instead of acknowledging that the current House of Representatives Majority Leader, a legislator with significant power, has publicly pledged the necessary funding for NASA's Mars and Moon missions.
I acknowledge that Tom DeLay wouldn't give a rat's ass about NASA if the Johnson Space Center weren't in his home district. This just is a typical effort to ladel out pork barrel funds to his constituents, no more, no less.
The 1927 model 'T' Ford cost $3138.49 in 2005 dollars.
A car with the same performance and (lack of) features as a model T could most likely be built and sold today for $3000. Good luck finding anybody willing to buy such a vehicle.
If you've only got $3000, buy a used car. It'll be a far better deal than a new Model T would be.
Try it twice in a row. The first time on my Athlon 2100+ box, it was 10 seconds at 50%. The second time it was 5 seconds at 100%; that's still annoying. (And my system has prelink turned on.) Why it needs to to execute ~10e10 instructions just to pull up a blank word processor window I have no idea.
My original point was still valid though. I don't think that 8 little parallel vector FPU units with 256K of their own private memory each is going to help pull up OOo faster in any way.
Well, if 64000 CPUs in one machine were a compelling solution to anything, then businesses would have come to them. But they weren't, as the article says:
Many of Thinking Machines' first customers, says Dave Waltz, who ran the company's AI group, did most of their computing on the floating-point processors, ignoring the 64,000 single-bit processors.
Not that it wasn't a cool design; I'd love to try programming one of those systems. It was an attempt to get closer to the human brain architecture, but it just came up short compared to the countless trillions of simultaneously operating connections in a real brain.
When that massive level of parallelism was found to be unworkable, Thinking Machines tried to transition to a more conventional design with off-the-shelf CPUs like their competitors, but they flubbed that.
At any rate, the parallel supercomputer market has always been a niche, and putting a parallel supercomputer on a consumer grade chip isn't necessarily going to provide a huge benefit to the average user over what they have today other than some cost reductions. The average user's main use for all that power, graphics rendering, is already handled by highly parallel consumer-grade GPUs.
Sure, but traditionally such apps have not been highly CPU bound, anyway.
Some bloated apps are still annoyingly CPU bound. OOo startup, for example. Many server apps are also CPU bound.
Games and media (playback and encoding, as I believe the latter is efficiently parallelisable) will benefit greatly, and this is usually the reason people upgrade their chips.
Games and media are already accelerated in the GPU on the graphics card. Moving it into the main CPU would simply be a change in packaging strategy, not the orgasmic revolution in computing that the OP was talking about.
Any minute now, Cell Architecture machines will be in full flow, and Von Neuman architecture will be a dead duck
Yeah, sure. We've heard that one before. If highly parallel operations were some kind of silver bullet, then Thinking Machines wouldn't have gone out of business a decade ago.
Once you have it, the performance gains for many tasks are 1,000 fold.
Maybe some "highly crucial" tasks, like rendering textures in yet another FPS game. However, it doesn't look like the general-purpose decision making logic, which dominates a lot of applications, has been beefed up much at all vs. a conventional CPU.
This is the same bargain that I offer to my dog: Unless you agree to wear this collar around your neck and stay coralled behind doorknobs that you can't operate, I'm afraid that I won't be able to offer you any more lukewarm cans of rendered beef byproducts.
My dog seems happy with this arrangement. Why does everyone seem so ungrateful about the broadcast flag? Do you all want to be put to sleep?
It's true that most hardware companies are Microsoft's towel boys. They do their part to ensure the Windows revenue stream by writing free drivers for Microsoft, while Linux developers often have to write the drivers on their own (many times without the benefit of the hardware specs).
Hopefully that will change one day. In the mean time, the more people who take a couple of minutes to Google for Linux driver support before making each hardware purchase, the more market pressure will be put on the vendors to change the situation.
The aim of getting the same microchip is to ensure compatability in screening terrorist suspects.
To implement this screening, they only need to give the chips to the terrorist suspects. Since 99.999% of the public are not terrorist suspects, very few people will ever need to deal with these IDs at all.
When, how, and under what circumstances is it ok for copyright owners to protect their content?
