This is actually nothing new. The NIF is something that is reported on about once a year, just to keep people interested in the Fusion project that will happen Real Soon Now(TM).
These lasers are definitely cool, but not what one would traditionally think of. Each laser charges up to one terrajoule of energy, then outputs one terrawatt for one second. The theory is that if the pulse is timed correctly, there will be enough pressure from all sides to force fusion. Unfortunately, we won't know if it's actually going to work until the end of the decade.
As for military uses, the military doesn't really need a laser this powerful. A gigawatt laser would do the job just as effectively, would charge much faster, and wouldn't strain the reactors in a combat situation. I'd provide more info if I could, but the Navy currently has the next generation ships listed as having "directed energy weapons". The only such weapon they've confirmed (for suitably shakey definitions of "confirmed") is the Rail Gun, which may allow destroyers to perform Battleship style land bombardments.
There are actually a few other instances in which it's not copyrightable.
Fair enough. I assume such situations are few and far between? The only one I can think of off the top of my head is that government agencies are not allowed to copyright material. (Although they can mark it top secret, allow a private sector entity to have the copyright, or otherwise restrict content based on national interests.)
HOLLYWOOD, May 23 2005 (Rueters) -- Coming hot on the heels of her smash hit single, My Give A Damn's Busted, Jo De Messina has announced a new record entitled My Sarcasm Sensor's Busted. When questioned about the possibility of this song being seen as repetitive, Ms. Messina had this to say,
"Whereas my previous song was targetted at those who like edgy country, my new song will be targetted at geeks like those found on Slashdot. Since the old song was probably never heard by these young individuals, I'm confident that we'll have record breaking sales!"
Ms. Messina has said that the record will target a May 24th release date, with hopes that it will catch Slashdotters before the story goes off the front page.
So the question is whether the AltiVec portion of the PPC will even be relied upon in the future
Alivec is used heavily in the audio/video decoding programs such as iTunes and Quicktime. That allows these programs to perform far better on OS X than many similar a/v decoders on Windows. In any case, AltiVec is the wrong sort of technology for the type of windowing effects OS X uses.
On the other hand, if they do provide a truly unbiased service we may get (for the first time) some interesting feedback on what percentage of torrents represent legal downloads...
Indeed. Although one has to wonder if it wouldn't become a feedback loop? i.e. As torrents become more accessable, it will probably encourage some types of content creators to use it. Which would only lead to more tools (perhaps a built in Torrent download manager in Mozilla?) which would then encourage even more content. If things do look bleak at first, it may be a very short time before they don't.:-)
I did. Note how the CEO used "Mozilla" as an example, while Wired blathered on about illegal content.
Their business model is to make money by displaying advertising on their search results page (hmmm, where have we seen this before?). They couldn't or shouldn't care less about what they index as long as they draw the traffic. In the long run, they might change their attitude due to legal harassment, but the existence of a single authoritative search engine has a lot of benefits for rights holders as well.
As long as they stay under the "traffic carrier" clauses, they'll be just as safe as any other search engine. Which means that they'll need to spider the torrents via methods similar to those used by Google, Yahoo, Inktomi (stupid bot), and other popular search engines. If they fail to provide an unbiased service that reflects the unbiased nature of the content, then they'll probably be in deep trouble.
One other thing to remember is that under the carrier status, the original content holder has a right to ask them to remove infringing links. As long as they follow that procedure, they are safe.
Minor nitpick: I think you mean "information on unauthorized copyrighted content". Unless a content creator explicitly enters his work into the public domain, it is copyrighted. However, he may choose to allow for free distribution of his content via a method such as BitTorrent. Examples of this situation abound. (OpenOffice, Mozilla, Star Wars Fan Films, Privateer Remake, OSS OS Distos, etc, etc, etc.) The illegal part only comes in when content is distributed without permission from the content holder.
This sounds like Napster all over again except with legal precedents in place it'll happen much quicker.
Nonsense. With Napster the problem was that it was a device for exchanging illegal content. The judge found that the small amount of legal content was nothing more than an excuse to allow for illegal wares.
In the case of BitTorrent, it has a LOT of uses that are perfectly legal. That is what this search engine is targetting. Want the entire Mozilla source tarball? BitTorrent it. Trying to get the latest 180MB release of Privateer Remake? BitTorrent it. OpenOffice, Mozilla, FreeBSD, Linux, America's Army, Doom III demo, Star Wars Fan Films, Star Trek New Missions videos, the list just goes on and on. BitTorrent is a response to the ever growing size of these files more than a method of distributing illegal wares. It just happens to work well for the illegal stuff as well.
The result is that a judge will no more condemn it than he would condemn the entire Internet.
I wish people wouldn't do this. SIMD instructions exist on practically all modern processors. e.g. Intel has MMX/SSE/SSE2, IBM has Altivec, and Sun just calls it Sparc SIMD. These technologies are highly comparable, but target very different processing requirements. As a result, each one shows tremendous performance gains in specific situations while falling flat in situations where a competitor does well. That's just the nature of the beast.
