This sort of technology already exists to an extent. TI's Hercules TMS570 microcontrollers have two CPUs that run in lockstep along with a bus comparison module. I think total fail-tolerance might take three CPUs, but this provides strong hardware fault detection in addition to the usual ECC and other monitoring/correction stuff.
Note that run-time fault tolerance is mostly needed for safety-critical systems. The customers who buy these products do not do so to get better yield, they do so to guarantee that their airbags, anti-lock brakes, or medical devices won't kill anyone. As such, manufacturing quality is very high. Also, die size is significantly larger than comparable general market (non-safety) devices. This means they cost a small fortune. The PC equivalent would be MLC vs. SLC SSDs. Consumer products usually don't waste money on that kind of reliability unless they need it. Now a super-expensive server CPU, maybe...
[Disclaimer: I am a TI employee, but this is not an official advertisement for TI. Do not use any product in safety-critical systems without contacting the manufacturer, or at least a good lawyer. I am not responsible for damage to humans, machinery, or small woodland creatures that may result from improper use of TI products.]
I'm not saying I have a solution (it's not clear if there's even a problem) but I think you have to accept that/. is now Fox News for Nerds. Like most news sources, it's used primarily by those who conform to its culture, and by those who want to be part of it. This is not a dynamic, cool site any more (if it ever was); it's for people who are tech conservatives and want to stay that way and regrettably for you, that position includes a rejection of 'commercial' culture.
Wow. That's... jeez, man, I think you just ruined this site for me. "Fox News for Nerds" is brilliant, even though it hit a little too close to home..
The "article" linked from the summary is just a blog that links to the Smithsonian Magazine. It's got a nice graph. The actual story is:
Recent research supports the conclusions of a controversial environmental study released 40 years ago: The world is on track for disaster. So says Australian physicist Graham Turner, who revisited perhaps the most groundbreaking academic work of the 1970s,The Limits to Growth...
Turner compared real-world data from 1970 to 2000 with the business-as-usual scenario. He found the predictions nearly matched the facts. “There is a very clear warning bell being rung here,” he says. “We are not on a sustainable trajectory.”
There's a graph comparing the 1972 study with what actually happened from 1970-2000. Not much technical information and I couldn't find a link to the study itself, but the lines are fairly close. Wikipedia has a number of references to other recent studies looking back on the predictions, most of which seem to agree.
He does not consider any technological advancement in next 18 years to augment our consumption rate and needs?
Sure they do. That's part of what "drastic measures for environmental protection" are. The advances won't happen on their own in a short enough amount of time. There's no magic wand on the horizon, just a lot of small changes. We could've been working on this for decades, except for people like this:
At the time, Wallich said attempting to regulate economic growth would be equal to "consigning billions to permanent poverty."
Which is what people always say about any regulation, from the Clean Air Act to the ADA to the global warming discussion today. Funny how it never comes true...
Heck we do not even find a new planet to move to?
Moving to a new planet is totally impractical. There's an essay that does a great job of explaining why.
TVs are better about viewing from different angles. Cheap desktop monitors (TN panels) in particular are not. Light gray tends to disappear when I stand up at my desk at work. On IPS displays (the nice ones), there's a lot of backlight bleed at off angles.
The inefficiency of modern digital circuits comes from two things:
1. Leakage through gate oxides (insulators) and switched-off transistors (semiconductor action). 2. Charging and discharging transistor gates during turn-on and turn-off (capacitance).
Unfortunately, superconductors won't help with either of those. Even switching power supplies lose a lot of power through transistor switching and diode drops. For most electronic products, imperfect semiconductor devices are a bigger problem than imperfect conductors.
I'm surprised anyone is still using 4:3 CRTs. Seriously. Why?????
1. I like the aspect ratio. I tend to do one thing at a time, usually web browsing. I don't like having to manually size windows to only use part of my monitor. It's much more convenient to hit maximize and not have to worry about comments being one giant line long.
