and memory effect slowly crippled their capacity, and there was no way back. Did that trick you've mentioned. Never worked.
Not to be an ass, but did you ever consider that maybe it wasn't memory effect? Maybe they were just lousy batteries wearing out too quickly? Maybe the charger had a problem with it?
There are many potential problems, but memory effect actually takes some work. You not only have to not discharge the batteries all the way - you have to discharge them to almost the exact same point each time.
As far as I'm concerned, if the battery loses the ability to store the same amount of power as it did when you first bought it, then it has a problem with battery memory
Battery memory is a specific problem with specific preventative measures and fixes. Would you call a lead acid battery's tendency to sulfate if left uncharged(or deeply discharged) memory? While it does lead to lower capacity and shortened life, it's not the same thing as NiCad memory.
From my understanding, LiIon tech currently degrades with age - it doesn't matter how often the battery is charged*, it's charge state or anything. It's pure degradation over time - it could be sitting in a controlled climate warehouse and it'd still be substantially worse after only a year or three. And it's permanently lost - so I'd hardly call it a memory issue. At least with memory problems you can more or less fix the batteries without reprocessing them.
Granted, you'd be stuck with yesteryear's speeds, but you just don't (well..shouldn't) need 3GHz to browse the web and write email. Anyone know any good notebook like devices using embedded type hw? Hopefully something that's still got a decent screen?
For stuff like that I'd suggest the $100 (Now $199?) OLPC design. It's got quite a lifespan. Don't know if the screen would be 'decent' though.
Still, the problem with 'decent screen' is that the screen is one of the biggest power users in a laptop. Especially if you go throwing low watt components in.
You could try underclocking your laptop, though many systems will automatically do it to conserve power.
So what happens if the vehicle has to make a series of emergency stops (or a series of emergency actions)? Then the vehicle gets lousy mileage, just like somebody pulling jackrabbit stops today.
If a car powered by this technology wrecks or impacts with another car, would it not be feasible that a significant amount charge would be depleted during an impact because the energy could not be fully recovered?
At the point of an accident, the charge on the caps is irrelevant except for arranging to discharge it in a preferably safe manner. They're more worried about preventing injury to the occupants at that point.
just get the guy riding in the car behind you to bump you a few times and he's out of 'gas'.
Bumps wouldn't do it. Hitting it hard enough to set off airbags probably would. Of course, at that point the police are going to want to talk to you.
Seriously, I see this being more useful for non-plug hybrids than a pure electric vehicle - An EV already has enough battery capacity to take the current of a pretty hard stop. With a current type hybrid they're constantly working on making the battery smaller - it only really needs to be able to hold power for one run up to speed, and one deceleration, after all. They have to oversize the battery for that use to get the current capacity. Otherwise you just can't pull enough power out to get good acceleration, or be able to charge the battery on decel.
Depending on how long it can hold the charge - might be useful for portable products that use a lot of juice quickly, but can also be plugged in quickly. At half the storage density of LiIon, it'd better be quite a bit cheaper, or use charging/regulation tech that takes almost no space in order to make it worth it.
[i]too many people at home actually make use of spreadsheets, even when preparing tax returns.[/i]
And I'd imagine that with the right software both the PS3 and XBox 360 would make quite acceptable work machines capable of running a spreadsheet program, for example, with ease.
I mean, what does a desktop computer have that a 360 can't do, that's relevant to your standard user? The only thing I can think of is resolution loss - a 17" LCD Monitor still has more resolution than most HDTVs.
Another point would be if computer penetration has reached the point that the only people who don't have computers choose not to have one, and many who do have one aren't replacing it quite as often - I mean, go from a 3 year/36 month average to a 3.5 year/42 month replacement average and you'll cut PC sales by 15%.
And, at least for normal productivity uses, there hasn't been a huge need to upgrade in the last three to four years. Does Office 2003 really do that much better than 98 or 2k? Heck, 2007 has huge interface changes for upgraders to contend with.
