What you say about upgrading to dual core is true (if the PR is to be believed anyway). However, every time I've tried to do anything like that in the past it hasn't worked out. The cost of a MB is minor compared to the cost of the new chip (especially since the new MB will have goodies like firewire which my current one doesn't). Plus if you upgrade your CPU you have to a) install it, and b) throw away the old one.
You won't get much for that old CPU, but on the other hand if you can get around a 90% throughput improvement for a couple hundred dollars, I'd say that's a good upgrade myself. Most CPU replacment upgrades in the past only got you 10-20% performance improvement for a big investment.
That means that the power consumption of all the CPUs in the world equate to over 3 million barrels of oil/year.
According to this page, Hoover Dam generates 4e9 kilowatt-hrs, or 4e6 MWH per year. 20 Hoover Dams would account for 8e7 MWH per year. Using your conversion factors, that comes out to 5.48e9 (~5.5 billion barrels) of oil a year, or 15 million barrels a day. Scarcely a drop in the bucket, eh? Worldwide, that is 3/4 of the American oil burn rate being consumed by CPUs (note that much electricity is generated by coal and nuclear).
First, I have to admit I have a preference for Intel. I always have, and I am willing to pay a premium for the name. Back in college, when some tried to save a few bucks and buy Cyrix, the rest of us saw the hell they lived through. Windows NT would NOT work with Cyrix, it kept locking up.
Yes, that all sounds about right but has absolutely zero relevance to today and AMD.
The past few years, I have started meeting some people who are fanatical about AMD, how it is better than Intel. And it is no coincidence, many of these people are die-hard linux users as well. But I remembered the old AMD k-5 chips that used to overheat. My logic was "AMD is following the leader, making imitation chips, they will never be in the lead".
I'm not sure how your "logic" follows, but AMD has had several firsts over the last few years - first to 1 GHz., first with on-chip memory controller, and first with x86-64 instruction set. AMD chips are also the highest performers on pretty much every workload except media encoding/decoding. If you're a gamer, they are the best performers these days. Plus, AMD64 CPUs are rock-solid stable, use less power, run cooler, and cost less for the same level of performance. What's not to like?
I think the #1 problem AMD must overcome is the relationship Intel has with Microsoft. AMD makes clone chips, Intel makes chips that fit into Microsofts OS. Intel and Microsoft share information about how the chip will work with the software.
I have no idea what you're talking about here. Microsoft has been up-front about preferring AMD's 64 bit technology, and is using for all their 64 bit servers. Further, AMD is absolutely compatible with Intel, and there haven't been any publicized compatibility issues for quite a while.
And, I guess it is also an issue of name. To this day, I still buy Sony because their TV's were the cadillac of TV's when I was a kid.
Basing your purchases strictly on a company name is a good way to waste money. Do some research and buy the best product. In my opinion, on the PC CPU front, that's AMD.
Oh, one last point about AMD's current lineup - you can purchase a socket 939 motherboard today, and use an inexpensive Athlon 64 CPU for now, then later do a firmware upgrade and install a dual-core replacement once prices come down. Intel has no such upgrade path for its products.
The author of the cited article is clueless on several fronts, but he does have a good basic point: if you're choosing between Windows, Mac and Linux for the "best" computing platform, Mac is looking awfully attractive these days.
In another article on Slashdot today it's mentioned that Eric Raymond recommends Microsoft "open document formats" and "adhere to standards". Document formats aren't really an issue with Apple, but Apple is doing a very nice job of adhering to open standards these days. BSD Unix, Java, OpenGL, PDF, TCP/IP, X11...Apple is much more programmer friendly than it has ever been. The G5 machines are also very competitive on performance.
If you need access to commercial applications, or would rather spend money instead of time to accomplish your computing tasks, Mac makes a lot of sense compared with Linux. Windows, for me, is a distant third due to the time lost dealing with security issues, and a general distaste for programming something that inelegant. Besides, I can target Windows using Java with very little pain.
A dual core processor will also run cooler than two single cores, and the reduced number of external interconnects means that the whole thing can be clocked faster.
