The reason I asked for more is because we're currently stuck with what we get. But the current HW revision is obviously a temporary rush job. The more recent European release drops the PS2 chip in favor of SW emulation on the Cell, and there are other clear indications that Sony is playing catchup to their own specs.
The Cell processes data at up to 800Tbps+, but its RAM is only at most about 3.2Gb. That's 2ms of data. The (single) HD connection is only 1.2Gbps, and "1Gbps" (probably 6-800Mbps) ethernet. It's not clear whether it's got 6 parallel 400Mbps USB buses or just one into 4 external ports. Even if those IO operate at max possibility, that's only 4.6Gbps, or 2% of the Cell's speed. The Hypervisor locks out using the 1.8Tbps RSX, and locks its half of the RAM from truly "Random Access". So unless there's more RAM, the Cell is really overkill for Linux. $500 is better spent on a cheap Intel processor.
But with more RAM, the Cell is a monster, even without the RSX. It's worth porting Linux multimedia codecs to the SPEs, and using the Blu-Ray, WiFi, Bluetooth and HDMI HW for an extremely good home theater frontend. With SW PIP, PVR, running from a RAID of several 750GB+ HDs (even over USB), it would be worth over $2K, but will sell for $500.
So while Sony is changing the value proposition, I want them to spend the extra $50 putting a SIMM slot or two into the console. That's worth a lot more than the equivalent of a single free game.
Anonymous nobody Coward says Sony doesn't listen to people like me, even though Sony officially sponsors PS3 Linux dev for people like me. And "people like me" include people who want to buy PS3s for more than the games that the AC thinks are the only reason people would spend money on a console.
"LOL" isn't an argument. It's the kind of stupid playground spit that people like me can easily ignore. But why not punch a brat in the face when it's all just a game?
So they drop the price $50. That's how much one game costs.
What the PS3 needs is expandable RAM, to more than 256/512MB. Not for the games, though they'd probably benefit to become more complex. But to run Linux on it, of course.
I don't know about ocean currents. I think their power is so much vaster than what we'd tap that it wouldn't matter much. And I believe that we've already messed them up, shifting huge ones miles in their courses, by just our Greenhouse actions so far, so we don't have the option of "not messing them up".
But I'm more interested in river currents. Which we've already messed with all over the place, including damming hundreds of thousands of rivers, many for hydroelectric. I'd like to see turbines in those rivers, whose banks probably have a lot more powerhungry development than even ocean coasts. That kind of tech would be a lot less disruptive than dams.
The Speakeasy speed tests are indeed easy, and easy to "speak" about on their site with posted ratings. But there's nothing magic about it, that you couldn't do with simple commands from your PC.
All you've got to do is fire up a shell (whether Windows, Linux, or other client OS), and download a big (>10MB) file while timing it. Find an HTML link to a video or something, then download it from the shell (eg. wget or curl in Linux) to a local directory. Watch the minutes and seconds from when you first connect (right after you give the command, after you get the download feedback), to when the file is complete. Then examine (eg. ls on Linux, or use your GUI file manager) the file for its exact size in bytes, then divide the time by the size.
I know this seems obvious, but distrusting Speakeasy's numbers as cooked by Comcast shouldn't be the last act before punting to Slashdot. Real tests, not just examples like Speakeasy, are trivial to run by yourself.
Thanks. There is some application of submerged turbines for harnessing water currents. We have a demo in the East River here in NYC that I'm researching. But I haven't heard of a floating platform. And since they're deploying most of the tech for them with these floating wind turbines, I'd like to see them go all the way.
How about floating, or submerged, platforms anchored to the bottom, with turbines pushed by the water currents flowing past them? The energy to move less viscous, less dense air in the volumes past windmills is much less than the viscous, dense water flowing beneath these platforms. And those currents are more predictable than the winds. While the weather (eg typhoons and lightning) probably makes air turbines more subject to damage than submerged ones.
Anyway, why choose? Why not water turbines submerged beneath platforms with windmills mounted on top?