I say they can try to protect it however they want, as long as they don't run to the government and try to turn the country into a police state for the benefit of "protecting" their "content". It's not worth it. If repressive measures are required to enforce content protection, then we'd be better off doing without that content. People will just have to find alternative, less passive forms of entertainment.
Sounds kinda like the thing PC manufacturers used to do with the "Turbo" button. If you turned the turbo off it would actually slow the CPU down.
That was there for a very specific reason: the lame-assed DRM in the original Lotus 1-2-3 used a CPU delay loop to time hacks on the floppy drive that they used to prevent normal copies from working. The DRM scheme failed with CPUs that ran faster than the original 4.77MHz 8086.
Therefore, to load Lotus 1-2-3, you had to turn off the turbo button to slow your machine down to the original speed of a 4.77MHz PC. It was also useful to run a handful of early games that used CPU speed to time the action.
What was really stupid is that the DRM scheme drove millions of otherwise law-abiding people to use questionable cracked copies. The original DRM'd 1-2-3 floppies were so precious, and floppy disks were so unreliable and subject to wear, very few people would risk using their original disks for day-to-day use. Most everyone I knew, even in large corporations, used cracked disks instead. The original disks stayed safely on the bookshelf in those thick cardboard ring binder + carton combos that software always used to come in.
17. The disk storage system of claim 16, where said stored data may be lost to read/write head operation failure.
18. The disk storage system of claim 17, where said operation failure is further caused by read/write head encountering dirt or debris on underprotected cheap media format.
19. The disk storage system of claim 18, where driver software further issues a plurality of reset commands to said read/write head in response to operation errors.
20. The disk storage system of claim 19, where said driver software reset function further slams read/write head against mechanical stops.
21. The disk storage system of claim 20, where said mechanical stop action further causes prominent audible clicking, thereby notifying human operator that they are SOL.
From the picture, it looks like they've got a satellite dish on their roof. Don't they know that that's just concentrating the radio beams from outer space, and then mainlining them through a coax right straight into their newly built echo chamber?
But seriously, with that jumble of jagged strips forming a bunch of slot radiators, it's possible that certain resonate frequencies in their house have actually been significantly amplified above background levels.
For years, we had an economy that was quite happy supporting both purchase and rental of videos.
Did you forget that the MPAA fought the very idea of videos tooth and nail when VCRs were introduced?
If they hadn't been smacked down by the US supreme court, they would never have been able to benefit from the fruits of the purchase and rental of videos.
Since they didn't seem to want this revenue stream in the first place, why should anyone care about how the Internet impacts it now?
Actually, acronyms are supposed to be pronounceable:
Initialism originally referred to abbreviations formed from initials, without reference to pronunciation, but during the middle portion of the twentieth century, when acronyms and initialisms saw more use than ever before, the word acronym was coined for abbreviations which are pronounced as a word, like "NATO" or "AIDS". The term initialism is now typically taken to refer to abbreviations which are pronounced by sounding out the name of each constituent letter (e.g. HTML).
What you are really saying is you don't like people using initialisms as acronyms.
Sure NASA says the parts are coming, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
I found the tracking number, and it looks like you're right:
NASA Express Package Tracking Results
383456875421256 Qty 1 Korelev Vital Oxygen Generator Model 340 383456875423858 Qty 12 Korelev 1 Month Supply Oxygen for Model 340
2003-11-13 14:32 Kiev, RU Package Pickup 2003-11-14 05:44 Moscow, RU Arrived Distribution Center 2003-11-14 18:32 Moscow, RU Departed Distribution Center 2003-11-15 05:44 Newark, NJ Arrived US Customs 2003-11-18 02:14 Newark, NJ Cleared US Customs 2003-11-20 22:33 Miami, FL Arrived Distribution Center 2003-11-21 04:18 Miami, FL Departed Distribution Center 2003-11-21 15:22 Cp. Cvl FL Arrived Space Port 2003-11-21 15:22 Cp. Cvl FL Arrived Space Port 2003-12-19 18:32 Cp. Cvl FL Out on Spaceplane for Delivery 2004-02-22 02:19 Cp. Cvl FL Out on Spaceplane for Delivery 2004-07-18 11:48 Cp. Cvl FL Out on Spaceplane for Delivery 2004-10-22 09:18 Cp. Cvl FL Out on Spaceplane for Delivery 2005-01-11 14:16 Cp. Cvl FL Out on Spaceplane for Delivery 2005-05-13 11:38 Cp. Cvl FL Out on Spaceplane for Delivery
Current estimated delivery date: 2005-08-03 by 4:30 pm
"If these maneuvers aren't successful by sol 483, then the controllers will have to accept the disintegration risk, and they will go ahead and hit the hyperspace button."
