Actually, plugging right into the PCI express bus is a great solution. It's more than fast enough for as fast as consumer SSDs are likely to get. (at a certain point, you stop getting meaningful performance advantages because the CPU is the bottleneck)
Most SATA controllers today actually link to the PCI express bus : a direct connect removes a whole unnecessary layer of chips in the drive and in the motherboard.
It's well supported, and the connectors and chips are reliable and inexpensive. Yes, it would even work for laptops, though they'd need to use a special form factor connector.
This kludgey design is a bad idea for several reasons :
1. Despite throwing the kitchen sink at the problem, those indilinx chips are still much slower than Intel's controller at small, random reads and writes.
2. Since the drive needs four indilinx controllers rather than 1, some complex packaging, AND 3 RAID controllers it's going to cost a lot more per gigabyte. It's probably also more failure prone. And the MSRPs bear that out : this is a lot more expensive than the MSRPs for the equivalent Intel product.
3. Doesn't support native TRIM support
4. Biggest problem of all : the drive is bandwidth starved because it's on the SATA bus rather than on the PCI express bus. Furthermore, those slow internal RAID chips don't help matters. So instead of supporting sequential reads at 600 megabytes/second, it's capped at about 240. Lame.
People, people, this debate is very simple and obvious.
For any given electronic device of a given size and cost, a specialty device will always do a better job than a generalist device. A portable ipod is (slightly) better than an iphone. A portable game player such as a PSP or DS is also better than an iphone. Handheld GPS systems, same story. A watch is a better time keeping device than a cell phone, with more time related features. A compact digital camera with a bigger lens is much better than the camera in a phone. And so on and so forth.
But the point is, for MOST users 99% of the time, the inferior function on your cell phone, especially a cutting edge phone like the iphone or the Droid DOES THE JOB. You only lose a few seconds pulling your phone out rather than looking at your watch. The pictures taken by the camera on the iphone or droid are more than sharp enough for posting to a resolution limited site like facebook. The iphone has a fairly good GPU, and many small and creative 2d games work great on it, so it's almost as entertaining as the PSP or DS. The GPS may be a little fuzzy, but it's usually close enough to find your way around. And so on.
So, the inferiority of the phone's functions are nearly always MASSIVELY OUTWEIGHED by the fact that you only carry ONE device rather than a whole batman belt worth of them. Size and weight and convenience means that for 99% of users, it's easier and cheaper just to buy a smartphone and use it exclusively for all of the above functions.
- In order to pirate an iphone app, you have to jailbreak your phone. Only a small percentage of the user base have done this
- By measuring the total number of "phone homes", you can figure out how many copies of your app are out in the wild, INCLUDING copies on jailbroken phones.
So if you find out that your app has 1000 copies in the wild.
600 of those copies are on the jailbroken iphones that make up maybe 5% of the total phones.
Therefore, you're out the revenue from those 600 copies? Nope, because if those users hadn't hacked their phones, they probably WOULD NOT have paid for your app. The reason you only have 400 sales in this scenario is that the 95% of users who are eligible to buy it weren't interested enough in your app. The jailbreaking users just grab whatever they want whenever they want, but wouldn't behave like that if they had to pay.
Why do we need to be absolutely 100% sure that the nukes will go boom? If we're merely "fairly certain" that the weapons will probably work, isn't that sufficient deterrence? What enemy is going to attack on the possibility that we MIGHT not be able to retaliate because our nukes were old and the missiles were poorly maintained? A pretty risky move to bet millions of lives of your countrymen on a maybe.
Not to mention the 3 legs of the triangle : it's kinda unlikely that plain old aging would prevent all the different types of nukes and delivery vehicles we have from working.
Your old car example : that's true if you are USING the car. You can easily take vehicle parts made in the 1940s or earlier that were stored in grease and bolt them right onto a vehicle of that vintage and it will work. In addition, Jay Leno has vehicles made around 1920 that work fine with basically no maintainence done in the mean time.
So let me get this straight : the DoD wants new nukes because it can't guarantee that all of our bombs will necessarily go off due to aging.
