Part of the reason a DNA half-life has been so elusive is that it is hard to find a large enough cache of samples that have been exposed to similar conditions. The moa bones were all between 600 and 8000 years old, and came from a 5-kilometre-wide area of New Zealand's South Island, key factors for the researchers to identify a regular pattern of decay.
With an estimated burial temperature of 13 ÂC, the DNA's half-life was 521 years - almost 400 times longer than expected from lab experiments at similar temperatures.
The conclusion is not just that some bonds decayed in 521 years, but the data over the time frame sorta fit an exponental decay model (R2 = 0.39) from which you can say there is such a thing as a half-life (as opposed to some other decay process). For those not versed in statistics, that R2 isn't great fit, but somewhat speculative (1.0 is perfect fit, 0.5 sorta means about 1/2 of the variation can be explained by exponential decay).
For completeness, they also only measured mitochondrial DNA decay (aparently 242 base pairs), and extrapolated from other studies that nuclear DNA degrades twice as fast as mtDNA. mtDNA used for this because there are generally many more copies per cell (each cell can have several mitochondria, but only 1 nucleus). Also, it would be impractical to extract from chromosomes and measure all the bonds that broke in a nuclear DNA sample with current technology.
The 521 year half-life is if the DNA is exposed to water in typical situations, ITFA (in the article) they give an estimate for the best case situation...
The team predicts that even in a bone at an ideal preservation temperature of 5 C, effectively every bond would be destroyed after a maximum of 6.8 million years. The DNA would cease to be readable much earlier — perhaps after roughly 1.5 million years, when the remaining strands would be too short to give meaningful information.
“This confirms the widely held suspicion that claims of DNA from dinosaurs and ancient insects trapped in amber are incorrect,” says Simon Ho, a computational evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney in Australia. However, although 6.8 million years is nowhere near the age of a dinosaur bone — which would be at least 65 million years old — “We might be able to break the record for the oldest authentic DNA sequence, which currently stands at about half a million years,” says Ho.
As other posters point out, the famous mammoth recreated from DNA was from about 10,000 years ago, much less than the 1.5 million year practical limit estimated by this research team.
Out in deep space, radiation comes from all directions. On the Moon, you might expect the ground, at least, to provide some relief, with the solid body of the Moon blocking radiation from below. Not so.
When galactic cosmic rays collide with particles in the lunar surface, they trigger little nuclear reactions that release yet more radiation in the form of neutrons. The lunar surface itself is radioactive!
So which is worse for astronauts: cosmic rays from above or neutrons from below? Igor Mitrofanov, a scientist at the Institute for Space Research and the Russian Federal Space Agency, Moscow, offers a grim answer: "Both are worse."
They are attempting to quantify this effect with CRaTER or Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation. Basically, the CRaTER instrument is aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (which is currently orbiting the Moon). However, I haven't seen any specific reports on their findings on their official website http://crater.sr.unh.edu/, press reports indicate that initial finding aren't good...
In a surprising discovery, scientists have found that the moon itself is a source of potentially deadly radiation.
Measurements taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter show that the number of high energy particles streaming in from space did not tail off closer to the moon's surface, as would be expected with the body of the moon blocking half the sky.
Rather, the cosmic rays created a secondary — and potentially more dangerous -- shower by blasting particles in the lunar soil which then become radioactive.
"The moon is a source of radiation," said Boston University researcher Harlan Spence, the lead scientist for LRO's cosmic ray telescope. "This was a bit unexpected."
While the moon blocks galactic cosmic rays to some extent, the hazards posed by the secondary radiation showers counter the shielding effects, Spence said at a press conference at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco this week.
It's actually much worse than this. The moon is basically a radiation nightmare. In addition to all the solar radiation from above (in the form of corona mass ejections), you've apparently got lots from below you as well (thorium and uranium in the crust).
I think most folks are thinking about using the water to make hydrogen (for rocket fuel) and for industrial purposes (e.g., thermal pumps, etc). Drinking water will likely be mostly closed-loop (not unlike how they do it on the ISS).
Even if the price advantage of desktops disappears, the upgradability and repairability of desktops (excluding laptop-like desktops like Mac Minis) will still be superior.
Repairability of desktops is really going down (if you haven't noticed). About the only thing replaceable on the motherboards are CPU, DIMMs, and storage (and often the RTC/cmos battery). Optical storage is on its last legs and will soon be gone like the floppy. Hard drives are probably next in line (functionally replaced by cloud storage). Eventually, the CPU will become so commoditized that it will be the SOC which will be the whole motherboard: you swap the whole thing out if it breaks. At that point the DRAM might as well be on the motherboard as well, since DRAM will be most of the motherboard cost.
At that point the most common desktops will be just like Mac Minis, and the old "ATX-like" desktops and their replacement components will be the niche/expensive developer/hobbist market that they were originally. Then you won't be able to make the "cost" argument anymore as likely individual piece-part prices will be higher than a brand new consumer-class machine.
I'm old enough to remember when technically inclined people went down to Walgreens to test and get replacement tubes for TVs and Stereo Amps to avoid being gouged by the TV repair shop and I can assure you that price and availability of replacement parts for old consumer products can change much faster than you think they will.
