I actually don't see how this can be applied to quantum computing, yet.
This sounds almost exactly like an optical transistor, except that a transistor actually is an amplifier.
To make it more like a transistor, imagine a 2 part crystal; part A is continually primed to be discharged, laser like. Part B is the light capturing component. A 'gate' laser turns B on and off, an input laser is the signal, and the lazed output is the output.
Quantum computing and quantum mechanics deals with superposition and tunneling, to my understanding, so unless they can feed in 4 inputs, freeze the crystal, and then get one 'correct' output when they unfreeze it, I fail to see how this is quantum.
Given that I described a transistor, I can see this as being critical to an optical computer:)
Combine input A and B into one beam. If they are in phase (both true) their output signal amplitude doubles. If they are out of phase (one true, one false) their output amplitude is zero. Pass this combined signal through two crystals.
Pass a *second* 'clock' signal as well that happens to be out of phase and half the amplitude of a true signal. The first crystal fires true when the clock and input signal cancel to produce a '1'. The second crystal fires false when the clock and the input signal combine to produce a '-1'
A person with too much p53 ages too fast to reproduce.
A person without enough p53 gets cancer and dies before reproduction. These too extremes are quickly dropped from the gene pool.
Where aging is loss of muscle tone, brittle bones, loss of coordination, skin elasticity, etc.
If you're asking about our lifespan vs the age of menopause?
If people only lived to the age of 50, then the genes that retard menopause to 60 never ever express themselves. They never really get selected for except at chance.
Enter medical science and improved lifestyle. People now regularly live to 70, meaning that only women with the genes to retard menopause until 55 can bear children at age 50. If there is any benefit for bearing children at 50, such as increased resources, then there's a positive effect on those genes that retard menopause. As more people chose to delay (if people choose to delay) childbirth due to economic reasons, then more selective pressure is placed on menopause retarding genes, until eventually the lifespan discrepancy disappears.
In the meantime, we prescribe drugs and lifestyle changes to women suffering from menopause.
You may want to read this about the Mckinley, successor to Merced.
As far as I know, Merced is HP's design. Mckinley is Intel's. So... you could say Intel is learning from their mistakes by letting HP engineers do a good job.
Anyway, it's a mutually beneficial thing because HP doesn't have the resources to market and drive the product, while Intel doesn't have the engineers or resources to design and implement the architecture in a 'good' way. Intel provides process and HP provides layout, and together they will take over the world!
At least that's what I've heard and read. Myself, I own a G4 and use a Mac, it's not exactly as if Itanium is going to strike me down anytime soon.
Unless I'm much mistaken...
on
Flying on Mars
·
· Score: 3, Informative
You're thinking rocket engines.
Rockets carry their own fuel and as such provide their own thrust.
Jets and props require an atmosphere to provide the gas necessary to provide thrust.
Sorta like... imagine outboard motors and water jets out of the water... not much thrust:)
Because it's new.
Because it's different.
Because it's a work in progress.
Because it's an adventure.
Because it's exciting.
Because it offers features monolithic kernels do not offer.
Microsoft really would be doing a disservice to it's shareholders to release Office for Linux if there's no profit to be gained. Remember the stupid web count? 0.24% was Linux desktop share, Hitbox or something. Even using a Mac website, it's 1.5% Regardless, it seems to be lower than Mac marketshare, which is roughly between 3% and 5%
Still, for the naysayers, here's the counter-arguments:
Unix programs exist, like Maya!
Except that Maya is expensive and specialized. Unless the average Linux person is willing to pay $1k for Office, at which point they should just buy a 500MHz iBook and Office and go impress the chicas.
Unix commodity programs exist, like FrameMaker!
That's hardly commodity, and it's hardly cheap. Sure it's Adobe, but FrameMaker is for library and content creation and management, hardly for consumer and consumable use, like Office. So, again, get the iBook (only $894!) and Office.
ID software ports Quake to Linux!
They do so out of charity and principle. I don't expect they make much money out of it, and it guarantees them a non Microsoft OS for sanity checking and portability; it's legitamately an exercise of goodwill and discipline for them. Do you expect Microsoft to perform the same?
