Why would any device be bounded by time quanta? Only serial devices are bound like this... a 100-way parallel computer, for instance, can provide 100 operations per quanta. Extend this to n-way, for n large, and you can do a heck of a lot in an absurdly small amount of time; the next limit you have to look at is number of particles, assuming each particle is in a finite number of states (that is, assuming we're not doing quantum computing. Why wouldn't we be?).
While I'm not sure this isn't true, I'd like to propose it may not be so straight forward. Particulate matter, the crap in soot and smoke, is surely down (although you should see Salt Lake City with an inversion...), but chemical pollutants are far up, simply because we have pollutants now that hadn't been discovered even half a century ago. While the air may be 'purer', I'd suggest that some of the stuff there may be much more deadly.
It gets even better. Sure, you can make a case that we only need a thimblefull of water. But we don't even need to store that water in a seperate tank! Notice that the reaction depends on a catalyst; in fact, without that catalyst, nothing happens at all. So, just dilute the fuel with a small (perhaps very small) percentage of water. And, of course, recapture water as was already mentioned. Problem solved?
I'm sorry, but this is a total non-issue. My digital camera (a low-end HP) already has 1GB of memory in it, courtesy of an IBM microdrive. This is, even at "high" resolution, effectively infinite. Give me 10k x 10k resolution, with only 2x compression, and I still have basically as many pictures as a standard roll of film - at, I suspect, much higher quality, especially when compared to that 25mm rubbish they call 'advanced.'
Moreover, if a breakthrough in CCD's was going to be made, it would occur first in the professional market, of course. In this market, carrying around a 2.5" 20GB hard drive is not a big deal; it's smaller than many of your lenses! I really don't see that storage space is, in any way, a limitting factor in todays digital photography.
Actually, think a tad harder. Even if 0xFFFF is negative one (which I find likely), the number of stages in the loop is the same. -1+1 = 0; -1-1 = MAX_POSITIVE;
I remember when first reading about the gameboy advance, I saw something about being able to use it as a controller for the GameCube. The example of when this would be a 'good thing' was a football game. Gameplay goes on on the main screen, but you can make your play selection, privately, on your own little screen.
Although the cost is currently prohibitive (to me, at least), this seemed like an absurdly cool idea. I haven't heard anything about it since. What happened?
It can do 320x240, you just need to get the modeline. (I forget what it is, but I've definitely used it.) I seem to recall that, in my experimenting, I managed to get it down to that bizarre 256x174 mode, or whatever it is, and things still worked. There are two things to beware of, though: (a) I don't know of any hardware that supports these absurdly low resolutions with a reasonable number of colors. This may or may not be a problem; (b) Many applications have hardcoded dialogs that are simply too big for this; you have no choice but to use a large virtual desktop, which will become a slight PITA for most people, and a huge PITA for people with limited input abilities.
I highly, highly recommend looking at http://www.fpgacpu.org. (I have no affiliation with this site, never even joined the mailing list, but I've learned tons looking around there.)
How about Morpheus? Or this other one you may have heard about, Napster? Yeah, I've heard rumors that people used them for pirating; I don't know, I used them daily, and never pirated anything. In any case, how is the app itself a piracy app?
Pedantic correction: "You can make [liquid hydrogen] as hot as you want." Unfortunately, no, though it would make life much simpler. Something can only exist in a liquid state at temperatures below it's 'critical temperature', a temperature unique to each compound/element. For water, for instance, this is about 645K, if my memory is at all correct. I suspect that for hydrogen it's much lower; indeed, it wouldn't surprise me to find that hydrogen can not, under any pressure, be a liquid at room temperature.
My (uninformed) assumption is that they mean a billion operations per second. After all, a 'computer' can do an infinite number of operations, given long enough. So a trillion performing one billion ops per second implies about twenty minutes to do an operation... reasonable, based on what DNA chemistry I've done.
Does this amaze anyone else? I'm 19. According to Moore's law, applied to system speed and memory density (yes, i know it originally applied only to transistor density; but this 'bastardized form' has held through my whole lifetime, so far) I will have pixar-level graphics on my desktop before I'm 35. Wow.
I'm not as convinced as you that emulating a PS2 on an XBox is impossible. I admit, it's pretty bloody hard, but it might be workable. The key is to realize that the XBox's GPU is can basically do everything the PS2's can, faster. If you could do instruction translation, maybe statically or JIT, instead of doing one instruction at a time, it might be workable.
"The Christian loose nothing, save the effort required to live a moraly upright life." [sic]
Isn't that the point!? That's a hell of a lot of effort. No heavy drugs, no murdering sprees, no cursing out Catholic school kids... what the heck are we supposed to do for fun? Pray?
