Perhaps it would be better to have two drives available to the OS with rated latencies and bandwidths. Then, the OS can make software-based decisions based on the usage profile of the machine (server, workstation, media, etc).
Alternatively, some rating could be given to each file installed by software installation programs. Things like help databases, samples, aux tools, uninstallers, etc could be thrown on lower-latency spin disks. The critical items like programs, DLLs, etc could be installed on the fast disks.
Alas, to put Chernobyl into the near-meltdown condition required for the test, they had to disable all of the safety interlocks, then push the plant to the brink of a meltdown.
I'm no expert on Chernobyl, but I thought the test actually required low power. In fact, when they started the test, they slowed the reactor down so much that they were worried about accidental shutdown and subsequent startup procedure. So, to get things going again, they ended up bringing out too many control rods (more than the allowed limit) -- this, of course, got the reaction going too quickly which caused the coolant to steam and explode.
Agreed. How about we teach them to do math and science first.
It was always my parents that told me not to take candy from strangers. My grade-school teachers taught me about prime numbers, British poetry, and scientific method.
This is not entirely true. While lead-free processes are posing challenges, the industry has been catching up with improving alloys. It's certainly possible to make working boards without rework. (we've made thousands) Defect rates are higher and the process needs to be more careful, but the defect rate certainly isn't as high as the o.p. suggests.
Military and medical are exempt because it doesn't make much sense to switch horses mid-stream. They're right to be careful about new technology when the consequences are dire and the environmental effects are considerably less than those from millions of iPods in landfills.
Truth is, military and medical will eventually be forced to RoHS by the simple fact that fewer components are available as leaded parts and manufacturers don't want to maintain leaded and lead-free production lines.
That they may be able to answer this may not be all that far-fetched.
Organizing the enormous amount of statistics that they have and associating them with behavior has been known to be accurate enough. That is, accurate enough to be revenue-producing when applied to large numbers of people and over enough time.
Considering that Las Vegas and other gambling communities have applied similar techniques to predict and channel human behavior, it's not surprising. It's really just a heuristic to predict the outcome of an incredibly complicated chemical reaction (our bodies).
Perhaps the illusion of free-will will eventually fade?
I think MS needs to root out the leak, that's just good business. But why exclusively ban people with the name Richard? I mean, if I were to do something like this, I wouldn't use my real name. That just doesn't make sense.
In fact, I'd probably think that a real Richard was less likely to have done this. But perhaps that's what Richard would have me think...
Police, fire trucks, and ambulances are all legal to run red lights under the condition that they run their lights and/or siren to indicate their intent. In fact, I've seen officers on many occasions run their lights JUST to proceed through an intersection, then turn them off.
The executive is not above the law, but certain accomodations are reasonably made.
Heat is certainly a concern. However, vertical stacking also helps address the issue of disparate technologies. For example, you may have two ICs that are manufactured with, say CMOS and bipolar technologies that together won't generate enough heat to be a concern, but because they are different technologies, need to be separated and therefore take up more space.
On the other hand, it would be neat to see them put heatsinks between each individual chip. They could still drill and insert the tungsten vias through the heatsink. The heatsinks would probably need to be pretty advanced, though, to move the head to the fringes. Maybe a circulating fluid or something.
Sounds to me like poor compression, not a bad Apple TV. I don't have an Apple TV, so I can't test it with a good stream, but many HD streams are over-compressed yielding very poor results. In particular, the iTunes store probably just hasn't caught up with the idea that people will actually be playing HD content on HD-capable devices.
There are some really crappy DVDs out there, too, but they don't mean that the DVD player is junk.
An FPGA could provide the same functionality, but at a tremendous loss of efficiency. FPGAs have a very high overhead to support reconfiguration. But the reconfiguration is considerably more than this processor (likely) offers. (I couldn't read the article - dead link)
But with a claim of incredible power efficiency, it's decidedly not an FPGA. I imagine they borrow some of the concepts, but not entirely.
As a hybrid, FPOA (field-programmable object arrays) provide small programmable "objects" which are less granular than typical FPGA offerings. In the right application, an FPOA can achieve higher speeds and better power efficiency. In the "wrong" application, they're horrible.
It seems that this device would switch between the high computational efficiency of DSPs and things like graphics processors and the better branching / decision-making performance of general-purpose CPUs.
Yeah, I was kinda shocked, really. I always wondered how people with bad blogs were able to break into the mainstream and gather regular readers. I guess they just try like hell to get picked up on Slashdot/Digg/etc with some worthless blog post.
I've found the same. When I have good hardware with solid driver support in my machines, they are extremely reliable. If I swap out a graphics card or add new memory, I can soon detect any problems. Crashes start to happen.
It has been said many times before and I echo the same: crummy hardware and driver support is the biggest problem Windows has to face.