I can't believe I had to browse at the anonomyous area to find here to find someone who mentioned marketshare!
Well, a GHz AMD CPU takes, what, 45W? This supercomputer is only useful when it's working, so I'm going to pretend it's being useful.
Still, here someone has take the time to measure the power usage of a 500MHz G3 powerbook. 17.54W under full load! A G4 is a couple W more expensive than a G3, but that's probably offset by the fact that the LCDs won't be powering on at all.
So 66 PCs at 75W sucks up $7 a day.
66 PowerBooks at 15W sucks up $1.50 a day. A month means $210 vs $45, and a year means $2,555 vs $547.5
Of course, the notebooks do cost more than the $2k delta, but 66 iBooks is a lot cooler, niftier, and compact than 66 PCs:)
You could probably stick it in the corner and use it as a space heater.
I have a TiBook. Apple *could* do away with the screen, keyboard, and speakers, and replace the CD-ROM slot with a ram-bay.
Not only could you hook them together using gigabit ethernet, you could take advantage of the firewire port as well, perhaps chaining them together with some sort of SAN, though you are still limited by the ~50MBps, though perhaps that's not useless, I don't know.
Still, with the ram bay you could up the memory from 1GB to something crazy, like 16GB. The battery is useful as a backup-emergency device, allowing the slab to run for about 4 hours in case of emergency (woo!).
You could even concievably netboot the thing, since OS X allows for that, right? Minimize the hard drive or get rid of it altogether... you could seriously make a slab about the size of 1/2" by 8" by 8" I suspect:)
Of course, heat *is* an issue... but imagine a half inch between each layer, you would rack mount them at a slight angle and use heat convection to pull up air, a chimney effect...
$1,499 for a 600MHz iBook, 20 of these would cost ~$30k, but you couldn't use the channel bonding concept, unfortunately. You'd be stuck with 100bT, which would probably get swamped with any real work in a 4 iBook per switch, 6 switch topology... without even trying to minimize latency.
20 iBooks would also take up about
8x9.1x11.2 per stack, so all 5 stacks would take up about 40 inches in space... You could stick these next to a desk or bed and use it as an end table! Okay, that'd be a tall end table...
$2,999 for a 667MHz ToBook, 20 of these would cost ~$60k, but these *are* Gigabit capable! In a similar topology, or perhaps because of prices for Gigabit switches, you might as well use one switch. Who knows?
Of course heat is even more of an issue, but give n the same space as the iBooks, there's a whole extra half inch of space available to the TiBook!
40x9.4x13.5 inches! It would even make a good space heater!
Okay, okay, I know, it's damn expensive. But... consider, how much is a 20 CPU machine from HP or IBM? I know, I know, they tackle different uses, like reliability, uptime, IO throughput, etc. A 4way 680 pServer from IBM is $220k, from their own website:)
Damn... I wonder when Apple is going to release a thin rackmount slab server?
Man, you're the first person I've met who doesn't seem to think outright that Apple adopting BSD ne NeXTStep is a 'better' thing.
There's a good reason for the 3 GUI APIs, though I only count 2, myself, Carbon and Cocoa, and they aren't GUI APIs, they're APIs. The third, Mac Classic outside of Carbon, only lives in OS 9. Unless you're counting Java and ObjectiveC+ as two different APIs. Likewise, Apple could hardly release and OS without a GUI; the BSD layer was a holdover from NeXT, and one I don't mind at all. Speaking from experience, since I own a OS X machine:)
Of course. I very carefully worded myself to avoid saying "OS X is built on top of BSD" because it isn't.
My point is still valid that the BSD OS that is Darwin that is an integral component of OS X is available for download and scrutiny and that it is still a BSD OS even if it sits atop the Mach kernel. OS X *does* come with extra software and functionality, but it still doesn't mean that there isn't a full fledged Unix OS underpinning everything, with full CLI access.
I ask you again, markj02, what are you talking about, when you ask, "That's a typical mistake people make. While not talking specifically about OSX vs. UNIX, more is not necessarily better, and the total can be less than the sum of its parts.
"?