But why does it matter if all our nukes detonate? Is any enemy going to realistically attack us HOPING that all our bombs won't detonate or that the missiles won't work? Even a partial failure of our attack would still cause more mass destruction than in all of human history.
Would you recommend attacking the Russians or the Chinese with a preemptive strike, hoping that their nukes didn't go off when they retaliate? (after all, they have the same problems with aging we do, and possibly lower quality control) I sure wouldn't.
I'm looking for the article I saw saying that nuclear costs more than wind, at the current prices that GE will charge you if you want to order a new reactor or a new plant. It's around here somewhere. Think it was in business week or the new york times.
Anyways, nuclear is by no means as cheap as coal. Can't be, if the decomissioning costs of one plant add up to several cents per kilowatt hour that the plant ever produced. And reducing the cost of reprocessing slightly barely affects the main driver of cost : building and running such an immense pile of expensive and dangerous capital equipment. A nuclear reactor has to have parts in it used in nothing else on the planet, all made to a very high standard of quality.
Yeah, the French way might just be affordable, but it would be tough to make it happen in the U.S. Not only do the French do reprocessing, but every one of their plants is a copy of each other. That last bit would simplify a lot of the current problems, and would make a new plant cost a lot less.
Anyways, I have thought about how to do nuclear right. You'd have to agree on a single, standardized design or two. The Federal government would have to guarantee a lot of things, and carve out places near a supply of cooling water to build them. There would be a few huge sites with dozens of plants all located next to each other, so that backup systems and safety systems could be shared between the plants. Each mega-site would have a single waste repository or reprocessing plant (so you don't have to transport the hot stuff anywhere) and would be guarded by federal troops with heavy weapons. (could even give it a Patriot missile battery so that airliners and missiles couldn't be used against the site)
We'd have 4 or 5 of these locations that would supply the base load power generation needs of the entire nation. Consolidating all the plants near each other would also greatly reduce the number of trained personnel you'd need to run the plants, since you could have a small number of real experts working there with PhDs, an emergency response team that knew what they were doing, and so forth. There would be ways to cross connect the plants such that if one plant's cooling system failed you could bring in giant hoses and use the system off of the reactor next to it. Individual firms would own each reactor, but they would be required to pay into a common fund used to pay the workers who had jurisdiction over the whole site.
These mega sites would be located on the least valuable land that is far from a populated area as possible, with a special high speed rail link between the site and the residential areas for the families of the workers. Like backwoods Louisiana or Oregon, places like that. Just has to be near a water source, usually saltwater.
I kind of was thinking that if "latency" measured the time between sending a read request to the drive and the time when you get back the very FIRST bit, then even the JMicron probably does that ok.
Well, they say that per kilowatt hour actually generated for a NEW PLANT, wind is cheaper as we speak today. Yeah, it's more expensive than the marginal cost to run an existing nuclear plant.
So it doesn't make any sense to build more nuclear plants : it's a terrible investment. That's why, even with a bunch of loan guarantees and liability immunity, no one is rushing to build a new plant.
Solar is probably another decade away from being both cheap and in mass production. However, I don't see how any reasonable person can doubt that it will happen eventually. Right now, those LED lightbulbs cost about $40-$100 for a bulb equivalent to a 50 cent incandescent. Yet, nobody doubts that in a few more years the LED bulbs will be pretty affordable, maybe 4-10 dollars or so.
That's because the fundamental materials and energy cost of thin film are really, really low : just a matter of getting the formula right and ironing out the kinks in mass production.
Nuclear and the health care industry are two major exceptions to the rule of lowering costs, and the reason is obvious. In neither industry can you innovate much in a way that makes things cheaper, because if you do that, there's a possibility that your cost cutting measure will instead cause a catastrophe. So you keep doing things the same old risk averse way, year after year. Also, in both industries there is a gigantic amount of government regulation.