This isn't correct. Note that the recently announced dual-core CPUs from both Intel and AMD are significantly underclocked from the fastest single-core offering. This is to keep TDP (thermal design power) down.
For this reason, the fastest dual-CPU systems are still faster than the fastest single CPU dual-core system. Going to dual dual-core CPUs involves some tradeoffs, and plenty of cash. However, you can make that upgrade when you wish with existing dual-CPU Opteron systems.
AMD and Intel both rushed dual core to market for bragging rights. Both companies are using a design that's really not much more than two dies on the same wafer with a little interconnect circuitry.
So no, the PPC970 hasn't received dual core yet, but claiming that IBM 'can't keep up' from a technological standpoint is absolutely ridiculous, and suggests that you don't really know what you're talking about.
Granted, IBM knows what it's doing. It should make a dual core annoucement soon for the PPC970 (if it has such plans) soon though, just for bragging rights.
Quad-core Power Macs would be sweet, especially at the same price point! =)
Hard to see how to improve that without destroying run-anywhere.
Not true. Why would you think that?
You'd have to stick with 32-bit integers, or you wouldn't get the same behaviour on two different platforms.
You don't know about "long"?
I guess the VM could use 64-bit pointers internally, but as you can't access memory directly in Java I don't know how the programmer would ever be able to tell.
The programmer would be able to tell when the allocation of more than 4 GB worth of objects happened without incident.:-)
If you really want to limit yourself to a single platform, use JNI to call C code that uses your hardware-specific instructions. But if you're going to do that, why not just use C++ in the first place?
Because C++ is rather broken, and people would rather use a saner language? For instance, gcj and CNI provide a lightweight approach that seems superior to JNI in many situations.
C++ really needs to be replaced, and Java seems the logical candidate to do it. Java needs further improvements and extensibility, but C++ was around a *long* time before it began to approach actual usability.
Your simulation was a bit flawed. For the actual numbers given, and 45 deg. angle of impact (considered most likely), effects look fairly severe at 30 km. range, not so bad at 75 (this was for impact into sedimentary rock). If it were to hit in the ocean, I'd say there's potential for a fairly bad tsunami, especially if it were to hit close to shore. Here was my run:
Your Inputs:
Distance from Impact: 30.00 km = 18.63 miles
Projectile Diameter: 320.00 m = 1049.60 ft = 0.20 miles
Projectile Density: 2681 kg/m3
Impact Velocity: 12.59 km/s = 7.82 miles/s
Impact Angle: 45 degrees
Target Density: 2500 kg/m3
Target Type: Sedimentary Rock
Energy:
Energy before atmospheric entry: 3.65 x 1018 Joules = 8.71 x 1e2 MegaTons TNT
The average interval between impacts of this size somewhere on Earth during the last 4 billion years is 2.0 x 1e4years
Relevant figures for a 75 km. distant sedimentary rock hit:
Ejecta:
The ejecta will arrive approximately 125 seconds after the impact.
At your position the ejecta arrives in scattered fragments
Average Ejecta Thickness: 3.5 mm = 0.138 inches
Mean Fragment Diameter: 5.62 cm = 2.21 inches
Air Blast:
The air blast will arrive at approximately 227 seconds.
Peak Overpressure: 11900 Pa = 0.119 bars = 1.69 psi
Max wind velocity: 26.8 m/s = 59.9 mph
Sound Intensity: 82 dB (Loud as heavy traffic)
Damage Description:
Glass windows will shatter.
For 30 km. range:
Ejecta:
The ejecta will arrive approximately 78.5 seconds after the impact.
Average Ejecta Thickness: 5.47 cm = 2.15 inches
Mean Fragment Diameter: 63.7 cm = 25.1 inches
Air Blast:
The air blast will arrive at approximately 90.9 seconds.
Peak Overpressure: 59800 Pa = 0.598 bars = 8.5 psi
Max wind velocity: 115 m/s = 257 mph
Sound Intensity: 96 dB (May cause ear pain)
Damage Description:
Multistory wall-bearing buildings will collapse.
Wood frame buildings will almost completely collapse.
Glass windows will shatter.
