Nice! It really seems like the two technologies are perfect for each other! I'm a bit skeptical about letting gyros do all the work because I expect them to drift and not know how to re-zero. Still if these GyroMouse guys solved this problem, AlphaGrip should just borrow their solution. A more accurate way for the thing to become aware of its position is to install several mini-cameras that take pictures of the room and from these (plus gyro data) work out exactly which way the device is facing.
I really like this device, except for the mouse. That trackball seems worthless. Even if the sensitivity issues were solved, it still occupies a thumb, which is already an overemployed digit with all the chords it needs to participate in. Also, I have no hope that a thumb-controlled wheel could be both fast and accurate enough to use in a game.
But we already have a solution: the Nintendo Revolution!
The idea is simple: you move the mouse cursor through tilting the device. It requires no extra buttons and is perfectly natural and intuitive, since you're already holding the thing in the air. Basically, it would be a pointing device that you could really point with. Finally, you could mouse around without interrupting your typing! There would be all sorts of ways the device could detect its orientation. I'm not sure which method will be best, though the Nintendo Revolution controller will probably provide us with good clues. So why not build the innards of the Revolution controller inside of this keyboard? Apart from being useful for living room applications, it would just be awesome for games! Consider for example a game like GTA where you turn the car's steering wheel by tilting the controller!
If these guys don't build that in, I hope someone else does. Hell, I'd pay $200 for a wireless tilt-driven one of these (that fits large hands).
Aah, oops, my bad. Thank you for the correction. I meant PCI-Express, though I noticed that the motherboard only supports 8X while most graphics cards want 16. And strangely, the intergrated video is ATi even though the chipset is NVidia. This thing is really some sort of chimera!
A Supermicro source rushed to claim some of the glory tied to rumors that Google has become a large Opteron shop.
"There's some truth to the rumors" about Supermicro supplying gear to Google, the source said. "It was happy days around here."
This is pretty slick hardware, and given Google's recent and complete switch to AMD, this seems like a good match. Opterons are just awesome, even I'm seriously thinking of buying a 165 (slobber...).
On an unrelated note, did you notice the chipset is made by NVidia? Wow, they've come a long way! I'm impressed to see this kind of iron from a company that used to live off pimply gamers. With PCI-X supported, I can't help but wonder about what framerates one could get in a properly multithreaded game.
If you read the article, you'd find that each of the Opterons in it will use 55 watts. Since you're stupid, I won't take any chances and do the calculation for you: 55 X 4 = 220 Watts of power (plus a bit extra for running the chipset and drives). That's not bad for what is essentially 8 cpu's! The recommended (read the spec sheet) 1000 watt power supply is there to insure perfectly stable voltages. It would be overkill for anything except applications where maximum uptime is essential (like web serving).
For the sake of comparison, I run a 530 Watt PSU on this system, which draws about 100 Watts from the wall. Yaay for cool-running AMDs!
Oh, so you have evidence that attractive people reproduce more? I ask because I only ever seem to see evidence to the contrary. When I see a litter of six children, I can feel pretty confident that the parents never were "attractive".
For one thing, there is a strong correlation between attractiveness and wealth: Wealthy people attract more desirable mates. There is also a strong correlation between wealth and low fertility, because wealthy people tend to have stuff to do besides running a home nursery. (This was not always the case - there was a time when people would have as many kids as they could afford to raise, but those times are now definitively over.)
My point is, however you define attractiveness, the prima facie evidence is that attractive people have fewer children, and there is certainly no evidence to the contrary.
I don't know how many socket architectures Intel has introduced in the last two years. I just stopped caring enough to count. AMD, on the other hand, has basically standardized on one: 939. They deserve a lot of praise and respect for the fact that 939 runs everything from (almost) the bottom of the line to the very top, which is a big range, covering at least eight distinct core designs.
Nobody believed them when they said that they won't make you buy a new mobo to upgrade to dual-core processors. Amazingly, AMD kept their promise! They even migrated some Opterons to 939 so you can upgrade your home computer with a real server chip. Now compare this to Intel and you'll see how disciplined and customer-friendly AMD have been.
