Actually the initial speed rating on AMD chips was in direct comparison to a 1ghz Thunderbird. So a 2400 would be 2.4x as fast as a 1ghz Thunderbird. I'm still using an "ancient" Athlon64 3000, which Ubuntu no longer wants to boot on. (Unless they fixed that nasty bad no PSS objects bug) At 2ghz, it is somehow 3x as fast. The faster FSB certainly helps. For what I do (photoshop, lightroom, sound mixing) it is still plenty adequate, though I've been due for an upgrade to last years technology for some time now. The AMD chips are so cheap now, I can't see why anyone would spend so much more for, what, like a 10-25% increase in speed. I mean if you need raw CPU, an 8-way, dual CPU configuration would certainly still be a lot cheaper on the AMD side.
The bus speeds are still so much more important and with both sides of the fence pushing over 1ghz now, it is going to be quite interesting. Clearly processors are starting to push into theoretical limitations, at least with current manufacturing technologies. At what, 32nm? I have no idea how they are controlling voltage leak at that level. With parallel cores seemingly the future, it seems about time that chip designers start looking at making the buses approach the speeds of the chips they are connected to. What's next? 3D chip fabrication? I question the benefit of having hot chips sandwiched together, or even RAM for that matter, but that's me.
The government exists to pave roads, protect the borders, pick up the trash (at least in my city), and maintain parks. Public water is a good idea too. Everything else is a waste of good tax payer dollars. The more dollars that are in your pocket the more you can spend on things that drive innovation. There is surely a market for long lasting batteries, and as in the case of GM, companies have been investing heavily in new technologies. How is getting some public governmental research entity started going to be remotely cost effective and efficient, because we all know that government departments are the model of efficiency? Oh, and do you just start from scratch? I mean there are scores of next generation batteries being worked on right now, with a lot of inroads being built behind closed doors. It doesn't really make sense to just start with nothing and try to compete with that. This is also market manipulation. A public domain battery concept would ultimately undermine any company's investment in battery research and development. Doesn't the government own GM anyways now? I mean, look at it this way, your tax dollars are already going to battery research.
At least the new cameros look sweet. There might be some hope left for good old gm....
Who says you have the right to judge other people? The guilt of knowing you killed 200 people would be punishment enough. That alone is almost worse than death. No. Further tragedy ultimately solves nothing and does nothing to replace the loss that those people felt. There are plenty of completely evil people out there to whack if that's your thing......If anyone needs a list to get started on, feel free to contact me.....
From what I understand the exoskeletons can run for 2 hours or something on a charge. I know the japanese HAL units are claimed to run for about 2.5 hours. Not a very long time. I can't see any of this stuff making it into the field any time soon.
You are missing his point. If you essentially have a large walking tank there is no point in having a human inside when a human can just control one remotely. The F-22 will likely be the last manned fighter. That is significant. The weight, size, and cost savings from not having to support a pilot are immensely game changing as well. For a long time now, the pilot has been a large limitation on aircraft performance. Unmanned aircraft pull turns potentially radically harder than humans. With some basic AI you could even have them automatically fly home if they lose contact with the base. This is where our current level of AI could prove effective, so forget the AI requirement, as it is not really important at this point. Most army "robots" are hardly autonomous. For what its worth, any occupying force would likely keep soldiers in the streets amongst the population. Rolling tanks and heavy equipment around tends to make the people feel (understandably) extremely uneasy and oppressed. I'm sure the Palestinians might know a thing or two about the psychology of that.
Doesn't HD radio downsample past even FM standards?
"Promotion for HD Radio does not always make clear that some of its capabilities are mutually incompatible with other of its capabilities. For example, the FM system has been described as "CD quality;" however, the FM system also allows multiplexing the data stream between two or more separate programs. A program utilizing one half or less of the data stream does not attain the higher audio quality of a single program allowed the full data stream. The FCC has declared "one free over-the-air digital stream [must be] of equal or greater quality than the station's existing analog signal".[30] (If the FCC discontinues analog simulcasting, each station will have over 300 kbit/s bandwidth available, allowing for CD or even Surround Sound-quality audio together with multiple sub-channels.)"