Solar and the semiconductor industry have basically no regulation. If a chip or a panel fails, it's a dispute between the buyer and the seller. It's fairly easy for all parties to measure the price/performance ratio of a new product, and the worst that can go wrong is that the device breaks or melts...nobody will die, and nothing will be contaminated.
Where are you getting your data from? I've heard numbers like disposal/decommissioning costing 6 cents per kilowatt hour ALONE.
Solar panel manufacturing is not yet a mature technology. Your cost numbers are like quoting the cost per MIP for computing when all we have are 286 chips. Various thin film technologies that use less raw materials and can be mass produced like newspaper are just now becoming available.
And the cost will continue to fall for solar, because you can just leave the equipment out there and ignore it. You don't need well educated workers, and you don't have to worry about a potential disaster.
Nanosolar claims that their marginal production costs RIGHT now make solar cheaper than coal, if the panels go in the right climate zone like Arizona. Yes, we'll need some serious storage in a couple more decades to solve the obvious problem of the sun setting.
Nuclear, on the other hand, can't really get cheaper. It's only gotten more expensive by a factor of 10 or so in the last few decades. It can't get cheaper because you're always going to have radioactive waste and a mountain of stuff that came in contact with radiation. You're also going to always have the very real problem that if someone were to detonate a truck bomb next to a nuclear reactor, it would ruin hundreds of square miles of land. Yeah, yeah....such an attack scenario is unlikely to succeed. But you can't just close the gates on the nuclear plant and leave at night....with a solar farm, you can leave the controls alone for weeks at a time...worst thing that can happen is the equipment fails and it stops making electricity.
Even the lowliest grunt workers in the nuclear industry need weeks to months of training, and have to be fairly well paid, do they not?
In the long run, nuclear fission reactors will still be pretty dangerous. If not carefully run and monitored, they can blow or be deliberately detonated to contaminate a vast area.
That danger factor means that we can't ever have totally automated plants, and we can't lower the cost of building a reactor by deliberately cutting corners where we don't think it will matter.
Solar is going to be the only main source of power in the long run. It's entirely conceivable to make a factory that can make solar panels in a completely automated manner, and installation and maintainance is optional : nothing catastrophic will happen if you stop maintaining your solar plant, or cut corners wherever you can. Parts of it will just go dead.
Yeah, storage is currently a problem : but solutions like the compressed air caverns and electric car batteries will eventually eliminate this problem. Eventually it'll be possible to churn out cheap solar panels and storage for basically nothing.
And in the long, long run it'll be space based power : no more problems with storage. I think even for our distance descendents, it'll be a lot easier to park solar sheets in space than to run a fusion reactor (except, of course, for interstellar expeditions into the dark...those will need portable power systems of some sort)
Nuclear's a dying industry, and not for the reason commonly cited.
Fact is, it is ALREADY much more expensive to build new nuclear reactor capacity than it is to put up new windmills (which are in turn much more expensive than natural gas or coal)
I suspect that even when you factor in the cost of storage, as long as you use something like a compressed air cavern for storage, then wind is still cheaper.
I predict that less than 10 new nuclear fission plants for commercial power generation will ever be built in the United States over the rest of human history.
It kind of seems like men are just big, hairy, smelly, and violent brutes who are completely superceded by women. It seems like all the PC research that comes out says that women are better at basically everything.
There's actually some truth in that : as society becomes more and more regimented and controlled and more 'civilized', men are at a disadvantage. A lot of the risk taking behaviors that men were rewarded for in the past are now likely to result in problems. Since so few people in society die from violence, the protective abilities of men are now not so valuable.
There are some valuable roles for men, still. Basically everything that was ever invented or designed was created by a man, even now. While some may blame societal pressure, I suspect than men's neural nets may make them better inventors and engineers on average than women.
Erm. Booting Windows 7 off of a USB thumbdrive? (you'd need that 32GB model)
Dunno, doesn't sound like a very good idea. The OS is huge, and needs lots and lots of IO accesses, both for booting and during normal operation. Thumbdrives generally aren't really designed for that kind of continuous use. And finally, the slowdown from waiting to boot would possibly cause more lost time than you'd gain from having an $800 PCI-express card for your application files.
