A few years back, NIAC funded a study of a propulsion system based on hydrino energy (where hyrdogen atoms are shrunk to a size smaller than the conventional ground state, in the process releasing 2-3 orders of magnitude more energy than you'd get from combustion of the same amount of hydrogen).
C|Net's article created fantastic media buzz for Apple. I'm betting that ten times as many people followed today's keynote address than otherwise would have. This allowed Steve to explain the transition in the best possible light, to a huge audience. And I do think he did a great job of putting a positive spin on this, with the CEO of Intel and the cofounder of Wolfram Research as eloquent guest speakers.
I had to deal with a painful and extremely nasty transition, when Apple switched from the 680x0 to the PowerPC architecture... The PPC represented such a massive boost in power that the 680x0 could be emulated with more speed than the fastest mac 680x0s themselves offered.
I dealt with that transition too. It was totally painless.
Mac users had to deal with the obnoxiousness of fat binaries vs ppc vs 68k for years
Fat binaries were an elegant solution for delivering code to two different user bases. Not obnoxious in the least. I look forward to getting PPC/x86 fat binaries.
and the slowdown when those 68k apps were running
Didn't you just say that 68k apps ran faster on PPC than on 68k?
Awhile after this, I had to deal with another painful and extremely nasty transition, when Apple switched to OS X.
OS X 10.0 and 10.1 left some things to be desired... so I waited for 10.2 to make the transition. And it wasn't painful at all.
this wasn't like the 68k switch, where having the wrong binary meant a little bit of slowdown; the software library had to start over at zero.
Guess what. I am still using a number of beloved old 68k apps in my Classic environment. And I expect they'll still run (under Classic under Rosetta) when I move them to a "Macintel."
this transition is different. There isn't a viable benefit to the customers. When the whole thing's done, in three years or whenever, we'll have a marginally faster computer... rather than making mac/x86 and mac/PPC equal alternatives Apple is simply phasing PPC out.
Steve said, "When we look at future roadmaps, mid-2006 and beyond, we see PoweRPC gives us 15 units of perfomance per watt, but Intel's roadmap gives us 70."
That sounds like more than "marginally faster." If those roadmaps are even close to accurate, why should Apple continue to make PPC Macs? Nobody would buy them.
the architecture that is being moved to is (due to unfortunate design differences) at a rediculous disadvantage when emulating PPC anyway
PearPC is a notoriously slow emulator. It will be very interesting to see whether Apple has somehow found a way to speed up PPC emulation to acceptable levels with Rosetta. Based on today's demo, it looks like they have done it.
My mac, which before I was expecting I could use indefinitely, for years and years at least, now has a limited amount of time to live before it becomes useless.
Such pessimism! I expect that Apple will strongly encourage developers to deliver fat PPC/x86 binaries for many years to come, so as not to orphan the PPC customers.
A general-purpose PC is pretty much a necessity for modern life. It excels at games, and much more. Why then do people buy consoles in addition to PCs? Now you own two CPUs whose cycles go 99.9% unused, instead of just one. Now you own two graphics cards, when you can only use one at a time. Now you own another hard drive, which is needlessly dedicated exclusively to games. Now you own a third device capable of playing DVDs.
I'd like to see this trend reversed -- people buying fewer consoles and starting to realize more of the potential of their general-purpose PCs. Wasn't "convergence" supposed to be a buzzword? Moving away from general-purpose computers toward specialized devices is "anti-convergence."
You make toying with genes sound like fun. But this field is rife with potential for bad unforseen consequences.
Suppose somebody designs a breed of dog that can run twice as fast as a greyhound. Thousands of the cute critters are bred, but it turns out that this breed also invariably develops severe osteoarthritis at three years of age. A great deal of suffering has just resulted from somebody's "toying".
Things get worse when you start to mix in human genes. At what point should you start to accord human rights to the creature -- when its genome is 5% human? 50%? 90%? 95%?
