I'm pretty sure the chart is talking about all forms of physical money, which does make sense to an extent. Bits of data in a central bank have no more intrinsic value than a fiat currency, and it's a whole lot easier for that central bank to account for all of its currency.
On the other hand, much of the rest of the first world takes a somewhat different approach to paper money than the US. The UK, EU, and Australia all use slightly higher-quality (and much better looking!) banknotes, which greatly increases their longevity.
More importantly, however, they only use banknotes for larger denominations. The smallest banknote currently in circulation in the UK is £5, which is approximately equal to $10 USD.
It's absolutely absurd to carry around $1 banknotes (especially with the tanking value of the dollar). The US treasury needs to put its foot down, push $1 coins, and kill the dollar bill in due time, possibly phasing out the use of the penny as well. $2 and $5 coins wouldn't be bad ideas either. If you required retailers to include sales tax with advertised prices, you'd probably also see change being given in much more sensible amounts.
'Futurists' is listed on that timeline, so I'm pretty sure that the whole thing's mostly a joke (along with the footnote of "Not to be taken too seriously")
At least these people have finally stopped predicting Fidel Castro's death to lessen the extent by which they make fools out of themselves.
(It also lists us simultaneously plunging ourselves into a second dark age and finding the cure to all disease a few years later, which would be somewhat unlikely)
I don't want to turn this into an argument, because the Air is a nice machine, although it fills a distinctly different niche from the 12" Powerbook.
The Air is *strictly* a machine to be used either as a "second" computer, or to be plugged into a permanent workstation with a mouse, external storage, etc...
The dual cores, LED screen, etc are all technological improvements that could have just as easily been added to any other machine.
The lack of wired ethernet is a massive drawback. Wireless isn't everywhere, and 802.11n is even rarer. Dongles = Evil.
*One* USB port is rather weak, especially if you're going to be needing a USB->Ethernet dongle. (This is perhaps the Air's greatest crime)
The SSD is nice, but at $1000, is also vastly overpriced. The 4200 RPM hard drive offered as an alternate is, to be frank, pathetic.
I never *plan* on using a 12" laptop to do massive video editing projects, nor do I use the optical drive all that frequently. However, it is nice to know that I'm equipped to do both, should the need arise (which it has, and on more than a few occasions!)
5 hour battery life isn't particularly impressive, especially if there's an SSD involved. A 12" powerbook can be squeezed to about 4.5 hours with a new battery and the screen brightness turned down.
All in all, I'm going to have to pass on the Air. I suppose that when this machine finally kicks the bucket in a few years time, I'll reluctantly move to a MacBook.
Owing to Germany's history, there exists a keen sense among the populous that making the government too powerful is a bad thing. No such feeling is present among a majority of Americans/British/etc., and the possibility of governmental abuse of an ID card scheme is consequently real. Have you ever actually read the constitution? It borders on paranoid as to the extent to which it goes to ensure that the government doesn't become too powerful. America's worst infractions have been a result of directly and blatantly violating the constitution.
We're not that different from France in that regard. There was quite a bit of ideological spillover between the drafting of the constitution and the French Revolution.
The UK is an interesting case, because, for the most part, the British government have been responsible stewards of the power which is (sort of) given to them by their citizens. Although the slippery slope argument still does apply, it hasn't really happened. Public sentiment about this is particularly strong due to the failure of several of Thatcher's privatization efforts -- the newly privatized Post Office recently determined that the most efficient/profitable way for it to operate would be to sell off virtually all of its assets, and call it a day.
My personal view on the ID cards is that they'd be perfectly acceptable (and probably a good idea) provided that they're implemented properly and that strong protective measures are put into place.
Worry not. This breakthrough was found at the publicly financed University of Alberta. You can keep on crowing about how much Medicine costs to Discover, but the pharma companies spend a lot on computer generated bees and animated restless legs as they do research, and even more on direct marketing to physicians. All of the big pharma companies are publicly-traded, and are therefore required to disclose their financials. Take a look at their annual budgets. Marketing and sales are an absolutely miniscule piece of the pie compared to the cost of R&D and Clinical Trials.
Also take a look at where many big research universities derive their funding from. It's no secret that academic research labs whore themselves out on "profitable" projects to fund their other hard-science works that might not have an immediate (or any) payoff/profit.