I probably won't come as a surprise, but as the volume of desktop computers goes down, and the volume of mobile devices goes up, the price tags will likely converge more so that there is only a small mobile premium. The only limiting factor will be the screen size that differentiate a mobile device from a desktop device.
If someone can solve this problem with some sort of projector or retinal imaging (not retina display, but imaging directly on the retina) technology, that last difference will go away.
This tidbit known mostly to industry insiders is largely true, especially when comparing comparable drive sizes. But how storage arrays handle the respective drive type failures is what continues to perpetuate the customer perception that more expensive drives should be more reliable. One of the storage industry’s dirty secrets is that most enterprise and consumer drives are made up of largely the same components. However, their external interfaces (FC, SCSI, SAS or SATA) and most importantly their respective firmware design priorities / resulting goals play a huge role in determining enterprise vs. consumer drive behavior in the real world.
Costco generally limits markup to 15%, not 10%. Also, certain state laws require that Costco apply minimum markups to the selling prices for specific goods, such as tobacco products, alcoholic beverages, and gasoline. Of course, some products are marked down for quick sale. However, the resultant average gross margin target is around 10%.
They do, however, attempt to control their SG&A (overhead) to match their gross margin target of 10%. The net corporate profit is from membership fees which is why they try so hard to get you to sign up for executive memberships...
I thought it was the other way around, it was the SSMP people that came to ICF. Originally the ICF program was just going to upgrade the Nova system and reuse a lot of their equipment as much as possible. But the SSMP people thought the upgraded Nova facility would not be enough for their own needs, and told they should scrap the Nova upgrade plans which were pretty fleshed out, and build a new facility.
AFAIK, the SSMP was the "golden" grant of $4.5B that came out the the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty efforts. All the national labs wanted a piece of it and a deal was struck. LLNL used their negotiated "piece-of-the-pie" to upgrade their originally proposed upgrade of the NOVA under the guise of closing the loop on the warhead simulation (I think that was part of the ASC Initiative). Basically the LLNL got the money when the getting was good to supercharge their ignition work. Of course the getting is no longer so good and they haven't had much positive to show for their efforts so far (except for 192 big frickin lasers).
Now that the NI Campaign funding is coming to a close, they seemed to be *forced* to say that they will spend some time for SSMP support experiments (which apparently was being shelved for the NIC). I think this all supports my contention that they basically did whatever they wanted (continue with their ignition experiments), even though they were taking money from SSMP. Of course since they weren't successful, they now have to grovel for their continued existance (by tossing some bones to the SSMP folks) or perhaps hope for someone else to take up the banner (e.g., the military)...
The NIF started out attempting to research the tech needed to make a ICF powerplant, but over time they haven't had much success. After a few major rearchitectures and funding shifts across other national labs, they decided to latch on to Stockpile Stewardship and Management Program as their reason for existance. Unfortunatlly, their current direction isn't very helpful to either the original charter, or their new SSMP charter.
One might argue that based on its initial charter, it should have been canceled a long time ago, but when a government program is threatened, they attempt to latch on to whatever funding is available and basically that is what happened. As with most goverment pork programs, the managment was a mess and there was no oversight. In 2000, the whole project was rebaselined and new management was brought in. Initally, they thought they could theoretically achieve ignition with only a 1MJ or so. Now they have 500TW laser capable of 2MJ, and they acknowledge that the current design won't really work. Not blaming the science or the scientists, but just to clearly illustrate that they really aren't on the cusp of anything...
The SSMP stuff is just a ruse, the facility does whatever they want. The nuclear weapons test stuff was really the previous benefactor that was selected to be the source of funds for the pork. The lastest round of funding (the so-called National Ignition Campaign), was basically a pork-barrel earmark for Diane Feinstein. Their public schedule to achieve ignition was top down made to match the NIC funding duration. Since now they admit that it still doesn't work, it's not clear how long they can keep this house of cards funding up.
I suppose the military is up next, but if Obama wins re-election, they might have to go the PBS funding route;^) National Ignition Nest Egg? (apologies to big bird)
You most certainly had that stuff in HS, although it depends on your school district.
In my HS, we had several Teletypes connected via acoustic coupler to a central computer where Basic was available interactively (fortran was only available via punchcard). The class we had in my HS at that time taught Basic, but several students convinced the district to run their Fortran card-decks on the computer (but not as part of any class).
Predictably, though, the most common use of the Teletypes was StarTrek which consumed so much greenbar paper, that the paper eventually got rationed to students in class, so a few students got together and bought their own case of greenbar to continue their addiction...
Sadly, the sole computer class that was available at the school was reserved for seniors, and by the time I was a senior, they stopped offering it (budget cuts). Fortunatly, I had a few upper-classmen friends that let me hack on those teletypes and I had other avenues available to use computers...
Although, I agree, electronic calculators were basically unheard of in my HS at the time, except for the rich kids...
Really? I'm surprised. I'd figure they'd use 1553 or CANbus.