Up to 90 percent of trees blown down; remainder stripped of branches and leaves.
Everything is made of of elements, elements have different atomic masses. With out being able to determine the composition of the asteriod, and thus its mass, we can't figure out how much force is going to be generated by the earth's gravitation on the asteroid, and thus its eventual trajectory. That is of course even assumes the formula you have provided is correct, and applicable to a correct answer.
It's the correct formula, but the mass of the asteroid is completely negligible compared to the mass of the Earth. Also, since F = ma, you should be able to divide both sides by the mass of the asteroid and end up with a = G * Me / r^2. r isn't well known either though... However, I agree with the GP poster, I don't see what difference the composition makes unless it's passes within the Roche limit for its makeup and gets broken into smaller rocks.
You need to lose the "initial speed * time" term here. It is a two-step process.
t = v / a gives you the time needed to stop.
d = 1/2 * a * t^2 gives you the distance required.
If your stopping distance + your initial position is >= the stopping distance of the car in front of you + its initial position, you have a problem.
Note that the accelerations can be quite different, for instance if you're following a Porsche Carrera in your Cadillac Escalade.
However, this calculation still neglects an important, and highly variable value, human reaction time. Be sure and add a term of:
d = v * t
Where v is the initial velocity, and t is the reaction time of the driver. This only needs to be done for the rear vehicle.
The reason people use the "3 seconds" rule is that it works at any speed and requires only 3-5 seconds to evaluate as you travel along.
Let's see...again by high school physics, 3 seconds at 60 MPH (88 ft/s) works out to 264 ft. Shooting for following distances like that simply won't work (other drivers cut in, or drive like maniacs, or you get shot) in any urban freeway environment I've lived in...YMMV of course.;-)
Automated speed control is a good thing. You can't rely on people's own judgement on how good drivers they are -- it's well known that most people completely overestimate their abilities.
You're touching on a point that is extremely important. What we need are autonomous cars that drive themselves. In our current through-the-looking-glass legal system there is already whining about liability "but if one of these cars has an accident and kills someone who is responsible?". That shouldn't matter if it can be shown that overall they are safer than human drivers...which shouldn't be hard. The manufacturers should be granted immunity from any lawsuits against the control software. Perhaps they could pay a fixed amount (say $1 million per death) for every time it is shown that the car's software didn't perform as well as an expert human driver would have, resulting in a fatality.
The social benefits (no more "under the influence" deaths/arrests, no more tickets, fewer traffic deaths overall etc.) combined with the increased productivity of being able to do something useful while commuting would be staggering.
a) Two cores sharing the same bus... well... what have all the dual processor machines in the x86 line from Intel used?
Right...and they've suffered as a result.
2) There's more to life than games.
True, and dual cores are perhaps better suited to non-game applications. Your point is...?
D) Hypertransport doesn't enable dual cores.
I'm sure the dual-core chips are using the same SMP scheme they did with HT, just over an on-chip link. All four processors on a 2-way dual core processor look logically equivalent to the OS and each other...the on-chip link just looks like part of the HT ring.
Actually, I would only consider a dual AMD64 system worthwile. With NUMA support improving in Linux, this should be a lot faster than 2 P4 cores competing for the same memory, already suffering from high latency.
Not only that, later you could upgrade to dual-core Opterons and have a four-way system.:-)
No. If you ever read about any of the roadmaps, you'd know. Smithfield: the first dual-core processor, which is two Prescott dies welded together. No big news.
Right. Two cores sharing a single frontside bus, my understanding is that they won't perform well, plus they dissipate more heat and have larger die size than a true dual-core solution. Further, what was the point of a dual-core gaming processor right now again?
you'll learn that Intel has a huge dual-core product lineup, which dates back before AMDs Opteron announcements.
Well that's a good theory, but AMD has stated that Opteron/Athlon64 was designed for dual-core from the start. Hypertransport is also a great technology enabling this...Intel is playing catchup in that area.
One thing that's cool about the AMD approach is that dual-core processors will plug in to existing motherboards (at least socket 939 and 940). Intel's require a new chipset.