I don't find this to be the case. I have a MacBook Pro 17" and it is by far the worst LCD I've seen in 5 yrs. The verticle viewing angle is horrible and there is significant backlight leakage at the bottom. The display hinge doesn't have enough friction.
It's fast, but any Core 2 Duo machine will be fast. Battery life isn't any different than any other laptop of its class. I'm a big fan of the slot DVD, but I imagine there are other makers with those.
My Compaq X1000 laptop from 4 yrs back is much better in construction. The MBP feels flimsy. My X1000 is indestructible with very little wear to show from 4 yrs of use.
Ah, but if Apple were to support some random PC with their OS, their margin would drop to ZERO very fast. First, they wouldn't be selling their hardware. Second, the cost of doing business in the OS arena would skyrocket.
Try writing an OS that relies on a handful of drivers to run on a handful of hardware devices. It's generally not too difficult to perform QC.
Now try writing an OS that must be able to perform flawlessly on thousands of hardware devices running thousands of drivers written by who-knows-who. You can try to blame the hardware driver writers for only so long. Then you decide that it's in your best interest to encapsulate and abstract the hardware layer to a ridiculous degree to make things easier for hardware vendors and make it more difficult to bring the system down. Eventually, you end up with Windows.
Choice can be a good thing. But what many people don't understand is that choice is an expensive thing.
(and before the Linux folks chime in, Linux is only free if you value your time at $0)
It's similar to how a reflecting telescope works. The mirror is a reflector, but operates similarly to a lens in how it can focus light. Just imagine collapsing a standard reflecting telescope several times onto itself. The most complicated part of it is the manufacturing which requires very precise control of the lens surface.
The advantage is, of course, the reduced thickness. These can be mounted on the skin of a surveillance device and not protrude like a lens would.
Perhaps. But the browser has brought one very important thing to the table and that is a description language for form presentation. This was very lacking in most previous "thick client" applications. This absense dramatically increased the costs of building such applications.
This description language makes application development much faster and flexible. Although present in one way or another in some things like MFC or more modern incarnations, having a "standard" helps tremendously.
Yes, I think there is a lot of value in looking at problems and solutions of the past. But a tradesman-like training is involved with showing students how to solve the problems of today. They become very ill-equipped to solve the problems of tomorrow.
It's important to recognize the context of these problems of the past. Many of the most significant scientific and engineering breakthroughs have not come from a company. They came from individuals that truly owned the problem.
I remember the "senior design" class at my university had started to do joint corporate designs where companies would essentially sponsor a project. I think that defeats the purpose of senior design courses. They become one more homework problem that the student is most likely able to solve.
Sometimes the most interesting problems/projects are those that the student invents, works hard on, and may never even solve. The invention of the problem provides the critical "ownership" of the problem.
Schools have tremendous resources available for those that want to put down the beer and get hands-on experience. The next 40 yrs of engineering will be hands-on experience.
What matters most for the 4 yrs is the density of education. And that comes from learning how to think, analyze, learn new methods, etc. Hands-on apprenticeships are typically little more than pattern-matching. A good education builds mental capability for a wide variety of pursuits.
A decade later, that apprentice is worthless when the market changes and he no longer has a job. With a good education, one can easily come up to speed on a completely new style of engineering because he has the mental tools to be effective.
In their efforts to woo corporations and become more competitive as corporations themselves, higher education has become a whore to the corporate agenda and that has (and will continue to) damage the future preparedness of our students.
I'm personally on the side of the science supporting global warming. But the truth is, skepticism is a healthy thing regardless of who funds it.
I think the skepticism and controversy has helped scientist secure more funding for their research into the issue. This, in turn, has helped them secure more proof supporting their stand. More funding and more research will help the truth distill faster. For something such as global warming that is time-critical, this is a good thing.
It sucks that there are those fighting to confuse the masses, but it just helps the truth clarify its arguments.
It's a question of context. Most companies promote their own products. The question is more regarding the ethics behind doing so. In particular, when MS began putting IE on every installed OS (with some other details in there), MS got into a little hot water. You could argue the same thing -- of course MS would want you to use their own products.
But the devil is in the details. As the article says very clearly, Google is in a (near monopoly) position to direct users to "the best" of the web. When they do so with their own products in a way that is inaccessible to other vendors, questions begin to be asked.
At the moment, it's more of a concern to advertisers. If I were Kodak trying to advertise my photo sharing product on Google, I'd be pretty upset that their competing product has far better visibility.
It's a very clear conflict of interests -- just like MS with IE. Or MS with Office using "secret" API calls.
Slashdot Mirror
Not a novel idea, but is it actually implemented anywhere like this?
You know, this is a pretty interesting point.
