The situation for doctors isn't different here. Top specialists, especially surgeons, make a lot of money, but many other doctors (notably primary care) don't, and they all pay a lot of money for malpractice insurance. (There were reports some years back of doctors being forced out of OB/GYN because of high insurance rates: see http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-06/uomh-hco053105.php for one example.) And to get there, they have to survive years of training with very long hours, and pay a lot of money for schooling, typically taking on a crushing load of student loans.
The wire is indeed a problem; we're also seeing a move to wireless charging but that has its own capacity limits. We probably won't see a phone that can charge in 20 seconds for that reason, but even a phone that could charge in minutes instead of hours would be a major step forward. Not to mention that the non-replaceable battery would no longer be an issue because the battery would easily last for the lifetime of the device.
Supercapacitor technology is an even bigger deal for electric cars. The charge time is a big limiting factor now; even if you have a car like the Tesla S with the biggest battery option, the fact that you have to stop for an hour every 150-200 miles to charge it (assuming you can find a charging station) is a problem for long distance travel. If the charge time were reduced to 5 minutes (about the same as a current gas station stop) the car would be much more practical.
This student is far from the only person working on supercapacitors; we have seen other stories here on Slashdot. But the fact that the technology is within the range of something that an (admittedly well connected) student could replicate is encouraging.
The California Corridor (San Diego to San Francisco) is also getting substantial funding now. Vancouver to Portland OR is worthy but would require international cooperation; it could be done as far as Seattle without that. Transcontinental trains probably won't catch on until we're ready to build even higher speed rail service (250mph or so); at that speed people might be willing to take a cross-country train instead of flying.
The Northeast Corridor gets the most funding because it's the only place where Amtrak makes money running trains. There are enough passengers, and they will pay high enough fares, to produce an operating profit. All the train fares are higher than bus fares, and the Acela Express is up in the same neighborhood as air fares.
Amtrak did operate the Boston-area commuter rail services for a while, under contract with the MBTA. That contract expired in 2003, and a newly formed company, MBCR, took over running the service. Amtrak also operated commuter oriented trains (the Clocker service) on the New York-Philadelphia route until 2005.
So far as I know, Amtrak is not currently operating any pure commuter rail services, but they may still have some operating agreements with regional transit authorities as they used to with the MBTA. Commuters ride some of their Northeast Corridor trains as well as the Downeaster service between Maine and Boston, and probably some trains in other parts of the country.
Re:I believe I speak for a dozen people when I say
on
Amtrak Upgrades Wi-Fi
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The Northeast Corridor is one place where there is a high enough density of rail users to support good service. It's about the only Amtrak service that shows an operating profit. Not a profit overall, as the capital expenses of building the lines and the rail cars come from a separate budget, but no form of transportation in the US pays all its expenses directly.
I wouldn't put the eMac in the failed list. It was created as a product for a specific market - K-12 education - and did well there for a while; at the time the educators needed something a bit more powerful than the original iMac but flat panels were still too expensive for them. Selling it as a retail product was an poorly marketed afterthought, and it's true that it was not successful there.
Windows 8 has a bunch of performance improvements, especially to boot time. If people could get the good stuff without having to deal with the bad (the Metro UI and the schizophrenic experience that goes with it), more people would bite.
Interesting question, that. California is one of the states that has a state-level Equal Rights Amendment, so this could well be not merely illegal but unconstitutional.
You say that phones are smaller and tablets are bigger. But there have been 5" devices marketed as tablets (the Dell Streak 5) and 5" devices marketed as phones (Samsung Galaxy S4). There are devices popularly referred to as "phablets" because they straddle the boundary (Samsung Galaxy Note series).
So what differentiates phones and tablets? Phones can make phone calls but tablets could easily have phone capabilities added, and can make phone calls with Skype or Google Talk in any case. Phones have better cameras, for now. Tablets are bigger, except when they're not. Both phones and tablets can have 3G and 4G data, GPS, and NFC. The two leading mobile OSes (iOS and Android) run on phones and tablets.
