If this guy is right (which I think he is) then RETAIL DESKTOP PC SALES means desktops sold at your typical bricks-and-mortar store, eg. Best Buy, Circuit City, etc., and NOT mail order. So Dell's numbers were not taken into account.
Go into a Best Buy and you see lots of cheap Athlon machines, so I think it makes sense. Heck, those eMachines love AMD.
My wife graduated in the top 15 of her class at RHIT (400+ that year) and yet she has some interesting things to say about this.
>>Who knows...schools like RHIT, Cooper Union, and Harvey Mudd are considered the place to get an elite undergraduate education, which you can then take to another school's graduate-level programs.
Interesting that you mentioned that... she feels that Rose didn't prepare her for a PhD in Engineering. The focus there is on very practical things whereas in Grad. School you focus very much on the the theoretical aspect of things. Good thing she's pretty smart and figured things out. But the other RHIT student that came for a PhD didn't even make it through the first year. In fact, they were the first RHIT students admitted here in a while because RHIT students have a poor track record.
>>Sometimes graduate programs aren't that intensive, either...
Lets just say she couldn't disagree more with you on this point.
Is Rose a good school? Certainly. It trains people to be good Engineers right out of school. But, it can sacrifice some of the needed theory in that pursuit and that hurts students that want to go on Grad. School.
My whole reply was that the rankings need to be taken with a grain of salt. I've gone with my wife to RHIT homecoming and the rankings are posted everywhere. You can say it's my pet peeve.
Ok Why do RHIT people always show that stuff? Seriously? My wife graduated from there (first class of women) and she even laughs about it now. It's a good school and all... but don't show me rankings about how good you are in Engineering when you aren't being compared to the majority of Engineering schools.
For those of you that didn't see it... they're ranked #1 in Engineering for schools that don't offer PhDs. So they don't compete against places like MIT, UIUC, Berkeley, Stanford, CalTech, etc. To me those rankings need to be taken with a grain of salt.
As a side note, I was once at an Engineering conference where RHIT placed a copy of that list over a bunch of MIT flyers.
That might be very useful. It takes a huge amount of heat to boil something -- and then the vapor just takes it away. Then you place a condenser somewhere and have the vapor condense, dump the heat, and then return to the processor in a loop.
This is essentially why places use radiators. A heater vaporizes water and then the steam carries that heat efficiently to the radiator where it's dumped into the room. The vapor condenses and the liquid returns to the boiler.
Are you sure of this? The last two institutions I've been at have had Nature online for anyone to access... it's the journal "Science" that seems quite a bit more restricted online. Maybe it's a dig at them?
Darl McBride, chief executive of SCO Group Inc., says he sometimes carries a gun because his enemies are out to kill him.
Nice. I say that we throw him in a locked warehouse (ala The Running Man) with ESR. That seems like a great match.
From ESR's website... "I generally shoot plain-vanilla 230-grain copper-jacketed hardball at the range, but load blue-tip Glaser rounds for home defense. In case they fail to penetrate and I can't make a head shot, the last round in the mag is hardball." I have no idea what that means other than "headshot", but it doesn't sound good for an assailant.
I'm so lost. How is it possible that someone from Caldera -- which is now The Sco Group, came out to pitch his Linux products, and then after they go with someone else, sues them. But they didn't sue them for something illegitimate in the bidding or choosing of RedHat, but that the product (the same one they tried to sell to you) is "illegal".
I think crack dealers should use this strategy... "If you buy from someone other than me, I'll turn you into the cops for buying drugs".
Here's an interesting twist... the tinfoils in the crowd are assuming that Budweiser wants to track individuals with this. But that opens a can of worms for the beer distributors! See, then the Govt. could easily see who is selling to minors just by looking at Bud's database. There's no way the stores or the Beer companies want that data out. The beer companies have been doing well to push the whole "you must be 21 to buy" thing, but that step would make them now accountable.
2.) This would also make it easy to see who sold the beer that the drunk driver was drinking when he smashed his car into a school bus, further opening up the distributors to possible litigation in our sue-happy society.
