So I guess the answer is yes, you can get 802.11n, 5 GHz devices now. (At least one, anyway.) What sucks is that it can't run on both 2.4 and 5 GHz at once, so unless you have all 5 GHz devices, you'll have to run on 2.4 GHz or you'll have to get another base station for the older devices.
I have to admit, the tech specs are ambiguous. It says the router does 2.4/5 GHz, and also that it does 802.11a/b/g/n, but does not say in which combinations. It could be 802.11b/g/n on 2.4 GHz and 802.11a on 5 GHz, but it could also be 802.11b/g/n on 2.4 GHz and 802.11a/n on 5 GHz. It isn't clear.
Just to note: On the 2.4 GHz band used by 802.11b and g (and n which can do both 2.4 and 5 GHz), there is substantial frequency overlap between channels. Channels 1, 6, and 11 considered "non-overlapping" (which is mostly true, though not entirely). Channels 1 and 2, however, interfere quite a bit.
This is another advantage to the 5 GHz band used by 802.11a and 802.11n. The 5 GHz band is divided into channels which do not overlap, which allows a lot more concurrent access points to be run. Unfortunately, 5 GHz does not penetrate through walls as well, which limits the area you can cover with one access point. But in a high density housing area, you likely don't have very much area to cover, unless you are trying to split your wifi with your neighbors.:)
It would be nice if the shift to 802.11n meant that we saw more built-in support for the 5 GHz band. 802.11a seems to have mostly died in the consumer market, while the 2.4 GHz band with its overlapping channels gets more and more congested with b/g devices. Unless you live in low density housing, you aren't going to get anywhere near 54 Mbps to your router, even if you wanted to.
Unfortunately, since 802.11n allows for 2.4 GHz and/or 5 GHz operation, there are some people who are pessimistic that we'll see many consumer grade devices that are dual band. (A quick check revealed that the Airport Extreme base station does both 2.4 and 5 GHz, which is nice, but I can't tell if the Macbooks with draft-n cards do both bands as well.)
Maybe you have already tried this, but I would highly, highly recommend Parallels for running Windows apps if you have an Intel-based Mac. Now that they don't have to translate from x86 to PPC on the fly, virtualization on one of these new Macs is nearly as good as the real thing. Jump into fullscreen mode, and you won't notice the difference. And check out the "Coherence" feature in the latest release, which lets you have Windows windows (not stuttering there) next to Mac windows.
Wide area symmetric multiprocessing. (Too bad WASMP sounds stupid.) The amount of computing power and storage in the world is enormous, but spread out. Anything that can increase throughput and lower latency opens up more options for distributed computing on geographically separated nodes. Not every task needs Infiniband-level of speed and latency. If we can ever get home connections that are reasonably symmetric, there are a lot more options. We might even be able to have something almost like a large, virtual SMP system.
I'm fascinated by projects like CPUShare, which has a great idea, but seems to be hampered by a need to write your programs in an unusual style to distribute them over all the clients. (And apparently by the Italian government bureaucracy involved in transacting money.) Part of cumbersome nature is just because the project is new, but part is to work around the fact that clients are separated by slow links.
If you hold the domains for less than 5 days at a time, then you can do this for free (aside from a deposit). Ironically (given the subject of this thread) it is Bob Parsons, of GoDaddy, who explains the process:
http://www.bobparsons.com/DomainKiting.html
Unfortunately, it sounds like they aren't yet able to make things work in very cold environments. From the article:
He also doesn't believe that the ceramic structure--brittle by nature--will be able to handle thermal stresses that are bound to cause microfractures and, ultimately, failure. Finally, EEStor claims that its system works to specification in temperatures as low as -20 C, revised from a previous claim of -40 C.
Oh, upon rereading, I realized that I was agreeing with something more general than most people are seeing. I don't have much of an opinion about Bill Gates, perhaps due to oversaturation generated by reading several-too-many Slashdot threads on the guy. I was more applauding someone putting words to my suspicion as to why threads on topics like these usually degenerate into pointlessness.
