This will clearly have influence on future solar power research. I know that there are research groups trying to use insights from plant photosynthesis for building solar cells, and having another natural system that is not plant (or bacterium) based will inspire a lot of new work.
One of the things that is most interesting is the nano-structures that are used to make light gathering more efficient. Understanding these structures could
improve the efficiency of existing solar power collectors. With current genetic techniques it might even be possible to grow these structures, and perhaps even used grown material in real world applications.
Another point is that the wasp's collection structures are yellow, not green like plant chlorophyll. The green color results from chlorophyll not using green light, but absorbing more blue end light. If the wasps look yellow, that might mean that they are efficient in a different part of the visible light spectrum.
This follows the classic path of corporate criminal behavior.
1. Company makes product, sells it and makes profit. In this case there is a main contractor and a sub-contractor.
2. Corporate greed leads to faulty product. In this case innocent people die.
3. Bad result eventually is discovered. In this case by sub-contractor.
4. A civil court case makes the problem public.
5. Parties settle out of court for undisclosed amount. Given Netezza's purchase for $1.7Bn, IISI walked away with $250 million or more.
6. No legal blame is assigned anyone. No criminal charges are brought.
7. There is no public disclosure that is meaningful in a court of law, only allegations.
8. No one in the company suffers any negative career, financial, or legal repercussions. Most end up being rewarded.
9. None of the harmed parties or their survivors has any recourse or get any compensation.
10. Harm from bad product continues.
This is just normal business practice, and the costs are baked into the economic model before anything starts. Lawyers get rich, along with corporate executives no matter how much damage they do. The negative economic cost is born by the injured parties and investors, not management. There is no incentive to change corporate behavior, and overall insiders do better when greed wins no matter what the result.
As long as this is normal, do you expect anything to change?
This is at least the third time that Intel has said that it is going to change the way computing is done.
The first time was the i432 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432 Anyone remember that hype? Got to love the first line of the Wikipedia article "The Intel iAPX 432 was a commercially unsuccessful 32-bit microprocessor architecture, introduced in 1981."
The second time was the Itanium (aka Itanic) that was going to bring VLIW to the masses. Check out some of the juicy parts of the timeline also over on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium#Timeline
1997 June: IDC predicts IA-64 systems sales will reach $38bn/yr by 2001
1998 June: IDC predicts IA-64 systems sales will reach $30bn/yr by 2001
1999 October: the term Itanic is first used in The Register
2000 June: IDC predicts Itanium systems sales will reach $25bn/yr by 2003
2001 June: IDC predicts Itanium systems sales will reach $15bn/yr by 2004
2001 October: IDC predicts Itanium systems sales will reach $12bn/yr by the end of 2004
2002 IDC predicts Itanium systems sales will reach $5bn/yr by end 2004
2003 IDC predicts Itanium systems sales will reach $9bn/yr by end 2007
2003 April: AMD releases Opteron, the first processor with x86-64 extensions
2004 June: Intel releases its first processor with x86-64 extensions, a Xeon processor codenamed "Nocona"
2004 December: Itanium system sales for 2004 reach $1.4bn
2005 February: IBM server design drops Itanium support
2005 September: Dell exits the Itanium business
2005 October: Itanium server sales reach $619M/quarter in the third quarter.
2006 February: IDC predicts Itanium systems sales will reach $6.6bn/yr by 2009
2007 November: Intel renames the family from Itanium 2 back to Itanium.
2009 December: Red Hat announces that it is dropping support for Itanium in the next release of its enterprise OS
2010 April: Microsoft announces phase-out of support for Itanium.
I worked in the film industry with a software engineer from China who got his degree in Canada and got a job in LA. He had been there two years or so and he saw another software engineer from India being laid off 6 months short of getting his green card. It was done so that the studio wouldn't "look bad" for hiring people and having them establish residency. I also think they knew he would quit because it was such a bad place to work.
So the Chinese engineer went back to Canada because he knew if he didn't they would pull the same trick on him, and he would have to go back home, which he didn't want to do. He did get some really boring job in Canada, but it really sent him into a mental hole. Six months later he jumped out of a window and killed himself.
As far as I am concerned, the HR department and the management might as well have been standing there and opening the window so he could jump. They acted as if everyone is a piece of toilette paper, and once you are used they flush you down the shit hole. Not everyone can take it, and the results can be fatal.
This was about 10 years ago, and I think it is worse now. If corporate American thought they could get away with killing employees and selling there body parts they would do just that. Until corporations are held responsible they will continue to destroy workers, either directly like BP or the Massey coal mine disaster in West Virginia, or indirectly by cutting health care, or by working people into impossible corners like my friend.
Oooh, I must have hit a nerve. First, read what I said:
the ARM cpu is a RISC design that provides better performance due to a more efficient architecture with fewer gates AT LOW POWER CONSUMPTION.
The key word here is efficient. Specifically I am talking about operations per watt. If some combination of heat dissipation and cost to run the system are limiting factors, then this kind of efficiency is important.