If the Empire State Building isn't on that list, it's bullshit.
And if you think it doesn't belong, but have never been to its top for the view, or just seen it dominate the skyline of NYC, even among its wondrous neighbors, a beacon for a hundred miles among the tens of millions of jaded East Coasters, then you should stick with "a beer on the house" as your limit of wonder.
The Kraken is mutating in its ancient war with the narwhal. Will we see the narwhal hybrid with humans, into some kind of "manwhal", a mammal version of the mermaid? Or maybe a narfish, enlisting fish species before the Kraken snaps them up, and hauls us all down the maelstrom?
No, it's a stupid design because all those little tactical gains are at the cost of the great strategic loss: shipping the phone around to replace the battery.
It's like the CIA used to say about Soviets building a "suitcase nuke": of course those devious bastards could do it, but the batteries would be the size of skyscrapers.
If either of them had worked longer on their battery tech before shipping under "market pressure" mostly in the minds of their marketers, they'd each have developed batteries small, powerful and maintainable to achieve the mobile device's full benefits. Apple's compromise bombed.
A consumer advocacy group sent a letter to Apple complaining that this information was not made public before iPhone's release since the cost of the battery replacement is so high.
Funny, I knew the battery would have to be "upgraded" by returning it to Apple at significant expense, leaving me without a phone for the duration. And all I have is public info that was pushed at me in the past few months - I did no proactive research into the iPhone.
It's a stupid design, a waste of time, money, energy. It's obvious that Apple rushed to market rather than finish a design with a longer-lived battery, or at least user-replaceable. For that matter, I've always bought an extra battery with every new mobile phone, because phone power management is highly unreliable, while I rely on the phone. Apple's design stops even that basic risk mitigation.
Next up will be people figuring out that AT&T's EDGE wireless network, at max 300Kbps, is too slow (and probably unreliable) to be more than the same old trick. Hopefully they won't be so discouraged by figuring out the battery burned them that they won't pressure Apple and AT&T to deliver a faster network, even to such a small UI.
I'll be interested in an iPhone once its design is ready for its market. Not just when Apple's marketers are ready for its market.
If it runs Linux, or any other OS that doesn't support the kind of process exclusion and impervious access control by omnipotent administators who never use user accounts, then it's not a mainframe. Even if it's got centralized processing into vector units and huge IO, that's not a mainframe. Multicore CPUs are already "supercomputers"; calling them mainframes just because they're fast and big is meaningless.
This system you propose could get a big boost if the people populating the documentation/DB were those working for public universities and libraries. These people read a lot, and have the training to describe in fairly uniform detail what they've read. In fact, even the science fiction fans of the world, working with their libraries organized in "classes" like grad schools and book discussion clubs, could document most of the real prior art for most of the inventions engineers have produced in the past century or more.
Since these institutions are publicly funded, and that prior art puts the inventions in the public domain, the public's interest in running that process is obvious.
Windmills harness the power of air moving under force from both solar and the Earth's rotation. One of the oldest transducers known to industry, after the waterwheel.
This robot could be even more environmentally friendly if it were made from bamboo. Or even better, from some composite made from the weeds it pulls. If it could make extra weed pulling capacity out of the weeds it pulls, that would be perfect.
Just as long as we can stop it from "evolving" or adding humans, or our food plants, to its list of "weeds".
But I didn't say to use it instead of a credit card. I just said it's a technique that works with a debit card.
Besides, credit cards all have minimum $50 liability cutoff, and it takes forever to stop and restart them. Debit cards, if actually used instead of credit cards, are at least simple. And with the automation I describe.
The speed dial in/out is actually three buttons. One dials into the system for either in/out, then the system prompts for my password, which I enter manually. Then I press one or the other button to continue with the menus for their respective operation. Though I only ever did the $100 in, and merely planned the $1000 and $20 in for extra convenience.
That keeps only the secret secret, and the "executable code" useless without the secret. And of course the phone's keypad is locked with a password, too. But this is a hell of a lot more typing than I wanted to do to share a trick designed to save typing.
