If Intel designs were unemcumbered by IP rights, then why would not Globalfounderies (or TSMC) be preparing to produce such chips? Given the fact that there is no global competition for Intel architectures, one has to presume that it is probably IP protected preventing effective competition from lowering the prices paid for such machines. And even though ARMS may be marketed by a monopoly, it is marketed to anyone, e.g. if one can produce it cheaper, then one is free to do so. I do not believe the same can be said for core Intel architectures.
I'm quoting/pasting/. comments so this may be a bit rough.
ARM announced a "2GHz Capable Cortex-A9 Dual Core Processor" in Sept. of 2009.
Have there been any systems with this CPU? Even samples/demo units?
I don't know. But Google searches should reveal this. The point being that at some point dual processor ARM based systems will be available. Do you want to pay the premium for an Intel Atom (locked in) processor now?
> them? I find this highly unlikely.
The ARM based systems *should* be available, even with multiple cores (which for a "normal" user means one core does nothing (I defy you to come up with a scenario where 2 cores are kept busy 24/7 unless you are running SETI@Home (or equivalents) on your laptop/netbook.
One need not actually use the full CPU capacity at all times.
At any rate, I mentioned dual core because the system in the article does have a dual core CPU. There are a lot (probably 100+ million people) who work with desktop systems running Pentium (IV) systems -- which are not likely to get changed anytime soon.
At which point you have to begin to ask serious questions as to whether or not the CPU (power/CO2 emissions) use is justified in the possible expansion of the human knowledge base.
Justified? It doesn't matter if it's justified; we do not have an ideological-driven centrally planned economy. What matters is that people are willing to pay for the energy and any environmental costs involved in generating it.
Anyway, modern CPUs have plenty of power saving features (which may or may not have PS perspective) --the better question for/. is "What is the most efficient CPU/OS combinatin for users to use.
I do not accept this argument. A simple Google search for "Linux ARM systems" yields 4.7 million pages. Don't even begin to go down the path that ARM is not supported. If one cannot obtain them off-the-shelf (and there are a number of end-user providers distributing Linux on ARM processors) then building ones own is probably a day-long exercise. Taking a day to free oneself from the Intel/Microsoft Monopoly... A small investment for a large benefit (disassociation from monopolistic providers is priceless) has merit. What levels are you willing to go to in order to experience "freedom of choice"? To choose an ARM based machine over an Atom based machine? If one is following the Atom bandwagon then I would suggest that you do not even understand the meaning of "freedom of choice".
ARM announced a "2GHz Capable Cortex-A9 Dual Core Processor" in Sept. of 2009. If it isn't migrating into off-the-shelf end-user sub-$250 notebooks/netbooks, then you ought to be taking a serious look at whether your supplier is locked into "Intel/Microsoft". The ARM based systems *should* be available, even with multiple cores (which for a "normal" user means one core does nothing (I defy you to come up with a scenario where 2 cores are kept busy 24/7 unless you are running SETI@Home (or equivalents) on your laptop/netbook. At which point you have to begin to ask serious questions as to whether or not the CPU (power/CO2 emissions) use is justified in the possible expansion of the human knowledge base. We all know that CPU time has become so cheap that one can dedicate it to frivolous pursuits. AKA computer games. But we fail to factor into the equation what that may be doing to the world we grew up in (I am 53 years old and have some experience before computers ruled reality to draw upon).
At this point in the game, the price determining factor seems to be the screen resolution. Most laptops/netbooks are very bad with respect to displaying pages of text (thus the rise of the eReader/eBook paradigm). The movie industry wants to drive you in the horizontal direction while the book industry wants to drive you in the vertical direction. The people who master rotating the display 90 degrees will win the conflict.
Purchasing a non-Windows system on an Atom makes no sense at all. The only current use for an Atom is to run Windows. If you are going to run a non-Windows (free software, open source) system you should be looking at ARM based systems. Part of being an informed consumer is recognizing monopolies (both software and hardware) and making purchasing decisions that do not promote said monopolies. I'll bet any surveys did not include a choice of hardware (and one has to wonder how/why KDE got selected given that there are 3+ other window managers available under Linux -- most of which have a much smaller footprint).
You are making the point that being able to run Javascript more efficiently is good. I would argue that any external program being able to run another program (i.e. executing Javascript) on ones computer is fundamentally evil and bad. It is MY computer! No external sources of programs should be able to use it for computing unless I have explicitly approved them. To do otherwise is "theft" (of my CPU resources). Failure to recognize this on the part of browser manufacturers/distributors contributes to the problems in which we currently find ourselves enmeshed. I don't want to run Javascript except under very explicit circumstances. I did not startup my browser to run other people's programs. Every single browser should on every single page that requests the ability to run Javascript -- i.e. say "May I?" -- until that point is reached any advancements in Javascript speed are completely useless to me -- because I view it running Javascript as anti-green, anti-security and anti-moving the world in a forward direction. HTML was laid out as a language to display information -- it was not laid out as a language (once enabled by Javascript) to allow advertisers (or others) to manipulate ones personal computer. One of the biggest mis-steps in the history of HTML/web development was Netscape's development of the ability of the server's to control the browser's through Javascript. That destroyed the fundamental principles of the web (your machine is your machine and I am simply providing you with information, which BTW works as a model for Google (with whom I have no connection with) but simply points out how they got it right the first time around, and we are going to have to work very very hard to recover those principles). Otherwise we are going to have to put up with a web where suppliers are always sticking their noses into our business in order to sell us something. Which if they did it with a passive browser would be fine (IMO), but once they do it with an active browser (i.e. Javascript enabled) they are a friggen pain in the rear end.
So Firefox, get the message. There are lots of us who DO NOT WANT friggen faster Javascript, in fact we would prefer, if like chromium, there were a startup option to completely disable it! (Though I can now effectively start Firefox w/o Javascript by "fudging" the preferences file. In which case the battle is forwarded to the vendors that insist that one "must" have Javascript for their sites to work -- go shove one's Javascript in a dark place, if you have designed your web site so that it only works with Javascript enabled, which was NOT the way the web was envisioned, and being drawn and quartered would probably be too good for you, I'm debating in my mind the difference between being keel-hauled and impaled...).
The bottom line is that browser vendors focused on Javascript performance are next-to-useless. The real test IMO is vendors who replace the default gtk poll function with something more intelligent that reduces power consumption (more green) while maintaining performance (but both Firefox and Chromium have yet to do that -- in spite of the fact, that at bug reports have been filed, at least with Firefox)) -- so the user base awaits... [1]
1. It would appear that neither the Firefox nor the Chromium developers have bothered to strace their primary processes (the ones which accumulate the CPU time) and recognized that there are a significant number of poll() and/or gettimeofday() calls which seem to by and large DO NOTHING). Any programmer concerned with efficiency would suggest there is either a flaw in the process model or a flaw in the implementation. Sad, that even in this modern era (where if the ice caps melt and you are living in a coastal area you are going to need to relocate), consideration of CPU use under Linux is going so disregarded.
You are observing a competition between the browsers and the CPU manufacturers. And the thing that you fail to understand is that "it does not matter". I am NEVER going to buy another machine with an Intel processor (because they burnt me a decade ago) and I view payback as sweet. Current CPU's are more than fast enough for most applications, i.e. a Pentium IV Prescott (single CPU) (which I inherited, so didn't have to purchase) works fine. N years ago (perhaps 8-10) I was able to work and be productive using a Pentium Pro @ 200 MHz (circa Y2000). Anyone who needs/wants more processing power is dumping the electricity down the non-productive heat drain (e.g. gamers) or pursuits which will never produce anything of use (e.g. SETI@HOME).
Yes, I am taking direct aim at people who really don't know what they are doing. So sue me. Or perhaps more productively engage in a constructive discussion with me with respect to the most efficient way to use the resources at our disposal and how to get to the point where that is the focus of our society rather than consume, consume, consume (electricity or otherwise). You decide.