What kind of suffering have you created when an organism that's 70% human wants to interact with us "real" humans and finds itself at a disadvantage... Treated like a pariah by the pure humans. Or confused by a hybrid sex drive. Or cursed with a feline desire to kill smaller mammals. Or endowed with slightly superhuman abilities like the ability to jump 30 feet, yet barred from the track meet. Or reeking of skunk musk. Or able to comprehend but not speak. Or consumed by dark thoughts, because she's the only one of her kind.
LCD isn't nearly as good as CRT either, unless you think your (reclaimed) desk space is worth 1000$/sq ft.
Well said. People who complain about the bulkiness of CRTs have rarely actually done the math.
Me: "How much per square foot is your desk space worth to you?"
Chrissy: "Oh, I dunno, $20?"
Me: "Well then you shouldn't upgrade to LCD until you can find one at a garage sale for under $60."
Chrissy::-(
Your post is a great demonstration of the fact that capitalist countries are much better stewards of the environment than communist countries -- mainly because they have the means to be. Many environmentalists lean towards Marxism, and that's exactly the wrong approach if your goal is truly a clean environment.
Ex-Soviet Russia is famous for *not* managing its nuclear waste (hundreds of nuclear submarines slowly rotting away in Barents Sea, pissing off Finns and Swedes) ; nuclear weapons out of hand or simply "missing" ; some famous fuckups (Tchernobyl; that bio-warfare incident about 20 years ago, when a lab leaked a killer virus over a village) ; etc...
So nobody should be surprised that they let booster rockets fall on populated areas...
Is there really anything wrong with a government electing to support its own economy and keep the tax money it collects and spends within its borders?
Yes there is (and this principle applies to any product or service, not just software, and any country, not just China). If a foreign product or service would have been a better value than the domestically-produced product or service, they aren't spending taxpayer dollars as wisely as they could have. Such a policy benefits a small group (in this case, Chinese software developers) at the expense of the other 99.8% of Chinese citizens. The net effect is negative for their economy.
I've worked for the Federal Government for 10 years, and I didn't know what it stood for. So I went to the FOSE.com site to try to find a definition for the acronym... and found nothin!
This Google query confirms that the definition of the acronym is nowhere to be found at FOSE.com:
I said *encoded* backup copies -- not straightforward backup copies. Of course they're not going to find the backup, if the way it's encoded is not yet understood.
I've always thought it was presumptuous for biologists to declare that "95% of our DNA is junk that serves no purpose."
No purpose that you know of, yet.
I've always thought that "junk DNA" might just contain error-correcting algorithms, encoded backup copies, checksums, and stuff like that. Today I feel pretty vindicated.
TFA says this object is "a mass of hydrogen atoms a hundred million times the mass of the Sun."
It may be unusual that none of this hydrogen has ignited in a fusion reaction, but that doesn't change the fact that hydrogen atoms are baryonic matter, quite common here on earth. (There are quadrillions of them in my body right now.)
Later, TFA says "according to cosmological models, dark matter is five times more abundant than the ordinary (baryonic) matter that makes up everything we can see and touch."
So this object is "dark" in the sense that it doesn't emit visible light, but it's not Dark Matter.
So it's not surprising China wants to end this slaughter by switching to a much safer source of energy.
In its 50 year history, the nuclear power industry has killed only 24 people (all at Chernobyl).
Compare that to about 375,000 deaths in the coal mining industry over the past 50 years.
These statistics have been very effectively suppressed by the anti-nukes media. But anyone who really thinks about them would become a huge supporter of nuclear power -- which also happens to be the only viable source of energy that doesn't emit greenhouse gases.
The Cell could be Apple's nemesis or their saviour, they are the obvious candidate company to use the Cell. It's perfect for them as it will accelerate all the applications their primary customer base uses and whatever core it uses the the PU will be PowerPC compatible...
The Core Image technology due to appear in OS X "Tiger" already uses GPUs (Graphics Processor Units) for things other than 3D computations and this same technology could be retargeted at the Cell's APUs. Perhaps that's why it was there in the first place...
