturing the mirror?
It wasn't a design flaw... the prototype was manufactured correctly, and the backup mirror made by Eastman-Kodak was flawless as well. No design issue was involved, and their use of a similar design wouldn't have given them any magical insight into a random manufacturing flaw.
You're mistaken. The fine for killing an animal generally only equates to the cost of replacement (a few hundred dollars, depending). People who seriously abuse animals typically pay 1000$, and if you're lucky, get 6 months of probation. I certainly don't expect an average person would have gotten worse (unless they didn't pay the fine).
Right. The figures for US manufacturing alone are more than double that of China, our nearest rival these days (though I wouldn't count Japan out) is ample evidence that the US manufactures nothing.
Those Boeing jets with GE/Pratt&Whitney engines are certainly not made in the USA, because we don't manufacture anything, you see...
And Catepillar? That's some Chinese brand, right? Surely china doesn't purchas its jets and heavy machinery from the US, because we don't manufacture anything, of course.
nonsense. Login to a random box and show that account expiration and lockout have been set below the 90 day limit, and show that no users have passwords older than that. It takes more time to write it up here than it does to do it. That's as much as an auditor would want.
10% of their network dedicated to authentication? You're clearly missing the forrest for the trees. And a competent admin for a 20 person company? Not likely. The guy in question sounds very much like he's got a 6mo contract, then he's out the door.
there are a million questions that need to be asked, but you've assumed the answer that suits you, and used it to justify your position, with no evidence at all.
In a decade in the business, I can barely ever remember seeing a PC on someone's desk. They are PERFECT for putting on the floor, out of the way. It's a non-issue.
That sounds like a great reason to use CentOS on the desktops as well, with some window manager that is sufficiently restricted to disallow users making it unusable (Blackbox, XFce, and others are very good for this). And you avoid the extra cost of Apple hardware and software. Not to mention how immensely easy Linux is to admin remotely, and the much wider pool of IT talent for Linux versus OS X (connecting to Linux servers).
My god, did you actually just recomend a CentOS server running Samba connecting serving OS X clients? It burns!
This is why I so rarely read Ask Slashdot stories.
Yes it can, if you keep making-up crap.
PCI-DSS doesn't require central authentication, and I doubt most government security policies do, either. What it does require is password expiration restrictions be in-place, but those are one-off settings. Central authentication makes it easy for one user to be setup in one place, and able to login to any random system... Sometimes, that's a BAD THING, and while restrictions can be put in place, that's making things massively complex. And with some automated tools, it isn't very difficult to add/delete/modify user accounts to 20 machines.
And the GP is correct that the central auth server is a nasty single point of failure if you don't have competent IT support. You seriously risk bankrupting the company if the single server goes down at the wrong time and suddenly NOBODY can use any of the computers... (Note that the same thing is true of thin clients).
How do we know that magic pixie dust (clogging the heatsinks and causing computer failure) isn't the reason? Clearly, fanless systems is the answer! (To the problem I just pulled out of my ass.)
Ah yes, the Republican mantra. Government isn't perfect, so we should kill off all those good things it does first and foremost...
The TSA overreaching is a serious problem, but it's now getting public attention, which will likely lead to forcing them to step back.
As for every other major problem we've had in the past deacde... its pretty well all corporations behaving like criminals wherever government oversight hasn't yet reached, or has been rolled-back. It certainly wasn't the government causing the housing bubble, or forcing huge financial firms to fully leverage themselves in subprime mortages. In fact its government regulations dating from the 1940s that kept us from having problems like this in a good 60 years.
The government didn't create Enron, they just stopped regulating the industry and them run wild and manipulate the market. The government didn't create BP, or tell them to fuck-up their offshore drillingoperations, it just dropped the ball on the authority it had to monitor them for safety violations.
If you want to cut down the government, don't try vague, nebulous crap. Say what you're actually going to do. The two huge money sinks in the us government are medicare/social security and defense spending. The rest is a relatively tiny fraction. Which would you like to eliminated? And don't do the typical republican thing and pretend that we can drastically reduce spending eliminating some nebulous "waste" you're only going to do it by cutting real, actual services. So talk about what you want to get rid of, and you might be able to form a real, intelligent conversation about the best direction for the country.