I am not the only one who thinks this way. IBM has also made a system that chose lower power CPUs to build a supercomputer: the Blue Gene/L. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Gene#Major_features To quote the article "Trading the speed of processors for lower power consumption." This machine had two Power PC cores per node, which each being a 700 MHz PPC 440, not exactly a screaming demon of a CPU. The upgrade, the Blue Gene/P has four 850 MHz PPC processors per node. Still not blindingly fast. The next version, the Q model, out sometime soon, will continue to use even more relative low speed processors, "1.6 million processor cores" according to the article.
I can't immediately find the details online, but I think that the reason that there were so many AMD based supercomputers at one point was that the AMD CPUs, even though they were slower then the competing INTEL units, were more efficient in flops per watt.
So I will restate what I said in the original post in more detail. I think that people will start using ARM processors in server rooms in the near term. This is a no brainer. Also, someone will extend the ARM to handle 64 bit data paths, including 64 bit floating point. When that happens, ARM chips will be used to make supercomputers. Because they are IP can can be customized at the silicon level, in supercomputing multiple CPUs will be on a chip that includes some of the inter-processor communications hardware. It will be very hard for the i86 architecture to compete because it is a CISC, not a RISC.
I went and asked Mr. Google how this worked, and I couldn't find any answers. The best clue I got was that these devices use quantum tunneling, but this still does not explain how they exhibit diode behavior. Even the font of all online knowledge, Wikipedia, doesn't seem to know. Someone please post about this.
One thing I did see is that this kind of diode can operate at 100's of THz frequencies, and that this enables nantennas. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nantenna If these kind of MIM diodes can be made cheaply then a new cost effective class of solar power device may become feasible. So it could be a really big deal.
But on a pay-per-text plan, the 160-character messages typically cost 20 cents outgoing and 10 cents incoming. That's a markup of as much as 6,500%. OMG!
...
Even if customers sign up for an unlimited texting plan for, say, $10 a month, carriers are still cashing in considering that their overhead is basically $0. That's a lot to pay for a few LOLs.
There is a certain amount of irony in all of this. When RISC was invented it was suppose to displace CISC because of better performance due to a more efficient architecture that used fewer gates. INTEL, AMD and other i86 vendors were able to fight back by using RISC internally in their micro-architectures. This succeeded because of the standardization and network effect based around the generic i86 platform. For example, the MIPS CPU and Sun's SPARC never succeeded on the desk top once the price performance of the i86 got good enough.
So now INTEL and the i86 are facing intrusion from the bottom, because the ARM cpu is a RISC design that provides better performance due to a more efficient architecture with fewer gates AT LOW POWER CONSUMPTION. Finally there is a situation where the superior characteristics of RISC will win because a CISC cpu cannot compete. Power usage is the Achilles heal of the CISC design.
The only thing that the ARM lacks to become dominant in the sever room, and even in supercomputing is a 64 bit variant. With multi-cores and 64 bits power usage will be the deciding factor. Any guesses when this will happen?
Note that there are no USA companies, or technologies mentioned anywhere. It's already too late: the USA has lost it's technical edge, and it won't be coming back any time soon. Japan, Europeans, China and India are investing in basic technology. In the US the way to make money is high frequency trading and patent lawsuits. Who needs to invest in anything with a long rate of return, even if that is where future profits will come from?
In its “Counterexamples to Relativity” website, Conservapedia says, “The theory of relativity is a mathematical system that allows no exceptions.
It is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world.”
The forces of stupidity have a lot of practical power, and they are using (abusing) it. The net result will reduce the USA to a third world country. Most of the people reading this post will live to see it happen. Well, the USA had a good thing going for a while, at leas from 1945 to 2000 or so.
Hmm. Well, generally when using computers 'or' means logical or, so the compound statement is true if either of the clauses is true. And I did say "lower age or lower intelligence". You know, like when you do an advanced search on Google.
Now 'age' can refer to chronological age or mental development age. Here on Slashdot, as far as I have observed, the mental development age is around 12. I have no idea what the chronological age average is, but I assume that it skews to a younger demographic. Certainly under 40 and most likely under 30. But you can't tell that just by reading what people type.
Take me, for example. I have been programming since 1968, and I have been paid to do it full time since 1974. I have programmed every thing from what used to be called minicomputers (with teletypes and paper tape) and main frames (with punched cards) to what used to be called supercomputers (Cray-1/TM-2 from Thinking Machines). I predate the internet, and I actually remember hearing about the IMP going on line at UCLA for one of the first few nodes on what was then know as ARPA-NET. It is extremely likely that I have been programming longer the you have been alive. So when I hear you say that I must be a newbie because of my UID, it is just another one of those judgment problems that seem to be so prevalent here on Slashdot.
Now take a look at my SIG and if you think about what you wrote you might understand why I chose it.