2. Input lag. CRTs are analog, which means there's next to no lag between my mouse/keyboard and my screen. Many LCDs (particularly the nicer ones) have upwards of 20-40ms of lag. I play first-person shooters and am very sensitive to visual feedback. Laggy LCDs feel mushy.
3. 180-degree color correctness and better blacks. Comes from being an active light source rather than a backlight absorber.
LCDs are a mediocre display technology. They are often sharper (at eye-bleeding tiny resolution for text/images on a PC), but mostly they're smaller, lighter, use less power, and look prettier. Those are huge advantages, but some of us want the things that LCDs gave up.
Well, first of all, computers will never be able to calculate every possible outcome. The game tree complexity of chess is on the order of ~10^120, which is larger than the number of atoms in the observable universe. Even storing every position would take the matter content of a small galaxy.
Secondly, chess is a game first and a mathematical problem second. We're having fun, not calculating digits of pi. You can cheat at any game, but that doesn't mean games are pointless.
There are only two PC game categories -- one for old DOS/Windows, and one for "modern" Windows. Eight games doesn't seem like very much for 20 years, especially when 15 of those years were very distinct from console gaming. That being said, the list of games isn't bad. Lots of recognizable and clearly significant titles. I'd actually like to see this if I get the chance.
Wow, look at all the addicts here. You guys know you can buy caffeine in pill form, right? You don't even need a prescription. Or would that hit a little too close to home?:-p
For those of you who have never tasted good coffee, here's some stuff to try. I'm not a connoisseur or a fanatic, so this is just the easy stuff. First, buy good beans and grind them in the store. (You can roast and grind fresh beans daily but that's a little much for me.) Store the grinds at room temp, not in the freezer. Next, ditch the low-end creamers. Go to the grocery store and get some heavy whipping cream. Once you try it you'll never want to go back. Pour in enough so that the coffee is medium brown (however brown you like it -- experiment!). Finally, sweeten. I like a 50/50 mix of sucrose and sucralose. Sucralose (Splenda) is one of the best artificial sweeteners. You can buy it online in pure liquid form, which is better than the powdered packets. Go 100% if you can; this is an easy place to save calories. Each sweetener has a different onset/aftertaste profile, so experiment to find one you like.
The result of all this is a hot, sweet, creamy drink with the warm comfort of hot cocoa and the delicious aroma of coffee. Give it a try and see if you still think coffee sucks.
I agree with you. Last November I bought Skyrim on DVD and found that my disc was defective. I was able to enter the product key into Steam and get exactly the same "product" with a slower download. The key is now locked to my account. I got a nifty paper map of the game world, but that's about it.
Aside from piracy, the other reason for this is pretty clear -- single-use installs mean that you can sell the same game many years later for cheap, much like Steam is doing now. I think Nintendo is releasing some of their old games on XBLA as well. Kind of sad given that ROMs, emulators, and DOSBox were already available.
The CPI-based results are within $1-2 of this, if you're curious. I tried to dig up some old game prices for comparison, but this information seems hard to find. Anyone know a good source?
No. I believe the Christians you want to kick out make up about 0.0001%. That would be about the percentage that rejects science and believes the earth is roughly 6000 years old.
While I agree with your larger point that treating all Christians identically is silly, I'm afraid you're off by several orders of magnitude here. Evolution has never been accepted by a majority of Americans at any point in our history. Here's some more recent data:
There are some inconsistencies in the answers. People are more supportive of evolution and related ideas when asked about it in isolation. But if you give a choice between humans evolving naturally vs. being created by god within the last 10,000 years, creationism wins. There's also a majority in favor of teaching creation/ID alongside evolution in schools. This is not just a grass roots thing, either -- it includes high-profile figures like Rick Santorum.
I was familiar with the CONFIG.SYS menus, but my parents wouldn't let me do anything to complicate the startup process (they had to use it too). I might have put in one with a short timeout eventually.