I guess. The thing is, PCI express x4 is perfect for the job. Another poster mentioned that modern machines often hang the SATA controller off of the PCI express bus anyways...might as well reduce the complexity. All the interface chips have been out for years, and are very cheap and ready to go. The only missing element is that you do need a very high performance design for the drive controller on your SSD in order for it to be worth it.
First off, late in the article they show that game level load times are faster with these PCIx SSDs. Left For Dead loads about twice as quick with the Fusion IOXtreme. So the end user would notice a difference (especially as time goes on and apps become more and more bloated)
One thing this product does effectively illustrate is that SATA 6 is already obsolete. All this card really is is the same grade of memory chips that goes in a lesser SSD like an Intel X-25M. The difference is that the controller gangs together 25 channels instead of just 10 like the Intel product. The controller isn't even that high performance a part - it's using an FPGA. An ASIC version of the chip could be cheaply fabbed using technology several generations back. So, in the long run, the cost to design and manufacture a PCIx SSD is virtually identical to the cost of a SATA SSD. And SATA 6 is already too slow for SSDs to use (and too fast of an interface for a mechanical hard drive)
All in all, I predict that in a few more years, basically all SSDs sold will use a PCIx interface to connect to the host PC. Laptop manufacturers will have to change their internal mounting scheme slightly. And, prices should fall drastically from the $900 this IoXtreme is MSRPing at.
Dude, you try going to college and getting a CS degree at a top school like Stanford or Carnegie Mellon. Try to be in the top 20% of your class. Now, try to get a job working for Microsoft.
If you get past all of those steps (most Americans would fail), NOW you can talk. Can you really produce 600 lines of code a month that have NO errors and NO mistakes at all. Code that works 100% of the time, no matter what? Good luck.
Yes, there are probably a few unbelievably talented programmers that could accomplish what I just listed. John Carmack, for instance, is probably almost this good. But most people aren't, even those at the top of their respective classes.
Maybe it needs to be this complex, maybe it doesn't. Fact is, the majority of the desktop apps in the world are still run using a variant of windows, and for the moment it does not look like that fact is going to ever change.
Microsoft cannot remove much code and maintain compatibility with legacy apps.
People make mistakes. Perhaps the coders of the loop thought that input protection located in code elsewhere would prevent this from ever being a problem. Maybe the person who was supposed to write the input protection piece forgot to do it because of a miscommunication. (one of the downsides of working on a project where the job is split between thousands of developers)
Given that Windows has more lines of code than just about any other software in existence, it's actually fairly impressive how well it holds up the majority of the time.
My only comment is this : such 'impossible' things already exist. The universe we exist in is impossible by any standard of reason or logic. This is because we observe a clear arrow of time and effects like entropy, yet under the laws of physics in the universe we live in the universe could not have been created nor came to be. (since the only way for our universe to exist is that the 'substance' of which it is made had to ALWAYS exist, because something cannot create itself from nothing)
So allowing for the reality that the very fact we are able to have this conversation is impossible, maybe free will is not impossible, either.
But whether humans have free will or not to a degree is irrelevent for the current discussion : fact is, biochemical effects can enormously sway our behavior in rather impressive ways. (given that many of the things we do today did not exist at all when humans were evolving)
Err I meant through cultural exposure. With chemicals, you're changing how the brain operates and so you can adjust it's preferences. (so much for 'free will', eh)
However, they've tried to give boys the dolls and tea sets and encourage them to play with them, and vice versa and it hasn't worked. Hence, it probably isn't cultural.
It's a neat trick, isn't it? Yes, it is biology : somehow the neural net on a male 'prefers' the action figures while the neural net on a female 'prefers' the doll set. There's no known way to override this : it has been tried.
Mother nature is a pretty brilliant hardware designer, most of the time.
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Actually, plugging right into the PCI express bus is a great solution. It's more than fast enough for as fast as consumer SSDs are likely to get. (at a certain point, you stop getting meaningful performance advantages because the CPU is the bottleneck)
Most SATA controllers today actually link to the PCI express bus : a direct connect removes a whole unnecessary layer of chips in the drive and in the motherboard.
