What is the longest super conducting power line today? How much power is used for cooling? The longest superconducting power line I have found on order is only 50 miles. That is a long way from a thousand mile cable and that isn't built yet.
He is using different speeds for the interconnects based on distance to get around the issue. This is not uncommon in supercomputers today where the cores on the node can communicate much faster than the nodes can communicate over infinity band. It sort of reminds me of the Connection machine that used a hyper-cube type system for interconnects. The problems that this computer is going to try and solve are probably well suited to this type of system after all I am sure that our brains don't have a zero latency switched fabric. The choice of the ARM is probably part patriotic, part personal history, and part sound technical reasoning. All in all I think it is an interesting idea.
I think that setting up a similar system with FPGAs in place of the CPUs might be even more interesting. And if we could get wafer scale integration of FPGA it could be even more interesting but the yields would be terrible.
I have yet to see a windows version of Evolution. I keep hearing about one but so far I have not seen one. Thunderbird works on Windows and Linux so it is a better choice for people that have to use both systems.
Re:Can't forget Bill Gates didn't finish college
on
Bill Gates On Energy
·
· Score: 1
Cool so we can throw out Greenpeace and the Sierra clubs input and listen to the majority of nuclear engineers that say nuclear is safe! Great I am good with that. And it was your idea.
It doesn't work at night. Battery technology is limited by physics and chemistry. Very little of it is in many places where you need it. The North East US for instance and all of Canada. Transmission lines are not a total solution. You will loose a lot of power shipping it from Texas to New York for example. Plus you have the NIMBY and the issues with massive centralization. If lots of power is sent over a few very good power lines from Texas to the North East those lines become a single point of failure. Since you will not build only one Nuclear plant to power the North East you have at least some redundancies compared to a thousand mile long power line. Solar cells will not follow Moore's law. Moore's law is based on things getting smaller. The amount of power a solar cell can produce is going to be tied directly the size of the cell. Economies of scale is also a mixed bag. Economies of scale fights with supply and demand for production to go up you must have the demand, high demand drives up prices which gets more people to start producing which should drive down prices in the long run the problem is that we are not there yet so demand goes up more than supply prices will first rise that will create a barrier to since it must compete with mature energy sources like natural gas. I am not anti solar or anti nuclear. I think that nuclear has a very bright future as a base load provider. I am also all for Solar as well. In the south every home should have a solar roof to help out with peak AC loads. However the pro solar and wind spout off buzz words like "Smart grid" and "Economies of Scale" without really understanding the problems or the meanings of the terms. Today I would have to agree with Mr. Gates that Nuclear is the way to replace Coal fired plants and to reduce CO2 emissions. I would love to see more research into Thorium cycle plants as well. I also want to see more funding for the Polywell reactor. In the county I live in we have two nuclear reactors and they are looking into building a wind farm as well. I am good with both. The fact is that Solar and Wind can not today or in the foreseeable future replace Coal, Nuclear, and or Hydro. It can and should be part of our current energy plans and future but so should nuclear.
I am pretty sure that Hydro has been a larger part or at least very close of the US power grid than nuclear for a while, at least in years with a large snow pack in west like this year. Add in all the imports from Canada of Hydro and this is a duh... Yep this is a very skillful lie. The best lies start with the the truth after all. Look we don't need more nuclear all the renewables that we have been adding have now surpassed that nasty nuclear. It is all spin. And it will be justified because the other guy does it. And the Solar and wind people that buy this and repeat it uncorrected are no better then the Dittio heads that they look down on as mindless drones.
There is not much meat on any part at $10. As I said include all the rest of the costs and it will be about the same more or less. Hey if you are happy with being a jerk then you are part of the problem. You are a worthless jerk and cause misery to people for your own jollies. As to the Karma well if you put any real value on your Slashdot karma then you are rather more pathetic than most jerks.
Can you name an equal number that are not US based and founded that are also massive multi-national tech companies. They US needs about lossing it's lead not getting it back. That is the key. Even in space while the US seems to be falling behind it is the US that is sending probes to Pluto and a new massive rover to Mars. It is you basic FUD and other nations trying to spread fear and shake US confidence. There are lots of problems. The biggest problems in my opinion is the broken patent system. The US needs to drop software patients. Another is the telcom infrastructure. Mobile and Internet are as important to growth today as the railroads where in the 1800s and highways where in the 1900s They are too important to be in the hands of few mega corps with a vested intrest in keeping their old business models intact. Education is improving believe it or not. Compared to the 80s it is much better now.
