Despite any flaws, I think they're an absolute breakthrough and a sign of things to come in the next decade.
Not only do they have performance, but they also go the distance and I believe they're also astoundingly cheap. If I had a spare $100,000 laying around and they were shipping to Australia, I'd buy one in a heartbeat!
The price of carbon fibre is declining faster than predicted and battery production is ramping up in line with Toyota's ramp-up of hybrid powertain cars and GM's announcement to mass-produce an electric car so hopefully the price of batteries will come down a lot as well.
Things are definitely looking good. Now we just need to start building a bunch of nuclear power plants so they'll be ready in time for when the plug-in hybrids and pure-electric vehicles hit critical mass.
I do it that way (it's virtually the same generic pasta sauce recipe my mum taught me... it's also great when grilled on toast with a bit of cheese on top!) but the advantage of browning the mince separately is that you can use a cheaper grade and then drain off the excess fat without losing the delicious olive oil, garlic and onion juices.
Mate, in Australia at the moment and for the forseeable future the money is in trades, not degrees. Australia is all about the "mining boom". Yesterday the second-biggest mining company in the world (Rio Tinto) announced a 85% increase in the price of iron ore. China is sucking up commodities faster than we can dig them out the ground - on the east coast there are dozens of ships waiting out at sea to be loaded with coal.
My youngest brother did 6-months of a 2 year mining course before a mining company offered him a job that pays more than I earn after 4 years of University and 4 years of cutting code. He gets flown out to a mine for a week with no living expenses while there and then gets flown back for a week off, so he only really works 6 months of the year.
Would I want to mix with his crowd though? Not likely. He even thinks I'm a snob. Money isn't everything, although it is nice!
For example, one area where Apple would benefit from full 64bits would be in Video Drivers, as shoving data to GPUs in 64bit chunks is much more efficient and faster.
It is better to remain quiet and have everyone think you a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
Smart people use DMA for shuffling around large blocks of data.
When I was under 18 (go Australia!) my friends and I felt similar about the hassles of acquiring booze. Then one of us stumbled upon the fact it was legal to buy a home brew kit.
We all chipped in and were soon having fun brewing extra-strong beer and cider and getting absolutely shitfaced on it, all for a hell of a lot less money than commercial off the shelf booze! Then when we were all 18 we gave up because it was less hassle to go buy the ready-made stuff.
Current consumption for Olympic Dam is 120MW. Consumption post-ODX is estimated to be 700-750MW. Even 750MW is nowhere near 75% nor 42% of current generation capacity in South Australia, which exceeds 4,000MW.
Getting such a large industrial load back will help to keep a lid on power prices in SA as well.
The only problem with your thinking is that the USA doesn't account for much of global barley production and the top barley producers don't produce much corn either.
But you are on the right track though because barley is mostly used as livestock feed. Corn has been too, but only because it's been abnormally cheap due to the huge subsidies farmers are paid in the USA. As the cheaper corn is diverted to other uses that are willing to pay more (because of market distortions in the form of more subsidies), livestock producers revert to barley, of which there's a much more limited supply. Thus the price goes up.
Further exacerbating the grain price situation is the rapid development of China and India (China is urbanising more than 1 million people per month!) and major grain growing regions are suffering from prolonged droughts.
75% now? Wow, it just keeps getting better and better. First random idiots claim Olympic Dam uses more water than Adelaide (it doesn't even come close, which is beside the point because it takes water from a different source) and then The Australian and The Advertiser publish a story claiming 42% and titled as "half", and now 75%. Where did you pull that number from? It's patently false. The three largest generators in SA produce 1280MW at Torrens Island, 780MW at Port Augusta and 485MW at Pelican Point. That's over 2500MW (total generation capacity is over 4000MW - SA's power grid has the most wildly fluctuating load in the world). The largest estimate for ODX's power requirements I've heard is 750MW and that certainly is nowhere near 75% of 4000MW let alone 2500MW.
Also, Olympic Dam is primarily a Copper mine. It just happens to also be the world's largest Uranium deposit and one of the largest Gold and Silver deposits as well. $1 trillion worth of metal or so with a 200 year life at current production rates and prices. (I think they're still trying to find the extent of the orebody as well.)