That's interesting, but it totally doesn't answer my question. I know FM is something like 96kb and that's not all that great. I think AM is around 22khz and FM is something like 32-38khz (I couldn't find hard numbers....). HD doesn't really seem like that much of a step forward when it requires taxed hardware and offers little if any advantages over traditional FM analog signals, asides from more streams of top 40 crap followed by commercials of course. I don't see how fragmentation can help the state of radio today. Look at it this way, stations will have to show smaller markets for their channels as users start listening to different streams. I guess they could sell a package that covers all of their substations, but I could see smaller numbers of listeners ultimately hurting their market price for advertising. 30 thousand is a lot better sounding than 15 thousand. It is also expensive to operate a legal radio station. You need a real legal antenna and a lot of cash for licensing. I understand that XM and Sirius are really not much better, but the 128k or so they are pumping is a definite improvement over 96k with far less frequency range. Face it. Radio is nearing death. I don't know what broadcast format will take over, but something tells me its a four letter word that starts with an i and ends with a d. You could just podcast some of your favorite internet radio shows and listen to them at your leisure if hearing something new is important. Lots of good quality streams out there too. I totally understand the need to have a radio that you can just turn on and listen to some jazz (thanks NPR!) or whatever might be soothing for background music, but if it really went away, after you missed it for a while, I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to fill that void in your life and chances are you might never look back. I know I didn't. For that oldschool radio flavor check out black and white radio from spain (I think it was spain) spitting out the classics from the 40s and 50s mostly all in glorious 22khz mono (AM quality).
no criminal organization should be allowed to hide under the thin veil of religion
if they offer therapy to people for a fee they need to adhere to state guidelines and laws concerning licencing.
"1 Scientology has attempted to operate its Narconon drug "therapy" program outside of required State licensing or inspection on a leased "independently sovereign" Indian reservation outside of Newkirk Oaklahoma. Just this month, after extensive and costly litigation the state goverment of Oaklahoma ordered this facility closed."
Today at work a brand new 1TB seagate came in. I went over to my machine to breathe life back into it to find out that it was instead a 32 megabyte drive according to Windows. Immediately the cache sprang to mind. The drive actually is reporting the cache as the actual drive. Well...hell. At first I thought it was just DOA with corrupt firmware, but after some googling you can actually reset the size that the drive reports with LBA. Hopefully I won't have too many other problems. Not a big fan of the newer seagates, but my boss seems to be going for whatever is cheapest these days....:/
I would love to get away from complex mechanical drives as a storage medium. Can't someone just make some solid state cube that will hold a petabyte (no petabyte in mozilla's spell checker?? for shame!) and can withstand being written to millions of times?
Well sure. These are all just rough ideas. Trust me, I'm not really an expert in electric motors. I just happened to stay at a holiday inn. I was merely trying to explain that actual horsepower is not the number that really matters in the end. Though with gasoline engines it does have some bearing to a lot of people. Where your engine puts the most torque is certainly where you want it to stay. Look at the electric bike that can do 0-60 in one second. That's some serious torque. Especially considering how much more weight it has to lug around. Not much fun when the battery goes flat in 60 seconds or less though.....
I second that. I post process photos and do design all the time on my ancient Dell 19" Trinitron, and the colors are not really all that great but still close enough that I doubt it makes a huge overall difference. Apple spends a lot of money on display technology and I would imagine that the iphone was designed with a top quality screen. I can't see how the color could be all that inaccurate, especially when you consider the quality of the built in camera and the screen certainly has to color match with that.
Ahhh grasshopper. You are confusing horsepower with torque. A diesel engine with 100hp can create hundreds of pounds of torque. Horsepower doesn't tell the whole story and is not representative of how much torque the engine can produce, which varies with engine speed. A typical car has a torque curve that starts out gradually climbing and then reaching its maximum around 3000-4000 rpm (just an example here people) and begins to flatten and decline towards the red line, say at 6000 RPM. That means that this engine is only outputting peak torque at the maximum point in the curve. An electric engine has a purely linear torque scale. At 1 RPM it is generating 500lbs of torque. At 6000 RPM it is generating 500lbs of torque.
