I've found that tasks waiting on resources without a reasonable timeout (or sometimes no timeout at all) and refusing to respond to outside stimuli are more often the problem than a task stuck in an infinite loop.
Or, perhaps, I want to make a new operating system that can run multiple copies of Unix. Though I want the name to mean something other than just a play on Unix. I'll change the last couple of letters and call it Multics for "Multiple Computer Servers"...
It says in TFA that they are modifying the house charger to be two way. That's a 30 amp 220/240 circuit. The batteries can supply substantially more amperage but you have to actually get that out of the car to be useful. The "level 3" plug can handle it but there's nothing in your house that can use anything like that. If you wanted to build a system that took the battery power and converted it to usable current to supply the house, you're going to need a pretty serious inverter. To fully
supply a house you need probably over 20,000 watt capacity for a typical house running electric heat or A/C and a fully electric kitchen.
Now, the 30A 220/240V supply can be useful. But little things add up quick. Fridges can draw a lot more than 1.5 amps, though usually less than 5. Add in a computer, a satellite dish, a TV, lights, etc. and you'll hit that 30A cap a lot faster than you think.
A 240V, 30A circuit won't feed as much as you might think. That circuit could feed four 15 amp 110 circuits. That might power your fridge, several lights and maybe a TV. Forget an electric cooktop (usually a 220V, 50A circuit). Though you may be able to get away with just one burner. No way can you run your A/C system. Electric heat? Not a chance. You'd probably have to choose between running the gas powered furnace and the television (a hard decision for some I know).
30 amps just doesn't cut it for running a whole house.
I don't doubt that. But the chance of that actually happening is still very low. Sure, it may start to get worse over the coming years. I have no doubt it will given how little this country spends on infrastructure maintenance. But here's the thing. Grid reliability is the only thing that lets people rely on electric cars. If the grid starts crashing more often, the draw for pure electric cars will vanish and most people won't buy them. Why buy a car that you can't reliably charge? The very thing that makes it irrelevant as a backup source (i.e. reliable power) would make it irrelevant as reliable transportation if it wasn't there. Either way, the Leaf is irrelevant as a backup power source.
Oh, the batteries certainly have the juice to do it. However, the charging circuit can't handle that amperage. I suppose if you attached a monstrous inverter directly to the batteries, you could possibly do it. But the charging station you put in most houses in Japan and the US can only support maybe 30 amps at 220/240v. That's a couple of circuits for lights and the fridge and you're tapped out. If you're using the standard household plug circuit, that's only 12 amps at 110v. That's not enough to run very much more than several lights. Perhaps if you plugged into their "Level 3" connector (125A @ 480VDC), you could draw enough to power a whole house. But that equipment is not cheap. The charging station for that level is over $16K and you probably can't install it in your house because it will overdraw the typical 200 amp service to a residence. Besides, you can buy a decent dedicated generator and have it installed for less than that. Hell, you could buy some dedicated batteries and a big inverter and chuck them into your basement and have a more practical, less expensive house battery backup.
So I've been thinking about this a little and here's a couple of drawbacks I see:
Assuming you're using a pure electric car, using your car to run your house means it has no charge the next morning so you can't get to work.
If you come home at the end of the day with a mostly depleted charge in the batteries, The car won't be able to supply much power to the house before being completely dead.
You could use a gas/electric hybrid like the Volt or Prius to run this type of system. However, the charging system for the car is inside a garage. Having a gas powered car run in the garage is a "bad" thing last time I checked. Though a well designed ventilation system could help.
Cost of operation. Having your gas powered car generate your electricity is a horribly inefficient method. Dedicated generators are much more efficient. If you live in an area with natural gas, you can hook up your auxiliary generator to the natural gas supply and get your backup power much more efficiently.
Capacity. The charging/generating circuit won't be able to power the whole house. Sure, you could keep the fridge going to keep your leftovers from spoiling. But you probably can't run the whole house. A dedicated generator can supply more than enough power to run the whole house and still cost less to run.