My answer would be 'slightly less than a megabyte', or 'a megabyte' if I'm in a hurry.
That's why this took so long to become a problem - even 7% difference can be explained by rounding, but when you start approaching TB levels, it's significant enough to matter.
Hit submit instead of preview by accident, rest of post
As to the laughable post I saw further down that indicated gold was akin to snake oil? Somebody needs to take an electrical refresher course. Gold IS a better conductor than copper, it just costs too damn much to wire everything with so we go with the next best alternative. However in high(er) end theatre setups (mine tops $10k without the cables) gold connectors are the way to go.
What makes Gold good for connectors is that it doesn't corrode or oxidize like copper/silver will, oxidation increases resistance.
For the record; when you're on the cusp of making a $5000 equipment purchase it's quite easy at that point to convince the salesman to throw in some Monster cabling gratis. That's how I get the quality of the Monster cables without suffering the ridiculous markup.
Then you paid the right price for them; none of us will argue with using monster cables if you got them for free.
This seems to be at odds with the rest of your post. I'm confused; you admit that you can suffer pops and static using cheap cables for digital audio, but you don't believe in high-end shielded digital audio cables?!?
Because the signal will make it through intact on any half decent cable that meets specifications? Heck, in my earlier post the cheapest cable still had shielding. Better quality cable enables longer runs before interference shows up- not better sound.
We're not talking 'bottom line' here, we're talking 'sub monster generic cables that are still well constructed'.
Except that I don't "download" my movie soundtracks from my DVD player to my receiver and then to my speakers before pressing "play" - this has to happen in real-time and reach each of my six speakers in the proper order and without interference at any level.
The data is traveling over dedicated circuits with short runs. It's not even a high speed data link shows the max speed of data transmission of 3Mhz, with a 6Mhz clock. An appropriate length of Cat3 could handle that, much less a $5 cat 6 cable.
People consider cables to be unimportant with digital signals because they confuse ages old analog "snow" with a series of digital 1s and 0s. The "snow" doesn't go away when you convert to digital, instead it turns into pixelization or blocky bits on the screen, motion blur, etc. As for the sound arena it turns into hums, pops, crackles or gaps in the sound IE Digital bit errors are MORE visible and hearable than analogue distortion. People don't worry about cable as much with digital data for the reason I mentioned - As long as the distortions don't start flipping bits, you're getting the same signal out as you put in.
when the signal is interrupted by any of the hundreds of sources of RFI / EMI in a residential setting. (That, or the power shifting as a major appliance is turned on/off during the viewing period).
Like these aren't present in businesses? If it was such a bit deal, why does my UTP network work at speeds 100X that of audio traffic?
People like to jump on the "Monster is evil!" bandwagon because the cables are horrifically over priced. I'll admit that their margins are absurd, but to compare a proper THX grade monster cable to a $10-15 store-bought jobbie? Please.
I have. I prefered the $10 RCA cables I got from Radioshack a while back over the $40 Monster equivalent. I think you're confusing the <$5 bargain basement cables with 'decent generics'. The problem I have with stores like best buy and walmart is that they often jump directly from the ultra-cheaply built yumcha brand to decent quality but highly priced monsters.
Well your argument here is a bit off, because you're not using the Ethernet cable to PLAY the audio. Now, if we were talking about POTS line used for networking, interfernce suddenly DOES become an important factor. Ethernet cabling is more expensive than RJ45 because besides there being more wires, they need to be twisted to resist interference.
A lot of POTS lines are twisted though. Cat3 anyone? A lot of phone cords aren't twisted because they're short and the quality of data a phone needs to carry is exceptionally limited.
A standard speaker cable is just ONE plain old copper wire
Actually, it's two wires for a speaker cable.
and if you'll remember from your digital systems class, two straight copper wires is an antenna, a twisted pair is not. So, the cheapo audio cables may not be shielded in anyway, meaning they are more prone to interference. That hurts the signal, digital or analog. The more expensive ones will be shielded or twisted.
