Parent is a troll, but I'll answer this anyway (I'm bored).
Maybe you dumb US fuckers will stop shipping all your manufacturing away. -> Perhaps, when other countries stop bending over backwards to get jobs for their people. Simply put, their country wants these jobs more than ours do.
Why are these not manufactured in the US? -> Because, in all likelihood, it's cost prohibitive.
Why does the destruction of one plant cause this much harm? -> Because it accounted for 25% of the market. That's actually fairly large; however, most techs would argue that 25% of the market going under does not justify a 400% price increase. It is possible, but something seems kind of...off about the situation. We'll revisit the problem in a few months, and see what the fallout is. Personally, I'm finding it difficult to believe that large HD manufacturers do not have capacity to spare. But then, Seagate merged with Maxtor, so bad decisions abound.
Because you're all fucking shortsighted idiots. -> Natural disasters tend to hit everyone, at some point or another. Why, a little while back, there was this Hurricane called Katrina that...
There's no reason to rebuild. The HD market is under assault from the SSD market; hence, investing in HD manufacturing is seen as a losing proposition.
The current HD manufacturers can milk the shortage for all its worth, then their companies will die and be forgotten.
Bah. The lasers they want (X-Ray) can't be powered by a reasonable number of solar cells. You'd have to pepper the moon with solar cells to get enough energy to power one of those lasers.
If think the best idea they have come up with for powering those x-ray lasers involved detonating a nuclear fission bomb, and mirroring the resulting X-Rays toward the earth. Something complicated and single-use, like that.
And the atmosphere, even with the latest optics, is still something of an obstacle.
Oh yes. Lead-acid or lithium ion batteries are an excellent choice for rapid cycling and high currents. I don't think even NiCad is looking too hot there.
And yes, there are many ways of storing electricity, but it pushes up the price for your powerplant. And typically takes up more land, which solar already does a lot of.
And most importantly: batteries will store less power than a nuclear reactor can provide at full tilt. The old light-water reactors are limited, by law, to half their efficiency, because greater efficiency requires higher temperatures. They can easily double their power output by lifting those laws; not that doing so with 50 year old reactors is, in my opinion, a good time to start, but with newer ones, why not? What other technology do you know of would let you double your power output with your existing equipment?
Yes, but you'll still have somewhat corrosive salts touching metal pipes. With very few exceptions, that's a no-no.
It's kind of why nuclear powerplants tend to use relatively pure water. The nuclear chemistry of that water, what is put into it, and where its value should fall whenever they test it is rather exact.
I mean, nothing is safe if you're not willing to follow the basic safety requirements, which Fukushima apparently violated. Like smoking while filling the car up with gas. There are unavoidable risks, and then there are avoidable ones.
Planning for a Tsunami far in excess of that region's previously recorded history? I can understand that as an avoidable/unavoidable risk. Not having a gravitation-ally-inclined reservoir with which to flood the reactors with fresh water and halt an out of control reaction? Avoidable.
And once again, the more dangerous something is, the shorter the half-life is. Visiting an area immediately after a dropping a nuclear bomb? Very bad for your health. Visiting an area 60 years after dropping a nuclear bomb? Your health won't notice.
It's intermediate until we crack nuclear fusion. After which every nuclear fission proponent of every color will stop supporting nuclear fission, and move onto nuclear fusion. We really wouldn't be supporting a form of energy that is as....interesting...as nuclear fission if we hadn't already weighed the costs and benefits of all the other ones, and found this one favorable.
They performed a series of tests, on a live nuclear reactor, WITH (ALMOST) ALL THE SAFETIES DISENGAGED. Purposefully disengaged. For experiments. On a live reactor.
And one of the fail-safe pumps, I believe, that was supposed to work, was never actually tested. Something about the manufacturer wanted a bonus for completing the work (well, the workers wanted their bonus, and they needed to complete it by a certain date or ahead of schedule in order to collect), so they skipped the tests. I think it was declared a Worker's Victory, or something of some similar nonsense.
The point is, we have dedicated reactors, in the US, that we perform research in. Some of them are actually safe enough to walk around in. And while I am partial to return on investment, we reeeeeeeaaaaaaaaallllllllyyyyyy need to retire the Model-T of reactor designs.
Nothing is environmentally neutral. *Shhhhhhhhhh!* It's a big secret.
And as for the nuclear waste, the general rule is the more dangerous something is, the shorter the half-life it has. This is a general rule, with a few exceptions, but it tends to work.
And the sad part is, I remember when Dell didn't have to resort to cheap tricks to sell PCs. Speccing in non-standard and substandard parts, plus rolling over for every sad business brain-fart has destroyed that company. Such a pity, at one time their Just-In-Time business model was seen as a something of a wonder.