As much as the world would like to believe that big pharma companies are pure malevolent evil, the reality is that doing business in their industry is staggeringly expensive, and that those companies are actually not all that profitable (which should also be clearly stated in their annual report, and reflected in their stock price).
Like the grandparent poster said: The system's not perfect, but the private pharmas are actually doing a fairly decent job at the moment given the conditions they have to work with.
Who says you're getting less? You'd have to be extremely one-dimensional to make that claim. A 50% weight reduction might easily be worth more than a 15" screen. A loss of 3/4" in thickness could very well make sense for a slower CPU and fewer ports. If you don't need or want something, it doesn't have any value to you.
Yes, and no. What if you don't have to make major compromises for the advantage of portability?
Apple's last generation of PowerBooks were essentially identical across screen sizes. The 12" model had virtually all of the important features of the 15" model, and the 17" didn't add all that much of value (apart from the big screen). It was no surprise, that the 12" model was one of the most popular and highly-regarded machines that Apple ever produced. Fast processor (for the time it was produced), a full range of ports (2x Usb, Firewire, Display, Ethernet, Modem, Audio), DVD Burner, decent graphics processor, and literally everything else you'd expect to find in a high-end notebook.
I own one such machine, and although the small screen does get annoying at times, the increased portability makes it 100% worthwhile. I've got a nice big screen at home, and at work that I can use if I need to, although a 12" screen is perfectly adequate for what you'd want to use a laptop for anyhow...... Serious photoshop work and marathon coding sessions do benefit from a big screen, although most tasks are perfectly fine on a smaller screen.
Not that this is an advertisement for Apple in any way..... Their recent machines have been somewhat of a letdown. The MacBook made numerous sacrifices in the name of affordability, and actually *increased* the size of the machine (albeit in the name of re-scaling the screen to a more practical aspect ratio). The MacBook Air, on the other end of the spectrum, made far too many sacrifices in the name of portability, and also costs a bloody fortune given how crippled it is.
Nobody needs a 15"+ 5+ pound laptop. The benefits of a small machine vastly outweigh those of a large one, and it's not all that difficult to build a full-featured machine into a small chassis without making too many compromises.
Diesel-electric locomotives have been used by railroads since the 1920s, and have proven to be extremely practical devices by using the diesel engine to drive alternator, which in turn provides power to traction motors on the wheels. Although this configuration appears quite a bit more complex on the surface, it completely eliminates the need for a mechanical transmission, and offers greatly improved reliability and efficiency. Virtually every diesel locomotive today operates in this fashion.
Although they're not strictly hybrids, as there is no regenerative braking, several locomotives which incorporate batteries and regenerative braking are in development, and promise to cut emissions by 50% and reduce costs by up to 20%. If these claims turn out to be even remotely accurate, the next generation of railroad locomotives will all almost certainly use such a design.
It's easy to see how this can all extend to cars. Although Americans for some reason have a strong aversion to diesel cars, they've proven to be extremely popular, efficient, and reliable in Europe. A true diesel-electric hybrid is naturally the next step.
If we can work out a viable energy storage mechanism (better batteries/supercapacitors/flywheels) and completely de-couple the diesel "power plant" from the mechanical drivetrain, we can come very close to achieving "optimal" energy efficiency in a fuel-burning vehicle. The electric engine must be fast and responsive enough to run at all speeds, and the diesel engine only kicks in to recharge the vehicle (and does so running with a predetermined "optimal" throttle)
There's a very fine line between "terrorist" and "people who are pissed off because their country is being occupied"
As long as we're in Iraq (and making an absolute mess of it), we're providing impetus to breed more terrorists.
You cannot eliminate terrorism without addressing the underlying causes. There is no vast underground terrorist network. Just a lot of very pissed-off individuals.
Indeed. Ever since Apple "opened up" its WebKit development, they've made quite a few cool innovations. In addition to cleaning up their JavaScript engine (which has been a sore point for Safari for the entirety of its existence), they're beginning to implement functions commonly provided by many of the increasingly popular Javascript Libraries.
Long and short, Safari's native implementation of getElementsByClassName is astronomically faster. Firefox 3 shows similar improvements over the JavaScript implementation of the same function.
On the other hand, it *does* beg the question of why on earth we haven't begun to design something a bit more friendly and efficient than JavaScript, which is (at best) an obfuscated nightmare, and pitifully slow on even the fastest of machines when performing simple tasks.