Perhaps it would be better to have two drives available to the OS with rated latencies and bandwidths. Then, the OS can make software-based decisions based on the usage profile of the machine (server, workstation, media, etc).
Alternatively, some rating could be given to each file installed by software installation programs. Things like help databases, samples, aux tools, uninstallers, etc could be thrown on lower-latency spin disks. The critical items like programs, DLLs, etc could be installed on the fast disks.
First post!!!
I'm no expert on Chernobyl, but I thought the test actually required low power. In fact, when they started the test, they slowed the reactor down so much that they were worried about accidental shutdown and subsequent startup procedure. So, to get things going again, they ended up bringing out too many control rods (more than the allowed limit) -- this, of course, got the reaction going too quickly which caused the coolant to steam and explode.
Agreed. How about we teach them to do math and science first.
It was always my parents that told me not to take candy from strangers. My grade-school teachers taught me about prime numbers, British poetry, and scientific method.
This is not entirely true. While lead-free processes are posing challenges, the industry has been catching up with improving alloys. It's certainly possible to make working boards without rework. (we've made thousands) Defect rates are higher and the process needs to be more careful, but the defect rate certainly isn't as high as the o.p. suggests.
Military and medical are exempt because it doesn't make much sense to switch horses mid-stream. They're right to be careful about new technology when the consequences are dire and the environmental effects are considerably less than those from millions of iPods in landfills.
Truth is, military and medical will eventually be forced to RoHS by the simple fact that fewer components are available as leaded parts and manufacturers don't want to maintain leaded and lead-free production lines.
That they may be able to answer this may not be all that far-fetched.
Organizing the enormous amount of statistics that they have and associating them with behavior has been known to be accurate enough. That is, accurate enough to be revenue-producing when applied to large numbers of people and over enough time.
Considering that Las Vegas and other gambling communities have applied similar techniques to predict and channel human behavior, it's not surprising. It's really just a heuristic to predict the outcome of an incredibly complicated chemical reaction (our bodies).
Perhaps the illusion of free-will will eventually fade?
I think MS needs to root out the leak, that's just good business. But why exclusively ban people with the name Richard? I mean, if I were to do something like this, I wouldn't use my real name. That just doesn't make sense.
In fact, I'd probably think that a real Richard was less likely to have done this. But perhaps that's what Richard would have me think...
Police, fire trucks, and ambulances are all legal to run red lights under the condition that they run their lights and/or siren to indicate their intent. In fact, I've seen officers on many occasions run their lights JUST to proceed through an intersection, then turn them off.
The executive is not above the law, but certain accomodations are reasonably made.
I see this all over the place. WWJD...WWJD...What Would Jake Do... Why does everyone care so much what I would do?
Heat is certainly a concern. However, vertical stacking also helps address the issue of disparate technologies. For example, you may have two ICs that are manufactured with, say CMOS and bipolar technologies that together won't generate enough heat to be a concern, but because they are different technologies, need to be separated and therefore take up more space.
On the other hand, it would be neat to see them put heatsinks between each individual chip. They could still drill and insert the tungsten vias through the heatsink. The heatsinks would probably need to be pretty advanced, though, to move the head to the fringes. Maybe a circulating fluid or something.
Sounds to me like poor compression, not a bad Apple TV. I don't have an Apple TV, so I can't test it with a good stream, but many HD streams are over-compressed yielding very poor results. In particular, the iTunes store probably just hasn't caught up with the idea that people will actually be playing HD content on HD-capable devices.
There are some really crappy DVDs out there, too, but they don't mean that the DVD player is junk.
Actually, 68,000 was the approximate number of transistors that made up the processor. (I believe)
And if memory serves, 16MB in 1980 would have been a lot more than $68,000.
An FPGA could provide the same functionality, but at a tremendous loss of efficiency. FPGAs have a very high overhead to support reconfiguration. But the reconfiguration is considerably more than this processor (likely) offers. (I couldn't read the article - dead link)
But with a claim of incredible power efficiency, it's decidedly not an FPGA. I imagine they borrow some of the concepts, but not entirely.
As a hybrid, FPOA (field-programmable object arrays) provide small programmable "objects" which are less granular than typical FPGA offerings. In the right application, an FPOA can achieve higher speeds and better power efficiency. In the "wrong" application, they're horrible.
It seems that this device would switch between the high computational efficiency of DSPs and things like graphics processors and the better branching / decision-making performance of general-purpose CPUs.
Yeah, I was kinda shocked, really. I always wondered how people with bad blogs were able to break into the mainstream and gather regular readers. I guess they just try like hell to get picked up on Slashdot/Digg/etc with some worthless blog post.
I replaced the bulb in my EZ-Bake oven with an LED one. It took 3 days to cook the first brownie.
I've found the same. When I have good hardware with solid driver support in my machines, they are extremely reliable. If I swap out a graphics card or add new memory, I can soon detect any problems. Crashes start to happen.
