TFA suggests that they just improved the laser diode assembly (and probably the firmware) on a drive in the lab, it didn't say anything about mass producing a cost effective systems for consumers though. That's why I'm dubious.
Frankly, given the track record of optical formats, I'd be surprised if this ever makes it out of the laboratory, especially given the fact that it has so many layers. With DVD a lot of production companies basically gave up on the dual sided dual layer discs because the yield on 4 layer disks was so bad. Getting a good yield on a 25 layer disc is either an achievement worthy of talking about over the disc, or it's a bunch of lies and marketing hype.
The good news is that video card manufacturers have heard the plea and are trying to reduce the power consumption on their newer cards. nVidia's newest GTX series cards draw less power when idle than pretty much anything they've made outside of their Mobile line in years, although they are voracious when running full tilt. As long as you spend most of your time not gaming (which is true of most people) they won't inflate your power bill nearly as much as their maximum power draw might suggest.
According to TFA, it's a graphics card that Intel is making to compete with Intel and ATI. I'm guessing it's going to be highly optimized for Ray Tracing given Intel's statements in the past. Total power consumption estimates are jaw dropping, TFA estimates around 300W.
The TSA doesn't give a crap about your stuff unless it has a bomb/gun/knife/water bottle in it. They're certainly not going to pull a surveillance tape for Joe Schmoe unless you get a court order. Even if they did your chances of catching someone from camera footage is very small, even if you see the guy take it the best you're going to get is a grainy picture of his face.
That's actually a little surprising, because I've been on flights before where someone checks a bag and then doesn't show up for the departure (there's always at least one), and they have to open the cargo hold up and search for his bag to remove it.
I think the point is that two of them facing off would end up with just as much money as they started with over the long run.
Of course if the pool of money is not unlimited, then in the short term one will pull ahead of the other, and can "win" through sheer random chance. This isn't really that hard of a concept, the idea is that if another player is playing slightly suboptimally, then against this computer and both with a limitless pool of money and playing forever, the computer will slowly but surely pull ahead of the flawed opponent. It does not mean the computer will win against the human players in Vegas for several reasons:
The pool of money is limited (and fairly small)
The playtime is finite and also fairly small
Human players can walk away from the table if they get a short term advantage (quit while you are ahead), I'm guessing the computer program doesn't do that
This reminds me of an old mathematician joke:
One day this guy is finally fed up with his middle-class existence and
decides to do something about it. He calls up his best friend, who is a
mathematical genius. "Look," he says, "do you suppose you could find some
way mathematically of guaranteeing winning at the race track? We could
make a lot of money and retire and enjoy life." The mathematician thinks
this over a bit and walks away mumbling to himself.
A week later his friend drops by to ask the genius if he's had any
success. The genius, looking a little bleary-eyed, replies, "Well, yes,
actually I do have an idea, and I'm reasonably sure that it will work, but
there a number of details to be figured out.
After the second week the mathematician appears at his friend's house,
looking quite a bit rumpled, and announces, "I think I've got it! I still have
some of the theory to work out, but now I'm certain that I'm on the right
track."
At the end of the third week the mathematician wakes his friend by
pounding on his door at three in the morning. He has dark circles under his
eyes. His hair hasn't been combed for many days. He appears to be wearing
the same clothes as the last time. He has several pencils sticking out from
behind his ears and an almost maniacal expression on his face. "WE CAN DO
IT! WE CAN DO IT!!" he shrieks. "I have discovered the perfect solution!!
And it's so EASY! First, we assume that horses are perfect spheres in simple
harmonic motion..."
Process switching overhead is pretty low though, especially if you just have one thread hammering away and most everything else is largely idle. The fundamental limitation of being stuck with 1/1000 of the power of your 1000 core chip because your problem is difficult/impossible to parallelize is a real one.
From a practical standpoint, Intel is right that we need vastly better developer tools and that most things that require ridiculous amounts of compute time can be parallized if you put some effort into it.
The problem is that every carrier does this, so you can't just switch to a different one because your current one is screwing you. Your alternative is to either put up with it or forget the idea of owning a cell phone entirely. The logical extreme of the latter is to end up living like a hermit in some shack in the backwoods because all of society has terms and conditions you don't agree with.
A number like 1 or 3% sounds more like their internal accounting of how many people use profiles was wrong, because when talking to people who use Netflix (friends and family), I only know one guy (out of the 10-12 or so) that doesn't use it, and he's a single guy living in an apartment. Granted, that's a very small sample, but anecdotal evidence on Slashdot seems to suggest that maybe there is something wrong with their numbers.
Really? You're the first person I've ever met who prefers the big honking enter key design. Granted, I tend to hang around with command prompt/programmer types who use the | and \ characters frequently and can't stand when it's banished to some corner of the keyboard (or worse, scrunched up with the backspace key such that 50% of the time when you try to backspace you hit \ instead!). I've found that the great big enter keys tend to bind up a lot easier as well, requiring more force to press them on average.