Lastly, the amount of energy consumed to mine and manufacture fuel rods only accounts for at most a few percent of the energy that they will produce. Most of the energy used at Olympic Dam is used for electric furnaces and electrorefining of Copper.
But then Torvalds is hardly one to talk. Linux is written in C and he is firmly rooted in its ways. Personally, I think the Linux code looks like shit and is a mess because I'm a C++ programmer and it doesn't match my normal style. That's not to say it's not good and doesn't work well though. I agree that there's a lot of shitty C++ code out there written by people who don't know what they're doing. These are the sort of people who hear about some hot new thing and decide to apply it to everything. Java, XML,.NET, OOP, generic programming, etc.
I work in games, we write them in C++, as do hundreds of other studios around the world. The Joint Strike Fighter has all its software written in C++. How do we do it and manage to write high-performance and reliable code that works in embedded environments? We do it because we know what we're doing and only use the features of the language that are necessary. E.g. STL, exceptions? Fuck that! We assume it's C and then use the extra features of C++ as they suit the task at hand. Just because the language lets you do it, doesn't mean you should.
The extraordinary breadth and depth of the language and its features are what I believe make it so great. I fully agree with Stroustrup in the article. People just need to harden the fuck up and realise that life ain't easy and neither is writing code. It takes time to learn and master the tools. You don't throw someone a "Teach Yourself Carpentry in 21 Days" book and expect them to be able to craft furniture like someone who has worked as an apprentice for four years. Why should programming in C++ (or any serious language for that matter) be any different? I've been coding in C++ for about 14 years now - when I started I don't think there was such thing as templates, and I'm still willing to admit that there are things you can do with the language that I don't know about and that's because I haven't found a need for it yet.
Anyway, I can't really remember the point of this rant... must be going senile in my old age (and I'm not even 30 yet!)
The current version of DirectX is quite different to the original release that this guy probably worked on.
There are also numerous differences between console and PC versions. But even if they were the same, you would still do things on the console differently because you know what the underlying hardware is and its performance characteristics.
Besides, the guy that's pushing the "PC gaming is future" argument happens to work for a company that develops and publishes PC games. So the source is very relevant, and if he was the architect of the original DirectX then I'd say that his opinion isn't worth much in the first place.
Laser separation is here and now. It's called SILEX (I think it stands for "Separation of Isotopes via Laser EXcitation") and is a technology that was developed in Australia (like Synroc). I believe it's been licensed to Westinghouse, who are building a pilot plant. It supposedly uses a smaller amount of energy compared to gas centrifuge enrichment as that does compared to gaseous diffusion.
It's fascinating viewing and this weeks episode detailed how the oligarchs put Putin into power, thinking he'd be their patsy like Yeltsin had been, and how he turned around and stabbed them all in the back.
For me, it has put the current situation in Russia into context. Not that I agree with all of what Putin is currently doing, but I suppose it is the realpolitik of the situation.
Yes, because filling out and submitting those forms was much more convenient that rocking up to a polling place, getting your name marked off and then putting your ballot in a box.
By the time we run out of Uranium the sun will have gone supernova, and if we run out before there's still the Thorium cycle (even more abundant than Uranium).
Indeed, as the poster above me said, BHP's Olympic Dam mine in Australia is going to be freakin' huge. How huge? Well, BHP recently announced that the deposit is twice as large as previously thought. They're still doing exploration drilling, too. They're gearing up to expand mining there - converting from Australia's largest underground operation to the world's largest pit (I think something like over 3km in diameter and over 1km deep) and when ramped up will be producing about 15,000 tonnes per year of Uranium with an expected mine life of 70-100 years! It apparently now accounts for 40% of world reserves, even though the Uranium is a by-product of it being a Copper mine (it's also a huge reserve of Gold and Silver). Basically, they'll be digging out over 1 tonne of ore per second, 24/7 for well over half a century... I don't think there's a word that describes just how big a bad-ass operation that is! =]
But bear in mind that less than 10% of the fuel that goes into a reactor is used up. Reprocessing enables us to separate out the "poisons" and recycle the remaining fuel. This is practiced in France and enables a tenfold reduction in the amount of waste for final disposal. The separated waste is highly radioactive and so has a much shorter half-life than if you were to just dispose of the spent fuel from the reactor - it is safe to handle with your own hands after a few hundred years.