AMD *CPUS* are fine, the problem is the POS SIS, VIA and various other low-quality, buggy and incompatible chipsets that proliferate on AMD-compatible motherboards.
Go for NVIDIA nForce3 or nForce4 chipsets. Very stable, very fast, unified driver for everything but sound. Plus you get some nice extra features like hardware firewall with little CPU overhead.
It's still best to get a good quality motherboard, but they're still quite affordable. Asus has a good track record it seems...
Now I've always wondered why, if the escape velocity means the velocity you need to attain (with no additional force accelerating you away) to escape a gravitational force, why can't you have a constantly applied force, like a rocket, constantly applying a force away from the black hole, letting you escape it at less than its escape velocity?
In conventional space, this will work. From what I remember (from popular reading on the subject) once you cross the event horizon, the space and time dimensions essentially switch, and just as you can't avoid moving forward in time in normal space, you can't avoid progressing to the singularity in the center of the black hole. It's just not a reversible process.
In other words, event horizons are best avoided.:-)
Then along comes an argument like this. Gee we science types have data that all our science says doesn't make sense, so to explain it we'll postulate unexplained varying physical sates for the Universe that start for no reason we can nail down and then end for no particular reason we can give (Expansion), invisible energy that no one seems able to find (Dark Matter), or unprovable ripples that just happen to be beyond our ability to find or prove (Cosmic Irregularity Theory?).
And our evidence for this? Well it makes our math look good (just as long as you use our equations to do the math with, anyway)
What you're missing is that science has theories that make predictions about observable things in the real world.
General Relativity, for instance, led to predictions of 1) longer particle decay times for moving subatomic particles, 2) different orbital period for Mercury than Newtonian mechanics predicted and 3) bending of starlight due to intervening gravitational fields. There are quite famous observations confirming these predictions.
Similarly, there are quite convincing observations that lend support to the Big Bang theory. Cosmic backround radiation measurements, observed Hubble expansion and observations of galactic evolution as we look further away (further into the past) come to mind as examples.
That is the difference between religion and science. Science attempts to verify its theories with observed phenomena and experiments. Religion accepts its theories based on blind faith.
All that said, there is nothing incompatible between science and religion really, as long as your religion doesn't dogmatically insist its wisdom about the real world subsumes observed scientific knowledge (the big trap into which some Christian sects seem to have fallen). In fact, I would argue that quantum mechanics provides an interesting "out" for religion - quantum randomness versus "Gods will". After all, quantum randomness is neither knowable or predictable for us, but it might be exactly enacting Gods will...
I've often wondered why Einstein said "God would never play dice with the Universe". Perhaps Gods dice are loaded.:-)
Thanks for admiting that there is man-made global warming.
It's not a matter of "admitting" or "not admitting". I think there is legitimate concern about greenhouse gasses. However, given that we have no real idea a) if there is a significant enough effect to be concerned about or b) what the rate of warming is, my position is that more research is needed before making drastic and costly decisions.
Granted, cleaner is better if the cost is not too high - with or without global warming being a major factor.
The Kyoto protocol doesn't give a shit how many nuclear plants you build. If you want to produce more CO2 in addition, your plants are not going to help much with global warming.
Even if a country is producing "more CO2", the nuclear plants will still eliminate yet more CO2 from entering the atmosphere, no?
Two points. Firstly methane has a very short cycle time in the atmosphere compared to CO2; so yes, molecule-for-molecule it kicks more global warming butt than CO2 but the effect is gone in a decade or so.
I thought the point here was that various human-sponsored factors are constantly producing new methane...? Could you provide a pointer to a discussion of the normal methane cycle in the biosphere?
Secondly most of that methane is shifting carbon around within the upper, biotic, part of the carbon cycle and, as such, is not the main point at issue WRT the implications of Climate Change Theory - which is that we are mining system altering quantities of carbon out of the lithosphere and releasing it into the atmosphere/biosphere.
