> I would be very surprised if the write speed of phase-change memory could ever exceed that of DRAM
You might very well be surprised. Individual memory cell write time is not all there is to write speed. There are addressing delays, amplifier settling time, etc. Depending on the design of the memory cells, some of these effects could be a lot lower for phase change memory.
Intuitively, shuffling some electrons into and out of a capacitor seems like it would have to be faster than heating up a bit of crystal enough to change its structure. Of course, if the bit of crystal is small enough, the amount of energy required could well be less than for charging or discharging a DRAM cell. If the total energy requirement is similar, then the write speed is limited by the amount of current flow the drivers can provide.
I think your yield estimates are probably off by at least 2x, but that's not really important. Assuming your numbers are correct, a $1 Billion dollar money-maker is nothing to walk away from, even if it's "only" 4% to 8% of Intel's revenue.
I think continuing to develop Itanium would be worth it to Intel, even if they were to take a loss on it, year after year. A lot of the R&D effort that goes into making those monster chips, for example, will be directly applicable to future mass-market processors. The compiler technology is useful for massively-parallel future products from the Larrabee architecture line, etc, etc. Itanium serves as a test-bed, somewhere the designers and process engineers can try things that would be too risky in the mass-market products.
Obligatory car analogy: It's a little like how car companies produce limited-market enthusiast cars, and participate in racing. The Top-500 supercomputer list is computing's version of F1 racing.
It's much more likely that you're just hearing some lower-frequency harmonics from the RF. Something similar to what causes cell phones to create noise on a radio or a speakerphone, even when they're just sitting idle next to it.
If you fork out 2000 for a laptop people look at you like you have money. Also, people are under the impression that increased cost means better performance.
I don't know a single Mac user who doesn't complain about Apple's high prices, but they pay them anyway. They must be getting some value for that extra cash.
When you sign up as a developer, one of the terms that you need to agree to is that you won't upload anything to the app store which has a license that is incompatible with other parts of the developer agreement.
Restricting the nozzle of a solid rocket usually causes it to explode, so maybe you could "throttle" it by opening the nozzle, to reduce the burn rate. You might even be able to get it to blow itself out that way, I suppose.
Isn't our solar system's ecliptic plane closely aligned with the galactic plane? That's what I remember from the last time I actually looked at the Milky Way up in the sky, anyway. I had always assumed this was for the same reason that the plane of rotation of most of the planets are aligned with their planes of revolution around the sun...
The last time I tried to figure this out, what I came up with was that you could detect a megawatt-level signal out to a distance of a dozen or so light years, using a dish like Aricebo on both ends, and the best available detection technology. The whole SETI project presupposes that other cultures are making an explicit, extremely expensive effort to contact us. We aren't doing that, so I suspect they aren't either. I imagine the folks on other planets have built their equivalent of the Very Large Array and are patiently waiting for signals to come in that they couldn't get the funding to send out, either.
This actually turns out to be an argument for having SETI concentrate on visible-light signals, rather than radio. Higher-frequency signals would have much lower divergence, helping with the collection requirements at the other end. http://www.google.com/search?q=optical+seti
They ask you to upload a copy of your state-issued Id before they'll sell you one, and they make you click a bunch of checkboxes on a form. I suspect that's a CYA move on their part - if someone buys one of these and then blinds themselves or someone else, the wickedlasers guys can say "look, he agreed it was dangerous, and he even went to the effort of scanning his drivers license".
Well, in the case that you know the specific wavelength you want to protect against, you can notch-filter just that frequency. Unfortunately, there's quite a range of wavelengths in high-power portable lasers these days - at least red, green, blue, violet, IR, and UV. Anything that protects against all of those at the same time is probably going to look like welding shades.
beam shape of a laser is primarily related to the shape and size of the lasing cavity. Since diode lasers are so small, they tend to have fairly high divergence. Interestingly, if you expand the beam at the source, it reduces the spread proportionately. Actually, the wickedlasers folks have a chart on their web site: (doesn't include the laser we're discussing her, probably because it's new, but gives you an idea). http://www.wickedlasers.com/laser-tech/laser_beam_comparison.html
From the pictures on the website, it looks like the projector has an array of 8x3 laser diodes. Not sure whether 8 of those are the blue ones, or more, or less. So figure between $100 and $4 per laser, depending. I'me sure they have that enclosure down to a few bucks by now, considering how many models they make that are nearly the same...