It's well supported, and the connectors and chips are reliable and inexpensive. Yes, it would even work for laptops, though they'd need to use a special form factor connector.
This kludgey design is a bad idea for several reasons :
1. Despite throwing the kitchen sink at the problem, those indilinx chips are still much slower than Intel's controller at small, random reads and writes.
2. Since the drive needs four indilinx controllers rather than 1, some complex packaging, AND 3 RAID controllers it's going to cost a lot more per gigabyte. It's probably also more failure prone. And the MSRPs bear that out : this is a lot more expensive than the MSRPs for the equivalent Intel product.
3. Doesn't support native TRIM support
4. Biggest problem of all : the drive is bandwidth starved because it's on the SATA bus rather than on the PCI express bus. Furthermore, those slow internal RAID chips don't help matters. So instead of supporting sequential reads at 600 megabytes/second, it's capped at about 240. Lame.
People, people, this debate is very simple and obvious.
For any given electronic device of a given size and cost, a specialty device will always do a better job than a generalist device. A portable ipod is (slightly) better than an iphone. A portable game player such as a PSP or DS is also better than an iphone. Handheld GPS systems, same story. A watch is a better time keeping device than a cell phone, with more time related features. A compact digital camera with a bigger lens is much better than the camera in a phone. And so on and so forth.
But the point is, for MOST users 99% of the time, the inferior function on your cell phone, especially a cutting edge phone like the iphone or the Droid DOES THE JOB. You only lose a few seconds pulling your phone out rather than looking at your watch. The pictures taken by the camera on the iphone or droid are more than sharp enough for posting to a resolution limited site like facebook. The iphone has a fairly good GPU, and many small and creative 2d games work great on it, so it's almost as entertaining as the PSP or DS. The GPS may be a little fuzzy, but it's usually close enough to find your way around. And so on.
So, the inferiority of the phone's functions are nearly always MASSIVELY OUTWEIGHED by the fact that you only carry ONE device rather than a whole batman belt worth of them. Size and weight and convenience means that for 99% of users, it's easier and cheaper just to buy a smartphone and use it exclusively for all of the above functions.
Agreed. Not only did my thinking come out garbled in my post, but I hadn't RTFA. My bad.
Ok, wait a second
- In order to pirate an iphone app, you have to jailbreak your phone. Only a small percentage of the user base have done this
- By measuring the total number of "phone homes", you can figure out how many copies of your app are out in the wild, INCLUDING copies on jailbroken phones.
So if you find out that your app has 1000 copies in the wild.
600 of those copies are on the jailbroken iphones that make up maybe 5% of the total phones.
Therefore, you're out the revenue from those 600 copies? Nope, because if those users hadn't hacked their phones, they probably WOULD NOT have paid for your app. The reason you only have 400 sales in this scenario is that the 95% of users who are eligible to buy it weren't interested enough in your app. The jailbreaking users just grab whatever they want whenever they want, but wouldn't behave like that if they had to pay.
Why do we need to be absolutely 100% sure that the nukes will go boom? If we're merely "fairly certain" that the weapons will probably work, isn't that sufficient deterrence? What enemy is going to attack on the possibility that we MIGHT not be able to retaliate because our nukes were old and the missiles were poorly maintained? A pretty risky move to bet millions of lives of your countrymen on a maybe.
Not to mention the 3 legs of the triangle : it's kinda unlikely that plain old aging would prevent all the different types of nukes and delivery vehicles we have from working.
Your old car example : that's true if you are USING the car. You can easily take vehicle parts made in the 1940s or earlier that were stored in grease and bolt them right onto a vehicle of that vintage and it will work. In addition, Jay Leno has vehicles made around 1920 that work fine with basically no maintainence done in the mean time.
So let me get this straight : the DoD wants new nukes because it can't guarantee that all of our bombs will necessarily go off due to aging.