Yeah... but the dumb thing was that the scale went from 2.0 up to 6.0. So to convert, you just have to subtract 2.0. I guess the 2 freebie points were there just for enrolling.
>>I challenge you to find a purely biological material that has the specific heat capacity of ordinary steel.
No sweat. Actually, steel has a low heat capacity - about 40% that of water even. Any organic compound would be higher than steel. Conductivity is another matter... >>There's also the question of computing to consider. Our current computers operate on smaller scales than biological computers ever could. If you ever make a transistor out of living cells, let me know.
Again I disagree. DNA, for example, stores all the information your body needs to recreate itself, and it does it on a scale that's 100 times smaller than the smallest features possible in making computer chips. And if you want to think of the brain as doing calculations, then it's slow but massively parallel so it outpaces even our fastest supercomputers. In fact, the Dept. of Energy doesn't seem to think they'll have a supercomputer that can come close to the human brain until the year 2016.
Living organisms are pretty fascinating and that's really the reason we're seeing this whole investment in biotechnology.
There's no evidence for that -- ever heard of an MRI? Magenetic Resonance Imaging uses magnetic fields that are immensely stronger than this. I work with some huge superconducting magnets and they're all pretty safe. In fact, it seems there's even evidence that magnets help the circulation of blood.
I highly doubt these fields are strong enough on the train... but in the MRI where higher magnetic fields mean better images the only safety concerns come if you have some short of ferromagnetic material in your body. Then an MRI has the potential to rip it right out of your body. I got one recently, and they made sure to ask if I ever did welding or something that might get small metal flakes in the eye as that has the potential to wreak havoc.
I second this one! This is a clip from the initial Linux announcement on Usenet by Linus Torvalds back in 1991:
I can (well, almost) hear you asking yourselves "why?". Hurd will be out in a year (or two, or next month, who knows), and I've already got minix. This is a program for hackers by a hacker. I've enjouyed doing it, and somebody might enjoy looking at it and even modifying it for their own needs. It is still small enough to understand, use and modify, and I'm looking forward to any comments you might have.
See what a visionary he was? He knew back in 1991 that GNU/HURD would be the greatest piece of vaporware.
On the G5 homepage, Apple lists the Spec fp and int scores for the 2GHz G5 as 840 and 800 respectively. On AMD's site, a 2GHz Opteron comes in at 1271 and 1335. If we look for dual processor scores, the dual 2Ghz G5 scores a 15.7 in specfp_rate while a dual 1.8GHz Opt. comes in at 24.7
I think the G5 is an awesome machine. But I also think the Opterons are pretty great, too. Kudos to IBM as without them we'd have neither chip.
As an aside, we could easily find an Opteron machine that would be cheaper than the Alienware one... for example they use the Opteron 2xx series which isn't needed for a uniprocessor machine such as this. Knock $340 off (newegg.com) for that. Then the video cards are polar opposites from each other. Knock another $240 off. OTOH, I'd die to have either of those machines.
This isn't *really* silly putty
on
Homemade Silly Putty
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I had my students make this one time -- I was teaching a class on polymers. I had seniors in college playing with glue and boarx like little kindergarteners. Hah. They enjoyed it and learned something about viscoelastic polymers in the process, so I think it was all good.
Anyway... while fun, the stuff isn't really Silly Putty (R). That's a silicone polymer. The poly(vinyl alcohol) that's in glues these days does a pretty decent impersonation, though. You'll notice that it does feel and act differently, and it tends to dry out much quicker than the real stuff.
Just in case anyone cared on this obviously slow news day.
Come on, where do they get these figures? In August alone: From NetworkWoldFusion
The Blaster worm - also known as MSBlast or LoveSAN - has spread rapidly since it was first noticed on Monday. It has infected an estimated 188,000 systems running Microsoft operating systems, including Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows 2003 and NT, that are unpatched for the so-called RPC vulnerability discovered last month, according to a security firm tracking the worm.