Don't fall for the marketing nonsense. Take the time to understand what it means, and how it affects you. It may very well be that Altivec performs better than SSE2 for you, but that isn't a guarantee.
In any case, sorry to interrupt with a does of reality. Carry on.:-)
As someone who lives in Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator for 45+ hours a week, I wouldn't complain if my filters were twice as fast. Not every cpu-intensive process is bus- or disk-limited.
Your photoshop filter probably *is* bus and memory limited. For one, your processor needs to move the memory in and out of the processor quickly. If the bus is saturated, then it can't feed the CPU any more than it already has. Which means that the CPU can't run any faster than what the bus can feed it. And if you run out of memory, you'll have to start accessing the disk - which is several magnitudes slower than memory. Improved disk performance (e.g. Serial ATA) can help hide some of that swapping.
I regularly peg my dual 2ghz g5s. If it were dual 4ghz, I would peg that too, just not as often.
Pegging a CPU is not the same as getting 100% of the CPU's performance. If the bus can't feed the CPU, it's going to start running wait states which look like normal CPU usage to the OS. Most people would be amazed to know that the time spent in wait states can easily be half or more of a CPU's processing time. i.e. It's all about how efficiently the bus can service the CPU.
Trust me. Every time you get a new machine, most of the performance increase comes from systems other than the CPU.
Do you seriously think Apple LIKES to ship G4 chips? In their high-end laptops?
Of course not. But as you said, it's currently the only option for meeting the design of the laptop. The current line of G5s run far too hot and are far too power hungry.
I'm sure Jobs is yelling at IBM to get those promised low-power G5s to market.
Update to my own post: It looks like iMacs now carry G5's, modern busses, and Serial ATA drives. Considering that they have A flat screen built in, they are very reasonably priced.
Good point, but Apple still ships G4 chips with an obsolete 20th century-style bus.
Apple ships G4 chips with low-end hardware (where price > performance) and laptops (where low heat & battery > performance). The PowerMac line has the desktop performance demons that are strong competitors to the latest Wintel offerings.
If PowerPC was truely competitive, Apple would have stopped shipping G4 chips a long time ago.
If Intel/x86 was truely competitive, they would have stopped shipping Celeron and Pentium M a long time ago.
Intel has very good marketing. That's why people think that they're always fastest, even when they're not. Low-end and Laptop PCs suffer from many of the same design aspects as low end Macs. This is an intentional characteristic, as it allows for machines to be cheaper for your average user. The high end user is going to have to pay fairly heavily for a top of the line machine.
As for laptops, Apple has recognized that these machines are not designed to be high-performance machines, but rather computers designed for doing work on the road. So they've designed them to have long battery lives and low heat disappation. Up until the introduction of the Pentium M/Centrino design, x86 laptops tended toward high performance, short battery lives, and massive heat dissapation. (Trust me, it's quite annoying when your Dell is dead after an hour and a half, and the guy with the Mac next to you decides to stop working and throw in a DVD for the next two hours or so.)
It is amazing how many people still believe that PPC is vastly superior to x86.
I'm amazed at how many people still think that any performance gap (real or perceived) actually matters. The majority of your PC's performance now comes from the size of the bus, the transfer rate of your disks, and how much memory you have. No one really *needs* a 5GHz processor to run a wordprocessor, email client, MP3 player, or even something more intensive like a graphics editor, video editor, or sound studio. Even games now rely far more heavily on the GPU than they do the CPU.
Haha, i got modded down for defending some Star Trek guy.
Goddamn mod abusers. They modded you overrated so that they couldn't even be meta-modded. Sorry about that. The moderators so love to ruin a discussion by modding down people they disagree with.
If any moderators are still reading this, can they give the great-grandpappy post a +1 underrated to cancel out the -1 overrated nonsense? Thanks.
I heard you and you are WRONG. Not to be rude or anything, but I suggest you take a modern history class.
History has jack-squat to do with it. Physics does. Let me put it this way. The dinosaur killer asteroid was estimated at 75,000,000 megatons. It was not capable of destroying the entire surface, but did wipe out 95% of life from its after-effects. If we assume that every nuke ever made was of 50 megatons (probably high for an average, but we'll go with it), then we'd need 1,500,000 nukes to equal the dinosaur killer. According to NuclearWeaponsArchive.org, the US has built about 70,000 nukes since the inception of such weapons. It isn't known how many were produced by Russia, but it's estimated to be significantly less. We'll double the 70,000 figure and then add on another 2,000 to cover incidental countries with nuclear technology. That gives us a grand total of 160,000 nukes, or about 10% of the force of the dinosaur killer.
It depends on whether you think a high school diploma makes you educated or not. Given the value of a high school education these days, one could argue either way.