If I had a biometric phone I might include the password in it, and map another speed dial button to call the cops while putting in the money.
One advantage of a debit card is that it can be "zeroed" (no balance) with a "speed dial" to the bank's automated phone "voicemail" (IVR) system. Just keep two accounts, one the pool of money, the other a "public" account for transfers. Program your mobile phone's speed dial button to dial the numbers (with pauses between menus) that transfer all the money from the public account back into the private pool. Give out only the public account#/card#. Program another speed dial button to transfer money in (maybe a button for $1000, another for $100, another for $20) to keep the public one liquid, but not a big loss.
Of course, web services should do this, but they're not necessary, and any cheap phone will work. Just make sure it doesn't sound the tones when it works, or you could get "sniffed". The actual over-the-air transaction is probably safe enough for most people's use, protected by both banks and phone companies.
Until everyone's doing it, and the crooks figure out how to crack this protection, too. While the banks, telcos and FBI all stand idly by, distracting us with fake news about "terrorist" money launderers.
What a retard you are, Anonymous Bush apologist Coward. Who cares how much you disklike Clinton? I don't care how you feel about Millard Fillmore, either.
You're now busy denying how Bush commuting Libby's sentence for covering up Bush's lying us to war (well documented, even in the court that convicted him) is Bush's fault. Some how your idiotic hyperbole rejection strawman about "every problem in the universe" seems adequate to you to deny that Bush is to blame for Bush's commuting Libby's sentence.
I think you're disgusting in every way. Every anonymous, cowardly way.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason I asked for more is because we're currently stuck with what we get. But the current HW revision is obviously a temporary rush job. The more recent European release drops the PS2 chip in favor of SW emulation on the Cell, and there are other clear indications that Sony is playing catchup to their own specs.
The Cell processes data at up to 800Tbps+, but its RAM is only at most about 3.2Gb. That's 2ms of data. The (single) HD connection is only 1.2Gbps, and "1Gbps" (probably 6-800Mbps) ethernet. It's not clear whether it's got 6 parallel 400Mbps USB buses or just one into 4 external ports. Even if those IO operate at max possibility, that's only 4.6Gbps, or 2% of the Cell's speed. The Hypervisor locks out using the 1.8Tbps RSX, and locks its half of the RAM from truly "Random Access". So unless there's more RAM, the Cell is really overkill for Linux. $500 is better spent on a cheap Intel processor.
But with more RAM, the Cell is a monster, even without the RSX. It's worth porting Linux multimedia codecs to the SPEs, and using the Blu-Ray, WiFi, Bluetooth and HDMI HW for an extremely good home theater frontend. With SW PIP, PVR, running from a RAID of several 750GB+ HDs (even over USB), it would be worth over $2K, but will sell for $500.
So while Sony is changing the value proposition, I want them to spend the extra $50 putting a SIMM slot or two into the console. That's worth a lot more than the equivalent of a single free game.
Anonymous nobody Coward says Sony doesn't listen to people like me, even though Sony officially sponsors PS3 Linux dev for people like me. And "people like me" include people who want to buy PS3s for more than the games that the AC thinks are the only reason people would spend money on a console.
"LOL" isn't an argument. It's the kind of stupid playground spit that people like me can easily ignore. But why not punch a brat in the face when it's all just a game?
Anonymous Coward never stopped to think that river currents would be a great place to do it. What a tiny, anonymous mind.
So they drop the price $50. That's how much one game costs.
What the PS3 needs is expandable RAM, to more than 256/512MB. Not for the games, though they'd probably benefit to become more complex. But to run Linux on it, of course.
You don't need "time": wget will report the average DL rate when it's done. But since they asked such a basic question, I felt like being pedantic.
I don't know about ocean currents. I think their power is so much vaster than what we'd tap that it wouldn't matter much. And I believe that we've already messed them up, shifting huge ones miles in their courses, by just our Greenhouse actions so far, so we don't have the option of "not messing them up".
