A Cray 2 requires 200KW. The panels claim 80% efficiency, so you'd need 200/0.8 = 250KW. Sun intensity, ignoring atmosphere and with optimal panel orientation, is around 1.3KW/M^2. So you'd need 192 M^2 of panels. In practice you'd need space for panel orientation gear, plus atmospheric attenuation would reduce power, so you'd need rather more than that, but it's entirely practical. However, no running the Cray at night.
The Cray 2 had 1.3GF of floating-point processing power. A single i7 chip has 109GF, double-precision. The Cray 2 was without doubt one of the coolest looking computers ever built, but the technology is rather dated. You could comfortably emulate it on a modern desktop.
Thunderbolt cables have part of the interface electronics physically in the connector body - that's why they cost so much. It also means you can swap a thunderbolt copper cable for a thunderbolt fiber cable without having to worry about the equipment at the ends having an exotic fiber interface.
I don't know if you can even get a thunderbolt fiber cable yet. They don't go any faster than copper, but they do go longer, which could be handy in a few niche applications. I'm thinking supercomputer and cluster interconnects. Could be cheaper than infiniband, and lower latency than ten-gig ethernet.
It's just another sensational summary. Happens all the time.
Scientist: I discovered an interesting new feature of the McFluffington-Mickel babbletransform that could have implications in finding more selective drugs to target tumor cells. Media: MIT SCIENTIST FINDS CURE FOR CANCER! Sciensist: I said nothing of the sort!
From a technical perspective, big difference. From a business perspective, not so much. The business side doesn't care about just how the technology is built. What matters is that mainframes and server farms are a black box in a company-controlled office built with company-controlled hardware where vast amounts of data are stored and processed. Centralisation and specialisation.
And if they can't get any locally... that's why so many companies are lobbying for more H1-B visas. There are plenty of American tech workers who'll work for peanuts, but plenty more elsewhere who'll work for just the crumbs.
Even not having an account in the first place won't stop them. Every time you see a facebook 'like' button on a webpage, Facebook knows where you are. They build web history profiles even of non-users. It doesn't give them nearly so much data to process as someone with an account could, but they do what they can with it.
We went through similar reporting in the UK on the tube/bus bombings. I watched that reporting as it happened, on two channels at once - not because I care to be that up-to-date, but because the reporting itsself interested me. Sky News and BBC. Both reported a lot of things which were soon after revealed to be false - varying estimates not just for the casualties, but the number of bombs!
This is what the public seems to demand now. News reporting just seconds behind events, from the front line, as it happens. That means there isn't time to check facts. If a station stops to check facts, a competitor will report things first.
If you want to see some really interesting 'reporting' try the biased sites and internet news. Plenty of speculation reporting as fact there, and an effective industry of 'experts' who can be interviewed to say anything on anything. The leading groundless speculation right now is that this must be an Al Quida attack, on the grounds that the bombs were constructed using pressure cookers as components, and some Al Quida bombs in the past have used pressure cookers too. That, and a middle-eastern-looking bearded man was seen in the crowd on some mobile phone footage. The conclusion may be correct, but the reasoning isn't.
Simply falsifying DNS won't do it - you can't impersonate an https site without a cert. Easiest way I see would be to intercept logins to non-https sites, and rely on the user reusing passwords.
That's because the Pi chip doesn't have ethernet at all. Instead the ethernet port is connected via USB internally. It was the only way to meet the low-cost requirement, but comes with a performance cost: USB takes considerable processor time for bulk data transfers.
The onboard ethernet is actually connected via USB, and a second network port would have to be connected the same way. It's doable, but not really optimal. Fine for those on low-bandwidth connections, but many internet services now would easily overwhelm it. It's only a 100mbit port at best, and the processor might be a limitation before you reach that point.
Someone has to control it, and it is an unavoidable fact that that control will ultimately rest with either those who control the hardware or those who are able to coerce them. Building large-scale network infrastructure is beyond the budget of volunteer groups, so there are only two options: Either the government controls the internet, or private corporations control the internet. Pick your poison.
That sounds like the democrats too. They put on a big show together of fighting over things, but on most issues they are really very similar. Just find me any recent act passed by congress in which they gave up any significant amount of power.
Even when the parties aren't screwing the people over, there are lobbyists to make sure they do. Look at healthcare reform, for example: It started out as a well-intentioned plan to set up a minimal level of universal health care. By the time the lobbyists from the insurance industry were done, all it did was compel everyone to have an insurance policy and hand out mountains of money in subsidies. Not even subsidies to directly pay for medical care, but subsidies to private insurance companies.
I agree that the Republicans are, on balance, worse than the democrats... but that just means the democrats are less bad.
The power to control the internet rests with whomever has either control over the hardware, or control over those who have control over the hardware. They can blow all the hot air they want about an internet 'free from censorship and government control' - but in the end, a lot of that internet runs on hardware that isn't located in the US. If China, or Iran, or Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan, or Turkey, or any other country with a government that decides the internet needs to be censored of 'harmful' political or social content, then there is nothing the US government can do about it.