You missed my point. A diploma is just a piece of paper. It means nothing other than that you've been able to complete a bunch of tests and not get into too much trouble. It does not define whether you are educated or not. There have been many people throughout history who have been very well educated but haven't had diplomas from higher education (or sometimes even high school!). As time goes on and information becomes more available thanks to libraries and the internet, this only becomes more common.
i.e. If you think you *need* an American school to become educated, you've just bought into another lie.
Experience is not the same as education. That is why people separate the two.
Nonsense. If it wasn't, then schools wouldn't make you dissect animals, perform chem experiments, do word problems (math), or a million other pieces of practice that give you experience. That's why we call experience outside of the school "real world" experience, and make the point that the real-world doesn't always align with the simplicity of school experience.
If you believe that your education stops as soon as you leave school, you have bought into a third lie.
It requires a significant industrial infrastructure to process Uranium and Plutonium. [...] Then I guess you couldn't create a bomb all by yourself.
Nice try, but an industrial base is separate from the ability or inability to create bombs. i.e. Just like you need equipment to create an airplane, you need equipment to create create nuclear weapons. It's not anything sophisticated you need, either. A strong enough centrifuge is really the main ingredient. Any country that has access to semi-modern technology can build these things, so don't twist my words.
Twisting my words only pisses me off. Especially since I was only correcting the more questionable points of your original post, and not attacking you. You, OTOH, have seen fit to attack me with lies, half-truths, and twisted words. Good day to you sir, and I hope our paths shall not cross again.
The seven season did have a lot of crap in it but it isn't fair to put the whole season down.
True, there was still some good stuff. However, the way I see it was that the Star Trek machine already had sufficient momentum to maintain itself. It didn't manage to go off the deepend until it broke free of its original creative influences. (e.g. DS9, Voyager, Enterprise)
Under Roddenberry, as i recall, Star Trek was about to tank, wasn't it?
Think again. Under Roddenberry The Wrath of Khan, Yesterday's Enterprise, Best of Both Worlds, the Drumhead, Darmok, and other truely great episodes were made. Roddenberry didn't die until right before Unification aired, so we don't know if he was there to guide some of the other episodes such as Unification, I Borg, and Inner Light. I *do* know that Star Trek began to slowly decline after that, culminating in the stupidity of the seventh season. (Force of Nature, Masks, Eye of the Beholder, Journey's End, etc.)
So, you're nitpicking over semantics. No, we didn't have enough firepower to destroy the world a la Star Wars. However, the term "destroy the world" as I and most other people were using it referred to destroying all life on the world. THAT we were able to do with enough coverage to engulf the world multiple times over.
No, you're not listening. We don't have enough firepower to cover any more than a fraction of the surface area. There's nowhere near enough weapons to wipe out all life on Earth. As I said, not even enough antimatter to go to Alpha-Centauri could do it. We're good, but we're nowhere near THAT good.
Yes, and they still spent to keep up with us. So what? It still doesn't change the fact that they overspent because we overspent.
You complained that the Russian equipment always outnumbered ours. That's not as true as it was made out to be, and there equipment ended up being non-comparable to our own. i.e. They were all bark and no bite. And because of their attempts to keep up with our technology, the Russians easily outspent us on military ventures. The overspending ended up being a good thing because our economy could take it and their's couldn't.
Then again, what's overspending when your very existance depends on it?
I've had talks with a technician that serviced nuclear weapons. You need to build a device with a shaped charge that will detonate in a precise sequence while still maintaining the integrity of the device. No such device is so easy to make that an uneducated person could do so with "the proper equipment".
Be careful about your usage of the term "uneducated". Uneducated is not the same as no higher education. Education comes in two components:
1. Access to knowledge 2. Experience
The access to knowledge is already solved and that is all the US can actually control. Experience comes by doing things. Designing a proper charge and shell can be done by an experienced engineer who understands his materials. Even third world countries have industry similar to what the US had in the 1940s. Not to mention that the properties of many materials are better understood (e.g. Depleted Uranium makes an excellent construction material for something that has to be super-strong. This wasn't fully understood in the 1940s.)
Were your statement true, then every country in the world would have plutonium nukes.
They would, if it weren't for one minor issue: Where do they get the Plutonium from? The method for generating sufficient plutonium is a nuclear reactor. In case you haven't noticed, nuclear reactors are carefully controlled by the UN. All nuclear materials must be accounted for or there will be hell to pay.
Note that pretty much every first world (and now some second and third world countries) has nuclear weapons, especially implosion devices. And that's despite the fact that gun devices are far easier to construct and obtain materials for.
Here's an interesting account for you. The Israelis attacked an Iraqi nuclear power plant explicitly to prevent Saddam from obtaining plutonium. Wonder why they might do that?;-)
I was hoping you'd fall into that trap. We are talking about weapons. These weapons are physical devices one could touch or hold. Learning French does not enable you to make a weapon. And yes, you could steal a weapon, but knowing French does not specifically give you the ability to steal. However, knowing nuclear engineering certainly does give you the knowledge to build a nuclear weapon.