My 486 only had four megabytes of RAM. I had to reboot and bypass CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to run Doom. The reason? My mouse driver took up too much memory. And this was in DOS, where you only had three or four drivers to begin with.
(Before any other old folks ask -- I already had other drivers in upper memory so the mouse driver wouldn't fit there.)
Those of you who are panicked and/or outraged might want to read the Register article, which strongly suggests that none of this is actually happening. In particular, these paragraphs:
The ITU has said, time and time again, that it has no interest in running the internet. Earlier this month the organisation's secretary general pointed out that even if he had a mandate (which he doesn't) he hasn't the budget. ITU budgets are always linked to policy objectives, and taking over the internet is not a policy objective....
McDowell claims there's a meeting scheduled for 27 February where the land-grab will be agreed, and that these things will pass into international law in December - as though the US ever moved that fast. He's referring to the WCIT (the World Conference on International Telecommunications), which starts in Geneva next week, but the agenda for that was set months ago and includes no clause to make a grab for cyberspace.
So the question becomes not if anyone is trying to take over the internet, but who stands to gain by spreading the rumour that such a takeover is on the cards. ITU reps, speaking off the record, are starting to fear some sort of conspiracy themselves: they've adamantly stated that they have neither the desire, nor the budget, nor the mandate, to interfere with governance of the internet, and yet the scare stories just refuse to die.
Yeah, there are already lots of higher-performance microcontrollers out there if you're interested. If you really want speed and memory, go for something based on a 32-bit ARM. I see a 64 MHz Cortex-M3 with 1 MB of flash on DigiKey for $11. You can get 256k of flash for under $10.
The most damning part of the climate strategy document wasn't the curriculum stuff, it was this:
Expanded climate communications Heartland plays an important role in climate communications, especially through our in-house experts (e.g., Taylor) through his Forbes blog and related high profile outlets, our conferences, and through coordination with external networks (such as WUWT and other groups capable of rapidly mobilizing responses to new scientific findings, news stories, or unfavorable blog posts). Efforts at places such as Forbes are especially important now that they have begun to allow high profile climate scientists (such as Gleick) to post warmist science essays that counter our own. This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out. Efforts might also include cultivating more neutral voices with big audiences (such as Revkin at DotEarth/NYTimes, who has a well-known antipathy for some of the more extreme AGW communicators such as Rornm, Trenberth, and Hansen) or Curry (who has become popular with our supporters). AVe have also pledged to help raise around $90,000 in 2012 for Anthony Watts to help him create a new website to track temperature station data.
In other words, they don't want a debate.
The budget document says that their key projects are (in order of funding): eliminating or reducing FDA approval requirements for new medicines, opposing the Wisconsin recall elections (i.e. anti-union activity), opposing global warming, supporting charter schools and the privatization of education, supporting fracking, and a couple of Chicago-specific items. The Wisconsin work goes by the name Operation Angry Badger, for no apparent reason.
The fundraising document is the most interesting, and describes an "Anonymous Donor" who once gave them half of their money but is now merely the largest donor. This donor is particularly interested in climate change, and has earmarked the majority of his donations for related projects.
Heartland has an anonymous donor who has given as much as half the organizations’ entire budget in some past years, and currently gives about one-fifth of total receipts. Renewing him each year and keeping him informed and engaged is a major responsibility of the President. We regularly solicite his ideas for new projects
There's a description of their anti-IPCC report project:
Heartland sponsors the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), an international network of scientists who write and speak out on climate change. Heartland pays a team of scientists approximately $300,000 a year to work on a series of editions of Climate Change Reconsidered, the most comprehensive and authoritative rebuttal of the United Nations’ IPCC reports. Another $88,000 is earmarked for Heartland staff, incremental expenses, and overhead for editing, expense reimbursement for the authors, and marketing.