The terms get muddied. Net neutrality is regulation: Regulation to prevent service providers from doing things which are in their business interests, but would be detrimental to the internet as a whole. So an 'anti-regulatory agenda' is in opposition to net neutrality. Right now the internet is built in part on a set of very informal 'unwritten rules,' and it's dubious how well those will hold up as commercial pressures become ever greater.
There are plenty of examples in history of governments 'devaluing' gold or silver coin by sneakily issueing a new coin made of an alloy of lower precious metal content.
I have in my shopping bag a slice of fish labeled 'contains fish' and a yogurt labeled 'contains milk product.' I've also seen peanut butter with a 'contains nuts' warning, but not recently.
Which is exactly what the annoying neighbor wants: Once you shoot the drone down, then he can sue you for destruction of property.
This is another use of a very common, and very powerful, trick: 1. Taunt opponent, provoking them into striking back. If they don't, taunt harder. 2. Once they strike back, call upon authority to come to your aid.
It's the same basic approach be it the school bully trying to provoke a victim into hitting him so that victim will be expelled for assault, or a difficult neighbor harassing you with littering, noise and things thrown over the fence in the hope you'll hit him and he can have you arrested for assault. Drones are just another avenue to exploit an age-old trick.
It lacks a way to communicate the other way privately and hands-free. Voice recognition tech is fairly good now, but hardly silent - it'll get really annoying on the train when everyone is chanting 'page page page page' as they read. Maybe a future version can incorporate eye tracking, or subvocalisation detection, but it'll be years before that tech is compact, reliable and cheap enough.
If it's blocked by one ISP, you can blame a mistake. If it's blocked by many ISPs, then the directive must have come from somewhere. I can only see three classes of organisation that could have the power to issue a block order: 1. Government. 2. Whatever organisation supplies Australian ISPs with the list of child porn sites to block. Wouldn't be the first time - remember when all major ISPs in the UK filtered Wikipedia, because our national blocklist provider decided an album cover was child porn? 3. A copyright enforcement contractor that mass-mails block requests to all ISPs.
Three seems unlikely, because this isn't common practice in Australia - some ISP should have kicked up a fuss. Which means either 1 or 2 are possibilities.
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A Cray 2 requires 200KW. The panels claim 80% efficiency, so you'd need 200/0.8 = 250KW. Sun intensity, ignoring atmosphere and with optimal panel orientation, is around 1.3KW/M^2. So you'd need 192 M^2 of panels. In practice you'd need space for panel orientation gear, plus atmospheric attenuation would reduce power, so you'd need rather more than that, but it's entirely practical. However, no running the Cray at night.
The Cray 2 had 1.3GF of floating-point processing power. A single i7 chip has 109GF, double-precision. The Cray 2 was without doubt one of the coolest looking computers ever built, but the technology is rather dated. You could comfortably emulate it on a modern desktop.
*European, not handegg.
Thunderbolt cables have part of the interface electronics physically in the connector body - that's why they cost so much. It also means you can swap a thunderbolt copper cable for a thunderbolt fiber cable without having to worry about the equipment at the ends having an exotic fiber interface.
I don't know if you can even get a thunderbolt fiber cable yet. They don't go any faster than copper, but they do go longer, which could be handy in a few niche applications. I'm thinking supercomputer and cluster interconnects. Could be cheaper than infiniband, and lower latency than ten-gig ethernet.
It's just another sensational summary. Happens all the time.
Scientist: I discovered an interesting new feature of the McFluffington-Mickel babbletransform that could have implications in finding more selective drugs to target tumor cells.
Media: MIT SCIENTIST FINDS CURE FOR CANCER!
Sciensist: I said nothing of the sort!
From a technical perspective, big difference. From a business perspective, not so much. The business side doesn't care about just how the technology is built. What matters is that mainframes and server farms are a black box in a company-controlled office built with company-controlled hardware where vast amounts of data are stored and processed. Centralisation and specialisation.
And if they can't get any locally... that's why so many companies are lobbying for more H1-B visas. There are plenty of American tech workers who'll work for peanuts, but plenty more elsewhere who'll work for just the crumbs.
Not to an ant.
The outside world may be basically a 2D space, but the colony itsself is not. Ant colonies are a maze of twisty passages.
Advertising keeps the economy running. If everyone stopped buying pointless crap they don't really need or want, we'd see mass-unemployment in a year.
Even not having an account in the first place won't stop them. Every time you see a facebook 'like' button on a webpage, Facebook knows where you are. They build web history profiles even of non-users. It doesn't give them nearly so much data to process as someone with an account could, but they do what they can with it.
We went through similar reporting in the UK on the tube/bus bombings. I watched that reporting as it happened, on two channels at once - not because I care to be that up-to-date, but because the reporting itsself interested me. Sky News and BBC. Both reported a lot of things which were soon after revealed to be false - varying estimates not just for the casualties, but the number of bombs!
