The Watts per performance unit have been getting lower lately, not higher. That is obviously offset by the performance increasing. So the original poster's point was that it's really unknown how that balances out.
When the PS1 was first released, it probably used a lot more power than when they re-released it several years later. If they were to build a PSone today using the very latest technology, it would probably consume less than a Watt at full tilt.
In my area next month, according to rumor, FiOS rolls out. That will move me from 6Mb cable to 15Mb fiber (and more significantly, 0.3Mb upstream to 2Mb upstream) for slightly less money than I pay today. My guess is that FiOS will trigger rapid price competition in the broadband markets in which it's an option.
This looks like a somewhat minor addition to the state of the art in this field. The folks at Graphics Security Systems Corporation patented similar techniques which use a lenticular lens to pull out a hidden image at a specific frequency, or software to do the same (search http://www.uspto.gov/" for inventor=Alasia). This technique appears to take the same approach down to the pixel wavelength level, and let the software "tune in" certain hidden images as if it was an FM radio. GSSC's advantage is that it can be decoded with a physical device, though.
This is a good argument *for* JIT compiling, because the JIT has information available to it at runtime that a static compiler lacks. Such as how many times a loop tends to be run, or a piece of code tends to get executed, or the miss rate of caches. Theoretically, a good JIT-compiled piece of code should be able to optimize circles around C++. In practice, you don't want to spend TOO much time optimizing most code, because it tends not to get run a zillion times. That's why Java's so great on the server and sometimes lacking on the client, IMHO.
I haven't bought the 360, and probably never will, but a $600 Blu-Ray player with all the dohickeys that ALSO plays all my existing games sounds good to me. Plus, next generation games, too!
Which is, of course, completely and utterly anti-competitive in this case.
Um, no, actually it's virtually the definition of competitive. You know, competition leading to lower prices. If AMD can compete, they will, and consumers will win.
The current Java license is obviously unacceptable
If it were obvious there wouldn't be a debate. This whole thing appears to be another example of the open source's constant struggle between the happiness of the developers vs. the happiness of the users. With Debian, the users seem to be winning.
I am an Xbox and XBox360 owner and while I'm mildly upset that I can't play some of the 15 games that I own, I would be even more upset if I couldn't play 30-40 games.
Considering the number of titles available for PS2 vs XBox, 30-40 sounds like a much lower percentage of PS2 games than 15 is of XBox games.
In a world where a $500 PC is going to be able to do 99.9 percent of anything that the average home user wants to do
I've heard this argument before, but in the world you're talking about, average home users aren't given nearly enough cool software. I know a lot of average Mac users will gobble the extra Intel horsepower up using the free included software, doing multi-person iChats with high compression, iMovie+iDVDs, Quartz Compositions, etc. The world where the average home user does no video codecs or high-horsepower entertainment uses is ending, and the home computer is for a lot more than the kid's school paper these days.
XBox 360 customers don't seem to be hugely upset by this same problem.
And I'm skeptical that Sony is ever planning on removing the hardware logic, if it even exists. I could see eventually including it on the same silicon in a future chip revision to cut costs (turning several chips into one), but redesigning a motherboard and adding a software emulator sounds like a good way to increase costs.
Well, 1. it wasn't the slightest bit funny, 2. it made snide and inaccurate implications in order to attack a political position. That sounds like a troll to me. Unfortunately I have no mod points.
The PS3 is why I think you're wrong. Since over 50% of televisions sold these days are HD, and the PS3 is going to likely sell millions of units, it won't be a question of "what format should I choose?" It will be "I can buy a movie with 4x the resolution that plays on my existing system? Ok!" People will probably ask for movies that are "PS3 compatible" at least as often as they ask for "Blu-Ray", I'll bet.
, you are free to slaughter the innocent little potential babies
This is exactly the type of language that doesn't help anyone. For the most part, the stem cells come from embryos that are going to be destroyed anyway. So it's really the choice between incinerating them or letting them help humanity. And as for potential babies, that's the same argument that's causing the Catholic church to ban condoms which leads to huge increases in HIV and other STDs. So it all depends on how far you want to go with this "potential baby" thing. (In Jesus' day, a baby wasn't considered "viable" until 30 days *after* birth, and I don't recall reading his sermon on that topic.)
