Is there anyone who doubts that Karl Rove has the wiretaps indexed for the most effective political control of both his Republican "friends" and Democratic enemies? I'm sure Rove knows who you are.
I said "practically infinite". That's because the data is not limited by the storage medium, but by our limited ability to read it.
It's funny how many people jumped on me for my pointing out how much more than a "petabyte" is on those plates. But no one has joined me in laughing at the "petabytes" claim.
"Blurred" is an oversimplification. What we could get from the original optics is the convolution by what optics signal the recorded signal was changed. So we could deconvolve the data on the plates. In a hundred years, I expect our skills at such deconvolution of optics at the nanoscale will be quite good. We held those plates for a century, we ought to hold them for at least another to get the full use of them.
Yeah, but that was Mercury's intro pricing, before the PS3 was even released, a year ago. The Cell itself costs only <$100 apiece, and the rest of the HW to support it on a blade is probably under $50. A real multi-Cell blade, like an 8-way one, should cost under $1000. And it should have as much RAM as possible, at best 32GB per 8-SPE Cell, plus probably another 4GB or so for the PPE, for 260GB, which is probably $10K. That kind of monster is well worth $11K, and even a 100GB one, with 4x2x10Gb-e on a PCI-e bus is well worth $5K. Hell, it's probably as fast as a $5M machine running on some other CPU. A $40K machine with 64 Cells, 1TB RAM, all on PCI-e plus a bank of 32x2x10Gb-e ports is probably one of the faster supercomputers, which would cost well over $50M. And suck godwaful (regulated) power, an air-conditioned room, and a faculty of PhDs to design, assemble and run each one. Those Cell machines could roll off assembly lines by the thousands.
Yeah, like I said, 400 year old "grownups", experiencing their second childhood - or just advanced vampirism. Or didn't you notice how Conservatism has destroyed the country?
I guess not - "noticing" is low down on the Conservative list of "values". Evidently, below hookers and cocaine.
No, PS3 Cell SPEs each have 256KB of local store, plus they each can DMA from each other, and from main memory another 256MB (or possibly nearly 512MB).
The PS3 in game mode uses both the SPEs and the RSX, and has the same amount of memory, but has excellent graphics.
In another hundred years that kind of data collection will probably be easy. But still extremely valuable, because the data recorded in them is irreplaceable.
If the astronomers who recorded these plates weren't anal, then astronomy wouldn't be advanced enough by now for you to enjoy it as an amateur.
Sony could make more money if it included a drive that reads both old UMD and new Blu-Ray or just cheap, but compatible, CD or DVD discs. You know, compatible with the rest of their products.
But I guess you're just too fucking stupid to think of something obvious like that. Did you also notice that Sony isn't asking your worthless opinion?
Well, the lenses/mirrors that are now lost to history do introduce noise. But the atmospheric effects, and inconsistencies in the glass and silver, and probably much of the "writing" noise from the optics do all hold the possibility of being filtered out. Maybe not now, with today's early signal processing tech. But in another hundred or more years, that signal info could be available. If we don't damage them in the interim.
Glass photographic plates, especially from silver emulsion, are analog at extremely fine granularity. Effectively molecular, depending on how flat the glass surface was settled from its molten liquid state. The features of its silver oxide crystals, laid in place by individual photons arriving from vastly distant stars, could be meaningful at less than a nanometer. Especially when measuring extremely subtle influences, like the gravity from one distant star bending the light of another distant star, measured across a century in which those stars lost gravitational mass, for comparison.
There is a practically infinite amount of data on each of those plates, limited by our precision in measuring them. It's a smaller degree of infinity than that of the sky. But the original infinite sky is lost. While the plates' lesser infinities are impossible to replace, and all we'll get to use to look back across all the billions of years we saw in a long century of them.
I really wish you could remember the name of the company. The only companies making Cell products that I know of are IBM, Toshiba, Mercury, and Sony (and Terrasoft was releasing custom clusters of PS3s). A Java library that runs on more than just the Cell PPC, especially on multiple parallel Cells, would be compelling. And if the product has died, or the company making it, that orphaned library could be a good candidate for opening its source, if it was previously proprietary.
Actually, free as in beer/speech are closely related, but usually distinct in software licensing. True liberty is also not limited by a selling price. Truly zero-price "sales" are limited by nothing.
It's the part-way application of each kind of "free" to software licensing that requires careful distinction and frequent disambiguation.