If other companies use Cell to produce computers there is no obvious consumer OS to use, with OS X Apple have - for the second time - the chance to become the new Microsoft...
PC manufacturers don't really care which components they use or OS they run, they just want to sell PCs. If Apple was to "think different" on OS X licensing and get hardware manufacturers using Cells perhaps they could turn Microsoft's clone army against their masters. I'm sure many companies would be only too happy to get released from Microsoft's iron grip. This is especially so if Apple was to undercut them, which they could do easily given the 400% + margins Microsoft makes on their OS.
Licensing OS X wouldn't necessarily destroy Apple's hardware business, there'll always be a market for cooler high end systems [Alien]...
A Cell based system running OS X could be nearly as cheap (depending on the price Apple want to charge for OS X) but with Cell's sheer power it will exceed the power of even the most powerful PCs. This system could sell like hot cakes and if it's sufficiently low cost it could be used to sell into the low cost markets which PC makers are now beginning to exploit. There is a huge opportunity for Apple here, I think they'll be stark raving mad not to take it - because if they don't someone else will - Microsoft already have PowerPC experience with the Xbox2 OS...
Cell will have a performance advantage over the PC and will be able to use the PC's advantages as well. With Apple's help it could also run what is arguably the best OS on the market today, at a low price point. The new Mac mini already looks like it's going to sell like hot cakes, imagine what it could do equipped with a Cell...
Slashdot Mirror
A few years back, NIAC funded a study of a propulsion system based on hydrino energy (where hyrdogen atoms are shrunk to a size smaller than the conventional ground state, in the process releasing 2-3 orders of magnitude more energy than you'd get from combustion of the same amount of hydrogen).
The project was successful. You can read a summary here:
http://users.rowan.edu/~marchese/blr.html
and more details here:
http://users.rowan.edu/~marchese/final-niac.pdf
http://users.rowan.edu/~marchese/finalpres.pdf
See http://www.versiontracker.com/macos/
Exactly. This thing is neither an air conditioner nor a heat pump. It barely uses principles taught in a decent thermodynamics class.
C|Net's article created fantastic media buzz for Apple. I'm betting that ten times as many people followed today's keynote address than otherwise would have. This allowed Steve to explain the transition in the best possible light, to a huge audience. And I do think he did a great job of putting a positive spin on this, with the CEO of Intel and the cofounder of Wolfram Research as eloquent guest speakers.
I had to deal with a painful and extremely nasty transition, when Apple switched from the 680x0 to the PowerPC architecture... The PPC represented such a massive boost in power that the 680x0 could be emulated with more speed than the fastest mac 680x0s themselves offered.
I dealt with that transition too. It was totally painless.
Mac users had to deal with the obnoxiousness of fat binaries vs ppc vs 68k for years
Fat binaries were an elegant solution for delivering code to two different user bases. Not obnoxious in the least. I look forward to getting PPC/x86 fat binaries.
and the slowdown when those 68k apps were running
Didn't you just say that 68k apps ran faster on PPC than on 68k?
Awhile after this, I had to deal with another painful and extremely nasty transition, when Apple switched to OS X.
OS X 10.0 and 10.1 left some things to be desired... so I waited for 10.2 to make the transition. And it wasn't painful at all.
this wasn't like the 68k switch, where having the wrong binary meant a little bit of slowdown; the software library had to start over at zero.
Guess what. I am still using a number of beloved old 68k apps in my Classic environment. And I expect they'll still run (under Classic under Rosetta) when I move them to a "Macintel."
this transition is different. There isn't a viable benefit to the customers. When the whole thing's done, in three years or whenever, we'll have a marginally faster computer... rather than making mac/x86 and mac/PPC equal alternatives Apple is simply phasing PPC out.
Steve said, "When we look at future roadmaps, mid-2006 and beyond, we see PoweRPC gives us 15 units of perfomance per watt, but Intel's roadmap gives us 70."