Perhaps, but it misses the point to say that methane is "shifting carbon around", since other forms of carbon compound aren't strong greenhouse gasses. Also, pray that the oceans don't warm enough to release the methane in the methane hydrates trapped underwater...;-)
CO2 can also be scrubbed out of the air and returned to the lithosphere (or converted into tennis rackets for that matter;). The fact is, though, that the situation is not well understood enough at this point, and more research is necessary.
So the US should refuse to participate in Kyoto and keep on producing most of the CO2 in the world because it ignores cooking fires?
First, the US will hopefully make some headway on CO2 production with or without Kyoto. The point I'm making is that Kyoto is based on our current highly imperfect understanding of what's going on, and isn't addressing a highly signficant source of potential global warming. To quote:
A large cloud of soot, produced mainly by impoverished Asians burning dung for energy, is blanketing the region, and indeed the globe. Ramanathan's discovery of the "Asian Brown Cloud," as it came to be known, offered scientists an opportunity to study and perhaps eliminate one of Earth's most deadly masses of pollution.
However, study of the cloud indicated it was doing more than filling human respiratory systems with high levels of gritty soot, mercury, and other pollutants... it was perhaps the single greatest cause of global warming on the planet.
Another flaw with Kyoto is that, as far as I can tell, it doesn't consider nuclear a "clean" power source for purposes of controlling global warming.
I couldn't see a section on bovine flatulence either, come to think of it.
I think methane emissions are addressed, as they should be - methane traps 21 times the heat as the same mass of CO2. According to current thinking, methane accounts for 20% of the anthropogenic greenhouse effect. Browsing the Net, I found conflicting reports of how fast methane concentrations are increasing, but according to this article the contribution from farm animals is significant:
Unfortunately, burped methane is more difficult to collect, with the result that about six million metric tons of it float blissfully up into the atmosphere every year. And that's just from herds in the United States. (Worldwide, ruminant livestock -- including cattle, sheep, goats, and buffalo -- produces about 80 million metric tons of methane per year, accounting for 22% of anthropogenic methane emissions.)
I don't know the details about this issue, but Kyoto is about CO2 budgets, not about air pollution. Burning wood for cooking may produce soot, but it doesn't produce extra CO2 as long as new trees take the place of the once that are burnt.
Yes, but that is why the Kyoto protocol is flawed. The authors of the cooking fire study estimated the warming effect of the soot was 30 times worse than that of the same mass of CO2.
The problem of course is who decides how secret something is and when it shouldn't be a secret anymore.
No agency can possibly do this outside the government.
The government (the current administration moreso than most, but not *much* more) has a definite "make it secret" reflex. It's shocking to me how little outcry various abuses of that have been (like a redacted FOIA on an internal audit, where the redacted sections were exposed, and were revealed to be the parts of the audit where the agency failed).
Of course they have a "make it secret" reflex. That is called "erring on the side of caution".
Secrecy is of course prone to abuse, which is why there are Congressional oversight committees. How effective those are is another topic of course...
Sadly, although unsuprisingly, both the populace and the government have forgetten who's supposed to be the servant.
Slashdot Mirror
You won't get much for that old CPU, but on the other hand if you can get around a 90% throughput improvement for a couple hundred dollars, I'd say that's a good upgrade myself. Most CPU replacment upgrades in the past only got you 10-20% performance improvement for a big investment.
According to this page, Hoover Dam generates 4e9 kilowatt-hrs, or 4e6 MWH per year. 20 Hoover Dams would account for 8e7 MWH per year. Using your conversion factors, that comes out to 5.48e9 (~5.5 billion barrels) of oil a year, or 15 million barrels a day. Scarcely a drop in the bucket, eh? Worldwide, that is 3/4 of the American oil burn rate being consumed by CPUs (note that much electricity is generated by coal and nuclear).
Double check your arithmetic.
Yes, that all sounds about right but has absolutely zero relevance to today and AMD.
The past few years, I have started meeting some people who are fanatical about AMD, how it is better than Intel. And it is no coincidence, many of these people are die-hard linux users as well. But I remembered the old AMD k-5 chips that used to overheat. My logic was "AMD is following the leader, making imitation chips, they will never be in the lead".