Let me generalize the original poster's statement: Facts and events are just a blank canvas upon which we paint our pre-existing opinions. Once you grasp the basics of the subject being discussed, most comments you read will teach you more about the person posting them than the topic itself.
Once stated that way, it seems painfully obvious. Nevertheless, I often forget it while idly sifting through posts, looking for something interesting, and getting annoyed with ridiculous comments that twist an innocuous statement into "proof" of some talking point. I should just accept it as a natural and normal product of our psychology.:)
(I leave it as an exercise to the reader to recursively apply the principle to this post as well.)
It's almost certainly a lifetime achievement, though not just for papers he wrote 30 years ago. Hawking is pretty active, as a quick look at the SPIRES index will show:
His most recent paper of interest is the 2005 paper on information loss in black holes, where he argues that information can in fact leak out of a black hole due to a quantum mechanical effect. The irony of this paper is that he made a public bet with another famous general relativity researcher 9 years ago that information which went into the black hole could never come out again. After publishing his paper, Hawking conceded the bet, though the paper is still somewhat controversial in the field.
When I first heard about the PhysX, I was very excited because I thought there might be a way to use the card as a coprocessor in actual physics simulations. Much to my dismay, the PhysX website was totally focused on games, only offered a very-high level Windows SDK which cost tens of thousands of dollars unless your software was a mass-market game, and had no useful information about the specific hardware capabilities of their chip (single precision? double precision? instructions set?). I emailed them to ask if they had any plans to investigate the scientific computing market, and got no response at all, which I guess was all the answer I needed. A Windows-only black box is worse than useless for us, so I have moved on to investigating the general-purpose use of GPUs instead. ATI and Nvidia are far more forthcoming with information, although only slightly. Getting accessed to ATI's GPGPU libraries for Linux required several attempts at getting a researcher account before they finally replied.
Yeah, I've been using ZFS via Nexenta in VMware, and aside from how much physical disk support blows in VMware Server, it's been awesome. The hard part has not been userspace, which Nexenta smooths over quite a bit, but low-level stuff that I took for granted:
How do I tell what drivers are installed? Did it detect my virtual network hardware correctly?
I just added a new disk, what device name did it receive?
And so on. All stuff with obvious answers to the Solaris experts, but it took a while with google to get oriented. (My reflex to use dmseg is not helpful on Solaris.)
Yeah, I've been playing with Nexenta and was pretty impressed by the layout (and ZFS of course), but had a rough time figuring out what hardware was detected, how drivers are loaded, and so on.
As for the Linux distros, I had to start thinking about them as branches in a family tree, rather than as one OS. There is the Debian lineage, the RedHat/Fedora lineage, the Gentoo lineage,....
Hopefully this guy will finish his port of ZFS to FUSE on Linux someday, in which case a lot of the work will have been done. You will still have to do some cleanup to make it run again in kernel space, and port it to the Linux VFS layer, of course. His choice of FUSE is in part due to the license, I imagine. A kernel port of the ZFS code could never go into the Linux kernel due to the license issues between the CDDL and GPL, where as this is perfectly fine in userspace.
That said, it's too bad the FUSE port has stalled (no commits for 5 weeks now). I want ZFS bad, but trying to admin a Solaris box feels like having my hands chopped off. Nothing is where I expect it to be.
Whoa buddy. You seem to be cramming words into my mouth here. (Perhaps rehashing the console wars over and over again is making people cranky.)
If we agree that fraud is for lying for person gain, then yes, Sony selling fewer units than they actually have and then claiming to have "run out" is fraud. (Although not the criminal kind, I suspect.) The fraud part of course being the second part, where they lie about the supply.
And, strictly speaking, I am pretending this "market vulnerability" you allude to does not exist, since I don't know what the heck you are talking about. (Seriously. This isn't some passive-agressive debate tactic. What are you talking about?)