Everybody giggling about this would mean the end of "Big Oil" forgets that gasoline is only one of many petroleum based products. Plastics are still going to be a huge market, for example. The oil companies still won't like it, as their profits will no doubt go down. On the plus side, the profits for terrorist funders (Saudi Arabia) would go down, too. Plastics are recyclable, and aren't produced from the same hydrocarbons as gasoline IIRC.
Likewise, we've already come up with a few ways to make bio-plastics (some of them even being economically on-par with petroleum-based plastics). I imagine that more alternative materials will surface as time goes on. Conserving and reusing plastics will take some getting used to, but also won't be a huge issue.
Perhaps we might even be able to do away with the "disposable" consumer culture we live in.
The funny thing is that villagers like these use enormous amounts of fuel and create tremendous pollution (per-capita, anyway) with their snowmobiles and poorly insulated houses. And how many times do you figure the lawyer pushing them into this suit has flown in from Boston? Everything in moderation, and responsible usage.
For instance, odds are good that as an Alaskan, you have a legitimate reason to own an SUV or Pickup truck. If you live in New York City, the odds that you need an SUV are asymptotically close to zero.
Ironically, during the time I lived in Alaska, I witnessed far fewer SUVs than I normally would have at home in New Jersey. Subaru AWD station wagons are by far the most popular vehicle in Alaska.
The Alaska Railroad is heavily used to transport freight. I don't have any specific numbers, but I imagine that the amount of rail freight vastly outweighs whatever is carried by road.
So, what it comes down to is that we do the best we can. Alaska seems to do a pretty decent job, and actually strikes me as one of the few places that has a legitimate need for fossil fuels. On the other hand, the fact that most urban areas in the US lack proper mass transit is inexcusable.
Hmm. Can't the alternator/turbine be taken out of gear, and bypassed?
Although I imagine that a nuclear plant has somewhat specialized requirements in this regard, I'd be surprised if there weren't some mechanism to do this already in place.
I worked in College IT for a time, and we hated it too.
Problem is, that sort of purchasing decision almost always gets made much higher up, or even at the state level. That's also why you also see SunGard/Banner all over the place.
Re:Wrong marketing did them in, clock *does* matte
on
Is AMD Dead Yet?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I call bullshit.
The original Pentium 4 models were widely and famously known for the fact that their clockrate was vastly out of proportion to its real-world performance. I believe that clock-for-clock, a Pentium III performed 1.5 to 2x as fast as a Pentium 4. It is quite possibly, the least efficient CPU in terms of clock per performance ever to be manufactured.
The early Pentium 4s were almost universally slower than the Pentium IIIs that they replaced.
Likewise, only very specific types of "number crunching" actually took advantage of the Pentium 4. Certain types of video encoding worked quite well, whilst "general purpose" calculations were pathetically slow. Intel was also widely known for running highly-optimized benchmarks on their processors, and then running unoptimized i386 compiles on AMD's machines to make them look poor by comparison.
AMD's chips, at the time, however, had clock speeds that were more closely pared to Pentium IIIs.
Intel wound up getting a taste of its own poison after the architecture proved to be unsustainable in meaningful yields past 4Ghz, and its low-power Pentium 4 M chips began outperforming their power-hungry desktop equivalents that were priced twice as high. This architecture eventually evolved into the Core series of chips. In the interim, Intel had a *very* tough time marketing its chips, and for a time, Mhz ratings dropped out of Intel's marketing entirely.
AMD's speed rating was pegged to the Pentium 4, and from what I can remember, it was a fairly faithful benchmark. Although the "fake" speed ratings aren't as necessary today, it's still nice to be able to vaguely compare processors across generations.
If it weren't for the Core series of chips (which weren't even developed by Intel's main development group!), AMD would almost certainly be on top of Intel right now, provided they could keep up with the demand.
To be perfectly fair, this sounds like a half-decent compromise.
"You're free to use our work, and use it to benefit whatever you happen to be doing. However, if you want to make money off of it, we want a piece of the pie"
The GPL's nice and all, but do you honestly think that Microsoft are going to adopt something that liberal? It actually *does* have a considerable chance of hurting them. This legislation, on the other hand, will probably help them catch up to Apple, who have somehow managed to jump into the lead in terms of standards-compliance.
If you've ever coded for one of Apple's platforms, you'll see that it's an....interesting experience. Lots of "standards" are supported, but in a "but only when you embed it in one of our proprietary container formats" sort of way. I won't argue OS X is a damn good platform to develop for, but it's also pretty easy to see that Apple doesn't completely "get it" when it comes to properly adopting standards or interacting with and supporting their developers.
