I love how your comments (and the GP) haven't been modded up - I was going to post about the E-10 and E-20 myself. They are very innovative designs.
The one thing you forgot to mention about the E-series cameras is that you can get great addon lenses. For under $1000, you can get an F 2.8 600 mm. telephoto - a VERY expensive lens for 35 mm. cameras.
This Sony sounds quite unappealing, really. I wonder why this particular camera was worthy of a Slashdot story?
So this is how they're working around G-Force limitations in human F-22 pilots?
Exactly the point I was going to make, glad to see you beat me to it. I think the main point of this research is more to better understand how bio neurons work so we can make better electronic ones. If some derivative of neural net theory turns out to be a good model for working nerves, then in theory we could build large networks of electronic neurons that "think" in the same way bio brains do - except by the nature of electronic impulses versus nerve impulses the electronic version should be thousands(?) of times faster. Oh yeah, and immune to G forces.;-)
We already have semi-functional large bio neural nets (most likely you have one in your head). Next step is large electronic neural nets. =)
"Scribblings on a bathroom wall." I'll remember that the next time I am tempted to cite the Wikipedia as a reference.
No academic would likely use the Wikipedia as a reference, simply because the content is malleable. Perhaps it could be used with a printed (or cut/pasted) version of the current article there, but never the live site.
You know, I'm really sick of the World War II comparison. I'm not a historian and even I know it's bullshit.
Well, that's an impressive argument.:-P
First, in the Japan case, we kept the Emperor around. The Emperor of Japan, at the time, was the absolute power to the Japanese. If the emperor said, "Cooperate with the Americans", the people cooperated. If the emperor said, "We're now a democracy. Go vote," people went and voted. If the emperor said "Hop on one foot for the day," people hopped on one foot. You did what the emperor said.
Yes, I'd agree that Japan is not a good analogy...and it's also one I didn't use. Next strawman please.
Second, in the Germany case, you had a country that already had a democratic history. The people of Germany essentially elected Hitler as dictator. When the War was over, they had experience and trust in a democratic system.
Horsepucky. The German people had a terrible time under their "democratic" government. That's WHY they brought Hitler to power.
The people of Iraq have no such history.
Below you point out that Hussein was elected... Which is it?
Also, the rebuilding of Germany was sort of the first steps of the Cold War--we had to show the people of the world that America, Freedom, Mom, Apple Pie, etc. were better than those godless commies. Again, the idea was to win the hearts of minds of the people of Germany. There was no such plan in place in Iraq.
Also nonsense. We have a very large rebuilding plan in Iraq, designed to do EXACTLY what you suggest. It hasn't gone as well as hoped, mainly due to security issues.
However, the factor that you're conveniently ignoring that makes Iraq a much *easier* proposition than Germany in the long run, is the proliferation of Western culture and technology through the media. From what I hear the typical Iraqi teenager in Baghdad today is sporting a rapper T-shirt and talking on a cell phone. Satellite TV dishes are everywhere. McDonalds franchises can't be far behind.;-)
Every government in the area is terrified of the effect of Western media on its citizens - and Iraq is now thoroughly immersed in it.
Things are actually looking quite good, depending on how things go through December 15. I'm highly optimistic.
Then there's the whole "rebuilding" thing. Who do you think rebuilt Germany? The answer, of course, is Germans via money provided by the US's Marshall Plan. In the end, you had German companies who owned their own assets. Who is rebuilding Iraq? Halliburton. And what do you have in the end? US Ownership of Iraq's assets.
Horsecrap again. The US can't afford to come out of this looking "imperialistic", so sadly enough we're absorbing the cost ourselves (well some is being borne by our allies, but not much). US companies won't end up owning much in Iraq, though there well may be some "sweetheart deals". I don't see a problem with that - better us than Germany, France or China.
The other thing you're missing is that Germany was quite poor at the end of WWII, while Iraq has vast petroleum wealth. Iraq won't need nearly as much help to succeed, it just needs a working government, industrious citizens, and a modicum of security.
In Iraq the precision aerial bombardment technology did not protect innocent civilians from "collateral damage" as advertised.
LOL! You are totally clueless.
Do you have any idea how many civilians would have died in Baghdad alone if precision guided weapons *hadn't* been used?!? It would probably have been 100x more.