As for me, I'd probably go further than most. My current opinion is that I don't see a microscopic bundle of cells at that level as anything higher than an animal. I think if you want to protect innocent human life, you should start with the already-born children's quality of life and education before you go down to the little cells.
It was meant as humor, and you kind of proved his point. $800/mo would be considered poverty here in the United States-- low enough that if you were a citizen you'd be paying "negative" income taxes on it and getting a couple hundred dollars back from the government each year. And my guess is the folks who answer phones for tech support lines get paid a lot less than that.
On cable connections, you're sharing the connection -- is it so shocking that you're not getting what's advertised?
On every connection you're sharing it, whether it's on the local switch or the switch at the station. Cable you share it on the local segment, while DSL you share the central switch with everyone else. Cable tends to be dramatically better than DSL at raw speeds and speed per dollar, though, so I'm not sure why you're picking on it. I regularly get over 5Mb down on my cable modem, and I have the basic Comcast package. Of course, cable's upstream rates suck, which is why I'm likely to switch to FiOS when they offer it around here next month.
I bet you would also have advised Mr Stallman that the market would sort out software in 1985?
I think a more apt comparison would be software copy protection. I recall in 1985 almost all commercial software had copy protection. A little earlier than that, the Commodore 64 was legendary for various schemes that caused intentional error states in the floppy disk that was required for the software to run, etc. As the industry matured, they realized that copy protection was only hurting the honest folks, and that the people who wanted to copy would still copy. By the time the Mac reached its market share peak, MacWorld was taking away a "mouse" in its software ratings if the software had copy protection. It sorted itself out.
If DRM doesn't sort itself out the same way, it probably means that it's probably not all that bad for the honest folks. I know Apple's DRM has never annoyed me at all when I'm trying to do legal listening to my music. As soon as the DRM starts getting in the way of regular lawful usage, industry forces will start to push it out.
I thought engineers and geeks appreciated efficiency. They should just stay home and stick their hands in a waffle iron periodically, then go back to coding.
Good point, and as a private pilot myself I should have been more precise. However, since the article is discussing Airbus, and I suspect the number of private pilots flying an Airbus are small, I was over-generalizing.
I was always under the impression that pilots were trained pretty much entirely for these once-in-a-lifetime events, such as mid-air collision and having one jet fail.
Not really. Most pilot training goes into flight planning, preparation, rules, etc. Then you train on normal operations and contingengies. Then accuracy and consistency.
But really, ever since the Airbus 320 introduced the inability to stall, more intelligence is going into the planes. (No matter how hard you pull back on the Airbus 320's stick, you're not going to go into an aerodynamic stall and plunge into the earth. Likewise, it won't let you go overspeed.) There is always a debate when you take the person out of the loop, so it tends to be done in extremely controlled ways when it can be shown that the safety is substantially increased.
Technically, the latest planes flying into the most high-tech airports have enough information and computing power to automate every segment of the trip from takeoff to full-stop landing. And most flights are probably done 95% on autopilot these days. As a practical matter, though, anything can happen up there and you really want a human in the loop.
"According to the authors, the current implementation of Cell is most often noted for its extremely high performance single-precision (32-bit) floating performance, but the majority of scientific applications require double precision (64-bit). Although Cell's peak double precision performance is still impressive relative to its commodity peers (eight SPEs at 3.2GHz = 14.6 Gflop/s), the group quantified how modest hardware changes, which they named Cell+, could improve double precision performance."
So the Cell is great because there's going to be millions of them sold in PS3's so they'll be cheap. But it's only really great if a new custom variant is built. Sounds kind of contradictory.
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Not the whole world, just America.
The Watts per performance unit have been getting lower lately, not higher. That is obviously offset by the performance increasing. So the original poster's point was that it's really unknown how that balances out.