They didn't count them. Why? Most of them aren't servers, right? Well how did they differentiate Linux servers then? I bet they didn't -- did they check and only record RH Advanced Server and disregard all the RH Workstation. I doubt it. This is pure FUD by a place that has trouble with math.
Did you see the benchmarks or even RTFA? The proof that you're on crack is there. How do you explain that the NV cards are getting 31, 12, and 9 FPS for the Ultra 5900, 5600, and 5200 respectively whereas the ATI's are getting 60 and 47. That doesn't sound like VSync'd to me. That sounds like NV has stumbled with their latest line of cards.
OTOH, don't count them out. NV is the kind of company that will redouble their efforts and come looking for blood -- but it does seem we'll have to wait until the next generation to see it.
Re:Maybe it time to start working on HURD
on
Back To SCO
·
· Score: 1
ROFL! Hurd. Hah. You made my day!
I stumbled on this a while back -- it's Linus' Usenet announcement of Linux back in 1991. But the part that's priceless is:
I can (well, almost) hear you asking yourselves "why?". Hurd will be out in a year (or two, or next month, who knows)
That was 1991! Nowadays Linux is running on everything from the biggest computer systems in the world (3rd fastest supercomputer (unclassified) in the world is running Linux -- here) to people's Tivos and PS2s.
>> A box designed to be separate just will not have the latency advantage of a supercomputer designed from the ground up. I suggest you look at the list of the top supercomputers in the world. Most are clusters, ie. separate, distinct machines (just a quick glance shows the top 25 all are). It's just too darn hard to make a shared memory computer with 1000's of processors. So the common architecture is to make a cluster of smaller shared memory machines.
Besides, most clusters built utilize special interconnects like Myrinet that offer low latency connections. They're more expensive than ethernet, but it's a supercomputer so you spend it.
>> All this "the internet is one giant distributed computer" doesn't acknowledge this. On the contrary... people know this very well. That's why we see rendering and SETI processing as distributed. They don't really need to communicate with others often.
Let me remind you who these people are... I'll assume you're talking about Science or Engineering types since this is/. Typically, Professors were the top of their class (or near there) in their Undergraduate studies. Then they went on and gave up 4 - 6 years of their lives being Graduate Students getting paid peanuts for their long hours while their Undergrad. classmates were getting paid pretty well. Most likely, they were also near the top in their Grad. studies before finding an academic job. Then they went on and did a post-doc for not much money before joining the ranks at a school and working their way up the tenure ladder (while getting substantially less than their peers).
What's my point? Becoming a Professor is definitely not about the money. Remember, these people are typically the top-of-the-top and could have gotten really great jobs but decided to stick around and teach for a living. Professors that have been around a while do pretty well for themselves -- but that's only after more than a decade of not.
You tell me... are you gonna work 60 - 80 hours a week for no money so that you can teach or would you accept that job with a company that would be more than happy to hire a world expert and would compensate accordingly? If we forced Professors to make minimum wage then only the worst are gonna teach because the others know they need to provide for their families. Don't say it's for the love of it... there are lots of things I love to do but I know I have to eat and so I don't do them for a living.
Well I think you've struck upon a great analogy for closed source! In fact, the "Beware of the Leopard" matches very well with "Beware of the Lawyers".
I'm not trying to open a debate about which is better, but I think your analogy is going a little too far. Especially so in the light of the programs that people are writing to scan for similarities between BSD and Linux (the so-called shredding) that run in no time on an ordinary PC.
The holy grail of fuel cells has always been using hydrogen since it's only end product is water. If we use methane (or methanol for that case) then we end up dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere just as with fossil fuels (albeit at a higher energy efficiency than internal combustion engines). Now if we could create cheaper fuel cell catalysts and find a safe way to tote around lots of hydrogen safely.
>>Unfortunatly this testing can not be done untill there are enough units to test
>>AMD has not had this sort of problem resently Does that mean they're jealous of Intel's problems and resent not having them? >>The posts I've read so far, remind me of what a class of 10 year olds would right in criticing
Wow. With your mad spelling and grammar skills you ought to know exactly what 10 year olds are capable of.