Precision munitions saved many, many civilian lives. That isn't the same thing as saying "No civilians were killed".
This is not "real-time" application. This is hardware-in-the-loop simiulation.
HIL simulations are hard realtime applications. Do you even know what the definition of "hard realtime" is? In a nutshell it's "If a task fails to run at it's scheduled time, it's a fatal error.". Soft realtime means it's not a 'fatal' error if the task schedule isn't met (i.e. a dropped frame in a game).
Moreover, not only is Linux inappropriate for real-time primary defense system..
Baloney.
it is generally strictly prohibited (almost uniformly) by military specification because it is not a true real time operating system. Back at the old job, VxWorks [xs4all.nl] variants were most common.
Also not true. Linux (with an appropriately modified kernel) is in fact a "true" realtime OS. Here's a list of military projects using Lynuxworks (only one flavor out of several).
This page has a good description of the Lynuxworks product, along with some RT certification information.
WindRiver is also offering Linux, though I see their version isn't RT capable. Guess they still haven't figured out that vxWorks is on the way out...
(BTW, I'm a certified vxWorks developer myself...)
But what about the little blurb in the Java license that says, essentially, to not use Java for critical systems like nuclear reactor controllers, medical XRay machines, etc.?
That is a liability disclaimer, so if you use Java for something it wasn't designed for, Sun doesn't get sued. Also, Sun would like to sell you an RT version of Java instead.;-)
RT Java is currently being used in one of the major military autonomous aircraft programs. There was a blurb about it at Javalobby.
Like it or not, in 10+ years from now most (if not all) applications will be written in either Java,.NET or a similar Framework/Language.
Perhaps. It isn't clear to me why one would necessarily want to write a "traditional" application (i.e. desktop style application) in a "managed" language. I've been a big Java fan, mainly from the standpoint of someone who came from C++ and could see that Java was much more productive. I even wanted to write high-performance code (and games) in Java. However, the numbers have never really been in Java's favor. Look at the benchmarks at the Great Computer Language Shootout. They're microbenchmarks, where Java should do quite well if it can really stand up to "traditional" languages in efficiency. The short story is, it doesn't. Further, I don't see the JVM/JIT ever catching up with a highly optimizing ahead-of-time compiler, especially in terms of memory efficiency.
In short, I'm planning on using Java for web-oriented programming, but for 'real' desktop apps it'll either be D or Dylan for me. Both are far more expressive, just as safe, just as productive (if not moreso) and both are significantly faster. Oh, one final point...both are available as FOSS.
C/C++ will only be used where bit-banging stuff is needed AND NO ONE will care about except a few grumpy old man...
Both will be around for a *long* time due to legacy code, but I agree for new development a more modern language is desirable. D and Dylan both fit the bill...Java really doesn't hit the same target. Also, both languages have language constructs like operator overloading that're more suitable for HPC/simulation/game programming, and feature very performant C calling interfaces.
Having said that, the science on this topic is both overwhelming and irrefutable (and anyone who really cares enough to do a literature review will confirm it): media (and game) violence increases a person's propensity towards aggression and violence.
Isn't that fascinating? How is it, then, that violent crime has consistently dropped over the last thirty years, during precisely the period when such violent media and games have become ubiquitous? In fact the "catharsis" argument begins to look pretty good...
In short, imitating violent behavior could just as well be play for children as serious violence (think cops and robbers). The question really is (and it appears to have been answered negatively) is are there significant long-term psychological consequences to being exposed to such material?
Don't believe me? Do your due diligence (don't make me do it for you, you're a big boy now) and maybe in the process you will discover why all the major medical, psychological, psychiatric, and pediatric organizations (who have reviewed the literature) agree with what I'm saying.
Psychiatry is a soft science, and all those "studies" prove it.
What about those violent crime statistics?
To be on the other side is analogous to denying global warming.
No, to be on the other side is to wait the arrival of definitive information. That is also my stance on global warming, which is far from "scientifically proven". (And just so you don't blow a gasket, I agree that less pollution is good...that seems a common sense stance.;)
You're free to do it, but it makes you a bit of a non-science person and more of a 'faith-based reasoning' person. And, you know you fancy yourself a science person cuz you read slashdot, LOL. One final note - when I say "literature" I mean peer-reviewed science, not pop-journalism, just to be clear.
