There is no hope for "getting money out of politics" any more than there is hope for ending the drug war.
1971: Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA): contribution disclosure 1974: FECA expanded to limit contributions 2002: McCain-Feingold limits speech and soft money
Guess what? No big change.
Ron Paul raised $35 million, and he didn't see much in the way of votes.
Politicians love to spread anti-business rhetoric to get votes, but they all know that if they screw up the economy by destroying businesses they will lose those votes, thus they act more like economists in action, and talk like economically ignorant people on the stump.
VHS won the consumer war over Betamax, but Betacam (that used the same tape cassette) went on to become the dominant professional video format.
Now BluRay won the consumer war, but it is unclear if the professional disk version called XDCAM will win the professional format, as pro video folks moving beyond tapes are also looking at flash-based systems like DVCPRO P2 , and even Sony now offers professional XDCAM EX on SxS flash memory.
If we assume that when it was destroyed, pieces flew in all directions, some of them would have ended up with a greater net orbital velocity at the end. These pieces aren't the ones that exploded *up* (normal to the surface of the Earth), though, they're the ones that exploded *forward* (in the direction of the satellite's motion). They picked up some velocity and would end up in a slightly higher orbit as a result.
An impulsive delta-v in the forward direction of orbit only raises apogee, perigee will remain the same.
No matter how many cores you've got you are somewhat limited by HD and memory speeds which have not grown as fast as CPU power.
I don't buy the HD speed issue, since that can be solved with RAID and eventually RAIDed Flash solid-state.
Memory speed is a different issue - the only solution is to dramatically change how we think about memory from some chips on a bus to being intimate with and connected to in a parallel fashion to CPU cores.
The "The Landscape of Parallel Computing Research: A View from Berkeley" white paper says:
The good news is that if we look inside a DRAM chip, we see many independent, wide memory blocks. For example, a 512 Mbit DRAM is composed of hundreds of banks, each thousands of bits wide. Clearly, there is potentially tremendous bandwidth inside a DRAM chip waiting to be tapped, and the memory latency inside a DRAM chip is obviously much better than from separate chips across an interconnect.
In creating a new hardware foundation for parallel computing hardware, we should not limit innovation by assuming main memory must be in separate DRAM chips connected by standard interfaces. New packaging techniques, such as 3D stacking, might allow vastly increased bandwidth and reduced latency and power between processors and DRAM. Although we cannot avoid global communication in the general case with thousands of processors and hundreds of DRAM banks, some important classes of computation have almost entirely local memory accesses and hence can benefit from innovative memory designs.
Even for video encoding you reach a point where the problem becomes IO-bound (and you can't compress video frame n independently of video frame n+1 because of interframe compression).
The question is how much can you cache - you can throw a GOP at a core, you can cache the I-frame on chip and predict from that.
Or you could do the annoying solution and break up the frame spatially and work each "quadrant" or "region" on a separate core (though motion prediction between cores becomes troublesome).
There are folks doing H.264 encoding with Cell BE now, and H.264 can have some long, long GOPs.
Truth is that for Long-GOP compression, transforms and motion prediction are pretty CPU-hard problems. The I/O is not ignorable though.
Guess what guys? We've run out of GHz (mainly a power/heat problem). Start writing parallel programs.
Here is what the article says:
To be fair, though, it is not Intel's hardware that is at fault here, but today's software. If a program only uses four of the eight processor cores, then the Skulltrail system is noticeably slower than a single-socket quad-core computer. Since there are practically no current games or desktop applications around that can utilize more than four cores (if that many), the Skulltrail system does not offer any benefit here.
Also examine NVIDIA's CUDA platform, which scales from a handful of processors on your PC's NVIDIA chip to the 128 processor NVIDIA Tesla card. Scalable parallel processing is the future.
All the motion image archivists I talk to prefer digital tape currently because of the long history and understanding of archiving analog tape that can be applied to digital tape (a 50+ year history now). None of the archivists I've talked to trust any of the optical media yet, but time may change this.
LTO is currently the preferred archival tape format because it is open, multi-vendor, and has a fairly predictable migration path to higher densities over time.
The archival codec of choice currently is JPEG 2000. That is what the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center is using (http://www.pictureshowman.com/articles_restprev_NAVCC_part2.cfm).
That said, I suspect that in a few years even JPEG 2000 will seem silly, and most archives will move to uncompressed as digital costs decline.