I'm not sure how your "logic" follows, but AMD has had several firsts over the last few years - first to 1 GHz., first with on-chip memory controller, and first with x86-64 instruction set. AMD chips are also the highest performers on pretty much every workload except media encoding/decoding. If you're a gamer, they are the best performers these days. Plus, AMD64 CPUs are rock-solid stable, use less power, run cooler, and cost less for the same level of performance. What's not to like?
I think the #1 problem AMD must overcome is the relationship Intel has with Microsoft. AMD makes clone chips, Intel makes chips that fit into Microsofts OS. Intel and Microsoft share information about how the chip will work with the software.
I have no idea what you're talking about here. Microsoft has been up-front about preferring AMD's 64 bit technology, and is using for all their 64 bit servers. Further, AMD is absolutely compatible with Intel, and there haven't been any publicized compatibility issues for quite a while.
And, I guess it is also an issue of name. To this day, I still buy Sony because their TV's were the cadillac of TV's when I was a kid.
Basing your purchases strictly on a company name is a good way to waste money. Do some research and buy the best product. In my opinion, on the PC CPU front, that's AMD.
Oh, one last point about AMD's current lineup - you can purchase a socket 939 motherboard today, and use an inexpensive Athlon 64 CPU for now, then later do a firmware upgrade and install a dual-core replacement once prices come down. Intel has no such upgrade path for its products.
In another article on Slashdot today it's mentioned that Eric Raymond recommends Microsoft "open document formats" and "adhere to standards". Document formats aren't really an issue with Apple, but Apple is doing a very nice job of adhering to open standards these days. BSD Unix, Java, OpenGL, PDF, TCP/IP, X11...Apple is much more programmer friendly than it has ever been. The G5 machines are also very competitive on performance.
If you need access to commercial applications, or would rather spend money instead of time to accomplish your computing tasks, Mac makes a lot of sense compared with Linux. Windows, for me, is a distant third due to the time lost dealing with security issues, and a general distaste for programming something that inelegant. Besides, I can target Windows using Java with very little pain.
Just my $.02.
This isn't correct. Note that the recently announced dual-core CPUs from both Intel and AMD are significantly underclocked from the fastest single-core offering. This is to keep TDP (thermal design power) down.
For this reason, the fastest dual-CPU systems are still faster than the fastest single CPU dual-core system. Going to dual dual-core CPUs involves some tradeoffs, and plenty of cash. However, you can make that upgrade when you wish with existing dual-CPU Opteron systems.
True for Intel, not so for AMD.
So no, the PPC970 hasn't received dual core yet, but claiming that IBM 'can't keep up' from a technological standpoint is absolutely ridiculous, and suggests that you don't really know what you're talking about.
Granted, IBM knows what it's doing. It should make a dual core annoucement soon for the PPC970 (if it has such plans) soon though, just for bragging rights.
Quad-core Power Macs would be sweet, especially at the same price point! =)
Or you got XP Home with your machine, which applies to a lot of people... Perhaps most of those are better off sticking with 32-bit for now though...
Not true. Why would you think that?
You'd have to stick with 32-bit integers, or you wouldn't get the same behaviour on two different platforms.
You don't know about "long"?
I guess the VM could use 64-bit pointers internally, but as you can't access memory directly in Java I don't know how the programmer would ever be able to tell.
The programmer would be able to tell when the allocation of more than 4 GB worth of objects happened without incident. :-)
If you really want to limit yourself to a single platform, use JNI to call C code that uses your hardware-specific instructions. But if you're going to do that, why not just use C++ in the first place?
Because C++ is rather broken, and people would rather use a saner language? For instance, gcj and CNI provide a lightweight approach that seems superior to JNI in many situations.
C++ really needs to be replaced, and Java seems the logical candidate to do it. Java needs further improvements and extensibility, but C++ was around a *long* time before it began to approach actual usability.
By the way, 64-bit VMs do already exist...
Relevant figures for a 75 km. distant sedimentary rock hit:
For 30 km. range:
Doesn't sound like too much fun at 30 km.!