Nonsense.
At any rate, as someone who's enjoyed violent movies since childhood, and played videogames since I was a teenager (a LONG time ago), I must say that I never had any problem separating my in-game actions and thoughts which had no consequences from my real life actions and thoughts which have real consequences. Anyone who cannot is not, in fact, sane. I don't think we should base media availability on whether or not it would have adverse effects on the mentally unbalanced.
I think you meant to say "has the same or better performance, it just costs more".
I'm not the original poster, but Itanium is substantially slower than Opteron at integer calcs. These are the numbers for the 1.6 GHz. Itanium with 9 MB(!) of cache, vs. the 2.6 GHz. Opteron 154 with 1 MB of cache:
The Itanium is *marginally* faster at FP, but is almost 25% slower at integer calcs. Database and webserving are two server application areas that are integer calc intensive. Guess which processor wins?
On the other hand, if your goal is maximizing performance/price, Opteron wins hands down for all workloads. =)
I'm ECSTATIC about this news - as long as the rumored ability to dual-boot Windows XP is a reality.
I think it's even better than that - I think there'll be affordable solutions allowing Windows apps to run at basically full speed under OSX, in a sandbox where they can't harm the rest of the OSX system. Should be sweet, no dual booting!
Statments like "The dual-core Yonah chip could very likely deliver performance greater than Apple's current G4-based PowerBooks." does not sound too reliable.
It's worse than that, it sounds inane. Current single-core Pentium M boxes absolutely kill Powerbooks on performance.
I find the predictions AppleInsider made last Friday to be more sensible, but I am still not sure if Apple would put the 32-bit Yonah into the iMac, as it may be seen as a step back from the 64-bit G5.
Has any iMac permitted more than 4 GB of RAM? IIRC, the current limit is 2 GB...so 32-bit is not a limitation in the near future. You do realize that Pentium-M fetches 64 bits at a time right? A 64 bit memory path is different from a 64 bit address space. (64 bit integer registers are a different issue but in practice don't make too much difference.)
If Apple wanted a great 64-bit low power x86 CPU it should have not gone exclusively with Intel, and also used Turion. Turion looks like an excellent Pentium-M competitor with 64-bit thrown in as a bonus.
I want to see at least a solid 5-10 years of profitability before I'd consider investing a dime, personally.
At which point you'll be investing in a mature, proven company...with a lot less growth potential, and hence much lower stock appreciation prospects.
The way to make big money in the stock market is to find small, great companies and ride their coattails to wealth. More risk, but far greater rewards.
I'm sure you will correct me if I am wrong, but I do not believe there are any pebble bed power-gen plants in the US.
No power generation plants are, since few new plants have been built recently.
One might as well say fusion power plants will have no containment vessels therefore nuclear energy is safe.
Non sequitur. We don't know how to build fusion plants - we do know how to build pebble bed reactors. Big difference.
Even the current plants are extremely safe, there are currently 104 operating in the United States. Hundreds of billions(!) of kilowatt-hours a year, and absolutely zero greenhouse gas emissions.
if you intercept the key you can read the rest of the transaction at your leisure
This isn't true, and is the exact point of public key cryptography. The encryption keys are public, but observers still can't read encrypted data since secret private keys are required to decrypt.
I think you're referring to a "man in the middle" attack, where you intercept one party's public key, then send your own public key to the intended recipient. You get any responses, which you now decrypt, save your copy, re-encrypt with the original party's key, and send it to him. No one ever realizes you were involved in the transaction (at least until they compare keys), and you escape with the cleartext.
Interestingly, quantum mechanics has solved the "man in the middle" problem. Companies are already selling quantum-based communcications links which are impossible to tap undetected (in order to set up a man-in-the-middle situaton).
I think these numbers demonstrate that it is definately within the realm of possibility for a well funded government agency to crack such passwords.
You made some serious simplifying assumptions though - your approach won't find passwords like "Fred$simplifY", "wIlMa$1453", "s1am$%!mythong", or even "jerk234". So, you'd better check your numbers again.;-)
Oh, by the way, even in your scenario the punctuation would increase the crack time by a factor of 10...you forgot to include it.