You are a socialist. Nobody has the "right" to make money. You have the opportunity to start a business and succeed or fail, but engaging in legitimate business is the fundamental right that you have. To assert anything else means that you expect a system that automatically generates profits for you. That would be socialism for business.
The "right to make money"/socialism for business is at the center of the corrupt economic regime that dominates Wall St. It is standard practice to commit fraud because being profitable trumps the rule of law. The latest "robosigning" scandal is a classic example of how things really work. If you signed a fraudulent affidavit as part of a real estate transaction then you would go to jail. When Bank of America does it to save money then it is a "paperwork error". There is one law for big corporate American and another law for individuals. That means there is in effect no rule of law at all. And it goes back to people like you who think that making profit is a right. You are pro-corruption. It is this attitude and it's real world effect that are destroying the US and world economy.
Technology is unimportant, only revenue counts. Even here at Geek Central, there are no discussions about which of the competing technologies (JVM/Dalek, Harmony/OpenJDK) is better or more future oriented. All the tech talk is about who can prevail or how Google can get out from under Oracle, or how Oracle can shut down Google using license agreements and patents.
The theory is that we have this capitalistic system so that the profit motive drives innovation which makes thing better for society. Life get better for everyone
in the long run.
The practice is crap like this. Decisions are based on lawsuits and business strategies, not on innovation.
Resources are allocated for defensive purposes or to pay lawyers or make "campaign contributions" (aka bribes).
There is no level playing field, there is no open competition, unless you confuse competition with entrenched monopolies
fighting over which of them will be the last monopoly standing.
The goal of all this is so that Ellison can build a bigger more automated yacht,
or the Google Twins can move up a notch in the world's richest asshole competition.
All the innovation that we are exploiting now happened decades ago. We are coasting, and we will shortly grind to a halt because
instead of funding actual innovation the institutions and individuals are wasting their resources on crap like this.
But what happens next? To innovate takes time and money, so how do we get back up to speed? It's not going to be pretty.
at least we have "Spaceships" that look like they were on the covers of 1930's science fiction magazines. Now if they would just have stewardesses dressed in outfits like the old 1930's Flash Gorden moves they we could at least pretend that we were living in the future.
Actually this is a brilliant move on IBM's part. They can train high school students and then employ them at minimum wage here in the US. The technically trained high school students can do some of the work that engineers are hired for in India and China and cost even less! Plus there will be lower coordination costs and managers won't have to get up at ridiculous hours for conference calls, and IBM can pretend that they are a US company that is supporting the US economy. It's a win-win situation for the upper management at IBM. Of course its a loose-loose for employees, stockholders and customers, but isn't American business all about making the CEO/board of director class filthy rich at the expense of everyone else?
Whether or not society should support an "efficient market" system to this extent is an question one is not supposed to ask.
The algorithm didn't fail, Wall Street as an institution has failed. The simplistic view of why capitalism works is that individuals
and institutions making informed decisions results in good allocation of resources. The profitable thrive and the unprofitable die, and
on the whole society benefits.
None of the preconditions for capitalism exist in the current setup. The big entrenched special interests change the nature of the system so that they take profit and are shielded from risk. The technical term for this is "moral hazard". The TARP bailout is the perfect example of this. All the big Wall St. firms made huge amounts of money by playing insider games with mortgage back securities (MBS)
and collateralized debt obligations (CDO), and then when their gambling resulted in failure, the were bailed out to the tune of
ONE HALF TRILLION DOLLARS, and the government is left with the bad assets. And the people who caused the mess are still in charge and got to keep all the money they stole during the bubble, as well as the money they got from the Treasury. Does the phrase
"moral hazard" seem sufficient to describe this behavior, or would "rape, pillage and burn" seem more appropriate?
Programmed high frequency trading (along with hedge funds) are another mechanism for taking wealth from the system that breaks the
capitalistic model. The claim is the it "increases fluidity" and therefore make the market "more efficient". The plain English translation of "more efficient" is theft, and "increases fluidity" is like saying "magic pixie dust".
The real world value of a company cannot change at millisecond resolution. The only things of economic value that change that fast are electronic abstractions of money. Therefore, high frequency trading is completely disconnected from real world value, so no
capitalism is involved. The system is built so that insiders can become personally wealthy because they are the insiders, not because they
do an efficient (good) job of allocating resources and benefiting society.
This is identical to the MBS/CDO monstrosity, in that there is no clear real world description of how value is created. For MBS/CDOs there
was a lot of math that no one making decisions really understood, but somehow mortgages from buyers who were previously unqualified could become AAA securities. For flash trading there is "fluidity" and algorithms that traders don't understand. It is the same kind of scam.
As long as the stock market allows high frequency trading it will be intrinsically unstable, because this kind of trading is about manipulating the abstract system, not about real world issues. No set of rules will change things, because computationally based trading is about taking advantage of rules to get advantage via manipulation.