Although I agree that the numbers might be heavily inflated, the underlying concept is intriguing, as it completely steps around the limitations of current battery technology for producing hybrids and "zero-emission" vehicles.
Air compressors have been around forever, are extremely reliable, and can be manufactured very inexpensively using low-tech materials and methods. If you wanted to get clever, you could even divert some of the torque from the secondary engine to refill the air tanks, and ensure that the "idle" torque of the engine isn't wasted when you take your foot off of the accelerator (you could use some sort of Continuously-Variable transmission to achieve this, which is also convenient given that CVTs are enjoying somewhat of a renaissance at the moment).
Until batteries get *much* better, I'd put my money on compressed air and flywheels as being the most viable "next-gen" energy storage mechanism for vehicles. Also, at $18,000 these things could potentially sell in massive quantities.
Reinforced cockpit doors. We've already done it. It's virtually impossible for 9/11 to occur again via the same mechanisms.
To take it to the next level, you could even separate the cabins completely so that the pilot cannot move between the cockpit and the rest of the plane without physically leaving the aircraft (eg. there are separate exterior doors).
If you were *really* paranoid, you could even separate the individual cabins within the plane.
I'm also not totally opposed to armed air marshals disguised as normal passengers or flight crew.
Professor: Hell no! We're going to wipe all other universities off the face of the Earth! Funny that. Most would be perfectly happy just to settle for tenure:-)
It certainly adds to the mystique for such an absolute legend of a man to disappear into the wilderness to never be seen or heard from again, leaving absolutely no trace behind.
He's a human being, and one of the most accomplished ones of our generation at that.
Therefore, yes. I certainly do give a fuck.
I'll agree that it might be a bit odd to be overwhelmingly emotional about a total stranger, but at the same time, you'd practically have to be a robot not to empathize with his family.
Those are primarily the games that were both popular and groundbreaking.
There are games that are "artistic" and groundbreaking on a much deeper level, if you look hard enough. This is a good place to start.
And as much as I enjoyed Half-Life, the level plot wasn't *quite* where it needed to be to compete with a serious film or piece of literature. Damn close, though.
RPGs (Planescape Torment jumps out, as do many of the Final Fantasy games) also tend to have fantastic "artistic" visuals, great storylines, and good music.
They also haven't moved all that far from their starting position (about 7 miles).
If you landed in the bed of a (former) salt lake in the US (eg. the aptly-named Dead Sea), you'd likely draw the same conclusions. It'd be really tough to support life in that locale.
I don't want to discredit the fantastic achievements of the project, but we currently don't have even remotely enough data to make these sorts of grandiose claims.
I believe that Canon has explicitly stated that the feature has to be manually turned on, and that there is a non-trivial setup process to get it working. In other words, the privacy implications of the feature are essentially nonexistant.
Watermarking technology for copyright-protection already exists. Canon is simply one of the first to be building it into their cameras.
Given that image plagiarism is a legitimate problem for professional photographers, the feature does make a good bit of sense.
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I'm pretty sure the chart is talking about all forms of physical money, which does make sense to an extent. Bits of data in a central bank have no more intrinsic value than a fiat currency, and it's a whole lot easier for that central bank to account for all of its currency.
On the other hand, much of the rest of the first world takes a somewhat different approach to paper money than the US. The UK, EU, and Australia all use slightly higher-quality (and much better looking!) banknotes, which greatly increases their longevity.
More importantly, however, they only use banknotes for larger denominations. The smallest banknote currently in circulation in the UK is £5, which is approximately equal to $10 USD.
It's absolutely absurd to carry around $1 banknotes (especially with the tanking value of the dollar). The US treasury needs to put its foot down, push $1 coins, and kill the dollar bill in due time, possibly phasing out the use of the penny as well. $2 and $5 coins wouldn't be bad ideas either. If you required retailers to include sales tax with advertised prices, you'd probably also see change being given in much more sensible amounts.
'Futurists' is listed on that timeline, so I'm pretty sure that the whole thing's mostly a joke (along with the footnote of "Not to be taken too seriously")
At least these people have finally stopped predicting Fidel Castro's death to lessen the extent by which they make fools out of themselves.