I hereby revoke your/. licence for suggesting military standards and a license encumbered protocol;^)
But seriously, that's probably a big consideration for a commercial project. Tie your commercial project to some MIL standard and the cost of all your components go up since components that implement MIL standards often are sold to the less than cost concious miltary programs. Similarly, Bosch has a lock on the CANbus with their patents and have used this to essentially create a tax on the automotive electronics business. The only reason to use CANbus is that your product is in an automobile and has to talk to the bus that is in nearly all automobiles.
Is the 600 barrels a measure of volume, 42 gallons to a barrel? Did it mean 600 drums of unknown capacity, perhaps 55 gallon drums? But it's a Canadian story and wouldn't they use metric? Perhaps the barrels are made of maple wood, charred inside and used for aging the syrup, eh?
A barrel (used in a liquid measurement context) is usually approx 120 liters. However, there is some variation, and each commodity tends to have it's own "barrel" measurement. For example, a barrel of oil is about 160 liters, but a barrel of beer is a bit light of a standard liquid barrel (except in the UK where it's a bit bigger).
The history of the "barrel" measurement is that it is defined to be 1/2 a hogshead (a really big barrel 4ft tall, 30inches diameter), 1/4 of a pipe, and 1/8 of a liquid tonne. For smaller measurements, you had the kilderkin (1/2 barrel), the firkin (1/4 barrel). These measurements were simply the capacity of the common containers used for shipping ale, wine, and tobbaco (among other things) back in the american colonial times. In many ways, the factor-of-two system is preferable to the factor-of-ten metric unit for stuff like this...
Perhaps this investment is a true test of faith in quantum mechanics. If you are pretty sure the probability that this company will succeed is non-zero, then perhaps in one universe this investment will pay off. Even if in this universe, the investment goes belly up, in another universe, you will be rich. Maybe then you can live vicarously in that knowlege... If you are true believer, that is;^)
Nonsense, the variant of processor can matter, but software must be written to take advantage of it...
The amount of software that is written to take specific advantage of a processor architecture is going down in this era of the cloud. Unless the thing you are doing is so trivial that it doesn't matter, or vast that you can fill your own datacenter with it 24-7, odds are today your software will (eventually) want to run on a cloud platform (e.g, like Amazon AWS/EC2). In a cloud environment, you don't own the computer, you rent a virtual computer. The cheapest rentals will likely be the most commoditized platforms. Specialized software which need specific variants of processors is not only is less cost effective to develop, but also to execute.
FWIW, As for the other arguments, x86 is mostly dead in the cloud world. Everyone is x86-64-AVX That means in addition to the 16 standard integer registers there are 16 256-bit SIMD registers in the IAS which are quite competitive with Sparc (0+7g+8i+8o register window). Besides, today processors have many more physical registers and do top-of-stack caching so ISA registers don'tt mean as much as it used to mean (e.g, the sandy bridge i7 architecture has 160 integer registers available for renaming).
Also, all those arguments about magic instructions are mostly not relavent anymore. Everyone pretty much has the similar stuff. For example, the latest rabbit out of the Sparc bag have been a dedicated security co-processor (given that many of their servers are web-host front-ends, maybe a co-processor that does AES/DES/RSA is a reasonable thing), although not clear that it's net any better than say an i7 with x86-AES-NI acceleration instructions + a highly optmized AVX RSA implementation unless all that's all your server is doing is RSA (usually there's some other code running).
FWIW: If you read WP2 & WP3, I think they are just attempting to read some of the SRAM from inside the GPU for a source of what they call a "PUF" (physically uncloneable function). They hope to sprinkle some error-correction code and some magic crypto dust the uninitialized SRAM pattern to create a number that will be useable for attestation (basically to assure that it is the machine that you think it is).
Once you power up your system, something is gonna want to use that SRAM (GPU vendors aren't in the business of leaving big chunks of SRAM that they don't use for researchers to discover and use), so you have to take a snapshot after powerup, but before someone wants to use the GPU. This makes many avenues of attack available (e.g., you have to put that fingerprint somewhere, because the GPUs will shortly trounce all over it).
Secondly is the stability issue. Although some parts of the uninitialized SRAM is going to be statistically stable (power-up to 1 or 0 pretty reliably), some others are going to be pretty random (in fact other researchers are looking for highly unstable bits in SRAM powerup to be able to extract a random number for a nonce). Across temperature, and over time as the parts age, these bits will change (some stable ones will become random and some random ones may exhibit a strong bias one way or another). Without extensive characterization over age and temperature, this would be pretty unstable to use as a definitive ID.
Third, when GPU vendors notice that people are accessing SRAM before initalization, they will start wiping the memory on boot. This is to prevent this third-party ID usage model (because nobody wants to repeat the intel CPUID fiasco) and because now that GPUs are being used for general-purpose computing, any type of SRAM retention issues across power-up is a security risk. On a related note, there are in fact there are other researchers attempting to use SRAM retention to create a reasonably secure clock (google TARDIS: Time and Remanence Decay in SRAM).
If I had to speculate, about the only reasonable model for this (assuming the GPU vendors don't co-opt it or shut them out) is to create some sort of "ticket" system. Distill a timestamp and a challenge value with the PUF (and maybe even the "random" part of the SRAM for salt) down to a ticket using some cryptomagic. That ticket would be valid for a while, and you'd have to create a new ticket before it expired. Over a short enough time and temperature regime, a security system might be convinced that this temporary ticket is an acceptable substitute credential, but it would not really replace an actual authentication technique.