Grid reliability. I live in an area that has more than enough capacity and a grid that stays up over 99.9% of the time. Sure, there are some people who don't have this luxury. And that's certainly a driving force for some people to want a backup. But most suburban dwellers in first world countries (the type who are the most likely to drive a Leaf in the first place since you need a grid like that to be able to rely on a purely electric car) share my luxury of a stable grid. When the grid is (almost) always operating just fine, why do you need to have a backup?
I'm not going to buy an overpriced car just to serve as my backup generator.
I'm sure that some people may have a use for this technology. But it's a niche market at best.
It's great that they have achieved this speed with such simple technology. However, I wonder how useful this technology will really be. If you set your laptop down next to the TV, I wonder what kind of interference you'll get from the rapid fluctuations in light. I know the average techy type here is a troll living in the basement but what about the unwashed masses trying to use this in rooms above ground with the shades open? I wonder how much interference will all that light introduce, especially if you have lots of shiny bits in the window. I suppose they could really crank up the "LED (Light-Emitting Diode) light bulbs" to improve signal to noise ratio. But is that a practical solution? How about the really non-techy types wanting to use their wireless devices outside? How does it work when exposed to direct sunlight? If it doesn't, then what's the alternative? Traditional radio based wireless? We already have that.
I'm sure this is a great achievement but I'm just not sure if it's going to be practical for daily use for the average person. Though it may contribute to something that's useful. Perhaps as a semi-secure wireless network for higher security areas that are already closed off to the outside world. Maybe it would be good for dedicated areas that don't have the general purpose demands of the average consumer device. Maybe this will be integrated into some greater new technology further down the road. I know. We could use dedicated digital light transmissions to control the consumer devices in our homes. Oh. Wait...
You really should read up on the new generation of integrated GPUs. They have come a long way in just the last year. AMD has integrated a full up ATI 6xxx GPU on die. Intel is making remarkable strides as well.
Having a discrete graphics card hanging on a PCIe bus may have been 20x faster last year. Integrated graphics were really inadequate when they were in the northbridge. Again, that was last year. Things have evolved significantly since then.
Oh, and I forgot one more thing. The newest integrated CPU/GPU from AMD uses the same processor core that goes into the HD6xxx series chips coming from ATI. So, contrary to what you say, the FLOPS are not ". . . shit in comparison to any discreet [sic] graphics card . .."
I should have explained myself better. You're thinking about small blade servers doing simple tasks. Sure, for that the GPU is a complete waste. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about a computer that's cranking out killer graphics. I'm talking about computers that do "real work" that is seriously floating point intensive. Far beyond what you'd find running on a small server.
Get that small blade server out of your head. Think big iron. Think supercomputers. Think racks of cards all interconnected to act as one big computer. Think hundreds (or thousands) of individual processors all coordinated to act as one big computer. Now think about putting in a chip that does really fast floating point calculations in place of a general purpose CPU. That's where the GPU becomes useful in the "servers" I'm talking about. If you're a physicist wanting to model a nuclear explosion, you need a lot of floating point calculating power. You need a supercomputer with huge capabilities. Same with the weather service trying to generate weather forecasting. Things like that.
To do this kind of work with older generation supercomputers (i.e. last year), you were talking about running on a computer full of Intel or AMD x86_64 chips. Now, they do an acceptable job for floating point calculations. But now you can put a different chip in there. Each individual chip comes with a GPU that does floating point calculations much faster than the general purpose CPU by a substantial margin. Instead of a thousand CPUs doing your calculations, you can get a thousand GPUs doing far more calculations. That's where the integrated GPU works well in the "server" environment.
How is this ethical dilemma any different than any other game where people sell items? People have been selling items they obtained in online games for a very long time. Changing the game so you can do it without going to a 3rd party doesn't fundamentally change anything. Actually, I would think that with the game managing the trading, it would be easier for the company to find people exploiting this hack. They could track all sales and when they see one player selling lots of big ticket items, they can take action.
I can see your point. Building the game around the real money trading system could negatively impact the game. But you ask "how much will players tolerate?" I suggest that if they set up a game that isn't very much fun to play, no one will spend money on things from the game. A poorly designed game that is only there to fuel the real money trading system will be its own victim. In order to make the real money trading system appealing, they have to have things that people want to spend their money on. That is, the game must be interesting enough to play that people are willing to part with their real world money in exchange for things in that game.