That sounds like more than "marginally faster." If those roadmaps are even close to accurate, why should Apple continue to make PPC Macs? Nobody would buy them.
the architecture that is being moved to is (due to unfortunate design differences) at a rediculous disadvantage when emulating PPC anyway
PearPC is a notoriously slow emulator. It will be very interesting to see whether Apple has somehow found a way to speed up PPC emulation to acceptable levels with Rosetta. Based on today's demo, it looks like they have done it.
My mac, which before I was expecting I could use indefinitely, for years and years at least, now has a limited amount of time to live before it becomes useless.
Such pessimism! I expect that Apple will strongly encourage developers to deliver fat PPC/x86 binaries for many years to come, so as not to orphan the PPC customers.
If such a "black market" existed, you'd think slashdotters would know about it.
A general-purpose PC is pretty much a necessity for modern life. It excels at games, and much more. Why then do people buy consoles in addition to PCs? Now you own two CPUs whose cycles go 99.9% unused, instead of just one. Now you own two graphics cards, when you can only use one at a time. Now you own another hard drive, which is needlessly dedicated exclusively to games. Now you own a third device capable of playing DVDs.
I'd like to see this trend reversed -- people buying fewer consoles and starting to realize more of the potential of their general-purpose PCs. Wasn't "convergence" supposed to be a buzzword? Moving away from general-purpose computers toward specialized devices is "anti-convergence."
You make toying with genes sound like fun. But this field is rife with potential for bad unforseen consequences.
Suppose somebody designs a breed of dog that can run twice as fast as a greyhound. Thousands of the cute critters are bred, but it turns out that this breed also invariably develops severe osteoarthritis at three years of age. A great deal of suffering has just resulted from somebody's "toying".
Things get worse when you start to mix in human genes. At what point should you start to accord human rights to the creature -- when its genome is 5% human? 50%? 90%? 95%?
What kind of suffering have you created when an organism that's 70% human wants to interact with us "real" humans and finds itself at a disadvantage...
Treated like a pariah by the pure humans.
Or confused by a hybrid sex drive.
Or cursed with a feline desire to kill smaller mammals.
Or endowed with slightly superhuman abilities like the ability to jump 30 feet, yet barred from the track meet.
Or reeking of skunk musk.
Or able to comprehend but not speak.
Or consumed by dark thoughts, because she's the only one of her kind.
Well said. People who complain about the bulkiness of CRTs have rarely actually done the math.
Me: "How much per square foot is your desk space worth to you?" :-(
Chrissy: "Oh, I dunno, $20?"
Me: "Well then you shouldn't upgrade to LCD until you can find one at a garage sale for under $60."
Chrissy:
A local shop sells refurb 21" CRTs for $79.
LCDs of that size are too new to be available as refurbs. The cheapest 20" LCD here
http://shop4.outpost.com/catreq/3376
is $794 (+ shipping). (It happens to be the Apple Cinema Display.)
Ex-Soviet Russia is famous for *not* managing its nuclear waste (hundreds of nuclear submarines slowly rotting away in Barents Sea, pissing off Finns and Swedes) ; nuclear weapons out of hand or simply "missing" ; some famous fuckups (Tchernobyl; that bio-warfare incident about 20 years ago, when a lab leaked a killer virus over a village) ; etc...
So nobody should be surprised that they let booster rockets fall on populated areas...
Is there really anything wrong with a government electing to support its own economy and keep the tax money it collects and spends within its borders? Yes there is (and this principle applies to any product or service, not just software, and any country, not just China). If a foreign product or service would have been a better value than the domestically-produced product or service, they aren't spending taxpayer dollars as wisely as they could have. Such a policy benefits a small group (in this case, Chinese software developers) at the expense of the other 99.8% of Chinese citizens. The net effect is negative for their economy.
I had conversations like this with ELIZA running on an Apple ][ in 1983. Sad to see that the state of AI has not advanced in the last 22 years.