Almost all film archivists are looking at LTO tape for long-term storage of digitized assets. Hard drives are not really an economic option, compared with the economies of large robotic LTO tape libraries from ADIC or Sun. The expectation is every five years or so they will need to migrate data from LTO-(x) to LTO-(x+1), taking a doubling of data density per tape in each generation.
Speaking as a DC area commuter who takes I-95 in Virginia everyday, this is a great idea.
When traffic is heavy, any small distraction can turn into a back-up as the flow phase changes from movement to stoppage.
So on I-95, cops patrol the HOV lanes, and when they find a violator they turn on their lights and pull the miscreant over.
Meanwhile, the very action of turning on their lights and pulling the miscreant over slows down the traffic in the non-HOV lanes, leading to a back-up.
I'd much prefer that HOV violators are detected by camera and mailed tickets than stopped by a police car.
Foreign graduate students make up 29% of all enrolled graduate students in science and engineering (S&E) fields.
First-time, full-time enrollment of Computer Science is 56% foreign, Engineering is 51% foreign, Math is 39% foreign, Biology is 23% foreign, Social Sciences are only 21% foreign.
Her side is that she was picking up a friend at the airport, and thought the flashing LEDs would help (kind of like people holding up a sign, or balloons, etc.)
The CPI excludes stocks, bonds, and real estate:) Rent is included, and as you may have noticed the uptick in real estate prices have not been matched by a similarly large increase in rental prices.
While things like gas are up, other things (like the Department Store Inventory Price Index) is down over 10 years. Clothing is cheap, computers are cheap, etc.
the truth is the US dollar is in freefall, loosing value hand over fist
But the US dollar is not losing value in the US. Domestic inflation remains low. The US falling against foreign currencies may make imports more expensive, but they will probably have to cut prices to meet US domestic competition, or simply be replaced with US domestic competition. Imports from cheap labor countries like China have a lot of flexibility in pricing, foreign imports to the US from advanced economies such as Europe will face bigger challenges, but they can automate more.
Given that we are in the middle of a pretty expensive war, the US should be happy with low inflation, low interest rates, low unemployment rates, and a couple of percent GDP growth. Of course, if we weren't in the middle of a war, we'd probably have 3% or 4% GDP growth.
There is a proposition to put a 27.5% tariff on imports from China. This is mainly because China keeps its currency artificially low in value. It's really hurting American manufacturing
Actually US manufacturing output is at an all-time high. Manufacturing in the US is doing fine, it just is becoming more automated and productive, thus needs fewer workers.
NTSC uses 4.2 MHz of bandwidth as a combination of amplitude modulation for luminance and phase coding for chrominance. The actual luminance resolution generally seen on NTSC televisions is about 440 pixels per line. Most devices have some overscan so only the central 90% of the product aperture width is visible.
Standard-definition production is generally done using digital SMPTE 274M (SDI) devices, which have 720 active pixels of luminance and 360 active pixels of color difference per line. This is why digital SD (which is generally 640 pixels per line) should actually have slightly better resolution than analog NTSC, but you have to ignore the MPEG artifacts in the digital:)
Most digital cable STBs have both analog and digital receivers. Cable MSOs generally receive broadcast channels off the air (which is usually analog in SD, until Feb. 17, 2009), and generally deliver them to the home over their analog tier.
It seems to me that some of the new Network Access Control (NAC) technologies might be able to mitigate such a situation - they can automatically shutdown switch ports that are using excessive bandwidth or doing other "naughty things".
Slashdot Mirror
There is no hope for "getting money out of politics" any more than there is hope for ending the drug war.
1971: Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA): contribution disclosure
1974: FECA expanded to limit contributions
2002: McCain-Feingold limits speech and soft money
Guess what? No big change.
Ron Paul raised $35 million, and he didn't see much in the way of votes.
Politicians love to spread anti-business rhetoric to get votes, but they all know that if they screw up the economy by destroying businesses they will lose those votes, thus they act more like economists in action, and talk like economically ignorant people on the stump.
VHS won the consumer war over Betamax, but Betacam (that used the same tape cassette) went on to become the dominant professional video format.
Now BluRay won the consumer war, but it is unclear if the professional disk version called XDCAM will win the professional format, as pro video folks moving beyond tapes are also looking at flash-based systems like DVCPRO P2 , and even Sony now offers professional XDCAM EX on SxS flash memory.