One of the issues here is the definition of 'battery life.' I tend to agree with you, in general, that these fancy new PDA's have too short life. But I challenge you to do an experiment, the same thing I did with my (palm compatable) TRGPro a few weeks ago. The battery life listed (2-8 hours) is valid under continuous usage. Turn your Visor on, and use it (on fresh batteries) until the batteries die. Don't let the screen go off. Don't let the processor go fully idle for hours at a time. You'll find that the 'weeks' of battery life you're accustomed to (and my palm has lasted over five weeks between charges, under more-or-less normal usage) corresponds to many fewer hours than you expect; with mine, it finally croaked after 12 hours, with no backlight on. That is, it's only 50% more life than this has. (On the other hand, the palms run on AAA's...)
Okay. You need 64 GB of ram. I can understand that. Explain to me why, exactly, you need 64 bit addressing? You're aware that recent intel chips (at least the PIII and PIV xeons) use 36 bit addressing, right? And that 36 bit addressing allows you to access... you guessed it, 64 GB of ram! Now, admittedly, you may have a hard time finding a system board to run it all (my current, erm, desktop, and HP LXr 8500, only supports 32GB), but I've seen them out there.
The remaining issue is that, under most OS's, a single process is still limitted to 32 bit pointers; that is, 4GB. Even so, you may find that a more commodity system fits your needs quite well, especially as you can pick up eight or ten of these systems at low, low prices in fire sales (where do you think I got mine?).
Question I've been meaning to ask (since my current, erm, desktop supports 32GB of ram)... does Linux support more than 4GB for the OS? If so, how gracefully? How do I enable it, if it's not enabled by default?
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Why would any device be bounded by time quanta? Only serial devices are bound like this... a 100-way parallel computer, for instance, can provide 100 operations per quanta. Extend this to n-way, for n large, and you can do a heck of a lot in an absurdly small amount of time; the next limit you have to look at is number of particles, assuming each particle is in a finite number of states (that is, assuming we're not doing quantum computing. Why wouldn't we be?).
"air pollution has gone way down"
While I'm not sure this isn't true, I'd like to propose it may not be so straight forward. Particulate matter, the crap in soot and smoke, is surely down (although you should see Salt Lake City with an inversion...), but chemical pollutants are far up, simply because we have pollutants now that hadn't been discovered even half a century ago. While the air may be 'purer', I'd suggest that some of the stuff there may be much more deadly.
It gets even better. Sure, you can make a case that we only need a thimblefull of water. But we don't even need to store that water in a seperate tank! Notice that the reaction depends on a catalyst; in fact, without that catalyst, nothing happens at all. So, just dilute the fuel with a small (perhaps very small) percentage of water. And, of course, recapture water as was already mentioned. Problem solved?
I'm sorry, but this is a total non-issue. My digital camera (a low-end HP) already has 1GB of memory in it, courtesy of an IBM microdrive. This is, even at "high" resolution, effectively infinite. Give me 10k x 10k resolution, with only 2x compression, and I still have basically as many pictures as a standard roll of film - at, I suspect, much higher quality, especially when compared to that 25mm rubbish they call 'advanced.'
Moreover, if a breakthrough in CCD's was going to be made, it would occur first in the professional market, of course. In this market, carrying around a 2.5" 20GB hard drive is not a big deal; it's smaller than many of your lenses! I really don't see that storage space is, in any way, a limitting factor in todays digital photography.
Actually, think a tad harder. Even if 0xFFFF is negative one (which I find likely), the number of stages in the loop is the same. -1+1 = 0; -1-1 = MAX_POSITIVE;
I remember when first reading about the gameboy advance, I saw something about being able to use it as a controller for the GameCube. The example of when this would be a 'good thing' was a football game. Gameplay goes on on the main screen, but you can make your play selection, privately, on your own little screen.
Although the cost is currently prohibitive (to me, at least), this seemed like an absurdly cool idea. I haven't heard anything about it since. What happened?
It can do 320x240, you just need to get the modeline. (I forget what it is, but I've definitely used it.) I seem to recall that, in my experimenting, I managed to get it down to that bizarre 256x174 mode, or whatever it is, and things still worked. There are two things to beware of, though: (a) I don't know of any hardware that supports these absurdly low resolutions with a reasonable number of colors. This may or may not be a problem; (b) Many applications have hardcoded dialogs that are simply too big for this; you have no choice but to use a large virtual desktop, which will become a slight PITA for most people, and a huge PITA for people with limited input abilities.