I'm not going to take time to rebut all your points, since this paragraph shows your depth of research and reasoning nicely.
However, the parent's statitics *are* silly. To say that the radioactive hazard from a failed launch of a nuclear reactor would be unimportant because uranium is emitted by coal-fired power plants is silly for many reasons, one of which is that the uranium emitted by coal-fred plants is not reactor-grade and the uranium in a reactor is...well, reactor grade. Or the fissionble material may even be plutonium.
If you read what he wrote, he was in fact talking about *bomb grade* (worse than reactor grade) U-235 *and* plutonium. Exactly the same chemicals we'd be facing if a reactor vaporized in the atmosphere.
Oh, I will address one of your other points. Pebble bed reactors have virtually no issues with reactor vessels, since they physically can't melt down.
Almost all technologies get safer over time, and nuclear power is no exception.
There's no way their custom motherboards can compete with quality brands like Abit, Asus and MSI and this is the reason I would never buy a computer from them to begin with.
You'd better take a hard look after the Intel transition then, since their motherboards will be essentially standard and most likely manufactured by the third parties you mention.
I hope Apple will be willing to let a little profit margin go after the switch, in order to gain massive market share (say, 10%;).
Actually, wouldn't an encrypted OS hard-drive typically boil down to some kind of Password Based Encryption (PBE) scheme anyways? These are notoriously easy to use dictionary attacks on, especially if you know something about the encrypted data (like it contains OS-X binaries for example...)
I thought dictionary attacks won't work with passwords of the form "concerned$citizen"? As I understand it to break this type of hashed password it is basically a brute-force approach against the whole field.
For that password, I make the possible combinations if just upper/lower case text, digits, and 10 punctuation symbols are possible at each position in a 13 character password at:
1,397,405,517,247,104,682,033,152 ((52+10+10)^13)
So, that is how many hash operations you need if you happen to know the password is 13 char. Given that cracking it is a perfect distributed application, i.e. perfect for Beowulf cluster and friends, it is possible for the government to easily throw a large cluster at the problem.
Let's say their cluster has 1024 2 GHz. CPUs that can hash every 1,000 cycles (this is probably optimistic). So, 2,000,000 hashes per second per machine. If I did the calculation right, the cluster would take 7,897,302,230 days (or 329,054,259 years) to complete the search. There are some ways to cut this down, for instance assuming there are no more than 4 punctuation chars or captials, but it can't be cut down all that much.
Even worse, in practice you don't know how many characters the password was, which means you need to search a space from (say) 6 characters to 32 characters wide. Good luck.:-)
A far more reasonable approach would be for them to install a keylogger or other form of surveillance, and capture your password.;-)
So, to return to the topic at hand, I think the idea of 90 days versus 30 is strictly in hopes the prisoner breaks.
It would be pretty goddamned serious if it was spread out in my yard or in my neighborhood or in my city.
I'm quite sure no possible flight path will pass over your location, so relax.
It is all about concentration.
Only partly, it is also about location, as you allude above.
I get very tired of people trying to use silly statitics like this to rationalize how hazardous materials are really harmless.
They aren't 'silly statistics', or irrelevant. The grandparent was pointing out that the "doomsday" scenario often touted by the antinukers is "the spacecraft will burn up and plutonium dust will be dispersed over a huge area!". His post directly addressed that scenario and showed it to be...silly. Nice job.
By your logic because power plants put millions of tons of carbon monoxide into the air every year it is somehow proved that fraction of a pound of it in the air of my garage isn't going to kill me dead?
Absolutely not. What he is pointing out is that a) burning coal has some nasty and not well known side effects and b) dispersing even quite large amounts of "deadly nuclear material" into the atmosphere pales by comparision. By the way, coal power plant emissions do kill a lot of people every year. We should be aggressively building nuclear power plants both for health reasons, and to help the environment. Any environmentalist that says otherwise simply doesn't know what it's talking about.
BTW, even high concentrations can be no problem whatsoever. The most likely scenario would be for the reactor to land in the ocean, not suffer a vessel rupture, and sit on the sea floor in a perfectly benign manner. The fuel couldn't even be processed into nuclear bombs (at least without at government-level effort).