Likewise, neither "games and movies" nor "works on every device" alone is the meaning of "universal" in storage tech. But the beer/speech distinction is pretty familiar. Sony's UMD is more remarkable that it plays only on a single device, the PSP, than that it can accommodate both games and movies. Because of the limits to which the two senses refer, the single device is a bigger problem. And there are other disc techs that can store movies, games, and other content (eg data, music), like CD, DVD, etc, none of which are touted for their universality. But they're "more" universal (universal is really an aboslute, not a relative, term) than UMD. Hence, Sony's use of "universal" to refer to a format that is most remarkably not universal in either sense is orwellian.
So I guess the answer is "Sony stuck us again with UMD on the new PSP".
Does the new PSP still use the orwellian-named Universal Media Disc", that is compatible with nothing but the original PSP? The UMD for which there is no way for anyone but Sony to burn a disc? Or maybe they've got a miniBlu-Ray, which would be a lot cooler.
I'd love to see someone port an open source Java class libary or VM's graphics library to render the graphics on the Cell microprocessor's SPE math processors, especially in PS3/Ubuntu.
Is there an open source Java OpenGL implementation? That would be a great package to see running on the Cell.
Since the river I'm targeting is an estuary, it's not very salty, and even is minimally salty during much of its tidal cycle. But I still would consider two sealed compartments, one with the rotating mechanics pushed by the water, the other coupled to it by magnets, rotating the direct dynamo driver entirely inside the sealed chamber. Much like those "induction mixers" in chemical labs, or the recent "induction chargers" offered for mobile devices. That construction should use the "propeller" tech proven salt-resistant for decades and centuries.
Storage is certainly necessary, especially as an emergency failsafe (NYC now has reliable blackouts every Summer). I'd also like to look into directly cracking water into hydrogen with the dynamo, or somehow producing ethanol, for storage in a fuelcell. That has higher net energy density (electric output per storage system kilogram/liter) than batteries, and probably the equipment lasts longer. Someday, some genius will invent a turbine that churns air and water together into diesel more quickly and efficiently than does photosynthesis:).
Do you have any cost estimates on the smallest production turbines into which you've got insight? Whether 500KW or less, but for mere production/deployment/operation/maintenance, not including the R&D costs to figure out the "final" factory/system design.
The PS3 IO limits the data rate to 2-5% of the Cell's capacity to process it, whether or not you think that's funny. Games programming doesn't suffer as much, because it works on the same data over and over: turn head left, right, left, right, spin opponent, spin, turn head left...
Getting access to the RSX would just mean using the graphics processing power that is already available, instead of spending time reprogramming it on the SPEs. And the reason I said 2D, is because I'm not really interested in games. I'm interested in Linux, which doesn't need the 3D. But it does need the 2D, which won't compete with Sony's licensed 3D games that Sony wants no competition for.
If PS3 had more RAM, it would be an excellent Linux server. If it had RSX 2D, it would be an excellent Linux workstation. With both, it would be an excellent media hub. The games it can play in GameOS mode are interesting to me only because it sells enough PS3s to make them cheap.
You might have a disclaimer from your Xbox preference, but your strawman arguments, projected unilateral issues and invocation of fanboys reads like any other fanboy competition. I'm not interested in playing that game.
I didn't say the superbugs were more lethal than antibiotic-sensitive strains, or anything else except that they are antibiotic resistant.
I don't know where you get your stats from, but antibiotic-resistant pathogens are a serious health threat. Unless there is specific evidence that resistance mechanisms offer significant disadvantages to competing with sensitive strains, then it's pretty clear that the resistance to a lethal environmental element is an advantage, and that the resistant strain will eventually succeed in replacing the sensitive strain in the environment to which it is better fit to survive to reproduce.
Hopefully the doctors who prescribe this new cure won't just pump the environment full of it at any sign of anything wrong, the way generations of their fellow doctors have antibiotics to create today's resistant "superbugs". Every time around this treadmill it's harder to kill the new superbugs, and the more people get sick and die from them.
The embedded PS2 chip in the original PS3s was one of the most glaring signs that Sony had rushed the PS3 to market before it was ready. The several firmware upgrades in the 7-8 months since its release (up to 1.82 or so now) are more signs that Sony's tech is catching up to its marketing rollout.
The PS3 HW was always planned to offer PS2 support in SW emulation, not the chip. But they didn't finish the SW until the EU rollout, when they could finally drop the chip that was faster to design in than was emulation.
So what has happened is that Sony is now dropping its PS3 price right as it's dropping the more expensive HW kluge. That alone doesn't raise any realistic doubts. If anything, it shows how skillful is Sony in mitigating its project management and marketing risks with alternate designs. Because users won't even notice the difference. All they'll notice is dropping prices and increased functions.