Private links still exist. I manage several. However, you're an idiot if you think that somehow a leased line is magically more secure than two sites that use an IPSec VPN over the internet. Both are IP networks with an that might or might not have internet access.
Once you have an IP network, all it takes is a single infected executable, or laptop, to get onto your private network and infect all others. Security requires extensive network access controls, not just barracading the front door. Stuxnet is a prime example, as it doesn't require internet access to spread, but will then use whatever network access it gets on the infected machines...
Cause and effect. Because they aren't integrated, more and more tasks are being fully offloaded to the GPUs, requiring more power. Also, do you really not think there's an upper limit, where the GPU can render more polygons at a higher resolution than anyone is going to care about? It happens. It's the natural progression of high technology.
I can't imagine what I wrote that would lead you to believe that. Of course there's too much heat. With a couple process shrinks, or maybe just one shrink and a CPU redesign, it'll be fine. The simple option for the high-end right now is to give the GPU it's own CPU socket, which AMD has discussed repeatedly.
Point me to a 200 watt FPU.
China is resource-poor, while the US is rather flush with natural resources of most desirable kinds... Consider that the US produced more oil than Saudia Arabia has, while China has to import an overwheliming percentage of what it consumes. This fact alone is going to make it more difficult for China to compete, once the bubble burts, and leave it more vulnerable.
High-tech industries have been fairly well anchored... you don't find every country in the world turning out turbot-jet engines. US based Catepillar heavy machinery continues to be immensely successful despite competition. Outsourcing of IT, while putting some downward pressure on wages, has not remotely lived-up to expectations, and in-sourcing has become a hot trend.
No you won't. AMD's original idea was to have an SMP motherboard, with an Opteron in one socket, and a GPU in another. This would be eminently doable with a GTX 480, and anything else you can name. FPUs had their own sockets to start with, too.
These days, having a GPU as a seperate core on a chip would be the expected way to go, and there's no reason that couldn't happen. Sure, it's a lot of transistors, but with entirely separate dies glued together, it really doesn't matter. Power consumption would be more of a problem, so your 480 will have to get a die shrink or two first.
In the end, after several years, it'll end up in the die, though. Yes, the transistor count on CPUs will grow faster than GPUs, until it won't be so big of a leap. We're obviously not there yet, but we're headed that direction.
I would call any solution that involves renting a vehicle more than once a year, non-viable. They're immensely expensive either per-day or per-mile (hence, people own vehicles rather than using rentals), and the processes of renting and returning (and loading and unloading) is terribly inconvenient and quite time-consuming, sucking up several extra hours.
I count 10% as the maximum potential market, and perhaps 1% as real sales. Yes, that's still a respectable number, that should be good enough to start getting some charging stations to appear, but we're looking at upwards of a decade for even that to happen.
Serial hybrids like the Volt, OTOH, aren't limited to that 1%. They could be adopted far more quickly as they make short trips inexpensive, and reduce trips to the gas station, while also making long trips possible and practical. I expect adoption of plug-in hybrids will far outshadow fully electric vehicles for the foreseeable future, and will be the impetus for electric charging stations, rather than the all-electric vehicles which are actually more dependent on them.
Nope. GPUs are just today's version of the FPUs in the 90s. Right now, they're a feature omitted in most systems, with software emulation taking up the slack but at a performance penalty. In newer and higher-end system, they're available as an add-on that can be coupled with the CPU, though the system can run fine without it for those who wish to omit it. And soon, all systems will come with it integrated right into the CPU silicon, just another footnote as to why your CPU die has to be so large...
This doesn't bode well for embedded CPUs, of course. They weren't taken seriously in the high-end due to missing FPUs for over a decade, while all non-embedded processors had them. And with GPUs, AMD is quite far down the road of integration. Intel has enough money to play catch-up without anyone really noticing they missed a beat. But embedded CPU designers like ARM aren't even in the ballpark, and could well fall behind and stay behind for the next decade just as soon as the benefits of a CPU-GPU are realized by mainstream software. It looks a whole lot like history repeating.
"What is: the speed of a supercomputer falling off a cliff?"