The only kind of rule changes that will help are things like increasing the cost of individual trades or keeping electronic traders from placing trades that they cannot or do not intend to make. (Trading algorithm determine price points by placing lots of orders and seeing which ones get responses.) Or electronic traders must be forced to honor trades or hold assets that they are trading, so they are exposed to the market risks of the underlying securities. Right now there is no cost for these traders for any manipulative practices, which
effectively decouples risk from reward. All these kinds proposals move this kind of trading back towards actual capitalism.
It will be very hard to get meaningful changes to high frequency trading because the powerful and personally corrupt Wall St. insiders don't want a capitalistic system, they want their guaranteed profits. It is much closer to a Mafia style protection racket then a system that enables real business activity.
The campaign’s designated human, Eric Hensal, will help the corporation conform to antiquated “human only” procedures and sign the necessary voter registration and candidacy paperwork. Hensal is excited by this new opportunity. “We want to get in on the ground floor of the democracy market before the whole store is bought by China.”
Murray Hill Inc. plans on filing to run in the Republican primary in Maryland’s 8th Congressional District. Campaign Manager William
Klein promises an aggressive, historic campaign that “puts people second” or even third.
“The business of America is business, as we all know,” Klein says. “But now, it’s the business of democracy too.” Klein plans to use
automated robo-calls, “Astroturf” lobbying and computer-generated avatars to get out the vote.
Considering how current congress members, such as Boehner,
are already primarily representing corporate America, letting corporations
be directly in congress will clearly save time and money. If we can just outsource the rest of the Government to a third world country then the dream of Regan Republicans will be fulfilled. The entire economy and running of the US will be done for the lowest price possible by private enterprise. Of course no US citizens except politicians, lobbyists, and corporate lawyers will have jobs, but that is a small price to pay for the ultimate Republican wet dream.
The Rubidium 85 are being illegally restrained against their will, and the laws of nature!!! We must rise up and free our atomic comrades!!! Atom traps are cruel and unusual punishment!!!
This is similar to the recent IRS action against USB, the big Swiss based bank. USB was actively involved in smuggling assets out of the US, including telling people how to get diamonds and then putting them in toothpaste tubes to get around customs.
http://gswlaw.com/irsblog/2009/08/31/ubs-whistle-blower-gets-40-month-sentence/
These tax cheats are scum sucking pigs. The high end ones have huge amounts of money and they still cheat. Can you afford to buy diamonds to smuggle out of the country? Remember, people with six figure incomes pay less then the rest of us because they get taxed at capital gains rates, which can be as low as 15%. Real working people pay around %30 or more.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_gains_tax#United_States
When these greedheads duck out on taxes, the rest of us have to pay a lot more. This is on top of all the custom tax breaks that big corrupt corporate players have put in the law by buying legislation. The ballooning deficit in the US is due to tax cuts for the ultra rich, not because taxes are too high for the remaining 99% of the population.
The right wingers who say otherwise are lying weasels, and if you believe them then you are weak minded and like having your pocket picked by the rich.
Almost overnight the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was in full flower, and Captain Black was enraptured to discover himself spearheading it. He had really hit on something. All the enlisted men and officers on combat duty had to sign a loyalty oath to get their map cases from the intelligence tent, a second loyalty oath to receive their flak suits and parachutes from the parachute tent, a third loyalty oath for Lieutenant Balkington, the motor vehicle officer, to be allowed to ride from the squadron to the airfield in one of the trucks. Every time they turned around there was another loyalty oath to be signed. They signed a loyalty oath to get their pay from the finance officer, to obtain their PX supplies, to have their hair cut by the Italian barbers. To Captain Black, every officer who supported his Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was a competitor, and he planned and plotted twenty-four hours a day to keep one step ahead. He would stand second to none in his devotion to country. When other officers had followed his urging and introduced loyalty oaths of their own, he went them one better by making every son of a bitch who came to his intelligence tent sign two loyalty oaths, then three, then four; then he introduced the pledge of allegiance, and after that “The Star-Spangled Banner,” one chorus, two choruses, three choruses, four choruses. Each time Captain Black forged ahead of his competitors, he swung upon them scornfully for their failure to follow his example. Each time they followed his example, he retreated with concern and racked his brain for some new stratagem that would enable him to turn upon them scornfully again.
Without realizing how it had come about, the combat men in the squadron discovered themselves dominated by the administrators appointed to serve them. They were bullied, insulted, harassed and shoved about all day long by one after the other. When they voiced objection, Captain Black replied that people who were loyal would not mind signing all the loyalty oaths they had to. To anyone who questioned the effectiveness of the loyalty oaths, he replied that people who really did owe allegiance to their country would be proud to pledge it as often as he forced them to. And to anyone who questioned the morality, he replied that “The Star-Spangled Banner” was the greatest piece of music ever composed. The more loyalty oaths a person signed, the more loyal he was; to Captain Black it was as simple as that, and he had Corporal Kolodny sign hundreds with his name each day so that he could always prove he was more loyal than anyone else.