It's not a trap. A spy is just as much of weapon as a nuclear bomb. A spy can not only steal information, but can plant fake information, reduce operating capacity, ensure defects in weapons, sow discord, and potentially even have key people executed. Spys are *very* dangerous weapons.
I don't particularly care about saving lives in China, Cuba, In
One of the principal problems with "Star Trek" is that there have been too many television shows and too many movies.
I disagree. The problem with Star Trek is that B&B milked it instead of building it. Roddenberry's Star Trek created new and interesting characters and villans. Berman's Star Trek only milks the existing ones for money.
Under Roddenberry, the Borg were scary. Under Berman, they were pathetic. Under Roddenbery, characters had internal conflict because of who they were. (e.g. Spock suppressing emotions, Data attempting to achieve them, Worf reconciling his human home with his Klingon blood, etc.) Under Berman characters were lifeless and without conflict. (e.g. Janeway, Kes, Neelix, Harry Kim, etc.) Even cases where Berman attempted conflict (Kira, B'Elanna, Paris, etc.) it ended up getting brushed off because it just wasn't believable. Then they'd pull it out of the closet on occasion to force an emotional issue instead of making the conflict integral to the character.
Give Star Trek to someone with talent and I think you'll find that it can still recapture some of its lost magic.
You seriously need to take a class in history if you actually believe that.
No, you need to take lessons in nuclear science. We have enough weapons to "blast ourselves back to the stoneage", but not enough to wipe out the earth (or even the surface). Not even sufficient antimatter for a trip to alpha-centauri could do it. We've maanged to shrink the world to a small place, but at the end of the day the Earth *is* still pretty damn big.
The effect of those overstatements was that the US overspent on the military. This led to the Soviet Union increasing spending.
Doesn't change the fact that the Russian threat was always overstated. We just didn't know it until the Cold War was over.
You also need a trained mind to do the figuring. The US should not be in the business of training those minds.
"At the age of 12, I experienced a wonder in a booklet dealing with Euclidean plane geometry, which came into my hands at the beginning of a school year. Here were assertions, as for example the intersection of the three altitudes of a triangle in one point, which -- though by no means evident -- could nevertheless be proved with such certainty that any doubt appeared to be out of the question. This lucidity and certainty made an indescribable impression on me."
My point is that no one *needs* to have their mind trained if they're willing to do it themselves. Even if you are relying on someone else, there's nothing in our schools that's particularly special other than the knowledge available. And since the knowledge can be obtained from other sources, they don't actually need our schools, do they?
I'm sorry, I lack a college degree but I could probably build you an implosion nuke if I had the proper equipment. These things are stupidly simple in theory. The only tricky part is the proper construction. One of the reasons why we embargo computers is to prevent certain countries from running the simulations that allow them to skip the trial and error involved in creating an implosion device.
Tell me how studying French could become a weapon. Tell me how studying anthropology could become a weapon.
You've just described two core elements of a spy. How else do you think the Russians built the Tupolev Tu-144?
I can certainly tell you how studying nuclear engineering could become a weapon.
And I can tell you how nuclear engineering can be used to save lives. Including the destructive power of a hydrogen bomb.
We don't HAVE to teach them nuclear engineering or something that could create a weapon.
No, we don't. Nuclear engineering would be a wise thing to screen, but it's impossible to keep the information from people. I've gotten a basic education in it just by chatting with nuclear scientists on the Internet and filling in the rest with publicly available information. If I was actually trying to build a nuclear device (be it a reactor or a bomb), then there's plenty of stuff I could dig up. Including basic instructions on how to separate the Uranium 235 from the 238.
Actually, eugenics has been proven to be highly effective.
Having worked in genetics, I can say that this is blatently untrue. Genetic manipulation is a useful tool for adapting a plant to its environment. This makes the plant more successful in areas that it would otherwise fail. However, for everything you gain you have to give something back. Sometimes you don't really care about those attributes, because they are irrelevant in the target environment. Sometimes, though, you lose something more important. For example, a lot of produce today isn't as nutritionally rich as traditional crops because they are able to grow in soil that has been bankrupt of nutrients considered unimportant to the plant's growth.
An even bigger danger of Eugenics is the matter of inbreeding. I'm not certain of the situation with plants, but livestock companies have had to enrich their stock with foreign livestock to buy more time on the issue of inbreeding. Unfortunately, this is only buying time. If we don't find a way to isolate and repair genetic defects we're going to end up with a very small gene pool for our livestock.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, every time I make a reference to Real Genius around here, it goes right over everyone's heads. Which can mean only one of two things:
1. Slashdot is infested with teenage wannabes who aren't old enough to have seen Real Genius.
2. Slashdot is infested with people who *wish* they were cool enough to be geeks.
Considering how much nonsense we see, plus the general Slashdot GroupThink(TM), I'm going for number 3: All of the above.
This is actually nothing new. The NIF is something that is reported on about once a year, just to keep people interested in the Fusion project that will happen Real Soon Now(TM).