But why does it matter if all our nukes detonate? Is any enemy going to realistically attack us HOPING that all our bombs won't detonate or that the missiles won't work? Even a partial failure of our attack would still cause more mass destruction than in all of human history.
Would you recommend attacking the Russians or the Chinese with a preemptive strike, hoping that their nukes didn't go off when they retaliate? (after all, they have the same problems with aging we do, and possibly lower quality control) I sure wouldn't.
Makes me wonder what the engineers who designed that piece of crap were thinking they were doing.
I'm looking for the article I saw saying that nuclear costs more than wind, at the current prices that GE will charge you if you want to order a new reactor or a new plant. It's around here somewhere. Think it was in business week or the new york times.
Anyways, nuclear is by no means as cheap as coal. Can't be, if the decomissioning costs of one plant add up to several cents per kilowatt hour that the plant ever produced. And reducing the cost of reprocessing slightly barely affects the main driver of cost : building and running such an immense pile of expensive and dangerous capital equipment. A nuclear reactor has to have parts in it used in nothing else on the planet, all made to a very high standard of quality.
Yeah, the French way might just be affordable, but it would be tough to make it happen in the U.S. Not only do the French do reprocessing, but every one of their plants is a copy of each other. That last bit would simplify a lot of the current problems, and would make a new plant cost a lot less.
Anyways, I have thought about how to do nuclear right. You'd have to agree on a single, standardized design or two. The Federal government would have to guarantee a lot of things, and carve out places near a supply of cooling water to build them. There would be a few huge sites with dozens of plants all located next to each other, so that backup systems and safety systems could be shared between the plants. Each mega-site would have a single waste repository or reprocessing plant (so you don't have to transport the hot stuff anywhere) and would be guarded by federal troops with heavy weapons. (could even give it a Patriot missile battery so that airliners and missiles couldn't be used against the site)
We'd have 4 or 5 of these locations that would supply the base load power generation needs of the entire nation. Consolidating all the plants near each other would also greatly reduce the number of trained personnel you'd need to run the plants, since you could have a small number of real experts working there with PhDs, an emergency response team that knew what they were doing, and so forth. There would be ways to cross connect the plants such that if one plant's cooling system failed you could bring in giant hoses and use the system off of the reactor next to it. Individual firms would own each reactor, but they would be required to pay into a common fund used to pay the workers who had jurisdiction over the whole site.
These mega sites would be located on the least valuable land that is far from a populated area as possible, with a special high speed rail link between the site and the residential areas for the families of the workers. Like backwoods Louisiana or Oregon, places like that. Just has to be near a water source, usually saltwater.
I kind of was thinking that if "latency" measured the time between sending a read request to the drive and the time when you get back the very FIRST bit, then even the JMicron probably does that ok.
Well, they say that per kilowatt hour actually generated for a NEW PLANT, wind is cheaper as we speak today. Yeah, it's more expensive than the marginal cost to run an existing nuclear plant.
So it doesn't make any sense to build more nuclear plants : it's a terrible investment. That's why, even with a bunch of loan guarantees and liability immunity, no one is rushing to build a new plant.
Solar is probably another decade away from being both cheap and in mass production. However, I don't see how any reasonable person can doubt that it will happen eventually. Right now, those LED lightbulbs cost about $40-$100 for a bulb equivalent to a 50 cent incandescent. Yet, nobody doubts that in a few more years the LED bulbs will be pretty affordable, maybe 4-10 dollars or so.
That's because the fundamental materials and energy cost of thin film are really, really low : just a matter of getting the formula right and ironing out the kinks in mass production.
Nuclear and the health care industry are two major exceptions to the rule of lowering costs, and the reason is obvious. In neither industry can you innovate much in a way that makes things cheaper, because if you do that, there's a possibility that your cost cutting measure will instead cause a catastrophe. So you keep doing things the same old risk averse way, year after year. Also, in both industries there is a gigantic amount of government regulation.