The point that the digital crowd are trying to make is that it doesn't matter if you have 100% of the signal remaining or 51% - as long as enough remains for the system to reconstruct the bits, you get the same signal out of the line as you put onto it. This isn't true with analogue(the run from the amp to the speaker). Better cables make sense there - longer runs, analogue, higher power.
Besides, we're generally not talking about the wire from the amp to the speaker, we're talking about the digital wire from the player to the receiver, which is a digital connection. There are people who claim that extremely expensive special digital cables costing hundreds of dollars a meter improve the sound for this connection. We're saying that it doesn't really matter as long as your cable meets specs. The extremely bad cheap cables might not work right, but a good quality generic will get the job done just as well as the monster cable+ crowd.
Digital data is just that. Digital: It doesn't matter whether the incoming bits would actually be.2/1.2, -.1/.8, it's all seen as 0 and 1. Noise is ignored until it's so bad that the receiving end can't sort out the 1&0, and can't recover using the normally included error correction systems. The cabling needed is set by design specs - which are set low for stuff like this.
If stuff was really this sensative, we wouldn't be pushing gigabit data streams over Unshielded Twisted Pair(UTP), and Ten/hundred gigabit streams over fiber.
Now, spending a few dollars on good quality cables makes a certain amount of sense from the standpoint that a good cable can handle more abuse than the cheapest you can get - the connector is usually easier to use, holds on tighter(so it doesn't wiggle loose), and can withstand more unpluggings before wearing out.
Hell, even today its not unreasonable to say: You need a core for the OS, a core for anti virus/trojen/spypware software, a core for the foreground app, a core for background tasks. 2-4 cores already reaonable.
I wouldn't segment that far, at least right now. A single core should be able to handle the OS, antivirus/spyware, and background tasks like handling non-video drivers like disk access, sound and network and still not be strained. My computer with a single core processer, just sitting there is 99% idle. Intensive disk browsing might get it up to 10% in spurts.
A smart OS with even halfway decent singlethreaded programs should be able to move these tasks between CPUs as necessary for load balancing.
With a dual core you'd be able to play a intensive single thread game and compress a DVD on the other core in the background without noticing anything but longer load times(and not even that if they're using different disks).
A dual core is probably on average best off not worrying about multithreaded applications yet - let the OS handle it. Get above that though, and smart applications will have substantial benefits to gain by multithreading.
Though using additional cores for AI enemies might make for interesting reviews: 'The enemies are real dumb on our ancient 5.0 Ghz Quadcore test bed, but are frighteningly intelligent on our 5.0 Ghz 64 Core GamerXtreme hyperchip!'
The 8800 GTX has 128 graphics pipelines - that is indeed a good amount of parallelization.
I agree that getting video games to take advantage of multiple cores isn't as easy as some people seem to think - OTOH, games already are massively parallelised. It's just that the parallelisation has already happened on dedicated hardware - a graphics card. Since the CPU tends not to be the bottleneck, it wouldn't benefit from a faster CPU anyway, whether that's higher GHz or more cores.
CPU right now might not be the bottleneck - but it is a concern. Graphics cards enable great eye candy, but just as an example, AI units* are still quite dumb. I've read some reviews where they had to scale back the AI for units, go to more scripting because machines couldn't handle the computational expense of AI. We're talking about where going to scripting to essentially fake AI can reduce CPU load for that unit ~100X. With more cores, you'd be able to make the enemies smarter. Go into more detail with the physics models, etc...
Sure, it's going to require a shift in skill set for game programmers - but they have to deal with new engines all the time anyways. Heck, it'd only take one company making a massively parallelized engine and other companies can license the tech to make their own games. Even better if the company produces a non-parallel optimized version of the engine that can take the same inputs, so people with single or dual core systems can still play the game at a decent efficiency.
Right now I only have a dual core system; what I see happening is that a CPU hungry program like a game ends up on one core while the other stuff like CPU and background systems end up on the other. So a dual core does help me out a fair bit, but doesn't double performance.