Some people, especially those who use the smartphone frequently to make phone calls, will prefer a device small enough to put in a pocket. Some, especially those who use the tablet primarily for data, will prefer a device with a larger screen. (I'm in the latter camp; if I could have something the size of my Nexus 7 that could also make phone calls on the rare occasion that I actually talk on the phone I would buy it and give up my smartphone. Once there is a similar tablet with 4G LTE data I might buy a good Bluetooth headset and do that anyway.) Some will continue to carry both a large and a small device. And people who do a lot of writing will replace the larger device with a convertible notebook (or a tablet/notebook hybrid: ASUS Transformer, Microsoft Surface, HP Envy x2) so they can have a real keyboard.
It is possible that "tablet" as a distinct product category will die in five years. But products that we would recognize as tablets will not die. Netbooks haven't died either; they've just grown up into low-end Ultrabooks. The ASUS VivoBook x202e is an excellent example of what Netbooks wanted to be, and at the current price of under $500 it's almost cheap enough. This fall's Haswell-based Ultrabooks will be even less expensive, perhaps enough so to finally turn the Ultrabook into a hit.
Why not a 50" monitor instead? (http://gizmodo.com/5994765/seiki-50+inch-4k-tv-eyes+on-how-the-hell-is-a-tv-this-beautiful-so-cheap) It's being marketed as a TV, but you can connect to any video card that has an HDMI output and enough GPU power to light up all those pixels. $1500 counts as cheap for a technology at this stage of development; the $500 30" model is next year's product.
Mathematically it's not 4K, but it is a resolution that the industry is calling "4K" for marketing reasons. (Anything that is at least 2x 1080p in each direction qualifies.) It's annoying to see a mathematically incorrect term be used, but at least it's a convenient shorthand for the next generation of display products.
Theatrical 4K projectors are mostly 4096x2160, at least for now. Home equipment will converge on 3840x2160 because it's easier to upscale 1080p content to that resolution, and low-end theatrical projectors for small theaters might end up using the same resolution because of the possibility of using components designed for consumer devices.
Moving to solar will likely mean moving to less of a 24/7 economy. We'll have to cut back on nighttime activity. We'll have some nighttime power from wind so the world won't go completely dark at night.
As for energy for home heating, storage is a solvable problem. Put a bank of rocks under your house, heat them during the day when energy is available, and use the stored heat to keep the house warm at night.
Another energy storage technology - carbon nanotube ultracapacitors - is under development and could solve many of these problems. A device with the energy density of lithium ion batteries but with a lifetime of MILLIONS of charge cycles... if it can be produced at a reasonable price it would eliminate most of the objections to electric vehicles. Reference: http://web.mit.edu/erc/spotlights/ultracapacitor.html
XP isn't a fix of ME. Windows ME was a dead end, the last of its lineage, and a step backward from its predecessor, Windows 98. Windows XP is the successor to Windows 2000, taking what was already a decent Microsoft OS and improving it.
To carry on the history: Windows Vista was a release with some good points but also some serious flaws; not as bad as ME but not good either. Its biggest problems were with hardware support: Microsoft changed the way device drivers worked but lots of hardware never got the new drivers, and it came with Aero as new GUI eye candy at a time when most computers had graphics cards that were not powerful enough to run it. Most of the problems with Vista were fixed by the time Service Pack 1 was released, but public opinion had already written off Vista by then.
What we got as Vista isn't really what Microsoft had in mind at the time. They had been working on a much more ambitious upgrade with the codename Longhorn, but it turned out to be too ambitious for their development skill and/or the hardware of the time. We STILL haven't seen Microsoft release some of the things they were planning to put in Longhorn.