Of course, they want to make use of DDR2, and since your old motherboard doesn't have DDR2 slots, you'll need to buy a new motherboard to use DDR2. That's the end of the story! You'd have to be high to think you could keep your board and just upgrade to DDR2. AMD switched the pinout a tiny bit so that you don't make the mistake of plugging in an incompatible processor into the board. There's nothing more to it than that.
So maybe people are complaining about being forced to go to DDR2, but I don't think that will happen. I'm quite sure there will be several new AMD processors for Socket 939, probably priced at the same level as their AM2 counterparts. The only difference will be the memory controller. Of course, it won't make much sense to buy 939, with DDR2 being almost as cheap as DDR.
Maybe people were complaining about the extra burden on mobo manufacturers to retool, but this is absolutely minimal, as the Anand article makes clear. We will see many cheap AM2 boards almost right away, because they are so similar to Socket 939 and 940.
Really, this is a great illustration of how a socket change should look.
If you make ethanol from corn, what you produce will not even be enough to run the tractors of your ethanol farm. If you count all the energy costs of farming, you consume six units of energy to produce one unit of ethanol energy. And you destroy perfectly good land. This must be the dumbest investment ever, and the only reason people talk about it is because they want to win over "rural voters" who are slobbering for federal farming subsidies (tax handounts). Fucking leeches!
The article is a bit thin about quantitative stuff, but if these devices really are cheap and they produce enough neutrons, they should prove quite practical for U238 or Thorium-to-fissile-Uranium transmutation. A lot also depends on their efficiency, and also on access to large quantities of Deuterium (not trivial).
Right now, there are two practical ways to make material for a bomb: reprocess spent fuel from a nuclear reactor, or centrifuge the hell out of UF6 to produce highly enriched Uranium. Both of these happen to be rather hard to do. Really, they are the bottleneck that keeps nuclear proliferation from spiraling out of control. Even a powerful state like Iran will almost certainly be stuck on this step for a decade if the rest of the world keeps paying attention. In comparison, separation of Plutonium from Uranium is easy: it's just chemistry.
If a bunch of college professors could build this device on a tabletop, so can Iran. If they do this on a tabletop in a very deep bunker, US-Israeli bombing threats will no longer sound very threatening.
Again, maybe this will turn out to be impractical for reasons of quantity: Maybe these devices will draw too much power, Deuterium will prove hard to get, there won't be enough neutrons, etc. But in principle, this really could be trouble.
Huh? Scientists learned something new and you're diappointed? No, a disappointment look like this: We looked out in space and everything exactly fit our pre-conceptions. Nature has no surprises for us today, just bland old confirmations! Is that what you would have preferred?
This comment made me chuckle and then it made me think. In a constitutional democracy, it really is amazingly hypocritical for a governing administration to compel disclosure of data about private individuals in private homes who look at porn, while at the same saying that Diebold has the right to withhold data it gathered while administering an election, on the basis that a portion of that data is proprietary.
So someone's searching Google for pictures of boobs is the government's business after all?
And what data Diebold-made, state-purchased machines collected during a public election - that's nobody's business but Diebold's? Wow!
(I know the parent expressed the very same thought more elegantly, tersely and humorously, but I just had to vent a little. Sorry.)
I have a bit of experience building AMD socket939 systems and I always thought even the old heatsinks were a bit overkill. Athlon 64's are so damn efficient that the stock heatsink is always cool to the touch. Frankly, the stock fan runs much faster than it needs to. I imagine that the point of this fancier heatsink, which comes with an RPM regulator, is to make a quieter system. I wholeheartedly support that. But it really should be Intel that's making fancy retail heatsinks, with the insane temperatures generated by their Prescotts and Xeons!
I'm sure Newegg will soon be full of reviews about how high you can overclock an Athlon using this retail heatsink. It almost seems like AMD is encouraging them... and I wouldn't be surprised if the Athlon's widespread fame as an excellent overclocker contributes to the increased market share that AMD is enjoying. But I also wouldn't be surprised if overclocking eats into the sales AMD's higher-margin models.
Maybe the solution is to bundle these fancy heatsinks only with their upmarket processors ($350 and up) so as to allow even them to run at a substantial overclock.