Most C programming these days is systems level - drivers, compilers, database engines, that sort of thing. If you're not working in the embedded world, you probably won't see much C, but if you're writing Linux drivers (for example), C is what you'll be using. So come on out to sunny California, and hack on some kernel modules.
Or, go to work in India or China, for the companies that have outsourced their systems development.
You may have overestimated the problem, here. While it's true that not everybody has a garage in America, there are simple solutions for most people. For the apartment dwellers, they probably park in a parking lot of some sort. The apartment complex can provide (metered) charging stations there. Some employers already provide electric vehicle charging stations. If EVs become more popular, they'll likely add more.
Not everyone will be able to switch over to electric cars all at once, but that's okay. We don't have the capacity to make them or charge them set up, anyway. One great thing about EVs is that the charging stations are incredibly cheap compared to what it costs to build and operate a gas station. You could put an EV charging station on every street corner of a small city for less than the cost of a single gas station.
> I could easily come up with latest where the Prius beats the fell out of a BMW. say traveling S. on the 605 from City of industry into hunting beach at about 5PM.
That's one place where the Prius really shines - when you're crawling along in traffic at ~ 5 mph for an hour, the engine doesn't run for that whole hour.
> amazing battery life, and it'll do sms and phone calls Yeah, as it turns out, those two don't go together very well. The cellular modem uses by far more power than anything else on the system, for most phones. The second-highest power drain is usually the display & backlight, so you'd see some improvement, but not "amazing".
Seriously, have you ever talked to anybody in the media player business? We *all* hate DRM - it's a pain in the neck to do well, there's absolutely no benefit to the end user (our customer), and you have to make ridiculous commitments to the content providers - about physical security of the keys, procedures for managing the inevitable discovery of workarounds, etc.
I worked on the iPod team, and later for a company using Windows Media DRM. You might remember that the original version of the iPod had no DRM at all - we just put a "don't steal music" sticker on it, and stored the songs in a "hidden" folder.
The record labels insisted on Apple imposing a DRM scheme for the iTunes store. They would have preferred that Apple license Windows Media, but as you might imagine, that idea really didn't fly for Apple.
Instead, Apple created Fairplay, which was enormously less restrictive and annoying to end-users, most of whom were never aware that it existed at all. At the time "unlimited play on up to 5 computers and an unlimited number of iPods" was an incredible step forward compared to the mess that was WM-DRM.
Without the success of Apple's much-less restrictive scheme, the record companies would never have considered allowing Amazon to sell DRM-free songs.
We had someone like that on the jury I served on for a Federal case. One of our jurors decided that she didn't want to be responsible for sending someone to prison, so she was going to vote "not guilty". We had to explain to her several times that that wasn't her decision to make, and that we were supposed to be determining whether or not the defendants were guilty of the crimes they had been charged with. I was worried that she'd have to be removed from the jury, and that'd result in us not being able to come to a decision.
Eventually, she agreed to discuss the case, and we managed to come to a decision. Well, 6 decisions, actually, since we had 2 defendants, each charged with three different crimes.
>Of course, it does give us some protection should we decide to use nukes first
And that is exactly the objection the USSR had (and now the Russians have) against missile-defense systems. It would take a hellaciously-expensive system to take out all of the Russian stockpile if it were launched at one time, but after a US first-strike, there would be a lot fewer missiles left, and it'd be relatively easy to pick off the retaliatory strike.
Once the US has built a system that protects it from retaliation, it becomes much easier for someone in Washington to contemplate using nukes on the Russians.
In the one case I'm familiar with, which was at another company, the infection was traced to a single PC on the production floor that was just *packed* with malware. Apparently, it had been re-purposed from somebody's desk to the QA station when production capacity was expanded.
This was at a reputable, top-tier contract manufacturing company.
You probably don't need an exact solution for this. If you divided the windshield into a 10x10 grid, and assume that the driver's head is in a particular position in the cabin, you might be able to shade just that square, and cast a shadow over everywhere the driver's head would likely be. This would en up shading a lot more than just the disk of the sun, bit it'd be an overall improvement, since you wouldn't have been able to see anything in that area anyway.
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When did 'elite' become a pejorative?
Some time around 1917 or so.
> I would be very surprised if the write speed of phase-change memory could ever exceed that of DRAM
You might very well be surprised. Individual memory cell write time is not all there is to write speed. There are addressing delays, amplifier settling time, etc. Depending on the design of the memory cells, some of these effects could be a lot lower for phase change memory.