Windows 7 cleaned up the rough edges of Vista and improved performance, but mostly it was more accepted because hardware and drivers had caught up. Windows 8 made a radical break from the Windows UI, introducing the Modern (nee Metro) UI that is halfheartedly integrated with Windows and which has serious failings for power users, like the inability to have unlimited applications on the screen and poor handling of multi-monitor setups. The Modern UI is an attempt at creating an UI that works on both PCs and tablets; to my mind less successfully than Unity does.
Running XP in a VM still helps. You can use the VM just to run the medical software and do everything else in the supported host OS. You can also do the firewalling in the host OS and severely limit what gets into the VM.
64-bit XP never got any acceptance in consumer PCs and rightly so, because the drivers needed for many consumer devices were never written. It wasn't just sound cards as another comment implied, it was also all the other stuff that people connect to their PCs. Good luck getting that cheap printer or scanner, TV tuner, etc. to work on the 64-bit version.
64-bit XP did get used in engineering settings. At the time I told people to avoid it unless they had a specific need for its support for large applications.
The story changed with Vista. You needed new drivers anyway and most devices got both 32 and 64-bit driver support. (The fact that you had to offer both to get permission to use the "Designed for Windows" logo didn't hurt.) But the 64-bit version didn't really go mainstream until Windows 7 came along; by then ordinary desktop users were buying PCs with enough memory to need it.
Nothing new here really. Some early 32-bit processors couldn't actually address 4GB of memory, and it was a long time before anybody produced a motherboard for a 32-bit processor that could hold 4GB. (It never happened for the 386 or 486 although those CPUs had 32 address lines.) No Alpha CPU ever had 64 real address lines, and I doubt that any SPARC or Power CPU has to date.
100% of the console business compares favorably in volume to the 10% of the PC business that AMD has now. It's a considerable increase in volume for them, whereas for Intel it would be a drop in the bucket. And AMD's APUs were made to order for the console business, giving the console makers a single chip solution. Intel's integrated graphics are inadequate for game consoles; they would have had to partner with NVidia on a two-chip setup.
The console contracts aren't going to help AMD regain a place in the heart of computing enthusiasts. Nothing the company does may ever do that. But it will help them get up their production volumes for parts intended for mainstream PCs and laptops, and meanwhile make a bit of money; that may be enough to keep AMD alive as an Avis to Intel's Hertz.
AMD is good at serving the low-margin part of the CPU business. They've been doing it with x86 in PCs for years now, so doing it in the console business isn't a big change for them.
Sure, I'll try that. Under my 32-bit Linux OS. Works just fine, since 32-bit Linux has access to more than 4GB RAM, it just can't give all of it to one process. It wouldn't be a notable success on Windows, where the 32-bit version has 4GB of address space, period.
That said, I'd still choose to run the 64-bit version of Linux in that scenario.
64-big x86-64 code only suffers a slight size penalty in real-world applications; I've seen it range anywhere from zero to 10%. The longer pointers cost you but there aren't that many of them in typical code, and you get some code size back by gaining access to more registers.
This led to an interesting phenomenon in the early days of x86-64: programs recompiled for 64-bit architectures typically had a 20% speed advantage on Athlon 64 systems but no advantage at all or a slight slowdown on Pentium 4 systems. The AMD systems were execution-unit bound, and doing fewer but larger instructions was a win. The P4 was instruction-fetch bound (the design's memory bandwidth for instruction fetch was lacking) and so the fact that the programs were bigger hurt the P4's performance. AMD was also helped by the fact that the code optimization in compilers at the time was tuned for AMD processors as they had gotten to market earlier.
And you can't customize the thickness of those edges. Not in any easy way anyway. I find them difficult to use with a mouse; it would be even harder with a trackpad, no matter how well executed. This is an Ubuntu/Unity problem, not a Dell problem.
Dell desktop systems can still be extensively customized. Their laptop line has moved toward less ability to customize; the company just isn't offering as large a range of component choices as they once did. The trend toward ultraportables is a big factor; you can't easily offer a choice of five CPU models when the CPU is soldered to the motherboard.