These lasers are definitely cool, but not what one would traditionally think of. Each laser charges up to one terrajoule of energy, then outputs one terrawatt for one second. The theory is that if the pulse is timed correctly, there will be enough pressure from all sides to force fusion. Unfortunately, we won't know if it's actually going to work until the end of the decade.
As for military uses, the military doesn't really need a laser this powerful. A gigawatt laser would do the job just as effectively, would charge much faster, and wouldn't strain the reactors in a combat situation. I'd provide more info if I could, but the Navy currently has the next generation ships listed as having "directed energy weapons". The only such weapon they've confirmed (for suitably shakey definitions of "confirmed") is the Rail Gun, which may allow destroyers to perform Battleship style land bombardments.
There are actually a few other instances in which it's not copyrightable.
Fair enough. I assume such situations are few and far between? The only one I can think of off the top of my head is that government agencies are not allowed to copyright material. (Although they can mark it top secret, allow a private sector entity to have the copyright, or otherwise restrict content based on national interests.)
I'm curious, what other instances exist?
HOLLYWOOD, May 23 2005 (Rueters) -- Coming hot on the heels of her smash hit single, My Give A Damn's Busted, Jo De Messina has announced a new record entitled My Sarcasm Sensor's Busted. When questioned about the possibility of this song being seen as repetitive, Ms. Messina had this to say,
"Whereas my previous song was targetted at those who like edgy country, my new song will be targetted at geeks like those found on Slashdot. Since the old song was probably never heard by these young individuals, I'm confident that we'll have record breaking sales!"
Ms. Messina has said that the record will target a May 24th release date, with hopes that it will catch Slashdotters before the story goes off the front page.
So the question is whether the AltiVec portion of the PPC will even be relied upon in the future
Alivec is used heavily in the audio/video decoding programs such as iTunes and Quicktime. That allows these programs to perform far better on OS X than many similar a/v decoders on Windows. In any case, AltiVec is the wrong sort of technology for the type of windowing effects OS X uses.
On the other hand, if they do provide a truly unbiased service we may get (for the first time) some interesting feedback on what percentage of torrents represent legal downloads...
:-)
Indeed. Although one has to wonder if it wouldn't become a feedback loop? i.e. As torrents become more accessable, it will probably encourage some types of content creators to use it. Which would only lead to more tools (perhaps a built in Torrent download manager in Mozilla?) which would then encourage even more content. If things do look bleak at first, it may be a very short time before they don't.
might i recommend that you read the article?
I did. Note how the CEO used "Mozilla" as an example, while Wired blathered on about illegal content.
Their business model is to make money by displaying advertising on their search results page (hmmm, where have we seen this before?). They couldn't or shouldn't care less about what they index as long as they draw the traffic. In the long run, they might change their attitude due to legal harassment, but the existence of a single authoritative search engine has a lot of benefits for rights holders as well.
As long as they stay under the "traffic carrier" clauses, they'll be just as safe as any other search engine. Which means that they'll need to spider the torrents via methods similar to those used by Google, Yahoo, Inktomi (stupid bot), and other popular search engines. If they fail to provide an unbiased service that reflects the unbiased nature of the content, then they'll probably be in deep trouble.
One other thing to remember is that under the carrier status, the original content holder has a right to ask them to remove infringing links. As long as they follow that procedure, they are safe.
Minor nitpick: I think you mean "information on unauthorized copyrighted content". Unless a content creator explicitly enters his work into the public domain, it is copyrighted. However, he may choose to allow for free distribution of his content via a method such as BitTorrent. Examples of this situation abound. (OpenOffice, Mozilla, Star Wars Fan Films, Privateer Remake, OSS OS Distos, etc, etc, etc.) The illegal part only comes in when content is distributed without permission from the content holder.
:-)
Sorry to interrupt.
This sounds like Napster all over again except with legal precedents in place it'll happen much quicker.
Nonsense. With Napster the problem was that it was a device for exchanging illegal content. The judge found that the small amount of legal content was nothing more than an excuse to allow for illegal wares.
In the case of BitTorrent, it has a LOT of uses that are perfectly legal. That is what this search engine is targetting. Want the entire Mozilla source tarball? BitTorrent it. Trying to get the latest 180MB release of Privateer Remake? BitTorrent it. OpenOffice, Mozilla, FreeBSD, Linux, America's Army, Doom III demo, Star Wars Fan Films, Star Trek New Missions videos, the list just goes on and on. BitTorrent is a response to the ever growing size of these files more than a method of distributing illegal wares. It just happens to work well for the illegal stuff as well.
The result is that a judge will no more condemn it than he would condemn the entire Internet.
Altivec, for one. x86 has nothing that compares.
:-)
I wish people wouldn't do this. SIMD instructions exist on practically all modern processors. e.g. Intel has MMX/SSE/SSE2, IBM has Altivec, and Sun just calls it Sparc SIMD. These technologies are highly comparable, but target very different processing requirements. As a result, each one shows tremendous performance gains in specific situations while falling flat in situations where a competitor does well. That's just the nature of the beast.