Solar and the semiconductor industry have basically no regulation. If a chip or a panel fails, it's a dispute between the buyer and the seller. It's fairly easy for all parties to measure the price/performance ratio of a new product, and the worst that can go wrong is that the device breaks or melts...nobody will die, and nothing will be contaminated.
Where are you getting your data from? I've heard numbers like disposal/decommissioning costing 6 cents per kilowatt hour ALONE.
Solar panel manufacturing is not yet a mature technology. Your cost numbers are like quoting the cost per MIP for computing when all we have are 286 chips. Various thin film technologies that use less raw materials and can be mass produced like newspaper are just now becoming available.
And the cost will continue to fall for solar, because you can just leave the equipment out there and ignore it. You don't need well educated workers, and you don't have to worry about a potential disaster.
Nanosolar claims that their marginal production costs RIGHT now make solar cheaper than coal, if the panels go in the right climate zone like Arizona. Yes, we'll need some serious storage in a couple more decades to solve the obvious problem of the sun setting.
Nuclear, on the other hand, can't really get cheaper. It's only gotten more expensive by a factor of 10 or so in the last few decades. It can't get cheaper because you're always going to have radioactive waste and a mountain of stuff that came in contact with radiation. You're also going to always have the very real problem that if someone were to detonate a truck bomb next to a nuclear reactor, it would ruin hundreds of square miles of land. Yeah, yeah....such an attack scenario is unlikely to succeed. But you can't just close the gates on the nuclear plant and leave at night....with a solar farm, you can leave the controls alone for weeks at a time...worst thing that can happen is the equipment fails and it stops making electricity.
Even the lowliest grunt workers in the nuclear industry need weeks to months of training, and have to be fairly well paid, do they not?
In the long run, nuclear fission reactors will still be pretty dangerous. If not carefully run and monitored, they can blow or be deliberately detonated to contaminate a vast area.
That danger factor means that we can't ever have totally automated plants, and we can't lower the cost of building a reactor by deliberately cutting corners where we don't think it will matter.
Solar is going to be the only main source of power in the long run. It's entirely conceivable to make a factory that can make solar panels in a completely automated manner, and installation and maintainance is optional : nothing catastrophic will happen if you stop maintaining your solar plant, or cut corners wherever you can. Parts of it will just go dead.
Yeah, storage is currently a problem : but solutions like the compressed air caverns and electric car batteries will eventually eliminate this problem. Eventually it'll be possible to churn out cheap solar panels and storage for basically nothing.
And in the long, long run it'll be space based power : no more problems with storage. I think even for our distance descendents, it'll be a lot easier to park solar sheets in space than to run a fusion reactor (except, of course, for interstellar expeditions into the dark...those will need portable power systems of some sort)
Nuclear's a dying industry, and not for the reason commonly cited.
Fact is, it is ALREADY much more expensive to build new nuclear reactor capacity than it is to put up new windmills (which are in turn much more expensive than natural gas or coal)
I suspect that even when you factor in the cost of storage, as long as you use something like a compressed air cavern for storage, then wind is still cheaper.
I predict that less than 10 new nuclear fission plants for commercial power generation will ever be built in the United States over the rest of human history.
It kind of seems like men are just big, hairy, smelly, and violent brutes who are completely superceded by women. It seems like all the PC research that comes out says that women are better at basically everything.
There's actually some truth in that : as society becomes more and more regimented and controlled and more 'civilized', men are at a disadvantage. A lot of the risk taking behaviors that men were rewarded for in the past are now likely to result in problems. Since so few people in society die from violence, the protective abilities of men are now not so valuable.
There are some valuable roles for men, still. Basically everything that was ever invented or designed was created by a man, even now. While some may blame societal pressure, I suspect than men's neural nets may make them better inventors and engineers on average than women.
Erm. Booting Windows 7 off of a USB thumbdrive? (you'd need that 32GB model)
Dunno, doesn't sound like a very good idea. The OS is huge, and needs lots and lots of IO accesses, both for booting and during normal operation. Thumbdrives generally aren't really designed for that kind of continuous use. And finally, the slowdown from waiting to boot would possibly cause more lost time than you'd gain from having an $800 PCI-express card for your application files.