But seriously though, Intel sells these chips to a completely different market than AMD. The customers here demand a box that never falls over. IBM and others test like crazy to make sure this stuff doesn't happen with their big chips. You have to remember that these aren't $800 clones here -- rather, big tin -- 6 figure kind of stuff.
Oh, and when has it been customary to give credit to companies for making mistakes? It's like everything else, you have to earn trust. Intel's trying to get into the lucrative big tin market and need to earn the trust of people. So far they're not handling this one well... I'd be super ticked if I had to take down my machines (the ones that I was under the assumption would give me 99.999% uptime) so that I could underclock them to 800MHz. I do supercomputing work and I expect the machines to just run. That's what I paid all that money for, right?
Well since you're on the "ever hear of" kick, I'll play along. Ever hear of reading the article?
These Opterons aren't being proposed to replace their big systems. These are being targeted as "inexpensive blade servers", per the article. So they aren't going to be huge systems with lots of redundancy, n-way scaling, and hot swapping. The original post hit upon a good question. How is Sun going to differentiate these from other vendors? Dell hasn't jumped aboard the Opteron train so more likely how is Sun going to differentiate from Newisys boxes and the sort? On the other hand, they seem to do alright with their Cobalt RaQ systems and they're Linux on Intel.
Those figures don't apply here, though. His calculations are probably correct for ethanol as a burnable fuel. The problem in making Ethanol comes from the need to get almost all of the water out of it so it can be burned. That takes a lot of energy. In fact, you can't even get it all out. Around 95% alcohol is as good as you can get with distillation (ever wonder why Everclear is 190 proof, ie. 95%?). This is a classical azeotrope, or constant boiling mixture. To achieve greater than 95% you need to do extra things to get the water out.
Anyway... with these enzymes you needn't get all that water out since they're not burning the ethanol. In fact, I would assume that the enzymes work on a relatively low percent of ethanol in water -- which would be very cheap to produce (up to ~13% can be done without any addition of energy, ie. wine!).
Slashdot Mirror
Easy there cowboy.
If this guy is right (which I think he is) then RETAIL DESKTOP PC SALES means desktops sold at your typical bricks-and-mortar store, eg. Best Buy, Circuit City, etc., and NOT mail order. So Dell's numbers were not taken into account.
Go into a Best Buy and you see lots of cheap Athlon machines, so I think it makes sense. Heck, those eMachines love AMD.
My wife graduated in the top 15 of her class at RHIT (400+ that year) and yet she has some interesting things to say about this.
>>Who knows...schools like RHIT, Cooper Union, and Harvey Mudd are considered the place to get an elite undergraduate education, which you can then take to another school's graduate-level programs.
Interesting that you mentioned that... she feels that Rose didn't prepare her for a PhD in Engineering. The focus there is on very practical things whereas in Grad. School you focus very much on the the theoretical aspect of things. Good thing she's pretty smart and figured things out. But the other RHIT student that came for a PhD didn't even make it through the first year. In fact, they were the first RHIT students admitted here in a while because RHIT students have a poor track record.
>>Sometimes graduate programs aren't that intensive, either...
Lets just say she couldn't disagree more with you on this point.
Is Rose a good school? Certainly. It trains people to be good Engineers right out of school. But, it can sacrifice some of the needed theory in that pursuit and that hurts students that want to go on Grad. School.
My whole reply was that the rankings need to be taken with a grain of salt. I've gone with my wife to RHIT homecoming and the rankings are posted everywhere. You can say it's my pet peeve.
Oh and you have a stupid mascot.
Ok
Why do RHIT people always show that stuff? Seriously? My wife graduated from there (first class of women) and she even laughs about it now. It's a good school and all... but don't show me rankings about how good you are in Engineering when you aren't being compared to the majority of Engineering schools.
For those of you that didn't see it... they're ranked #1 in Engineering for schools that don't offer PhDs. So they don't compete against places like MIT, UIUC, Berkeley, Stanford, CalTech, etc. To me those rankings need to be taken with a grain of salt.
As a side note, I was once at an Engineering conference where RHIT placed a copy of that list over a bunch of MIT flyers.