"The torque of an electric motor is independent of speed. It is rather a function of flux and armature current." - Wiki
Coupled with a continuously variable transmission (ala Prius) electric engines are both highly efficient and insanely powerful. If we can get past the hurdles of energy storage, which clearly dominates this discussion, then internal combustion engines will start to look as antique as the coal fired steam engine. I mean seriously. Which is more elegant, a giant motor, a shaft of metal surrounded by magnets and a coil of wire which is like 95% efficient or an insanely complex machine made of thousands of moving parts and components, which including a whole lot of small motors is only like 23% efficient at best? Never mind all the crap you had to go through to get the fuel that only yields 23% efficiency. Oh and forget about the terribly messy process of getting some black tar that was supposed to probably stay in the ground for a few million more years to cook down and refine into gasoline. (And people wonder why they haven't been building new refineries in the United States, maybe those people should have one in their backyard) I mean geez, solar panels are starting to exceed those kind of numbers already.... To hell with spending money on how to suck out the last few drops of oil from some sandy shoals. We should be spending all of our money on figuring out how to cleanly produce electricity. Our very future depends upon it in more ways than one.
Hmmmmmm....now where do we have a huge source of energy close by?
thanks. I just upgraded to a pretty sweet camera and the adventure continues. as soon as I get a pro account on flikr I'll start dumping some of the much better shots I've been taking lately. for what its worth everything you see (except for some west coast pics) were shot with a powershot 590is. I dropped mine (again) and finally broke it, but it was a great little pocket camera with full manual controls for like $100. They quit making them, so I guess get one while they last. The newer A1000 or whatever is automatic only which is too bad. I just got a Panasonic FZ28 and its like 5x the camera that my canon was for really cheap and definitely is starting to approach DSLR territory in image quality. I'll have some new pics up soon, I promise. I already got 100 or so keepers in two weeks.:)
One of the earliest calculating machines, built by Thomas Fowler entirely from wood in 1840, was a ternary computer. The only modern ternary computer Setun was built in the late 1950s in the Soviet Union at the Moscow State University by Nikolai Brusentsov, and it had notable advantages over the binary computers which eventually replaced it (such as lower electricity consumption and lower production cost). In 1970 Brusentsov built an enhanced version of the computer, which he called Setun-70.
[edit] Balanced ternary
Ternary computing is commonly implemented in terms of balanced ternary, which uses the three digits -1, 0, and +1. The negative value of any balanced ternary digit can be obtained by replacing every + with a - and vice versa. It is easy to subtract a number by inverting the + and - digits and then using normal addition. Balanced ternary can express negative values as easily as positive ones, without the need for a leading negative sign as with decimal numbers. These advantages make some calculations more efficient in ternary than binary.
"I often reflect that had the Ternary instead of the denary Notation been adopted in the Infancy of Society, machines something like the present would long ere this have been common, as the transition from mental to mechanical calculation would have been so very obvious and simple". (Fowler, 1840)
[edit] The future
With the advent of mass-produced binary components for computers, ternary computers have diminished to a small footnote in the history of computing. However, ternary logic's elegance and efficiency is predicted by Donald Knuth to bring them back into development in the future[1]. Possible ways on how this can happen is by the combination of an optical computer with the ternary logic system [2] The simple way to explain this is to compare it to binary. In binary computer, normally electronic computing, there are two values 1 or ON and 0 or OFF. A ternary computer using fiber optics could use three values: 0 or OFF, 1 or low, 2 or high. This future potential has also been remarked by certain companies as Hypres which is actively engaged in ternary computing. IBM also reports infrequently on ternary computing topics (in its papers), but it is not actively engaged in it.