The problem with reprocessing now is that it extracts Plutonium from the spent fuel. That's why the USA banned reprocessing, because they were concerned about weapons proliferation - not that it stopped them from building thousands of HEU warheads. Right now in France, Japan and the USA the stockpiles of Plutonium are being used in "MOX" fuel for reactors. The problem with this fuel is that you have to leave it in cooling ponds after it comes out of the reactor for a hell of a lot longer than normal fuel.
The ideal solution for disposing of Plutonium is to burn it with depleted uranium left over from enrichment in breeder reactors and then reprocessing the fuel to burn in normal reactors. France has come the closest to getting a full-size breeder reactor running, but greenies had the government pull the pin on it. (Plus they'd spent billions getting to the point they had.)
By using reprocessing and breeder reactors we have an essentially unlimited fuel source. There is also currently a massive investment in Uranium exploration, after about 30 years of minimal activity, which has been brought about because the cheap supply of Uranium from decommissioned Russian and US weapons that accounted for 50% of world demand is drying up. Add onto that the resurgence of interest in nuclear power - new reactors in Finland and France, China and Russia are to build dozens, and the UK and USA are considering replacing their aging fleets and Germany is looking at reversing their decision to phase out nuclear energy in the wake of Russia's resurgence and concerns about their dependence on Russian gas.
The largest Uranium deposit in the world, Olympic Dam in Australia, was recently announced to be twice the size as initially thought - it now accounts for over 40% of known reserves, and the mine's owner BHP Billiton is set to double production to create the world's largest mine: http://odx.bhpbilliton.com
Despite this fella getting his rig for free from SCE, if you're looking to do serious computation on Cell processors you're best off talking to IBM about getting some of their Cell Blades. They pack dual processors on them and you get the full eight SPU's plus more RAM and very fast comms. And yes, they run Linux. I haven't used these blades, but IBM gave me a sneak peek a few years ago.
A lot of people (still) discount the performance that the Cell is capable of. If you know the basics of how to work it then you can achieve incredible performance gains over bog-standard scalar code with next-to trivial effort. (Although I can't really say what it's like for developing to run on Linux)
Big deal. Sounds like he was going through heroin withdrawal more than not being able to hold his piss.
David Boon, a famous Australian cricketer, is legendary and admired for one thing (and it's not the 'tash!): Drinking 52 cans of beer on a flight from Sydney to London.
It's our god-given right as Aussies to sink piss on planes!
Very profitable in the long run? Please, put down the crack pipe son.
The Xbox is BILLIONS in the red. It better start making some spectacular returns pronto to pay back the money that's been poured into it, plus interest otherwise I predict large shareholders are going to start asking questions like "why are you pissing that money away when you could be giving it to us as dividends or investing in something profitable?"... you know, opportunity cost and all that.
With the costs of the new warrenty (in addition to any costs that can be associated with the honoring existing warrenties to cover the high failure rates of the console) and cutting the price which changes the profitability on each unit sold, when does Microsoft now expect their Xbox division to become profitable?
It will be considered profitable when they're bringing in more money each quarter than they're spending. This is where I don't get it, but maybe that's because I grew up in a family business and not some billion dollar publicly listed company. I'd only call it a profitable division when it has recouped all of the money that's been poured into it. Apparently they're still $5 billion or so down, which from what I can tell means they'll never make any money back on the division unless they can churn out consoles for $100 each or something and refrain from making stupidly overpriced acquisitions like Rare.
If you ask me, it'll never be profitable by my definition. If some big shareholders think the same way I do then in a couple of years they might start asking questions about Microsoft being in the hardware business and they could end up doing a Sega. I mean, if you poured billions into something you'd be expecting a return after almost ten years, wouldn't you?
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Nice one, I didn't even think of that when I wrote it =]
Despite any flaws, I think they're an absolute breakthrough and a sign of things to come in the next decade.