It's the correct formula, but the mass of the asteroid is completely negligible compared to the mass of the Earth. Also, since F = ma, you should be able to divide both sides by the mass of the asteroid and end up with a = G * Me / r^2. r isn't well known either though... However, I agree with the GP poster, I don't see what difference the composition makes unless it's passes within the Roche limit for its makeup and gets broken into smaller rocks.
That would be convenient. ;-)
Like 2U 8-way (4 way with dual core) rackmount servers that perform like 16-way Xeons? And take about 1/4 the power of a 16-way Xeon?
Oh well, time for Dell's competitors to make some hay. =)
You need to lose the "initial speed * time" term here. It is a two-step process.
t = v / a gives you the time needed to stop.
d = 1/2 * a * t^2 gives you the distance required.
If your stopping distance + your initial position is >= the stopping distance of the car in front of you + its initial position, you have a problem.
Note that the accelerations can be quite different, for instance if you're following a Porsche Carrera in your Cadillac Escalade.
However, this calculation still neglects an important, and highly variable value, human reaction time. Be sure and add a term of:
d = v * t
Where v is the initial velocity, and t is the reaction time of the driver. This only needs to be done for the rear vehicle.
The reason people use the "3 seconds" rule is that it works at any speed and requires only 3-5 seconds to evaluate as you travel along.
Let's see...again by high school physics, 3 seconds at 60 MPH (88 ft/s) works out to 264 ft. Shooting for following distances like that simply won't work (other drivers cut in, or drive like maniacs, or you get shot) in any urban freeway environment I've lived in...YMMV of course. ;-)
You're touching on a point that is extremely important. What we need are autonomous cars that drive themselves. In our current through-the-looking-glass legal system there is already whining about liability "but if one of these cars has an accident and kills someone who is responsible?". That shouldn't matter if it can be shown that overall they are safer than human drivers...which shouldn't be hard. The manufacturers should be granted immunity from any lawsuits against the control software. Perhaps they could pay a fixed amount (say $1 million per death) for every time it is shown that the car's software didn't perform as well as an expert human driver would have, resulting in a fatality.
The social benefits (no more "under the influence" deaths/arrests, no more tickets, fewer traffic deaths overall etc.) combined with the increased productivity of being able to do something useful while commuting would be staggering.
Right...and they've suffered as a result.
2) There's more to life than games.
True, and dual cores are perhaps better suited to non-game applications. Your point is...?
D) Hypertransport doesn't enable dual cores.
I'm sure the dual-core chips are using the same SMP scheme they did with HT, just over an on-chip link. All four processors on a 2-way dual core processor look logically equivalent to the OS and each other...the on-chip link just looks like part of the HT ring.
Not only that, later you could upgrade to dual-core Opterons and have a four-way system. :-)
Right. Two cores sharing a single frontside bus, my understanding is that they won't perform well, plus they dissipate more heat and have larger die size than a true dual-core solution. Further, what was the point of a dual-core gaming processor right now again?
you'll learn that Intel has a huge dual-core product lineup, which dates back before AMDs Opteron announcements.
Well that's a good theory, but AMD has stated that Opteron/Athlon64 was designed for dual-core from the start. Hypertransport is also a great technology enabling this...Intel is playing catchup in that area.
One thing that's cool about the AMD approach is that dual-core processors will plug in to existing motherboards (at least socket 939 and 940). Intel's require a new chipset.
Go for NVIDIA nForce3 or nForce4 chipsets. Very stable, very fast, unified driver for everything but sound. Plus you get some nice extra features like hardware firewall with little CPU overhead.
It's still best to get a good quality motherboard, but they're still quite affordable. Asus has a good track record it seems...
In conventional space, this will work. From what I remember (from popular reading on the subject) once you cross the event horizon, the space and time dimensions essentially switch, and just as you can't avoid moving forward in time in normal space, you can't avoid progressing to the singularity in the center of the black hole. It's just not a reversible process.
In other words, event horizons are best avoided. :-)
Fine, but those are different from advocating violent overthrow of the government, publically threatening anyone, or divulging state secrets.
Those are criminal matters, and are examples of "state censorship", if you choose to view it that way.
What you're missing is that science has theories that make predictions about observable things in the real world.