In reference to your comment about floating point, the argument he makes is that it is not something to be taken lightly. I don't know about speed anymore on modern computers. It used to be the case that executing floating point operations was much more costly than integers. Something tells me that this is still probably the case, though I am certainly not an expert on chip design. RISC units IIRC do addition and subtraction in substitution for multiplication and division because they can do so much faster. I imagine the risc-like guts of AMD and intel chips to be pretty similar. Any evidence to back up your point?
"Automated garbage collection is rubbish" and "Real men don't use floating point" were two of the most interesting and compelling arguments I've read all week. And using LISP as a web platform framework? Fascinating. There were some great ideas back in the days when computers were in there infancy and a lot of them have been abandoned for the most part. Like trinary computing for instance. The building blocks of the computers that you see today were partially designed because of technological limitations at the time. The mechanical underpinnings of the first computers are still present today. I don't care if I'm really wrong about this point (I've been wrong before), but I think computing really needs to transcend a system based on 0s and 1s. Why not abandon the general purpose cpu altogether or at least reduce it to a single core and focus on multiple cores of different types of chips that are optimized for different types of problems? Larrabee might be an hint of that, though I think that ultimately it will really just be a cost saving measure since the gpu no longer needs to be integrated into the board. I think we may be locked into a future of x86 clones for another 30 years at this rate. The Itanic was a good lesson for intel in how much the market values their older code still being able to run without issue. Forgive my bit of a ramble. Just had a whole bunch of random thoughts there.
I don't know what happens if they drop the case either. If it goes to court and you lose, then yeah, you have to pay the winner's legal fees, but a lot of cases never make it to court and those people are probably just out of money on a lawyer. At $200 an hour or so, lawyers can get expensive very quickly......
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Actually the initial speed rating on AMD chips was in direct comparison to a 1ghz Thunderbird. So a 2400 would be 2.4x as fast as a 1ghz Thunderbird. I'm still using an "ancient" Athlon64 3000, which Ubuntu no longer wants to boot on. (Unless they fixed that nasty bad no PSS objects bug) At 2ghz, it is somehow 3x as fast. The faster FSB certainly helps. For what I do (photoshop, lightroom, sound mixing) it is still plenty adequate, though I've been due for an upgrade to last years technology for some time now. The AMD chips are so cheap now, I can't see why anyone would spend so much more for, what, like a 10-25% increase in speed. I mean if you need raw CPU, an 8-way, dual CPU configuration would certainly still be a lot cheaper on the AMD side.
The bus speeds are still so much more important and with both sides of the fence pushing over 1ghz now, it is going to be quite interesting. Clearly processors are starting to push into theoretical limitations, at least with current manufacturing technologies. At what, 32nm? I have no idea how they are controlling voltage leak at that level. With parallel cores seemingly the future, it seems about time that chip designers start looking at making the buses approach the speeds of the chips they are connected to. What's next? 3D chip fabrication? I question the benefit of having hot chips sandwiched together, or even RAM for that matter, but that's me.
The government exists to pave roads, protect the borders, pick up the trash (at least in my city), and maintain parks. Public water is a good idea too. Everything else is a waste of good tax payer dollars. The more dollars that are in your pocket the more you can spend on things that drive innovation. There is surely a market for long lasting batteries, and as in the case of GM, companies have been investing heavily in new technologies. How is getting some public governmental research entity started going to be remotely cost effective and efficient, because we all know that government departments are the model of efficiency? Oh, and do you just start from scratch? I mean there are scores of next generation batteries being worked on right now, with a lot of inroads being built behind closed doors. It doesn't really make sense to just start with nothing and try to compete with that. This is also market manipulation. A public domain battery concept would ultimately undermine any company's investment in battery research and development. Doesn't the government own GM anyways now? I mean, look at it this way, your tax dollars are already going to battery research.
At least the new cameros look sweet. There might be some hope left for good old gm....
Who says you have the right to judge other people? The guilt of knowing you killed 200 people would be punishment enough. That alone is almost worse than death. No. Further tragedy ultimately solves nothing and does nothing to replace the loss that those people felt. There are plenty of completely evil people out there to whack if that's your thing......If anyone needs a list to get started on, feel free to contact me.....