I made no mistake, I left the BSD vs Linux discussion for another topic because that's not what I was trying to address. In fact, if I read my histories and understand my facts correctly, OS X ne BSD *is* a Unix, and is not an issue of OS X vs Unix.
OS X is built upon the BSD bedrock; you can go download Darwin and install it on x86 or PPC systems. It's a full featured OS in it's own right, excepting that it's missing an X server out of the box. Are you trying to say that Darwin/BSD is somehow not sufficient?
Are you trying to say that OS X somehow removes functionality from Darwin/BSD with the GUI interface?
What I saw will also be dogmatic and anecdotal, as it is being drawn from my own life.
Comparing Macs to Windows is not SUVs to cars and trucks. It is not about different, or suited to different needs, though one can very clearly make that distinction.
It's *almost* like talking about luxury vehicles though, as noxious as car analogies are. You pay for the Mac experience, where the Windows world spans the whole gamut of econoboxes to SUV.
I'm going to leave out Linux and Unix for simplicity and because with Mac OS X you get BSD 'for free' since it's built atop it.
For the average (not the specific individuals), a Mac is drop in compatible with a PC, about the same way that an AMD Athlon is compatible with the Intel P4.
Macs have less quantity software, but it is not without the entire spectrum (except, perhaps, maybe only in the short term, for VB virii)
What Windows has is the ability to transform nearly any machine into a Window's platform device. Think borg, think virus. A 486? A P2? A P3? A Duron? A MP P4? You can install Windows. It's not perfect, it's not seamless, it's not graceful, but it works. That seems to be the catchphrase that is Windows.
The Mac is arguably more tightly bound to it's hardware. It *is* seamless, graceful, and clean. Perhaps it wasn't like that in the past, but right now, and for the next few iterations, OS X is going to be hand tailored for the hardware and the hardware is going to be hand tailored for the OS.
If you prefer the simplicty of a single setup, like I do, you can get one Mac PowerBook G4 for home use (video, graphics, games, movies, etc) and for work (BSD, bash, gcc, etc).
Cause if there's any mechanical-physical inefficiency, 1 lost photon means the transmission needs to be resent, or whatever the protocol allows for, because one lost photon could easily be one stolen photon.
It's certainly *possible*, it's just a question of is it currently feasible?
It doesn't change the fact that cooler fast chips can be packed more tightly (fit in smaller spaces and achieve higher densities in servers, due to heat and power constraints)
It's almost always better to be more efficient; basic laws of physics and all, when you have constrained resources like we do... you get more done and more bang for the buck.
You input energy X, enough to account for a single photon and circuit inefficiencies.
Where X isn't enough energy for more than one photon.
The problem with the detector is that it's possible to build detectors that register single photons, it just requires that someone builds one, and that shouldn't be impossible either. It's a function of creating an optic trap akin to a waveguide and lens such that the single photon has to fall into a set of paths which is appropriately matched with a CCD able to register single photons.
It doesn't give much info on the MPEG4 support; I suppose Microsoft already has MPEG4 support (I don't know, I've never tried it, and I don't count DiVX and the ilk as proper MPEG4) but what Mac MPEG4 support?
Unless they know something about Quicktime and MPEG4 that I don't, I guess.
Has anyone seen anything about MPEG4 support in Quicktime?
It is nice that the article mentions FireWire support, but I wasn't able to gather what that meant, since it was 'optional'
There is only *one* MPEG4 standard; DiVX and 3iVX etc are bastard children of the MPEG4 standard.
Now there may be multiple implementations (Apple, Microsoft, etc), but like MP3, should, if the standard means anything, be cross compatible, though I have heard that the MPEG4 standard allows for multiple codecs (ala Flash layered with MP3 audio etc)... but I don't know about the last bit.
Slashdot Mirror
True.
Essentially you can built SRAM with this. Lots, and lots, of sram. One giant block of crystal, with focusing beams.
I actually don't see how this can be applied to quantum computing, yet.
:)
This sounds almost exactly like an optical transistor, except that a transistor actually is an amplifier.
To make it more like a transistor, imagine a 2 part crystal; part A is continually primed to be discharged, laser like. Part B is the light capturing component. A 'gate' laser turns B on and off, an input laser is the signal, and the lazed output is the output.