It has been said many times before and I echo the same: crummy hardware and driver support is the biggest problem Windows has to face.
I don't find this to be the case. I have a MacBook Pro 17" and it is by far the worst LCD I've seen in 5 yrs. The verticle viewing angle is horrible and there is significant backlight leakage at the bottom. The display hinge doesn't have enough friction.
It's fast, but any Core 2 Duo machine will be fast. Battery life isn't any different than any other laptop of its class. I'm a big fan of the slot DVD, but I imagine there are other makers with those.
My Compaq X1000 laptop from 4 yrs back is much better in construction. The MBP feels flimsy. My X1000 is indestructible with very little wear to show from 4 yrs of use.
Ah, but if Apple were to support some random PC with their OS, their margin would drop to ZERO very fast. First, they wouldn't be selling their hardware. Second, the cost of doing business in the OS arena would skyrocket.
Try writing an OS that relies on a handful of drivers to run on a handful of hardware devices. It's generally not too difficult to perform QC.
Now try writing an OS that must be able to perform flawlessly on thousands of hardware devices running thousands of drivers written by who-knows-who. You can try to blame the hardware driver writers for only so long. Then you decide that it's in your best interest to encapsulate and abstract the hardware layer to a ridiculous degree to make things easier for hardware vendors and make it more difficult to bring the system down. Eventually, you end up with Windows.
Choice can be a good thing. But what many people don't understand is that choice is an expensive thing.
(and before the Linux folks chime in, Linux is only free if you value your time at $0)
It's similar to how a reflecting telescope works. The mirror is a reflector, but operates similarly to a lens in how it can focus light. Just imagine collapsing a standard reflecting telescope several times onto itself. The most complicated part of it is the manufacturing which requires very precise control of the lens surface.
The advantage is, of course, the reduced thickness. These can be mounted on the skin of a surveillance device and not protrude like a lens would.
Perhaps. But the browser has brought one very important thing to the table and that is a description language for form presentation. This was very lacking in most previous "thick client" applications. This absense dramatically increased the costs of building such applications.
This description language makes application development much faster and flexible. Although present in one way or another in some things like MFC or more modern incarnations, having a "standard" helps tremendously.
Yes, I think there is a lot of value in looking at problems and solutions of the past. But a tradesman-like training is involved with showing students how to solve the problems of today. They become very ill-equipped to solve the problems of tomorrow.
It's important to recognize the context of these problems of the past. Many of the most significant scientific and engineering breakthroughs have not come from a company. They came from individuals that truly owned the problem.
I remember the "senior design" class at my university had started to do joint corporate designs where companies would essentially sponsor a project. I think that defeats the purpose of senior design courses. They become one more homework problem that the student is most likely able to solve.
Sometimes the most interesting problems/projects are those that the student invents, works hard on, and may never even solve. The invention of the problem provides the critical "ownership" of the problem.
Couldn't disagree with you more.
Schools have tremendous resources available for those that want to put down the beer and get hands-on experience. The next 40 yrs of engineering will be hands-on experience.
What matters most for the 4 yrs is the density of education. And that comes from learning how to think, analyze, learn new methods, etc. Hands-on apprenticeships are typically little more than pattern-matching. A good education builds mental capability for a wide variety of pursuits.
A decade later, that apprentice is worthless when the market changes and he no longer has a job. With a good education, one can easily come up to speed on a completely new style of engineering because he has the mental tools to be effective.
In their efforts to woo corporations and become more competitive as corporations themselves, higher education has become a whore to the corporate agenda and that has (and will continue to) damage the future preparedness of our students.
I'm personally on the side of the science supporting global warming. But the truth is, skepticism is a healthy thing regardless of who funds it.
I think the skepticism and controversy has helped scientist secure more funding for their research into the issue. This, in turn, has helped them secure more proof supporting their stand. More funding and more research will help the truth distill faster. For something such as global warming that is time-critical, this is a good thing.
It sucks that there are those fighting to confuse the masses, but it just helps the truth clarify its arguments.
It's a question of context. Most companies promote their own products. The question is more regarding the ethics behind doing so. In particular, when MS began putting IE on every installed OS (with some other details in there), MS got into a little hot water. You could argue the same thing -- of course MS would want you to use their own products.
But the devil is in the details. As the article says very clearly, Google is in a (near monopoly) position to direct users to "the best" of the web. When they do so with their own products in a way that is inaccessible to other vendors, questions begin to be asked.
At the moment, it's more of a concern to advertisers. If I were Kodak trying to advertise my photo sharing product on Google, I'd be pretty upset that their competing product has far better visibility.
It's a very clear conflict of interests -- just like MS with IE. Or MS with Office using "secret" API calls.