I too have no interest in playing Diablo III myself. But it's because I see that games have become revenue streams rather than cheap fun games. I saw it back in the 80's when Gauntlet and the other "quarter flood" games came out. The games were fun until they figured out how to set them up so you had to keep flooding quarters in to keep playing. Overnight, the arcade lost all the great old games in favor of the new breed of revenue streams. Sure, the game play was fun but the cost was way too high for me to justify spending any time playing them. The thing is, my opinion was in the minority. Far more people put far more money into the games than ever before and the industry raked it in.
PC games were great at first. I spent endless hours playing Diablo, Doom, Quake, Counter Strike, et al. As soon as I saw the first subscription based online games, I knew the industry was doomed (from my perspective). I've purchased a couple new games since then but it's becoming increasingly rare. But, again, I'm in the minority. People who never even heard of a computer back in the early Duke Nukem days are lining up in droves to buy and play these games. The gaming companies have figured out how to maximize their profit stream.
And that's the point. The revenue stream is a priority. If they make a bad game just to cater to a real-money auction system, they aren't going to make any money because no one will play the game. If no one plays the game, no one will buy or sell items in the game. In order to make the in-game real-money auction system work, the game has to appeal to the masses first. Because of that, I disagree that this auction system has as much potential to ruin the game as you suggest. Will it change the game? Absolutely without question. Blizzard will be sure to monitor everything and regulate the supply of items given out by the game so the price stays high and they get more out of their percentage. Will it ruin the game? I'm pretty sure they won't let it. Again, the appeal of the game is the driver of the higher order revenue stream and they won't cut off their nose to spite their face.
GPUs provide substantially faster floating point processing than a general purpose CPU. Putting these new Intel/AMD integrated chips in big iron supercomputers will give research teams orders of magnitude more computing power (for less power and money) than the current CPU-only based offerings.
As far as Intel trying to make an ARM chip, that's for an entirely different market.
The whole point of being in business selling games is to make a profit. If they make a system so horribly onerous people will do their trading elsewhere like they already do. Blizzard will see either a revenue drop or just that the trading is an under performing revenue segment and they will focus on what they need to do to bring it back up (If they don't kill the franchise through stupidity à la Ubisoft).
Given that most games now are riddled with DRM and many require subscription to an online service to play, I say that the profit motive has already destroyed gaming. But the gaming companies have pretty well figured out the threshold that most gamers will accept for restrictions/fees. Sure, they've lost some players but only a very small percentage of the market. Most successful gaming companies have figured out where the fine line is between profitability and giving the people enough of what they want.
If this new trading system isn't executed well, people won't use it. There's nothing stopping people from dropping items while standing next to someone else. You can't take that away without breaking the game. And so long as that's part of the game, people will figure out a way to trade items for real cash. If Blizzard gets it right, they'll just do it in-game instead of elsewhere.
So, there's a good chance I'll never play the game. And if I did, I wouldn't spend real money to buy stuff for one of my game characters. However, a lot of people do this. It's amazing how much real world money changes hands over intangible things like this. I say good for Blizzard for taking advantage of it. It doesn't sound like they're going to charge a huge percentage (else players will continue to buy and sell elsewhere like they always have). It just lets Blizzard get that percentage rather than an outside company. And why shouldn't they? These people are going to do it one way or another. Why not integrate it into the game? It may even make the trading a little more secure. If the game system runs the transaction, there's less chance for fraud. The game can ensure that both sides of the transaction take place at the same time. The game can make sure items aren't misrepresented. At least in theory. If they do it right, this could be a significant improvement to the game.
That's why I put in the caveat of the government figuring it out. Sure, people get away with tax evasion all the time. But the key difference is that not one person has been arrested for failing to fill out their SF86. They just get their clearance pulled or don't get it in the first place. They don't go to jail for it. Some people (a small percentage at least) of tax evaders get put in jail.
There's a big difference. Everyone who earns some minimum income in this country is required by law to fill out the 1040. You only need to fill out an SF86 if you want to get a government clearance. If you don't fill out the form, you don't get the clearance and nothing else. If you don't fill out your 1040 and the government figures it out, men with guns come to your house and lock you up.