Re:Since the submitter didn't bother to explain...
on
IBM Releases Cell SDK
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3) Steve goes out on stage and pretends like he has made the 'choice' to move to Intel
You're bitter about something. Care to share?
Steve most certainly made a decision to go Intel. No "pretending" involved. Just what dollar value to you ascribe to "5% of IBM's chip volume", BTW?
4) With Cell processors in Macs no longer an option for Apple, the sour grapes meme that the idiot above parroted starts to make its rounds in Mac circles.
Cell wouldn't be that great for it's clock speed, but it would certainly work. I'm pretty sure Pentium-M and descendants will beat it for GP computation, and without learning an involved new programming approach.
5) Intel's processor roadmap fiasco continues, but what is funny is how Intel's roadmap for future chips years down the road has chip designs that look very close to STI's Cell chips that being made today.
Really, care to provide a link? What are you claiming corresponds to SPEs in Intel's designs? I've heard nothing about this.
Slashdot Mirror
The one thing you forgot to mention about the E-series cameras is that you can get great addon lenses. For under $1000, you can get an F 2.8 600 mm. telephoto - a VERY expensive lens for 35 mm. cameras.
This Sony sounds quite unappealing, really. I wonder why this particular camera was worthy of a Slashdot story?
Exactly the point I was going to make, glad to see you beat me to it. I think the main point of this research is more to better understand how bio neurons work so we can make better electronic ones. If some derivative of neural net theory turns out to be a good model for working nerves, then in theory we could build large networks of electronic neurons that "think" in the same way bio brains do - except by the nature of electronic impulses versus nerve impulses the electronic version should be thousands(?) of times faster. Oh yeah, and immune to G forces. ;-)
We already have semi-functional large bio neural nets (most likely you have one in your head). Next step is large electronic neural nets. =)
No academic would likely use the Wikipedia as a reference, simply because the content is malleable. Perhaps it could be used with a printed (or cut/pasted) version of the current article there, but never the live site.
Now we just need to start building some real (nuclear) spaceships.
Well, that's an impressive argument. :-P
First, in the Japan case, we kept the Emperor around. The Emperor of Japan, at the time, was the absolute power to the Japanese. If the emperor said, "Cooperate with the Americans", the people cooperated. If the emperor said, "We're now a democracy. Go vote," people went and voted. If the emperor said "Hop on one foot for the day," people hopped on one foot. You did what the emperor said.
Yes, I'd agree that Japan is not a good analogy...and it's also one I didn't use. Next strawman please.
Second, in the Germany case, you had a country that already had a democratic history. The people of Germany essentially elected Hitler as dictator. When the War was over, they had experience and trust in a democratic system.
Horsepucky. The German people had a terrible time under their "democratic" government. That's WHY they brought Hitler to power.
The people of Iraq have no such history.
Below you point out that Hussein was elected... Which is it?
Also, the rebuilding of Germany was sort of the first steps of the Cold War--we had to show the people of the world that America, Freedom, Mom, Apple Pie, etc. were better than those godless commies. Again, the idea was to win the hearts of minds of the people of Germany. There was no such plan in place in Iraq.
Also nonsense. We have a very large rebuilding plan in Iraq, designed to do EXACTLY what you suggest. It hasn't gone as well as hoped, mainly due to security issues.
However, the factor that you're conveniently ignoring that makes Iraq a much *easier* proposition than Germany in the long run, is the proliferation of Western culture and technology through the media. From what I hear the typical Iraqi teenager in Baghdad today is sporting a rapper T-shirt and talking on a cell phone. Satellite TV dishes are everywhere. McDonalds franchises can't be far behind. ;-)
Every government in the area is terrified of the effect of Western media on its citizens - and Iraq is now thoroughly immersed in it.
Things are actually looking quite good, depending on how things go through December 15. I'm highly optimistic.
Then there's the whole "rebuilding" thing. Who do you think rebuilt Germany? The answer, of course, is Germans via money provided by the US's Marshall Plan. In the end, you had German companies who owned their own assets. Who is rebuilding Iraq? Halliburton. And what do you have in the end? US Ownership of Iraq's assets.