Slashdot Mirror
The situation for doctors isn't different here. Top specialists, especially surgeons, make a lot of money, but many other doctors (notably primary care) don't, and they all pay a lot of money for malpractice insurance. (There were reports some years back of doctors being forced out of OB/GYN because of high insurance rates: see http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-06/uomh-hco053105.php for one example.) And to get there, they have to survive years of training with very long hours, and pay a lot of money for schooling, typically taking on a crushing load of student loans.
The wire is indeed a problem; we're also seeing a move to wireless charging but that has its own capacity limits. We probably won't see a phone that can charge in 20 seconds for that reason, but even a phone that could charge in minutes instead of hours would be a major step forward. Not to mention that the non-replaceable battery would no longer be an issue because the battery would easily last for the lifetime of the device.
Supercapacitor technology is an even bigger deal for electric cars. The charge time is a big limiting factor now; even if you have a car like the Tesla S with the biggest battery option, the fact that you have to stop for an hour every 150-200 miles to charge it (assuming you can find a charging station) is a problem for long distance travel. If the charge time were reduced to 5 minutes (about the same as a current gas station stop) the car would be much more practical.
This student is far from the only person working on supercapacitors; we have seen other stories here on Slashdot. But the fact that the technology is within the range of something that an (admittedly well connected) student could replicate is encouraging.
Headphones?
The California Corridor (San Diego to San Francisco) is also getting substantial funding now. Vancouver to Portland OR is worthy but would require international cooperation; it could be done as far as Seattle without that. Transcontinental trains probably won't catch on until we're ready to build even higher speed rail service (250mph or so); at that speed people might be willing to take a cross-country train instead of flying.
The Northeast Corridor gets the most funding because it's the only place where Amtrak makes money running trains. There are enough passengers, and they will pay high enough fares, to produce an operating profit. All the train fares are higher than bus fares, and the Acela Express is up in the same neighborhood as air fares.
Metroliner service ended in 2006. Amtrak continues to run the fast Acela Express and the somewhat slower Northeast Regional trains.
Amtrak did operate the Boston-area commuter rail services for a while, under contract with the MBTA. That contract expired in 2003, and a newly formed company, MBCR, took over running the service. Amtrak also operated commuter oriented trains (the Clocker service) on the New York-Philadelphia route until 2005.
So far as I know, Amtrak is not currently operating any pure commuter rail services, but they may still have some operating agreements with regional transit authorities as they used to with the MBTA. Commuters ride some of their Northeast Corridor trains as well as the Downeaster service between Maine and Boston, and probably some trains in other parts of the country.
The Northeast Corridor is one place where there is a high enough density of rail users to support good service. It's about the only Amtrak service that shows an operating profit. Not a profit overall, as the capital expenses of building the lines and the rail cars come from a separate budget, but no form of transportation in the US pays all its expenses directly.
I wouldn't put the eMac in the failed list. It was created as a product for a specific market - K-12 education - and did well there for a while; at the time the educators needed something a bit more powerful than the original iMac but flat panels were still too expensive for them. Selling it as a retail product was an poorly marketed afterthought, and it's true that it was not successful there.
Windows 8 has a bunch of performance improvements, especially to boot time. If people could get the good stuff without having to deal with the bad (the Metro UI and the schizophrenic experience that goes with it), more people would bite.
Interesting question, that. California is one of the states that has a state-level Equal Rights Amendment, so this could well be not merely illegal but unconstitutional.
What, you say?
You say that phones are smaller and tablets are bigger. But there have been 5" devices marketed as tablets (the Dell Streak 5) and 5" devices marketed as phones (Samsung Galaxy S4). There are devices popularly referred to as "phablets" because they straddle the boundary (Samsung Galaxy Note series).
So what differentiates phones and tablets? Phones can make phone calls but tablets could easily have phone capabilities added, and can make phone calls with Skype or Google Talk in any case. Phones have better cameras, for now. Tablets are bigger, except when they're not. Both phones and tablets can have 3G and 4G data, GPS, and NFC. The two leading mobile OSes (iOS and Android) run on phones and tablets.