But I'm more interested in river currents. Which we've already messed with all over the place, including damming hundreds of thousands of rivers, many for hydroelectric. I'd like to see turbines in those rivers, whose banks probably have a lot more powerhungry development than even ocean coasts. That kind of tech would be a lot less disruptive than dams.
The Speakeasy speed tests are indeed easy, and easy to "speak" about on their site with posted ratings. But there's nothing magic about it, that you couldn't do with simple commands from your PC.
All you've got to do is fire up a shell (whether Windows, Linux, or other client OS), and download a big (>10MB) file while timing it. Find an HTML link to a video or something, then download it from the shell (eg. wget or curl in Linux) to a local directory. Watch the minutes and seconds from when you first connect (right after you give the command, after you get the download feedback), to when the file is complete. Then examine (eg. ls on Linux, or use your GUI file manager) the file for its exact size in bytes, then divide the time by the size.
I know this seems obvious, but distrusting Speakeasy's numbers as cooked by Comcast shouldn't be the last act before punting to Slashdot. Real tests, not just examples like Speakeasy, are trivial to run by yourself.
Thanks. There is some application of submerged turbines for harnessing water currents. We have a demo in the East River here in NYC that I'm researching. But I haven't heard of a floating platform. And since they're deploying most of the tech for them with these floating wind turbines, I'd like to see them go all the way.
Until I see actual prior art, I'll believe that my crude Slashdot post was the prior art for this patentable invention.
How about floating, or submerged, platforms anchored to the bottom, with turbines pushed by the water currents flowing past them? The energy to move less viscous, less dense air in the volumes past windmills is much less than the viscous, dense water flowing beneath these platforms. And those currents are more predictable than the winds. While the weather (eg typhoons and lightning) probably makes air turbines more subject to damage than submerged ones.
Anyway, why choose? Why not water turbines submerged beneath platforms with windmills mounted on top?
If the Empire State Building isn't on that list, it's bullshit.
And if you think it doesn't belong, but have never been to its top for the view, or just seen it dominate the skyline of NYC, even among its wondrous neighbors, a beacon for a hundred miles among the tens of millions of jaded East Coasters, then you should stick with "a beer on the house" as your limit of wonder.
The Kraken is mutating in its ancient war with the narwhal. Will we see the narwhal hybrid with humans, into some kind of "manwhal", a mammal version of the mermaid? Or maybe a narfish, enlisting fish species before the Kraken snaps them up, and hauls us all down the maelstrom?
No, it's a stupid design because all those little tactical gains are at the cost of the great strategic loss: shipping the phone around to replace the battery.
It's like the CIA used to say about Soviets building a "suitcase nuke": of course those devious bastards could do it, but the batteries would be the size of skyscrapers.
If either of them had worked longer on their battery tech before shipping under "market pressure" mostly in the minds of their marketers, they'd each have developed batteries small, powerful and maintainable to achieve the mobile device's full benefits. Apple's compromise bombed.
Funny, I knew the battery would have to be "upgraded" by returning it to Apple at significant expense, leaving me without a phone for the duration. And all I have is public info that was pushed at me in the past few months - I did no proactive research into the iPhone.
It's a stupid design, a waste of time, money, energy. It's obvious that Apple rushed to market rather than finish a design with a longer-lived battery, or at least user-replaceable. For that matter, I've always bought an extra battery with every new mobile phone, because phone power management is highly unreliable, while I rely on the phone. Apple's design stops even that basic risk mitigation.
Next up will be people figuring out that AT&T's EDGE wireless network, at max 300Kbps, is too slow (and probably unreliable) to be more than the same old trick. Hopefully they won't be so discouraged by figuring out the battery burned them that they won't pressure Apple and AT&T to deliver a faster network, even to such a small UI.
I'll be interested in an iPhone once its design is ready for its market. Not just when Apple's marketers are ready for its market.
I love it when people release these spy tools publicly. Finally "Joe Mousepad" can catch up with the NSA, and spy on his neighbors.