Intuitively, shuffling some electrons into and out of a capacitor seems like it would have to be faster than heating up a bit of crystal enough to change its structure. Of course, if the bit of crystal is small enough, the amount of energy required could well be less than for charging or discharging a DRAM cell. If the total energy requirement is similar, then the write speed is limited by the amount of current flow the drivers can provide.
I think your yield estimates are probably off by at least 2x, but that's not really important. Assuming your numbers are correct, a $1 Billion dollar money-maker is nothing to walk away from, even if it's "only" 4% to 8% of Intel's revenue.
I think continuing to develop Itanium would be worth it to Intel, even if they were to take a loss on it, year after year. A lot of the R&D effort that goes into making those monster chips, for example, will be directly applicable to future mass-market processors. The compiler technology is useful for massively-parallel future products from the Larrabee architecture line, etc, etc. Itanium serves as a test-bed, somewhere the designers and process engineers can try things that would be too risky in the mass-market products.
Obligatory car analogy: It's a little like how car companies produce limited-market enthusiast cars, and participate in racing. The Top-500 supercomputer list is computing's version of F1 racing.
PET scans involve injecting radioactive sugar into the bloodstream of the person being tested.
It's much more likely that you're just hearing some lower-frequency harmonics from the RF. Something similar to what causes cell phones to create noise on a radio or a speakerphone, even when they're just sitting idle next to it.
I don't know a single Mac user who doesn't complain about Apple's high prices, but they pay them anyway. They must be getting some value for that extra cash.
When you sign up as a developer, one of the terms that you need to agree to is that you won't upload anything to the app store which has a license that is incompatible with other parts of the developer agreement.
Restricting the nozzle of a solid rocket usually causes it to explode, so maybe you could "throttle" it by opening the nozzle, to reduce the burn rate. You might even be able to get it to blow itself out that way, I suppose.
Isn't our solar system's ecliptic plane closely aligned with the galactic plane? That's what I remember from the last time I actually looked at the Milky Way up in the sky, anyway. I had always assumed this was for the same reason that the plane of rotation of most of the planets are aligned with their planes of revolution around the sun...
The last time I tried to figure this out, what I came up with was that you could detect a megawatt-level signal out to a distance of a dozen or so light years, using a dish like Aricebo on both ends, and the best available detection technology. The whole SETI project presupposes that other cultures are making an explicit, extremely expensive effort to contact us. We aren't doing that, so I suspect they aren't either. I imagine the folks on other planets have built their equivalent of the Very Large Array and are patiently waiting for signals to come in that they couldn't get the funding to send out, either.
This actually turns out to be an argument for having SETI concentrate on visible-light signals, rather than radio. Higher-frequency signals would have much lower divergence, helping with the collection requirements at the other end. http://www.google.com/search?q=optical+seti
They ask you to upload a copy of your state-issued Id before they'll sell you one, and they make you click a bunch of checkboxes on a form. I suspect that's a CYA move on their part - if someone buys one of these and then blinds themselves or someone else, the wickedlasers guys can say "look, he agreed it was dangerous, and he even went to the effort of scanning his drivers license".
Seriously - I didn't get anywhere near that many x-rays when I had my root canal/crown operation a couple of years ago.
Well, in the case that you know the specific wavelength you want to protect against, you can notch-filter just that frequency. Unfortunately, there's quite a range of wavelengths in high-power portable lasers these days - at least red, green, blue, violet, IR, and UV. Anything that protects against all of those at the same time is probably going to look like welding shades.
beam shape of a laser is primarily related to the shape and size of the lasing cavity. Since diode lasers are so small, they tend to have fairly high divergence. Interestingly, if you expand the beam at the source, it reduces the spread proportionately. Actually, the wickedlasers folks have a chart on their web site: (doesn't include the laser we're discussing her, probably because it's new, but gives you an idea).
http://www.wickedlasers.com/laser-tech/laser_beam_comparison.html
From the pictures on the website, it looks like the projector has an array of 8x3 laser diodes. Not sure whether 8 of those are the blue ones, or more, or less. So figure between $100 and $4 per laser, depending. I'me sure they have that enclosure down to a few bucks by now, considering how many models they make that are nearly the same...