Don't fall for the marketing nonsense. Take the time to understand what it means, and how it affects you. It may very well be that Altivec performs better than SSE2 for you, but that isn't a guarantee.
In any case, sorry to interrupt with a does of reality. Carry on.
That's a bit of a blanket statement...
No, it's not.
As someone who lives in Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator for 45+ hours a week, I wouldn't complain if my filters were twice as fast. Not every cpu-intensive process is bus- or disk-limited.
Your photoshop filter probably *is* bus and memory limited. For one, your processor needs to move the memory in and out of the processor quickly. If the bus is saturated, then it can't feed the CPU any more than it already has. Which means that the CPU can't run any faster than what the bus can feed it. And if you run out of memory, you'll have to start accessing the disk - which is several magnitudes slower than memory. Improved disk performance (e.g. Serial ATA) can help hide some of that swapping.
I regularly peg my dual 2ghz g5s. If it were dual 4ghz, I would peg that too, just not as often.
Pegging a CPU is not the same as getting 100% of the CPU's performance. If the bus can't feed the CPU, it's going to start running wait states which look like normal CPU usage to the OS. Most people would be amazed to know that the time spent in wait states can easily be half or more of a CPU's processing time. i.e. It's all about how efficiently the bus can service the CPU.
Trust me. Every time you get a new machine, most of the performance increase comes from systems other than the CPU.
Do you seriously think Apple LIKES to ship G4 chips? In their high-end laptops?
;-)
Of course not. But as you said, it's currently the only option for meeting the design of the laptop. The current line of G5s run far too hot and are far too power hungry.
I'm sure Jobs is yelling at IBM to get those promised low-power G5s to market.
I suspect he's doing a lot more than yelling.
Update to my own post: It looks like iMacs now carry G5's, modern busses, and Serial ATA drives. Considering that they have A flat screen built in, they are very reasonably priced.
Good point, but Apple still ships G4 chips with an obsolete 20th century-style bus.
Apple ships G4 chips with low-end hardware (where price > performance) and laptops (where low heat & battery > performance). The PowerMac line has the desktop performance demons that are strong competitors to the latest Wintel offerings.
If PowerPC was truely competitive, Apple would have stopped shipping G4 chips a long time ago.
If Intel/x86 was truely competitive, they would have stopped shipping Celeron and Pentium M a long time ago.
Intel has very good marketing. That's why people think that they're always fastest, even when they're not. Low-end and Laptop PCs suffer from many of the same design aspects as low end Macs. This is an intentional characteristic, as it allows for machines to be cheaper for your average user. The high end user is going to have to pay fairly heavily for a top of the line machine.
As for laptops, Apple has recognized that these machines are not designed to be high-performance machines, but rather computers designed for doing work on the road. So they've designed them to have long battery lives and low heat disappation. Up until the introduction of the Pentium M/Centrino design, x86 laptops tended toward high performance, short battery lives, and massive heat dissapation. (Trust me, it's quite annoying when your Dell is dead after an hour and a half, and the guy with the Mac next to you decides to stop working and throw in a DVD for the next two hours or so.)
It is amazing how many people still believe that PPC is vastly superior to x86.
I'm amazed at how many people still think that any performance gap (real or perceived) actually matters. The majority of your PC's performance now comes from the size of the bus, the transfer rate of your disks, and how much memory you have. No one really *needs* a 5GHz processor to run a wordprocessor, email client, MP3 player, or even something more intensive like a graphics editor, video editor, or sound studio. Even games now rely far more heavily on the GPU than they do the CPU.
Haha, i got modded down for defending some Star Trek guy.
Goddamn mod abusers. They modded you overrated so that they couldn't even be meta-modded. Sorry about that. The moderators so love to ruin a discussion by modding down people they disagree with.
If any moderators are still reading this, can they give the great-grandpappy post a +1 underrated to cancel out the -1 overrated nonsense? Thanks.
I heard you and you are WRONG. Not to be rude or anything, but I suggest you take a modern history class.
History has jack-squat to do with it. Physics does. Let me put it this way. The dinosaur killer asteroid was estimated at 75,000,000 megatons. It was not capable of destroying the entire surface, but did wipe out 95% of life from its after-effects. If we assume that every nuke ever made was of 50 megatons (probably high for an average, but we'll go with it), then we'd need 1,500,000 nukes to equal the dinosaur killer. According to NuclearWeaponsArchive.org, the US has built about 70,000 nukes since the inception of such weapons. It isn't known how many were produced by Russia, but it's estimated to be significantly less. We'll double the 70,000 figure and then add on another 2,000 to cover incidental countries with nuclear technology. That gives us a grand total of 160,000 nukes, or about 10% of the force of the dinosaur killer.