"Suspicion Breeds Confidence"
Oh, so then Bush must be a saint. Or an aardvark. How could I have been so wrong? Sorry I brought it up.
It's a signing statement. Since Bush has been breaking the law without legal authority using them, and Bush's admin was hustled into power by Jack Abramoff's network, who was initiated into lobbying at Preston Gates (yes, that Gates, though it's the huge corporate lawyer father of Microsoft's "Bill"), why shouldn't the richest, most powerful man in the world start signing his own imperial decrees? It's all the rage among his aristocratic class. There's safety in numbers - of emperors and of dollars.
If it runs Linux, or any other OS that doesn't support the kind of process exclusion and impervious access control by omnipotent administators who never use user accounts, then it's not a mainframe. Even if it's got centralized processing into vector units and huge IO, that's not a mainframe. Multicore CPUs are already "supercomputers"; calling them mainframes just because they're fast and big is meaningless.
This system you propose could get a big boost if the people populating the documentation/DB were those working for public universities and libraries. These people read a lot, and have the training to describe in fairly uniform detail what they've read. In fact, even the science fiction fans of the world, working with their libraries organized in "classes" like grad schools and book discussion clubs, could document most of the real prior art for most of the inventions engineers have produced in the past century or more.
Since these institutions are publicly funded, and that prior art puts the inventions in the public domain, the public's interest in running that process is obvious.
Better do it before some quack patents it.
Windmills harness the power of air moving under force from both solar and the Earth's rotation. One of the oldest transducers known to industry, after the waterwheel.
This robot could be even more environmentally friendly if it were made from bamboo. Or even better, from some composite made from the weeds it pulls. If it could make extra weed pulling capacity out of the weeds it pulls, that would be perfect.
Just as long as we can stop it from "evolving" or adding humans, or our food plants, to its list of "weeds".
But I didn't say to use it instead of a credit card. I just said it's a technique that works with a debit card.
Besides, credit cards all have minimum $50 liability cutoff, and it takes forever to stop and restart them. Debit cards, if actually used instead of credit cards, are at least simple. And with the automation I describe.
The speed dial in/out is actually three buttons. One dials into the system for either in/out, then the system prompts for my password, which I enter manually. Then I press one or the other button to continue with the menus for their respective operation. Though I only ever did the $100 in, and merely planned the $1000 and $20 in for extra convenience.
That keeps only the secret secret, and the "executable code" useless without the secret. And of course the phone's keypad is locked with a password, too. But this is a hell of a lot more typing than I wanted to do to share a trick designed to save typing.
If I had a biometric phone I might include the password in it, and map another speed dial button to call the cops while putting in the money.
One advantage of a debit card is that it can be "zeroed" (no balance) with a "speed dial" to the bank's automated phone "voicemail" (IVR) system. Just keep two accounts, one the pool of money, the other a "public" account for transfers. Program your mobile phone's speed dial button to dial the numbers (with pauses between menus) that transfer all the money from the public account back into the private pool. Give out only the public account#/card#. Program another speed dial button to transfer money in (maybe a button for $1000, another for $100, another for $20) to keep the public one liquid, but not a big loss.
Of course, web services should do this, but they're not necessary, and any cheap phone will work. Just make sure it doesn't sound the tones when it works, or you could get "sniffed". The actual over-the-air transaction is probably safe enough for most people's use, protected by both banks and phone companies.
Until everyone's doing it, and the crooks figure out how to crack this protection, too. While the banks, telcos and FBI all stand idly by, distracting us with fake news about "terrorist" money launderers.
What a retard you are, Anonymous Bush apologist Coward. Who cares how much you disklike Clinton? I don't care how you feel about Millard Fillmore, either.
You're now busy denying how Bush commuting Libby's sentence for covering up Bush's lying us to war (well documented, even in the court that convicted him) is Bush's fault. Some how your idiotic hyperbole rejection strawman about "every problem in the universe" seems adequate to you to deny that Bush is to blame for Bush's commuting Libby's sentence.
I think you're disgusting in every way. Every anonymous, cowardly way.