That might be very useful. It takes a huge amount of heat to boil something -- and then the vapor just takes it away. Then you place a condenser somewhere and have the vapor condense, dump the heat, and then return to the processor in a loop.
This is essentially why places use radiators. A heater vaporizes water and then the steam carries that heat efficiently to the radiator where it's dumped into the room. The vapor condenses and the liquid returns to the boiler.
Are you sure of this? The last two institutions I've been at have had Nature online for anyone to access... it's the journal "Science" that seems quite a bit more restricted online. Maybe it's a dig at them?
Darl McBride, chief executive of SCO Group Inc., says he sometimes carries a gun because his enemies are out to kill him.
Nice. I say that we throw him in a locked warehouse (ala The Running Man) with ESR. That seems like a great match.
From ESR's website... "I generally shoot plain-vanilla 230-grain copper-jacketed hardball at the range, but load blue-tip Glaser rounds for home defense. In case they fail to penetrate and I can't make a head shot, the last round in the mag is hardball." I have no idea what that means other than "headshot", but it doesn't sound good for an assailant.
And if we run out of ammo, ESR's apparently also a back belt in Tae Kwon Do.
I'm so lost. How is it possible that someone from Caldera -- which is now The Sco Group, came out to pitch his Linux products, and then after they go with someone else, sues them. But they didn't sue them for something illegitimate in the bidding or choosing of RedHat, but that the product (the same one they tried to sell to you) is "illegal".
I think crack dealers should use this strategy... "If you buy from someone other than me, I'll turn you into the cops for buying drugs".
Hmmm... is that supposed to be to this tune?
Here's an interesting twist... the tinfoils in the crowd are assuming that Budweiser wants to track individuals with this. But that opens a can of worms for the beer distributors! See, then the Govt. could easily see who is selling to minors just by looking at Bud's database. There's no way the stores or the Beer companies want that data out. The beer companies have been doing well to push the whole "you must be 21 to buy" thing, but that step would make them now accountable.
2.) This would also make it easy to see who sold the beer that the drunk driver was drinking when he smashed his car into a school bus, further opening up the distributors to possible litigation in our sue-happy society.
Yeah... but the dumb thing was that the scale went from 2.0 up to 6.0. So to convert, you just have to subtract 2.0. I guess the 2 freebie points were there just for enrolling.
>>I challenge you to find a purely biological material that has the specific heat capacity of ordinary steel.
No sweat. Actually, steel has a low heat capacity - about 40% that of water even. Any organic compound would be higher than steel. Conductivity is another matter...
>>There's also the question of computing to consider. Our current computers operate on smaller scales than biological computers ever could. If you ever make a transistor out of living cells, let me know.
Again I disagree. DNA, for example, stores all the information your body needs to recreate itself, and it does it on a scale that's 100 times smaller than the smallest features possible in making computer chips. And if you want to think of the brain as doing calculations, then it's slow but massively parallel so it outpaces even our fastest supercomputers. In fact, the Dept. of Energy doesn't seem to think they'll have a supercomputer that can come close to the human brain until the year 2016.
Living organisms are pretty fascinating and that's really the reason we're seeing this whole investment in biotechnology.
There's no evidence for that -- ever heard of an MRI? Magenetic Resonance Imaging uses magnetic fields that are immensely stronger than this. I work with some huge superconducting magnets and they're all pretty safe. In fact, it seems there's even evidence that magnets help the circulation of blood.
I highly doubt these fields are strong enough on the train... but in the MRI where higher magnetic fields mean better images the only safety concerns come if you have some short of ferromagnetic material in your body. Then an MRI has the potential to rip it right out of your body. I got one recently, and they made sure to ask if I ever did welding or something that might get small metal flakes in the eye as that has the potential to wreak havoc.
I second this one! This is a clip from the initial Linux announcement on Usenet by Linus Torvalds back in 1991:
I can (well, almost) hear you asking yourselves "why?". Hurd will be
out in a year (or two, or next month, who knows), and I've already got
minix. This is a program for hackers by a hacker. I've enjouyed doing
it, and somebody might enjoy looking at it and even modifying it for
their own needs. It is still small enough to understand, use and
modify, and I'm looking forward to any comments you might have.