You do the math. You are probably buying the same cable they are for the same price they are. They also have to pay for shipping and then they have to pay rent, power, salaries, returns, benefits for some people, taxes, insurance. It all really adds up. I am not saying that they are over charging but to expect the blue shirts to know more than what is on the box is asking a bit too much. It is all the margins game. They make so little on things like TVs and computers that they try and make up for it on little things. The are betting that you will just buy it with the big ticket but low margin item instead of waiting to get it on line. I am not saying that you should buy the over priced cables at all. I am saying that beating up a poor Blue shirt over an HDMI cable price that they have zero control over is a. mean. b. useless. c. really just a bit of an Ego trip that does no one any good.
The can not just drop the price of the cable, they are not getting rich off selling those cables, and frankly they deal with enough jerks day in and day out that being one more jerk is just really kind of sad and pathetic. In other words why bother? Just tell them that you will just get one online. I have no problem with not buying an over priced cable. I have a problem with spending the effort to make someones life a little more miserable over something that isn't their fault and then spouting off righteous outrage on Slashdot over it. In the end who's life was improved by getting all bent over an over priced HDMI cable? Not one single persons. So why make the effort to make the world a less happy place?
Maybe you don't see the disconnect in that statment. You want a knowledgeable sales person at a store full of pretty low margin goods. Heck if you sold $5 HDMI cables at a store you are probably at a loss just from the time it takes a clerk to tell you that they are over on the wall. Even on that $1000 dollar TV at best buy I doubt that they make more than $200. I could be wrong but TVs are becoming commodities as well. So you really want an expert in home electronics and pay mail order prices.... It just doesn't work that way. If you want to pay $5 for an HDMI cable just buy it on line. Beating up a clerk at the store that can in no way meet the price point is just kind of man.
Facebook is really annoying because my friends are well my friends. My pictures and so on. Twitter is and Google I hope will fix this. Twitter is just an odd thing. How do they make money without destroying Twitter? Also I am shocked how few people use Twitter and yet at the same time how important it has become.
Okay thing is that they where probably not lying to you. Lying is when you know what you are saying is not the truth. They have been told by people that it is the truth and where just repeating what they have heard. They where ignorant. It is the same kind of mentality I get from people when it comes to things like anti virus. They believe if it is free that it can not be good. The people at Best Buy where told these cables are better, the box says they are better, and they cost more. It is only logical that they are in fact better. They can not believe that a company could be scamming them that much.
Yea right. Don't worry the NSA has enough recordings of you calling for Pizza delivery to your parents basement. Girlfriend and design product meeting. Now that is funny.
For most people CPU power is a none issue. Truth is that most office PC and home PCs are very over powered for what they are doing. Honestly most users would be see the biggest improvement in performance if they put their money into more RAM and faster storage as well as a half decent GPU over a faster CPU. The APU idea really has so much merit that it just isn't funny. If AMD can get this pushed out and if more software starts to take advantage of the GPU you will see a big benefit. This isn't all that different from when Intel came out with MMX and AMD came out with 3Dnow extensions for the CPU. At the time they where not used very often bot when they where the difference in performance was huge. Now we have SSE in the CPUs and most software uses it. Throw in the extra real cores on the APU vs the i3 and as the article pointed out for programs that supported threading the AMD APU tended to beat the more expensive I3. In graphics performance it was two to four times the speed. What we have is a CPU that will do very well when running programs that are multi-threaded and can use the GPU units well. Folding at home would be a good one. I would have loved to see some browser benchmarks using IE9 and Chrome as well since they are using GPU acceleration. This APU is could be marking a really big potential change in how programmers write code. When I started a few decades ago 64k was a lot of memory. Even when we got to 32bit CPUs and a few megabytes of memory we would avoid floating point math as much as possible. Until the Pentium line you still had to deal with many computers that didn't have support for hardware FPUs. Floating point was slow and we worked hard to not have to use it. Now we have thing like SSE and floating point is nothing. In fact it is as fast or faster then using integers. Today every programmer should be thinking of multiprocessing and how to use the GPU to solve problems besides graphics. This is just the first of the line and frankly I find it very interesting. And NO. We do not not want X86 on our mobile devices. Software on mobile is very different than software on the desktop binary compatibility is pretty much useless. In the mobile space we are now seeing the shift to multicore already and the integration of the GPU is already standard. SOCs like the Tegra 2, OMAP4, Apple A5, Snapdragon, and the next generation Hummingbird are all multicore and all have a GPU. Plus the X86 has a long way to go to match the low power and heat that ARM offers. If anything I would say the X86 needs to start being concerned that it will be pushed from the market from below just as the PDP-11 and VAX where. Multi-core mobile SOCs will be common in 6 months if not less and they are progressing at a very fast rate. Intel my have completely missed that boat.