This stuff has also been researched extensively for 5 years or so. I don't know what these folks are really bringing to the table (other than they are looking at GPUs for big blocks of SRAM). Why be so secret? Maybe it's because they want to keep that funding coming. A quick google showed someone in 2009 even wrote an undergrad paper on the subject of SRAM/PUFs... http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031709-141338/unrestricted/mqp_sram.pdf
I read in an interview, that you mentioned voice recognition as a possible up-and-coming revolutionary technology. Are Siri and Google-Now the direction of voice recognition technology (e.g., all in the cloud), or is there some "decentralization" (to borrow some fusion-io-speak) in the future that you can see where tinker-ers can get involved and help create a personal-voice recognition revolution (e.g., not dragon naturally speaking speach-to-text, but something actually semantic).
If we ever have Star Trek-style replicators, you can expect that to change.
You'd think we already do, with all the hype about 3D printers.
Of course Star Trek replicators (as with most of ST tech) has made the built-in assumption that energy is free. When energy is free many other things become free with the right (entropy modifying) tech...
I don't know if this was actually true, but originally there was some reporting that under terms of his probation, he was not allowed to use computers or the Internet for five years without approval from his probation officer. I would have suspected some outrage in./ over a condition like that.
As I understand it, communicating with folks uploading a video to the internet under an alias is what he's been held on. But what people seem to be concentrating on is the alias part (which seems a bit hippocrtical given the typical number of AC poist made on./ as well)...
Intel, allegedly, has a chip that can't compete with their existing products, and isn't a winner on margins. MS has a chip apparently designed just for them, except they would rather ship punchier devices with those existing products. So, who wins here?
Both intel and microsoft win (they hope). By putting a product out a product that fits right in between tablets and laptops, they have the chance to permanently segment the market by poisoning the middle. No-one will be able to charge more for a tablet than the price point they set, and they will expect anything "better" to be x86. This will create a firewall which will allow microsoft to bomb the price on the tablet OS to compete with android and microsoft and intel to continue to charge more for laptops (preserving margins on those products).The only fly in this ointment is that they have to muster up enough excitement to be able to sell enough to make the firewall stick. I don't think they'll be able to pull it off, but that's why you play the game, to see who's got the game...
Unfortunatly, it's just like getting a medical procedure for the parties involved. Intellectually, they know that even though the treatment is unpalletable, they should probably do it as it is better for them in the long run. However, a small voice inside always is thinking maybe I should just avoid it and hope things get better on their own.... Hmm, or maybe I'll try some alternative procedure and hope for the best... Then again, maybe I'll regret taking the alternative path... Decisions, decisions...
Any company involved in programming or manufacturing that self-driven car will be sued out of existence and the "love affair" everyone seems to have about auto-driving cars will end quickly.
That is a very real risk. Not sure how the laws will deal with it. But until that question is addressed, we won't see large-scale sales of automated cars. I suspect that we'll see the equivalent of ToS: by using this car, you agree to be fully responsible for all its actions and accidents.
That risk is already with us. Just witness the whole debacle concerning Toyota and the drive-by-wire sticky accelerator issue. After a lengthy investigation (where they dragged in NASA and NHTSA engineers to examine thousands of lines of embeded software code), it was found that although a few of them were the result of the accelerator pedal getting wedged under a floor mat, most of the reported accidents were likely driver error (panicking and hitting the accelerator pedal instead of the brake pedal), but that didn't stop the lawsuits. Lawyers will laugh at your ToS all the way to court.
I suspect the end game to this is that the software will be purchased from a different company that sells you the hardware. For most folks that will mean that we will not be able to purchase self-driving cars, but must rent them from integrator companies. Fortunatly, you'll be able to sleep well at the driver seat knowing that they bought the car and the software from the lowest bidder. Think a company like HP, buying from Intel and Microsoft and renting you the PC (so you can't tamper with it to install your own mods and they get to force update to fix bugs rather then let you continue to use the old buggy version).
I also suspect that google will probably not want to sell the software to any end-users (to avoid liability), and we will get a bunch a fly-by-night self-driving software competitors vying for business from these integrator companies. Welcome to the self-driving future;^)
Slashdot Mirror
China - The first economy based of stealing other people's ideas and manufacturing it for less.
Samuel Slater anyone? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-15002318
Of course the British couldn't help themselves either...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2178330/Royal-Worcester-porcelain-Remarkable-diary-porcelain-maker-1791-details-stole-trade-secrets.html
http://www.amazon.com/For-All-Tea-China-Favorite/dp/B003D0ZUOK
(Newton euphemistically called it standing on the shoulder of giants; but we all know he's nothing but a plagiarzing punk ;-)
Yes apparently Newton was a plagarizing punk (your words, not mine)... See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants
The paper was about a test. They tested bones of moas (a recently extinct flightless bird from NZ) that were between 600 and 8000 years old. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21628864.600-dnas-halflife-identified-using-fossil-bones.html
Part of the reason a DNA half-life has been so elusive is that it is hard to find a large enough cache of samples that have been exposed to similar conditions. The moa bones were all between 600 and 8000 years old, and came from a 5-kilometre-wide area of New Zealand's South Island, key factors for the researchers to identify a regular pattern of decay.