The bottom line is that you have to run up against the fact that a decade ago CPU's could satisfy any reasonable need for processing power. Now all one is buying CPUs for is "fluff" -- watching TV on ones computer, playing games, etc. I.e. it produces nothing, it contributes nothing, it is simply a consumer computing mentality -- my computer exists to entertain me. Sad IMO. "Yes, I completely support driving society into a non-productive cloned mentality" (i.e. one manufacturer rules all). "I support current business models because that will contribute to driving us into submission". One has to ask oneself, "When will Intel say "stop"? When will they say we dedicate ourselves to a more efficient, less Earth-damaging) processor, like ARM?" or "We embrace competition because it will further motivate our developers to be creative?"
The processors have been more than sufficient for a decade or more. What you are currently witnessing is whether or not one should view the competition as being valuable. I would currently argue not, and therefore Intel is proceeding towards a monopoly, in which it cares little about the customer. Which is the same place I found myself in the mid-1990's when the chose to desupport the Intel camera that I was using. Does the concept of "sorry, we are going to force you to upgrade" (because it increases our profit margins) ring any bells?" (I don't care that your current computer is completely sufficient for your needs -- you need to do more, need more, that requires an upgrade, etc. Watch my commercials to prove that that is the case.)
If the old software/hardware works fine then be comfortable with it. Do not easily accept that upgrading is a requirement.
Kepler and Corot are the missions which have been launched and will be searching for exoplanets over the next few years. WISE and Herschel are the missions that have been launched, which are not targeted at exoplanets, but instead in the IR region. WISE tends to be focused as a total sky survey mission in the near-IR while Herschel is focused more on the mid-far IR at more specific targets.
Combined they potentially give use the ability to begin the search for Matrioshka Brains. IMO, one of the primary problems with astronomy and astrophysics is that the physicists (and most physics based research activities) start with the assumption that the "Universe is dead". But what if thats not true? What if it is in fact quite "alive"? This makes things horribly more complex for the physicists and astronomers because "life", esp. advanced intelligent life, can stretch the boundaries of what is determined by the laws of physics. Even more difficult -- for a complete "Theory of Everything" it probably means the physicists and astronomers are going to have to enter into serious discussions with the biologists and sociologists (to determine the characteristics that advanced civilizations might possess.
The Kepler and Corot missions, because they are focused on stellar photometry (brightness) can detect transients of other objects in front of stars. So they may be able to provide some limits on the abundance of various "dark objects" orbiting between our solar system and those stars (the planet searches are obviously looking for repeats, but the data, once public could be scanned for transient occultations (i.e. one time apparent occultations which indicate something between us and the star, be it a nearby asteroid or a more distant Matrioshka Brain). Freeman Dyson has suggested that the study of stellar occultations would be useful (presumably recognizing that not every stellar occultation indicates a planet around the star -- some might represent intervening objects transiting across the field of view. Know the size of the object being viewed, and one can set limits on sizes/distances of what is being viewed). (And Jupiter Brains or Matrioshka Brains clearly fall outside of the realm of classical (read acceptable to the "realm of comfortability" of most astrophysicists). [I have been to several conferences of gravitational microlensing astronomers -- this statement is made on the basis of direct experience -- they think in terms of hard data and they will only reluctantly acknowledge ideas which conflict with those in which they have been trained).
Now the WISE and Herschel missions are more interesting from the perspective that they begin to allow us to ask the fundamental question of "What is the rate at which Stars go dark?", i.e. what is the rate at which civilizations migrate from a pre-Kardashev type I level civilization (where we are now) to a Kardashev type II level civilzation (which does not require but is significantly enabled by the development of mature molecular nanotechnology [in the robust Drexler/Merkle/Freitas framework]. So the possible development rate could be measured in anything from months (which is feasible within our solar system, to decades, to centuries (solar system development has varying degrees of "difficulty")). And one measures that rate at that which a solar system goes "dark", with a slow conversion of visible light radiation (an undeveloped star) into an IR star (that being intelligently harvested) (i.e. the star effectively goes "dark"). We are just posed on this transition point ourselves, so it is not unworthy of study or discussion.
Perhaps most importantly, the currently launched missions enable the setting of limits on the abundance of Advanced Extraterrestrial Civilizations. And it is useful to
If one has a cultural framework in which on values males over females (in spite of the fact that India, at least from my reading of PBS programs, has a high respect for females). If you check the CIA World Factbook, regarding the "People" ratios it becomes fairly obvious. Sex selection is occurring in India taking place either by implicit or explicit actions (the most explicit actions being the clandestine abortion of female fetuses). If one has a sex selection process going on (and one could argue the same thing is taking place in China) then there is obviously going to be a demand for online "sex" information, esp. if one has rations involving 10's of millions of males with respect to females. And if you happen to think that constraining search engine results (presumably what the governments or the puritanical U.S. search engine providers might think) is going to constrain access then you fail to understand what outside of the box thinking of millions of individuals can accomplish. You cannot correct the problem by constraining internet access, you can can only correct it by changing the culture (a slow and difficult process, but one which the "west" has been through) or by changing the fundamental nature of human beings (clamping down on the natural desires to mate, etc.) which probably requires genetic engineering beyond our current capabilities.
Thus complaining about this (at least from a "West"ern perspective) is pretty much of a no-op / noise). Complaining about this from an "East"ern perspective (India/China) (combined population 2+ billion people or 30+% of the world's population) simply gives the creative individuals information required to do what they do best (i.e. work around the "system"). I could within a few hours easily work up a Perl script which figures out which keywords are blocked and which are not and the best way around such systems. Until government officials learn that attempting to "censor" the thought paths of their populations is relatively pointless exercise in an internet world, then conversations like this one (at least in the "West"ern world are relatively pointless). The paths to change (where females and males are valued as equal) have to come from within the individual cultures.
The problem with the/. lead-in and the SD article quoting an astronomer is that THEY ARE BOTH PROBABLY WRONG! I have this problem all the time when I see shows on the Discovery Channel or the Science Channel where they explain how the sun *will* die in 5 billion years (The implicit assumption is that the current natural laws of physics will apply for that period -- and within an intelligent species framework that may be completely false. What they SHOULD be saying is "The sun, if allowed to continue on its natural evolutionary course, will die in 5 billion years." But qualified it, of course, sounds less dramatic. IMO, the probability of that occurring, is nearly zero. Why? Because our solar system is inhabited by an intelligent technological species and if we could stop talking about the next great iPhone app or global warming [1] for just a minute we might begin a discussion about how to develop real molecular scale nanotechnology [2] and the best way to approach dismantling the sun so it never becomes a red giant.
For the unaware, we are "dismantling" planets *now* -- what do you think launching satellites to explore foreign bodies (that don't return to earth) or crashing them into foreign bodies (where some of the material ejected may reach escape velocity for said body) is??? Now given the influx in asteroid/comet/solar ion debris I suspect the Earth is still in a net mass gaining state -- but we know how to invert that situation should we choose to do so. We do understand the physics involved and have the technology to manage it.
What most people are unaware of is that there has been some thought devoted to planetary dismantlement. Freeman Dyson did some (in discussing in 1960 in Science the dismantlement of Jupiter to create a Dyson shell) [1]). David Criswell [3] thought of some more/better paths to dismantlement.
So the answer is very clear -- we dismantle the sun at a rate which slows its aging -- so the 5 Billion years number becomes ENTIRELY fictional -- we cannot predict what a technological civilization would do. But there are significant odds that it might dismantle the sun to the point where its lifetime is on the order of that of a red dwarf (several hundred billion years or more with no red giant phase). Ample time to decide when and how to move to a new star with a new lease on life.