I'm still using the version 1 Microsoft Natural keyboard from 1995. Sure it's a hulking beast, but it's super comfortable to type on and doesn't make a tremendous racket. It also doesn't have that bizarre vertical orientation for the Insert block that the version 2 keyboard picked up. The only downside is that the keys were made out of different plastic than the body, and have yellowed with time. It's also PS/2, and I'm not sure my next motherboard (maybe 2 years down the road given my rate of upgrades) will have PS/2 ports.
Shoot, my school district gave you a big fat nothing extra for taking AP classes. The only advantage was that you could get college credit, at the risk of lowering your GPA because the material was more difficult. Of course then I got to college and discovered that almost none of them take AP credit. I think I got a grand total of 3 college credits for taking AP classes for my entire senior year, unfortunatly unless you know a full year in advance where you're going to be accepted to college, it's impossible to plan and only take the AP classes that your university will accept.
Really? Last report I heard was about some native people who eek out an existence on the edge of the desert that were pretty much on the road to doom because the edge of the desert was moving past their lands into the lands of some hated enemy. I've heard several reports talking about global warming making arid areas even more arid, although that has caused me to wonder where the water goes (are wet areas going to get wetter? Especially since there should be more water vapor in the air on account of the higher energy content in the atmosphere).
You're saying that without humans there would be no deserts? I find this assertion to be difficult to believe. There is an argument that global warming has caused deserts to grow, but one also has to consider the effect of desert reclamation (the Soviets were big on this) through irrigation and careful land management.
It's also blatantly wrong to say that deserts are collapsed ecosystems. Another ecosystem that dies off can turn into a desert, but within the desert is an ecosystem all to itself. They may not be desirable to humans, but there is no shortage of species that call a desert home.
No, it was just the creation of a.xxx domain, there was never any realistic talk about forcing all pornographic material on there (defining what is pornographic for the entire world would be impossible anyway). It was going to be completely self selected. The reason they didn't want to make it is because they didn't want to create a "red light" district on the internet, an idea I still find baffling given the current nature of the internet.
The concealed carry permit in DC was pointless IMHO. The DC Metro literally has service to areas with gun stores (Virginia and Maryland). Thug life types don't get concealed carry permits anyway. All it did was keep the honest people honest and make the NRA types really really angry when they visited the city.
Having a single big moon is supposed to be ultra rare? I'm really curious why that is. Given what we know of our solar system, moons are far from rare. We may only have one example of a large unitary moon, but come on, that's out of a sample size of 9 (8 now I guess) from a universe with presumably a nearly limitless number of planetoids. The argument almost strikes me as one of those arguments for Humans being the only intelligent species in the entire universe because it must be almost impossible for life to occur. Arguments that are grounded entirely in conjecture.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure it won't take long for the module to show up on CPAN.
Yeah, I mean XML didn't earn its reputation for being lightning fast and byte efficient for nothing...
TFA suggests that they just improved the laser diode assembly (and probably the firmware) on a drive in the lab, it didn't say anything about mass producing a cost effective systems for consumers though. That's why I'm dubious.
Frankly, given the track record of optical formats, I'd be surprised if this ever makes it out of the laboratory, especially given the fact that it has so many layers. With DVD a lot of production companies basically gave up on the dual sided dual layer discs because the yield on 4 layer disks was so bad. Getting a good yield on a 25 layer disc is either an achievement worthy of talking about over the disc, or it's a bunch of lies and marketing hype.
The good news is that video card manufacturers have heard the plea and are trying to reduce the power consumption on their newer cards. nVidia's newest GTX series cards draw less power when idle than pretty much anything they've made outside of their Mobile line in years, although they are voracious when running full tilt. As long as you spend most of your time not gaming (which is true of most people) they won't inflate your power bill nearly as much as their maximum power draw might suggest.
Obviously they're competing with nVidia and ATI, not Intel and ATI. Geez, even mandatory previews don't always work.
According to TFA, it's a graphics card that Intel is making to compete with Intel and ATI. I'm guessing it's going to be highly optimized for Ray Tracing given Intel's statements in the past. Total power consumption estimates are jaw dropping, TFA estimates around 300W.
The TSA doesn't give a crap about your stuff unless it has a bomb/gun/knife/water bottle in it. They're certainly not going to pull a surveillance tape for Joe Schmoe unless you get a court order. Even if they did your chances of catching someone from camera footage is very small, even if you see the guy take it the best you're going to get is a grainy picture of his face.
That's actually a little surprising, because I've been on flights before where someone checks a bag and then doesn't show up for the departure (there's always at least one), and they have to open the cargo hold up and search for his bag to remove it.