From what I understand the exoskeletons can run for 2 hours or something on a charge. I know the japanese HAL units are claimed to run for about 2.5 hours. Not a very long time. I can't see any of this stuff making it into the field any time soon.
You are missing his point. If you essentially have a large walking tank there is no point in having a human inside when a human can just control one remotely. The F-22 will likely be the last manned fighter. That is significant. The weight, size, and cost savings from not having to support a pilot are immensely game changing as well. For a long time now, the pilot has been a large limitation on aircraft performance. Unmanned aircraft pull turns potentially radically harder than humans. With some basic AI you could even have them automatically fly home if they lose contact with the base. This is where our current level of AI could prove effective, so forget the AI requirement, as it is not really important at this point. Most army "robots" are hardly autonomous. For what its worth, any occupying force would likely keep soldiers in the streets amongst the population. Rolling tanks and heavy equipment around tends to make the people feel (understandably) extremely uneasy and oppressed. I'm sure the Palestinians might know a thing or two about the psychology of that.
Yeah. Because nobody has thought of that before.
Yeah, uh, TFR has a manual override too. The radar tends to not see reflective surfaces like dunes for instance....
This guy I work with has plenty of gas. Surely it could be used for something other than stinking up the place!
Doesn't HD radio downsample past even FM standards?
"Promotion for HD Radio does not always make clear that some of its capabilities are mutually incompatible with other of its capabilities. For example, the FM system has been described as "CD quality;" however, the FM system also allows multiplexing the data stream between two or more separate programs. A program utilizing one half or less of the data stream does not attain the higher audio quality of a single program allowed the full data stream. The FCC has declared "one free over-the-air digital stream [must be] of equal or greater quality than the station's existing analog signal".[30] (If the FCC discontinues analog simulcasting, each station will have over 300 kbit/s bandwidth available, allowing for CD or even Surround Sound-quality audio together with multiple sub-channels.)"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_Radio#Bandwidth
That's interesting, but it totally doesn't answer my question. I know FM is something like 96kb and that's not all that great. I think AM is around 22khz and FM is something like 32-38khz (I couldn't find hard numbers....). HD doesn't really seem like that much of a step forward when it requires taxed hardware and offers little if any advantages over traditional FM analog signals, asides from more streams of top 40 crap followed by commercials of course. I don't see how fragmentation can help the state of radio today. Look at it this way, stations will have to show smaller markets for their channels as users start listening to different streams. I guess they could sell a package that covers all of their substations, but I could see smaller numbers of listeners ultimately hurting their market price for advertising. 30 thousand is a lot better sounding than 15 thousand. It is also expensive to operate a legal radio station. You need a real legal antenna and a lot of cash for licensing. I understand that XM and Sirius are really not much better, but the 128k or so they are pumping is a definite improvement over 96k with far less frequency range. Face it. Radio is nearing death. I don't know what broadcast format will take over, but something tells me its a four letter word that starts with an i and ends with a d. You could just podcast some of your favorite internet radio shows and listen to them at your leisure if hearing something new is important. Lots of good quality streams out there too. I totally understand the need to have a radio that you can just turn on and listen to some jazz (thanks NPR!) or whatever might be soothing for background music, but if it really went away, after you missed it for a while, I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to fill that void in your life and chances are you might never look back. I know I didn't. For that oldschool radio flavor check out black and white radio from spain (I think it was spain) spitting out the classics from the 40s and 50s mostly all in glorious 22khz mono (AM quality).
I'm too lazy to edit other people's bad spelling. Everything in quotes I claim no responsibility for.
no criminal organization should be allowed to hide under the thin veil of religion
if they offer therapy to people for a fee they need to adhere to state guidelines and laws concerning licencing.