NIPCC is currently funded by two gifts a year from two foundations, both of them requesting anonymity. In 2012 we plan to solicit gifts from other donors to add to what these two donors are giving in order to cover more of our fixed costs for promoting the first two Climate Change Reconsidered volumes and writing and editing the volume scheduled for release in 2013. We hope to raise $200,000 in 2012.
Again with the anonymous donors.
There's a long description of the anti-AGW curriculum project. It was proposed by a consultant who works with the Department of Energy, Dr. David Wojick. Wojick studies science education, and his knowledge of national test requirements and contacts in educational organizations are described as his key attributes. He is not described as a climate scientist.
Many people lament the absence of educational material sui
I had a hard time believing they'd go for an iPad over a more rugged device, but the article says Special Operations Command already did so. iPads are consumer hardware. From Apple's specs:
* Operating temperature: 32 to 95 F (0 to 35 C)
* Nonoperating temperature: -4 to 113 F (-20 to 45 C)
* Relative humidity: 5% to 95% noncondensing
* Maximum operating altitude: 10,000 feet (3000 m)
Even for a cargo plane, that seems pretty limited. I know they have at least some climate control in flight, but don't they park the planes in arctic and desert environments too? Don't they need the checklists before they start the plane up? Or do they keep them running all the time and only shut down at their home base?
Slashdot Mirror
This sort of technology already exists to an extent. TI's Hercules TMS570 microcontrollers have two CPUs that run in lockstep along with a bus comparison module. I think total fail-tolerance might take three CPUs, but this provides strong hardware fault detection in addition to the usual ECC and other monitoring/correction stuff.
Note that run-time fault tolerance is mostly needed for safety-critical systems. The customers who buy these products do not do so to get better yield, they do so to guarantee that their airbags, anti-lock brakes, or medical devices won't kill anyone. As such, manufacturing quality is very high. Also, die size is significantly larger than comparable general market (non-safety) devices. This means they cost a small fortune. The PC equivalent would be MLC vs. SLC SSDs. Consumer products usually don't waste money on that kind of reliability unless they need it. Now a super-expensive server CPU, maybe...
[Disclaimer: I am a TI employee, but this is not an official advertisement for TI. Do not use any product in safety-critical systems without contacting the manufacturer, or at least a good lawyer. I am not responsible for damage to humans, machinery, or small woodland creatures that may result from improper use of TI products.]
I'm not saying I have a solution (it's not clear if there's even a problem) but I think you have to accept that /. is now Fox News for Nerds. Like most news sources, it's used primarily by those who conform to its culture, and by those who want to be part of it. This is not a dynamic, cool site any more (if it ever was); it's for people who are tech conservatives and want to stay that way and regrettably for you, that position includes a rejection of 'commercial' culture.
Wow. That's... jeez, man, I think you just ruined this site for me. "Fox News for Nerds" is brilliant, even though it hit a little too close to home..
I'm going to go offline and rethink my bookmarks.
The "article" linked from the summary is just a blog that links to the Smithsonian Magazine. It's got a nice graph. The actual story is:
There's a graph comparing the 1972 study with what actually happened from 1970-2000. Not much technical information and I couldn't find a link to the study itself, but the lines are fairly close. Wikipedia has a number of references to other recent studies looking back on the predictions, most of which seem to agree.
He does not consider any technological advancement in next 18 years to augment our consumption rate and needs?
Sure they do. That's part of what "drastic measures for environmental protection" are. The advances won't happen on their own in a short enough amount of time. There's no magic wand on the horizon, just a lot of small changes. We could've been working on this for decades, except for people like this:
At the time, Wallich said attempting to regulate economic growth would be equal to "consigning billions to permanent poverty."
Which is what people always say about any regulation, from the Clean Air Act to the ADA to the global warming discussion today. Funny how it never comes true...
Heck we do not even find a new planet to move to?
Moving to a new planet is totally impractical. There's an essay that does a great job of explaining why.
I'm with you. There's no reason to depend on one version number for everything.