Trebeck: "That's correct. You select next."
"I'll take: 'Bad jokes' for 1,000, Alex."
My primary point, above, is that most people have just one vehicle, so even a 95% suitable vehicle won't work for most people. In short, give me the figures for those people who NEVER drive more than 80 miles per day, and I'll use those numbers. 10% sounds about right to me.
I agree. That's why I set that number at a firm 10%.
Surely you don't think that EVERYONE who can possibly get by with an electric car will run right out and buy one??? I think 1 in 10 of the potential market buying an EV is rather optimistic, hence the 1% figure.
The added cost to your electric bill will be far, far less than you pay for gasoline currently. Something like 1 cent/mi. Sure, it sounds worse because you get it all down on paper at the end of the month, rather than some nebulous recollection that you dropped $20 here, and $20 there, several times over during the course of the month..
Agreed.
Wrong. To get out of a tiny niche market, recharging stations will be quite important. Most people don't have multiple vehicles, and yet, they at least occasionally need to travel more than the 100 miles nearly all electric vehicles max-out at... Many people commute more than 100 miles, every single day. Even those that do not, have a need to do so often enough. And the fact that an electric vehicle can't do that at all, eliminates it from consideration as their sole vehicle.
I'd love to get an electric car like the Nissan Leaf, despite the high prices, but I've got two strikes against me...
1) I'm currently living in an apartment complex where I'm a good 100 feet away from my car, and stringing electric lines is sure to be frowned upon
2) I live more than 100 miles (each way) from my niece, whom I regularly visit. In fact between family and work I'd say I drive over 100 miles at least twice a month on average (and it's not always something I can plan well in advance). Hell, I've got a 400mi trip coming up next week.
You can complain that I'm just not the the target customer for an electric vehicle, but I'd bet I'm in the overwhelming majority. Maybe 10% of people are in a position where they could get by with an electric vehicle... Now you're reducing your potential market by an order of magnitude. You've got to CONVINCE that small minority they want an electric vehicle, and that's no easy task. I don't believe all-electric vehicles will be able to breach the 1% mark until a substantial number of charging stations are available. Yes, the nice thing is that "stations" consist of a $10,000 box connected to the electrical grid, and can be easily dropped-in to any high-traffic parking-lot without trouble, but until it happens, there's a lot of truth to the claim that a gas engine is a strict requirement, because it is, to open up the market to that other 99%.
You're a good couple years behind. "Tasting" is long-dead.
http://www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-12aug09-en.htm
So now would you like to try again to regail us with your extensive insight into the domain name system, and the answers to all our problems?
A) You may just be over-generalizing, but yes, full CC#s do need to be stored for a decent bit of time to handle any number of order processing issues that may occur.
B) Even if you as a company may not want to keep CC#s lying around forever, your lawyers may well tell you it is required. Though I dont deal with the lawyers myself and cant give specifics, I can tell you that my employer treats CC info the same as all other business info that might possibly be needed by the IRS up to 7 years down the line...
C) PCI-DSS is the (publically available) standard that the CC companies set on businesses who need to process credit cards. They can pretty well dictate any terms they want. However, they most certainly arent strict by any stretch. They do not set a length of time after which you must erase full CC#s from your records. They do, however, dictate that any such info being stored must be protected, essentially requiring encryption, and dictating annual key changes as well.
D) If retailers aren't abiding by PCI-DSS standards, and passing their audits, they're liable to get their right to process CCs revoked, and, may be open to lawsuits by the CC companies. If the standards aren't tough enought, they can easily add more restrictions that retailers must follow. However, if CC companies wish to choose to allow retailers to be in violation, and choose not to improve their security standards, then they've decided it's better to take these kind of losses, and that's hard to argue with... There's a question of a moral hazard, as letting criminals make billions is a bad thing in itself, and how much money police and courts are wasting on prosecuting criminals that need not have been able to get anything in the first place, but if they've decided lack of security is more profitable, they deserve to pay out every fraudulent dollar, and we shouldn't give it a second thought, until they start asking to be bailed out...
Just because something is not charitable, doesn't make it cease to be idealistic. I suggest you buy a dictionary, and start making sense...