It'll get better if they improve game threading, but to truly double performance I'll probably need 4 cores.
I figure many(IE more than four) core systems are about four years away. An eternity in computer terms, of course.
A properly functioning word processor can already do pretty much everything 99.99% of what a user asks of it as fast as the user can tell it to do something, even on the bottom line processor.
Today's video games, sure, aren't going to benefit much from multicore. But I disagree that the benefits for future games will top out at 2. I mean - you could have 1 core handling user input and processing, 1 core handling the physics enviroment, 1 core for unit AI, 1 core for graphics information. There's a quad core right there.
Business and scientific apps will see some beyond that, but memory tends to be the bottleneck there- we'd be better off increasing memory bandwidth and latency than clock speed
Then they can start worrying about beefing up memory bandwidth - I've read about some technologies in the pipe that will help with this. And the scientific community can always use more bandwidth - they are one of the larger users of supercomputers, and this might take a project from 'Need to rent 24hrs on the supercomputer for $$$' to 'I can run this on my work computer for a month/week to get the same results for $'.
True, and it's up to the organization holding an event as to whether they recognize the pass. For example, I might hold an event and specifically ban Andy Rooney because I didn't like one of his pieces 7.3982 years ago, disallow the NYT because I think that they're a 'rag', yet invite Dan of Dan's Data because I think he's brilliant.
It gets a little more complicated with government agencies - especially those that deal with crime, but I think their general policies are 'Large Local organizations first'. If there's room left, then let smaller local agencies and big national ones in on the press conference.
Ok, so Canada doesn't split crimes into Misdemeanor and Felony levels. The USA generally considers fine level type stuff as civil offenses, not criminal.
In the USA, the general difference between Felony and Misdemeanor is possible punishments - Felonies are punishable by more than a year in prison, while Misdemeanors are punishable by less than a year in jail. The majority of crimes in the USA are misdemeanors.
Still, I'll admit that the line between felonies and misdemeanors is fairly artificial today.
"Nice trading we got going there... it'd be a shame if anything were to happen to it..." Works every time.
Still need to grow a pair.
The USA has more to lose than Canada does. Ones that would put up trade barriers, whether they're called tariffs or embargoes generally lose out more than the one being blocked.
One thing that is worth looking into is if there are any moderate size online stores who have thier warehouse near you and if so whether they have a sales counter at said warehouse.
I live in North Dakota. Figure the odds. I'm not kidding about BB being about the only option.
Then look up 'political asylum' which Canada granted, at least for a time, to a US citizen fleeing what he managed to portray as a railroading court conviction. It involved scientology and a alleged biased judge.
Because of various people, I've started specifying 'crimes that would be crimes even if the person wasn't protesting'. IE a person doesn't automatically get a pass from criminal prosecution because they're 'protesting'.
precious the small percentage of anti-government malcontents are, to keep their government sane and honest.
I don't mind anti-government malcontents, heck, I'm a libertarian. Almost by definition I'm a malcontent. It's just that I confine my activities to legal ones that won't hurt my cause - my weapons in this fight are words, not rocks, bottles, and molotov cocktails. I also don't feel the need to engage in theatrics like codepink. And I think theatrics are a good word for it - they plan their activities beforehand for maximum attention.
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and memory effect slowly crippled their capacity, and there was no way back. Did that trick you've mentioned. Never worked.
Not to be an ass, but did you ever consider that maybe it wasn't memory effect? Maybe they were just lousy batteries wearing out too quickly? Maybe the charger had a problem with it?
There are many potential problems, but memory effect actually takes some work. You not only have to not discharge the batteries all the way - you have to discharge them to almost the exact same point each time.
As far as I'm concerned, if the battery loses the ability to store the same amount of power as it did when you first bought it, then it has a problem with battery memory
Battery memory is a specific problem with specific preventative measures and fixes. Would you call a lead acid battery's tendency to sulfate if left uncharged(or deeply discharged) memory? While it does lead to lower capacity and shortened life, it's not the same thing as NiCad memory.