This is what the public seems to demand now. News reporting just seconds behind events, from the front line, as it happens. That means there isn't time to check facts. If a station stops to check facts, a competitor will report things first.
If you want to see some really interesting 'reporting' try the biased sites and internet news. Plenty of speculation reporting as fact there, and an effective industry of 'experts' who can be interviewed to say anything on anything. The leading groundless speculation right now is that this must be an Al Quida attack, on the grounds that the bombs were constructed using pressure cookers as components, and some Al Quida bombs in the past have used pressure cookers too. That, and a middle-eastern-looking bearded man was seen in the crowd on some mobile phone footage. The conclusion may be correct, but the reasoning isn't.
Simply falsifying DNS won't do it - you can't impersonate an https site without a cert. Easiest way I see would be to intercept logins to non-https sites, and rely on the user reusing passwords.
That's because the Pi chip doesn't have ethernet at all. Instead the ethernet port is connected via USB internally. It was the only way to meet the low-cost requirement, but comes with a performance cost: USB takes considerable processor time for bulk data transfers.
My Atom mini-ITX router was running happily at 14W.
The onboard ethernet is actually connected via USB, and a second network port would have to be connected the same way. It's doable, but not really optimal. Fine for those on low-bandwidth connections, but many internet services now would easily overwhelm it. It's only a 100mbit port at best, and the processor might be a limitation before you reach that point.
Someone has to control it, and it is an unavoidable fact that that control will ultimately rest with either those who control the hardware or those who are able to coerce them. Building large-scale network infrastructure is beyond the budget of volunteer groups, so there are only two options: Either the government controls the internet, or private corporations control the internet. Pick your poison.
That sounds like the democrats too. They put on a big show together of fighting over things, but on most issues they are really very similar. Just find me any recent act passed by congress in which they gave up any significant amount of power.
Even when the parties aren't screwing the people over, there are lobbyists to make sure they do. Look at healthcare reform, for example: It started out as a well-intentioned plan to set up a minimal level of universal health care. By the time the lobbyists from the insurance industry were done, all it did was compel everyone to have an insurance policy and hand out mountains of money in subsidies. Not even subsidies to directly pay for medical care, but subsidies to private insurance companies.
I agree that the Republicans are, on balance, worse than the democrats... but that just means the democrats are less bad.
The power to control the internet rests with whomever has either control over the hardware, or control over those who have control over the hardware. They can blow all the hot air they want about an internet 'free from censorship and government control' - but in the end, a lot of that internet runs on hardware that isn't located in the US. If China, or Iran, or Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan, or Turkey, or any other country with a government that decides the internet needs to be censored of 'harmful' political or social content, then there is nothing the US government can do about it.
The terms get muddied. Net neutrality is regulation: Regulation to prevent service providers from doing things which are in their business interests, but would be detrimental to the internet as a whole. So an 'anti-regulatory agenda' is in opposition to net neutrality. Right now the internet is built in part on a set of very informal 'unwritten rules,' and it's dubious how well those will hold up as commercial pressures become ever greater.
Most of them are.
There are plenty of examples in history of governments 'devaluing' gold or silver coin by sneakily issueing a new coin made of an alloy of lower precious metal content.
I have in my shopping bag a slice of fish labeled 'contains fish' and a yogurt labeled 'contains milk product.' I've also seen peanut butter with a 'contains nuts' warning, but not recently.
Which is exactly what the annoying neighbor wants: Once you shoot the drone down, then he can sue you for destruction of property.
This is another use of a very common, and very powerful, trick:
1. Taunt opponent, provoking them into striking back. If they don't, taunt harder.
2. Once they strike back, call upon authority to come to your aid.
It's the same basic approach be it the school bully trying to provoke a victim into hitting him so that victim will be expelled for assault, or a difficult neighbor harassing you with littering, noise and things thrown over the fence in the hope you'll hit him and he can have you arrested for assault. Drones are just another avenue to exploit an age-old trick.
That type of augmented reality requires processing power still far beyond the capabilities and power profile of a smartphone.
Give it another ten years.
It lacks a way to communicate the other way privately and hands-free. Voice recognition tech is fairly good now, but hardly silent - it'll get really annoying on the train when everyone is chanting 'page page page page' as they read. Maybe a future version can incorporate eye tracking, or subvocalisation detection, but it'll be years before that tech is compact, reliable and cheap enough.
If it's blocked by one ISP, you can blame a mistake. If it's blocked by many ISPs, then the directive must have come from somewhere. I can only see three classes of organisation that could have the power to issue a block order:
1. Government.
2. Whatever organisation supplies Australian ISPs with the list of child porn sites to block. Wouldn't be the first time - remember when all major ISPs in the UK filtered Wikipedia, because our national blocklist provider decided an album cover was child porn?
3. A copyright enforcement contractor that mass-mails block requests to all ISPs.
Three seems unlikely, because this isn't common practice in Australia - some ISP should have kicked up a fuss. Which means either 1 or 2 are possibilities.