'The bill is mislabeled... This is not protecting children from Internet pornography. It's creating a database for everybody in this country for a lot of other purposes.'
On the face of it, this looks like an accident. There really wasn't a lot to be gained by not publishing the source. And the initial message notifying the public was a "we need to fix this yesterday, one way or another". Someone who was doing this out of malice would have put out a "we were notified of the problem and are taking appropriate steps to address the issue" while they covered their asses.
Slashdot Mirror
I've found that tasks waiting on resources without a reasonable timeout (or sometimes no timeout at all) and refusing to respond to outside stimuli are more often the problem than a task stuck in an infinite loop.
Or, perhaps, I want to make a new operating system that can run multiple copies of Unix. Though I want the name to mean something other than just a play on Unix. I'll change the last couple of letters and call it Multics for "Multiple Computer Servers"...
It says in TFA that they are modifying the house charger to be two way. That's a 30 amp 220/240 circuit. The batteries can supply substantially more amperage but you have to actually get that out of the car to be useful. The "level 3" plug can handle it but there's nothing in your house that can use anything like that. If you wanted to build a system that took the battery power and converted it to usable current to supply the house, you're going to need a pretty serious inverter. To fully
supply a house you need probably over 20,000 watt capacity for a typical house running electric heat or A/C and a fully electric kitchen.
Now, the 30A 220/240V supply can be useful. But little things add up quick. Fridges can draw a lot more than 1.5 amps, though usually less than 5. Add in a computer, a satellite dish, a TV, lights, etc. and you'll hit that 30A cap a lot faster than you think.
A 240V, 30A circuit won't feed as much as you might think. That circuit could feed four 15 amp 110 circuits. That might power your fridge, several lights and maybe a TV. Forget an electric cooktop (usually a 220V, 50A circuit). Though you may be able to get away with just one burner. No way can you run your A/C system. Electric heat? Not a chance. You'd probably have to choose between running the gas powered furnace and the television (a hard decision for some I know).
30 amps just doesn't cut it for running a whole house.
I don't doubt that. But the chance of that actually happening is still very low. Sure, it may start to get worse over the coming years. I have no doubt it will given how little this country spends on infrastructure maintenance. But here's the thing. Grid reliability is the only thing that lets people rely on electric cars. If the grid starts crashing more often, the draw for pure electric cars will vanish and most people won't buy them. Why buy a car that you can't reliably charge? The very thing that makes it irrelevant as a backup source (i.e. reliable power) would make it irrelevant as reliable transportation if it wasn't there. Either way, the Leaf is irrelevant as a backup power source.
Oh, the batteries certainly have the juice to do it. However, the charging circuit can't handle that amperage. I suppose if you attached a monstrous inverter directly to the batteries, you could possibly do it. But the charging station you put in most houses in Japan and the US can only support maybe 30 amps at 220/240v. That's a couple of circuits for lights and the fridge and you're tapped out. If you're using the standard household plug circuit, that's only 12 amps at 110v. That's not enough to run very much more than several lights. Perhaps if you plugged into their "Level 3" connector (125A @ 480VDC), you could draw enough to power a whole house. But that equipment is not cheap. The charging station for that level is over $16K and you probably can't install it in your house because it will overdraw the typical 200 amp service to a residence. Besides, you can buy a decent dedicated generator and have it installed for less than that. Hell, you could buy some dedicated batteries and a big inverter and chuck them into your basement and have a more practical, less expensive house battery backup.
Possible? Yes. Practical. Not a chance.
BTW, my information comes from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Leaf
So I've been thinking about this a little and here's a couple of drawbacks I see:
I'm sure that some people may have a use for this technology. But it's a niche market at best.
It's great that they have achieved this speed with such simple technology. However, I wonder how useful this technology will really be. If you set your laptop down next to the TV, I wonder what kind of interference you'll get from the rapid fluctuations in light. I know the average techy type here is a troll living in the basement but what about the unwashed masses trying to use this in rooms above ground with the shades open? I wonder how much interference will all that light introduce, especially if you have lots of shiny bits in the window. I suppose they could really crank up the "LED (Light-Emitting Diode) light bulbs" to improve signal to noise ratio. But is that a practical solution? How about the really non-techy types wanting to use their wireless devices outside? How does it work when exposed to direct sunlight? If it doesn't, then what's the alternative? Traditional radio based wireless? We already have that.