You obviously don't know anything about electricity or radiation.
Ultraviolet light can cause significant damage, and it's only a few electron volts per particle. Chemical bonds are disrupted by energy in the single-digit electron volt range. These beta particles are in the keV range. X-rays are also in the range of thousands of electron volts. What's worse, a doorknob shock or a heavy dose of X-rays?
"Paper stopping beta rays" is also irrelevant. I originally stated that the problem is if the battery is incinerated and the resulting tritiated water is ingested.
So, in this case, radiation == electricity.
Likewise "alpha rays are just helium". Therefore, breathing an alpha emitter like radon must be just as safe as inhaling from a party balloon!
A gun device only works with pure U235. It can't work with plutonium for exactly the reason we're talking about: plutonium would fizzle before the assembly is complete. That's why most bombs use the much more complex implosion technique.
Gun devices also require much more material to operate, and they are less efficient using the material. So with a gun device, you're constrained to using a less common weapons material, the material must be free of neutron emitters, and you have to use more of it.
None of this changes the fact that boosting a bomb increases efficiency and yield consistency.
The argument "somebody could build a crappy bomb, therefore it's OK go spread around materials that can be used to make a good bomb" doesn't make sense.
You ever touched a doornob and seen blue sparks? That just did several times more damage than tritium decay could do to you.
Radiation != electricity. At any rate, each tritium dekay is 18keV. That's more than enough to disrupt chemical bonds; the harm depends on how much you've ingested. (18kV of electricity can easily kill you as well if you have enough current. Your contrived example has almost no current.)
Tritium is used for fusion, not fission bombs.
Wrong. It's used to boost fission cores, whether or not they're in a fusion bomb. You have no idea what you're talking about.
f they're using "subpar materials" they don't have a weapon. The uranium is either pure enough to go critical or it isn't.
That's not true. If you're using uranium for the bomb, it's very difficult to assemble the core into a critical state without a premature chain reaction setting off a fizzle. This problem is made worse by impurities that emit neutrons, which is one reason why some neutron-emitting reactor waste is considered relatively hard to make bomb material from. Tritium boosting goes a long way in helping to reduce the effects of premature reactions in a bomb.
Tritium isn't particularly radioactive to start off with.
That doesn't matter. To get 20W of energy out of a battery, which what this "power my laptop" idea involves, you need to include enough tritum to generate that much power. 20W of radioactive decay energy is a significant biological risk no matter how you slice it.
Your WMD argument is bogus. Tritium is relatively easy to get -- it's used in gunsights, keychains, watch faces, all sorts of stuff.
In microgram quantities. A reasonable-sized battery would require many orders of magnitude more tritium than those trinkets.
but I think anyone who has the resources to build one in the first place is almost certainly able to process it out of glow paint.
Your order for 3 million keychains might tip off the FBI. Not so with a couple of laptops.
which presupposes that terrorists have the fission bomb to start off with.
They might have a crappy weapon made out of subpar materials. The tritium could make the difference between a fizzle and a destroyed city.
I have doubts that many terrorists or rogue states that are willing to use a bomb would want to go to the work and expense of boosting it.
It wouldn't be expensive if tritium was readily available. It would certainly be a lot easier than having to obtain twice the plutonium to get the same bang, for example.
Trust me, a battery that uses Alpha or Beta rays is really nothing to worry about. The radiation can't even penetrate your skin!
Of course, once somebody tosses one into an incinerator then the tritium will be directly released into the environment as radioactive H20, which is highly dangerous and doesn't need to penetrate your skin. Any nuclear battery with enough power to power a laptop (~20W) will contain a significant amount of total radioactivity, which would be a major concern if the battery were incinerated or corroded in a landfill. Therefore, you will never see these on the consumer market.