If we assume that when it was destroyed, pieces flew in all directions, some of them would have ended up with a greater net orbital velocity at the end. These pieces aren't the ones that exploded *up* (normal to the surface of the Earth), though, they're the ones that exploded *forward* (in the direction of the satellite's motion). They picked up some velocity and would end up in a slightly higher orbit as a result.
An impulsive delta-v in the forward direction of orbit only raises apogee, perigee will remain the same.
I don't buy the HD speed issue, since that can be solved with RAID and eventually RAIDed Flash solid-state.
Memory speed is a different issue - the only solution is to dramatically change how we think about memory from some chips on a bus to being intimate with and connected to in a parallel fashion to CPU cores.
The "The Landscape of Parallel Computing Research: A View from Berkeley" white paper says: The good news is that if we look inside a DRAM chip, we see many independent, wide memory blocks. For example, a 512 Mbit DRAM is composed of hundreds of banks, each thousands of bits wide. Clearly, there is potentially tremendous bandwidth inside a DRAM chip waiting to be tapped, and the memory latency inside a DRAM chip is obviously much better than from separate chips across an interconnect.
In creating a new hardware foundation for parallel computing hardware, we should not limit innovation by assuming main memory must be in separate DRAM chips connected by standard interfaces. New packaging techniques, such as 3D stacking, might allow vastly increased bandwidth and reduced latency and power between processors and DRAM. Although we cannot avoid global communication in the general case with thousands of processors and hundreds of DRAM banks, some important classes of computation have almost entirely local memory accesses and hence can benefit from innovative memory designs.
Even for video encoding you reach a point where the problem becomes IO-bound (and you can't compress video frame n independently of video frame n+1 because of interframe compression).
The question is how much can you cache - you can throw a GOP at a core, you can cache the I-frame on chip and predict from that.
Or you could do the annoying solution and break up the frame spatially and work each "quadrant" or "region" on a separate core (though motion prediction between cores becomes troublesome).
There are folks doing H.264 encoding with Cell BE now, and H.264 can have some long, long GOPs.
Truth is that for Long-GOP compression, transforms and motion prediction are pretty CPU-hard problems. The I/O is not ignorable though.
Guess what guys? We've run out of GHz (mainly a power/heat problem). Start writing parallel programs.
Here is what the article says:
To be fair, though, it is not Intel's hardware that is at fault here, but today's software. If a program only uses four of the eight processor cores, then the Skulltrail system is noticeably slower than a single-socket quad-core computer. Since there are practically no current games or desktop applications around that can utilize more than four cores (if that many), the Skulltrail system does not offer any benefit here.
Read The Landscape of Parallel Computing Research: A View From Berkeley which has the description of why, this time, there is no getting around parallel programming.
Also examine NVIDIA's CUDA platform, which scales from a handful of processors on your PC's NVIDIA chip to the 128 processor NVIDIA Tesla card. Scalable parallel processing is the future.
Even stuff ranging from running fiber to getting deliveries are slowed by the picket lines...
I had a dark horse hope that perhaps the writers would learn to disintermediate the studios.
The reality is that the reverse was more likely.
friend recently turned me on to BBC's "I.T. Crowd," which you can only watch in the States over the intertubes.
I wonder how much (if anything) the writers of that show are getting from the Internet delivery...
All the motion image archivists I talk to prefer digital tape currently because of the long history and understanding of archiving analog tape that can be applied to digital tape (a 50+ year history now). None of the archivists I've talked to trust any of the optical media yet, but time may change this.
LTO is currently the preferred archival tape format because it is open, multi-vendor, and has a fairly predictable migration path to higher densities over time.
The archival codec of choice currently is JPEG 2000. That is what the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center is using (http://www.pictureshowman.com/articles_restprev_NAVCC_part2.cfm).
That said, I suspect that in a few years even JPEG 2000 will seem silly, and most archives will move to uncompressed as digital costs decline.
Will anyone be able to play a VC-1 file 50 or 100 years from now?
:)
Of course, VC-1 is a SMPTE standard (SMPTE 421M)
SMPTE 1 for 2-inch videotape from the 1960's is still available...
However there is today a feeling that it would be wise to put a copy of the codec source code in with the digital archive, just in case.
Almost all film archivists are looking at LTO tape for long-term storage of digitized assets. Hard drives are not really an economic option, compared with the economies of large robotic LTO tape libraries from ADIC or Sun. The expectation is every five years or so they will need to migrate data from LTO-(x) to LTO-(x+1), taking a doubling of data density per tape in each generation.