With an estimated burial temperature of 13 ÂC, the DNA's half-life was 521 years - almost 400 times longer than expected from lab experiments at similar temperatures.
The conclusion is not just that some bonds decayed in 521 years, but the data over the time frame sorta fit an exponental decay model (R2 = 0.39) from which you can say there is such a thing as a half-life (as opposed to some other decay process). For those not versed in statistics, that R2 isn't great fit, but somewhat speculative (1.0 is perfect fit, 0.5 sorta means about 1/2 of the variation can be explained by exponential decay).
For completeness, they also only measured mitochondrial DNA decay (aparently 242 base pairs), and extrapolated from other studies that nuclear DNA degrades twice as fast as mtDNA. mtDNA used for this because there are generally many more copies per cell (each cell can have several mitochondria, but only 1 nucleus). Also, it would be impractical to extract from chromosomes and measure all the bonds that broke in a nuclear DNA sample with current technology.
The 521 year half-life is if the DNA is exposed to water in typical situations, ITFA (in the article) they give an estimate for the best case situation...
The team predicts that even in a bone at an ideal preservation temperature of 5 C, effectively every bond would be destroyed after a maximum of 6.8 million years. The DNA would cease to be readable much earlier — perhaps after roughly 1.5 million years, when the remaining strands would be too short to give meaningful information.
“This confirms the widely held suspicion that claims of DNA from dinosaurs and ancient insects trapped in amber are incorrect,” says Simon Ho, a computational evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney in Australia. However, although 6.8 million years is nowhere near the age of a dinosaur bone — which would be at least 65 million years old — “We might be able to break the record for the oldest authentic DNA sequence, which currently stands at about half a million years,” says Ho.
As other posters point out, the famous mammoth recreated from DNA was from about 10,000 years ago, much less than the 1.5 million year practical limit estimated by this research team.
The only information that I know about is here...
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2005/08sep_radioactivemoon/
Out in deep space, radiation comes from all directions. On the Moon, you might expect the ground, at least, to provide some relief, with the solid body of the Moon blocking radiation from below. Not so.
When galactic cosmic rays collide with particles in the lunar surface, they trigger little nuclear reactions that release yet more radiation in the form of neutrons. The lunar surface itself is radioactive!
So which is worse for astronauts: cosmic rays from above or neutrons from below? Igor Mitrofanov, a scientist at the Institute for Space Research and the Russian Federal Space Agency, Moscow, offers a grim answer: "Both are worse."
They are attempting to quantify this effect with CRaTER or Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation. Basically, the CRaTER instrument is aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (which is currently orbiting the Moon). However, I haven't seen any specific reports on their findings on their official website http://crater.sr.unh.edu/, press reports indicate that initial finding aren't good...
In a surprising discovery, scientists have found that the moon itself is a source of potentially deadly radiation.
Measurements taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter show that the number of high energy particles streaming in from space did not tail off closer to the moon's surface, as would be expected with the body of the moon blocking half the sky.
Rather, the cosmic rays created a secondary — and potentially more dangerous -- shower by blasting particles in the lunar soil which then become radioactive.
"The moon is a source of radiation," said Boston University researcher Harlan Spence, the lead scientist for LRO's cosmic ray telescope. "This was a bit unexpected."
While the moon blocks galactic cosmic rays to some extent, the hazards posed by the secondary radiation showers counter the shielding effects, Spence said at a press conference at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco this week.
It's actually much worse than this. The moon is basically a radiation nightmare. In addition to all the solar radiation from above (in the form of corona mass ejections), you've apparently got lots from below you as well (thorium and uranium in the crust).
I think most folks are thinking about using the water to make hydrogen (for rocket fuel) and for industrial purposes (e.g., thermal pumps, etc). Drinking water will likely be mostly closed-loop (not unlike how they do it on the ISS).
Apparently, this guy (psychologist Dr. Aric Sigman) apparently has lots of agendas...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1149207/How-using-Facebook-raise-risk-cancer.html
Not saying that TV is good for you, but sometimes you have to look at the source of this stuff and wonder how seriously to take it...
Even if the price advantage of desktops disappears, the upgradability and repairability of desktops (excluding laptop-like desktops like Mac Minis) will still be superior.
Repairability of desktops is really going down (if you haven't noticed). About the only thing replaceable on the motherboards are CPU, DIMMs, and storage (and often the RTC/cmos battery). Optical storage is on its last legs and will soon be gone like the floppy. Hard drives are probably next in line (functionally replaced by cloud storage). Eventually, the CPU will become so commoditized that it will be the SOC which will be the whole motherboard: you swap the whole thing out if it breaks. At that point the DRAM might as well be on the motherboard as well, since DRAM will be most of the motherboard cost.
At that point the most common desktops will be just like Mac Minis, and the old "ATX-like" desktops and their replacement components will be the niche/expensive developer/hobbist market that they were originally. Then you won't be able to make the "cost" argument anymore as likely individual piece-part prices will be higher than a brand new consumer-class machine.