"Intelligent Integration Systems developed the technology behind Spatial, which initially ran on an earlier Netezza's data-warehousing platform, the Netezza Performance Server. "
Then Netezza sold the product on their new server TwinFin. "Intelligent Integration Systems officials say they didn't know about plans for TwinFin when they signed the contract with Netezza, and that the company never agreed to develop software for future platforms. "
Netezza signed a contract without bothering to check with IISi about porting the code.
The case file includes emails among Netezza officials, in which they discuss how to handle the situation, in light of the fact that Intelligent Integration Systems wouldn't give up its source code while the customer is in a hurry. The emails imply that Netezza promised a product to the CIA before anyone had developed it. They also reference "floating point" difficulty, a mathematical computing issue that can lead to accuracy problems. (A Nov. 12 email from a Netezza account manager refers to "errors in the spatial toolkit hack." "Hacking" usually means gaining unauthorized access to a computer, a key point in Intelligent Integration Systems' countersuit.)
"Someone should have told me this product was not ready," Netezza Federal Account Manager Joe Wiltshire wrote in an email to Shepherd, which is included among the court documents. "We are negatively exposed to one of our most important customers now. In his eyes, we concealed info to close the deal, or we are not 'in the know.' Either one is not good. Please get this product ready immediately so we can get out of this predicament."
So Netezza sold the hacked version to the CIA, which accepted it.
An email exchange from Oct. 23, also in the court record, indicates that the customer signed off on the deal, after all. "They are satisfied," Wiltshire wrote in an email to Netezza executives, adding that the customer "believes that the minor discrepancy in metrics between the 10100 and the TwinFin 12 is due to the TF doing a better job."
Nettezza sued IISi for breach of contract for not porting the code, which they just lost. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/24/cia_netezza/ "That case was dismissed last month, with the judge finding that contrary to Netezza's repeated claims, IISi was under no obligation to carry out the work."
Now ISSi is suing Nettezza.
Discovery also revealed that Shepherd had called on staff to develop "our own version of the spatial toolkit", which was introduced in January this year as "Netezza Spatial", which is available on the open market.
Now IISi claims both the hack and Netezza's own software are illegally based on reverse engineering and misappropriation of its trade secrets, and is pursuing an injunction that if granted would block their use by anyone. It's unclear which, if either, is currently in use at the CIA. A hearing on the injunction application is scheduled next week.
So it looks like they stole both the original code and marketed it, and they stole the trade secrets in the code and sold them as well. It looks like a slam dunk that they will loose. So what part of illegal don't you understand?
This is a fantastic technical achievement. However, it has no meaningful direct link to ANY deployable technology. It is a measurement technique, and although the article does not say so, I'm sure it requires a temperature of somewhere below 1K, maybe below.001K. That is the only way they could be getting signals of these phenomena without getting swamped by thermal noise. All the stuff about single atom storage is boilerplate marketing hype. I assumes that they have a hot key to paste in how a new technology can be used for memory storage, or solar cells, or green technology or...
Slashdot Mirror
Chemical-X!!! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Powerpuff_Girls#Overview
One of the things that is most interesting is the nano-structures that are used to make light gathering more efficient. Understanding these structures could improve the efficiency of existing solar power collectors. With current genetic techniques it might even be possible to grow these structures, and perhaps even used grown material in real world applications.
Another point is that the wasp's collection structures are yellow, not green like plant chlorophyll. The green color results from chlorophyll not using green light, but absorbing more blue end light. If the wasps look yellow, that might mean that they are efficient in a different part of the visible light spectrum.
1. Company makes product, sells it and makes profit. In this case there is a main contractor and a sub-contractor.
2. Corporate greed leads to faulty product. In this case innocent people die.
3. Bad result eventually is discovered. In this case by sub-contractor.
4. A civil court case makes the problem public.
5. Parties settle out of court for undisclosed amount. Given Netezza's purchase for $1.7Bn, IISI walked away with $250 million or more.
6. No legal blame is assigned anyone. No criminal charges are brought.
7. There is no public disclosure that is meaningful in a court of law, only allegations.
8. No one in the company suffers any negative career, financial, or legal repercussions. Most end up being rewarded.
9. None of the harmed parties or their survivors has any recourse or get any compensation.
10. Harm from bad product continues.
This is just normal business practice, and the costs are baked into the economic model before anything starts. Lawyers get rich, along with corporate executives no matter how much damage they do. The negative economic cost is born by the injured parties and investors, not management. There is no incentive to change corporate behavior, and overall insiders do better when greed wins no matter what the result.
As long as this is normal, do you expect anything to change?
The first time was the i432 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432 Anyone remember that hype? Got to love the first line of the Wikipedia article "The Intel iAPX 432 was a commercially unsuccessful 32-bit microprocessor architecture, introduced in 1981."