1. In a molecular nanotechnology enabled world, there isn't really a "global warming" perspective to worry about. It is too simple to take the CO2 out of the atmosphere and store it in some inert form. People who are in the hard-core "global warming" camp should ask themselves why when I wrote the paper "Sapphire Mansions" in 2001, did I not instead call them "Diamond Mansions"? [4] It was because I did not wish to encourage the sucking of CO2 out of the atmosphere to the extent that all plants would DIE!
2. Molecular scale Nanotechnology has been defined and reviewed since 1992 (Drexler, Nanosystems) -- over 15 ago!. During that period nobody has said it is "incorrect", nobody has said it violates "laws of physics", at the most people may have said it is "hard". But if I can point out 4+ paths to get there -- so one has to wonder if it is simply not a lack of technological imagination that keeps us from already being there (and as a species having such methods in our technology toolbox).
3. David R. Criswell from Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience, Eds.: Ben R. Finney and Eric M. Jones, University of California Press, 1985, Chapter 4, pp 50-87.
4. It may be worth noting that the "Sapphire Mansions" phase of human development I consider to probably be limited to a few decades -- while the "Matrioshka Brains" phase lasts the life of our engineered sun (or longer).
I might suggest that you study the technology a bit more. The Earth can support a much large population than 7 billion people using bio/nanotechnology to its full extent. The biotechnology foundation is already in our hands and the nanotechnology foundation is being developed. If the population drops to zero it will be because of our own stupidity and focus on the short term rather than the long term view.
We would never send bacteria on interstellar voyages. Yes there are some which are hardy enough to survive the trip but the costs are so high and the trip so long that it would be pointless. We would send nanorobots to dead or uninhabited (young) star systems programmed to transform them into potential places to live should individuals decide to leave the Earth.
Yes, but the question is *why* can the data be recombined in radio astronomy and not IR astronomy. I would think if its just a problem of having the actual light waves then it would be as easy as running an ultra-high purity fiber optic cable between the two observatories. But if radio detectors can measure the frequencies sufficiently then why aren't we at the stage where IR or light detectors could as well?
And note -- for whomever moderates this comment... I did not write it as "Flamebait" -- I wrote it to provide a little "outside-of-the-box" thinking. One way to alter fundamentalist mindsets is to force them to think about alternative solutions which may be workable compromises. However my position stands that there is an inherent contradiction between positions of many religions and science. In order to believe in fundamentalist positions one largely has to embrace "faith" and do no critical analysis of the premises or stories. And that is why during my teenage years (when I learned enough about science and rational thought) I gave up being an individual who believed in the teachings of the Catholic religion and became an agnostic. One could make arguments that the Jewish and Islamic fundamentalist teachings are similar "historical artifacts" (largely before scientific methods were validated). The only rational explanation I can find for the "miracles" of Jesus (if they are not simply myths) is that he might have been an alien who might have had the ability to manipulate matter using nanotechnology (or other equivalently advanced technology), e.g. nanorobots/nanoreplicators under mind control. These would place most religions on seriously swampy ground and the only 2 explanations I can offer are (a) that we are being manipulated by an advanced alien civilization (perhaps as an experiment) or (b) that we are all running in an extremely large computer simulation. And since those alternatives seem unprovable (to me) -- being an agnostic is the proper choice.
It sounds to me like the trends in Israeli (Jewish) society are little different from the trends with Christian or Islamist fundamantalists -- they seek an exclusionist society with uniform beliefs. I believe this Sunday, Thomas L. Friedman made the point on a news talk show that there are a number of people within these societies (he was speaking about Islamist societies but it could be applied as well to Jewish or Christian societies) -- who want to turn back the clock to the 13th century -- where the Torah's and Bible's and Quran's dictated reality (if you could sort it out from what each of them says) is the fundamental reality -- and attempt to enforce upon the societies around them and the world that that *opinion* is the "real" reality. So for the Israeli's to push towards a more exclusive society (are they building settlements for the Palestinians, no, are they building settlements for the Christians, no, they are building settlements for the Jews -- and they fail to recognize that within the general trends in the world -- keeping control of a little bit of land is a historical artifact -- my solution to the problem of Israel/Palestine would be to use nanotechnology to construct a second copy of Isreal out in the Mediterranean creating dual Jewish/Islamic states -- using 50% of the atoms in the original copy -- So nobody could really say which is "better" (or maybe move it into a better climate where the rainfall is higher while the views are just as good) [and don't 'dis me on the concept, go read my Sapphire Mansions paper]. And so the only objection one can imagine is the faction of Israeli society that would object to 1/2 of their "homeland" atoms being moved to a jurisdiction under the control of the Palestinians. I mean *really* -- you want to claim that those are "Jewish atoms"???
Fundamentalists will never likely accept rational thought processes (in particular where science shows their beliefs are false), in large part that because current systems indoctrinate children with "beliefs" before their ability for "rational thought" develops. They seek to maintain their belief system and will from time to time act upon it. The only response the rest of us can take is to resist this and keep pointing out the contradictions and flaws in their thinking.
But I already had the ATI card and there was no point to letting it go to waste. I've also tried the standard disbributed binary drivers from ATI (which I believe can't coexist in current kernels with the Intel drivers but the newer (>=2.28.8) linux/X radeon open source drivers drivers which use acceleration, EXA, and some of the other options do work reasonably well for most of my purposes (as I don't play games I'm primarily interested in video CPU loads and it did well in the test cases that I've run. So the problem really isn't the ATI hardware though there may be a problem even getting the Intel and ATI X drivers to load and work at the same time. There is also a problem that it looks like if you setup the HP BIOS to use the ATI card (for booting before X is even loaded) it looks like the Intel i915 PCI access is disabled. So the for me to make the maximum use of the Intel+ATI (3 monitors) is to run the primary screen on the Intel and the secondary screens off the ATI.
And also, now that AMD (+ATI) have released the documentation on the hardware it should be possible for the Linux open source ATI drivers to improve over time to the same level as the proprietary drivers in the past.
Yes, this solution is fine (and easy!) for someone who wants to shell out the $$$ for a multi-headed graphics card (or even say the new Matrox 8-screen card) -- but say one wants to live with older hardware. Say one has a MB with an i915 chip for "standard" VGA and one has added a "Radeon HD 3450" card which is relatively a cheap 2 head graphics card -- one has the capability of configuring 2 additional (total of 3) monitors -- but can one get X to talk to both hardware drivers (the Intel and the ATI)? Not in my experience (and I have tried).
If X indeed supports this (multiple screens across multiple hardware (driver) types) then I simply have not figured out the required tricks. If it doesn't support this it is a deficiency in the X capabilities and should be fixed.
The version of X I am currently running is 1.7.1 and I'm about to upgrade to 1.7.3.
Side note: The most annoying thing IMO is that given the cooling capacity requirements of most current medium-to-high-end video cards is that they take up 2-slots. Slots I could devote to other uses (ATI TV receivers -> MythTV recorders for example). The standard "one size fits all" releases of hardware to the masses will never be right for my interests (I generally view unused slots as opportunities to make my computer more interesting [think very old car/engine tinkerer]) -- so I will want all of the slots available -- and the MB manufacturers have generally not changed the general design layout in ~15 years to deal with this.
If one notes from the articles on the architecture Intel is *still* not biting the bullet of reversible computing [1]. There has to be a fair amount of the architecture built into the frequency and voltage management of the chips (not to discuss chip layer layers involving voltage management (I would like to know whether they are doing all the voltage management on-chip or require new power supplies and/or motherboards (meaning one is unlikely to see plug-in replacements of CPUs on desktop/laptop PCs. One could adopt a conspiracy perspective and argue that this is Intel's attempt to redefine the "standard" computing platform and forcing all "modern" users to purchase new computers! (Wouldn't that sell hundreds of millions or billions of chips???)