Quantum computing and quantum mechanics deals with superposition and tunneling, to my understanding, so unless they can feed in 4 inputs, freeze the crystal, and then get one 'correct' output when they unfreeze it, I fail to see how this is quantum.
Given that I described a transistor, I can see this as being critical to an optical computer
Source = input
Gate = freezing laser
Drain = output
You can make an optical and gate this way:
Combine input A and B into one beam. If they are in phase (both true) their output signal amplitude doubles. If they are out of phase (one true, one false) their output amplitude is zero. Pass this combined signal through two crystals.
Pass a *second* 'clock' signal as well that happens to be out of phase and half the amplitude of a true signal. The first crystal fires true when the clock and input signal cancel to produce a '1'. The second crystal fires false when the clock and the input signal combine to produce a '-1'
I mean... isn't it sorta obvious?
A person with too much p53 ages too fast to reproduce.
A person without enough p53 gets cancer and dies before reproduction. These too extremes are quickly dropped from the gene pool.
Where aging is loss of muscle tone, brittle bones, loss of coordination, skin elasticity, etc.
If you're asking about our lifespan vs the age of menopause?
If people only lived to the age of 50, then the genes that retard menopause to 60 never ever express themselves. They never really get selected for except at chance.
Enter medical science and improved lifestyle. People now regularly live to 70, meaning that only women with the genes to retard menopause until 55 can bear children at age 50. If there is any benefit for bearing children at 50, such as increased resources, then there's a positive effect on those genes that retard menopause. As more people chose to delay (if people choose to delay) childbirth due to economic reasons, then more selective pressure is placed on menopause retarding genes, until eventually the lifespan discrepancy disappears.
In the meantime, we prescribe drugs and lifestyle changes to women suffering from menopause.
You may want to read this about the Mckinley, successor to Merced.
As far as I know, Merced is HP's design. Mckinley is Intel's. So... you could say Intel is learning from their mistakes by letting HP engineers do a good job.
Anyway, it's a mutually beneficial thing because HP doesn't have the resources to market and drive the product, while Intel doesn't have the engineers or resources to design and implement the architecture in a 'good' way. Intel provides process and HP provides layout, and together they will take over the world!
At least that's what I've heard and read. Myself, I own a G4 and use a Mac, it's not exactly as if Itanium is going to strike me down anytime soon.
You're thinking rocket engines.
:)
Rockets carry their own fuel and as such provide their own thrust.
Jets and props require an atmosphere to provide the gas necessary to provide thrust.
Sorta like... imagine outboard motors and water jets out of the water... not much thrust
But I can imitate one:
Because it's new.
Because it's different.
Because it's a work in progress.
Because it's an adventure.
Because it's exciting.
Because it offers features monolithic kernels do not offer.
Hmmm, I guess I wasn't very clear, apologies.
I didn't literally mean you, but those people who hate Windows, but love Office, of which you aren't a member.
Thats economics as well, isn't it? That's the whole concept of demand :)
You hate Windows, you like like Linux/Unix, you love Office...
Is it too expensive to get a Mac? That's hardly a critical showstopper.
Microsoft really would be doing a disservice to it's shareholders to release Office for Linux if there's no profit to be gained. Remember the stupid web count? 0.24% was Linux desktop share, Hitbox or something. Even using a Mac website, it's 1.5% Regardless, it seems to be lower than Mac marketshare, which is roughly between 3% and 5%
Still, for the naysayers, here's the counter-arguments:
Unix programs exist, like Maya!
Except that Maya is expensive and specialized. Unless the average Linux person is willing to pay $1k for Office, at which point they should just buy a 500MHz iBook and Office and go impress the chicas.
Unix commodity programs exist, like FrameMaker!
That's hardly commodity, and it's hardly cheap. Sure it's Adobe, but FrameMaker is for library and content creation and management, hardly for consumer and consumable use, like Office. So, again, get the iBook (only $894!) and Office.
ID software ports Quake to Linux!
They do so out of charity and principle. I don't expect they make much money out of it, and it guarantees them a non Microsoft OS for sanity checking and portability; it's legitamately an exercise of goodwill and discipline for them. Do you expect Microsoft to perform the same?