From my understanding, LiIon tech currently degrades with age - it doesn't matter how often the battery is charged*, it's charge state or anything. It's pure degradation over time - it could be sitting in a controlled climate warehouse and it'd still be substantially worse after only a year or three. And it's permanently lost - so I'd hardly call it a memory issue. At least with memory problems you can more or less fix the batteries without reprocessing them.
*though this still wears the battery out.
Granted, you'd be stuck with yesteryear's speeds, but you just don't (well..shouldn't) need 3GHz to browse the web and write email. Anyone know any good notebook like devices using embedded type hw? Hopefully something that's still got a decent screen?
For stuff like that I'd suggest the $100 (Now $199?) OLPC design. It's got quite a lifespan. Don't know if the screen would be 'decent' though.
Still, the problem with 'decent screen' is that the screen is one of the biggest power users in a laptop. Especially if you go throwing low watt components in.
You could try underclocking your laptop, though many systems will automatically do it to conserve power.
So what happens if the vehicle has to make a series of emergency stops (or a series of emergency actions)?
Then the vehicle gets lousy mileage, just like somebody pulling jackrabbit stops today.
If a car powered by this technology wrecks or impacts with another car, would it not be feasible that a significant amount charge would be depleted during an impact because the energy could not be fully recovered?
At the point of an accident, the charge on the caps is irrelevant except for arranging to discharge it in a preferably safe manner. They're more worried about preventing injury to the occupants at that point.
just get the guy riding in the car behind you to bump you a few times and he's out of 'gas'.
Bumps wouldn't do it. Hitting it hard enough to set off airbags probably would. Of course, at that point the police are going to want to talk to you.
Seriously, I see this being more useful for non-plug hybrids than a pure electric vehicle - An EV already has enough battery capacity to take the current of a pretty hard stop. With a current type hybrid they're constantly working on making the battery smaller - it only really needs to be able to hold power for one run up to speed, and one deceleration, after all. They have to oversize the battery for that use to get the current capacity. Otherwise you just can't pull enough power out to get good acceleration, or be able to charge the battery on decel.
Depending on how long it can hold the charge - might be useful for portable products that use a lot of juice quickly, but can also be plugged in quickly. At half the storage density of LiIon, it'd better be quite a bit cheaper, or use charging/regulation tech that takes almost no space in order to make it worth it.
[i]too many people at home actually make use of spreadsheets, even when preparing tax returns.[/i]
And I'd imagine that with the right software both the PS3 and XBox 360 would make quite acceptable work machines capable of running a spreadsheet program, for example, with ease.
I mean, what does a desktop computer have that a 360 can't do, that's relevant to your standard user? The only thing I can think of is resolution loss - a 17" LCD Monitor still has more resolution than most HDTVs.
Another point would be if computer penetration has reached the point that the only people who don't have computers choose not to have one, and many who do have one aren't replacing it quite as often - I mean, go from a 3 year/36 month average to a 3.5 year/42 month replacement average and you'll cut PC sales by 15%.
And, at least for normal productivity uses, there hasn't been a huge need to upgrade in the last three to four years. Does Office 2003 really do that much better than 98 or 2k? Heck, 2007 has huge interface changes for upgraders to contend with.
people on the street also tend to round.
My answer would be 'slightly less than a megabyte', or 'a megabyte' if I'm in a hurry.
That's why this took so long to become a problem - even 7% difference can be explained by rounding, but when you start approaching TB levels, it's significant enough to matter.
Oh wait, we already have binary prefixes. NIST, the IEC, and IEEE highly encourage their use.
And the rest of the world continues to ignore them. I've seen some of their documents, and THEY don't even use them. How's that 'highly encouraging'?
Hit submit instead of preview by accident, rest of post
As to the laughable post I saw further down that indicated gold was akin to snake oil? Somebody needs to take an electrical refresher course. Gold IS a better conductor than copper, it just costs too damn much to wire everything with so we go with the next best alternative. However in high(er) end theatre setups (mine tops $10k without the cables) gold connectors are the way to go.