Interesting. Thanks for the info.
TVs are better about viewing from different angles. Cheap desktop monitors (TN panels) in particular are not. Light gray tends to disappear when I stand up at my desk at work. On IPS displays (the nice ones), there's a lot of backlight bleed at off angles.
The inefficiency of modern digital circuits comes from two things:
1. Leakage through gate oxides (insulators) and switched-off transistors (semiconductor action).
2. Charging and discharging transistor gates during turn-on and turn-off (capacitance).
Unfortunately, superconductors won't help with either of those. Even switching power supplies lose a lot of power through transistor switching and diode drops. For most electronic products, imperfect semiconductor devices are a bigger problem than imperfect conductors.
I'm surprised anyone is still using 4:3 CRTs. Seriously. Why?????
1. I like the aspect ratio. I tend to do one thing at a time, usually web browsing. I don't like having to manually size windows to only use part of my monitor. It's much more convenient to hit maximize and not have to worry about comments being one giant line long.
2. Input lag. CRTs are analog, which means there's next to no lag between my mouse/keyboard and my screen. Many LCDs (particularly the nicer ones) have upwards of 20-40ms of lag. I play first-person shooters and am very sensitive to visual feedback. Laggy LCDs feel mushy.
3. 180-degree color correctness and better blacks. Comes from being an active light source rather than a backlight absorber.
LCDs are a mediocre display technology. They are often sharper (at eye-bleeding tiny resolution for text/images on a PC), but mostly they're smaller, lighter, use less power, and look prettier. Those are huge advantages, but some of us want the things that LCDs gave up.
Well, first of all, computers will never be able to calculate every possible outcome. The game tree complexity of chess is on the order of ~10^120, which is larger than the number of atoms in the observable universe. Even storing every position would take the matter content of a small galaxy.
Secondly, chess is a game first and a mathematical problem second. We're having fun, not calculating digits of pi. You can cheat at any game, but that doesn't mean games are pointless.
There are only two PC game categories -- one for old DOS/Windows, and one for "modern" Windows. Eight games doesn't seem like very much for 20 years, especially when 15 of those years were very distinct from console gaming. That being said, the list of games isn't bad. Lots of recognizable and clearly significant titles. I'd actually like to see this if I get the chance.
Wow, look at all the addicts here. You guys know you can buy caffeine in pill form, right? You don't even need a prescription. Or would that hit a little too close to home? :-p
For those of you who have never tasted good coffee, here's some stuff to try. I'm not a connoisseur or a fanatic, so this is just the easy stuff. First, buy good beans and grind them in the store. (You can roast and grind fresh beans daily but that's a little much for me.) Store the grinds at room temp, not in the freezer. Next, ditch the low-end creamers. Go to the grocery store and get some heavy whipping cream. Once you try it you'll never want to go back. Pour in enough so that the coffee is medium brown (however brown you like it -- experiment!). Finally, sweeten. I like a 50/50 mix of sucrose and sucralose. Sucralose (Splenda) is one of the best artificial sweeteners. You can buy it online in pure liquid form, which is better than the powdered packets. Go 100% if you can; this is an easy place to save calories. Each sweetener has a different onset/aftertaste profile, so experiment to find one you like.
The result of all this is a hot, sweet, creamy drink with the warm comfort of hot cocoa and the delicious aroma of coffee. Give it a try and see if you still think coffee sucks.
Ah, that is a good point. Thank you for clarifying.
That's why I used the unskilled wage instead of CPI, although they came out pretty close. Was that not the right thing to do?
I agree with you. Last November I bought Skyrim on DVD and found that my disc was defective. I was able to enter the product key into Steam and get exactly the same "product" with a slower download. The key is now locked to my account. I got a nifty paper map of the game world, but that's about it.
Aside from piracy, the other reason for this is pretty clear -- single-use installs mean that you can sell the same game many years later for cheap, much like Steam is doing now. I think Nintendo is releasing some of their old games on XBLA as well. Kind of sad given that ROMs, emulators, and DOSBox were already available.