Actually I want one of those. I want to leave it our booth at the next trade show after the attendees leave but while the other vendors are still there.
At 12 weeks? What about 24 weeks. And what about corals? If that is covered under the law I would say that argument is shot to heck. And adult cat again you would have to pick a point. I would say that by seven months that is also out the window.
A guppy has feelings but a fetus doesn't? And I am not for making abortion illegal but I am a fan of truth and logic. What about sea monkeys? Will people with fish now still have the option to buy live life food for them like brine shrimp?
Tanks and Armor in general do best in an open plain they are really optimized for that. If are are going to try an build armor for an urban environment you would make very different trade offs. For one thing speed probably wouldn't matter as much since you are not likely to need to go 50 MPH. Armor would be the big factor. You would want heavy protection on top and all sides. You will probably not need a 120MM gun since odds are that you are not going to engage other tanks at long distances. Again a walker doesn't really help here at all. Again something like powered personal battle armor is probably the best option but even that may be too large and slow. The simple truth is that fighting door to door is going to take time, be dirty, and cost a lot of lives for what you gain. It is the reason why armies for centuries would just lay siege or destroy urban targets outright. The idea is that most cites would surrender instead of being destroyed or suffer starvation from a siege they are unlikely to win. Until we have man shaped battle bots I fear that we will not have a good way to wage urban warfare. Frankly I question if having battle bots going door to door in an urban warfare setting can really be a good thing. Frankly I find the idea deeply disturbing. Seems to me that if a goal is deemed worth killing for it should be worth risking lives for as well.
Powered Armor is actually more likely. I do agree with you on that one. Today anything but MBTs are really rare. You have a few light tanks but mostly you have MBTs. The issue with Mechs is they tend to be tall and the goal with tanks is to be as low as possible so they are hard to see. Even a four leg walker is going to be pretty tall. Thing is that wheels are actually more efficient over flat terrain. Legs work well on very rocky. Thing is that any Mech is going to be a great target for an AH-64, A-10, and or a Drone packing a Hellfire.
Slashdot Mirror
How convent.
What is the longest super conducting power line today?
How much power is used for cooling?
The longest superconducting power line I have found on order is only 50 miles. That is a long way from a thousand mile cable and that isn't built yet.
He is using different speeds for the interconnects based on distance to get around the issue. This is not uncommon in supercomputers today where the cores on the node can communicate much faster than the nodes can communicate over infinity band. It sort of reminds me of the Connection machine that used a hyper-cube type system for interconnects.
The problems that this computer is going to try and solve are probably well suited to this type of system after all I am sure that our brains don't have a zero latency switched fabric. The choice of the ARM is probably part patriotic, part personal history, and part sound technical reasoning. All in all I think it is an interesting idea.
I think that setting up a similar system with FPGAs in place of the CPUs might be even more interesting. And if we could get wafer scale integration of FPGA it could be even more interesting but the yields would be terrible.
I have yet to see a windows version of Evolution. I keep hearing about one but so far I have not seen one. Thunderbird works on Windows and Linux so it is a better choice for people that have to use both systems.
Cool so we can throw out Greenpeace and the Sierra clubs input and listen to the majority of nuclear engineers that say nuclear is safe! Great I am good with that.
And it was your idea.
It doesn't work at night.
Battery technology is limited by physics and chemistry.
Very little of it is in many places where you need it. The North East US for instance and all of Canada.
Transmission lines are not a total solution. You will loose a lot of power shipping it from Texas to New York for example. Plus you have the NIMBY and the issues with massive centralization. If lots of power is sent over a few very good power lines from Texas to the North East those lines become a single point of failure. Since you will not build only one Nuclear plant to power the North East you have at least some redundancies compared to a thousand mile long power line.
Solar cells will not follow Moore's law. Moore's law is based on things getting smaller. The amount of power a solar cell can produce is going to be tied directly the size of the cell.
Economies of scale is also a mixed bag. Economies of scale fights with supply and demand for production to go up you must have the demand, high demand drives up prices which gets more people to start producing which should drive down prices in the long run the problem is that we are not there yet so demand goes up more than supply prices will first rise that will create a barrier to since it must compete with mature energy sources like natural gas.
I am not anti solar or anti nuclear. I think that nuclear has a very bright future as a base load provider. I am also all for Solar as well. In the south every home should have a solar roof to help out with peak AC loads. However the pro solar and wind spout off buzz words like "Smart grid" and "Economies of Scale" without really understanding the problems or the meanings of the terms.