Moreover, tritium has major WMD issues. All modern nuclear weapons use tritium to boost the fission core; it allows bombs to much more efficiently use their fissile fuel and provides a much more consistent yield. Currently, the world supply of tritium is tiny, and much of it is carefully hoarded by nuclear-capable states to keep the tritum boosters in their warheads replenished as they naturally decay. The powers that be will want to keep this key weapons material hard to obtain; this is another reason that governments are never going to allow significant amounts of tritium to be handled by the general public.
Slashdot Mirror
I acknowledge that Tom DeLay wouldn't give a rat's ass about NASA if the Johnson Space Center weren't in his home district. This just is a typical effort to ladel out pork barrel funds to his constituents, no more, no less.
A car with the same performance and (lack of) features as a model T could most likely be built and sold today for $3000. Good luck finding anybody willing to buy such a vehicle.
If you've only got $3000, buy a used car. It'll be a far better deal than a new Model T would be.
My original point was still valid though. I don't think that 8 little parallel vector FPU units with 256K of their own private memory each is going to help pull up OOo faster in any way.
When that massive level of parallelism was found to be unworkable, Thinking Machines tried to transition to a more conventional design with off-the-shelf CPUs like their competitors, but they flubbed that.
At any rate, the parallel supercomputer market has always been a niche, and putting a parallel supercomputer on a consumer grade chip isn't necessarily going to provide a huge benefit to the average user over what they have today other than some cost reductions. The average user's main use for all that power, graphics rendering, is already handled by highly parallel consumer-grade GPUs.
Some bloated apps are still annoyingly CPU bound. OOo startup, for example. Many server apps are also CPU bound.
Games and media (playback and encoding, as I believe the latter is efficiently parallelisable) will benefit greatly, and this is usually the reason people upgrade their chips.
Games and media are already accelerated in the GPU on the graphics card. Moving it into the main CPU would simply be a change in packaging strategy, not the orgasmic revolution in computing that the OP was talking about.
Yeah, sure. We've heard that one before. If highly parallel operations were some kind of silver bullet, then Thinking Machines wouldn't have gone out of business a decade ago.
Once you have it, the performance gains for many tasks are 1,000 fold.
Maybe some "highly crucial" tasks, like rendering textures in yet another FPS game. However, it doesn't look like the general-purpose decision making logic, which dominates a lot of applications, has been beefed up much at all vs. a conventional CPU.
My dog seems happy with this arrangement. Why does everyone seem so ungrateful about the broadcast flag? Do you all want to be put to sleep?
Hopefully that will change one day. In the mean time, the more people who take a couple of minutes to Google for Linux driver support before making each hardware purchase, the more market pressure will be put on the vendors to change the situation.
That's not such a big stretch. For every person killed by terrorists in the past century, hundreds more have been killed by their own governments.
To implement this screening, they only need to give the chips to the terrorist suspects. Since 99.999% of the public are not terrorist suspects, very few people will ever need to deal with these IDs at all.
Right?
I say they can try to protect it however they want, as long as they don't run to the government and try to turn the country into a police state for the benefit of "protecting" their "content". It's not worth it. If repressive measures are required to enforce content protection, then we'd be better off doing without that content. People will just have to find alternative, less passive forms of entertainment.
That was there for a very specific reason: the lame-assed DRM in the original Lotus 1-2-3 used a CPU delay loop to time hacks on the floppy drive that they used to prevent normal copies from working. The DRM scheme failed with CPUs that ran faster than the original 4.77MHz 8086.
Therefore, to load Lotus 1-2-3, you had to turn off the turbo button to slow your machine down to the original speed of a 4.77MHz PC. It was also useful to run a handful of early games that used CPU speed to time the action.
What was really stupid is that the DRM scheme drove millions of otherwise law-abiding people to use questionable cracked copies. The original DRM'd 1-2-3 floppies were so precious, and floppy disks were so unreliable and subject to wear, very few people would risk using their original disks for day-to-day use. Most everyone I knew, even in large corporations, used cracked disks instead. The original disks stayed safely on the bookshelf in those thick cardboard ring binder + carton combos that software always used to come in.
Yes. From the patent:
But seriously, with that jumble of jagged strips forming a bunch of slot radiators, it's possible that certain resonate frequencies in their house have actually been significantly amplified above background levels.
Did you forget that the MPAA fought the very idea of videos tooth and nail when VCRs were introduced?