Of course if the pool of money is not unlimited, then in the short term one will pull ahead of the other, and can "win" through sheer random chance. This isn't really that hard of a concept, the idea is that if another player is playing slightly suboptimally, then against this computer and both with a limitless pool of money and playing forever, the computer will slowly but surely pull ahead of the flawed opponent. It does not mean the computer will win against the human players in Vegas for several reasons:
This reminds me of an old mathematician joke:
As a bonus, you occasionally get "free" energy out of your storage system when it rains.
Process switching overhead is pretty low though, especially if you just have one thread hammering away and most everything else is largely idle. The fundamental limitation of being stuck with 1/1000 of the power of your 1000 core chip because your problem is difficult/impossible to parallelize is a real one.
From a practical standpoint, Intel is right that we need vastly better developer tools and that most things that require ridiculous amounts of compute time can be parallized if you put some effort into it.
We're shocked until we see the prices the rest of the world pays for their outgoing calls.
The problem is that every carrier does this, so you can't just switch to a different one because your current one is screwing you. Your alternative is to either put up with it or forget the idea of owning a cell phone entirely. The logical extreme of the latter is to end up living like a hermit in some shack in the backwoods because all of society has terms and conditions you don't agree with.
A number like 1 or 3% sounds more like their internal accounting of how many people use profiles was wrong, because when talking to people who use Netflix (friends and family), I only know one guy (out of the 10-12 or so) that doesn't use it, and he's a single guy living in an apartment. Granted, that's a very small sample, but anecdotal evidence on Slashdot seems to suggest that maybe there is something wrong with their numbers.
Really? You're the first person I've ever met who prefers the big honking enter key design. Granted, I tend to hang around with command prompt/programmer types who use the | and \ characters frequently and can't stand when it's banished to some corner of the keyboard (or worse, scrunched up with the backspace key such that 50% of the time when you try to backspace you hit \ instead!). I've found that the great big enter keys tend to bind up a lot easier as well, requiring more force to press them on average.
I'm still using the version 1 Microsoft Natural keyboard from 1995. Sure it's a hulking beast, but it's super comfortable to type on and doesn't make a tremendous racket. It also doesn't have that bizarre vertical orientation for the Insert block that the version 2 keyboard picked up. The only downside is that the keys were made out of different plastic than the body, and have yellowed with time. It's also PS/2, and I'm not sure my next motherboard (maybe 2 years down the road given my rate of upgrades) will have PS/2 ports.
Shoot, my school district gave you a big fat nothing extra for taking AP classes. The only advantage was that you could get college credit, at the risk of lowering your GPA because the material was more difficult. Of course then I got to college and discovered that almost none of them take AP credit. I think I got a grand total of 3 college credits for taking AP classes for my entire senior year, unfortunatly unless you know a full year in advance where you're going to be accepted to college, it's impossible to plan and only take the AP classes that your university will accept.
The real problem is that reality has a liberal bias.
Really? Last report I heard was about some native people who eek out an existence on the edge of the desert that were pretty much on the road to doom because the edge of the desert was moving past their lands into the lands of some hated enemy. I've heard several reports talking about global warming making arid areas even more arid, although that has caused me to wonder where the water goes (are wet areas going to get wetter? Especially since there should be more water vapor in the air on account of the higher energy content in the atmosphere).
You're saying that without humans there would be no deserts? I find this assertion to be difficult to believe. There is an argument that global warming has caused deserts to grow, but one also has to consider the effect of desert reclamation (the Soviets were big on this) through irrigation and careful land management.
It's also blatantly wrong to say that deserts are collapsed ecosystems. Another ecosystem that dies off can turn into a desert, but within the desert is an ecosystem all to itself. They may not be desirable to humans, but there is no shortage of species that call a desert home.
No, it was just the creation of a .xxx domain, there was never any realistic talk about forcing all pornographic material on there (defining what is pornographic for the entire world would be impossible anyway). It was going to be completely self selected. The reason they didn't want to make it is because they didn't want to create a "red light" district on the internet, an idea I still find baffling given the current nature of the internet.
The concealed carry permit in DC was pointless IMHO. The DC Metro literally has service to areas with gun stores (Virginia and Maryland). Thug life types don't get concealed carry permits anyway. All it did was keep the honest people honest and make the NRA types really really angry when they visited the city.
Having a single big moon is supposed to be ultra rare? I'm really curious why that is. Given what we know of our solar system, moons are far from rare. We may only have one example of a large unitary moon, but come on, that's out of a sample size of 9 (8 now I guess) from a universe with presumably a nearly limitless number of planetoids. The argument almost strikes me as one of those arguments for Humans being the only intelligent species in the entire universe because it must be almost impossible for life to occur. Arguments that are grounded entirely in conjecture.
My guess is that anybody who was going to be offended never got around to installing the hack in the first place.