I'm old enough to remember when technically inclined people went down to Walgreens to test and get replacement tubes for TVs and Stereo Amps to avoid being gouged by the TV repair shop and I can assure you that price and availability of replacement parts for old consumer products can change much faster than you think they will.
I probably won't come as a surprise, but as the volume of desktop computers goes down, and the volume of mobile devices goes up, the price tags will likely converge more so that there is only a small mobile premium. The only limiting factor will be the screen size that differentiate a mobile device from a desktop device.
If someone can solve this problem with some sort of projector or retinal imaging (not retina display, but imaging directly on the retina) technology, that last difference will go away.
Google did a study on consumer grade drives a while ago...
http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en/us/archive/disk_failures.pdf
And here's how NetApp (one of those "enterprise" guys responded)...
http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/26/netapp-weighs-in-on-disks/
This tidbit known mostly to industry insiders is largely true, especially when comparing comparable drive sizes. But how storage arrays handle the respective drive type failures is what continues to perpetuate the customer perception that more expensive drives should be more reliable. One of the storage industry’s dirty secrets is that most enterprise and consumer drives are made up of largely the same components. However, their external interfaces (FC, SCSI, SAS or SATA) and most importantly their respective firmware design priorities / resulting goals play a huge role in determining enterprise vs. consumer drive behavior in the real world.
Costco generally limits markup to 15%, not 10%. Also, certain state laws require that Costco apply minimum markups to the selling prices for specific goods, such as tobacco products, alcoholic beverages, and gasoline. Of course, some products are marked down for quick sale. However, the resultant average gross margin target is around 10%.
They do, however, attempt to control their SG&A (overhead) to match their gross margin target of 10%. The net corporate profit is from membership fees which is why they try so hard to get you to sign up for executive memberships...
I thought it was the other way around, it was the SSMP people that came to ICF. Originally the ICF program was just going to upgrade the Nova system and reuse a lot of their equipment as much as possible. But the SSMP people thought the upgraded Nova facility would not be enough for their own needs, and told they should scrap the Nova upgrade plans which were pretty fleshed out, and build a new facility.
AFAIK, the SSMP was the "golden" grant of $4.5B that came out the the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty efforts. All the national labs wanted a piece of it and a deal was struck. LLNL used their negotiated "piece-of-the-pie" to upgrade their originally proposed upgrade of the NOVA under the guise of closing the loop on the warhead simulation (I think that was part of the ASC Initiative). Basically the LLNL got the money when the getting was good to supercharge their ignition work. Of course the getting is no longer so good and they haven't had much positive to show for their efforts so far (except for 192 big frickin lasers).
Now that the NI Campaign funding is coming to a close, they seemed to be *forced* to say that they will spend some time for SSMP support experiments (which apparently was being shelved for the NIC). I think this all supports my contention that they basically did whatever they wanted (continue with their ignition experiments), even though they were taking money from SSMP. Of course since they weren't successful, they now have to grovel for their continued existance (by tossing some bones to the SSMP folks) or perhaps hope for someone else to take up the banner (e.g., the military)...
The NIF started out attempting to research the tech needed to make a ICF powerplant, but over time they haven't had much success. After a few major rearchitectures and funding shifts across other national labs, they decided to latch on to Stockpile Stewardship and Management Program as their reason for existance. Unfortunatlly, their current direction isn't very helpful to either the original charter, or their new SSMP charter.
One might argue that based on its initial charter, it should have been canceled a long time ago, but when a government program is threatened, they attempt to latch on to whatever funding is available and basically that is what happened. As with most goverment pork programs, the managment was a mess and there was no oversight. In 2000, the whole project was rebaselined and new management was brought in. Initally, they thought they could theoretically achieve ignition with only a 1MJ or so. Now they have 500TW laser capable of 2MJ, and they acknowledge that the current design won't really work. Not blaming the science or the scientists, but just to clearly illustrate that they really aren't on the cusp of anything...
The SSMP stuff is just a ruse, the facility does whatever they want. The nuclear weapons test stuff was really the previous benefactor that was selected to be the source of funds for the pork. The lastest round of funding (the so-called National Ignition Campaign), was basically a pork-barrel earmark for Diane Feinstein. Their public schedule to achieve ignition was top down made to match the NIC funding duration. Since now they admit that it still doesn't work, it's not clear how long they can keep this house of cards funding up.
I suppose the military is up next, but if Obama wins re-election, they might have to go the PBS funding route ;^) National Ignition Nest Egg? (apologies to big bird)
You most certainly had that stuff in HS, although it depends on your school district.
In my HS, we had several Teletypes connected via acoustic coupler to a central computer where Basic was available interactively (fortran was only available via punchcard). The class we had in my HS at that time taught Basic, but several students convinced the district to run their Fortran card-decks on the computer (but not as part of any class).
Predictably, though, the most common use of the Teletypes was StarTrek which consumed so much greenbar paper, that the paper eventually got rationed to students in class, so a few students got together and bought their own case of greenbar to continue their addiction...
Sadly, the sole computer class that was available at the school was reserved for seniors, and by the time I was a senior, they stopped offering it (budget cuts). Fortunatly, I had a few upper-classmen friends that let me hack on those teletypes and I had other avenues available to use computers...