"What you're talking about doesn't apply until the radio frequency range."
Actually if you look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Vdorna_globina.png
You can see that skin depth is down to 1mm at 10 KHz in copper, so maybe the cable nuts have a case.
More details at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_depth
It's not like your kids would be driving by themselves otherwise :)
But I tell you what, I'll count your kids if you count my dogs towards HOV occupancy...
Speaking as a DC area commuter who takes I-95 in Virginia everyday, this is a great idea.
When traffic is heavy, any small distraction can turn into a back-up as the flow phase changes from movement to stoppage.
So on I-95, cops patrol the HOV lanes, and when they find a violator they turn on their lights and pull the miscreant over.
Meanwhile, the very action of turning on their lights and pulling the miscreant over slows down the traffic in the non-HOV lanes, leading to a back-up.
I'd much prefer that HOV violators are detected by camera and mailed tickets than stopped by a police car.
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf07312/
Foreign graduate students make up 29% of all enrolled graduate students in science and engineering (S&E) fields.
First-time, full-time enrollment of Computer Science is 56% foreign, Engineering is 51% foreign, Math is 39% foreign, Biology is 23% foreign, Social Sciences are only 21% foreign.
two Russian airliners were brought down on the same day in 2004 with explosives suspected to have been hidden in the bras of two female passengers.
Are we now going to shoot anyone who wears a bra to the airport?
Her side is that she was picking up a friend at the airport, and thought the flashing LEDs would help (kind of like people holding up a sign, or balloons, etc.)
I assert my right to wear circuits!
The CPI excludes stocks, bonds, and real estate :) Rent is included, and as you may have noticed the uptick in real estate prices have not been matched by a similarly large increase in rental prices.
http://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/pdf/homch17.pdf
Here is a graph of the CPI:
http://www.inflationdata.com/Inflation/images/charts/Annual_Inflation/annual_inflation_chart.htm
US inflation has remained around 3% since the 1990s. Information on how the BLS computes the CPI is here:
http://www.bls.gov/bls/inflation.htm
While things like gas are up, other things (like the Department Store Inventory Price Index) is down over 10 years. Clothing is cheap, computers are cheap, etc.
On the other hand, the Dollar has been rising relative to the Japanese Yen since 2005 (although it has lost a bit of ground in the last few weeks).
:)
The dollar is also up versus the Venezuelan Peso (black market trading) and the Zimbabwe Dollar
Looking at things another way, the EUR is up strongly over the CAD over the last few months.
the truth is the US dollar is in freefall, loosing value hand over fist
But the US dollar is not losing value in the US. Domestic inflation remains low. The US falling against foreign currencies may make imports more expensive, but they will probably have to cut prices to meet US domestic competition, or simply be replaced with US domestic competition. Imports from cheap labor countries like China have a lot of flexibility in pricing, foreign imports to the US from advanced economies such as Europe will face bigger challenges, but they can automate more.
Given that we are in the middle of a pretty expensive war, the US should be happy with low inflation, low interest rates, low unemployment rates, and a couple of percent GDP growth. Of course, if we weren't in the middle of a war, we'd probably have 3% or 4% GDP growth.
There is a proposition to put a 27.5% tariff on imports from China. This is mainly because China keeps its currency artificially low in value. It's really hurting American manufacturing
Actually US manufacturing output is at an all-time high. Manufacturing in the US is doing fine, it just is becoming more automated and productive, thus needs fewer workers.
http://www.rutledgeblog.com/askrutl/archives/000340.html
NTSC uses 4.2 MHz of bandwidth as a combination of amplitude modulation for luminance and phase coding for chrominance. The actual luminance resolution generally seen on NTSC televisions is about 440 pixels per line. Most devices have some overscan so only the central 90% of the product aperture width is visible.
:)
Standard-definition production is generally done using digital SMPTE 274M (SDI) devices, which have 720 active pixels of luminance and 360 active pixels of color difference per line. This is why digital SD (which is generally 640 pixels per line) should actually have slightly better resolution than analog NTSC, but you have to ignore the MPEG artifacts in the digital
Most digital cable STBs have both analog and digital receivers. Cable MSOs generally receive broadcast channels off the air (which is usually analog in SD, until Feb. 17, 2009), and generally deliver them to the home over their analog tier.
It seems to me that some of the new Network Access Control (NAC) technologies might be able to mitigate such a situation - they can automatically shutdown switch ports that are using excessive bandwidth or doing other "naughty things".