Unlike the magnets, this electrical system really does chemically change the wine. It's a good question whether its effect is chemically similar to what you'd get if you just let the wine sit in a cellar for 2 decades... but I'm keeping an open mind. In my view, it's unlikely that the aging effect is so chemically complex and exacting that it couldn't be accelerated or at least simulated nearly enough, or even improved upon!
I would certainly pay $5 for a bottle of new wine treated this way, just to see what I think. Hell, I'd even pay $10 if the initial wine were decent. (Aging crappy wine leaves with you with crappy old wine and I'm sure this device can't fix it either.)
Even if it makes a small improvement, it still seems worth doing because the process just sounds so incredibly cheap! Also, if it really eliminates the need for anti-oxydizing additives, that alone is justification enough.
As far as wine experts are concerned, I don't think they're worthless or stupid. Wine reviews really are useful as a starting point. I've never tasted a wine with a 87+ rating which I thought was bad. Some wines I love are not rated highly by Wine Spectator, but they've never given a high rating to a gross wine. I hope they're impartial once they get to taste these electro-processed wines. There will be pressure on them not to be, but I still have faith.
And I absolutely agree with the need for double-blind experiments. I'd love to see 50 experts comparing a new untreated California wine, a 2000 from the same vineyard (famously good year), and the new wine that's electro-treated. Actually, I'd love to participate in this test. If these Japanese inventors were smart, they'd go to a Napa valley wine festival and offer a showy double-blind taste test. That would get peoples' attention, and they'd have no shortage of snooty, unpaid test subjects.
I expect you're right. If this thing takes off, it's because we will agree on a standard, open, easy-to-convert-to format that will have both DRMed and un-DRMed flavors. I don't doubt that Sony will propose such a standard, but who will sign on to it? Companies are scared of letting Sony own the standards. The fights about Betamax and Blu-ray are just two of several examples.
In a much better position to legislate a standard for this would be:
Apple: No doubt their book reader, when it comes, will be thinner and prettier, and they won't screw up the launch, and people are willing to let them lead because they're not party to the mega-disputes. Also, it's not cool to snub Apple.
Google: They already on their way to having all the world's books scanned and archived. All they need to do is ask permission to sell them. Yeah, not every publisher will let them (at first), but especially for out-of-print books, many will see they have nothing to lose and royalties to gain.
Maybe the two could team up on ebooks, the buzz alone would sideline competitors. If they're hesitating at all, it's because they're not sure there will ever be much of a market for ebooks.
Thanks, that was an interesting connection, though certainly not an insoluble problem. The "service route" does not need to be perfectly optimal, it just needs to be good, and debugged.
Sorry, I teach philosophy in college and I read student essays like this every semester. This one seems reasonably insightful, probably B+ (though I haven't read the book myself, so I can't say whether it misrepresents the position).
But what's really on my mind is this: Read the table of contents - this book could not possibly be anything but crap. I mean, what sense does it make to have one chapter called "Chapter 3: The Libertarian Case for Slavery" and once you're done with musings on economic theory, you toss off a Chapter 7 where you casually present your solution to the question about the difference between minds and machines? How promising is that? Not very. So while the review author may have torn this chapter a new orifice (and the thesis surely has many other problems to boot), I must say that I do not toast his choice of reading. This is crap that was ignored in 1995, and just because it's a $2.95 special at the used book store doesn't mean we need to hear the following on Slashdot:
Newsflash: Some crank wrote a stupid book 11 years ago and I found there is a problem with one of the chapters!!!!! Read on!!!!!
I'd have more sympathy if the text were available online so we could RTFA and have a substantive discussion, but in the absence of that, our only option is to flame the responsible.
Absolutely, it's pretty shocking that it's taking this long to wire up the stations in a subway as busy NYC's. I have a feeling that this has to do with the allergy Americans have to public [anything]. I think you can drive under the Hudson River without losing your signal, but because you're in a car, your're entitled to service. If you're in a train, it means you're a communist... or al quaeda... or poor. That entitles you to nothing in this country.
Do you know if there are plans for multiple elevators in a shaft? The idea seems obvious (it occured to me independently, see my other post) but I wonder if there isn't some fundamental hitch. If not this would be an excellent solution and might really improve the practicality of very tall buildings.