And as for the last part: Asking for what is causing the shortage does not mean "I would have you believe" anything. I understand that a fake shortage can be used to pump up prices, especially luxury goods whose market price is highly dependent on "buzz". But create too big of a shortage and you are just leaving money on the table. As you point out 80k units is ridiculously small for a launch in Japan. So small, that I can't see how it would generate enough buzz to compensate for leaving hundreds of thousands of potential buyers out in the cold. Maybe Sony really did engineer a shortage to justify a $500-600 price tag, but maybe they just bet the farm of on a poor supply chain. Either way, I don't think this will ultimately be good for their bottom line.
Actually, that's not a particularly good term, since it is both inaccurate and emotionally loaded. Asking friends to shill your PS3 auction on eBay would be "fraudent demand." This is more like "artificial scarcity." Sony might be acting foolishly, but certainly not fraudulently, unless they are secretly paying people to go buy the units in order to ensure they sell out.
The recording of history has seldom been democratic or representative. For much of the time we have been using written language, it has been the elite (in income or education) who have done the writing.
But I think the original article submitter mistakes history for archaeology. Archaeologists study material culture of the past, and historians study the records of the past. They both try to understand what has gone before, but from different angles. Wikipedia will be of interest to future historians. The server room which houses it will be of interests to future archaeologists.
and leaving aside the fact that evolution doesn't work over the incredibly small timescale of 3 generations anyway
Then why do doctors drill me about family history of heart disease, diabetes and cancer during a health check up? We may not spawn off new species quite so fast, but degeneration certainly can happen fast when breeding individuals with the same defects.
I think the reason your doctor asks you that is because you are likely to know the health history of your immediate ancestors. Any genetic health problems they had could possibly go back many, many generations, but you might not know that. Not only just because you don't have records, but also the average life span was much shorter until the last 4 or 5 generations, so a lot of diseases might not have had much time to show symptoms until the last couple hundred years.
The root problem here is that standard email is intrinsically insecure. Most people imagine it as a digital letter, but it is more of a digital postcard. Anyone can read the message contents on any mail server queue it sits in. To solve this problem properly, you really need to start using encrypted email. Then you don't have to worry about the IT people (unless they installed a keyboard sniffer while you were on vacation) reading your mail, or anyone for that matter even if there is a server break in.
Slashdot Mirror
To answer my own question: This reviewer says he tested the device in 802.11n/5 GHz mode: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/airport-n. ars
So I guess the answer is yes, you can get 802.11n, 5 GHz devices now. (At least one, anyway.) What sucks is that it can't run on both 2.4 and 5 GHz at once, so unless you have all 5 GHz devices, you'll have to run on 2.4 GHz or you'll have to get another base station for the older devices.
Is this still true, even of the Airport Extreme?: http://www.apple.com/airportextreme/specs.html
I have to admit, the tech specs are ambiguous. It says the router does 2.4/5 GHz, and also that it does 802.11a/b/g/n, but does not say in which combinations. It could be 802.11b/g/n on 2.4 GHz and 802.11a on 5 GHz, but it could also be 802.11b/g/n on 2.4 GHz and 802.11a/n on 5 GHz. It isn't clear.
Anyone have one of these devices that can check?
Just to note: On the 2.4 GHz band used by 802.11b and g (and n which can do both 2.4 and 5 GHz), there is substantial frequency overlap between channels. Channels 1, 6, and 11 considered "non-overlapping" (which is mostly true, though not entirely). Channels 1 and 2, however, interfere quite a bit.
This is another advantage to the 5 GHz band used by 802.11a and 802.11n. The 5 GHz band is divided into channels which do not overlap, which allows a lot more concurrent access points to be run. Unfortunately, 5 GHz does not penetrate through walls as well, which limits the area you can cover with one access point. But in a high density housing area, you likely don't have very much area to cover, unless you are trying to split your wifi with your neighbors. :)
It would be nice if the shift to 802.11n meant that we saw more built-in support for the 5 GHz band. 802.11a seems to have mostly died in the consumer market, while the 2.4 GHz band with its overlapping channels gets more and more congested with b/g devices. Unless you live in low density housing, you aren't going to get anywhere near 54 Mbps to your router, even if you wanted to.