1. For those unfamiliar with "reversible computing" it evolved from the work of H. Bremermann, R. Landauer and C. Bennett, largely at IBM in the 1960's and 1970's and pointed out that one could not "destroy" bits without generating heat (Laws of entropy). As a result the only way to do computing without generating wasteful energy consumption (in the form of heat radiated and therefore bumping into the limits of heat dissipation per chip) would be to perform computations reversibly. I.e. you never destroy mass/energy/charge during a computation -- you simply return it to its original state. That is "reversible computatuion". Unfortunately manufacturers like Intel and AMD have not chosen to pursue this aggressively (one would have to believe that there may be some financial motivation behind this). I would tend to view this as pushing existing designs, technologies, instruction sets and limits to their farthest bounds before executing a shift to reversible computing. It may be observed that Eric Drexler, in Nanosystems, Chapter 12, "Nanomechanical Computational Systems" (published in 1992) explained the operation of an atomic scale mechanical gate array that did function as a reversible computational architecture, very much like a "reversible" abacus, because the energy required to reset the calculations was significantly less than that required to erase the matter/energy contained in them.
So the information is out there -- and the question remains when will manufacturers bite the bullet and transform the entire framework into a reversible one? Now in general one doesn't want to accept the delays of reversing the computation when a simple CLR will do.
I've noticed similar problems (sound drops in alsaplayer, javascript timeouts in chromium, etc.) -- particularly if anything else is running (even at nice -19). This can somewhat be helped by running alsaplayer with the "--realtime" option. I've glanced at the code and it doesn't do everything right (it tries to lock the entire program (and presumably all of the sound drivers (which it may not need) into memory and it does setup the process scheduling for realtime scheduling. I do not know if mythtv tries to do similar things, but if you are going to run "realtime" programs trying to at least consider these aspects. If mythtv is competing as a "normal" process with those which are running under Linux then you will see this type of behavior. You might try using "chrt" with "--fifo" scheduling and try bumping the priority up to see if it runs better. Be advised -- its a good idea to have a root shell handy that runs at the highest priority available (which can vary depending on your system and how the per-user priority allowances are setup) so if something runs amok you can kill it without having to reboot the system. You may have to chrt the various myth processes if its running a multi-process model rather than a multi-thread model (chromium has the option of running several models).
Plus you have the added fact that the prisons are generally outside of Russia/former Soviet Union -- and there is quite a bit of difference between going to prison in the former S.U. and more modern civilized countries. Financial criminals most probably view imprisonment in current environments as a paid vacation. Hardly a deterrent, perhaps even an incentive, to commit non-violent crimes.
Now of course the problem with discussing articles by "conventional" astronomers is that they want to limit everything to a "conventional" physical process (i.e. determined by the natural laws of physics).That approach fades once one begins to integrate (a) the age of the universe; (b) the probable evolution timescale for intelligent life; (c) the evolution of intelligent species. If one simply uses the data from the Lineweaver group -- the probability of intelligent technological civilizations older than ours goes up significantly (most of the potential civilization evolving stars are older than "we" are). Could not such civilizations choose to communicate with each other using relativistic electrons? Some of which will not make it but can easily be corrected by ECC.
Is not the dark matter simply evidence of the existence of Kardshev Type II level civilizations? It is useful to note that physicists still want to insist on explanations that are based in intrinsic laws of physics (read: "I'll invent laws if they do not already exist") rather than the evolution of universe as a whole (one which incorporates physics with chemistry and biology)..
Seriously dude, if you think seamonkey is "small" then send me some of what you've been smoking (likewise for firefox). These browsers are some of the largest programs on Linux. It is difficult to even get firefox started (using "ulimit -Sv") in less than 100MB of memory (seamonkey presumably requires more). I routinely run firefox/seamonkey sessions that range from 300-800 MB (lots of windows/tabs). (And limiting the amount of memory is also likely to produce inelegant terminations or outright core dumps -- a reported bug which has existed for 2+ years).
And don't even talk to me about "green"-ness. Open up 50-100 tabs in Seamonkey (somewhat more in Firefox using Noscript) and watch your CPU use climb (preventing the ondemand scheduler from reducing clock speed, electricity consumption or maximizing laptop battery life). I think this is because Mozilla has not optimized the gtk/glib polling functions (perhaps in part because they generally tend to dis' Linux). I'm a computer scientist rather than a rocket scientist and believe as a general rule that programs should not be paying a price (electricity consumption, CO2 emission, etc.) when much of the program (most tabs and windows) are inactive.
Both opera and chrome appear to have significantly smaller memory footprints compared with firefox/seamonkey. And if you really want "small", then we should talk about Mosaic or Netscape [1]. Now, I'll admit that opera and chrome lack some of the features that seamonkey has but it is clear (to me) that the folks developing the Mozilla based browsers have gone off the deep end in terms of using Javascript and thrown away concepts of efficiency. Chrome also appears to have a potentially much better process model than the Mozilla model (in that user's can adopt different process models for the type of browsing they do). I happen to open lots of tabs (and keep them open for days), though many of them may be on the same site. Chrome allows one to adopt the process model to this without the risk of crashing an entire (week old, many tab, takes 15+ minutes to restore) session which appears to be the common characteristic among Mozilla based browsers.
1. Mosaic or Netscape lack functionality for the "modern" web. But if one is dealing primarily with information (rather than video) one still is largely actually reading text and those browsers did work reasonably well (even with 15+ years of mileage). They actually are "small" and would still work for many applications. If upgraded to something like HTML 5 they would probably trump many "modern" browsers where the emphasis is on eye-candy rather than the simple delivery of information.
A mouse at 8.5 days out of a 19-21 day gestational cycle is about equal to a human at 3-4 months (out of 9 months). I'm not sure but I doubt physicians would be willing to operate on an unborn 3-4 month (12-16 week) old human. However there seems to be a presumption that one would want to invest such time and expense in that potential individual to repair such a congenital defect when it is accepted (at least by my myself) that it might be better to simply abort such a potentially problem prone potential individual and start over.
It is worth noting that 60-70% of conceptions end in "natural" terminations (presumably due to a self-error detection and correction process). Most likely heart defects may make it past or around such self-regulatory screening processes.
And yes, for the anti-abortion readers, I'm a cold heartless SOB who will take any "MOD -" points and stick them in the cookie jar on my desk -- and -- FYI, you most probably have no idea what is coming and I am simply going to sit back behind my cookie jar and chuckle when it gets here. For the people who don't know what this really means there are tools that might help called Google and Wikipedia.
Side note for people reading this. Linux 2.6.30+ broke "ondemand" scheduling and you may need to revert the specific file "p4-clockmod.c" to an earlier version to fix it (this only applies to Pentium IV machines obviously).
I'm interested in how you are running a home server if it is serving to the Internet (presumably via apache). My ISP Verizon (!#%&X!) [1] seems to have a policy of filtering incoming requests to "home" machines on port 80 (for normal HTTP). Have you switched to serving on an alternate port or is your ISP less restrictive?
My second suggestion (before you go the alternate hardware route) would be to switch your Linux installation to use the "ondemand" CPU scheduler. For the Pentium IV machine I am running this reduced the wall outlet CPU consumption was ~25 W (to around 105W). Still not the reduction you are seeking but a place to start.
1. Verizon seems to consider "home servers" to require a higher priced "business" class DSL service. On alternate HTTP ports the search bots will find your server fine though you will not rise high in the search results rankings unless you find ways to get the URLs with the alternate port #'s into circulation. I wonder how much power Verizon consumes/wastes on port filtering?
There have to be hundreds of ways one can use sinking of a nation into an advantage. First off move PirateBay there. Lets see the people don scuba gear to issue an injunction. Second of all, there has to be a host of laws (banking, stem cells, cloning, etc.) are much more effective when issued underwater than in a limited "normal world".