But what I want to see is Sony actually change 2 basic PS3 limits that hold back Linux on it. First, Sony must offer a model with RAM expandable beyond the 256-500MB hardwired into current models. Without more RAM, the fast Cell rips through all the data in 2ms, then can rely on all its IO to get only enough data to keep the Cell about 2-5% busy.
The other change Sony should make is to open the Hypervisor to allow SW running on the Cell to call at least the 2D graphics functions on the RSX videochip. Otherwise, all video must be computed on the Cell. PCs all put all that graphics/video computation/rendering on the VGA coprocessor.
If not, people will have to port Linux X drivers to the Cell SPEs. That could happen anyway, for even more interesting video processing than that built into the RSX. Once PS3 has video codecs ported to SPEs or RSX, MythTV will become a killer app, with a USB TV decoder feeding it, and a DLNA server for archive.
You are correct. Especially because the telcos/cablecos already have their own private research proving to them that it's cheaper and more manageable to solve network congestion problems by adding bandwith than by tiering or otherwise applying "Quality of Service" constraints on traffic. I know they have, because have interviewed for the NYC government network analysts who delivered that research to those telcos/cablecos.
The main issue is that telcos/cablecos all want to sell their own bundled apps, especially TV and phone, on their own networks. So they want to do to competitors, who must use their infrastructure in order to use "the" Internet, what the telcos did to their DSL competitors. Jack up prices and create unpredictable connection/service delays and outages to retail customers competing with them to deliver services to the same end users. The DSL industry was completely destroyed. The telcos/cablecos want to apply the same strategy to the new TV/phone industry before it ever gets a chance to compete with their huge incumbencies, but after the entrepreneurs have sparked the market with some early innovations. The last we'll ever see.
All of which is the real business reason they want the technical ability to block/allow traffic based on sender to be legal, and in fact continued to be subsidized by the government. Which means by us, the consumers in their cartel market.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there anyone who doubts that Karl Rove has the wiretaps indexed for the most effective political control of both his Republican "friends" and Democratic enemies? I'm sure Rove knows who you are.
I said "practically infinite". That's because the data is not limited by the storage medium, but by our limited ability to read it.
It's funny how many people jumped on me for my pointing out how much more than a "petabyte" is on those plates. But no one has joined me in laughing at the "petabytes" claim.
Slashdot is retarded.
"Blurred" is an oversimplification. What we could get from the original optics is the convolution by what optics signal the recorded signal was changed. So we could deconvolve the data on the plates. In a hundred years, I expect our skills at such deconvolution of optics at the nanoscale will be quite good. We held those plates for a century, we ought to hold them for at least another to get the full use of them.
Yeah, but that was Mercury's intro pricing, before the PS3 was even released, a year ago. The Cell itself costs only <$100 apiece, and the rest of the HW to support it on a blade is probably under $50. A real multi-Cell blade, like an 8-way one, should cost under $1000. And it should have as much RAM as possible, at best 32GB per 8-SPE Cell, plus probably another 4GB or so for the PPE, for 260GB, which is probably $10K. That kind of monster is well worth $11K, and even a 100GB one, with 4x2x10Gb-e on a PCI-e bus is well worth $5K. Hell, it's probably as fast as a $5M machine running on some other CPU. A $40K machine with 64 Cells, 1TB RAM, all on PCI-e plus a bank of 32x2x10Gb-e ports is probably one of the faster supercomputers, which would cost well over $50M. And suck godwaful (regulated) power, an air-conditioned room, and a faculty of PhDs to design, assemble and run each one. Those Cell machines could roll off assembly lines by the thousands.
Yeah, like I said, 400 year old "grownups", experiencing their second childhood - or just advanced vampirism. Or didn't you notice how Conservatism has destroyed the country?
I guess not - "noticing" is low down on the Conservative list of "values". Evidently, below hookers and cocaine.
No, PS3 Cell SPEs each have 256KB of local store, plus they each can DMA from each other, and from main memory another 256MB (or possibly nearly 512MB).
The PS3 in game mode uses both the SPEs and the RSX, and has the same amount of memory, but has excellent graphics.
In another hundred years that kind of data collection will probably be easy. But still extremely valuable, because the data recorded in them is irreplaceable.
If the astronomers who recorded these plates weren't anal, then astronomy wouldn't be advanced enough by now for you to enjoy it as an amateur.
Sony could make more money if it included a drive that reads both old UMD and new Blu-Ray or just cheap, but compatible, CD or DVD discs. You know, compatible with the rest of their products.