I'm sure this is a great achievement but I'm just not sure if it's going to be practical for daily use for the average person. Though it may contribute to something that's useful. Perhaps as a semi-secure wireless network for higher security areas that are already closed off to the outside world. Maybe it would be good for dedicated areas that don't have the general purpose demands of the average consumer device. Maybe this will be integrated into some greater new technology further down the road. I know. We could use dedicated digital light transmissions to control the consumer devices in our homes. Oh. Wait...
You really should read up on the new generation of integrated GPUs. They have come a long way in just the last year. AMD has integrated a full up ATI 6xxx GPU on die. Intel is making remarkable strides as well.
Having a discrete graphics card hanging on a PCIe bus may have been 20x faster last year. Integrated graphics were really inadequate when they were in the northbridge. Again, that was last year. Things have evolved significantly since then.
Oh, and I forgot one more thing. The newest integrated CPU/GPU from AMD uses the same processor core that goes into the HD6xxx series chips coming from ATI. So, contrary to what you say, the FLOPS are not ". . . shit in comparison to any discreet [sic] graphics card . . ."
I should have explained myself better. You're thinking about small blade servers doing simple tasks. Sure, for that the GPU is a complete waste. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about a computer that's cranking out killer graphics. I'm talking about computers that do "real work" that is seriously floating point intensive. Far beyond what you'd find running on a small server.
Get that small blade server out of your head. Think big iron. Think supercomputers. Think racks of cards all interconnected to act as one big computer. Think hundreds (or thousands) of individual processors all coordinated to act as one big computer. Now think about putting in a chip that does really fast floating point calculations in place of a general purpose CPU. That's where the GPU becomes useful in the "servers" I'm talking about. If you're a physicist wanting to model a nuclear explosion, you need a lot of floating point calculating power. You need a supercomputer with huge capabilities. Same with the weather service trying to generate weather forecasting. Things like that.
To do this kind of work with older generation supercomputers (i.e. last year), you were talking about running on a computer full of Intel or AMD x86_64 chips. Now, they do an acceptable job for floating point calculations. But now you can put a different chip in there. Each individual chip comes with a GPU that does floating point calculations much faster than the general purpose CPU by a substantial margin. Instead of a thousand CPUs doing your calculations, you can get a thousand GPUs doing far more calculations. That's where the integrated GPU works well in the "server" environment.
How is this ethical dilemma any different than any other game where people sell items? People have been selling items they obtained in online games for a very long time. Changing the game so you can do it without going to a 3rd party doesn't fundamentally change anything. Actually, I would think that with the game managing the trading, it would be easier for the company to find people exploiting this hack. They could track all sales and when they see one player selling lots of big ticket items, they can take action.
I think while we mostly agree, we are looking at this from slightly different perspectives.
In short (too late), yes, I think this is the case.
I can see your point. Building the game around the real money trading system could negatively impact the game. But you ask "how much will players tolerate?" I suggest that if they set up a game that isn't very much fun to play, no one will spend money on things from the game. A poorly designed game that is only there to fuel the real money trading system will be its own victim. In order to make the real money trading system appealing, they have to have things that people want to spend their money on. That is, the game must be interesting enough to play that people are willing to part with their real world money in exchange for things in that game.
I too have no interest in playing Diablo III myself. But it's because I see that games have become revenue streams rather than cheap fun games. I saw it back in the 80's when Gauntlet and the other "quarter flood" games came out. The games were fun until they figured out how to set them up so you had to keep flooding quarters in to keep playing. Overnight, the arcade lost all the great old games in favor of the new breed of revenue streams. Sure, the game play was fun but the cost was way too high for me to justify spending any time playing them. The thing is, my opinion was in the minority. Far more people put far more money into the games than ever before and the industry raked it in.
PC games were great at first. I spent endless hours playing Diablo, Doom, Quake, Counter Strike, et al. As soon as I saw the first subscription based online games, I knew the industry was doomed (from my perspective). I've purchased a couple new games since then but it's becoming increasingly rare. But, again, I'm in the minority. People who never even heard of a computer back in the early Duke Nukem days are lining up in droves to buy and play these games. The gaming companies have figured out how to maximize their profit stream.