The second time was the Itanium (aka Itanic) that was going to bring VLIW to the masses. Check out some of the juicy parts of the timeline also over on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium#Timeline
1997 June: IDC predicts IA-64 systems sales will reach $38bn/yr by 2001
1998 June: IDC predicts IA-64 systems sales will reach $30bn/yr by 2001
1999 October: the term Itanic is first used in The Register
2000 June: IDC predicts Itanium systems sales will reach $25bn/yr by 2003
2001 June: IDC predicts Itanium systems sales will reach $15bn/yr by 2004
2001 October: IDC predicts Itanium systems sales will reach $12bn/yr by the end of 2004
2002 IDC predicts Itanium systems sales will reach $5bn/yr by end 2004
2003 IDC predicts Itanium systems sales will reach $9bn/yr by end 2007
2003 April: AMD releases Opteron, the first processor with x86-64 extensions
2004 June: Intel releases its first processor with x86-64 extensions, a Xeon processor codenamed "Nocona"
2004 December: Itanium system sales for 2004 reach $1.4bn
2005 February: IBM server design drops Itanium support
2005 September: Dell exits the Itanium business
2005 October: Itanium server sales reach $619M/quarter in the third quarter.
2006 February: IDC predicts Itanium systems sales will reach $6.6bn/yr by 2009
2007 November: Intel renames the family from Itanium 2 back to Itanium.
2009 December: Red Hat announces that it is dropping support for Itanium in the next release of its enterprise OS
2010 April: Microsoft announces phase-out of support for Itanium.
So how do you think it will go this time?
So the Chinese engineer went back to Canada because he knew if he didn't they would pull the same trick on him, and he would have to go back home, which he didn't want to do. He did get some really boring job in Canada, but it really sent him into a mental hole. Six months later he jumped out of a window and killed himself.
As far as I am concerned, the HR department and the management might as well have been standing there and opening the window so he could jump. They acted as if everyone is a piece of toilette paper, and once you are used they flush you down the shit hole. Not everyone can take it, and the results can be fatal.
This was about 10 years ago, and I think it is worse now. If corporate American thought they could get away with killing employees and selling there body parts they would do just that. Until corporations are held responsible they will continue to destroy workers, either directly like BP or the Massey coal mine disaster in West Virginia, or indirectly by cutting health care, or by working people into impossible corners like my friend.
The key word here is efficient. Specifically I am talking about operations per watt. If some combination of heat dissipation and cost to run the system are limiting factors, then this kind of efficiency is important.
I am not the only one who thinks this way. IBM has also made a system that chose lower power CPUs to build a supercomputer: the Blue Gene/L. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Gene#Major_features To quote the article "Trading the speed of processors for lower power consumption." This machine had two Power PC cores per node, which each being a 700 MHz PPC 440, not exactly a screaming demon of a CPU. The upgrade, the Blue Gene/P has four 850 MHz PPC processors per node. Still not blindingly fast. The next version, the Q model, out sometime soon, will continue to use even more relative low speed processors, "1.6 million processor cores" according to the article.
I can't immediately find the details online, but I think that the reason that there were so many AMD based supercomputers at one point was that the AMD CPUs, even though they were slower then the competing INTEL units, were more efficient in flops per watt.
So I will restate what I said in the original post in more detail. I think that people will start using ARM processors in server rooms in the near term. This is a no brainer. Also, someone will extend the ARM to handle 64 bit data paths, including 64 bit floating point. When that happens, ARM chips will be used to make supercomputers. Because they are IP can can be customized at the silicon level, in supercomputing multiple CPUs will be on a chip that includes some of the inter-processor communications hardware. It will be very hard for the i86 architecture to compete because it is a CISC, not a RISC.
I hope this clears it up for you.
One thing I did see is that this kind of diode can operate at 100's of THz frequencies, and that this enables nantennas. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nantenna If these kind of MIM diodes can be made cheaply then a new cost effective class of solar power device may become feasible. So it could be a really big deal.
So now INTEL and the i86 are facing intrusion from the bottom, because the ARM cpu is a RISC design that provides better performance due to a more efficient architecture with fewer gates AT LOW POWER CONSUMPTION. Finally there is a situation where the superior characteristics of RISC will win because a CISC cpu cannot compete. Power usage is the Achilles heal of the CISC design.
The only thing that the ARM lacks to become dominant in the sever room, and even in supercomputing is a 64 bit variant. With multi-cores and 64 bits power usage will be the deciding factor. Any guesses when this will happen?
Just look at the mental state of the people who plan to "take back their country". The Tea Party morons deny global warming. http://www.newser.com/story/103446/among-tea-party-widespread-global-warming-doubt.html
The Conservapedia thinks that Relativity is a liberal plot: http://newsdesk.org/2010/08/conservapedia-calls-theory-of-relativity-a-liberal-conspiracy/
The Texas Board of Education (take that title with a grain of salt) is putting Christian thought into text books, including trying to teach creationism http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/09/24/texas-state-board-of-education-confirms-irony-is-dead/
The forces of stupidity have a lot of practical power, and they are using (abusing) it. The net result will reduce the USA to a third world country. Most of the people reading this post will live to see it happen. Well, the USA had a good thing going for a while, at leas from 1945 to 2000 or so.
