Apple buying PA Semi to get access to PWRficient in order to use the chips in iTMS servers makes as much sense as Amazon buying Hitachi to use their products to run S3/Amazon web store.
Relative size and existing markets are a factor in evaluating how much sense an acquisition makes. Apple makes stuff that uses computer chips, Amazon doesn't. Apple is much bigger than PASemi, Amazon isn't that big relative to Hitachi's drive division (as far as I can tell).
It is much more likely that Apple bought PA Semi for their brains and to get in-house chip design capabilities (the results of which we are unlikely to see for a couple of years)
Duh. But that's not answering why they bought PASemi. That's an argument for why they bought a chip design firm. They didn't choose this one out of the phone book.
than Apple buying them because they want to use PWRficient chips to power iTMS.
Apple is not going to throw the existing PWRficient chips out the window either. I say they look good for a media server. A media server that the iTMS would be the first customer for.
PA Semi is a designer firm, they don't manufacture the parts they design
A large part of the problem in the past was getting the chips designed.
But they already sell servers.
Which are general purpose intel-processor computers. Sure they've got redundancy and a small form factor, but from a computation standpoint it's just another PC.
This hypothetical machine would be adapted for high-volume delivery of streaming media or DRMed and/or watermarked static media. The PASemi chip has got enormous memory bandwidth, and some kind of "offload engine" for getting cryptography, RAID, and TCP out of the processor. At least, that's what I get from the Slashdot comment description of PASemi's products and Wikipedia. Their site hit its bandwidth limits for some mysterious reason so I can't look into what they do myself right now.
Wikipedia says current customers are using it for signal processing, image processing, and storage arrays. There was talk about building a new Amiga based on it, but that seems to have gone the way of most Amiga revivals.
I should of said "storage".
Just to be in character, you mean "should have said".
I'm saying you don't seem to have a sense of the scales of the companies you're talking about. Apple is much bigger than PASemi. Amazon is smaller than Hitachi. Although Amazon is bigger than Hitachi's storage subsidiary, it is not by anywhere near as wide a margin as Apple and PASemi.
It would be cheaper to buy the hardware than it is to buy the designer.
It's cheaper to buy the designer than be unable to ship product because your supplier can't keep up. Which is exactly the sort of problem Apple's had in the past.
And for selling servers and store to others.
I said this looked good for scratching Apple's itch. I didn't say they wouldn't try selling it to others with the same itch.
Servers and storage that would likely be specialized for pushing a lot of data efficiently. Sounds great for the iTMS.
Apple buying PASemi for that reason would make as much sense as Amazon buying Hitachi because they need servers and hard drives for their web store / S3 service. Have some sense of scale, man.
You're making the analogy of Apple:PASemi::Amazon:Hitachi, and you're accusing me of having no sense of scale?
Why would they buy a chip design company to make a few systems for their back end store?
The iTMS is the largest music retailer in the US. It's also starting to push video in quantity. Perhaps they anticipate becoming the largest video retailer as well.
But mostly my bet is it's for servers and storage to start.
Servers and storage that would likely be specialized for pushing a lot of data efficiently. Sounds great for the iTMS.
PASemi certainly do NOT specialise in low power chips for "small devices", they specialise in low power chips for *communications infrastructure* like storage, advanced image processing, cryptography and the like.
Sounds like the sort of thing you'd want if you were running some kind of high-volume online audio/video media store.
It was the size of a grapefruit or softball held out at arms length. We watched it travel through the sky and the most amazing thing I have ever seen in my life happened.
It bounced off the atmosphere TWICE and then fell below the horizon. There were no flame-trails that we associate with atmosphere entry.
I have often hoped that some expert would confirm or believe me, but I have been told that I "imagined it" and "that's impossible" buy the few I have told.
I hate to say this, but your story doesn't work. For an asteroid to be at that height and have that visual size, it would have to be several miles across. A rock that big tearing through the upper atmosphere would have been visible to anyone outside, and I'd imagine it would have made NORAD soil its collective pants.
Agreed, and further I think a lot of folks here are ignoring the probability that this massive object will hit more than just a single satellite. There are a lot of satellites packed into a rather constrained geosynchronous orbit. Further, even if it doesn't actually hit anything at all, it will certainly cause a number of nearly-missed satellites to have their orbits altered dramatically, perhaps irreversibly. So we'll likely have catastrophic communications failures, at the exact time we'll need to collaborate to determine our collective fate (and, hopefully, generate some mitigation strategies).