And that's the point. The revenue stream is a priority. If they make a bad game just to cater to a real-money auction system, they aren't going to make any money because no one will play the game. If no one plays the game, no one will buy or sell items in the game. In order to make the in-game real-money auction system work, the game has to appeal to the masses first. Because of that, I disagree that this auction system has as much potential to ruin the game as you suggest. Will it change the game? Absolutely without question. Blizzard will be sure to monitor everything and regulate the supply of items given out by the game so the price stays high and they get more out of their percentage. Will it ruin the game? I'm pretty sure they won't let it. Again, the appeal of the game is the driver of the higher order revenue stream and they won't cut off their nose to spite their face.
GPUs provide substantially faster floating point processing than a general purpose CPU. Putting these new Intel/AMD integrated chips in big iron supercomputers will give research teams orders of magnitude more computing power (for less power and money) than the current CPU-only based offerings.
As far as Intel trying to make an ARM chip, that's for an entirely different market.
Do you live under a rock? People have been doing this for years. Probably since the MUD days of yore.
The whole point of being in business selling games is to make a profit. If they make a system so horribly onerous people will do their trading elsewhere like they already do. Blizzard will see either a revenue drop or just that the trading is an under performing revenue segment and they will focus on what they need to do to bring it back up (If they don't kill the franchise through stupidity à la Ubisoft).
Given that most games now are riddled with DRM and many require subscription to an online service to play, I say that the profit motive has already destroyed gaming. But the gaming companies have pretty well figured out the threshold that most gamers will accept for restrictions/fees. Sure, they've lost some players but only a very small percentage of the market. Most successful gaming companies have figured out where the fine line is between profitability and giving the people enough of what they want.
If this new trading system isn't executed well, people won't use it. There's nothing stopping people from dropping items while standing next to someone else. You can't take that away without breaking the game. And so long as that's part of the game, people will figure out a way to trade items for real cash. If Blizzard gets it right, they'll just do it in-game instead of elsewhere.
So, there's a good chance I'll never play the game. And if I did, I wouldn't spend real money to buy stuff for one of my game characters. However, a lot of people do this. It's amazing how much real world money changes hands over intangible things like this. I say good for Blizzard for taking advantage of it. It doesn't sound like they're going to charge a huge percentage (else players will continue to buy and sell elsewhere like they always have). It just lets Blizzard get that percentage rather than an outside company. And why shouldn't they? These people are going to do it one way or another. Why not integrate it into the game? It may even make the trading a little more secure. If the game system runs the transaction, there's less chance for fraud. The game can ensure that both sides of the transaction take place at the same time. The game can make sure items aren't misrepresented. At least in theory. If they do it right, this could be a significant improvement to the game.
I wonder how long it will take for them to implement Positive Train Control, either buying it from someone who already makes it or building their own?
That's why I put in the caveat of the government figuring it out. Sure, people get away with tax evasion all the time. But the key difference is that not one person has been arrested for failing to fill out their SF86. They just get their clearance pulled or don't get it in the first place. They don't go to jail for it. Some people (a small percentage at least) of tax evaders get put in jail.
There's a big difference. Everyone who earns some minimum income in this country is required by law to fill out the 1040. You only need to fill out an SF86 if you want to get a government clearance. If you don't fill out the form, you don't get the clearance and nothing else. If you don't fill out your 1040 and the government figures it out, men with guns come to your house and lock you up.
If they want to stop their nose bleed by putting a tourniquet around their neck, that's their business.
'The bill is mislabeled... This is not protecting children from Internet pornography. It's creating a database for everybody in this country for a lot of other purposes.'
Conyers hit the nail on the head.
After I "hit" the enter key, I'm waiting for a new keyboard myself. I wonder if this one will come with the any key too...
On the face of it, this looks like an accident. There really wasn't a lot to be gained by not publishing the source. And the initial message notifying the public was a "we need to fix this yesterday, one way or another". Someone who was doing this out of malice would have put out a "we were notified of the problem and are taking appropriate steps to address the issue" while they covered their asses.