Laser has at least two major problems that I can think of.
1. Lasers are pretty damn inneficient. At least compared to radio equipment that can be very efficient. When you're in the 2 percent range you're happy.
2. Lasers are very high frequency. This is bad. Higher frequencies are absorbed MUCH more readily and are blocked by interfering objects. They also lose power faster through general attenuation through free space much faster than lower frequencies.
And if you think the laser will make a small dot we can see, you're wrong. The laser light will probably cover half the other planet (this works out to look like attenuation)
Basically, I dont see the reason to use lasers over long distances when lower freq RF works a lot better.
The problem here is intel spent a fortune developing a whole new architechture trying to get people away from x86. They cant be content to just let the market flood with xeons. A lost itanium sale doesnt automatically mean a xeon sale. While more XEON sales mean money for intel, they really need to try to make up their investment or it would be like throwing money in the garbage.
Despite all of this i agree wiht you..MS doesnt belong in the supercomputer market. But i doubt intel spent billions developing the itanium so it could be used in a few supercomputers worldwide. They tryed for mass market servers and failed. Cpus are a very low margin business and the failure of such an investment really just shaves their margins even thinnner.
One really has to wonder how long intel is going to stick with the itanium after its dissapointing sales figures and a move like this from the software giant is sure to really hurt. Maybe they will eventually drop their itanium line in favour of a AMD type X86-64 instruction set like they are using in their new P4's and new Xeons.
This is actually an exciting opertunity for AMD since they can increase their margin in the sever and business arena where the big money is. They should seize this opportunity and start pushing their server lines.
we were commissioned to be in charge of video archiving for our university and couldn't decide which codec to use to archive the student films and such for our school, let alone what software to use.
I heard some stuff about xvid, divx, etc, and based on a bit of word of mouth, thought about giving xvid a try. I read your post. I honestly can't believe I was actually about to use xvid for the job. thank god i came across this page. The part that influenced the decision mostly was the +1 informative moderation backing up your facts.
>The movie will center on the origins of the game's female protagonist, sexy bounty hunter Samus Aran, and relate her adventures battling the insidious life-sucking Metroids and their controlling force, Mother Brain."
>...They have a pif file atteched (which I never open) and have been coming from.lt or.gr servers (my ISP would not likely be using these.)...Windows 3.1 viruses:)
Yeah... I lost my job cause we were trained to use CTRL-ALT-DELETE to get into some S$S+3M hacking tools for NT but tried it on Linux for a web server computer and not only lost the company a lot of money, but my job as well...:(
>>> I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you BSD fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a BSD box (a PIII 800 w/512 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this BSD box, the same operation would take about 2 minutes.
Softupdates, my friend... Softupdates. On some FreeBSD systems softupdates is not set up by default, just like PCM sound isn't setup by default in the kernel config.
Softupdates caching is very fast my friend and after a proper configuration, that problem will be a thing of the past. Don't bash FreeBSD when it hasn't even been properly set up to take advantage of a computer's resources and potential.
Slashdot Mirror
Am I the only one to reply that there is no such thing as IOCATB? Google doesn't have even ONE reference to this. Quit wasting people's time
Here are some mirrors courtesy of mirrordot:
Their abstact(pdf)
And their homepage
Laser has at least two major problems that I can think of.
1. Lasers are pretty damn inneficient. At least compared to radio equipment that can be very efficient. When you're in the 2 percent range you're happy.
2. Lasers are very high frequency. This is bad. Higher frequencies are absorbed MUCH more readily and are blocked by interfering objects. They also lose power faster through general attenuation through free space much faster than lower frequencies.
And if you think the laser will make a small dot we can see, you're wrong. The laser light will probably cover half the other planet (this works out to look like attenuation)
Basically, I dont see the reason to use lasers over long distances when lower freq RF works a lot better.
And stepping but yes you're basically right.
The problem here is intel spent a fortune developing a whole new architechture trying to get people away from x86. They cant be content to just let the market flood with xeons. A lost itanium sale doesnt automatically mean a xeon sale. While more XEON sales mean money for intel, they really need to try to make up their investment or it would be like throwing money in the garbage.
Despite all of this i agree wiht you..MS doesnt belong in the supercomputer market. But i doubt intel spent billions developing the itanium so it could be used in a few supercomputers worldwide. They tryed for mass market servers and failed. Cpus are a very low margin business and the failure of such an investment really just shaves their margins even thinnner.
One really has to wonder how long intel is going to stick with the itanium after its dissapointing sales figures and a move like this from the software giant is sure to really hurt. Maybe they will eventually drop their itanium line in favour of a AMD type X86-64 instruction set like they are using in their new P4's and new Xeons.
This is actually an exciting opertunity for AMD since they can increase their margin in the sever and business arena where the big money is. They should seize this opportunity and start pushing their server lines.
Ashcroft's stamp of approval coming soon!
This is totally untrue, that policy says nothing of the kind.
hey man
we were commissioned to be in charge of video archiving for our university and couldn't decide which codec to use to archive the student films and such for our school, let alone what software to use.
I heard some stuff about xvid, divx, etc, and based on a bit of word of mouth, thought about giving xvid a try. I read your post. I honestly can't believe I was actually about to use xvid for the job. thank god i came across this page. The part that influenced the decision mostly was the +1 informative moderation backing up your facts.
later man
>The movie will center on the origins of the game's female protagonist, sexy bounty hunter Samus Aran, and relate her adventures battling the insidious life-sucking Metroids and their controlling force, Mother Brain."
Better stock up on some hand lotion.
Ahh.. new comers to the computer scene in the last couple of years... let me tell you a tell when I used to charm the pants of Violet at the Inn...
Hey guys,
I'm probably the stupidest fucker you'll ever meet, and not even I fell for this one.
> ...They have a pif file atteched (which I never open) and have been coming from .lt or .gr servers (my ISP would not likely be using these.) ...Windows 3.1 viruses :)
Yeah... I lost my job cause we were trained to use CTRL-ALT-DELETE to get into some S$S+3M hacking tools for NT but tried it on Linux for a web server computer and not only lost the company a lot of money, but my job as well... :(
>>> I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you BSD fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a BSD box (a PIII 800 w/512 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this BSD box, the same operation would take about 2 minutes.
Softupdates, my friend... Softupdates. On some FreeBSD systems softupdates is not set up by default, just like PCM sound isn't setup by default in the kernel config.
Softupdates caching is very fast my friend and after a proper configuration, that problem will be a thing of the past. Don't bash FreeBSD when it hasn't even been properly set up to take advantage of a computer's resources and potential.
You're gonna need that money for hand lotion expenses and medicated penis cream after a good hard days work.
it's about time they got rid of that goddamn Winamp browser.