Now 'age' can refer to chronological age or mental development age. Here on Slashdot, as far as I have observed, the mental development age is around 12. I have no idea what the chronological age average is, but I assume that it skews to a younger demographic. Certainly under 40 and most likely under 30. But you can't tell that just by reading what people type.
Take me, for example. I have been programming since 1968, and I have been paid to do it full time since 1974. I have programmed every thing from what used to be called minicomputers (with teletypes and paper tape) and main frames (with punched cards) to what used to be called supercomputers (Cray-1/TM-2 from Thinking Machines). I predate the internet, and I actually remember hearing about the IMP going on line at UCLA for one of the first few nodes on what was then know as ARPA-NET. It is extremely likely that I have been programming longer the you have been alive. So when I hear you say that I must be a newbie because of my UID, it is just another one of those judgment problems that seem to be so prevalent here on Slashdot.
Now take a look at my SIG and if you think about what you wrote you might understand why I chose it.
This post is proof that there is no lower age or lower intelligence limit on who posts on Slashdot.
The "right to make money"/socialism for business is at the center of the corrupt economic regime that dominates Wall St. It is standard practice to commit fraud because being profitable trumps the rule of law. The latest "robosigning" scandal is a classic example of how things really work. If you signed a fraudulent affidavit as part of a real estate transaction then you would go to jail. When Bank of America does it to save money then it is a "paperwork error". There is one law for big corporate American and another law for individuals. That means there is in effect no rule of law at all. And it goes back to people like you who think that making profit is a right. You are pro-corruption. It is this attitude and it's real world effect that are destroying the US and world economy.
The theory is that we have this capitalistic system so that the profit motive drives innovation which makes thing better for society. Life get better for everyone in the long run.
The practice is crap like this. Decisions are based on lawsuits and business strategies, not on innovation. Resources are allocated for defensive purposes or to pay lawyers or make "campaign contributions" (aka bribes). There is no level playing field, there is no open competition, unless you confuse competition with entrenched monopolies fighting over which of them will be the last monopoly standing.
The goal of all this is so that Ellison can build a bigger more automated yacht, or the Google Twins can move up a notch in the world's richest asshole competition.
All the innovation that we are exploiting now happened decades ago. We are coasting, and we will shortly grind to a halt because instead of funding actual innovation the institutions and individuals are wasting their resources on crap like this. But what happens next? To innovate takes time and money, so how do we get back up to speed? It's not going to be pretty.
at least we have "Spaceships" that look like they were on the covers of 1930's science fiction magazines. Now if they would just have stewardesses dressed in outfits like the old 1930's Flash Gorden moves they we could at least pretend that we were living in the future.
Actually this is a brilliant move on IBM's part. They can train high school students and then employ them at minimum wage here in the US. The technically trained high school students can do some of the work that engineers are hired for in India and China and cost even less! Plus there will be lower coordination costs and managers won't have to get up at ridiculous hours for conference calls, and IBM can pretend that they are a US company that is supporting the US economy. It's a win-win situation for the upper management at IBM. Of course its a loose-loose for employees, stockholders and customers, but isn't American business all about making the CEO/board of director class filthy rich at the expense of everyone else?
The algorithm didn't fail, Wall Street as an institution has failed. The simplistic view of why capitalism works is that individuals and institutions making informed decisions results in good allocation of resources. The profitable thrive and the unprofitable die, and on the whole society benefits.
None of the preconditions for capitalism exist in the current setup. The big entrenched special interests change the nature of the system so that they take profit and are shielded from risk. The technical term for this is "moral hazard". The TARP bailout is the perfect example of this. All the big Wall St. firms made huge amounts of money by playing insider games with mortgage back securities (MBS) and collateralized debt obligations (CDO), and then when their gambling resulted in failure, the were bailed out to the tune of ONE HALF TRILLION DOLLARS, and the government is left with the bad assets. And the people who caused the mess are still in charge and got to keep all the money they stole during the bubble, as well as the money they got from the Treasury. Does the phrase "moral hazard" seem sufficient to describe this behavior, or would "rape, pillage and burn" seem more appropriate?
Programmed high frequency trading (along with hedge funds) are another mechanism for taking wealth from the system that breaks the capitalistic model. The claim is the it "increases fluidity" and therefore make the market "more efficient". The plain English translation of "more efficient" is theft, and "increases fluidity" is like saying "magic pixie dust".
The real world value of a company cannot change at millisecond resolution. The only things of economic value that change that fast are electronic abstractions of money. Therefore, high frequency trading is completely disconnected from real world value, so no capitalism is involved. The system is built so that insiders can become personally wealthy because they are the insiders, not because they do an efficient (good) job of allocating resources and benefiting society.