Most C programming these days is systems level - drivers, compilers, database engines, that sort of thing. If you're not working in the embedded world, you probably won't see much C, but if you're writing Linux drivers (for example), C is what you'll be using. So come on out to sunny California, and hack on some kernel modules.
Or, go to work in India or China, for the companies that have outsourced their systems development.
You may have overestimated the problem, here. While it's true that not everybody has a garage in America, there are simple solutions for most people. For the apartment dwellers, they probably park in a parking lot of some sort. The apartment complex can provide (metered) charging stations there. Some employers already provide electric vehicle charging stations. If EVs become more popular, they'll likely add more.
Coulomb Technologies is installing charging stations in the streetlights in San Jose, CA:
http://www.azcentral.com/business/articles/2010/05/13/20100513arizona-companies-charge-charging-electric-cars.html
Not everyone will be able to switch over to electric cars all at once, but that's okay. We don't have the capacity to make them or charge them set up, anyway. One great thing about EVs is that the charging stations are incredibly cheap compared to what it costs to build and operate a gas station. You could put an EV charging station on every street corner of a small city for less than the cost of a single gas station.
> I could easily come up with latest where the Prius beats the fell out of a BMW. say traveling S. on the 605 from City of industry into hunting beach at about 5PM.
That's one place where the Prius really shines - when you're crawling along in traffic at ~ 5 mph for an hour, the engine doesn't run for that whole hour.
> amazing battery life, and it'll do sms and phone calls
Yeah, as it turns out, those two don't go together very well. The cellular modem uses by far more power than anything else on the system, for most phones. The second-highest power drain is usually the display & backlight, so you'd see some improvement, but not "amazing".
Seriously, have you ever talked to anybody in the media player business? We *all* hate DRM - it's a pain in the neck to do well, there's absolutely no benefit to the end user (our customer), and you have to make ridiculous commitments to the content providers - about physical security of the keys, procedures for managing the inevitable discovery of workarounds, etc.
I worked on the iPod team, and later for a company using Windows Media DRM. You might remember that the original version of the iPod had no DRM at all - we just put a "don't steal music" sticker on it, and stored the songs in a "hidden" folder.
The record labels insisted on Apple imposing a DRM scheme for the iTunes store. They would have preferred that Apple license Windows Media, but as you might imagine, that idea really didn't fly for Apple.
Instead, Apple created Fairplay, which was enormously less restrictive and annoying to end-users, most of whom were never aware that it existed at all. At the time "unlimited play on up to 5 computers and an unlimited number of iPods" was an incredible step forward compared to the mess that was WM-DRM.
Without the success of Apple's much-less restrictive scheme, the record companies would never have considered allowing Amazon to sell DRM-free songs.
We had someone like that on the jury I served on for a Federal case. One of our jurors decided that she didn't want to be responsible for sending someone to prison, so she was going to vote "not guilty". We had to explain to her several times that that wasn't her decision to make, and that we were supposed to be determining whether or not the defendants were guilty of the crimes they had been charged with. I was worried that she'd have to be removed from the jury, and that'd result in us not being able to come to a decision.
Eventually, she agreed to discuss the case, and we managed to come to a decision. Well, 6 decisions, actually, since we had 2 defendants, each charged with three different crimes.
>Of course, it does give us some protection should we decide to use nukes first
And that is exactly the objection the USSR had (and now the Russians have) against missile-defense systems. It would take a hellaciously-expensive system to take out all of the Russian stockpile if it were launched at one time, but after a US first-strike, there would be a lot fewer missiles left, and it'd be relatively easy to pick off the retaliatory strike.
Once the US has built a system that protects it from retaliation, it becomes much easier for someone in Washington to contemplate using nukes on the Russians.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-sulfur_battery
"A sodium-sulfur battery is a type of molten metal battery[1] constructed from sodium (Na) and sulfur (S)"
In the one case I'm familiar with, which was at another company, the infection was traced to a single PC on the production floor that was just *packed* with malware. Apparently, it had been re-purposed from somebody's desk to the QA station when production capacity was expanded.
This was at a reputable, top-tier contract manufacturing company.
You probably don't need an exact solution for this. If you divided the windshield into a 10x10 grid, and assume that the driver's head is in a particular position in the cabin, you might be able to shade just that square, and cast a shadow over everywhere the driver's head would likely be. This would en up shading a lot more than just the disk of the sun, bit it'd be an overall improvement, since you wouldn't have been able to see anything in that area anyway.