Some people, especially those who use the smartphone frequently to make phone calls, will prefer a device small enough to put in a pocket. Some, especially those who use the tablet primarily for data, will prefer a device with a larger screen. (I'm in the latter camp; if I could have something the size of my Nexus 7 that could also make phone calls on the rare occasion that I actually talk on the phone I would buy it and give up my smartphone. Once there is a similar tablet with 4G LTE data I might buy a good Bluetooth headset and do that anyway.) Some will continue to carry both a large and a small device. And people who do a lot of writing will replace the larger device with a convertible notebook (or a tablet/notebook hybrid: ASUS Transformer, Microsoft Surface, HP Envy x2) so they can have a real keyboard.
It is possible that "tablet" as a distinct product category will die in five years. But products that we would recognize as tablets will not die. Netbooks haven't died either; they've just grown up into low-end Ultrabooks. The ASUS VivoBook x202e is an excellent example of what Netbooks wanted to be, and at the current price of under $500 it's almost cheap enough. This fall's Haswell-based Ultrabooks will be even less expensive, perhaps enough so to finally turn the Ultrabook into a hit.
Why not a 50" monitor instead? (http://gizmodo.com/5994765/seiki-50+inch-4k-tv-eyes+on-how-the-hell-is-a-tv-this-beautiful-so-cheap) It's being marketed as a TV, but you can connect to any video card that has an HDMI output and enough GPU power to light up all those pixels. $1500 counts as cheap for a technology at this stage of development; the $500 30" model is next year's product.
That Wikipedia article is a great summary of the various 4K systems. If I hadn't already commented on this subject I'd give you a mod point.
Mathematically it's not 4K, but it is a resolution that the industry is calling "4K" for marketing reasons. (Anything that is at least 2x 1080p in each direction qualifies.) It's annoying to see a mathematically incorrect term be used, but at least it's a convenient shorthand for the next generation of display products.
Theatrical 4K projectors are mostly 4096x2160, at least for now. Home equipment will converge on 3840x2160 because it's easier to upscale 1080p content to that resolution, and low-end theatrical projectors for small theaters might end up using the same resolution because of the possibility of using components designed for consumer devices.
Moving to solar will likely mean moving to less of a 24/7 economy. We'll have to cut back on nighttime activity. We'll have some nighttime power from wind so the world won't go completely dark at night. As for energy for home heating, storage is a solvable problem. Put a bank of rocks under your house, heat them during the day when energy is available, and use the stored heat to keep the house warm at night. Another energy storage technology - carbon nanotube ultracapacitors - is under development and could solve many of these problems. A device with the energy density of lithium ion batteries but with a lifetime of MILLIONS of charge cycles... if it can be produced at a reasonable price it would eliminate most of the objections to electric vehicles. Reference: http://web.mit.edu/erc/spotlights/ultracapacitor.html
XP isn't a fix of ME. Windows ME was a dead end, the last of its lineage, and a step backward from its predecessor, Windows 98. Windows XP is the successor to Windows 2000, taking what was already a decent Microsoft OS and improving it.
To carry on the history: Windows Vista was a release with some good points but also some serious flaws; not as bad as ME but not good either. Its biggest problems were with hardware support: Microsoft changed the way device drivers worked but lots of hardware never got the new drivers, and it came with Aero as new GUI eye candy at a time when most computers had graphics cards that were not powerful enough to run it. Most of the problems with Vista were fixed by the time Service Pack 1 was released, but public opinion had already written off Vista by then.
What we got as Vista isn't really what Microsoft had in mind at the time. They had been working on a much more ambitious upgrade with the codename Longhorn, but it turned out to be too ambitious for their development skill and/or the hardware of the time. We STILL haven't seen Microsoft release some of the things they were planning to put in Longhorn.