"1 Scientology has attempted to operate its Narconon drug
"therapy" program outside of required State licensing or
inspection on a leased "independently sovereign" Indian
reservation outside of Newkirk Oaklahoma. Just this month, after
extensive and costly litigation the state goverment of Oaklahoma
ordered this facility closed."
http://skull.piratehaven.org/~atman/factnet/scnbond2.txt
Its amazing how many people have ended up 6-feet under after becoming a member of scientology:
http://www.badcult.info/watd/
Today at work a brand new 1TB seagate came in. I went over to my machine to breathe life back into it to find out that it was instead a 32 megabyte drive according to Windows. Immediately the cache sprang to mind. The drive actually is reporting the cache as the actual drive. Well...hell. At first I thought it was just DOA with corrupt firmware, but after some googling you can actually reset the size that the drive reports with LBA. Hopefully I won't have too many other problems. Not a big fan of the newer seagates, but my boss seems to be going for whatever is cheapest these days.... :/
I would love to get away from complex mechanical drives as a storage medium. Can't someone just make some solid state cube that will hold a petabyte (no petabyte in mozilla's spell checker?? for shame!) and can withstand being written to millions of times?
Well sure. These are all just rough ideas. Trust me, I'm not really an expert in electric motors. I just happened to stay at a holiday inn. I was merely trying to explain that actual horsepower is not the number that really matters in the end. Though with gasoline engines it does have some bearing to a lot of people. Where your engine puts the most torque is certainly where you want it to stay. Look at the electric bike that can do 0-60 in one second. That's some serious torque. Especially considering how much more weight it has to lug around. Not much fun when the battery goes flat in 60 seconds or less though.....
We have discovered the sparkler!
You just ruined my day! Thanks you insensitive clod!
I second that. I post process photos and do design all the time on my ancient Dell 19" Trinitron, and the colors are not really all that great but still close enough that I doubt it makes a huge overall difference. Apple spends a lot of money on display technology and I would imagine that the iphone was designed with a top quality screen. I can't see how the color could be all that inaccurate, especially when you consider the quality of the built in camera and the screen certainly has to color match with that.
Would the cars be guided by a metal pin in a slot as well? I don't see how that could possibly qualify as racing.
Ahhh grasshopper. You are confusing horsepower with torque. A diesel engine with 100hp can create hundreds of pounds of torque. Horsepower doesn't tell the whole story and is not representative of how much torque the engine can produce, which varies with engine speed. A typical car has a torque curve that starts out gradually climbing and then reaching its maximum around 3000-4000 rpm (just an example here people) and begins to flatten and decline towards the red line, say at 6000 RPM. That means that this engine is only outputting peak torque at the maximum point in the curve. An electric engine has a purely linear torque scale. At 1 RPM it is generating 500lbs of torque. At 6000 RPM it is generating 500lbs of torque.
"The torque of an electric motor is independent of speed. It is rather a function of flux and armature current." - Wiki
Coupled with a continuously variable transmission (ala Prius) electric engines are both highly efficient and insanely powerful. If we can get past the hurdles of energy storage, which clearly dominates this discussion, then internal combustion engines will start to look as antique as the coal fired steam engine. I mean seriously. Which is more elegant, a giant motor, a shaft of metal surrounded by magnets and a coil of wire which is like 95% efficient or an insanely complex machine made of thousands of moving parts and components, which including a whole lot of small motors is only like 23% efficient at best? Never mind all the crap you had to go through to get the fuel that only yields 23% efficiency. Oh and forget about the terribly messy process of getting some black tar that was supposed to probably stay in the ground for a few million more years to cook down and refine into gasoline. (And people wonder why they haven't been building new refineries in the United States, maybe those people should have one in their backyard) I mean geez, solar panels are starting to exceed those kind of numbers already.... To hell with spending money on how to suck out the last few drops of oil from some sandy shoals. We should be spending all of our money on figuring out how to cleanly produce electricity. Our very future depends upon it in more ways than one.