(It also lists us simultaneously plunging ourselves into a second dark age and finding the cure to all disease a few years later, which would be somewhat unlikely)
I don't want to turn this into an argument, because the Air is a nice machine, although it fills a distinctly different niche from the 12" Powerbook.
The Air is *strictly* a machine to be used either as a "second" computer, or to be plugged into a permanent workstation with a mouse, external storage, etc...
The dual cores, LED screen, etc are all technological improvements that could have just as easily been added to any other machine.
The lack of wired ethernet is a massive drawback. Wireless isn't everywhere, and 802.11n is even rarer. Dongles = Evil.
*One* USB port is rather weak, especially if you're going to be needing a USB->Ethernet dongle. (This is perhaps the Air's greatest crime)
The SSD is nice, but at $1000, is also vastly overpriced. The 4200 RPM hard drive offered as an alternate is, to be frank, pathetic.
I never *plan* on using a 12" laptop to do massive video editing projects, nor do I use the optical drive all that frequently. However, it is nice to know that I'm equipped to do both, should the need arise (which it has, and on more than a few occasions!)
5 hour battery life isn't particularly impressive, especially if there's an SSD involved. A 12" powerbook can be squeezed to about 4.5 hours with a new battery and the screen brightness turned down.
All in all, I'm going to have to pass on the Air. I suppose that when this machine finally kicks the bucket in a few years time, I'll reluctantly move to a MacBook.
We're not that different from France in that regard. There was quite a bit of ideological spillover between the drafting of the constitution and the French Revolution.
The UK is an interesting case, because, for the most part, the British government have been responsible stewards of the power which is (sort of) given to them by their citizens. Although the slippery slope argument still does apply, it hasn't really happened. Public sentiment about this is particularly strong due to the failure of several of Thatcher's privatization efforts -- the newly privatized Post Office recently determined that the most efficient/profitable way for it to operate would be to sell off virtually all of its assets, and call it a day.
My personal view on the ID cards is that they'd be perfectly acceptable (and probably a good idea) provided that they're implemented properly and that strong protective measures are put into place.
Also take a look at where many big research universities derive their funding from. It's no secret that academic research labs whore themselves out on "profitable" projects to fund their other hard-science works that might not have an immediate (or any) payoff/profit.
As much as the world would like to believe that big pharma companies are pure malevolent evil, the reality is that doing business in their industry is staggeringly expensive, and that those companies are actually not all that profitable (which should also be clearly stated in their annual report, and reflected in their stock price).
Like the grandparent poster said: The system's not perfect, but the private pharmas are actually doing a fairly decent job at the moment given the conditions they have to work with.
Yes, and no. What if you don't have to make major compromises for the advantage of portability?
Apple's last generation of PowerBooks were essentially identical across screen sizes. The 12" model had virtually all of the important features of the 15" model, and the 17" didn't add all that much of value (apart from the big screen). It was no surprise, that the 12" model was one of the most popular and highly-regarded machines that Apple ever produced. Fast processor (for the time it was produced), a full range of ports (2x Usb, Firewire, Display, Ethernet, Modem, Audio), DVD Burner, decent graphics processor, and literally everything else you'd expect to find in a high-end notebook.
I own one such machine, and although the small screen does get annoying at times, the increased portability makes it 100% worthwhile. I've got a nice big screen at home, and at work that I can use if I need to, although a 12" screen is perfectly adequate for what you'd want to use a laptop for anyhow...... Serious photoshop work and marathon coding sessions do benefit from a big screen, although most tasks are perfectly fine on a smaller screen.
Not that this is an advertisement for Apple in any way..... Their recent machines have been somewhat of a letdown. The MacBook made numerous sacrifices in the name of affordability, and actually *increased* the size of the machine (albeit in the name of re-scaling the screen to a more practical aspect ratio). The MacBook Air, on the other end of the spectrum, made far too many sacrifices in the name of portability, and also costs a bloody fortune given how crippled it is.
Nobody needs a 15"+ 5+ pound laptop. The benefits of a small machine vastly outweigh those of a large one, and it's not all that difficult to build a full-featured machine into a small chassis without making too many compromises.
Diesel-electric locomotives have been used by railroads since the 1920s, and have proven to be extremely practical devices by using the diesel engine to drive alternator, which in turn provides power to traction motors on the wheels. Although this configuration appears quite a bit more complex on the surface, it completely eliminates the need for a mechanical transmission, and offers greatly improved reliability and efficiency. Virtually every diesel locomotive today operates in this fashion.