Windows 7 cleaned up the rough edges of Vista and improved performance, but mostly it was more accepted because hardware and drivers had caught up. Windows 8 made a radical break from the Windows UI, introducing the Modern (nee Metro) UI that is halfheartedly integrated with Windows and which has serious failings for power users, like the inability to have unlimited applications on the screen and poor handling of multi-monitor setups. The Modern UI is an attempt at creating an UI that works on both PCs and tablets; to my mind less successfully than Unity does.
Running XP in a VM still helps. You can use the VM just to run the medical software and do everything else in the supported host OS. You can also do the firewalling in the host OS and severely limit what gets into the VM.
64-bit XP never got any acceptance in consumer PCs and rightly so, because the drivers needed for many consumer devices were never written. It wasn't just sound cards as another comment implied, it was also all the other stuff that people connect to their PCs. Good luck getting that cheap printer or scanner, TV tuner, etc. to work on the 64-bit version.
64-bit XP did get used in engineering settings. At the time I told people to avoid it unless they had a specific need for its support for large applications.
The story changed with Vista. You needed new drivers anyway and most devices got both 32 and 64-bit driver support. (The fact that you had to offer both to get permission to use the "Designed for Windows" logo didn't hurt.) But the 64-bit version didn't really go mainstream until Windows 7 came along; by then ordinary desktop users were buying PCs with enough memory to need it.
Nothing new here really. Some early 32-bit processors couldn't actually address 4GB of memory, and it was a long time before anybody produced a motherboard for a 32-bit processor that could hold 4GB. (It never happened for the 386 or 486 although those CPUs had 32 address lines.) No Alpha CPU ever had 64 real address lines, and I doubt that any SPARC or Power CPU has to date.
100% of the console business compares favorably in volume to the 10% of the PC business that AMD has now. It's a considerable increase in volume for them, whereas for Intel it would be a drop in the bucket. And AMD's APUs were made to order for the console business, giving the console makers a single chip solution. Intel's integrated graphics are inadequate for game consoles; they would have had to partner with NVidia on a two-chip setup.
The console contracts aren't going to help AMD regain a place in the heart of computing enthusiasts. Nothing the company does may ever do that. But it will help them get up their production volumes for parts intended for mainstream PCs and laptops, and meanwhile make a bit of money; that may be enough to keep AMD alive as an Avis to Intel's Hertz.
AMD is good at serving the low-margin part of the CPU business. They've been doing it with x86 in PCs for years now, so doing it in the console business isn't a big change for them.
Sure, I'll try that. Under my 32-bit Linux OS. Works just fine, since 32-bit Linux has access to more than 4GB RAM, it just can't give all of it to one process. It wouldn't be a notable success on Windows, where the 32-bit version has 4GB of address space, period.
That said, I'd still choose to run the 64-bit version of Linux in that scenario.
64-big x86-64 code only suffers a slight size penalty in real-world applications; I've seen it range anywhere from zero to 10%. The longer pointers cost you but there aren't that many of them in typical code, and you get some code size back by gaining access to more registers.
This led to an interesting phenomenon in the early days of x86-64: programs recompiled for 64-bit architectures typically had a 20% speed advantage on Athlon 64 systems but no advantage at all or a slight slowdown on Pentium 4 systems. The AMD systems were execution-unit bound, and doing fewer but larger instructions was a win. The P4 was instruction-fetch bound (the design's memory bandwidth for instruction fetch was lacking) and so the fact that the programs were bigger hurt the P4's performance. AMD was also helped by the fact that the code optimization in compilers at the time was tuned for AMD processors as they had gotten to market earlier.
And you can't customize the thickness of those edges. Not in any easy way anyway. I find them difficult to use with a mouse; it would be even harder with a trackpad, no matter how well executed. This is an Ubuntu/Unity problem, not a Dell problem.
Dell desktop systems can still be extensively customized. Their laptop line has moved toward less ability to customize; the company just isn't offering as large a range of component choices as they once did. The trend toward ultraportables is a big factor; you can't easily offer a choice of five CPU models when the CPU is soldered to the motherboard.