But I guess you're just too fucking stupid to think of something obvious like that. Did you also notice that Sony isn't asking your worthless opinion?
The optics can be subtracted from the recording if their specific details are known. That's the beauty of analog recording: it is infinite.
And when the sampled phenomenon is as vast as all of interstellar space, that infinitude is relevant.
Well, the lenses/mirrors that are now lost to history do introduce noise. But the atmospheric effects, and inconsistencies in the glass and silver, and probably much of the "writing" noise from the optics do all hold the possibility of being filtered out. Maybe not now, with today's early signal processing tech. But in another hundred or more years, that signal info could be available. If we don't damage them in the interim.
Glass photographic plates, especially from silver emulsion, are analog at extremely fine granularity. Effectively molecular, depending on how flat the glass surface was settled from its molten liquid state. The features of its silver oxide crystals, laid in place by individual photons arriving from vastly distant stars, could be meaningful at less than a nanometer. Especially when measuring extremely subtle influences, like the gravity from one distant star bending the light of another distant star, measured across a century in which those stars lost gravitational mass, for comparison.
There is a practically infinite amount of data on each of those plates, limited by our precision in measuring them. It's a smaller degree of infinity than that of the sky. But the original infinite sky is lost. While the plates' lesser infinities are impossible to replace, and all we'll get to use to look back across all the billions of years we saw in a long century of them.
I really wish you could remember the name of the company. The only companies making Cell products that I know of are IBM, Toshiba, Mercury, and Sony (and Terrasoft was releasing custom clusters of PS3s). A Java library that runs on more than just the Cell PPC, especially on multiple parallel Cells, would be compelling. And if the product has died, or the company making it, that orphaned library could be a good candidate for opening its source, if it was previously proprietary.
Actually, free as in beer/speech are closely related, but usually distinct in software licensing. True liberty is also not limited by a selling price. Truly zero-price "sales" are limited by nothing.
It's the part-way application of each kind of "free" to software licensing that requires careful distinction and frequent disambiguation.
Likewise, neither "games and movies" nor "works on every device" alone is the meaning of "universal" in storage tech. But the beer/speech distinction is pretty familiar. Sony's UMD is more remarkable that it plays only on a single device, the PSP, than that it can accommodate both games and movies. Because of the limits to which the two senses refer, the single device is a bigger problem. And there are other disc techs that can store movies, games, and other content (eg data, music), like CD, DVD, etc, none of which are touted for their universality. But they're "more" universal (universal is really an aboslute, not a relative, term) than UMD. Hence, Sony's use of "universal" to refer to a format that is most remarkably not universal in either sense is orwellian.
So I guess the answer is "Sony stuck us again with UMD on the new PSP".
Does the new PSP still use the orwellian-named Universal Media Disc", that is compatible with nothing but the original PSP? The UMD for which there is no way for anyone but Sony to burn a disc? Or maybe they've got a miniBlu-Ray, which would be a lot cooler.
All is change. The only thing that doesn't change is change, which itself still does change.
Conservatism is for people stuck in a 1600s mindset.
"Reality has a well known liberal bias." - Stephen Colbert
I'd love to see someone port an open source Java class libary or VM's graphics library to render the graphics on the Cell microprocessor's SPE math processors, especially in PS3/Ubuntu.
Is there an open source Java OpenGL implementation? That would be a great package to see running on the Cell.
I stand my display on the footprint where (half the area of) the mousepad would be, and use the little trackpad that's part of my keyboard :P.
Since the river I'm targeting is an estuary, it's not very salty, and even is minimally salty during much of its tidal cycle. But I still would consider two sealed compartments, one with the rotating mechanics pushed by the water, the other coupled to it by magnets, rotating the direct dynamo driver entirely inside the sealed chamber. Much like those "induction mixers" in chemical labs, or the recent "induction chargers" offered for mobile devices. That construction should use the "propeller" tech proven salt-resistant for decades and centuries.
:).
Storage is certainly necessary, especially as an emergency failsafe (NYC now has reliable blackouts every Summer). I'd also like to look into directly cracking water into hydrogen with the dynamo, or somehow producing ethanol, for storage in a fuelcell. That has higher net energy density (electric output per storage system kilogram/liter) than batteries, and probably the equipment lasts longer. Someday, some genius will invent a turbine that churns air and water together into diesel more quickly and efficiently than does photosynthesis
Do you have any cost estimates on the smallest production turbines into which you've got insight? Whether 500KW or less, but for mere production/deployment/operation/maintenance, not including the R&D costs to figure out the "final" factory/system design.