I guess. The thing is, PCI express x4 is perfect for the job. Another poster mentioned that modern machines often hang the SATA controller off of the PCI express bus anyways...might as well reduce the complexity. All the interface chips have been out for years, and are very cheap and ready to go. The only missing element is that you do need a very high performance design for the drive controller on your SSD in order for it to be worth it.
And the worthless JMicron controller SSDs probably have read latencies under 100 microseconds as well.
It's not read latency that matters at all, it's total THROUGHPUT for the smallest, random, reads and writes.
First off, late in the article they show that game level load times are faster with these PCIx SSDs. Left For Dead loads about twice as quick with the Fusion IOXtreme. So the end user would notice a difference (especially as time goes on and apps become more and more bloated)
One thing this product does effectively illustrate is that SATA 6 is already obsolete. All this card really is is the same grade of memory chips that goes in a lesser SSD like an Intel X-25M. The difference is that the controller gangs together 25 channels instead of just 10 like the Intel product. The controller isn't even that high performance a part - it's using an FPGA. An ASIC version of the chip could be cheaply fabbed using technology several generations back. So, in the long run, the cost to design and manufacture a PCIx SSD is virtually identical to the cost of a SATA SSD. And SATA 6 is already too slow for SSDs to use (and too fast of an interface for a mechanical hard drive)
All in all, I predict that in a few more years, basically all SSDs sold will use a PCIx interface to connect to the host PC. Laptop manufacturers will have to change their internal mounting scheme slightly. And, prices should fall drastically from the $900 this IoXtreme is MSRPing at.
Dude, you try going to college and getting a CS degree at a top school like Stanford or Carnegie Mellon. Try to be in the top 20% of your class. Now, try to get a job working for Microsoft.
If you get past all of those steps (most Americans would fail), NOW you can talk. Can you really produce 600 lines of code a month that have NO errors and NO mistakes at all. Code that works 100% of the time, no matter what? Good luck.
Yes, there are probably a few unbelievably talented programmers that could accomplish what I just listed. John Carmack, for instance, is probably almost this good. But most people aren't, even those at the top of their respective classes.
Maybe it needs to be this complex, maybe it doesn't. Fact is, the majority of the desktop apps in the world are still run using a variant of windows, and for the moment it does not look like that fact is going to ever change.
Microsoft cannot remove much code and maintain compatibility with legacy apps.
Well, they COULD, but using emulation....
People make mistakes. Perhaps the coders of the loop thought that input protection located in code elsewhere would prevent this from ever being a problem. Maybe the person who was supposed to write the input protection piece forgot to do it because of a miscommunication. (one of the downsides of working on a project where the job is split between thousands of developers)
Given that Windows has more lines of code than just about any other software in existence, it's actually fairly impressive how well it holds up the majority of the time.
My only comment is this : such 'impossible' things already exist. The universe we exist in is impossible by any standard of reason or logic. This is because we observe a clear arrow of time and effects like entropy, yet under the laws of physics in the universe we live in the universe could not have been created nor came to be. (since the only way for our universe to exist is that the 'substance' of which it is made had to ALWAYS exist, because something cannot create itself from nothing)
So allowing for the reality that the very fact we are able to have this conversation is impossible, maybe free will is not impossible, either.
But whether humans have free will or not to a degree is irrelevent for the current discussion : fact is, biochemical effects can enormously sway our behavior in rather impressive ways. (given that many of the things we do today did not exist at all when humans were evolving)
Err I meant through cultural exposure. With chemicals, you're changing how the brain operates and so you can adjust it's preferences. (so much for 'free will', eh)
However, they've tried to give boys the dolls and tea sets and encourage them to play with them, and vice versa and it hasn't worked. Hence, it probably isn't cultural.
It's a neat trick, isn't it? Yes, it is biology : somehow the neural net on a male 'prefers' the action figures while the neural net on a female 'prefers' the doll set. There's no known way to override this : it has been tried.
Mother nature is a pretty brilliant hardware designer, most of the time.