Try a new tactic. Go back to doing what made you successful in the first place. Put on a black turtleneck (if you must), and inform your customers that while their money means a lot to you, you simply cannot sell them machines that run like dogs anymore. If that laptop doesn't have at least 8 GBs of RAM and a 1 TB 7200 RPM HD or 256 GB SSD, with a separate video card, it cannot be sold. Your company depends on repeat business, correct?
Agreed. However, my point was that with all the problems they are running into with Bulldozer, they might be able to bridge the problem by modifying (hopefully slightly) their Phenom II design, and could spend a year or two punishing Intel. And I do mean punishing them.
And while games may not be designed to take advantage of those extra cores, I can think of a host of applications between the workstation - server range that could.
Virtual Machines, for starters. Video encoding for another. Databases love cores, last I checked. Web servers. Even most modern day operating systems like more cores. And that's not even tapping into the more interesting stuff out there.
If they (AMD) make more cores readily available, programmers will begin writing programs that take advantage of more cores. The optimizations of today, as you have pointed out, are barely using 2-3 cores, because that's what the vast majority of the market is likely to have.
Plus, there's geek cred. Who isn't going to boast about having 3 times the amount of cores of their neighbor, for less than a third the cost?
Is the cost to the public, in terms of liberty and money, far in excess of the cost of a few brain-dead stoners or meth-heads? Yes.
I'd take the 7-11 potheads over the J. Edgars any day of the week.
And while we have lots of {social, moral, economic} data to tell us what 70 odd years of attempted enforcement of said laws looks like, we have no data to tell us what things look like when we do not have said laws. So, let's try 70 years without these laws, and compare / contrast the results.
I find that my propensity for dissembling is limited by emails.
When I compose an email, am I typically under less stress / duress (someone isn't demanding an immediate response for information that I do not have), and can more carefully consider my words when emailing someone. In my experience, some people will play phone hostage with you, and ask you to commit or agree to things that cannot be. Something along the lines of "I need this website up by 2 PM," when it's 1:45 PM, and it requires a major overhaul, but the person on the other end of the phone does not appreciate that, nor care to understand that, as they have a client (who is late giving us needed information) breathing down their necks. So, a Catch-22; hang up, and the person will take it as an offense, or stay on, and they don't let you go until you agree to the impossible. So happy I will never do web programming for another person ever again, after I finish this one final project (for a good man).
I also tend to be a lot more polite, as typical interactions I have with people can be so fast or demanding that I must put aside the usual niceties of human conversation.
How about a Phenom that can be used in a multiple socket motherboard? It might destroy their Opteron marketshare, but they would own the desktop + server market.
Yes, but that was the point behind the entire movie! If and when society does / has devised a metric for who is and is not a valid, wars inevitably erupt. And the valid, as judged by society, end up getting the boots put to them by those who were deemed invalid.
Someone might call Godwin's law on this one, but let us consider the Third Reich. The German scientists went so far as to attempt to remove any "Jewish" influences in the branches of science, that while they achieved a lot early on, they ended up handing their enemies at least one Jewish scientist of note: Albert Einstein. And what a handful of scientists were cooking up on this side of the pond for the German threat (nukes), makes those V2s look like fire-crackers in comparison.
And yes, that is probably what would happen with genetic engineered children vs. non-genetic engineered children. And the big question is, the one no one wants to think about, is that while you can select for and pop out genetically engineered children like those no tomorrow, with all this engineering, how would you know that you didn't miss the cutoff for a major evolution of the human race? Do you want to be the genetic engineer who finds out that for the past two thousand years, mankind has been holding itself back, because its idea of perfect or better, was not?
The nasty bit about genetic illnesses is that some of that stuff is actually laying the groundwork for new and more interesting evolutionary paths for the human race. Not all, but possibly more than a few. Consider sickle-cell anemia or tay-sachs disease. They confer advantages on some, death / horrible lives on others.
It sounds like you're broadcasting from one access point to another, instead of from a wired connection to each access point.
Just run fiber to the access points. It's cheaper than you think, and forms a guaranteed, secure connection. Good for a mile, and it doesn't care about EM interference of any sort.
Slashdot Mirror
Parent is a troll, but I'll answer this anyway (I'm bored).
Maybe you dumb US fuckers will stop shipping all your manufacturing away. -> Perhaps, when other countries stop bending over backwards to get jobs for their people. Simply put, their country wants these jobs more than ours do.
Why are these not manufactured in the US? -> Because, in all likelihood, it's cost prohibitive.