General Relativity, for instance, led to predictions of 1) longer particle decay times for moving subatomic particles, 2) different orbital period for Mercury than Newtonian mechanics predicted and 3) bending of starlight due to intervening gravitational fields. There are quite famous observations confirming these predictions.
Similarly, there are quite convincing observations that lend support to the Big Bang theory. Cosmic backround radiation measurements, observed Hubble expansion and observations of galactic evolution as we look further away (further into the past) come to mind as examples.
That is the difference between religion and science. Science attempts to verify its theories with observed phenomena and experiments. Religion accepts its theories based on blind faith.
All that said, there is nothing incompatible between science and religion really, as long as your religion doesn't dogmatically insist its wisdom about the real world subsumes observed scientific knowledge (the big trap into which some Christian sects seem to have fallen). In fact, I would argue that quantum mechanics provides an interesting "out" for religion - quantum randomness versus "Gods will". After all, quantum randomness is neither knowable or predictable for us, but it might be exactly enacting Gods will...
I've often wondered why Einstein said "God would never play dice with the Universe". Perhaps Gods dice are loaded. :-)
It's not a matter of "admitting" or "not admitting". I think there is legitimate concern about greenhouse gasses. However, given that we have no real idea a) if there is a significant enough effect to be concerned about or b) what the rate of warming is, my position is that more research is needed before making drastic and costly decisions.
Granted, cleaner is better if the cost is not too high - with or without global warming being a major factor.
The Kyoto protocol doesn't give a shit how many nuclear plants you build. If you want to produce more CO2 in addition, your plants are not going to help much with global warming.
Even if a country is producing "more CO2", the nuclear plants will still eliminate yet more CO2 from entering the atmosphere, no?
I thought the point here was that various human-sponsored factors are constantly producing new methane...? Could you provide a pointer to a discussion of the normal methane cycle in the biosphere?
Secondly most of that methane is shifting carbon around within the upper, biotic, part of the carbon cycle and, as such, is not the main point at issue WRT the implications of Climate Change Theory - which is that we are mining system altering quantities of carbon out of the lithosphere and releasing it into the atmosphere/biosphere.
Perhaps, but it misses the point to say that methane is "shifting carbon around", since other forms of carbon compound aren't strong greenhouse gasses. Also, pray that the oceans don't warm enough to release the methane in the methane hydrates trapped underwater... ;-)
CO2 can also be scrubbed out of the air and returned to the lithosphere (or converted into tennis rackets for that matter;). The fact is, though, that the situation is not well understood enough at this point, and more research is necessary.
First, the US will hopefully make some headway on CO2 production with or without Kyoto. The point I'm making is that Kyoto is based on our current highly imperfect understanding of what's going on, and isn't addressing a highly signficant source of potential global warming. To quote:
Full article here.
Another flaw with Kyoto is that, as far as I can tell, it doesn't consider nuclear a "clean" power source for purposes of controlling global warming.
I couldn't see a section on bovine flatulence either, come to think of it.
I think methane emissions are addressed, as they should be - methane traps 21 times the heat as the same mass of CO2. According to current thinking, methane accounts for 20% of the anthropogenic greenhouse effect. Browsing the Net, I found conflicting reports of how fast methane concentrations are increasing, but according to this article the contribution from farm animals is significant:
That's a lot of methane!
Yes, but that is why the Kyoto protocol is flawed. The authors of the cooking fire study estimated the warming effect of the soot was 30 times worse than that of the same mass of CO2.
No agency can possibly do this outside the government.
The government (the current administration moreso than most, but not *much* more) has a definite "make it secret" reflex. It's shocking to me how little outcry various abuses of that have been (like a redacted FOIA on an internal audit, where the redacted sections were exposed, and were revealed to be the parts of the audit where the agency failed).
Of course they have a "make it secret" reflex. That is called "erring on the side of caution".
Secrecy is of course prone to abuse, which is why there are Congressional oversight committees. How effective those are is another topic of course...
Sadly, although unsuprisingly, both the populace and the government have forgetten who's supposed to be the servant.
Nice non sequitur.