1. Make a clumsy nerd pass at some hot woman
2. Receive painful, ego-shattering rejection.
3. Take pill.
4. Suddenly 2. doesn't seem so bad...
5. ???
6. Profit
(7. Repeat)
More than one cabin per shaft? Architect's dream!
on
Maglev Elevators by 2008?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The single greatest factor limiting the height of modern skyscrapers are the elevators. If you had 200 floors of offices, you would need so many elevator shafts that there would hardly be any room left for building occupants!
Now consider the possibility that there would just be two elevator shafts - an "up" and a "down" - just like there are two parallel railroad tracks. If a floor requires a stop the elevator cabin would leave the main shaft (so as to not block the other cabins in that shaft) and comes to a halt in that floor's "station". Really, think of it as a vertical train system rather than an elevator. The train stops only by request, and only where there is a station with a turn-out track.
Such a "railroad-like" elevator system would make high-rise architecture a great deal more practical. Even if an ultra-high-rise would need four elevator shafts (two up and two down), it would still be a huge improvement over the 16 or more that are needed now, and service would surely be much better.
Also, since the down-elevator would be slowed by passing through a magnetic field, much of its potential energy could be recovered as induced electricity, which could be used to help lift other cabins. It would be sort of like a virtual counterweight. It's possible the energy efficiency of a maglev elevator could be competitive with a cable elevator.
I was wondering this myself. If I ran a hardware review website, the first thing I would benchmark when I got my hands on a new MacBook would be Mozilla-on-Rosetta vs. Mozilla-running-native. Does anyone know of a review where Rosetta's emulation speed is put to the test?
Does the MacBook still have only one mouse button? Because if it does, running Windows will be a serious PITA. Oh well, I suppose a nice Bluetooth mouse would fix that...
Slashdot Mirror
Nice! It really seems like the two technologies are perfect for each other! I'm a bit skeptical about letting gyros do all the work because I expect them to drift and not know how to re-zero. Still if these GyroMouse guys solved this problem, AlphaGrip should just borrow their solution. A more accurate way for the thing to become aware of its position is to install several mini-cameras that take pictures of the room and from these (plus gyro data) work out exactly which way the device is facing.
But we already have a solution: the Nintendo Revolution!
The idea is simple: you move the mouse cursor through tilting the device. It requires no extra buttons and is perfectly natural and intuitive, since you're already holding the thing in the air. Basically, it would be a pointing device that you could really point with. Finally, you could mouse around without interrupting your typing! There would be all sorts of ways the device could detect its orientation. I'm not sure which method will be best, though the Nintendo Revolution controller will probably provide us with good clues. So why not build the innards of the Revolution controller inside of this keyboard? Apart from being useful for living room applications, it would just be awesome for games! Consider for example a game like GTA where you turn the car's steering wheel by tilting the controller!
If these guys don't build that in, I hope someone else does. Hell, I'd pay $200 for a wireless tilt-driven one of these (that fits large hands).
See the story in the Onion.
Aah, oops, my bad. Thank you for the correction. I meant PCI-Express, though I noticed that the motherboard only supports 8X while most graphics cards want 16. And strangely, the intergrated video is ATi even though the chipset is NVidia. This thing is really some sort of chimera!
"There's some truth to the rumors" about Supermicro supplying gear to Google, the source said. "It was happy days around here."
This is pretty slick hardware, and given Google's recent and complete switch to AMD, this seems like a good match. Opterons are just awesome, even I'm seriously thinking of buying a 165 (slobber...).On an unrelated note, did you notice the chipset is made by NVidia? Wow, they've come a long way! I'm impressed to see this kind of iron from a company that used to live off pimply gamers. With PCI-X supported, I can't help but wonder about what framerates one could get in a properly multithreaded game.
For the sake of comparison, I run a 530 Watt PSU on this system, which draws about 100 Watts from the wall. Yaay for cool-running AMDs!
For one thing, there is a strong correlation between attractiveness and wealth: Wealthy people attract more desirable mates. There is also a strong correlation between wealth and low fertility, because wealthy people tend to have stuff to do besides running a home nursery. (This was not always the case - there was a time when people would have as many kids as they could afford to raise, but those times are now definitively over.)
My point is, however you define attractiveness, the prima facie evidence is that attractive people have fewer children, and there is certainly no evidence to the contrary.