Not only do they have performance, but they also go the distance and I believe they're also astoundingly cheap. If I had a spare $100,000 laying around and they were shipping to Australia, I'd buy one in a heartbeat!
The price of carbon fibre is declining faster than predicted and battery production is ramping up in line with Toyota's ramp-up of hybrid powertain cars and GM's announcement to mass-produce an electric car so hopefully the price of batteries will come down a lot as well.
Things are definitely looking good. Now we just need to start building a bunch of nuclear power plants so they'll be ready in time for when the plug-in hybrids and pure-electric vehicles hit critical mass.
I do it that way (it's virtually the same generic pasta sauce recipe my mum taught me... it's also great when grilled on toast with a bit of cheese on top!) but the advantage of browning the mince separately is that you can use a cheaper grade and then drain off the excess fat without losing the delicious olive oil, garlic and onion juices.
Mate, in Australia at the moment and for the forseeable future the money is in trades, not degrees. Australia is all about the "mining boom". Yesterday the second-biggest mining company in the world (Rio Tinto) announced a 85% increase in the price of iron ore. China is sucking up commodities faster than we can dig them out the ground - on the east coast there are dozens of ships waiting out at sea to be loaded with coal.
My youngest brother did 6-months of a 2 year mining course before a mining company offered him a job that pays more than I earn after 4 years of University and 4 years of cutting code. He gets flown out to a mine for a week with no living expenses while there and then gets flown back for a week off, so he only really works 6 months of the year.
Would I want to mix with his crowd though? Not likely. He even thinks I'm a snob. Money isn't everything, although it is nice!
In Britain, they wouldn't show a sporting event so boring that people only tune in for the adverts
:)
There we have it: a cricket test match (five days) is more exciting that american football!
For example, one area where Apple would benefit from full 64bits would be in Video Drivers, as shoving data to GPUs in 64bit chunks is much more efficient and faster.
It is better to remain quiet and have everyone think you a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
Smart people use DMA for shuffling around large blocks of data.
When I was under 18 (go Australia!) my friends and I felt similar about the hassles of acquiring booze. Then one of us stumbled upon the fact it was legal to buy a home brew kit.
We all chipped in and were soon having fun brewing extra-strong beer and cider and getting absolutely shitfaced on it, all for a hell of a lot less money than commercial off the shelf booze! Then when we were all 18 we gave up because it was less hassle to go buy the ready-made stuff.
Current consumption for Olympic Dam is 120MW. Consumption post-ODX is estimated to be 700-750MW. Even 750MW is nowhere near 75% nor 42% of current generation capacity in South Australia, which exceeds 4,000MW.
Getting such a large industrial load back will help to keep a lid on power prices in SA as well.
The only problem with your thinking is that the USA doesn't account for much of global barley production and the top barley producers don't produce much corn either.
But you are on the right track though because barley is mostly used as livestock feed. Corn has been too, but only because it's been abnormally cheap due to the huge subsidies farmers are paid in the USA. As the cheaper corn is diverted to other uses that are willing to pay more (because of market distortions in the form of more subsidies), livestock producers revert to barley, of which there's a much more limited supply. Thus the price goes up.
Further exacerbating the grain price situation is the rapid development of China and India (China is urbanising more than 1 million people per month!) and major grain growing regions are suffering from prolonged droughts.
75% now? Wow, it just keeps getting better and better. First random idiots claim Olympic Dam uses more water than Adelaide (it doesn't even come close, which is beside the point because it takes water from a different source) and then The Australian and The Advertiser publish a story claiming 42% and titled as "half", and now 75%. Where did you pull that number from? It's patently false. The three largest generators in SA produce 1280MW at Torrens Island, 780MW at Port Augusta and 485MW at Pelican Point. That's over 2500MW (total generation capacity is over 4000MW - SA's power grid has the most wildly fluctuating load in the world). The largest estimate for ODX's power requirements I've heard is 750MW and that certainly is nowhere near 75% of 4000MW let alone 2500MW.
Also, Olympic Dam is primarily a Copper mine. It just happens to also be the world's largest Uranium deposit and one of the largest Gold and Silver deposits as well. $1 trillion worth of metal or so with a 200 year life at current production rates and prices. (I think they're still trying to find the extent of the orebody as well.)