I guess you and he are kindred spirits. http://www.woz.org/letters/general/78.html
I've worked for the Federal Government for 10 years, and I didn't know what it stood for. So I went to the FOSE.com site to try to find a definition for the acronym... and found nothin!
t ems%22&as_sitesearch=fose.com
This Google query confirms that the definition of the acronym is nowhere to be found at FOSE.com:
http://www.google.com/search?as_epq=%22office+sys
n/t
I said *encoded* backup copies -- not straightforward backup copies. Of course they're not going to find the backup, if the way it's encoded is not yet understood.
I've always thought it was presumptuous for biologists to declare that "95% of our DNA is junk that serves no purpose."
No purpose that you know of, yet.
I've always thought that "junk DNA" might just contain error-correcting algorithms, encoded backup copies, checksums, and stuff like that. Today I feel pretty vindicated.
This AC is correct... he didn't deserve to be modded down, and I probably didn't deserve my +5, Interesting.
If this is for real, it does great things for the viability of electric cars.
And here is a technology that could produce even greater breakthroughs in battery storage capacity.
If cables are rated for current not power, why do I have a power strip and an extension cord labeled, "do not exceed a total of 1350 watts" ?
TFA says this object is "a mass of hydrogen atoms a hundred million times the mass of the Sun."
It may be unusual that none of this hydrogen has ignited in a fusion reaction, but that doesn't change the fact that hydrogen atoms are baryonic matter, quite common here on earth. (There are quadrillions of them in my body right now.)
Later, TFA says "according to cosmological models, dark matter is five times more abundant than the ordinary (baryonic) matter that makes up everything we can see and touch."
So this object is "dark" in the sense that it doesn't emit visible light, but it's not Dark Matter.
Or am I missing something here?
I'm not making that up: see Coal mine accidents kill 6,027 in China.
So it's not surprising China wants to end this slaughter by switching to a much safer source of energy.
In its 50 year history, the nuclear power industry has killed only 24 people (all at Chernobyl).
Compare that to about 375,000 deaths in the coal mining industry over the past 50 years.
These statistics have been very effectively suppressed by the anti-nukes media. But anyone who really thinks about them would become a huge supporter of nuclear power -- which also happens to be the only viable source of energy that doesn't emit greenhouse gases.
I promote nuclear power every chance I get. It's the only viable way to generate electricity without producing greenhouse gases.
From TFA,
The Cell could be Apple's nemesis or their saviour, they are the obvious candidate company to use the Cell. It's perfect for them as it will accelerate all the applications their primary customer base uses and whatever core it uses the the PU will be PowerPC compatible...
The Core Image technology due to appear in OS X "Tiger" already uses GPUs (Graphics Processor Units) for things other than 3D computations and this same technology could be retargeted at the Cell's APUs. Perhaps that's why it was there in the first place...
If other companies use Cell to produce computers there is no obvious consumer OS to use, with OS X Apple have - for the second time - the chance to become the new Microsoft...
PC manufacturers don't really care which components they use or OS they run, they just want to sell PCs. If Apple was to "think different" on OS X licensing and get hardware manufacturers using Cells perhaps they could turn Microsoft's clone army against their masters. I'm sure many companies would be only too happy to get released from Microsoft's iron grip. This is especially so if Apple was to undercut them, which they could do easily given the 400% + margins Microsoft makes on their OS.
Licensing OS X wouldn't necessarily destroy Apple's hardware business, there'll always be a market for cooler high end systems [Alien]...
A Cell based system running OS X could be nearly as cheap (depending on the price Apple want to charge for OS X) but with Cell's sheer power it will exceed the power of even the most powerful PCs. This system could sell like hot cakes and if it's sufficiently low cost it could be used to sell into the low cost markets which PC makers are now beginning to exploit. There is a huge opportunity for Apple here, I think they'll be stark raving mad not to take it - because if they don't someone else will - Microsoft already have PowerPC experience with the Xbox2 OS...
Cell will have a performance advantage over the PC and will be able to use the PC's advantages as well. With Apple's help it could also run what is arguably the best OS on the market today, at a low price point. The new Mac mini already looks like it's going to sell like hot cakes, imagine what it could do equipped with a Cell...