Hmmmmmm....now where do we have a huge source of energy close by?
thanks. I just upgraded to a pretty sweet camera and the adventure continues. as soon as I get a pro account on flikr I'll start dumping some of the much better shots I've been taking lately. for what its worth everything you see (except for some west coast pics) were shot with a powershot 590is. I dropped mine (again) and finally broke it, but it was a great little pocket camera with full manual controls for like $100. They quit making them, so I guess get one while they last. The newer A1000 or whatever is automatic only which is too bad. I just got a Panasonic FZ28 and its like 5x the camera that my canon was for really cheap and definitely is starting to approach DSLR territory in image quality. I'll have some new pics up soon, I promise. I already got 100 or so keepers in two weeks. :)
From the wikipedia:
History
One of the earliest calculating machines, built by Thomas Fowler entirely from wood in 1840, was a ternary computer. The only modern ternary computer Setun was built in the late 1950s in the Soviet Union at the Moscow State University by Nikolai Brusentsov, and it had notable advantages over the binary computers which eventually replaced it (such as lower electricity consumption and lower production cost). In 1970 Brusentsov built an enhanced version of the computer, which he called Setun-70.
[edit] Balanced ternary
Ternary computing is commonly implemented in terms of balanced ternary, which uses the three digits -1, 0, and +1. The negative value of any balanced ternary digit can be obtained by replacing every + with a - and vice versa. It is easy to subtract a number by inverting the + and - digits and then using normal addition. Balanced ternary can express negative values as easily as positive ones, without the need for a leading negative sign as with decimal numbers. These advantages make some calculations more efficient in ternary than binary.
"I often reflect that had the Ternary instead of the denary Notation been adopted in the Infancy of Society, machines something like the present would long ere this have been common, as the transition from mental to mechanical calculation would have been so very obvious and simple". (Fowler, 1840)
[edit] The future
With the advent of mass-produced binary components for computers, ternary computers have diminished to a small footnote in the history of computing. However, ternary logic's elegance and efficiency is predicted by Donald Knuth to bring them back into development in the future[1]. Possible ways on how this can happen is by the combination of an optical computer with the ternary logic system [2] The simple way to explain this is to compare it to binary. In binary computer, normally electronic computing, there are two values 1 or ON and 0 or OFF. A ternary computer using fiber optics could use three values: 0 or OFF, 1 or low, 2 or high. This future potential has also been remarked by certain companies as Hypres which is actively engaged in ternary computing. IBM also reports infrequently on ternary computing topics (in its papers), but it is not actively engaged in it.
In reference to your comment about floating point, the argument he makes is that it is not something to be taken lightly. I don't know about speed anymore on modern computers. It used to be the case that executing floating point operations was much more costly than integers. Something tells me that this is still probably the case, though I am certainly not an expert on chip design. RISC units IIRC do addition and subtraction in substitution for multiplication and division because they can do so much faster. I imagine the risc-like guts of AMD and intel chips to be pretty similar. Any evidence to back up your point?
"Automated garbage collection is rubbish" and "Real men don't use floating point" were two of the most interesting and compelling arguments I've read all week. And using LISP as a web platform framework? Fascinating. There were some great ideas back in the days when computers were in there infancy and a lot of them have been abandoned for the most part. Like trinary computing for instance. The building blocks of the computers that you see today were partially designed because of technological limitations at the time. The mechanical underpinnings of the first computers are still present today. I don't care if I'm really wrong about this point (I've been wrong before), but I think computing really needs to transcend a system based on 0s and 1s. Why not abandon the general purpose cpu altogether or at least reduce it to a single core and focus on multiple cores of different types of chips that are optimized for different types of problems? Larrabee might be an hint of that, though I think that ultimately it will really just be a cost saving measure since the gpu no longer needs to be integrated into the board. I think we may be locked into a future of x86 clones for another 30 years at this rate. The Itanic was a good lesson for intel in how much the market values their older code still being able to run without issue. Forgive my bit of a ramble. Just had a whole bunch of random thoughts there.
I believe the Picassa linux "port" is basically the windows32 app wrapped with wine. It would explain the grayed out menu options.
I don't know what happens if they drop the case either. If it goes to court and you lose, then yeah, you have to pay the winner's legal fees, but a lot of cases never make it to court and those people are probably just out of money on a lawyer. At $200 an hour or so, lawyers can get expensive very quickly......
You really need to go to the west sometime. Its BEAUTIFUL. :)
I did the same thing. Stick it to the man!