Although, I agree, electronic calculators were basically unheard of in my HS at the time, except for the rich kids...
Really? I'm surprised. I'd figure they'd use 1553 or CANbus.
I hereby revoke your /. licence for suggesting military standards and a license encumbered protocol ;^)
But seriously, that's probably a big consideration for a commercial project. Tie your commercial project to some MIL standard and the cost of all your components go up since components that implement MIL standards often are sold to the less than cost concious miltary programs. Similarly, Bosch has a lock on the CANbus with their patents and have used this to essentially create a tax on the automotive electronics business. The only reason to use CANbus is that your product is in an automobile and has to talk to the bus that is in nearly all automobiles.
Just sayn'
Is the 600 barrels a measure of volume, 42 gallons to a barrel? Did it mean 600 drums of unknown capacity, perhaps 55 gallon drums? But it's a Canadian story and wouldn't they use metric? Perhaps the barrels are made of maple wood, charred inside and used for aging the syrup, eh?
A barrel (used in a liquid measurement context) is usually approx 120 liters. However, there is some variation, and each commodity tends to have it's own "barrel" measurement. For example, a barrel of oil is about 160 liters, but a barrel of beer is a bit light of a standard liquid barrel (except in the UK where it's a bit bigger).
The history of the "barrel" measurement is that it is defined to be 1/2 a hogshead (a really big barrel 4ft tall, 30inches diameter), 1/4 of a pipe, and 1/8 of a liquid tonne. For smaller measurements, you had the kilderkin (1/2 barrel), the firkin (1/4 barrel). These measurements were simply the capacity of the common containers used for shipping ale, wine, and tobbaco (among other things) back in the american colonial times. In many ways, the factor-of-two system is preferable to the factor-of-ten metric unit for stuff like this...
Perhaps this investment is a true test of faith in quantum mechanics. If you are pretty sure the probability that this company will succeed is non-zero, then perhaps in one universe this investment will pay off. Even if in this universe, the investment goes belly up, in another universe, you will be rich. Maybe then you can live vicarously in that knowlege... If you are true believer, that is ;^)
Q: What do Bruce Perens and an 82-year old nun have in common?
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/10/02/1952221/82-year-old-nun-breaks-into-nuclear-facility-contractors-blamed
Nonsense, the variant of processor can matter, but software must be written to take advantage of it...
The amount of software that is written to take specific advantage of a processor architecture is going down in this era of the cloud. Unless the thing you are doing is so trivial that it doesn't matter, or vast that you can fill your own datacenter with it 24-7, odds are today your software will (eventually) want to run on a cloud platform (e.g, like Amazon AWS/EC2). In a cloud environment, you don't own the computer, you rent a virtual computer. The cheapest rentals will likely be the most commoditized platforms. Specialized software which need specific variants of processors is not only is less cost effective to develop, but also to execute.
FWIW, As for the other arguments, x86 is mostly dead in the cloud world. Everyone is x86-64-AVX That means in addition to the 16 standard integer registers there are 16 256-bit SIMD registers in the IAS which are quite competitive with Sparc (0+7g+8i+8o register window). Besides, today processors have many more physical registers and do top-of-stack caching so ISA registers don'tt mean as much as it used to mean (e.g, the sandy bridge i7 architecture has 160 integer registers available for renaming).
Also, all those arguments about magic instructions are mostly not relavent anymore. Everyone pretty much has the similar stuff. For example, the latest rabbit out of the Sparc bag have been a dedicated security co-processor (given that many of their servers are web-host front-ends, maybe a co-processor that does AES/DES/RSA is a reasonable thing), although not clear that it's net any better than say an i7 with x86-AES-NI acceleration instructions + a highly optmized AVX RSA implementation unless all that's all your server is doing is RSA (usually there's some other code running).
FWIW: If you read WP2 & WP3, I think they are just attempting to read some of the SRAM from inside the GPU for a source of what they call a "PUF" (physically uncloneable function). They hope to sprinkle some error-correction code and some magic crypto dust the uninitialized SRAM pattern to create a number that will be useable for attestation (basically to assure that it is the machine that you think it is).
This idea isn't new. A quick google search shows papers about using SRAMs as both PUFs and Random numbers going back in 2007 (they called them FERNs) http://people.cs.umass.edu/~kevinfu/papers/holcomb-FERNS-RFIDSec07.pdf
The major problems with this stuff is that...
Once you power up your system, something is gonna want to use that SRAM (GPU vendors aren't in the business of leaving big chunks of SRAM that they don't use for researchers to discover and use), so you have to take a snapshot after powerup, but before someone wants to use the GPU. This makes many avenues of attack available (e.g., you have to put that fingerprint somewhere, because the GPUs will shortly trounce all over it).
Secondly is the stability issue. Although some parts of the uninitialized SRAM is going to be statistically stable (power-up to 1 or 0 pretty reliably), some others are going to be pretty random (in fact other researchers are looking for highly unstable bits in SRAM powerup to be able to extract a random number for a nonce). Across temperature, and over time as the parts age, these bits will change (some stable ones will become random and some random ones may exhibit a strong bias one way or another). Without extensive characterization over age and temperature, this would be pretty unstable to use as a definitive ID.