See what a visionary he was? He knew back in 1991 that GNU/HURD would be the greatest piece of vaporware.
Hmmm... let's start some lively debate then.
On the G5 homepage, Apple lists the Spec fp and int scores for the 2GHz G5 as 840 and 800 respectively. On AMD's site, a 2GHz Opteron comes in at 1271 and 1335. If we look for dual processor scores, the dual 2Ghz G5 scores a 15.7 in specfp_rate while a dual 1.8GHz Opt. comes in at 24.7
I think the G5 is an awesome machine. But I also think the Opterons are pretty great, too. Kudos to IBM as without them we'd have neither chip.
As an aside, we could easily find an Opteron machine that would be cheaper than the Alienware one... for example they use the Opteron 2xx series which isn't needed for a uniprocessor machine such as this. Knock $340 off (newegg.com) for that. Then the video cards are polar opposites from each other. Knock another $240 off.
OTOH, I'd die to have either of those machines.
I had my students make this one time -- I was teaching a class on polymers. I had seniors in college playing with glue and boarx like little kindergarteners. Hah. They enjoyed it and learned something about viscoelastic polymers in the process, so I think it was all good.
Anyway... while fun, the stuff isn't really Silly Putty (R). That's a silicone polymer. The poly(vinyl alcohol) that's in glues these days does a pretty decent impersonation, though. You'll notice that it does feel and act differently, and it tends to dry out much quicker than the real stuff.
Just in case anyone cared on this obviously slow news day.
Come on, where do they get these figures? In August alone:
From NetworkWoldFusion
The Blaster worm - also known as MSBlast or LoveSAN - has spread rapidly since it was first noticed on Monday. It has infected an estimated 188,000 systems running Microsoft operating systems, including Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows 2003 and NT, that are unpatched for the so-called RPC vulnerability discovered last month, according to a security firm tracking the worm.
They didn't count them. Why? Most of them aren't servers, right? Well how did they differentiate Linux servers then? I bet they didn't -- did they check and only record RH Advanced Server and disregard all the RH Workstation. I doubt it. This is pure FUD by a place that has trouble with math.
Did you see the benchmarks or even RTFA?
The proof that you're on crack is there. How do you explain that the NV cards are getting 31, 12, and 9 FPS for the Ultra 5900, 5600, and 5200 respectively whereas the ATI's are getting 60 and 47. That doesn't sound like VSync'd to me. That sounds like NV has stumbled with their latest line of cards.
OTOH, don't count them out. NV is the kind of company that will redouble their efforts and come looking for blood -- but it does seem we'll have to wait until the next generation to see it.
ROFL! Hurd. Hah. You made my day!
I stumbled on this a while back -- it's Linus' Usenet announcement of Linux back in 1991. But the part that's priceless is:
I can (well, almost) hear you asking yourselves "why?". Hurd will be out in a year (or two, or next month, who knows)
That was 1991! Nowadays Linux is running on everything from the biggest computer systems in the world (3rd fastest supercomputer (unclassified) in the world is running Linux -- here) to people's Tivos and PS2s.
>> A box designed to be separate just will not have the latency advantage of a supercomputer designed from the ground up.
I suggest you look at the list of the top supercomputers in the world. Most are clusters, ie. separate, distinct machines (just a quick glance shows the top 25 all are). It's just too darn hard to make a shared memory computer with 1000's of processors. So the common architecture is to make a cluster of smaller shared memory machines.
Besides, most clusters built utilize special interconnects like Myrinet that offer low latency connections. They're more expensive than ethernet, but it's a supercomputer so you spend it.
>> All this "the internet is one giant distributed computer" doesn't acknowledge this.
On the contrary... people know this very well. That's why we see rendering and SETI processing as distributed. They don't really need to communicate with others often.
Minimum wage? Wow.