This is identical to the MBS/CDO monstrosity, in that there is no clear real world description of how value is created. For MBS/CDOs there was a lot of math that no one making decisions really understood, but somehow mortgages from buyers who were previously unqualified could become AAA securities. For flash trading there is "fluidity" and algorithms that traders don't understand. It is the same kind of scam.
As long as the stock market allows high frequency trading it will be intrinsically unstable, because this kind of trading is about manipulating the abstract system, not about real world issues. No set of rules will change things, because computationally based trading is about taking advantage of rules to get advantage via manipulation.
The only kind of rule changes that will help are things like increasing the cost of individual trades or keeping electronic traders from placing trades that they cannot or do not intend to make. (Trading algorithm determine price points by placing lots of orders and seeing which ones get responses.) Or electronic traders must be forced to honor trades or hold assets that they are trading, so they are exposed to the market risks of the underlying securities. Right now there is no cost for these traders for any manipulative practices, which effectively decouples risk from reward. All these kinds proposals move this kind of trading back towards actual capitalism.
It will be very hard to get meaningful changes to high frequency trading because the powerful and personally corrupt Wall St. insiders don't want a capitalistic system, they want their guaranteed profits. It is much closer to a Mafia style protection racket then a system that enables real business activity.
30 years in prison; fine of $1,000,000 or twice the gross gain or loss; and restitution
20 years in prison; fine of $500,000 or twice the amount laundered; and restitution
15 years in prison; fine of $250,000 or twice the gross gain or loss; and restitution
10 years in prison; fine of $250,000 or twice the gross gain or loss; and restitution
The charges are bank fraud, wire fraud, false use of passports and false use of identification.
Plus, check out the FBI Cyber branch logo, obviously inspired by "The Matrix": http://newyork.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel10/images/nyfo093010_5.jpg
Considering how current congress members, such as Boehner, are already primarily representing corporate America, letting corporations be directly in congress will clearly save time and money. If we can just outsource the rest of the Government to a third world country then the dream of Regan Republicans will be fulfilled. The entire economy and running of the US will be done for the lowest price possible by private enterprise. Of course no US citizens except politicians, lobbyists, and corporate lawyers will have jobs, but that is a small price to pay for the ultimate Republican wet dream.
The Rubidium 85 are being illegally restrained against their will, and the laws of nature!!! We must rise up and free our atomic comrades!!! Atom traps are cruel and unusual punishment!!!
This is similar to the recent IRS action against USB, the big Swiss based bank. USB was actively involved in smuggling assets out of the US, including telling people how to get diamonds and then putting them in toothpaste tubes to get around customs. http://gswlaw.com/irsblog/2009/08/31/ubs-whistle-blower-gets-40-month-sentence/
These tax cheats are scum sucking pigs. The high end ones have huge amounts of money and they still cheat. Can you afford to buy diamonds to smuggle out of the country? Remember, people with six figure incomes pay less then the rest of us because they get taxed at capital gains rates, which can be as low as 15%. Real working people pay around %30 or more. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_gains_tax#United_States
When these greedheads duck out on taxes, the rest of us have to pay a lot more. This is on top of all the custom tax breaks that big corrupt corporate players have put in the law by buying legislation. The ballooning deficit in the US is due to tax cuts for the ultra rich, not because taxes are too high for the remaining 99% of the population. The right wingers who say otherwise are lying weasels, and if you believe them then you are weak minded and like having your pocket picked by the rich.
"Intelligent Integration Systems developed the technology behind Spatial, which initially ran on an earlier Netezza's data-warehousing platform, the Netezza Performance Server. "
Then Netezza sold the product on their new server TwinFin. "Intelligent Integration Systems officials say they didn't know about plans for TwinFin when they signed the contract with Netezza, and that the company never agreed to develop software for future platforms. "
Netezza signed a contract without bothering to check with IISi about porting the code.
So Netezza sold the hacked version to the CIA, which accepted it.
Nettezza sued IISi for breach of contract for not porting the code, which they just lost. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/24/cia_netezza/ "That case was dismissed last month, with the judge finding that contrary to Netezza's repeated claims, IISi was under no obligation to carry out the work."
Now ISSi is suing Nettezza.
So it looks like they stole both the original code and marketed it, and they stole the trade secrets in the code and sold them as well. It looks like a slam dunk that they will loose. So what part of illegal don't you understand?
This is a fantastic technical achievement. However, it has no meaningful direct link to ANY deployable technology. It is a measurement technique, and although the article does not say so, I'm sure it requires a temperature of somewhere below 1K, maybe below .001K. That is the only way they could be getting signals of these phenomena without getting swamped by thermal noise. All the stuff about single atom storage is boilerplate marketing hype. I assumes that they have a hot key to paste in how a new technology can be used for memory storage, or solar cells, or green technology or ...
Yes. The story was disassembled into it's component letters and then reassembled to harvest more Slashdot trolls. Recycling at it's most efficient.