This would be quite true if it had turned out the story was correct. However, Apophis is not coming in at the right inclination to hit anything in the geosynchronous belt, and will be too far out to hit LEO satellites.
what makes us think that there would not be hundreds or thousands of impacts of equal or greater significance during that period?
The fact that we can put satellites into orbit without them getting smashed. If there were enough 1 ton asteroids flying around that Apophis was running into one every week, Earth would be under constant heavy bombardment.
So all these calculations assume Apophis has no other impacts, whatsoever, of any kind, of any size, in the seven years it's wandering around lining up with the Atlantic?
Yes. Any impact would change the game. What effect it would have depends on the nature of the collision. Hitting another asteroid could turn the impact into a certainty, or send it falling into the Sun.
However, the odds of it hitting anything are low. Anything it is likely to hit is going to have an effect too small for us to measure with our instruments.
If the pebble did move, the results would not be accurate because the pebble could not move in the direction in which most of the force would push (downward into the floor).
It won't be accurate anyway because one object is a rolling bowling ball and the other is an asteroid moving without friction.
You also claim that the tires cancel out the effect of the bullet. However, the satellite is not completely solid. It would be crushed on impact at some of the energy that would deflect the asteroid would be absorbed. Is this not similar to the tires?
No. Momentum is conserved. Crushing can reduce the elasticity of the collision, but there will be a momentum transfer. The truck can transmit the momentum into the ground. The asteroid cannot.
If they instead ignored the thing until it was certain to collide with the Earth, then they would have several years to find a relatively easy solution, and up until that point they would have twenty years of advances under their belt.
Given the track record on space propulsion advances over the last twenty years, I'm not going to put much faith in a game-changing engine appearing in the next twenty.
If they instead ignored the thing until it was certain to collide with the Earth, then they would have several years to find a relatively easy solution, and up until that point they would have twenty years of advances under their belt.
The "relatively easy solution" is to go push it as soon as possible. The sooner you push, the less pushing you have to do. With Apophis in particular, you want to get your pushing done before the 2029 flyby, as it will magnify the effect.
(of course, it turns out the kid was wrong, but the point stands)
First off... how does a 200,000,000,000 tonne asteroid (200,000,000,000,000 kg) travelling at any substantial inter-planetary speed be deflected by a satellite travelling at 3070 m/s and at most wieghing 10,000kg?
The same way sunlight can push a 270m rock around. Lest you think I am kidding, let's read what NASA has to say about that:
For example, the team found solar energy can cause between 20 and 740 km (12 and 460 miles) of position change over the next 22 years leading into the 2029 Earth encounter. But, only 7 years later, the effect on Apophis' predicted position can grow to between 520,000 and 30 million km (323,000 and 18.6 million miles; 0.0035-0.2 AU).
The effect of a small force integrated over years and a few billion miles produces a significant effect. In this case a relatively small deflection gets magnified by the 2029 flyby.
Of course thats presuming an elelastic collision as opposed to the satellite deflecting off the asteroid in a cloud of debris.
Its been a while since I've done any physics, and I'm just grabbing numbers from the article (which are likely to be wrong anyways).
It's obviously been a long time. Any impact will impart momentum to the asteroid. I don't know if you mean "elastic" or "inelastic", but it doesn't matter. Bits of satellite bouncing off the asteroid represent momentum transferred from the asteroid.
But to bring it all together in a car analogy for the fellow/.ers... How does a.22 bullet deflect an oncoming semitruck forcing into the little old lady on the sidewalk?
Bad analogy. The elasticity and friction of the tires cancel out any effect of the impact. These effects don't exist for an asteroid.
A better analogy would be a bowling ball on a lane with one pin. There's a tiny pebble halfway down the lane. How does a 1g pebble deflect a 12 pound bowling ball? By getting run over. If the lane was 100 miles long, a grain of salt would have a significant effect on where the ball ends up.
It's not cheap as soon as you are going to take the digging into account. A 1000 ft trench will easily costs you as much as the $1.30/ft for the cable.
They're not digging, they're putting the fiber on existing poles.
Third, large scale mergers like this almost never work. AOL-Time Warner. Daimer-Chrylser. Recent history has shown that failure happens more often than naught. And those mergers were approved by both companies involved.
Counterexample: ExxonMobil. Although the old Mobil employees still complain about the Exxon corporate culture.
The problem with that is that The Colour of Magic ends with a (fairly literal) cliffhanger, and The Light Fantastic picks it up and runs with it.
The Colour of Magic is not a bad book, it just doesn't contain much of a story. I suppose one could call it a travelogue about a naive tourist and his cowardly escort.
Got about 20 words into the first one and never found time to pick it back up again. Worth it?