Today I would have to agree with Mr. Gates that Nuclear is the way to replace Coal fired plants and to reduce CO2 emissions. I would love to see more research into Thorium cycle plants as well. I also want to see more funding for the Polywell reactor. In the county I live in we have two nuclear reactors and they are looking into building a wind farm as well. I am good with both. The fact is that Solar and Wind can not today or in the foreseeable future replace Coal, Nuclear, and or Hydro. It can and should be part of our current energy plans and future but so should nuclear.
I am pretty sure that Hydro has been a larger part or at least very close of the US power grid than nuclear for a while, at least in years with a large snow pack in west like this year. Add in all the imports from Canada of Hydro and this is a duh...
Yep this is a very skillful lie. The best lies start with the the truth after all. Look we don't need more nuclear all the renewables that we have been adding have now surpassed that nasty nuclear.
It is all spin. And it will be justified because the other guy does it. And the Solar and wind people that buy this and repeat it uncorrected are no better then the Dittio heads that they look down on as mindless drones.
There is not much meat on any part at $10. As I said include all the rest of the costs and it will be about the same more or less.
Hey if you are happy with being a jerk then you are part of the problem. You are a worthless jerk and cause misery to people for your own jollies. As to the Karma well if you put any real value on your Slashdot karma then you are rather more pathetic than most jerks.
Can you name an equal number that are not US based and founded that are also massive multi-national tech companies. They US needs about lossing it's lead not getting it back. That is the key. Even in space while the US seems to be falling behind it is the US that is sending probes to Pluto and a new massive rover to Mars. It is you basic FUD and other nations trying to spread fear and shake US confidence.
There are lots of problems. The biggest problems in my opinion is the broken patent system. The US needs to drop software patients. Another is the telcom infrastructure. Mobile and Internet are as important to growth today as the railroads where in the 1800s and highways where in the 1900s They are too important to be in the hands of few mega corps with a vested intrest in keeping their old business models intact. Education is improving believe it or not. Compared to the 80s it is much better now.
dang it you are right. My bad thanks.
You do the math. You are probably buying the same cable they are for the same price they are. They also have to pay for shipping and then they have to pay rent, power, salaries, returns, benefits for some people, taxes, insurance. It all really adds up. I am not saying that they are over charging but to expect the blue shirts to know more than what is on the box is asking a bit too much. It is all the margins game. They make so little on things like TVs and computers that they try and make up for it on little things. The are betting that you will just buy it with the big ticket but low margin item instead of waiting to get it on line. I am not saying that you should buy the over priced cables at all. I am saying that beating up a poor Blue shirt over an HDMI cable price that they have zero control over is
a. mean.
b. useless.
c. really just a bit of an Ego trip that does no one any good.
The can not just drop the price of the cable, they are not getting rich off selling those cables, and frankly they deal with enough jerks day in and day out that being one more jerk is just really kind of sad and pathetic.
In other words why bother? Just tell them that you will just get one online. I have no problem with not buying an over priced cable. I have a problem with spending the effort to make someones life a little more miserable over something that isn't their fault and then spouting off righteous outrage on Slashdot over it.
In the end who's life was improved by getting all bent over an over priced HDMI cable? Not one single persons. So why make the effort to make the world a less happy place?
Just bring back the New Jersey class and the 16 inch AP shells. I doubt that a laser would have much effect on them :)
Maybe you don't see the disconnect in that statment. You want a knowledgeable sales person at a store full of pretty low margin goods. Heck if you sold $5 HDMI cables at a store you are probably at a loss just from the time it takes a clerk to tell you that they are over on the wall.
Even on that $1000 dollar TV at best buy I doubt that they make more than $200. I could be wrong but TVs are becoming commodities as well. So you really want an expert in home electronics and pay mail order prices.... It just doesn't work that way. If you want to pay $5 for an HDMI cable just buy it on line. Beating up a clerk at the store that can in no way meet the price point is just kind of man.
Facebook is really annoying because my friends are well my friends. My pictures and so on.
Twitter is and Google I hope will fix this. Twitter is just an odd thing. How do they make money without destroying Twitter? Also I am shocked how few people use Twitter and yet at the same time how important it has become.
Okay thing is that they where probably not lying to you. Lying is when you know what you are saying is not the truth. They have been told by people that it is the truth and where just repeating what they have heard. They where ignorant. It is the same kind of mentality I get from people when it comes to things like anti virus. They believe if it is free that it can not be good. The people at Best Buy where told these cables are better, the box says they are better, and they cost more. It is only logical that they are in fact better. They can not believe that a company could be scamming them that much.