In short, you're quoting a lie that has been repeated time and time again. YOU'RE WRONG, and repeating it won't change that. Here's some hard facts for you. Read them, understand them, and stop coming off like a friggin' idiot.
http://www.tinyvital.com/Misc/nukes.htm
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org
http://ned.ucam.org/~sdh31/misc/destroy.html
It depends on whether you think a high school diploma makes you educated or not. Given the value of a high school education these days, one could argue either way.
You missed my point. A diploma is just a piece of paper. It means nothing other than that you've been able to complete a bunch of tests and not get into too much trouble. It does not define whether you are educated or not. There have been many people throughout history who have been very well educated but haven't had diplomas from higher education (or sometimes even high school!). As time goes on and information becomes more available thanks to libraries and the internet, this only becomes more common.
i.e. If you think you *need* an American school to become educated, you've just bought into another lie.
Experience is not the same as education. That is why people separate the two.
Nonsense. If it wasn't, then schools wouldn't make you dissect animals, perform chem experiments, do word problems (math), or a million other pieces of practice that give you experience. That's why we call experience outside of the school "real world" experience, and make the point that the real-world doesn't always align with the simplicity of school experience.
If you believe that your education stops as soon as you leave school, you have bought into a third lie.
It requires a significant industrial infrastructure to process Uranium and Plutonium. [...] Then I guess you couldn't create a bomb all by yourself.
Nice try, but an industrial base is separate from the ability or inability to create bombs. i.e. Just like you need equipment to create an airplane, you need equipment to create create nuclear weapons. It's not anything sophisticated you need, either. A strong enough centrifuge is really the main ingredient. Any country that has access to semi-modern technology can build these things, so don't twist my words.
Twisting my words only pisses me off. Especially since I was only correcting the more questionable points of your original post, and not attacking you. You, OTOH, have seen fit to attack me with lies, half-truths, and twisted words. Good day to you sir, and I hope our paths shall not cross again.
There's less gravity on the Moon than on your Earth; I don't know if your feeble mind can comprehend that. Our vertical leap is beyond measure.
Earth Men Can't Jump. Coming to a theater near you!
The seven season did have a lot of crap in it but it isn't fair to put the whole season down.
True, there was still some good stuff. However, the way I see it was that the Star Trek machine already had sufficient momentum to maintain itself. It didn't manage to go off the deepend until it broke free of its original creative influences. (e.g. DS9, Voyager, Enterprise)
Under Roddenberry, as i recall, Star Trek was about to tank, wasn't it?
Think again. Under Roddenberry The Wrath of Khan, Yesterday's Enterprise, Best of Both Worlds, the Drumhead, Darmok, and other truely great episodes were made. Roddenberry didn't die until right before Unification aired, so we don't know if he was there to guide some of the other episodes such as Unification, I Borg, and Inner Light. I *do* know that Star Trek began to slowly decline after that, culminating in the stupidity of the seventh season. (Force of Nature, Masks, Eye of the Beholder, Journey's End, etc.)
So, you're nitpicking over semantics. No, we didn't have enough firepower to destroy the world a la Star Wars. However, the term "destroy the world" as I and most other people were using it referred to destroying all life on the world. THAT we were able to do with enough coverage to engulf the world multiple times over.
;-)
No, you're not listening. We don't have enough firepower to cover any more than a fraction of the surface area. There's nowhere near enough weapons to wipe out all life on Earth. As I said, not even enough antimatter to go to Alpha-Centauri could do it. We're good, but we're nowhere near THAT good.
Yes, and they still spent to keep up with us. So what? It still doesn't change the fact that they overspent because we overspent.
You complained that the Russian equipment always outnumbered ours. That's not as true as it was made out to be, and there equipment ended up being non-comparable to our own. i.e. They were all bark and no bite. And because of their attempts to keep up with our technology, the Russians easily outspent us on military ventures. The overspending ended up being a good thing because our economy could take it and their's couldn't.
Then again, what's overspending when your very existance depends on it?
I've had talks with a technician that serviced nuclear weapons. You need to build a device with a shaped charge that will detonate in a precise sequence while still maintaining the integrity of the device. No such device is so easy to make that an uneducated person could do so with "the proper equipment".
Be careful about your usage of the term "uneducated". Uneducated is not the same as no higher education. Education comes in two components:
1. Access to knowledge
2. Experience
The access to knowledge is already solved and that is all the US can actually control. Experience comes by doing things. Designing a proper charge and shell can be done by an experienced engineer who understands his materials. Even third world countries have industry similar to what the US had in the 1940s. Not to mention that the properties of many materials are better understood (e.g. Depleted Uranium makes an excellent construction material for something that has to be super-strong. This wasn't fully understood in the 1940s.)
Were your statement true, then every country in the world would have plutonium nukes.
They would, if it weren't for one minor issue: Where do they get the Plutonium from? The method for generating sufficient plutonium is a nuclear reactor. In case you haven't noticed, nuclear reactors are carefully controlled by the UN. All nuclear materials must be accounted for or there will be hell to pay.