Nobody believed them when they said that they won't make you buy a new mobo to upgrade to dual-core processors. Amazingly, AMD kept their promise! They even migrated some Opterons to 939 so you can upgrade your home computer with a real server chip. Now compare this to Intel and you'll see how disciplined and customer-friendly AMD have been.
Of course, they want to make use of DDR2, and since your old motherboard doesn't have DDR2 slots, you'll need to buy a new motherboard to use DDR2. That's the end of the story! You'd have to be high to think you could keep your board and just upgrade to DDR2. AMD switched the pinout a tiny bit so that you don't make the mistake of plugging in an incompatible processor into the board. There's nothing more to it than that.
So maybe people are complaining about being forced to go to DDR2, but I don't think that will happen. I'm quite sure there will be several new AMD processors for Socket 939, probably priced at the same level as their AM2 counterparts. The only difference will be the memory controller. Of course, it won't make much sense to buy 939, with DDR2 being almost as cheap as DDR.
Maybe people were complaining about the extra burden on mobo manufacturers to retool, but this is absolutely minimal, as the Anand article makes clear. We will see many cheap AM2 boards almost right away, because they are so similar to Socket 939 and 940.
Really, this is a great illustration of how a socket change should look.
Yes, and they're all less efficient.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/03/05032 9132436.htm
If you make ethanol from corn, what you produce will not even be enough to run the tractors of your ethanol farm. If you count all the energy costs of farming, you consume six units of energy to produce one unit of ethanol energy. And you destroy perfectly good land. This must be the dumbest investment ever, and the only reason people talk about it is because they want to win over "rural voters" who are slobbering for federal farming subsidies (tax handounts). Fucking leeches!
Right now, there are two practical ways to make material for a bomb: reprocess spent fuel from a nuclear reactor, or centrifuge the hell out of UF6 to produce highly enriched Uranium. Both of these happen to be rather hard to do. Really, they are the bottleneck that keeps nuclear proliferation from spiraling out of control. Even a powerful state like Iran will almost certainly be stuck on this step for a decade if the rest of the world keeps paying attention. In comparison, separation of Plutonium from Uranium is easy: it's just chemistry.
If a bunch of college professors could build this device on a tabletop, so can Iran. If they do this on a tabletop in a very deep bunker, US-Israeli bombing threats will no longer sound very threatening.
Again, maybe this will turn out to be impractical for reasons of quantity: Maybe these devices will draw too much power, Deuterium will prove hard to get, there won't be enough neutrons, etc. But in principle, this really could be trouble.
Huh? Scientists learned something new and you're diappointed? No, a disappointment look like this: We looked out in space and everything exactly fit our pre-conceptions. Nature has no surprises for us today, just bland old confirmations! Is that what you would have preferred?
So someone's searching Google for pictures of boobs is the government's business after all?
And what data Diebold-made, state-purchased machines collected during a public election - that's nobody's business but Diebold's? Wow!
(I know the parent expressed the very same thought more elegantly, tersely and humorously, but I just had to vent a little. Sorry.)
I'm sure Newegg will soon be full of reviews about how high you can overclock an Athlon using this retail heatsink. It almost seems like AMD is encouraging them... and I wouldn't be surprised if the Athlon's widespread fame as an excellent overclocker contributes to the increased market share that AMD is enjoying. But I also wouldn't be surprised if overclocking eats into the sales AMD's higher-margin models.
Maybe the solution is to bundle these fancy heatsinks only with their upmarket processors ($350 and up) so as to allow even them to run at a substantial overclock.
I would certainly pay $5 for a bottle of new wine treated this way, just to see what I think. Hell, I'd even pay $10 if the initial wine were decent. (Aging crappy wine leaves with you with crappy old wine and I'm sure this device can't fix it either.)
Even if it makes a small improvement, it still seems worth doing because the process just sounds so incredibly cheap! Also, if it really eliminates the need for anti-oxydizing additives, that alone is justification enough.
As far as wine experts are concerned, I don't think they're worthless or stupid. Wine reviews really are useful as a starting point. I've never tasted a wine with a 87+ rating which I thought was bad. Some wines I love are not rated highly by Wine Spectator, but they've never given a high rating to a gross wine. I hope they're impartial once they get to taste these electro-processed wines. There will be pressure on them not to be, but I still have faith.