The Colour of Magic isn't that great. It's basically a bunch of loosely-connected stories parodying fantasy tropes. The book has its moments, but it mostly serves to introduce the setting for the later and IMO better novels.
I don't think it was your intention to badmouth pit-bulls, but all the same [insert whole spiel about how Pit Bulls are wonderful pets here].
It wasn't. I spent some six months living with one that thought he was a lap dog. One of his favorite toys was a tractor tire. I was commenting on the capability, not the desire.
Nuclear reactors have a lot of waste heat. Might as well use that heat directly for desalination, rather than using the generated electricity.
Not that I've ever bothered to look at how modern desalination is accomplished.
Generally either reverse osmosis or flash distillation, it seems. There's an oil-fired power plant in Saudi Arabia that has its waste heat coupled into a flash desalination plant.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I threw them away because Leslie Nielsen made Dracula: Dead and Loving It, Spy Hard, and Mr. Magoo. Those were unforgivable crimes.
I think you'd have better luck if you lost some mass.
Relative size and existing markets are a factor in evaluating how much sense an acquisition makes. Apple makes stuff that uses computer chips, Amazon doesn't. Apple is much bigger than PASemi, Amazon isn't that big relative to Hitachi's drive division (as far as I can tell).
It is much more likely that Apple bought PA Semi for their brains and to get in-house chip design capabilities (the results of which we are unlikely to see for a couple of years)Duh. But that's not answering why they bought PASemi. That's an argument for why they bought a chip design firm. They didn't choose this one out of the phone book.
than Apple buying them because they want to use PWRficient chips to power iTMS.Apple is not going to throw the existing PWRficient chips out the window either. I say they look good for a media server. A media server that the iTMS would be the first customer for.
A large part of the problem in the past was getting the chips designed.
But they already sell servers.Which are general purpose intel-processor computers. Sure they've got redundancy and a small form factor, but from a computation standpoint it's just another PC.
This hypothetical machine would be adapted for high-volume delivery of streaming media or DRMed and/or watermarked static media. The PASemi chip has got enormous memory bandwidth, and some kind of "offload engine" for getting cryptography, RAID, and TCP out of the processor. At least, that's what I get from the Slashdot comment description of PASemi's products and Wikipedia. Their site hit its bandwidth limits for some mysterious reason so I can't look into what they do myself right now.
Wikipedia says current customers are using it for signal processing, image processing, and storage arrays. There was talk about building a new Amiga based on it, but that seems to have gone the way of most Amiga revivals.
I should of said "storage".Just to be in character, you mean "should have said".
I'm saying you don't seem to have a sense of the scales of the companies you're talking about. Apple is much bigger than PASemi. Amazon is smaller than Hitachi. Although Amazon is bigger than Hitachi's storage subsidiary, it is not by anywhere near as wide a margin as Apple and PASemi.
It's cheaper to buy the designer than be unable to ship product because your supplier can't keep up. Which is exactly the sort of problem Apple's had in the past.
And for selling servers and store to others.I said this looked good for scratching Apple's itch. I didn't say they wouldn't try selling it to others with the same itch.
You're making the analogy of Apple:PASemi::Amazon:Hitachi, and you're accusing me of having no sense of scale?
The iTMS is the largest music retailer in the US. It's also starting to push video in quantity. Perhaps they anticipate becoming the largest video retailer as well.
But mostly my bet is it's for servers and storage to start.Servers and storage that would likely be specialized for pushing a lot of data efficiently. Sounds great for the iTMS.
Sounds like the sort of thing you'd want if you were running some kind of high-volume online audio/video media store.
It was the size of a grapefruit or softball held out at arms length. We watched it travel through the sky and the most amazing thing I have ever seen in my life happened.
It bounced off the atmosphere TWICE and then fell below the horizon. There were no flame-trails that we associate with atmosphere entry.
I have often hoped that some expert would confirm or believe me, but I have been told that I "imagined it" and "that's impossible" buy the few I have told.I hate to say this, but your story doesn't work. For an asteroid to be at that height and have that visual size, it would have to be several miles across. A rock that big tearing through the upper atmosphere would have been visible to anyone outside, and I'd imagine it would have made NORAD soil its collective pants.
Memory is an inexact thing. So are human senses.
This would be quite true if it had turned out the story was correct. However, Apophis is not coming in at the right inclination to hit anything in the geosynchronous belt, and will be too far out to hit LEO satellites.
The fact that we can put satellites into orbit without them getting smashed. If there were enough 1 ton asteroids flying around that Apophis was running into one every week, Earth would be under constant heavy bombardment.