Horsecrap again. The US can't afford to come out of this looking "imperialistic", so sadly enough we're absorbing the cost ourselves (well some is being borne by our allies, but not much). US companies won't end up owning much in Iraq, though there well may be some "sweetheart deals". I don't see a problem with that - better us than Germany, France or China.
The other thing you're missing is that Germany was quite poor at the end of WWII, while Iraq has vast petroleum wealth. Iraq won't need nearly as much help to succeed, it just needs a working government, industrious citizens, and a modicum of security.
LOL! You are totally clueless.
Do you have any idea how many civilians would have died in Baghdad alone if precision guided weapons *hadn't* been used?!? It would probably have been 100x more.
Precision munitions saved many, many civilian lives. That isn't the same thing as saying "No civilians were killed".
HIL simulations are hard realtime applications. Do you even know what the definition of "hard realtime" is? In a nutshell it's "If a task fails to run at it's scheduled time, it's a fatal error.". Soft realtime means it's not a 'fatal' error if the task schedule isn't met (i.e. a dropped frame in a game).
Moreover, not only is Linux inappropriate for real-time primary defense system..
Baloney.
it is generally strictly prohibited (almost uniformly) by military specification because it is not a true real time operating system. Back at the old job, VxWorks [xs4all.nl] variants were most common.
Also not true. Linux (with an appropriately modified kernel) is in fact a "true" realtime OS. Here's a list of military projects using Lynuxworks (only one flavor out of several).
This page has a good description of the Lynuxworks product, along with some RT certification information.
WindRiver is also offering Linux, though I see their version isn't RT capable. Guess they still haven't figured out that vxWorks is on the way out...
(BTW, I'm a certified vxWorks developer myself...)
That is a liability disclaimer, so if you use Java for something it wasn't designed for, Sun doesn't get sued. Also, Sun would like to sell you an RT version of Java instead. ;-)
RT Java is currently being used in one of the major military autonomous aircraft programs. There was a blurb about it at Javalobby.
Not only that, you get free hardware! lol
With Niagara systems being launched today(?) you'd better include SPARC.
Perhaps. It isn't clear to me why one would necessarily want to write a "traditional" application (i.e. desktop style application) in a "managed" language. I've been a big Java fan, mainly from the standpoint of someone who came from C++ and could see that Java was much more productive. I even wanted to write high-performance code (and games) in Java. However, the numbers have never really been in Java's favor. Look at the benchmarks at the Great Computer Language Shootout. They're microbenchmarks, where Java should do quite well if it can really stand up to "traditional" languages in efficiency. The short story is, it doesn't. Further, I don't see the JVM/JIT ever catching up with a highly optimizing ahead-of-time compiler, especially in terms of memory efficiency.
In short, I'm planning on using Java for web-oriented programming, but for 'real' desktop apps it'll either be D or Dylan for me. Both are far more expressive, just as safe, just as productive (if not moreso) and both are significantly faster. Oh, one final point...both are available as FOSS.
C/C++ will only be used where bit-banging stuff is needed AND NO ONE will care about except a few grumpy old man...
Both will be around for a *long* time due to legacy code, but I agree for new development a more modern language is desirable. D and Dylan both fit the bill...Java really doesn't hit the same target. Also, both languages have language constructs like operator overloading that're more suitable for HPC/simulation/game programming, and feature very performant C calling interfaces.
Isn't that fascinating? How is it, then, that violent crime has consistently dropped over the last thirty years, during precisely the period when such violent media and games have become ubiquitous? In fact the "catharsis" argument begins to look pretty good...
In short, imitating violent behavior could just as well be play for children as serious violence (think cops and robbers). The question really is (and it appears to have been answered negatively) is are there significant long-term psychological consequences to being exposed to such material?
Don't believe me? Do your due diligence (don't make me do it for you, you're a big boy now) and maybe in the process you will discover why all the major medical, psychological, psychiatric, and pediatric organizations (who have reviewed the literature) agree with what I'm saying.
Psychiatry is a soft science, and all those "studies" prove it.
What about those violent crime statistics?
To be on the other side is analogous to denying global warming.