Slashdot Mirror
If Intel designs were unemcumbered by IP rights, then why would not Globalfounderies (or TSMC) be preparing to produce such chips? Given the fact that there is no global competition for Intel architectures, one has to presume that it is probably IP protected preventing effective competition from lowering the prices paid for such machines. And even though ARMS may be marketed by a monopoly, it is marketed to anyone, e.g. if one can produce it cheaper, then one is free to do so. I do not believe the same can be said for core Intel architectures.
I'm quoting/pasting /. comments so this may be a bit rough.
ARM announced a "2GHz Capable Cortex-A9 Dual Core Processor" in Sept. of 2009.
Have there been any systems with this CPU? Even samples/demo units?
I don't know. But Google searches should reveal this. The point being that at some point dual processor
ARM based systems will be available. Do you want to pay the premium for an Intel Atom (locked in) processor
now?
> them? I find this highly unlikely.
The ARM based systems *should* be available, even with multiple cores (which for a "normal" user means one core does nothing (I defy you to come up with a scenario where 2 cores are kept busy 24/7 unless you are running SETI@Home (or equivalents) on your laptop/netbook.
One need not actually use the full CPU capacity at all times.
At any rate, I mentioned dual core because the system in the article does have a dual core CPU. There are a lot (probably 100+ million people) who work with desktop systems running Pentium (IV) systems -- which are not likely to get changed anytime soon.
At which point you have to begin to ask serious questions as to whether or not the CPU (power/CO2 emissions) use is justified in the possible expansion of the human knowledge base.
Justified? It doesn't matter if it's justified; we do not have an ideological-driven centrally planned economy. What matters is that people are willing to pay for the energy and any environmental costs involved in generating it.
Anyway, modern CPUs have plenty of power saving features (which may or may not have /. is "What is the most efficient CPU/OS combinatin for users to use.
PS perspective) --the better question for
I do not accept this argument. A simple Google search for "Linux ARM systems" yields 4.7 million pages. Don't even begin to go down the path that ARM is not supported. If one cannot obtain them off-the-shelf (and there are a number of end-user providers distributing Linux on ARM processors) then building ones own is probably a day-long exercise. Taking a day to free oneself from the Intel/Microsoft Monopoly... A small investment for a large benefit (disassociation from monopolistic providers is priceless) has merit. What levels are you willing to go to in order to experience "freedom of choice"? To choose an ARM based machine over an Atom based machine? If one is following the Atom bandwagon then I would suggest that you do not even understand the meaning of "freedom of choice".
ARM announced a "2GHz Capable Cortex-A9 Dual Core Processor" in Sept. of 2009. If it isn't migrating into off-the-shelf end-user sub-$250 notebooks/netbooks, then you ought to be taking a serious look at whether your supplier is locked into "Intel/Microsoft". The ARM based systems *should* be available, even with multiple cores (which for a "normal" user means one core does nothing (I defy you to come up with a scenario where 2 cores are kept busy 24/7 unless you are running SETI@Home (or equivalents) on your laptop/netbook. At which point you have to begin to ask serious questions as to whether or not the CPU (power/CO2 emissions) use is justified in the possible expansion of the human knowledge base. We all know that CPU time has become so cheap that one can dedicate it to frivolous pursuits. AKA computer games. But we fail to factor into the equation what that may be doing to the world we grew up in (I am 53 years old and have some experience before computers ruled reality to draw upon).
At this point in the game, the price determining factor seems to be the screen resolution. Most laptops/netbooks are very bad with respect to displaying pages of text (thus the rise of the eReader/eBook paradigm). The movie industry wants to drive you in the horizontal direction while the book industry wants to drive you in the vertical direction. The people who master rotating the display 90 degrees will win the conflict.
Purchasing a non-Windows system on an Atom makes no sense at all. The only current use for an Atom is to run Windows. If you are going to run a non-Windows (free software, open source) system you should be looking at ARM based systems. Part of being an informed consumer is recognizing monopolies (both software and hardware) and making purchasing decisions that do not promote said monopolies. I'll bet any surveys did not include a choice of hardware (and one has to wonder how/why KDE got selected given that there are 3+ other window managers available under Linux -- most of which have a much smaller footprint).
You are making the point that being able to run Javascript more efficiently is good. I would argue that any external program being able to run another program (i.e. executing Javascript) on ones computer is fundamentally evil and bad. It is MY computer! No external sources of programs should be able to use it for computing unless I have explicitly approved them. To do otherwise is "theft" (of my CPU resources). Failure to recognize this on the part of browser manufacturers/distributors contributes to the problems in which we currently find ourselves enmeshed. I don't want to run Javascript except under very explicit circumstances. I did not startup my browser to run other people's programs. Every single browser should on every single page that requests the ability to run Javascript -- i.e. say "May I?" -- until that point is reached any advancements in Javascript speed are completely useless to me -- because I view it running Javascript as anti-green, anti-security and anti-moving the world in a forward direction. HTML was laid out as a language to display information -- it was not laid out as a language (once enabled by Javascript) to allow advertisers (or others) to manipulate ones personal computer. One of the biggest mis-steps in the history of HTML/web development was Netscape's development of the ability of the server's to control the browser's through Javascript. That destroyed the fundamental principles of the web (your machine is your machine and I am simply providing you with information, which BTW works as a model for Google (with whom I have no connection with) but simply points out how they got it right the first time around, and we are going to have to work very very hard to recover those principles). Otherwise we are going to have to put up with a web where suppliers are always sticking their noses into our business in order to sell us something. Which if they did it with a passive browser would be fine (IMO), but once they do it with an active browser (i.e. Javascript enabled) they are a friggen pain in the rear end.
So Firefox, get the message. There are lots of us who DO NOT WANT friggen faster Javascript, in fact we would prefer, if like chromium, there were a startup option to completely disable it! (Though I can now effectively start Firefox w/o Javascript by "fudging" the preferences file. In which case the battle is forwarded to the vendors that insist that one "must" have Javascript for their sites to work -- go shove one's Javascript in a dark place, if you have designed your web site so that it only works with Javascript enabled, which was NOT the way the web was envisioned, and being drawn and quartered would probably be too good for you, I'm debating in my mind the difference between being keel-hauled and impaled...).
The bottom line is that browser vendors focused on Javascript performance are next-to-useless. The real test IMO is vendors who replace the default gtk poll function with something more intelligent that reduces power consumption (more green) while maintaining performance (but both Firefox and Chromium have yet to do that -- in spite of the fact, that at bug reports have been filed, at least with Firefox)) -- so the user base awaits... [1]
1. It would appear that neither the Firefox nor the Chromium developers have bothered to strace their primary processes (the ones which accumulate the CPU time) and recognized that there are a significant number of poll() and/or gettimeofday() calls which seem to by and large DO NOTHING). Any programmer concerned with efficiency would suggest there is either a flaw in the process model or a flaw in the implementation. Sad, that even in this modern era (where if the ice caps melt and you are living in a coastal area you are going to need to relocate), consideration of CPU use under Linux is going so disregarded.
You are observing a competition between the browsers and the CPU manufacturers. And the thing that you fail to understand is that "it does not matter". I am NEVER going to buy another machine with an Intel processor (because they burnt me a decade ago) and I view payback as sweet. Current CPU's are more than fast enough for most applications, i.e. a Pentium IV Prescott (single CPU) (which I inherited, so didn't have to purchase) works fine. N years ago (perhaps 8-10) I was able to work and be productive using a Pentium Pro @ 200 MHz (circa Y2000). Anyone who needs/wants more processing power is dumping the electricity down the non-productive heat drain (e.g. gamers) or pursuits which will never produce anything of use (e.g. SETI@HOME).
Yes, I am taking direct aim at people who really don't know what they are doing. So sue me. Or perhaps more productively engage in a constructive discussion with me with respect to the most efficient way to use the resources at our disposal and how to get to the point where that is the focus of our society rather than consume, consume, consume (electricity or otherwise). You decide.