Why does the destruction of one plant cause this much harm? -> Because it accounted for 25% of the market. That's actually fairly large; however, most techs would argue that 25% of the market going under does not justify a 400% price increase. It is possible, but something seems kind of...off about the situation. We'll revisit the problem in a few months, and see what the fallout is. Personally, I'm finding it difficult to believe that large HD manufacturers do not have capacity to spare. But then, Seagate merged with Maxtor, so bad decisions abound.
Because you're all fucking shortsighted idiots. -> Natural disasters tend to hit everyone, at some point or another. Why, a little while back, there was this Hurricane called Katrina that...
The short-term answer is you can't replace them all just yet. You'll have to scour Pricewatch and other sites to find HDs at sane prices.
The long-term answer is that you will never have enough space for video.
Agreed. Which is why we buy multiple 1 TB drives. :-)
Wait. Is it legal to sell 5900 RPM HDs? ^_^
There's no reason to rebuild. The HD market is under assault from the SSD market; hence, investing in HD manufacturing is seen as a losing proposition.
The current HD manufacturers can milk the shortage for all its worth, then their companies will die and be forgotten.
Not if the price for SSDs keep dropping.
Once prices for 1 TB SSDs drop to something nice, HD will be shown the door.
Not going to happen.
Last I checked, there isn't much overlap for HD / SSD manufacturers. If HD prices remain high, SSD manufacturers will have the advantage.
Which means the HD manufacturers may go the way of the dinosaur in a few years.
They aren't up 150%.
They're up 400%.
Never thought 500 GB drives would come back into style...and yet they're what my friends are specc'ing into their machines these days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_Peace_Memorial
Looks safe to me.
Bah. The lasers they want (X-Ray) can't be powered by a reasonable number of solar cells. You'd have to pepper the moon with solar cells to get enough energy to power one of those lasers.
If think the best idea they have come up with for powering those x-ray lasers involved detonating a nuclear fission bomb, and mirroring the resulting X-Rays toward the earth. Something complicated and single-use, like that.
And the atmosphere, even with the latest optics, is still something of an obstacle.
Oh yes. Lead-acid or lithium ion batteries are an excellent choice for rapid cycling and high currents. I don't think even NiCad is looking too hot there.
And yes, there are many ways of storing electricity, but it pushes up the price for your powerplant. And typically takes up more land, which solar already does a lot of.
And most importantly: batteries will store less power than a nuclear reactor can provide at full tilt. The old light-water reactors are limited, by law, to half their efficiency, because greater efficiency requires higher temperatures. They can easily double their power output by lifting those laws; not that doing so with 50 year old reactors is, in my opinion, a good time to start, but with newer ones, why not? What other technology do you know of would let you double your power output with your existing equipment?
Yes, but you'll still have somewhat corrosive salts touching metal pipes. With very few exceptions, that's a no-no.
It's kind of why nuclear powerplants tend to use relatively pure water. The nuclear chemistry of that water, what is put into it, and where its value should fall whenever they test it is rather exact.
I mean, nothing is safe if you're not willing to follow the basic safety requirements, which Fukushima apparently violated. Like smoking while filling the car up with gas. There are unavoidable risks, and then there are avoidable ones.
Planning for a Tsunami far in excess of that region's previously recorded history? I can understand that as an avoidable/unavoidable risk. Not having a gravitation-ally-inclined reservoir with which to flood the reactors with fresh water and halt an out of control reaction? Avoidable.
And once again, the more dangerous something is, the shorter the half-life is. Visiting an area immediately after a dropping a nuclear bomb? Very bad for your health. Visiting an area 60 years after dropping a nuclear bomb? Your health won't notice.
It's intermediate until we crack nuclear fusion. After which every nuclear fission proponent of every color will stop supporting nuclear fission, and move onto nuclear fusion. We really wouldn't be supporting a form of energy that is as....interesting...as nuclear fission if we hadn't already weighed the costs and benefits of all the other ones, and found this one favorable.
Chernobyl was a source of infinite stupidity.
They performed a series of tests, on a live nuclear reactor, WITH (ALMOST) ALL THE SAFETIES DISENGAGED. Purposefully disengaged. For experiments. On a live reactor.
And one of the fail-safe pumps, I believe, that was supposed to work, was never actually tested. Something about the manufacturer wanted a bonus for completing the work (well, the workers wanted their bonus, and they needed to complete it by a certain date or ahead of schedule in order to collect), so they skipped the tests. I think it was declared a Worker's Victory, or something of some similar nonsense.
The point is, we have dedicated reactors, in the US, that we perform research in. Some of them are actually safe enough to walk around in. And while I am partial to return on investment, we reeeeeeeaaaaaaaaallllllllyyyyyy need to retire the Model-T of reactor designs.
Not if the solution has become a cultural taboo by that point.
Nothing is environmentally neutral. *Shhhhhhhhhh!* It's a big secret.