No, to be on the other side is to wait the arrival of definitive information. That is also my stance on global warming, which is far from "scientifically proven". (And just so you don't blow a gasket, I agree that less pollution is good...that seems a common sense stance.;)
You're free to do it, but it makes you a bit of a non-science person and more of a 'faith-based reasoning' person. And, you know you fancy yourself a science person cuz you read slashdot, LOL. One final note - when I say "literature" I mean peer-reviewed science, not pop-journalism, just to be clear.
Nonsense.
At any rate, as someone who's enjoyed violent movies since childhood, and played videogames since I was a teenager (a LONG time ago), I must say that I never had any problem separating my in-game actions and thoughts which had no consequences from my real life actions and thoughts which have real consequences. Anyone who cannot is not, in fact, sane. I don't think we should base media availability on whether or not it would have adverse effects on the mentally unbalanced.
I'm not the original poster, but Itanium is substantially slower than Opteron at integer calcs. These are the numbers for the 1.6 GHz. Itanium with 9 MB(!) of cache, vs. the 2.6 GHz. Opteron 154 with 1 MB of cache:
The Itanium is *marginally* faster at FP, but is almost 25% slower at integer calcs. Database and webserving are two server application areas that are integer calc intensive. Guess which processor wins?On the other hand, if your goal is maximizing performance/price, Opteron wins hands down for all workloads. =)
Apple is going to give away a free copy of Windows with every Mac86?
Um, no. :^)
Further, most likely some other software will be necessary such as VMWare.
Was there some other basis for your "FREE" comment?
I think it's even better than that - I think there'll be affordable solutions allowing Windows apps to run at basically full speed under OSX, in a sandbox where they can't harm the rest of the OSX system. Should be sweet, no dual booting!
It's worse than that, it sounds inane. Current single-core Pentium M boxes absolutely kill Powerbooks on performance.
I find the predictions AppleInsider made last Friday to be more sensible, but I am still not sure if Apple would put the 32-bit Yonah into the iMac, as it may be seen as a step back from the 64-bit G5.
Has any iMac permitted more than 4 GB of RAM? IIRC, the current limit is 2 GB...so 32-bit is not a limitation in the near future. You do realize that Pentium-M fetches 64 bits at a time right? A 64 bit memory path is different from a 64 bit address space. (64 bit integer registers are a different issue but in practice don't make too much difference.)
If Apple wanted a great 64-bit low power x86 CPU it should have not gone exclusively with Intel, and also used Turion. Turion looks like an excellent Pentium-M competitor with 64-bit thrown in as a bonus.
At which point you'll be investing in a mature, proven company...with a lot less growth potential, and hence much lower stock appreciation prospects.
The way to make big money in the stock market is to find small, great companies and ride their coattails to wealth. More risk, but far greater rewards.
No power generation plants are, since few new plants have been built recently.
One might as well say fusion power plants will have no containment vessels therefore nuclear energy is safe.
Non sequitur. We don't know how to build fusion plants - we do know how to build pebble bed reactors. Big difference.
Even the current plants are extremely safe, there are currently 104 operating in the United States. Hundreds of billions(!) of kilowatt-hours a year, and absolutely zero greenhouse gas emissions.
Every environmentalist should love 'em! =)
This isn't true, and is the exact point of public key cryptography. The encryption keys are public, but observers still can't read encrypted data since secret private keys are required to decrypt.
I think you're referring to a "man in the middle" attack, where you intercept one party's public key, then send your own public key to the intended recipient. You get any responses, which you now decrypt, save your copy, re-encrypt with the original party's key, and send it to him. No one ever realizes you were involved in the transaction (at least until they compare keys), and you escape with the cleartext.
Interestingly, quantum mechanics has solved the "man in the middle" problem. Companies are already selling quantum-based communcications links which are impossible to tap undetected (in order to set up a man-in-the-middle situaton).
You made some serious simplifying assumptions though - your approach won't find passwords like "Fred$simplifY", "wIlMa$1453", "s1am$%!mythong", or even "jerk234". So, you'd better check your numbers again. ;-)
Oh, by the way, even in your scenario the punctuation would increase the crack time by a factor of 10...you forgot to include it.