The bottom line is that you have to run up against the fact that a decade ago CPU's could satisfy any reasonable need for processing power. Now all one is buying CPUs for is "fluff" -- watching TV on ones computer, playing games, etc. I.e. it produces nothing, it contributes nothing, it is simply a consumer computing mentality -- my computer exists to entertain me. Sad IMO. "Yes, I completely support driving society into a non-productive cloned mentality" (i.e. one manufacturer rules all). "I support current business models because that will contribute to driving us into submission". One has to ask oneself, "When will Intel say "stop"? When will they say we dedicate ourselves to a more efficient, less Earth-damaging) processor, like ARM?" or "We embrace competition because it will further motivate our developers to be creative?"
The processors have been more than sufficient for a decade or more. What you are currently witnessing is whether or not one should view the competition as being valuable. I would currently argue not, and therefore Intel is proceeding towards a monopoly, in which it cares little about the customer. Which is the same place I found myself in the mid-1990's when the chose to desupport the Intel camera that I was using. Does the concept of "sorry, we are going to force you to upgrade" (because it increases our profit margins) ring any bells?" (I don't care that your current computer is completely sufficient for your needs -- you need to do more, need more, that requires an upgrade, etc. Watch my commercials to prove that that is the case.)
If the old software/hardware works fine then be comfortable with it. Do not easily accept that upgrading is a requirement.
Regards
Robert Bradbury
Kepler and Corot are the missions which have been launched and will be searching for exoplanets over the next few years. WISE and Herschel are the missions that have been launched, which are not targeted at exoplanets, but instead in the IR region. WISE tends to be focused as a total sky survey mission in the near-IR while Herschel is focused more on the mid-far IR at more specific targets.
Combined they potentially give use the ability to begin the search for Matrioshka Brains. IMO, one of the primary problems with astronomy and astrophysics is that the physicists (and most physics based research activities) start with the assumption that the "Universe is dead". But what if thats not true? What if it is in fact quite "alive"? This makes things horribly more complex for the physicists and astronomers because "life", esp. advanced intelligent life, can stretch the boundaries of what is determined by the laws of physics. Even more difficult -- for a complete "Theory of Everything" it probably means the physicists and astronomers are going to have to enter into serious discussions with the biologists and sociologists (to determine the characteristics that advanced civilizations might possess.
The Kepler and Corot missions, because they are focused on stellar photometry (brightness) can detect transients of other objects in front of stars. So they may be able to provide some limits on the abundance of various "dark objects" orbiting between our solar system and those stars (the planet searches are obviously looking for repeats, but the data, once public could be scanned for transient occultations (i.e. one time apparent occultations which indicate something between us and the star, be it a nearby asteroid or a more distant Matrioshka Brain). Freeman Dyson has suggested that the study of stellar occultations would be useful (presumably recognizing that not every stellar occultation indicates a planet around the star -- some might represent intervening objects transiting across the field of view. Know the size of the object being viewed, and one can set limits on sizes/distances of what is being viewed). (And Jupiter Brains or Matrioshka Brains clearly fall outside of the realm of classical (read acceptable to the "realm of comfortability" of most astrophysicists). [I have been to several conferences of gravitational microlensing astronomers -- this statement is made on the basis of direct experience -- they think in terms of hard data and they will only reluctantly acknowledge ideas which conflict with those in which they have been trained).
Now the WISE and Herschel missions are more interesting from the perspective that they begin to allow us to ask the fundamental question of "What is the rate at which Stars go dark?", i.e. what is the rate at which civilizations migrate from a pre-Kardashev type I level civilization (where we are now) to a Kardashev type II level civilzation (which does not require but is significantly enabled by the development of mature molecular nanotechnology [in the robust Drexler/Merkle/Freitas framework]. So the possible development rate could be measured in anything from months (which is feasible within our solar system, to decades, to centuries (solar system development has varying degrees of "difficulty")). And one measures that rate at that which a solar system goes "dark", with a slow conversion of visible light radiation (an undeveloped star) into an IR star (that being intelligently harvested) (i.e. the star effectively goes "dark"). We are just posed on this transition point ourselves, so it is not unworthy of study or discussion. Perhaps most importantly, the currently launched missions enable the setting of limits on the abundance of Advanced Extraterrestrial Civilizations. And it is useful to
If one has a cultural framework in which on values males over females (in spite of the fact that India, at least from my reading of PBS programs, has a high respect for females). If you check the CIA World Factbook, regarding the "People" ratios it becomes fairly obvious. Sex selection is occurring in India taking place either by implicit or explicit actions (the most explicit actions being the clandestine abortion of female fetuses). If one has a sex selection process going on (and one could argue the same thing is taking place in China) then there is obviously going to be a demand for online "sex" information, esp. if one has rations involving 10's of millions of males with respect to females. And if you happen to think that constraining search engine results (presumably what the governments or the puritanical U.S. search engine providers might think) is going to constrain access then you fail to understand what outside of the box thinking of millions of individuals can accomplish. You cannot correct the problem by constraining internet access, you can can only correct it by changing the culture (a slow and difficult process, but one which the "west" has been through) or by changing the fundamental nature of human beings (clamping down on the natural desires to mate, etc.) which probably requires genetic engineering beyond our current capabilities.
Thus complaining about this (at least from a "West"ern perspective) is pretty much of a no-op / noise). Complaining about this from an "East"ern perspective (India/China) (combined population 2+ billion people or 30+% of the world's population) simply gives the creative individuals information required to do what they do best (i.e. work around the "system"). I could within a few hours easily work up a Perl script which figures out which keywords are blocked and which are not and the best way around such systems. Until government officials learn that attempting to "censor" the thought paths of their populations is relatively pointless exercise in an internet world, then conversations like this one (at least in the "West"ern world are relatively pointless). The paths to change (where females and males are valued as equal) have to come from within the individual cultures.
The problem with the /. lead-in and the SD article quoting an astronomer is that THEY ARE BOTH PROBABLY WRONG! I have this problem all the time when I see shows on the Discovery Channel or the Science Channel where they explain how the sun *will* die in 5 billion years (The implicit assumption is that the current natural laws of physics will apply for that period -- and within an intelligent species framework that may be completely false. What they SHOULD be saying is "The sun, if allowed to continue on its natural evolutionary course, will die in 5 billion years." But qualified it, of course, sounds less dramatic. IMO, the probability of that occurring, is nearly zero. Why? Because our solar system is inhabited by an intelligent technological species and if we could stop talking about the next great iPhone app or global warming [1] for just a minute we might begin a discussion about how to develop real molecular scale nanotechnology [2] and the best way to approach dismantling the sun so it never becomes a red giant.
For the unaware, we are "dismantling" planets *now* -- what do you think launching satellites to explore foreign bodies (that don't return to earth) or crashing them into foreign bodies (where some of the material ejected may reach escape velocity for said body) is??? Now given the influx in asteroid/comet/solar ion debris I suspect the Earth is still in a net mass gaining state -- but we know how to invert that situation should we choose to do so. We do understand the physics involved and have the technology to manage it.
What most people are unaware of is that there has been some thought devoted to planetary dismantlement. Freeman Dyson did some (in discussing in 1960 in Science the dismantlement of Jupiter to create a Dyson shell) [1]). David Criswell [3] thought of some more/better paths to dismantlement.
So the answer is very clear -- we dismantle the sun at a rate which slows its aging -- so the 5 Billion years number becomes ENTIRELY fictional -- we cannot predict what a technological civilization would do. But there are significant odds that it might dismantle the sun to the point where its lifetime is on the order of that of a red dwarf (several hundred billion years or more with no red giant phase). Ample time to decide when and how to move to a new star with a new lease on life.