I can't believe I had to browse at the anonomyous area to find here to find someone who mentioned marketshare!
Well, a GHz AMD CPU takes, what, 45W? This supercomputer is only useful when it's working, so I'm going to pretend it's being useful.
:)
Still, here someone has take the time to measure the power usage of a 500MHz G3 powerbook. 17.54W under full load! A G4 is a couple W more expensive than a G3, but that's probably offset by the fact that the LCDs won't be powering on at all.
So 66 PCs at 75W sucks up $7 a day.
66 PowerBooks at 15W sucks up $1.50 a day. A month means $210 vs $45, and a year means $2,555 vs $547.5
Of course, the notebooks do cost more than the $2k delta, but 66 iBooks is a lot cooler, niftier, and compact than 66 PCs
You could probably stick it in the corner and use it as a space heater.
I have a TiBook. Apple *could* do away with the screen, keyboard, and speakers, and replace the CD-ROM slot with a ram-bay.
:)
Not only could you hook them together using gigabit ethernet, you could take advantage of the firewire port as well, perhaps chaining them together with some sort of SAN, though you are still limited by the ~50MBps, though perhaps that's not useless, I don't know.
Still, with the ram bay you could up the memory from 1GB to something crazy, like 16GB. The battery is useful as a backup-emergency device, allowing the slab to run for about 4 hours in case of emergency (woo!).
You could even concievably netboot the thing, since OS X allows for that, right? Minimize the hard drive or get rid of it altogether... you could seriously make a slab about the size of 1/2" by 8" by 8" I suspect
Of course, heat *is* an issue... but imagine a half inch between each layer, you would rack mount them at a slight angle and use heat convection to pull up air, a chimney effect...
:)
$1,499 for a 600MHz iBook, 20 of these would cost ~$30k, but you couldn't use the channel bonding concept, unfortunately. You'd be stuck with 100bT, which would probably get swamped with any real work in a 4 iBook per switch, 6 switch topology... without even trying to minimize latency.
20 iBooks would also take up about
8x9.1x11.2 per stack, so all 5 stacks would take up about 40 inches in space... You could stick these next to a desk or bed and use it as an end table! Okay, that'd be a tall end table...
$2,999 for a 667MHz ToBook, 20 of these would cost ~$60k, but these *are* Gigabit capable! In a similar topology, or perhaps because of prices for Gigabit switches, you might as well use one switch. Who knows?
Of course heat is even more of an issue, but give n the same space as the iBooks, there's a whole extra half inch of space available to the TiBook!
40x9.4x13.5 inches! It would even make a good space heater!
Okay, okay, I know, it's damn expensive. But... consider, how much is a 20 CPU machine from HP or IBM? I know, I know, they tackle different uses, like reliability, uptime, IO throughput, etc. A 4way 680 pServer from IBM is $220k, from their own website
Damn... I wonder when Apple is going to release a thin rackmount slab server?
Man, you're the first person I've met who doesn't seem to think outright that Apple adopting BSD ne NeXTStep is a 'better' thing.
:)
There's a good reason for the 3 GUI APIs, though I only count 2, myself, Carbon and Cocoa, and they aren't GUI APIs, they're APIs. The third, Mac Classic outside of Carbon, only lives in OS 9. Unless you're counting Java and ObjectiveC+ as two different APIs. Likewise, Apple could hardly release and OS without a GUI; the BSD layer was a holdover from NeXT, and one I don't mind at all. Speaking from experience, since I own a OS X machine
Of course. I very carefully worded myself to avoid saying "OS X is built on top of BSD" because it isn't.
My point is still valid that the BSD OS that is Darwin that is an integral component of OS X is available for download and scrutiny and that it is still a BSD OS even if it sits atop the Mach kernel. OS X *does* come with extra software and functionality, but it still doesn't mean that there isn't a full fledged Unix OS underpinning everything, with full CLI access.
I ask you again, markj02, what are you talking about, when you ask, "That's a typical mistake people make. While not talking specifically about OSX vs. UNIX, more is not necessarily better, and the total can be less than the sum of its parts.
"?