Although they're not strictly hybrids, as there is no regenerative braking, several locomotives which incorporate batteries and regenerative braking are in development, and promise to cut emissions by 50% and reduce costs by up to 20%. If these claims turn out to be even remotely accurate, the next generation of railroad locomotives will all almost certainly use such a design.
It's easy to see how this can all extend to cars. Although Americans for some reason have a strong aversion to diesel cars, they've proven to be extremely popular, efficient, and reliable in Europe. A true diesel-electric hybrid is naturally the next step.
If we can work out a viable energy storage mechanism (better batteries/supercapacitors/flywheels) and completely de-couple the diesel "power plant" from the mechanical drivetrain, we can come very close to achieving "optimal" energy efficiency in a fuel-burning vehicle. The electric engine must be fast and responsive enough to run at all speeds, and the diesel engine only kicks in to recharge the vehicle (and does so running with a predetermined "optimal" throttle)
There's a very fine line between "terrorist" and "people who are pissed off because their country is being occupied"
As long as we're in Iraq (and making an absolute mess of it), we're providing impetus to breed more terrorists.
You cannot eliminate terrorism without addressing the underlying causes. There is no vast underground terrorist network. Just a lot of very pissed-off individuals.
Indeed. Ever since Apple "opened up" its WebKit development, they've made quite a few cool innovations. In addition to cleaning up their JavaScript engine (which has been a sore point for Safari for the entirety of its existence), they're beginning to implement functions commonly provided by many of the increasingly popular Javascript Libraries.
Long and short, Safari's native implementation of getElementsByClassName is astronomically faster. Firefox 3 shows similar improvements over the JavaScript implementation of the same function.
On the other hand, it *does* beg the question of why on earth we haven't begun to design something a bit more friendly and efficient than JavaScript, which is (at best) an obfuscated nightmare, and pitifully slow on even the fastest of machines when performing simple tasks.
Likewise, we've already come up with a few ways to make bio-plastics (some of them even being economically on-par with petroleum-based plastics). I imagine that more alternative materials will surface as time goes on. Conserving and reusing plastics will take some getting used to, but also won't be a huge issue.
Perhaps we might even be able to do away with the "disposable" consumer culture we live in.
For instance, odds are good that as an Alaskan, you have a legitimate reason to own an SUV or Pickup truck. If you live in New York City, the odds that you need an SUV are asymptotically close to zero.
Ironically, during the time I lived in Alaska, I witnessed far fewer SUVs than I normally would have at home in New Jersey. Subaru AWD station wagons are by far the most popular vehicle in Alaska.
The Alaska Railroad is heavily used to transport freight. I don't have any specific numbers, but I imagine that the amount of rail freight vastly outweighs whatever is carried by road.
So, what it comes down to is that we do the best we can. Alaska seems to do a pretty decent job, and actually strikes me as one of the few places that has a legitimate need for fossil fuels. On the other hand, the fact that most urban areas in the US lack proper mass transit is inexcusable.
Hmm. Can't the alternator/turbine be taken out of gear, and bypassed?
Although I imagine that a nuclear plant has somewhat specialized requirements in this regard, I'd be surprised if there weren't some mechanism to do this already in place.
I worked in College IT for a time, and we hated it too.
Problem is, that sort of purchasing decision almost always gets made much higher up, or even at the state level. That's also why you also see SunGard/Banner all over the place.
I call bullshit.
The original Pentium 4 models were widely and famously known for the fact that their clockrate was vastly out of proportion to its real-world performance. I believe that clock-for-clock, a Pentium III performed 1.5 to 2x as fast as a Pentium 4. It is quite possibly, the least efficient CPU in terms of clock per performance ever to be manufactured.
The early Pentium 4s were almost universally slower than the Pentium IIIs that they replaced.
Likewise, only very specific types of "number crunching" actually took advantage of the Pentium 4. Certain types of video encoding worked quite well, whilst "general purpose" calculations were pathetically slow. Intel was also widely known for running highly-optimized benchmarks on their processors, and then running unoptimized i386 compiles on AMD's machines to make them look poor by comparison.
AMD's chips, at the time, however, had clock speeds that were more closely pared to Pentium IIIs.