Yes. Any impact would change the game. What effect it would have depends on the nature of the collision. Hitting another asteroid could turn the impact into a certainty, or send it falling into the Sun.
However, the odds of it hitting anything are low. Anything it is likely to hit is going to have an effect too small for us to measure with our instruments.
I said it was a better analogy, not a good one.
If the pebble did move, the results would not be accurate because the pebble could not move in the direction in which most of the force would push (downward into the floor).It won't be accurate anyway because one object is a rolling bowling ball and the other is an asteroid moving without friction.
You also claim that the tires cancel out the effect of the bullet. However, the satellite is not completely solid. It would be crushed on impact at some of the energy that would deflect the asteroid would be absorbed. Is this not similar to the tires?No. Momentum is conserved. Crushing can reduce the elasticity of the collision, but there will be a momentum transfer. The truck can transmit the momentum into the ground. The asteroid cannot.
Given the track record on space propulsion advances over the last twenty years, I'm not going to put much faith in a game-changing engine appearing in the next twenty.
If they instead ignored the thing until it was certain to collide with the Earth, then they would have several years to find a relatively easy solution, and up until that point they would have twenty years of advances under their belt.The "relatively easy solution" is to go push it as soon as possible. The sooner you push, the less pushing you have to do. With Apophis in particular, you want to get your pushing done before the 2029 flyby, as it will magnify the effect.
(of course, it turns out the kid was wrong, but the point stands)
First off... how does a 200,000,000,000 tonne asteroid (200,000,000,000,000 kg) travelling at any substantial inter-planetary speed be deflected by a satellite travelling at 3070 m/s and at most wieghing 10,000kg?
The same way sunlight can push a 270m rock around. Lest you think I am kidding, let's read what NASA has to say about that:
For example, the team found solar energy can cause between 20 and 740 km (12 and 460 miles) of position change over the next 22 years leading into the 2029 Earth encounter. But, only 7 years later, the effect on Apophis' predicted position can grow to between 520,000 and 30 million km (323,000 and 18.6 million miles; 0.0035-0.2 AU).The effect of a small force integrated over years and a few billion miles produces a significant effect. In this case a relatively small deflection gets magnified by the 2029 flyby.
Of course thats presuming an elelastic collision as opposed to the satellite deflecting off the asteroid in a cloud of debris.
Its been a while since I've done any physics, and I'm just grabbing numbers from the article (which are likely to be wrong anyways).
It's obviously been a long time. Any impact will impart momentum to the asteroid. I don't know if you mean "elastic" or "inelastic", but it doesn't matter. Bits of satellite bouncing off the asteroid represent momentum transferred from the asteroid.
But to bring it all together in a car analogy for the fellow /.ers... How does a .22 bullet deflect an oncoming semitruck forcing into the little old lady on the sidewalk?
Bad analogy. The elasticity and friction of the tires cancel out any effect of the impact. These effects don't exist for an asteroid.
A better analogy would be a bowling ball on a lane with one pin. There's a tiny pebble halfway down the lane. How does a 1g pebble deflect a 12 pound bowling ball? By getting run over. If the lane was 100 miles long, a grain of salt would have a significant effect on where the ball ends up.
It still only has the ordinary symmetries of a plane. No supersymmetry in sight.
It doesn't even obey ordinary physical symmetries.
If you build one out of antimatter from plans viewed in a mirror and then try to fly it backwards through time, it just explodes on the tarmac.
Incompetent engineers if you ask me.
They're not digging, they're putting the fiber on existing poles.
Counterexample: ExxonMobil. Although the old Mobil employees still complain about the Exxon corporate culture.
The problem with that is that The Colour of Magic ends with a (fairly literal) cliffhanger, and The Light Fantastic picks it up and runs with it.
The Colour of Magic is not a bad book, it just doesn't contain much of a story. I suppose one could call it a travelogue about a naive tourist and his cowardly escort.
The Colour of Magic isn't that great. It's basically a bunch of loosely-connected stories parodying fantasy tropes. The book has its moments, but it mostly serves to introduce the setting for the later and IMO better novels.
Well played.
Trick question, Taco Bell does not serve Mexican food.
It wasn't. I spent some six months living with one that thought he was a lap dog. One of his favorite toys was a tractor tire. I was commenting on the capability, not the desire.
Also, your link is broken.
Not that I've ever bothered to look at how modern desalination is accomplished.
Generally either reverse osmosis or flash distillation, it seems. There's an oil-fired power plant in Saudi Arabia that has its waste heat coupled into a flash desalination plant.