I highly, highly recommend looking at http://www.fpgacpu.org. (I have no affiliation with this site, never even joined the mailing list, but I've learned tons looking around there.)
"non-piracy p2p apps"
How about Morpheus? Or this other one you may have heard about, Napster? Yeah, I've heard rumors that people used them for pirating; I don't know, I used them daily, and never pirated anything. In any case, how is the app itself a piracy app?
Pedantic correction: "You can make [liquid hydrogen] as hot as you want." Unfortunately, no, though it would make life much simpler. Something can only exist in a liquid state at temperatures below it's 'critical temperature', a temperature unique to each compound/element. For water, for instance, this is about 645K, if my memory is at all correct. I suspect that for hydrogen it's much lower; indeed, it wouldn't surprise me to find that hydrogen can not, under any pressure, be a liquid at room temperature.
My (uninformed) assumption is that they mean a billion operations per second. After all, a 'computer' can do an infinite number of operations, given long enough. So a trillion performing one billion ops per second implies about twenty minutes to do an operation... reasonable, based on what DNA chemistry I've done.
"you can't monitor mouse motion, only get informed when the mouse button goes up or down"
Wibble? MouseMotionListener?????
Does this amaze anyone else? I'm 19. According to Moore's law, applied to system speed and memory density (yes, i know it originally applied only to transistor density; but this 'bastardized form' has held through my whole lifetime, so far) I will have pixar-level graphics on my desktop before I'm 35. Wow.
I'm not as convinced as you that emulating a PS2 on an XBox is impossible. I admit, it's pretty bloody hard, but it might be workable. The key is to realize that the XBox's GPU is can basically do everything the PS2's can, faster. If you could do instruction translation, maybe statically or JIT, instead of doing one instruction at a time, it might be workable.
Well, we're getting quite a thread off a troll.
"The Christian loose nothing, save the effort required to live a moraly upright life." [sic]
Isn't that the point!? That's a hell of a lot of effort. No heavy drugs, no murdering sprees, no cursing out Catholic school kids... what the heck are we supposed to do for fun? Pray?
You'd be surprised how little you miss 'em. And, for the record, parametric polymorphism (generics, for the less buzzword-compliant) is on the way.
What scares me most about emacs... is that I can almost believe this. :-)
One of the issues here is the definition of 'battery life.' I tend to agree with you, in general, that these fancy new PDA's have too short life. But I challenge you to do an experiment, the same thing I did with my (palm compatable) TRGPro a few weeks ago. The battery life listed (2-8 hours) is valid under continuous usage. Turn your Visor on, and use it (on fresh batteries) until the batteries die. Don't let the screen go off. Don't let the processor go fully idle for hours at a time. You'll find that the 'weeks' of battery life you're accustomed to (and my palm has lasted over five weeks between charges, under more-or-less normal usage) corresponds to many fewer hours than you expect; with mine, it finally croaked after 12 hours, with no backlight on. That is, it's only 50% more life than this has. (On the other hand, the palms run on AAA's...)
Okay... tell me one thing. How in the heck do you liquidate a city? I just can't for the life of me figure it out.
Also, did you get Civ running on Win2k AS? For some reason, that's failing utterly for me, although it runs fine on 2000 Server...
(I'd prefer if you responded by e-mail, but hey, whatever floats your boat.)
How is 6 servers in 1U denser than their previous 24 servers in 3U? Anyone? Anyone?
Okay. You need 64 GB of ram. I can understand that. Explain to me why, exactly, you need 64 bit addressing? You're aware that recent intel chips (at least the PIII and PIV xeons) use 36 bit addressing, right? And that 36 bit addressing allows you to access... you guessed it, 64 GB of ram! Now, admittedly, you may have a hard time finding a system board to run it all (my current, erm, desktop, and HP LXr 8500, only supports 32GB), but I've seen them out there.
The remaining issue is that, under most OS's, a single process is still limitted to 32 bit pointers; that is, 4GB. Even so, you may find that a more commodity system fits your needs quite well, especially as you can pick up eight or ten of these systems at low, low prices in fire sales (where do you think I got mine?).
Jon Katz!
(Moderation guidelines: +1, Bork Bork Bork)
Question I've been meaning to ask (since my current, erm, desktop supports 32GB of ram)... does Linux support more than 4GB for the OS? If so, how gracefully? How do I enable it, if it's not enabled by default?
I want to use forth! Microsoft won't feed me! Yet another reason I am a grumpy programmer.
Actually, because he's a regular troll, and posts at -1 by default. With that in mind, I for some reason doubt he'll be modded up.