Intel wound up getting a taste of its own poison after the architecture proved to be unsustainable in meaningful yields past 4Ghz, and its low-power Pentium 4 M chips began outperforming their power-hungry desktop equivalents that were priced twice as high. This architecture eventually evolved into the Core series of chips. In the interim, Intel had a *very* tough time marketing its chips, and for a time, Mhz ratings dropped out of Intel's marketing entirely.
AMD's speed rating was pegged to the Pentium 4, and from what I can remember, it was a fairly faithful benchmark. Although the "fake" speed ratings aren't as necessary today, it's still nice to be able to vaguely compare processors across generations.
If it weren't for the Core series of chips (which weren't even developed by Intel's main development group!), AMD would almost certainly be on top of Intel right now, provided they could keep up with the demand.
To be perfectly fair, this sounds like a half-decent compromise.
"You're free to use our work, and use it to benefit whatever you happen to be doing. However, if you want to make money off of it, we want a piece of the pie"
The GPL's nice and all, but do you honestly think that Microsoft are going to adopt something that liberal? It actually *does* have a considerable chance of hurting them. This legislation, on the other hand, will probably help them catch up to Apple, who have somehow managed to jump into the lead in terms of standards-compliance.
If you've ever coded for one of Apple's platforms, you'll see that it's an....interesting experience. Lots of "standards" are supported, but in a "but only when you embed it in one of our proprietary container formats" sort of way. I won't argue OS X is a damn good platform to develop for, but it's also pretty easy to see that Apple doesn't completely "get it" when it comes to properly adopting standards or interacting with and supporting their developers.
Although I agree that the numbers might be heavily inflated, the underlying concept is intriguing, as it completely steps around the limitations of current battery technology for producing hybrids and "zero-emission" vehicles.
Air compressors have been around forever, are extremely reliable, and can be manufactured very inexpensively using low-tech materials and methods. If you wanted to get clever, you could even divert some of the torque from the secondary engine to refill the air tanks, and ensure that the "idle" torque of the engine isn't wasted when you take your foot off of the accelerator (you could use some sort of Continuously-Variable transmission to achieve this, which is also convenient given that CVTs are enjoying somewhat of a renaissance at the moment).
Until batteries get *much* better, I'd put my money on compressed air and flywheels as being the most viable "next-gen" energy storage mechanism for vehicles. Also, at $18,000 these things could potentially sell in massive quantities.
The current governor of California has been operating a similar service since 1996.
Stupid ideas except for one.
Reinforced cockpit doors. We've already done it. It's virtually impossible for 9/11 to occur again via the same mechanisms.
To take it to the next level, you could even separate the cabins completely so that the pilot cannot move between the cockpit and the rest of the plane without physically leaving the aircraft (eg. there are separate exterior doors).
If you were *really* paranoid, you could even separate the individual cabins within the plane.
I'm also not totally opposed to armed air marshals disguised as normal passengers or flight crew.
It certainly adds to the mystique for such an absolute legend of a man to disappear into the wilderness to never be seen or heard from again, leaving absolutely no trace behind.
He's a human being, and one of the most accomplished ones of our generation at that.
Therefore, yes. I certainly do give a fuck.
I'll agree that it might be a bit odd to be overwhelmingly emotional about a total stranger, but at the same time, you'd practically have to be a robot not to empathize with his family.
Those are primarily the games that were both popular and groundbreaking.
There are games that are "artistic" and groundbreaking on a much deeper level, if you look hard enough. This is a good place to start.
And as much as I enjoyed Half-Life, the level plot wasn't *quite* where it needed to be to compete with a serious film or piece of literature. Damn close, though.
RPGs (Planescape Torment jumps out, as do many of the Final Fantasy games) also tend to have fantastic "artistic" visuals, great storylines, and good music.
They also haven't moved all that far from their starting position (about 7 miles).
If you landed in the bed of a (former) salt lake in the US (eg. the aptly-named Dead Sea), you'd likely draw the same conclusions. It'd be really tough to support life in that locale.
I don't want to discredit the fantastic achievements of the project, but we currently don't have even remotely enough data to make these sorts of grandiose claims.
I believe that Canon has explicitly stated that the feature has to be manually turned on, and that there is a non-trivial setup process to get it working. In other words, the privacy implications of the feature are essentially nonexistant.
Watermarking technology for copyright-protection already exists. Canon is simply one of the first to be building it into their cameras.
Given that image plagiarism is a legitimate problem for professional photographers, the feature does make a good bit of sense.