If they hadn't been smacked down by the US supreme court, they would never have been able to benefit from the fruits of the purchase and rental of videos.
Since they didn't seem to want this revenue stream in the first place, why should anyone care about how the Internet impacts it now?
Actually, the USSR got their flag to the moon first. They were the first to land space probes on the moon, and they made sure to include Soviet flags.
Actually, acronyms are supposed to be pronounceable:
What you are really saying is you don't like people using initialisms as acronyms.
I found the tracking number, and it looks like you're right:
"If these maneuvers aren't successful by sol 483, then the controllers will have to accept the disintegration risk, and they will go ahead and hit the hyperspace button."
Ultraviolet light can cause significant damage, and it's only a few electron volts per particle. Chemical bonds are disrupted by energy in the single-digit electron volt range. These beta particles are in the keV range. X-rays are also in the range of thousands of electron volts. What's worse, a doorknob shock or a heavy dose of X-rays?
"Paper stopping beta rays" is also irrelevant. I originally stated that the problem is if the battery is incinerated and the resulting tritiated water is ingested.
So, in this case, radiation == electricity.
Likewise "alpha rays are just helium". Therefore, breathing an alpha emitter like radon must be just as safe as inhaling from a party balloon!
Gun devices also require much more material to operate, and they are less efficient using the material. So with a gun device, you're constrained to using a less common weapons material, the material must be free of neutron emitters, and you have to use more of it.
None of this changes the fact that boosting a bomb increases efficiency and yield consistency.
The argument "somebody could build a crappy bomb, therefore it's OK go spread around materials that can be used to make a good bomb" doesn't make sense.
Radiation != electricity. At any rate, each tritium dekay is 18keV. That's more than enough to disrupt chemical bonds; the harm depends on how much you've ingested. (18kV of electricity can easily kill you as well if you have enough current. Your contrived example has almost no current.)
Tritium is used for fusion, not fission bombs.
Wrong. It's used to boost fission cores, whether or not they're in a fusion bomb. You have no idea what you're talking about.
That's not true. If you're using uranium for the bomb, it's very difficult to assemble the core into a critical state without a premature chain reaction setting off a fizzle. This problem is made worse by impurities that emit neutrons, which is one reason why some neutron-emitting reactor waste is considered relatively hard to make bomb material from. Tritium boosting goes a long way in helping to reduce the effects of premature reactions in a bomb.
That doesn't matter. To get 20W of energy out of a battery, which what this "power my laptop" idea involves, you need to include enough tritum to generate that much power. 20W of radioactive decay energy is a significant biological risk no matter how you slice it.
Your WMD argument is bogus. Tritium is relatively easy to get -- it's used in gunsights, keychains, watch faces, all sorts of stuff.
In microgram quantities. A reasonable-sized battery would require many orders of magnitude more tritium than those trinkets.
but I think anyone who has the resources to build one in the first place is almost certainly able to process it out of glow paint.
Your order for 3 million keychains might tip off the FBI. Not so with a couple of laptops.
which presupposes that terrorists have the fission bomb to start off with.
They might have a crappy weapon made out of subpar materials. The tritium could make the difference between a fizzle and a destroyed city.
I have doubts that many terrorists or rogue states that are willing to use a bomb would want to go to the work and expense of boosting it.
It wouldn't be expensive if tritium was readily available. It would certainly be a lot easier than having to obtain twice the plutonium to get the same bang, for example.
Of course, once somebody tosses one into an incinerator then the tritium will be directly released into the environment as radioactive H20, which is highly dangerous and doesn't need to penetrate your skin. Any nuclear battery with enough power to power a laptop (~20W) will contain a significant amount of total radioactivity, which would be a major concern if the battery were incinerated or corroded in a landfill. Therefore, you will never see these on the consumer market.
Moreover, tritium has major WMD issues. All modern nuclear weapons use tritium to boost the fission core; it allows bombs to much more efficiently use their fissile fuel and provides a much more consistent yield. Currently, the world supply of tritium is tiny, and much of it is carefully hoarded by nuclear-capable states to keep the tritum boosters in their warheads replenished as they naturally decay. The powers that be will want to keep this key weapons material hard to obtain; this is another reason that governments are never going to allow significant amounts of tritium to be handled by the general public.