Unfortunately, since 802.11n allows for 2.4 GHz and/or 5 GHz operation, there are some people who are pessimistic that we'll see many consumer grade devices that are dual band. (A quick check revealed that the Airport Extreme base station does both 2.4 and 5 GHz, which is nice, but I can't tell if the Macbooks with draft-n cards do both bands as well.)
Maybe you have already tried this, but I would highly, highly recommend Parallels for running Windows apps if you have an Intel-based Mac. Now that they don't have to translate from x86 to PPC on the fly, virtualization on one of these new Macs is nearly as good as the real thing. Jump into fullscreen mode, and you won't notice the difference. And check out the "Coherence" feature in the latest release, which lets you have Windows windows (not stuttering there) next to Mac windows.
Wish granted: http://www.telltalegames.com/
Wide area symmetric multiprocessing. (Too bad WASMP sounds stupid.) The amount of computing power and storage in the world is enormous, but spread out. Anything that can increase throughput and lower latency opens up more options for distributed computing on geographically separated nodes. Not every task needs Infiniband-level of speed and latency. If we can ever get home connections that are reasonably symmetric, there are a lot more options. We might even be able to have something almost like a large, virtual SMP system.
I'm fascinated by projects like CPUShare, which has a great idea, but seems to be hampered by a need to write your programs in an unusual style to distribute them over all the clients. (And apparently by the Italian government bureaucracy involved in transacting money.) Part of cumbersome nature is just because the project is new, but part is to work around the fact that clients are separated by slow links.
If you hold the domains for less than 5 days at a time, then you can do this for free (aside from a deposit). Ironically (given the subject of this thread) it is Bob Parsons, of GoDaddy, who explains the process: http://www.bobparsons.com/DomainKiting.html
Apple also uses lithium polymer batteries in the MacBook, MacBook Pro, and iPod Shuffle.
Oh, upon rereading, I realized that I was agreeing with something more general than most people are seeing. I don't have much of an opinion about Bill Gates, perhaps due to oversaturation generated by reading several-too-many Slashdot threads on the guy. I was more applauding someone putting words to my suspicion as to why threads on topics like these usually degenerate into pointlessness.
Let me generalize the original poster's statement: Facts and events are just a blank canvas upon which we paint our pre-existing opinions. Once you grasp the basics of the subject being discussed, most comments you read will teach you more about the person posting them than the topic itself.
Once stated that way, it seems painfully obvious. Nevertheless, I often forget it while idly sifting through posts, looking for something interesting, and getting annoyed with ridiculous comments that twist an innocuous statement into "proof" of some talking point. I should just accept it as a natural and normal product of our psychology. :)
(I leave it as an exercise to the reader to recursively apply the principle to this post as well.)Brilliant.... I've been trying to figure out how to phrase this general idea, and you nailed it.
It's almost certainly a lifetime achievement, though not just for papers he wrote 30 years ago. Hawking is pretty active, as a quick look at the SPIRES index will show:
r awcmd=FIND+EA+HAWKING%2C+S+W&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=d s(d)
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?
His most recent paper of interest is the 2005 paper on information loss in black holes, where he argues that information can in fact leak out of a black hole due to a quantum mechanical effect. The irony of this paper is that he made a public bet with another famous general relativity researcher 9 years ago that information which went into the black hole could never come out again. After publishing his paper, Hawking conceded the bet, though the paper is still somewhat controversial in the field.
When I first heard about the PhysX, I was very excited because I thought there might be a way to use the card as a coprocessor in actual physics simulations. Much to my dismay, the PhysX website was totally focused on games, only offered a very-high level Windows SDK which cost tens of thousands of dollars unless your software was a mass-market game, and had no useful information about the specific hardware capabilities of their chip (single precision? double precision? instructions set?). I emailed them to ask if they had any plans to investigate the scientific computing market, and got no response at all, which I guess was all the answer I needed. A Windows-only black box is worse than useless for us, so I have moved on to investigating the general-purpose use of GPUs instead. ATI and Nvidia are far more forthcoming with information, although only slightly. Getting accessed to ATI's GPGPU libraries for Linux required several attempts at getting a researcher account before they finally replied.