Gold is WORSE than copper at conductivity.
Gold: 22.1 (lower is better)
Copper: 17.1
Silver: 15.9
Iron: 96.1
What makes Gold good for connectors is that it doesn't corrode or oxidize like copper/silver will, oxidation increases resistance.
For the record; when you're on the cusp of making a $5000 equipment purchase it's quite easy at that point to convince the salesman to throw in some Monster cabling gratis. That's how I get the quality of the Monster cables without suffering the ridiculous markup.
Then you paid the right price for them; none of us will argue with using monster cables if you got them for free.
This seems to be at odds with the rest of your post. I'm confused; you admit that you can suffer pops and static using cheap cables for digital audio, but you don't believe in high-end shielded digital audio cables?!?
Because the signal will make it through intact on any half decent cable that meets specifications? Heck, in my earlier post the cheapest cable still had shielding. Better quality cable enables longer runs before interference shows up- not better sound.
We're not talking 'bottom line' here, we're talking 'sub monster generic cables that are still well constructed'.
Except that I don't "download" my movie soundtracks from my DVD player to my receiver and then to my speakers before pressing "play" - this has to happen in real-time and reach each of my six speakers in the proper order and without interference at any level.
The data is traveling over dedicated circuits with short runs. It's not even a high speed data link shows the max speed of data transmission of 3Mhz, with a 6Mhz clock. An appropriate length of Cat3 could handle that, much less a $5 cat 6 cable.
People consider cables to be unimportant with digital signals because they confuse ages old analog "snow" with a series of digital 1s and 0s. The "snow" doesn't go away when you convert to digital, instead it turns into pixelization or blocky bits on the screen, motion blur, etc. As for the sound arena it turns into hums, pops, crackles or gaps in the sound
IE Digital bit errors are MORE visible and hearable than analogue distortion. People don't worry about cable as much with digital data for the reason I mentioned - As long as the distortions don't start flipping bits, you're getting the same signal out as you put in.
when the signal is interrupted by any of the hundreds of sources of RFI / EMI in a residential setting. (That, or the power shifting as a major appliance is turned on/off during the viewing period).
Like these aren't present in businesses? If it was such a bit deal, why does my UTP network work at speeds 100X that of audio traffic?
People like to jump on the "Monster is evil!" bandwagon because the cables are horrifically over priced. I'll admit that their margins are absurd, but to compare a proper THX grade monster cable to a $10-15 store-bought jobbie? Please.
I have. I prefered the $10 RCA cables I got from Radioshack a while back over the $40 Monster equivalent. I think you're confusing the <$5 bargain basement cables with 'decent generics'. The problem I have with stores like best buy and walmart is that they often jump directly from the ultra-cheaply built yumcha brand to decent quality but highly priced monsters.
Let's look a bit of the spectrum:
$6.99 Gold Plated!
$14.99 Oxygen Free!
$16.99 Copper Shield
Now, is there anybody here who believes that they'd be able to hear the difference between these three cables when used to transmit digital data?
Well your argument here is a bit off, because you're not using the Ethernet cable to PLAY the audio. Now, if we were talking about POTS line used for networking, interfernce suddenly DOES become an important factor. Ethernet cabling is more expensive than RJ45 because besides there being more wires, they need to be twisted to resist interference.
A lot of POTS lines are twisted though. Cat3 anyone? A lot of phone cords aren't twisted because they're short and the quality of data a phone needs to carry is exceptionally limited.
A standard speaker cable is just ONE plain old copper wire
Actually, it's two wires for a speaker cable.
and if you'll remember from your digital systems class, two straight copper wires is an antenna, a twisted pair is not. So, the cheapo audio cables may not be shielded in anyway, meaning they are more prone to interference. That hurts the signal, digital or analog. The more expensive ones will be shielded or twisted.