/. Typically, Professors were the top of their class (or near there) in their Undergraduate studies. Then they went on and gave up 4 - 6 years of their lives being Graduate Students getting paid peanuts for their long hours while their Undergrad. classmates were getting paid pretty well. Most likely, they were also near the top in their Grad. studies before finding an academic job. Then they went on and did a post-doc for not much money before joining the ranks at a school and working their way up the tenure ladder (while getting substantially less than their peers).
Let me remind you who these people are... I'll assume you're talking about Science or Engineering types since this is
What's my point? Becoming a Professor is definitely not about the money. Remember, these people are typically the top-of-the-top and could have gotten really great jobs but decided to stick around and teach for a living. Professors that have been around a while do pretty well for themselves -- but that's only after more than a decade of not.
You tell me... are you gonna work 60 - 80 hours a week for no money so that you can teach or would you accept that job with a company that would be more than happy to hire a world expert and would compensate accordingly? If we forced Professors to make minimum wage then only the worst are gonna teach because the others know they need to provide for their families. Don't say it's for the love of it... there are lots of things I love to do but I know I have to eat and so I don't do them for a living.
Well I think you've struck upon a great analogy for closed source! In fact, the "Beware of the Leopard" matches very well with "Beware of the Lawyers".
I'm not trying to open a debate about which is better, but I think your analogy is going a little too far. Especially so in the light of the programs that people are writing to scan for similarities between BSD and Linux (the so-called shredding) that run in no time on an ordinary PC.
The holy grail of fuel cells has always been using hydrogen since it's only end product is water. If we use methane (or methanol for that case) then we end up dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere just as with fossil fuels (albeit at a higher energy efficiency than internal combustion engines). Now if we could create cheaper fuel cell catalysts and find a safe way to tote around lots of hydrogen safely.
>>Unfortunatly this testing can not be done untill there are enough units to test
>>AMD has not had this sort of problem resently
Does that mean they're jealous of Intel's problems and resent not having them?
>>The posts I've read so far, remind me of what a class of 10 year olds would right in criticing
Wow. With your mad spelling and grammar skills you ought to know exactly what 10 year olds are capable of.
But seriously though, Intel sells these chips to a completely different market than AMD. The customers here demand a box that never falls over. IBM and others test like crazy to make sure this stuff doesn't happen with their big chips. You have to remember that these aren't $800 clones here -- rather, big tin -- 6 figure kind of stuff.
Oh, and when has it been customary to give credit to companies for making mistakes? It's like everything else, you have to earn trust. Intel's trying to get into the lucrative big tin market and need to earn the trust of people. So far they're not handling this one well... I'd be super ticked if I had to take down my machines (the ones that I was under the assumption would give me 99.999% uptime) so that I could underclock them to 800MHz. I do supercomputing work and I expect the machines to just run. That's what I paid all that money for, right?
Well since you're on the "ever hear of" kick, I'll play along. Ever hear of reading the article?
These Opterons aren't being proposed to replace their big systems. These are being targeted as "inexpensive blade servers", per the article. So they aren't going to be huge systems with lots of redundancy, n-way scaling, and hot swapping. The original post hit upon a good question. How is Sun going to differentiate these from other vendors? Dell hasn't jumped aboard the Opteron train so more likely how is Sun going to differentiate from Newisys boxes and the sort? On the other hand, they seem to do alright with their Cobalt RaQ systems and they're Linux on Intel.
Those figures don't apply here, though. His calculations are probably correct for ethanol as a burnable fuel. The problem in making Ethanol comes from the need to get almost all of the water out of it so it can be burned. That takes a lot of energy. In fact, you can't even get it all out. Around 95% alcohol is as good as you can get with distillation (ever wonder why Everclear is 190 proof, ie. 95%?). This is a classical azeotrope, or constant boiling mixture. To achieve greater than 95% you need to do extra things to get the water out.
Anyway... with these enzymes you needn't get all that water out since they're not burning the ethanol. In fact, I would assume that the enzymes work on a relatively low percent of ethanol in water -- which would be very cheap to produce (up to ~13% can be done without any addition of energy, ie. wine!).