Don't forget inflation when complaining about game prices.
$60 in 2010 adjusted using the unskilled wage as an index via MeasuringWorth.com:
2005: $55.30
2000: $48.60
1995: $41.00
1990: $35.30
1985: $30.40
The CPI-based results are within $1-2 of this, if you're curious. I tried to dig up some old game prices for comparison, but this information seems hard to find. Anyone know a good source?
No. I believe the Christians you want to kick out make up about 0.0001%. That would be about the percentage that rejects science and believes the earth is roughly 6000 years old.
While I agree with your larger point that treating all Christians identically is silly, I'm afraid you're off by several orders of magnitude here. Evolution has never been accepted by a majority of Americans at any point in our history. Here's some more recent data:
http://www.pollingreport.com/science.htm
There are some inconsistencies in the answers. People are more supportive of evolution and related ideas when asked about it in isolation. But if you give a choice between humans evolving naturally vs. being created by god within the last 10,000 years, creationism wins. There's also a majority in favor of teaching creation/ID alongside evolution in schools. This is not just a grass roots thing, either -- it includes high-profile figures like Rick Santorum.
I was familiar with the CONFIG.SYS menus, but my parents wouldn't let me do anything to complicate the startup process (they had to use it too). I might have put in one with a short timeout eventually.
My 486 only had four megabytes of RAM. I had to reboot and bypass CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to run Doom. The reason? My mouse driver took up too much memory. And this was in DOS, where you only had three or four drivers to begin with.
(Before any other old folks ask -- I already had other drivers in upper memory so the mouse driver wouldn't fit there.)
Those of you who are panicked and/or outraged might want to read the Register article, which strongly suggests that none of this is actually happening. In particular, these paragraphs:
Yeah, there are already lots of higher-performance microcontrollers out there if you're interested. If you really want speed and memory, go for something based on a 32-bit ARM. I see a 64 MHz Cortex-M3 with 1 MB of flash on DigiKey for $11. You can get 256k of flash for under $10.
Whatever happened to, "Hope I die before I get old"?
We got old anyway.
One is about public debt in Cook County. The other is an outreach program to connect with finance and insurance professionals in Chicago.
The most damning part of the climate strategy document wasn't the curriculum stuff, it was this:
In other words, they don't want a debate.
The budget document says that their key projects are (in order of funding): eliminating or reducing FDA approval requirements for new medicines, opposing the Wisconsin recall elections (i.e. anti-union activity), opposing global warming, supporting charter schools and the privatization of education, supporting fracking, and a couple of Chicago-specific items. The Wisconsin work goes by the name Operation Angry Badger, for no apparent reason.
The fundraising document is the most interesting, and describes an "Anonymous Donor" who once gave them half of their money but is now merely the largest donor. This donor is particularly interested in climate change, and has earmarked the majority of his donations for related projects.
There's a description of their anti-IPCC report project:
Again with the anonymous donors.
There's a long description of the anti-AGW curriculum project. It was proposed by a consultant who works with the Department of Energy, Dr. David Wojick. Wojick studies science education, and his knowledge of national test requirements and contacts in educational organizations are described as his key attributes. He is not described as a climate scientist.
I had a hard time believing they'd go for an iPad over a more rugged device, but the article says Special Operations Command already did so. iPads are consumer hardware. From Apple's specs:
* Operating temperature: 32 to 95 F (0 to 35 C)
* Nonoperating temperature: -4 to 113 F (-20 to 45 C)
* Relative humidity: 5% to 95% noncondensing
* Maximum operating altitude: 10,000 feet (3000 m)
Even for a cargo plane, that seems pretty limited. I know they have at least some climate control in flight, but don't they park the planes in arctic and desert environments too? Don't they need the checklists before they start the plane up? Or do they keep them running all the time and only shut down at their home base?