And as for the nuclear waste, the general rule is the more dangerous something is, the shorter the half-life it has. This is a general rule, with a few exceptions, but it tends to work.
And the sad part is, I remember when Dell didn't have to resort to cheap tricks to sell PCs. Speccing in non-standard and substandard parts, plus rolling over for every sad business brain-fart has destroyed that company. Such a pity, at one time their Just-In-Time business model was seen as a something of a wonder.
Try a new tactic. Go back to doing what made you successful in the first place. Put on a black turtleneck (if you must), and inform your customers that while their money means a lot to you, you simply cannot sell them machines that run like dogs anymore. If that laptop doesn't have at least 8 GBs of RAM and a 1 TB 7200 RPM HD or 256 GB SSD, with a separate video card, it cannot be sold. Your company depends on repeat business, correct?
Agreed. However, my point was that with all the problems they are running into with Bulldozer, they might be able to bridge the problem by modifying (hopefully slightly) their Phenom II design, and could spend a year or two punishing Intel. And I do mean punishing them.
And while games may not be designed to take advantage of those extra cores, I can think of a host of applications between the workstation - server range that could.
Virtual Machines, for starters. Video encoding for another. Databases love cores, last I checked. Web servers. Even most modern day operating systems like more cores. And that's not even tapping into the more interesting stuff out there.
If they (AMD) make more cores readily available, programmers will begin writing programs that take advantage of more cores. The optimizations of today, as you have pointed out, are barely using 2-3 cores, because that's what the vast majority of the market is likely to have.
Plus, there's geek cred. Who isn't going to boast about having 3 times the amount of cores of their neighbor, for less than a third the cost?
Well, let's look at it this way.
Are we winning the "War on Drugs?" No.
Is the cost to the public, in terms of liberty and money, far in excess of the cost of a few brain-dead stoners or meth-heads? Yes.
I'd take the 7-11 potheads over the J. Edgars any day of the week.
And while we have lots of {social, moral, economic} data to tell us what 70 odd years of attempted enforcement of said laws looks like, we have no data to tell us what things look like when we do not have said laws. So, let's try 70 years without these laws, and compare / contrast the results.
I find that my propensity for dissembling is limited by emails.
When I compose an email, am I typically under less stress / duress (someone isn't demanding an immediate response for information that I do not have), and can more carefully consider my words when emailing someone. In my experience, some people will play phone hostage with you, and ask you to commit or agree to things that cannot be. Something along the lines of "I need this website up by 2 PM," when it's 1:45 PM, and it requires a major overhaul, but the person on the other end of the phone does not appreciate that, nor care to understand that, as they have a client (who is late giving us needed information) breathing down their necks. So, a Catch-22; hang up, and the person will take it as an offense, or stay on, and they don't let you go until you agree to the impossible. So happy I will never do web programming for another person ever again, after I finish this one final project (for a good man).
I also tend to be a lot more polite, as typical interactions I have with people can be so fast or demanding that I must put aside the usual niceties of human conversation.
How about a Phenom that can be used in a multiple socket motherboard? It might destroy their Opteron marketshare, but they would own the desktop + server market.
5 x ~$200 Phenom II X6s...30 cores for $1000.
Hehe. Install Ad-Aware, and run a full system scan. Watch those cores get used...
Yes, but that was the point behind the entire movie! If and when society does / has devised a metric for who is and is not a valid, wars inevitably erupt. And the valid, as judged by society, end up getting the boots put to them by those who were deemed invalid.
Someone might call Godwin's law on this one, but let us consider the Third Reich. The German scientists went so far as to attempt to remove any "Jewish" influences in the branches of science, that while they achieved a lot early on, they ended up handing their enemies at least one Jewish scientist of note: Albert Einstein. And what a handful of scientists were cooking up on this side of the pond for the German threat (nukes), makes those V2s look like fire-crackers in comparison.
And yes, that is probably what would happen with genetic engineered children vs. non-genetic engineered children. And the big question is, the one no one wants to think about, is that while you can select for and pop out genetically engineered children like those no tomorrow, with all this engineering, how would you know that you didn't miss the cutoff for a major evolution of the human race? Do you want to be the genetic engineer who finds out that for the past two thousand years, mankind has been holding itself back, because its idea of perfect or better, was not?
The nasty bit about genetic illnesses is that some of that stuff is actually laying the groundwork for new and more interesting evolutionary paths for the human race. Not all, but possibly more than a few. Consider sickle-cell anemia or tay-sachs disease. They confer advantages on some, death / horrible lives on others.
It sounds like you're broadcasting from one access point to another, instead of from a wired connection to each access point.
Just run fiber to the access points. It's cheaper than you think, and forms a guaranteed, secure connection. Good for a mile, and it doesn't care about EM interference of any sort.