Lastly, the amount of energy consumed to mine and manufacture fuel rods only accounts for at most a few percent of the energy that they will produce. Most of the energy used at Olympic Dam is used for electric furnaces and electrorefining of Copper.
But then Torvalds is hardly one to talk. Linux is written in C and he is firmly rooted in its ways. Personally, I think the Linux code looks like shit and is a mess because I'm a C++ programmer and it doesn't match my normal style. That's not to say it's not good and doesn't work well though. I agree that there's a lot of shitty C++ code out there written by people who don't know what they're doing. These are the sort of people who hear about some hot new thing and decide to apply it to everything. Java, XML, .NET, OOP, generic programming, etc.
I work in games, we write them in C++, as do hundreds of other studios around the world. The Joint Strike Fighter has all its software written in C++. How do we do it and manage to write high-performance and reliable code that works in embedded environments? We do it because we know what we're doing and only use the features of the language that are necessary. E.g. STL, exceptions? Fuck that! We assume it's C and then use the extra features of C++ as they suit the task at hand. Just because the language lets you do it, doesn't mean you should.
The extraordinary breadth and depth of the language and its features are what I believe make it so great. I fully agree with Stroustrup in the article. People just need to harden the fuck up and realise that life ain't easy and neither is writing code. It takes time to learn and master the tools. You don't throw someone a "Teach Yourself Carpentry in 21 Days" book and expect them to be able to craft furniture like someone who has worked as an apprentice for four years. Why should programming in C++ (or any serious language for that matter) be any different? I've been coding in C++ for about 14 years now - when I started I don't think there was such thing as templates, and I'm still willing to admit that there are things you can do with the language that I don't know about and that's because I haven't found a need for it yet.
Anyway, I can't really remember the point of this rant... must be going senile in my old age (and I'm not even 30 yet!)
The current version of DirectX is quite different to the original release that this guy probably worked on.
There are also numerous differences between console and PC versions. But even if they were the same, you would still do things on the console differently because you know what the underlying hardware is and its performance characteristics.
Besides, the guy that's pushing the "PC gaming is future" argument happens to work for a company that develops and publishes PC games. So the source is very relevant, and if he was the architect of the original DirectX then I'd say that his opinion isn't worth much in the first place.
Despite that big loss, SCE is still doing a hell of a lot better than Microsoft's Xbox division.
Laser separation is here and now. It's called SILEX (I think it stands for "Separation of Isotopes via Laser EXcitation") and is a technology that was developed in Australia (like Synroc). I believe it's been licensed to Westinghouse, who are building a pilot plant. It supposedly uses a smaller amount of energy compared to gas centrifuge enrichment as that does compared to gaseous diffusion.
Here in Australia, the ABC just showed the conclusion to the two-part documentary "The Rise And Fall Of The Russian Oligarchs", which is precisely about the title.
It's fascinating viewing and this weeks episode detailed how the oligarchs put Putin into power, thinking he'd be their patsy like Yeltsin had been, and how he turned around and stabbed them all in the back.
For me, it has put the current situation in Russia into context. Not that I agree with all of what Putin is currently doing, but I suppose it is the realpolitik of the situation.
Yes, because filling out and submitting those forms was much more convenient that rocking up to a polling place, getting your name marked off and then putting your ballot in a box.
By the time we run out of Uranium the sun will have gone supernova, and if we run out before there's still the Thorium cycle (even more abundant than Uranium).
Indeed, as the poster above me said, BHP's Olympic Dam mine in Australia is going to be freakin' huge. How huge? Well, BHP recently announced that the deposit is twice as large as previously thought. They're still doing exploration drilling, too. They're gearing up to expand mining there - converting from Australia's largest underground operation to the world's largest pit (I think something like over 3km in diameter and over 1km deep) and when ramped up will be producing about 15,000 tonnes per year of Uranium with an expected mine life of 70-100 years! It apparently now accounts for 40% of world reserves, even though the Uranium is a by-product of it being a Copper mine (it's also a huge reserve of Gold and Silver). Basically, they'll be digging out over 1 tonne of ore per second, 24/7 for well over half a century... I don't think there's a word that describes just how big a bad-ass operation that is! =]
But bear in mind that less than 10% of the fuel that goes into a reactor is used up. Reprocessing enables us to separate out the "poisons" and recycle the remaining fuel. This is practiced in France and enables a tenfold reduction in the amount of waste for final disposal. The separated waste is highly radioactive and so has a much shorter half-life than if you were to just dispose of the spent fuel from the reactor - it is safe to handle with your own hands after a few hundred years.