The point that the digital crowd are trying to make is that it doesn't matter if you have 100% of the signal remaining or 51% - as long as enough remains for the system to reconstruct the bits, you get the same signal out of the line as you put onto it. This isn't true with analogue(the run from the amp to the speaker). Better cables make sense there - longer runs, analogue, higher power.
Besides, we're generally not talking about the wire from the amp to the speaker, we're talking about the digital wire from the player to the receiver, which is a digital connection. There are people who claim that extremely expensive special digital cables costing hundreds of dollars a meter improve the sound for this connection. We're saying that it doesn't really matter as long as your cable meets specs. The extremely bad cheap cables might not work right, but a good quality generic will get the job done just as well as the monster cable+ crowd.
Only for a standard LCD screen. What about those with 1600x1200 screens? And unit AI? 2 Million cores sounds about right... ;)
Umm... No. What are you even doing on /.?
.2/1.2, -.1/.8, it's all seen as 0 and 1. Noise is ignored until it's so bad that the receiving end can't sort out the 1&0, and can't recover using the normally included error correction systems. The cabling needed is set by design specs - which are set low for stuff like this.
Digital data is just that. Digital: It doesn't matter whether the incoming bits would actually be
If stuff was really this sensative, we wouldn't be pushing gigabit data streams over Unshielded Twisted Pair(UTP), and Ten/hundred gigabit streams over fiber.
Now, spending a few dollars on good quality cables makes a certain amount of sense from the standpoint that a good cable can handle more abuse than the cheapest you can get - the connector is usually easier to use, holds on tighter(so it doesn't wiggle loose), and can withstand more unpluggings before wearing out.
Hell, even today its not unreasonable to say: You need a core for the OS, a core for anti virus/trojen/spypware software, a core for the foreground app, a core for background tasks. 2-4 cores already reaonable.
I wouldn't segment that far, at least right now. A single core should be able to handle the OS, antivirus/spyware, and background tasks like handling non-video drivers like disk access, sound and network and still not be strained. My computer with a single core processer, just sitting there is 99% idle. Intensive disk browsing might get it up to 10% in spurts.
A smart OS with even halfway decent singlethreaded programs should be able to move these tasks between CPUs as necessary for load balancing.
With a dual core you'd be able to play a intensive single thread game and compress a DVD on the other core in the background without noticing anything but longer load times(and not even that if they're using different disks).
A dual core is probably on average best off not worrying about multithreaded applications yet - let the OS handle it. Get above that though, and smart applications will have substantial benefits to gain by multithreading.
Though using additional cores for AI enemies might make for interesting reviews: 'The enemies are real dumb on our ancient 5.0 Ghz Quadcore test bed, but are frighteningly intelligent on our 5.0 Ghz 64 Core GamerXtreme hyperchip!'
The 8800 GTX has 128 graphics pipelines - that is indeed a good amount of parallelization.
I agree that getting video games to take advantage of multiple cores isn't as easy as some people seem to think - OTOH, games already are massively parallelised. It's just that the parallelisation has already happened on dedicated hardware - a graphics card. Since the CPU tends not to be the bottleneck, it wouldn't benefit from a faster CPU anyway, whether that's higher GHz or more cores.
CPU right now might not be the bottleneck - but it is a concern. Graphics cards enable great eye candy, but just as an example, AI units* are still quite dumb. I've read some reviews where they had to scale back the AI for units, go to more scripting because machines couldn't handle the computational expense of AI. We're talking about where going to scripting to essentially fake AI can reduce CPU load for that unit ~100X. With more cores, you'd be able to make the enemies smarter. Go into more detail with the physics models, etc...
Sure, it's going to require a shift in skill set for game programmers - but they have to deal with new engines all the time anyways. Heck, it'd only take one company making a massively parallelized engine and other companies can license the tech to make their own games. Even better if the company produces a non-parallel optimized version of the engine that can take the same inputs, so people with single or dual core systems can still play the game at a decent efficiency.
*I'm essentially talking about NPCs here.