Third, when GPU vendors notice that people are accessing SRAM before initalization, they will start wiping the memory on boot. This is to prevent this third-party ID usage model (because nobody wants to repeat the intel CPUID fiasco) and because now that GPUs are being used for general-purpose computing, any type of SRAM retention issues across power-up is a security risk. On a related note, there are in fact there are other researchers attempting to use SRAM retention to create a reasonably secure clock (google TARDIS: Time and Remanence Decay in SRAM).
If I had to speculate, about the only reasonable model for this (assuming the GPU vendors don't co-opt it or shut them out) is to create some sort of "ticket" system. Distill a timestamp and a challenge value with the PUF (and maybe even the "random" part of the SRAM for salt) down to a ticket using some cryptomagic. That ticket would be valid for a while, and you'd have to create a new ticket before it expired. Over a short enough time and temperature regime, a security system might be convinced that this temporary ticket is an acceptable substitute credential, but it would not really replace an actual authentication technique.
This stuff has also been researched extensively for 5 years or so. I don't know what these folks are really bringing to the table (other than they are looking at GPUs for big blocks of SRAM). Why be so secret? Maybe it's because they want to keep that funding coming. A quick google showed someone in 2009 even wrote an undergrad paper on the subject of SRAM/PUFs... http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031709-141338/unrestricted/mqp_sram.pdf
I read in an interview, that you mentioned voice recognition as a possible up-and-coming revolutionary technology. Are Siri and Google-Now the direction of voice recognition technology (e.g., all in the cloud), or is there some "decentralization" (to borrow some fusion-io-speak) in the future that you can see where tinker-ers can get involved and help create a personal-voice recognition revolution (e.g., not dragon naturally speaking speach-to-text, but something actually semantic).
You'd think we already do, with all the hype about 3D printers.
Of course Star Trek replicators (as with most of ST tech) has made the built-in assumption that energy is free. When energy is free many other things become free with the right (entropy modifying) tech...
I don't know if this was actually true, but originally there was some reporting that under terms of his probation, he was not allowed to use computers or the Internet for five years without approval from his probation officer. I would have suspected some outrage in ./ over a condition like that.
As I understand it, communicating with folks uploading a video to the internet under an alias is what he's been held on. But what people seem to be concentrating on is the alias part (which seems a bit hippocrtical given the typical number of AC poist made on ./ as well)...
Intel, allegedly, has a chip that can't compete with their existing products, and isn't a winner on margins. MS has a chip apparently designed just for them, except they would rather ship punchier devices with those existing products. So, who wins here?
Both intel and microsoft win (they hope). By putting a product out a product that fits right in between tablets and laptops, they have the chance to permanently segment the market by poisoning the middle. No-one will be able to charge more for a tablet than the price point they set, and they will expect anything "better" to be x86. This will create a firewall which will allow microsoft to bomb the price on the tablet OS to compete with android and microsoft and intel to continue to charge more for laptops (preserving margins on those products).The only fly in this ointment is that they have to muster up enough excitement to be able to sell enough to make the firewall stick. I don't think they'll be able to pull it off, but that's why you play the game, to see who's got the game...
Unfortunatly, it's just like getting a medical procedure for the parties involved. Intellectually, they know that even though the treatment is unpalletable, they should probably do it as it is better for them in the long run. However, a small voice inside always is thinking maybe I should just avoid it and hope things get better on their own.... Hmm, or maybe I'll try some alternative procedure and hope for the best... Then again, maybe I'll regret taking the alternative path... Decisions, decisions...
Any company involved in programming or manufacturing that self-driven car will be sued out of existence and the "love affair" everyone seems to have about auto-driving cars will end quickly.
That is a very real risk. Not sure how the laws will deal with it. But until that question is addressed, we won't see large-scale sales of automated cars. I suspect that we'll see the equivalent of ToS: by using this car, you agree to be fully responsible for all its actions and accidents.
That risk is already with us. Just witness the whole debacle concerning Toyota and the drive-by-wire sticky accelerator issue. After a lengthy investigation (where they dragged in NASA and NHTSA engineers to examine thousands of lines of embeded software code), it was found that although a few of them were the result of the accelerator pedal getting wedged under a floor mat, most of the reported accidents were likely driver error (panicking and hitting the accelerator pedal instead of the brake pedal), but that didn't stop the lawsuits. Lawyers will laugh at your ToS all the way to court.
I suspect the end game to this is that the software will be purchased from a different company that sells you the hardware. For most folks that will mean that we will not be able to purchase self-driving cars, but must rent them from integrator companies. Fortunatly, you'll be able to sleep well at the driver seat knowing that they bought the car and the software from the lowest bidder. Think a company like HP, buying from Intel and Microsoft and renting you the PC (so you can't tamper with it to install your own mods and they get to force update to fix bugs rather then let you continue to use the old buggy version).
I also suspect that google will probably not want to sell the software to any end-users (to avoid liability), and we will get a bunch a fly-by-night self-driving software competitors vying for business from these integrator companies. Welcome to the self-driving future ;^)