The problem with reprocessing now is that it extracts Plutonium from the spent fuel. That's why the USA banned reprocessing, because they were concerned about weapons proliferation - not that it stopped them from building thousands of HEU warheads. Right now in France, Japan and the USA the stockpiles of Plutonium are being used in "MOX" fuel for reactors. The problem with this fuel is that you have to leave it in cooling ponds after it comes out of the reactor for a hell of a lot longer than normal fuel.
The ideal solution for disposing of Plutonium is to burn it with depleted uranium left over from enrichment in breeder reactors and then reprocessing the fuel to burn in normal reactors. France has come the closest to getting a full-size breeder reactor running, but greenies had the government pull the pin on it. (Plus they'd spent billions getting to the point they had.)
By using reprocessing and breeder reactors we have an essentially unlimited fuel source. There is also currently a massive investment in Uranium exploration, after about 30 years of minimal activity, which has been brought about because the cheap supply of Uranium from decommissioned Russian and US weapons that accounted for 50% of world demand is drying up. Add onto that the resurgence of interest in nuclear power - new reactors in Finland and France, China and Russia are to build dozens, and the UK and USA are considering replacing their aging fleets and Germany is looking at reversing their decision to phase out nuclear energy in the wake of Russia's resurgence and concerns about their dependence on Russian gas.
The largest Uranium deposit in the world, Olympic Dam in Australia, was recently announced to be twice the size as initially thought - it now accounts for over 40% of known reserves, and the mine's owner BHP Billiton is set to double production to create the world's largest mine: http://odx.bhpbilliton.com
I take it you're unfamiliar with baskets, racks, panniers and trailers?
Despite this fella getting his rig for free from SCE, if you're looking to do serious computation on Cell processors you're best off talking to IBM about getting some of their Cell Blades. They pack dual processors on them and you get the full eight SPU's plus more RAM and very fast comms. And yes, they run Linux. I haven't used these blades, but IBM gave me a sneak peek a few years ago.
A lot of people (still) discount the performance that the Cell is capable of. If you know the basics of how to work it then you can achieve incredible performance gains over bog-standard scalar code with next-to trivial effort. (Although I can't really say what it's like for developing to run on Linux)
I'll say, if they tried to make us pay to use the beach here in Australia there'd be a revolution overnight!
Big deal. Sounds like he was going through heroin withdrawal more than not being able to hold his piss.
David Boon, a famous Australian cricketer, is legendary and admired for one thing (and it's not the 'tash!): Drinking 52 cans of beer on a flight from Sydney to London.
It's our god-given right as Aussies to sink piss on planes!
Very profitable in the long run? Please, put down the crack pipe son.
The Xbox is BILLIONS in the red. It better start making some spectacular returns pronto to pay back the money that's been poured into it, plus interest otherwise I predict large shareholders are going to start asking questions like "why are you pissing that money away when you could be giving it to us as dividends or investing in something profitable?"... you know, opportunity cost and all that.
It will be considered profitable when they're bringing in more money each quarter than they're spending. This is where I don't get it, but maybe that's because I grew up in a family business and not some billion dollar publicly listed company. I'd only call it a profitable division when it has recouped all of the money that's been poured into it. Apparently they're still $5 billion or so down, which from what I can tell means they'll never make any money back on the division unless they can churn out consoles for $100 each or something and refrain from making stupidly overpriced acquisitions like Rare.
If you ask me, it'll never be profitable by my definition. If some big shareholders think the same way I do then in a couple of years they might start asking questions about Microsoft being in the hardware business and they could end up doing a Sega. I mean, if you poured billions into something you'd be expecting a return after almost ten years, wouldn't you?