When the PS1 was first released, it probably used a lot more power than when they re-released it several years later. If they were to build a PSone today using the very latest technology, it would probably consume less than a Watt at full tilt.
In my area next month, according to rumor, FiOS rolls out. That will move me from 6Mb cable to 15Mb fiber (and more significantly, 0.3Mb upstream to 2Mb upstream) for slightly less money than I pay today. My guess is that FiOS will trigger rapid price competition in the broadband markets in which it's an option.
This looks like a somewhat minor addition to the state of the art in this field. The folks at Graphics Security Systems Corporation patented similar techniques which use a lenticular lens to pull out a hidden image at a specific frequency, or software to do the same (search http://www.uspto.gov/" for inventor=Alasia). This technique appears to take the same approach down to the pixel wavelength level, and let the software "tune in" certain hidden images as if it was an FM radio. GSSC's advantage is that it can be decoded with a physical device, though.
This is a good argument *for* JIT compiling, because the JIT has information available to it at runtime that a static compiler lacks. Such as how many times a loop tends to be run, or a piece of code tends to get executed, or the miss rate of caches. Theoretically, a good JIT-compiled piece of code should be able to optimize circles around C++. In practice, you don't want to spend TOO much time optimizing most code, because it tends not to get run a zillion times. That's why Java's so great on the server and sometimes lacking on the client, IMHO.
I haven't bought the 360, and probably never will, but a $600 Blu-Ray player with all the dohickeys that ALSO plays all my existing games sounds good to me. Plus, next generation games, too!
Which is, of course, completely and utterly anti-competitive in this case.
Um, no, actually it's virtually the definition of competitive. You know, competition leading to lower prices. If AMD can compete, they will, and consumers will win.
The current Java license is obviously unacceptable
If it were obvious there wouldn't be a debate. This whole thing appears to be another example of the open source's constant struggle between the happiness of the developers vs. the happiness of the users. With Debian, the users seem to be winning.
I am an Xbox and XBox360 owner and while I'm mildly upset that I can't play some of the 15 games that I own, I would be even more upset if I couldn't play 30-40 games.
Considering the number of titles available for PS2 vs XBox, 30-40 sounds like a much lower percentage of PS2 games than 15 is of XBox games.
In a world where a $500 PC is going to be able to do 99.9 percent of anything that the average home user wants to do
I've heard this argument before, but in the world you're talking about, average home users aren't given nearly enough cool software. I know a lot of average Mac users will gobble the extra Intel horsepower up using the free included software, doing multi-person iChats with high compression, iMovie+iDVDs, Quartz Compositions, etc. The world where the average home user does no video codecs or high-horsepower entertainment uses is ending, and the home computer is for a lot more than the kid's school paper these days.
XBox 360 customers don't seem to be hugely upset by this same problem.
And I'm skeptical that Sony is ever planning on removing the hardware logic, if it even exists. I could see eventually including it on the same silicon in a future chip revision to cut costs (turning several chips into one), but redesigning a motherboard and adding a software emulator sounds like a good way to increase costs.
Well, 1. it wasn't the slightest bit funny, 2. it made snide and inaccurate implications in order to attack a political position. That sounds like a troll to me. Unfortunately I have no mod points.
The PS3 is why I think you're wrong. Since over 50% of televisions sold these days are HD, and the PS3 is going to likely sell millions of units, it won't be a question of "what format should I choose?" It will be "I can buy a movie with 4x the resolution that plays on my existing system? Ok!" People will probably ask for movies that are "PS3 compatible" at least as often as they ask for "Blu-Ray", I'll bet.
Yes, I believe this was the "$40" replier's point.
, you are free to slaughter the innocent little potential babies
This is exactly the type of language that doesn't help anyone. For the most part, the stem cells come from embryos that are going to be destroyed anyway. So it's really the choice between incinerating them or letting them help humanity. And as for potential babies, that's the same argument that's causing the Catholic church to ban condoms which leads to huge increases in HIV and other STDs. So it all depends on how far you want to go with this "potential baby" thing. (In Jesus' day, a baby wasn't considered "viable" until 30 days *after* birth, and I don't recall reading his sermon on that topic.)