And I absolutely agree with the need for double-blind experiments. I'd love to see 50 experts comparing a new untreated California wine, a 2000 from the same vineyard (famously good year), and the new wine that's electro-treated. Actually, I'd love to participate in this test. If these Japanese inventors were smart, they'd go to a Napa valley wine festival and offer a showy double-blind taste test. That would get peoples' attention, and they'd have no shortage of snooty, unpaid test subjects.
I expect you're right. If this thing takes off, it's because we will agree on a standard, open, easy-to-convert-to format that will have both DRMed and un-DRMed flavors. I don't doubt that Sony will propose such a standard, but who will sign on to it? Companies are scared of letting Sony own the standards. The fights about Betamax and Blu-ray are just two of several examples.
In a much better position to legislate a standard for this would be:
Maybe the two could team up on ebooks, the buzz alone would sideline competitors. If they're hesitating at all, it's because they're not sure there will ever be much of a market for ebooks.
Thanks, that was an interesting connection, though certainly not an insoluble problem. The "service route" does not need to be perfectly optimal, it just needs to be good, and debugged.
But what's really on my mind is this: Read the table of contents - this book could not possibly be anything but crap. I mean, what sense does it make to have one chapter called "Chapter 3: The Libertarian Case for Slavery" and once you're done with musings on economic theory, you toss off a Chapter 7 where you casually present your solution to the question about the difference between minds and machines? How promising is that? Not very. So while the review author may have torn this chapter a new orifice (and the thesis surely has many other problems to boot), I must say that I do not toast his choice of reading. This is crap that was ignored in 1995, and just because it's a $2.95 special at the used book store doesn't mean we need to hear the following on Slashdot:
Newsflash: Some crank wrote a stupid book 11 years ago and I found there is a problem with one of the chapters!!!!! Read on!!!!!
I'd have more sympathy if the text were available online so we could RTFA and have a substantive discussion, but in the absence of that, our only option is to flame the responsible.
Absolutely, it's pretty shocking that it's taking this long to wire up the stations in a subway as busy NYC's. I have a feeling that this has to do with the allergy Americans have to public [anything]. I think you can drive under the Hudson River without losing your signal, but because you're in a car, your're entitled to service. If you're in a train, it means you're a communist... or al quaeda... or poor. That entitles you to nothing in this country.
Do you know if there are plans for multiple elevators in a shaft? The idea seems obvious (it occured to me independently, see my other post) but I wonder if there isn't some fundamental hitch. If not this would be an excellent solution and might really improve the practicality of very tall buildings.
2. Receive painful, ego-shattering rejection.
3. Take pill.
4. Suddenly 2. doesn't seem so bad...
5. ???
6. Profit
(7. Repeat)
Now consider the possibility that there would just be two elevator shafts - an "up" and a "down" - just like there are two parallel railroad tracks. If a floor requires a stop the elevator cabin would leave the main shaft (so as to not block the other cabins in that shaft) and comes to a halt in that floor's "station". Really, think of it as a vertical train system rather than an elevator. The train stops only by request, and only where there is a station with a turn-out track.
Such a "railroad-like" elevator system would make high-rise architecture a great deal more practical. Even if an ultra-high-rise would need four elevator shafts (two up and two down), it would still be a huge improvement over the 16 or more that are needed now, and service would surely be much better.
Also, since the down-elevator would be slowed by passing through a magnetic field, much of its potential energy could be recovered as induced electricity, which could be used to help lift other cabins. It would be sort of like a virtual counterweight. It's possible the energy efficiency of a maglev elevator could be competitive with a cable elevator.
Ah, thank you, I wish they mentioned this in TFA, it seems important!
I was wondering this myself. If I ran a hardware review website, the first thing I would benchmark when I got my hands on a new MacBook would be Mozilla-on-Rosetta vs. Mozilla-running-native. Does anyone know of a review where Rosetta's emulation speed is put to the test?
Does the MacBook still have only one mouse button? Because if it does, running Windows will be a serious PITA. Oh well, I suppose a nice Bluetooth mouse would fix that...