I made no mistake, I left the BSD vs Linux discussion for another topic because that's not what I was trying to address. In fact, if I read my histories and understand my facts correctly, OS X ne BSD *is* a Unix, and is not an issue of OS X vs Unix.
OS X is built upon the BSD bedrock; you can go download Darwin and install it on x86 or PPC systems. It's a full featured OS in it's own right, excepting that it's missing an X server out of the box. Are you trying to say that Darwin/BSD is somehow not sufficient?
Are you trying to say that OS X somehow removes functionality from Darwin/BSD with the GUI interface?
What I saw will also be dogmatic and anecdotal, as it is being drawn from my own life.
Comparing Macs to Windows is not SUVs to cars and trucks. It is not about different, or suited to different needs, though one can very clearly make that distinction.
It's *almost* like talking about luxury vehicles though, as noxious as car analogies are. You pay for the Mac experience, where the Windows world spans the whole gamut of econoboxes to SUV.
I'm going to leave out Linux and Unix for simplicity and because with Mac OS X you get BSD 'for free' since it's built atop it.
For the average (not the specific individuals), a Mac is drop in compatible with a PC, about the same way that an AMD Athlon is compatible with the Intel P4.
Macs have less quantity software, but it is not without the entire spectrum (except, perhaps, maybe only in the short term, for VB virii)
What Windows has is the ability to transform nearly any machine into a Window's platform device. Think borg, think virus. A 486? A P2? A P3? A Duron? A MP P4? You can install Windows. It's not perfect, it's not seamless, it's not graceful, but it works. That seems to be the catchphrase that is Windows.
The Mac is arguably more tightly bound to it's hardware. It *is* seamless, graceful, and clean. Perhaps it wasn't like that in the past, but right now, and for the next few iterations, OS X is going to be hand tailored for the hardware and the hardware is going to be hand tailored for the OS.
If you prefer the simplicty of a single setup, like I do, you can get one Mac PowerBook G4 for home use (video, graphics, games, movies, etc) and for work (BSD, bash, gcc, etc).
It's a matter of efficiency, maybe?
Cause if there's any mechanical-physical inefficiency, 1 lost photon means the transmission needs to be resent, or whatever the protocol allows for, because one lost photon could easily be one stolen photon.
It's certainly *possible*, it's just a question of is it currently feasible?
There you go then :)
I don't do this for a living, I took an Optics course in college.
Aren't photomultiplier tubes akin to... opamps?
And... can you chain one to a fiberoptic cable?
It doesn't change the fact that cooler fast chips can be packed more tightly (fit in smaller spaces and achieve higher densities in servers, due to heat and power constraints)
It's almost always better to be more efficient; basic laws of physics and all, when you have constrained resources like we do... you get more done and more bang for the buck.
Um... because gasolene has a higher energy to density ratio than steam or conventional batteries?
Or are you trying to say that making cooler chips is too difficult?
Well, it's not *that* difficult.
You input energy X, enough to account for a single photon and circuit inefficiencies.
Where X isn't enough energy for more than one photon.
The problem with the detector is that it's possible to build detectors that register single photons, it just requires that someone builds one, and that shouldn't be impossible either. It's a function of creating an optic trap akin to a waveguide and lens such that the single photon has to fall into a set of paths which is appropriately matched with a CCD able to register single photons.
It doesn't give much info on the MPEG4 support; I suppose Microsoft already has MPEG4 support (I don't know, I've never tried it, and I don't count DiVX and the ilk as proper MPEG4) but what Mac MPEG4 support?
Unless they know something about Quicktime and MPEG4 that I don't, I guess.
Has anyone seen anything about MPEG4 support in Quicktime?
It is nice that the article mentions FireWire support, but I wasn't able to gather what that meant, since it was 'optional'
There is only *one* MPEG4 standard; DiVX and 3iVX etc are bastard children of the MPEG4 standard.
Now there may be multiple implementations (Apple, Microsoft, etc), but like MP3, should, if the standard means anything, be cross compatible, though I have heard that the MPEG4 standard allows for multiple codecs (ala Flash layered with MP3 audio etc)... but I don't know about the last bit.
This is amusing how much like Mac vs Windows debates this sounds :)