1. In a molecular nanotechnology enabled world, there isn't really a "global warming" perspective to worry about. It is too simple to take the CO2 out of the atmosphere and store it in some inert form. People who are in the hard-core "global warming" camp should ask themselves why when I wrote the paper "Sapphire Mansions" in 2001, did I not instead call them "Diamond Mansions"? [4] It was because I did not wish to encourage the sucking of CO2 out of the atmosphere to the extent that all plants would DIE!
2. Molecular scale Nanotechnology has been defined and reviewed since 1992 (Drexler, Nanosystems) -- over 15 ago!. During that period nobody has said it is "incorrect", nobody has said it violates "laws of physics", at the most people may have said it is "hard". But if I can point out 4+ paths to get there -- so one has to wonder if it is simply not a lack of technological imagination that keeps us from already being there (and as a species having such methods in our technology toolbox).
3. David R. Criswell from Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience, Eds.: Ben R. Finney and Eric M. Jones, University of California Press, 1985, Chapter 4, pp 50-87. 4. It may be worth noting that the "Sapphire Mansions" phase of human development I consider to probably be limited to a few decades -- while the "Matrioshka Brains" phase lasts the life of our engineered sun (or longer).
I might suggest that you study the technology a bit more. The Earth can support a much large population than 7 billion people using bio/nanotechnology to its full extent. The biotechnology foundation is already in our hands and the nanotechnology foundation is being developed. If the population drops to zero it will be because of our own stupidity and focus on the short term rather than the long term view.
We would never send bacteria on interstellar voyages. Yes there are some which are hardy enough to survive the trip but the costs are so high and the trip so long that it would be pointless. We would send nanorobots to dead or uninhabited (young) star systems programmed to transform them into potential places to live should individuals decide to leave the Earth.
Yes, but the question is *why* can the data be recombined in radio astronomy and not IR astronomy. I would think if its just a problem of having the actual light waves then it would be as easy as running an ultra-high purity fiber optic cable between the two observatories. But if radio detectors can measure the frequencies sufficiently then why aren't we at the stage where IR or light detectors could as well?
And note -- for whomever moderates this comment... I did not write it as "Flamebait" -- I wrote it to provide a little "outside-of-the-box" thinking. One way to alter fundamentalist mindsets is to force them to think about alternative solutions which may be workable compromises. However my position stands that there is an inherent contradiction between positions of many religions and science. In order to believe in fundamentalist positions one largely has to embrace "faith" and do no critical analysis of the premises or stories. And that is why during my teenage years (when I learned enough about science and rational thought) I gave up being an individual who believed in the teachings of the Catholic religion and became an agnostic. One could make arguments that the Jewish and Islamic fundamentalist teachings are similar "historical artifacts" (largely before scientific methods were validated). The only rational explanation I can find for the "miracles" of Jesus (if they are not simply myths) is that he might have been an alien who might have had the ability to manipulate matter using nanotechnology (or other equivalently advanced technology), e.g. nanorobots/nanoreplicators under mind control. These would place most religions on seriously swampy ground and the only 2 explanations I can offer are (a) that we are being manipulated by an advanced alien civilization (perhaps as an experiment) or (b) that we are all running in an extremely large computer simulation. And since those alternatives seem unprovable (to me) -- being an agnostic is the proper choice.
It sounds to me like the trends in Israeli (Jewish) society are little different from the trends with Christian or Islamist fundamantalists -- they seek an exclusionist society with uniform beliefs. I believe this Sunday, Thomas L. Friedman made the point on a news talk show that there are a number of people within these societies (he was speaking about Islamist societies but it could be applied as well to Jewish or Christian societies) -- who want to turn back the clock to the 13th century -- where the Torah's and Bible's and Quran's dictated reality (if you could sort it out from what each of them says) is the fundamental reality -- and attempt to enforce upon the societies around them and the world that that *opinion* is the "real" reality. So for the Israeli's to push towards a more exclusive society (are they building settlements for the Palestinians, no, are they building settlements for the Christians, no, they are building settlements for the Jews -- and they fail to recognize that within the general trends in the world -- keeping control of a little bit of land is a historical artifact -- my solution to the problem of Israel/Palestine would be to use nanotechnology to construct a second copy of Isreal out in the Mediterranean creating dual Jewish/Islamic states -- using 50% of the atoms in the original copy -- So nobody could really say which is "better" (or maybe move it into a better climate where the rainfall is higher while the views are just as good) [and don't 'dis me on the concept, go read my Sapphire Mansions paper]. And so the only objection one can imagine is the faction of Israeli society that would object to 1/2 of their "homeland" atoms being moved to a jurisdiction under the control of the Palestinians. I mean *really* -- you want to claim that those are "Jewish atoms"???
Fundamentalists will never likely accept rational thought processes (in particular where science shows their beliefs are false), in large part that because current systems indoctrinate children with "beliefs" before their ability for "rational thought" develops. They seek to maintain their belief system and will from time to time act upon it. The only response the rest of us can take is to resist this and keep pointing out the contradictions and flaws in their thinking.
But I already had the ATI card and there was no point to letting it go to waste. I've also tried the standard disbributed binary drivers from ATI (which I believe can't coexist in current kernels with the Intel drivers but the newer (>=2.28.8) linux/X radeon open source drivers drivers which use acceleration, EXA, and some of the other options do work reasonably well for most of my purposes (as I don't play games I'm primarily interested in video CPU loads and it did well in the test cases that I've run. So the problem really isn't the ATI hardware though there may be a problem even getting the Intel and ATI X drivers to load and work at the same time. There is also a problem that it looks like if you setup the HP BIOS to use the ATI card (for booting before X is even loaded) it looks like the Intel i915 PCI access is disabled. So the for me to make the maximum use of the Intel+ATI (3 monitors) is to run the primary screen on the Intel and the secondary screens off the ATI.
And also, now that AMD (+ATI) have released the documentation on the hardware it should be possible for the Linux open source ATI drivers to improve over time to the same level as the proprietary drivers in the past.
Yes, this solution is fine (and easy!) for someone who wants to shell out the $$$ for a multi-headed graphics card (or even say the new Matrox 8-screen card) -- but say one wants to live with older hardware. Say one has a MB with an i915 chip for "standard" VGA and one has added a "Radeon HD 3450" card which is relatively a cheap 2 head graphics card -- one has the capability of configuring 2 additional (total of 3) monitors -- but can one get X to talk to both hardware drivers (the Intel and the ATI)? Not in my experience (and I have tried).
If X indeed supports this (multiple screens across multiple hardware (driver) types) then I simply have not figured out the required tricks. If it doesn't support this it is a deficiency in the X capabilities and should be fixed.
The version of X I am currently running is 1.7.1 and I'm about to upgrade to 1.7.3.
Side note: The most annoying thing IMO is that given the cooling capacity requirements of most current medium-to-high-end video cards is that they take up 2-slots. Slots I could devote to other uses (ATI TV receivers -> MythTV recorders for example). The standard "one size fits all" releases of hardware to the masses will never be right for my interests (I generally view unused slots as opportunities to make my computer more interesting [think very old car/engine tinkerer]) -- so I will want all of the slots available -- and the MB manufacturers have generally not changed the general design layout in ~15 years to deal with this.
If one notes from the articles on the architecture Intel is *still* not biting the bullet of reversible computing [1]. There has to be a fair amount of the architecture built into the frequency and voltage management of the chips (not to discuss chip layer layers involving voltage management (I would like to know whether they are doing all the voltage management on-chip or require new power supplies and/or motherboards (meaning one is unlikely to see plug-in replacements of CPUs on desktop/laptop PCs. One could adopt a conspiracy perspective and argue that this is Intel's attempt to redefine the "standard" computing platform and forcing all "modern" users to purchase new computers! (Wouldn't that sell hundreds of millions or billions of chips???)