Yea right. Don't worry the NSA has enough recordings of you calling for Pizza delivery to your parents basement. Girlfriend and design product meeting. Now that is funny.
For most people CPU power is a none issue. Truth is that most office PC and home PCs are very over powered for what they are doing. Honestly most users would be see the biggest improvement in performance if they put their money into more RAM and faster storage as well as a half decent GPU over a faster CPU.
The APU idea really has so much merit that it just isn't funny. If AMD can get this pushed out and if more software starts to take advantage of the GPU you will see a big benefit. This isn't all that different from when Intel came out with MMX and AMD came out with 3Dnow extensions for the CPU. At the time they where not used very often bot when they where the difference in performance was huge. Now we have SSE in the CPUs and most software uses it. Throw in the extra real cores on the APU vs the i3 and as the article pointed out for programs that supported threading the AMD APU tended to beat the more expensive I3. In graphics performance it was two to four times the speed.
What we have is a CPU that will do very well when running programs that are multi-threaded and can use the GPU units well. Folding at home would be a good one.
I would have loved to see some browser benchmarks using IE9 and Chrome as well since they are using GPU acceleration. This APU is could be marking a really big potential change in how programmers write code. When I started a few decades ago 64k was a lot of memory. Even when we got to 32bit CPUs and a few megabytes of memory we would avoid floating point math as much as possible. Until the Pentium line you still had to deal with many computers that didn't have support for hardware FPUs. Floating point was slow and we worked hard to not have to use it. Now we have thing like SSE and floating point is nothing. In fact it is as fast or faster then using integers. Today every programmer should be thinking of multiprocessing and how to use the GPU to solve problems besides graphics. This is just the first of the line and frankly I find it very interesting.
And NO. We do not not want X86 on our mobile devices. Software on mobile is very different than software on the desktop binary compatibility is pretty much useless. In the mobile space we are now seeing the shift to multicore already and the integration of the GPU is already standard. SOCs like the Tegra 2, OMAP4, Apple A5, Snapdragon, and the next generation Hummingbird are all multicore and all have a GPU. Plus the X86 has a long way to go to match the low power and heat that ARM offers. If anything I would say the X86 needs to start being concerned that it will be pushed from the market from below just as the PDP-11 and VAX where. Multi-core mobile SOCs will be common in 6 months if not less and they are progressing at a very fast rate. Intel my have completely missed that boat.
Thanks I was going to post that I thought that they where DOE labs and not the NSA.
Actually I want one of those. I want to leave it our booth at the next trade show after the attendees leave but while the other vendors are still there.
That is just evil. So how do you know what USB drive to trust?
Well maybe if we used a Polywell reactor to power it. :) :)
I wish I was 20 years younger
At 12 weeks? What about 24 weeks. And what about corals? If that is covered under the law I would say that argument is shot to heck.
And adult cat again you would have to pick a point. I would say that by seven months that is also out the window.
A guppy has feelings but a fetus doesn't? And I am not for making abortion illegal but I am a fan of truth and logic. What about sea monkeys? Will people with fish now still have the option to buy live life food for them like brine shrimp?
Tanks and Armor in general do best in an open plain they are really optimized for that. If are are going to try an build armor for an urban environment you would make very different trade offs. For one thing speed probably wouldn't matter as much since you are not likely to need to go 50 MPH. Armor would be the big factor. You would want heavy protection on top and all sides. You will probably not need a 120MM gun since odds are that you are not going to engage other tanks at long distances. Again a walker doesn't really help here at all. Again something like powered personal battle armor is probably the best option but even that may be too large and slow. The simple truth is that fighting door to door is going to take time, be dirty, and cost a lot of lives for what you gain. It is the reason why armies for centuries would just lay siege or destroy urban targets outright. The idea is that most cites would surrender instead of being destroyed or suffer starvation from a siege they are unlikely to win. Until we have man shaped battle bots I fear that we will not have a good way to wage urban warfare. Frankly I question if having battle bots going door to door in an urban warfare setting can really be a good thing. Frankly I find the idea deeply disturbing. Seems to me that if a goal is deemed worth killing for it should be worth risking lives for as well.
Powered Armor is actually more likely. I do agree with you on that one. Today anything but MBTs are really rare. You have a few light tanks but mostly you have MBTs. The issue with Mechs is they tend to be tall and the goal with tanks is to be as low as possible so they are hard to see. Even a four leg walker is going to be pretty tall. Thing is that wheels are actually more efficient over flat terrain. Legs work well on very rocky. Thing is that any Mech is going to be a great target for an AH-64, A-10, and or a Drone packing a Hellfire.