Right now I only have a dual core system; what I see happening is that a CPU hungry program like a game ends up on one core while the other stuff like CPU and background systems end up on the other. So a dual core does help me out a fair bit, but doesn't double performance.
It'll get better if they improve game threading, but to truly double performance I'll probably need 4 cores.
I figure many(IE more than four) core systems are about four years away. An eternity in computer terms, of course.
This sounds a lot like a '640k' quote to me.
A properly functioning word processor can already do pretty much everything 99.99% of what a user asks of it as fast as the user can tell it to do something, even on the bottom line processor.
Today's video games, sure, aren't going to benefit much from multicore. But I disagree that the benefits for future games will top out at 2. I mean - you could have 1 core handling user input and processing, 1 core handling the physics enviroment, 1 core for unit AI, 1 core for graphics information. There's a quad core right there.
Business and scientific apps will see some beyond that, but memory tends to be the bottleneck there- we'd be better off increasing memory bandwidth and latency than clock speed
Then they can start worrying about beefing up memory bandwidth - I've read about some technologies in the pipe that will help with this. And the scientific community can always use more bandwidth - they are one of the larger users of supercomputers, and this might take a project from 'Need to rent 24hrs on the supercomputer for $$$' to 'I can run this on my work computer for a month/week to get the same results for $'.
True, and it's up to the organization holding an event as to whether they recognize the pass. For example, I might hold an event and specifically ban Andy Rooney because I didn't like one of his pieces 7.3982 years ago, disallow the NYT because I think that they're a 'rag', yet invite Dan of Dan's Data because I think he's brilliant.
It gets a little more complicated with government agencies - especially those that deal with crime, but I think their general policies are 'Large Local organizations first'. If there's room left, then let smaller local agencies and big national ones in on the press conference.
That's one industry; and happens despite you saying that Canada bends over.
Play hardball a little more and you'd likely get better deals; despite running the country your way.
It's been a while now, but I seem to remember at least 1 DUI laden celebrity ended up being denied entry into Canada.
That's still enough compression to create the occasional artifacting problem that I can see.
Doubling the bit ratio would probably help. 1.5-2GB would help.
Ok, so Canada doesn't split crimes into Misdemeanor and Felony levels. The USA generally considers fine level type stuff as civil offenses, not criminal.
In the USA, the general difference between Felony and Misdemeanor is possible punishments - Felonies are punishable by more than a year in prison, while Misdemeanors are punishable by less than a year in jail. The majority of crimes in the USA are misdemeanors.
Still, I'll admit that the line between felonies and misdemeanors is fairly artificial today.
"Nice trading we got going there... it'd be a shame if anything were to happen to it..."
Works every time.
Still need to grow a pair.
The USA has more to lose than Canada does. Ones that would put up trade barriers, whether they're called tariffs or embargoes generally lose out more than the one being blocked.
One thing that is worth looking into is if there are any moderate size online stores who have thier warehouse near you and if so whether they have a sales counter at said warehouse.
I live in North Dakota. Figure the odds. I'm not kidding about BB being about the only option.
Then look up 'political asylum' which Canada granted, at least for a time, to a US citizen fleeing what he managed to portray as a railroading court conviction. It involved scientology and a alleged biased judge.
Because of various people, I've started specifying 'crimes that would be crimes even if the person wasn't protesting'. IE a person doesn't automatically get a pass from criminal prosecution because they're 'protesting'.
precious the small percentage of anti-government malcontents are, to keep their government sane and honest.
I don't mind anti-government malcontents, heck, I'm a libertarian. Almost by definition I'm a malcontent. It's just that I confine my activities to legal ones that won't hurt my cause - my weapons in this fight are words, not rocks, bottles, and molotov cocktails. I also don't feel the need to engage in theatrics like codepink. And I think theatrics are a good word for it - they plan their activities beforehand for maximum attention.
Canada's border, Canada's rules.
They want to deny entry on basis of an arrest, they may do so.
Just like the USA has the right(even if we don't do a good job of it), to limit immigrants by skillset.