As for me, I'd probably go further than most. My current opinion is that I don't see a microscopic bundle of cells at that level as anything higher than an animal. I think if you want to protect innocent human life, you should start with the already-born children's quality of life and education before you go down to the little cells.
It was meant as humor, and you kind of proved his point. $800/mo would be considered poverty here in the United States-- low enough that if you were a citizen you'd be paying "negative" income taxes on it and getting a couple hundred dollars back from the government each year. And my guess is the folks who answer phones for tech support lines get paid a lot less than that.
What does gramma need with 3Mbps anyway?!
And stop picking on my grandma... we regularly do 3-way iChats with my Dad, brother, and/or me, so she actually uses the bandwidth.
On cable connections, you're sharing the connection -- is it so shocking that you're not getting what's advertised?
On every connection you're sharing it, whether it's on the local switch or the switch at the station. Cable you share it on the local segment, while DSL you share the central switch with everyone else. Cable tends to be dramatically better than DSL at raw speeds and speed per dollar, though, so I'm not sure why you're picking on it. I regularly get over 5Mb down on my cable modem, and I have the basic Comcast package. Of course, cable's upstream rates suck, which is why I'm likely to switch to FiOS when they offer it around here next month.
I bet you would also have advised Mr Stallman that the market would sort out software in 1985?
I think a more apt comparison would be software copy protection. I recall in 1985 almost all commercial software had copy protection. A little earlier than that, the Commodore 64 was legendary for various schemes that caused intentional error states in the floppy disk that was required for the software to run, etc. As the industry matured, they realized that copy protection was only hurting the honest folks, and that the people who wanted to copy would still copy. By the time the Mac reached its market share peak, MacWorld was taking away a "mouse" in its software ratings if the software had copy protection. It sorted itself out.
If DRM doesn't sort itself out the same way, it probably means that it's probably not all that bad for the honest folks. I know Apple's DRM has never annoyed me at all when I'm trying to do legal listening to my music. As soon as the DRM starts getting in the way of regular lawful usage, industry forces will start to push it out.
I thought engineers and geeks appreciated efficiency. They should just stay home and stick their hands in a waffle iron periodically, then go back to coding.
Good point, and as a private pilot myself I should have been more precise. However, since the article is discussing Airbus, and I suspect the number of private pilots flying an Airbus are small, I was over-generalizing.
I was always under the impression that pilots were trained pretty much entirely for these once-in-a-lifetime events, such as mid-air collision and having one jet fail.
Not really. Most pilot training goes into flight planning, preparation, rules, etc. Then you train on normal operations and contingengies. Then accuracy and consistency.
But really, ever since the Airbus 320 introduced the inability to stall, more intelligence is going into the planes. (No matter how hard you pull back on the Airbus 320's stick, you're not going to go into an aerodynamic stall and plunge into the earth. Likewise, it won't let you go overspeed.) There is always a debate when you take the person out of the loop, so it tends to be done in extremely controlled ways when it can be shown that the safety is substantially increased.
Technically, the latest planes flying into the most high-tech airports have enough information and computing power to automate every segment of the trip from takeoff to full-stop landing. And most flights are probably done 95% on autopilot these days. As a practical matter, though, anything can happen up there and you really want a human in the loop.
Wow... not only did you apparently not read the article, you didn't even read the SUMMARY of the article before posting.
Katamari Damancy? Or is that game not as indie as it seemed?
What seems to be more important than that is:
"According to the authors, the current implementation of Cell is most often noted for its extremely high performance single-precision (32-bit) floating performance, but the majority of scientific applications require double precision (64-bit). Although Cell's peak double precision performance is still impressive relative to its commodity peers (eight SPEs at 3.2GHz = 14.6 Gflop/s), the group quantified how modest hardware changes, which they named Cell+, could improve double precision performance."
So the Cell is great because there's going to be millions of them sold in PS3's so they'll be cheap. But it's only really great if a new custom variant is built. Sounds kind of contradictory.