- How do I tell what drivers are installed? Did it detect my virtual network hardware correctly?
- I just added a new disk, what device name did it receive?
And so on. All stuff with obvious answers to the Solaris experts, but it took a while with google to get oriented. (My reflex to use dmseg is not helpful on Solaris.)The only complaint I can imagine is performance. Passing VFS calls in and out of userspace is slow.
Yeah, I've been playing with Nexenta and was pretty impressed by the layout (and ZFS of course), but had a rough time figuring out what hardware was detected, how drivers are loaded, and so on.
As for the Linux distros, I had to start thinking about them as branches in a family tree, rather than as one OS. There is the Debian lineage, the RedHat/Fedora lineage, the Gentoo lineage, ....
Hopefully this guy will finish his port of ZFS to FUSE on Linux someday, in which case a lot of the work will have been done. You will still have to do some cleanup to make it run again in kernel space, and port it to the Linux VFS layer, of course. His choice of FUSE is in part due to the license, I imagine. A kernel port of the ZFS code could never go into the Linux kernel due to the license issues between the CDDL and GPL, where as this is perfectly fine in userspace.
That said, it's too bad the FUSE port has stalled (no commits for 5 weeks now). I want ZFS bad, but trying to admin a Solaris box feels like having my hands chopped off. Nothing is where I expect it to be.
Whoa buddy. You seem to be cramming words into my mouth here. (Perhaps rehashing the console wars over and over again is making people cranky.)
If we agree that fraud is for lying for person gain, then yes, Sony selling fewer units than they actually have and then claiming to have "run out" is fraud. (Although not the criminal kind, I suspect.) The fraud part of course being the second part, where they lie about the supply.
And, strictly speaking, I am pretending this "market vulnerability" you allude to does not exist, since I don't know what the heck you are talking about. (Seriously. This isn't some passive-agressive debate tactic. What are you talking about?)
And as for the last part: Asking for what is causing the shortage does not mean "I would have you believe" anything. I understand that a fake shortage can be used to pump up prices, especially luxury goods whose market price is highly dependent on "buzz". But create too big of a shortage and you are just leaving money on the table. As you point out 80k units is ridiculously small for a launch in Japan. So small, that I can't see how it would generate enough buzz to compensate for leaving hundreds of thousands of potential buyers out in the cold. Maybe Sony really did engineer a shortage to justify a $500-600 price tag, but maybe they just bet the farm of on a poor supply chain. Either way, I don't think this will ultimately be good for their bottom line.
I'm curious what the limiting factor is. Yield on the short wavelength laser diodes? Small production lines?
Actually, that's not a particularly good term, since it is both inaccurate and emotionally loaded. Asking friends to shill your PS3 auction on eBay would be "fraudent demand." This is more like "artificial scarcity." Sony might be acting foolishly, but certainly not fraudulently, unless they are secretly paying people to go buy the units in order to ensure they sell out.
The recording of history has seldom been democratic or representative. For much of the time we have been using written language, it has been the elite (in income or education) who have done the writing.
But I think the original article submitter mistakes history for archaeology. Archaeologists study material culture of the past, and historians study the records of the past. They both try to understand what has gone before, but from different angles. Wikipedia will be of interest to future historians. The server room which houses it will be of interests to future archaeologists.
I think the reason your doctor asks you that is because you are likely to know the health history of your immediate ancestors. Any genetic health problems they had could possibly go back many, many generations, but you might not know that. Not only just because you don't have records, but also the average life span was much shorter until the last 4 or 5 generations, so a lot of diseases might not have had much time to show symptoms until the last couple hundred years.
The root problem here is that standard email is intrinsically insecure. Most people imagine it as a digital letter, but it is more of a digital postcard. Anyone can read the message contents on any mail server queue it sits in. To solve this problem properly, you really need to start using encrypted email. Then you don't have to worry about the IT people (unless they installed a keyboard sniffer while you were on vacation) reading your mail, or anyone for that matter even if there is a server break in.
Good with Slashdot Titles Means Bad With Reading Comprehension