1. For those unfamiliar with "reversible computing" it evolved from the work of H. Bremermann, R. Landauer and C. Bennett, largely at IBM in the 1960's and 1970's and pointed out that one could not "destroy" bits without generating heat (Laws of entropy). As a result the only way to do computing without generating wasteful energy consumption (in the form of heat radiated and therefore bumping into the limits of heat dissipation per chip) would be to perform computations reversibly. I.e. you never destroy mass/energy/charge during a computation -- you simply return it to its original state. That is "reversible computatuion". Unfortunately manufacturers like Intel and AMD have not chosen to pursue this aggressively (one would have to believe that there may be some financial motivation behind this). I would tend to view this as pushing existing designs, technologies, instruction sets and limits to their farthest bounds before executing a shift to reversible computing. It may be observed that Eric Drexler, in Nanosystems, Chapter 12, "Nanomechanical Computational Systems" (published in 1992) explained the operation of an atomic scale mechanical gate array that did function as a reversible computational architecture, very much like a "reversible" abacus, because the energy required to reset the calculations was significantly less than that required to erase the matter/energy contained in them.
So the information is out there -- and the question remains when will manufacturers bite the bullet and transform the entire framework into a reversible one? Now in general one doesn't want to accept the delays of reversing the computation when a simple CLR will do.
I've noticed similar problems (sound drops in alsaplayer, javascript timeouts in chromium, etc.) -- particularly if anything else is running (even at nice -19). This can somewhat be helped by running alsaplayer with the "--realtime" option. I've glanced at the code and it doesn't do everything right (it tries to lock the entire program (and presumably all of the sound drivers (which it may not need) into memory and it does setup the process scheduling for realtime scheduling. I do not know if mythtv tries to do similar things, but if you are going to run "realtime" programs trying to at least consider these aspects. If mythtv is competing as a "normal" process with those which are running under Linux then you will see this type of behavior. You might try using "chrt" with "--fifo" scheduling and try bumping the priority up to see if it runs better. Be advised -- its a good idea to have a root shell handy that runs at the highest priority available (which can vary depending on your system and how the per-user priority allowances are setup) so if something runs amok you can kill it without having to reboot the system. You may have to chrt the various myth processes if its running a multi-process model rather than a multi-thread model (chromium has the option of running several models).
Plus you have the added fact that the prisons are generally outside of Russia/former Soviet Union -- and there is quite a bit of difference between going to prison in the former S.U. and more modern civilized countries. Financial criminals most probably view imprisonment in current environments as a paid vacation. Hardly a deterrent, perhaps even an incentive, to commit non-violent crimes.
Now of course the problem with discussing articles by "conventional" astronomers is that they want to limit everything to a "conventional" physical process (i.e. determined by the natural laws of physics).That approach fades once one begins to integrate (a) the age of the universe; (b) the probable evolution timescale for intelligent life; (c) the evolution of intelligent species. If one simply uses the data from the Lineweaver group -- the probability of intelligent technological civilizations older than ours goes up significantly (most of the potential civilization evolving stars are older than "we" are). Could not such civilizations choose to communicate with each other using relativistic electrons? Some of which will not make it but can easily be corrected by ECC.
Is not the dark matter simply evidence of the existence of Kardshev Type II level civilizations?
It is useful to note that physicists still want to insist on explanations that are based in intrinsic laws of physics (read: "I'll invent laws if they do not already exist") rather than the evolution of universe as a whole (one which incorporates physics with chemistry and biology)..
Seriously dude, if you think seamonkey is "small" then send me some of what you've been smoking (likewise for firefox). These browsers are some of the largest programs on Linux. It is difficult to even get firefox started (using "ulimit -Sv") in less than 100MB of memory (seamonkey presumably requires more). I routinely run firefox/seamonkey sessions that range from 300-800 MB (lots of windows/tabs). (And limiting the amount of memory is also likely to produce inelegant terminations or outright core dumps -- a reported bug which has existed for 2+ years).
And don't even talk to me about "green"-ness. Open up 50-100 tabs in Seamonkey (somewhat more in Firefox using Noscript) and watch your CPU use climb (preventing the ondemand scheduler from reducing clock speed, electricity consumption or maximizing laptop battery life). I think this is because Mozilla has not optimized the gtk/glib polling functions (perhaps in part because they generally tend to dis' Linux). I'm a computer scientist rather than a rocket scientist and believe as a general rule that programs should not be paying a price (electricity consumption, CO2 emission, etc.) when much of the program (most tabs and windows) are inactive.
Both opera and chrome appear to have significantly smaller memory footprints compared with firefox/seamonkey. And if you really want "small", then we should talk about Mosaic or Netscape [1]. Now, I'll admit that opera and chrome lack some of the features that seamonkey has but it is clear (to me) that the folks developing the Mozilla based browsers have gone off the deep end in terms of using Javascript and thrown away concepts of efficiency. Chrome also appears to have a potentially much better process model than the Mozilla model (in that user's can adopt different process models for the type of browsing they do). I happen to open lots of tabs (and keep them open for days), though many of them may be on the same site. Chrome allows one to adopt the process model to this without the risk of crashing an entire (week old, many tab, takes 15+ minutes to restore) session which appears to be the common characteristic among Mozilla based browsers.
1. Mosaic or Netscape lack functionality for the "modern" web. But if one is dealing primarily with information (rather than video) one still is largely actually reading text and those browsers did work reasonably well (even with 15+ years of mileage). They actually are "small" and would still work for many applications. If upgraded to something like HTML 5 they would probably trump many "modern" browsers where the emphasis is on eye-candy rather than the simple delivery of information.
A mouse at 8.5 days out of a 19-21 day gestational cycle is about equal to a human at 3-4 months (out of 9 months). I'm not sure but I doubt physicians would be willing to operate on an unborn 3-4 month (12-16 week) old human. However there seems to be a presumption that one would want to invest such time and expense in that potential individual to repair such a congenital defect when it is accepted (at least by my myself) that it might be better to simply abort such a potentially problem prone potential individual and start over.
It is worth noting that 60-70% of conceptions end in "natural" terminations (presumably due to a self-error detection and correction process). Most likely heart defects may make it past or around such self-regulatory screening processes.
And yes, for the anti-abortion readers, I'm a cold heartless SOB who will take any "MOD -" points and stick them in the cookie jar on my desk -- and -- FYI, you most probably have no idea what is coming and I am simply going to sit back behind my cookie jar and chuckle when it gets here. For the people who don't know what this really means there are tools that might help called Google and Wikipedia.
Side note for people reading this. Linux 2.6.30+ broke "ondemand" scheduling and you may need to revert the specific file "p4-clockmod.c" to an earlier version to fix it (this only applies to Pentium IV machines obviously).
I'm interested in how you are running a home server if it is serving to the Internet (presumably via apache). My ISP Verizon (!#%&X!) [1] seems to have a policy of filtering incoming requests to "home" machines on port 80 (for normal HTTP). Have you switched to serving on an alternate port or is your ISP less restrictive?
My second suggestion (before you go the alternate hardware route) would be to switch your Linux installation to use the "ondemand" CPU scheduler. For the Pentium IV machine I am running this reduced the wall outlet CPU consumption was ~25 W (to around 105W). Still not the reduction you are seeking but a place to start.
1. Verizon seems to consider "home servers" to require a higher priced "business" class DSL service. On alternate HTTP ports the search bots will find your server fine though you will not rise high in the search results rankings unless you find ways to get the URLs with the alternate port #'s into circulation. I wonder how much power Verizon consumes/wastes on port filtering?
There have to be hundreds of ways one can use sinking of a nation into an advantage. First off move PirateBay there. Lets see the people don scuba gear to issue an injunction. Second of all, there has to be a host of laws (banking, stem cells, cloning, etc.) are much more effective when issued underwater than in a limited "normal world".