The PS3 IO limits the data rate to 2-5% of the Cell's capacity to process it, whether or not you think that's funny. Games programming doesn't suffer as much, because it works on the same data over and over: turn head left, right, left, right, spin opponent, spin, turn head left...
Getting access to the RSX would just mean using the graphics processing power that is already available, instead of spending time reprogramming it on the SPEs. And the reason I said 2D, is because I'm not really interested in games. I'm interested in Linux, which doesn't need the 3D. But it does need the 2D, which won't compete with Sony's licensed 3D games that Sony wants no competition for.
If PS3 had more RAM, it would be an excellent Linux server. If it had RSX 2D, it would be an excellent Linux workstation. With both, it would be an excellent media hub. The games it can play in GameOS mode are interesting to me only because it sells enough PS3s to make them cheap.
You might have a disclaimer from your Xbox preference, but your strawman arguments, projected unilateral issues and invocation of fanboys reads like any other fanboy competition. I'm not interested in playing that game.
I didn't say the superbugs were more lethal than antibiotic-sensitive strains, or anything else except that they are antibiotic resistant.
I don't know where you get your stats from, but antibiotic-resistant pathogens are a serious health threat. Unless there is specific evidence that resistance mechanisms offer significant disadvantages to competing with sensitive strains, then it's pretty clear that the resistance to a lethal environmental element is an advantage, and that the resistant strain will eventually succeed in replacing the sensitive strain in the environment to which it is better fit to survive to reproduce.
Hopefully the doctors who prescribe this new cure won't just pump the environment full of it at any sign of anything wrong, the way generations of their fellow doctors have antibiotics to create today's resistant "superbugs". Every time around this treadmill it's harder to kill the new superbugs, and the more people get sick and die from them.
Why does Sony have to choose between Blu-Ray and a SIMM slot?
The embedded PS2 chip in the original PS3s was one of the most glaring signs that Sony had rushed the PS3 to market before it was ready. The several firmware upgrades in the 7-8 months since its release (up to 1.82 or so now) are more signs that Sony's tech is catching up to its marketing rollout.
The PS3 HW was always planned to offer PS2 support in SW emulation, not the chip. But they didn't finish the SW until the EU rollout, when they could finally drop the chip that was faster to design in than was emulation.
So what has happened is that Sony is now dropping its PS3 price right as it's dropping the more expensive HW kluge. That alone doesn't raise any realistic doubts. If anything, it shows how skillful is Sony in mitigating its project management and marketing risks with alternate designs. Because users won't even notice the difference. All they'll notice is dropping prices and increased functions.
But what I want to see is Sony actually change 2 basic PS3 limits that hold back Linux on it. First, Sony must offer a model with RAM expandable beyond the 256-500MB hardwired into current models. Without more RAM, the fast Cell rips through all the data in 2ms, then can rely on all its IO to get only enough data to keep the Cell about 2-5% busy.
The other change Sony should make is to open the Hypervisor to allow SW running on the Cell to call at least the 2D graphics functions on the RSX videochip. Otherwise, all video must be computed on the Cell. PCs all put all that graphics/video computation/rendering on the VGA coprocessor.
If not, people will have to port Linux X drivers to the Cell SPEs. That could happen anyway, for even more interesting video processing than that built into the RSX. Once PS3 has video codecs ported to SPEs or RSX, MythTV will become a killer app, with a USB TV decoder feeding it, and a DLNA server for archive.
You are correct. Especially because the telcos/cablecos already have their own private research proving to them that it's cheaper and more manageable to solve network congestion problems by adding bandwith than by tiering or otherwise applying "Quality of Service" constraints on traffic. I know they have, because have interviewed for the NYC government network analysts who delivered that research to those telcos/cablecos.
The main issue is that telcos/cablecos all want to sell their own bundled apps, especially TV and phone, on their own networks. So they want to do to competitors, who must use their infrastructure in order to use "the" Internet, what the telcos did to their DSL competitors. Jack up prices and create unpredictable connection/service delays and outages to retail customers competing with them to deliver services to the same end users. The DSL industry was completely destroyed. The telcos/cablecos want to apply the same strategy to the new TV/phone industry before it ever gets a chance to compete with their huge incumbencies, but after the entrepreneurs have sparked the market with some early innovations. The last we'll ever see.
All of which is the real business reason they want the technical ability to block/allow traffic based on sender to be legal, and in fact continued to be subsidized by the government. Which means by us, the consumers in their cartel market.