Note that pretty much every first world (and now some second and third world countries) has nuclear weapons, especially implosion devices. And that's despite the fact that gun devices are far easier to construct and obtain materials for.
Here's an interesting account for you. The Israelis attacked an Iraqi nuclear power plant explicitly to prevent Saddam from obtaining plutonium. Wonder why they might do that?
I was hoping you'd fall into that trap. We are talking about weapons. These weapons are physical devices one could touch or hold. Learning French does not enable you to make a weapon. And yes, you could steal a weapon, but knowing French does not specifically give you the ability to steal. However, knowing nuclear engineering certainly does give you the knowledge to build a nuclear weapon.
It's not a trap. A spy is just as much of weapon as a nuclear bomb. A spy can not only steal information, but can plant fake information, reduce operating capacity, ensure defects in weapons, sow discord, and potentially even have key people executed. Spys are *very* dangerous weapons.
I don't particularly care about saving lives in China, Cuba, In
One of the principal problems with "Star Trek" is that there have been too many television shows and too many movies.
I disagree. The problem with Star Trek is that B&B milked it instead of building it. Roddenberry's Star Trek created new and interesting characters and villans. Berman's Star Trek only milks the existing ones for money.
Under Roddenberry, the Borg were scary. Under Berman, they were pathetic. Under Roddenbery, characters had internal conflict because of who they were. (e.g. Spock suppressing emotions, Data attempting to achieve them, Worf reconciling his human home with his Klingon blood, etc.) Under Berman characters were lifeless and without conflict. (e.g. Janeway, Kes, Neelix, Harry Kim, etc.) Even cases where Berman attempted conflict (Kira, B'Elanna, Paris, etc.) it ended up getting brushed off because it just wasn't believable. Then they'd pull it out of the closet on occasion to force an emotional issue instead of making the conflict integral to the character.
Give Star Trek to someone with talent and I think you'll find that it can still recapture some of its lost magic.
No, you need to take lessons in nuclear science. We have enough weapons to "blast ourselves back to the stoneage", but not enough to wipe out the earth (or even the surface). Not even sufficient antimatter for a trip to alpha-centauri could do it. We've maanged to shrink the world to a small place, but at the end of the day the Earth *is* still pretty damn big.
The effect of those overstatements was that the US overspent on the military. This led to the Soviet Union increasing spending.
Doesn't change the fact that the Russian threat was always overstated. We just didn't know it until the Cold War was over.
You also need a trained mind to do the figuring. The US should not be in the business of training those minds.
Did you know that Einstein took up Geometry when he was 12? It was given to him by a medical student he befriended.
My point is that no one *needs* to have their mind trained if they're willing to do it themselves. Even if you are relying on someone else, there's nothing in our schools that's particularly special other than the knowledge available. And since the knowledge can be obtained from other sources, they don't actually need our schools, do they?
I'm sorry, I lack a college degree but I could probably build you an implosion nuke if I had the proper equipment. These things are stupidly simple in theory. The only tricky part is the proper construction. One of the reasons why we embargo computers is to prevent certain countries from running the simulations that allow them to skip the trial and error involved in creating an implosion device.
Tell me how studying French could become a weapon. Tell me how studying anthropology could become a weapon.
You've just described two core elements of a spy. How else do you think the Russians built the Tupolev Tu-144?
I can certainly tell you how studying nuclear engineering could become a weapon.
And I can tell you how nuclear engineering can be used to save lives. Including the destructive power of a hydrogen bomb.
We don't HAVE to teach them nuclear engineering or something that could create a weapon.
No, we don't. Nuclear engineering would be a wise thing to screen, but it's impossible to keep the information from people. I've gotten a basic education in it just by chatting with nuclear scientists on the Internet and filling in the rest with publicly available information. If I was actually trying to build a nuclear device (be it a reactor or a bomb), then there's plenty of stuff I could dig up. Including basic instructions on how to separate the Uranium 235 from the 238.
BTW AKAImBatman, if you're scratching your head, I was just unscruptiously piggybacking on your post. This isn't in response to your comment.
:-)
Thanks for adding that. I was about to throw up a hugh question mark.
Actually, eugenics has been proven to be highly effective.
Having worked in genetics, I can say that this is blatently untrue. Genetic manipulation is a useful tool for adapting a plant to its environment. This makes the plant more successful in areas that it would otherwise fail. However, for everything you gain you have to give something back. Sometimes you don't really care about those attributes, because they are irrelevant in the target environment. Sometimes, though, you lose something more important. For example, a lot of produce today isn't as nutritionally rich as traditional crops because they are able to grow in soil that has been bankrupt of nutrients considered unimportant to the plant's growth.
An even bigger danger of Eugenics is the matter of inbreeding. I'm not certain of the situation with plants, but livestock companies have had to enrich their stock with foreign livestock to buy more time on the issue of inbreeding. Unfortunately, this is only buying time. If we don't find a way to isolate and repair genetic defects we're going to end up with a very small gene pool for our livestock.