However, the parent's statitics *are* silly. To say that the radioactive hazard from a failed launch of a nuclear reactor would be unimportant because uranium is emitted by coal-fired power plants is silly for many reasons, one of which is that the uranium emitted by coal-fred plants is not reactor-grade and the uranium in a reactor is...well, reactor grade. Or the fissionble material may even be plutonium.
If you read what he wrote, he was in fact talking about *bomb grade* (worse than reactor grade) U-235 *and* plutonium. Exactly the same chemicals we'd be facing if a reactor vaporized in the atmosphere.
Oh, I will address one of your other points. Pebble bed reactors have virtually no issues with reactor vessels, since they physically can't melt down.
Almost all technologies get safer over time, and nuclear power is no exception.
You'd better take a hard look after the Intel transition then, since their motherboards will be essentially standard and most likely manufactured by the third parties you mention.
I hope Apple will be willing to let a little profit margin go after the switch, in order to gain massive market share (say, 10%;).
I thought dictionary attacks won't work with passwords of the form "concerned$citizen"? As I understand it to break this type of hashed password it is basically a brute-force approach against the whole field.
For that password, I make the possible combinations if just upper/lower case text, digits, and 10 punctuation symbols are possible at each position in a 13 character password at:
1,397,405,517,247,104,682,033,152 ((52+10+10)^13)
So, that is how many hash operations you need if you happen to know the password is 13 char. Given that cracking it is a perfect distributed application, i.e. perfect for Beowulf cluster and friends, it is possible for the government to easily throw a large cluster at the problem.
Let's say their cluster has 1024 2 GHz. CPUs that can hash every 1,000 cycles (this is probably optimistic). So, 2,000,000 hashes per second per machine. If I did the calculation right, the cluster would take 7,897,302,230 days (or 329,054,259 years) to complete the search. There are some ways to cut this down, for instance assuming there are no more than 4 punctuation chars or captials, but it can't be cut down all that much.
Even worse, in practice you don't know how many characters the password was, which means you need to search a space from (say) 6 characters to 32 characters wide. Good luck. :-)
A far more reasonable approach would be for them to install a keylogger or other form of surveillance, and capture your password. ;-)
So, to return to the topic at hand, I think the idea of 90 days versus 30 is strictly in hopes the prisoner breaks.
I'm quite sure no possible flight path will pass over your location, so relax.
It is all about concentration.
Only partly, it is also about location, as you allude above.
I get very tired of people trying to use silly statitics like this to rationalize how hazardous materials are really harmless.
They aren't 'silly statistics', or irrelevant. The grandparent was pointing out that the "doomsday" scenario often touted by the antinukers is "the spacecraft will burn up and plutonium dust will be dispersed over a huge area!". His post directly addressed that scenario and showed it to be...silly. Nice job.
By your logic because power plants put millions of tons of carbon monoxide into the air every year it is somehow proved that fraction of a pound of it in the air of my garage isn't going to kill me dead?
Absolutely not. What he is pointing out is that a) burning coal has some nasty and not well known side effects and b) dispersing even quite large amounts of "deadly nuclear material" into the atmosphere pales by comparision. By the way, coal power plant emissions do kill a lot of people every year. We should be aggressively building nuclear power plants both for health reasons, and to help the environment. Any environmentalist that says otherwise simply doesn't know what it's talking about.
BTW, even high concentrations can be no problem whatsoever. The most likely scenario would be for the reactor to land in the ocean, not suffer a vessel rupture, and sit on the sea floor in a perfectly benign manner. The fuel couldn't even be processed into nuclear bombs (at least without at government-level effort).
You're bitter about something. Care to share?
Steve most certainly made a decision to go Intel. No "pretending" involved. Just what dollar value to you ascribe to "5% of IBM's chip volume", BTW?
4) With Cell processors in Macs no longer an option for Apple, the sour grapes meme that the idiot above parroted starts to make its rounds in Mac circles.
Cell wouldn't be that great for it's clock speed, but it would certainly work. I'm pretty sure Pentium-M and descendants will beat it for GP computation, and without learning an involved new programming approach.
5) Intel's processor roadmap fiasco continues, but what is funny is how Intel's roadmap for future chips years down the road has chip designs that look very close to STI's Cell chips that being made today.
Really, care to provide a link? What are you claiming corresponds to SPEs in Intel's designs? I've heard nothing about this.