"For Windoze software, it's actually very impressive"
WTF is that supposed to mean? I can understand an anti-Windows stance, but saying that sofware written FOR Windows is usually lame is a bit fanatical. I don't see why software written to run on Linux should be inherently better than sofware written for Windows.
Oh, and calling it "Windoze" is not clever, rather it makes you sound foolish.
Please. Stalin. Mao. Hitler. Mussolini. Pol Pot Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong. Hussein. Hoxha. Ceausescu. All of these were/are not motivated by religion.
Re:Flying Cars...
on
Minority Report
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
http://www.moller.com/. Very sweet engineering, but after The Twin Towers (and Pentagon) Tragedy (not suppsoed to call it nine-eleven anymore, didn't ya know?)I just can't see having these become as common as cars are today being a good thing. Packed with C4, one of these would be a terroist's dream.
Warner Brothers will develop Greg Bear's SF novel The Forge of God as a feature film, to be adapted by writer Ken Nolan (Black Hawk Down), Variety reported. The film is the envisioned as the first of three, which would include films based on Bear's sequel novel Anvil of Stars and a third book that the author has yet to write, the trade paper reported.
Ralph Vicinanza and Vince Gerardis will produce. Bear's first novel deals with hostile aliens who come to Earth lured by signal probes sent over the years."
The Forge of God should be easy to make a movie out of, maybe even a good one, but I don't think that their can be any way to make a movie out of Anvil of Stars. Their are many things that are going to be impossible to put on film. The alien race the humans rescue consist of individuals who are amalgamations of samller worm like creatures who communicate with a combination of odour and sound, and are psychologically incapable of not using double pronouns like "I we" (I would love to see a good CGI of one of these. It would be a nic antidote to Jar Jar).
one great big mother of a fan: any fan capable of generating static pressure sufficient to overcome the tensile streangth of the materials commonly used in PC cases. Use you imagination.
Um, I thought the whole point of asynch chips was to eliminate the need for a power hungry clock. If this chip is truly asynch, how can you say it runs at 120MHz?
So what? I have a hard time imagining other countries redesigning their currency because American tourists can't tell the bills apart. I am sorry, but I just can't feel sympathy for anyone who is too stupid to look at the bill BEFORE he spends it to make sure it isn't a 20 instead of a one.
I learned that the hard way. Was outbid by one damn dollar on an item at eBay. Very, very annoying. Always use a unusual number when using the automated bid system.
Um, 256MB of RAM seems AWFUL low. I read something about how RAM actually turns out to be cheaper for Google than hard drives in the final analysis due to it being about a million times faster, and that Google was using special machines that had a 36 bit segmented adressing scheme to get past the 4 gig limit on RAM. 256 MB per machine comes to about 5 terabytes total, but Google's index is actually in the petabyte region due to redundency, so it does seem a bit small.
It all comes doen to inter-cpu bandwidth needs for the particular piece of code you need to run. A render farm has pretty much no need for interprocessor bandwidth, wheras crays have it in the 100's of GBs/s because the kind of numerical physics simulation that is usually run on these beasties needs all the bandwidth it can get, and a little beowulf cluster of x86 toys just ain't gonna gut it.
In one of Stephen Baxter's books, he imagines a nifty successor to the Humvee(Hummer?). It has four electric motors in the HUB of each wheel. I visualize it to be kind of like a giant computer fan, where the motor is wrapped around the axle and instead of fan blades you have a tire attached to it. I always wondered why this slick idea never got more attention. It would have so many advantages. You could replace the entire transmission with wires, witch would improve efficiency dramatically. I would do it this way. Have an ultra-efficient Diesel engine sized to the AVERAGE load of the vehicle. It would only run at one RPM, which makes it easier to make a cleaner and more efficient engine. The engine would turn a high-efficiency DC generator (better than 90%), whose output would be cached in a bank of 2700 Farad ultra-capacitors to handle spikes in demand. (http://www.maxwell.com/ultracapacitors/products/T C2700.html). All this would make the internal combustion engine much more efficient. You could also lose two of the motors and still keep on truckin'.
I read somewhere that a pair of high quality headphones are the best device for 3D audio. Something to do with simplifying the calculations, and the fact that each ear cannot hear what the other is, wich also helps.
I have been wondering for a while now why the wicked fast DDR RAM and super wide buses that we are seeing on video cards can't be used as the main system ram and bus. I mean, the next generation of video cards are going to be using 750 MHz DDR RAM and a 256 bit bus, resulting in bandwithes of over 20GB/s, while the actual system bandwidth is stuck at well below 5GB/s. I mean, WTF!?!?
From http://www.au.af.mil/au/database/projects/ay1996/a csc/96-004/hardware/docs/gau8.htm:
The Avenger is an awesome weapon mounted only on the venerable A/OA-10 attack jet. The GAU-8 is a 30mm, 7 barrel gattling gun used primarily in the air to ground role as a soft target killer and tank buster. The Avenger is the only fighter gattling gun that retains its brass for recycle after the slugs are fired. The gun fires 3,900 rounds per minute, with a mix of both armored piercing incendiary (API) and high explosive incendiary (HEI). The entire front one- third of the A-10 consists of the gun. Many joke about the GAU-8 being designed first, with the airplane built around the gun after.
Aside from the jokes, the gun is also very effective in aerial combat against helicopters or fast moving fighter jets getting too close and slow. The gun is deadly accurate and feared by enemy tank commanders worldwide. The gun's performance was demonstrated thoroughly during Desert Storm at the able hands of Hog pilots. The highly maneuverable and agile A-10, combined with the GAU-8, is a force to be both feared and reckoned with on the battlefield.
The avenger could probbably put a few holes in the hull of a carrier, but it has no chance of sinking it, and no chance AT ALL of getting close enough to hit it. All US Navy ships have at least one of these bad boys (from Raytheon's website): The Phalanx Close-In Weapon System is a rapid-fire, computer-controlled, radar-guided gun system designed to defeat anti-ship missiles and other close-in air and surface threats. The system employs a pneumatically driven 20 mm Gatling gun with a fire rate of 4500 rounds per minute, and closed-loop-spotting radar technology to engage threats. A self-contained package, Phalanx automatically carries out functions usually performed by multiple systems -- including search, detection, threat evaluation, tracking, engagement, and kill assessment.
We have a laser that dumps ~30 Terrawatts
in about a billionth of a second 0
A Watt is one joule/second. 30 terrawatts is 30 trillion joules/second, or 30,000 joules/nanosecond.
Does a watt/second have any meaning?
Than what the hell ARE we supposed to call "a fatal dose of electricity"?
"He was accidently electrocuted." might be slightly oxymoronic, but it is a lot nicer than saying "He accidently recived a fatal dose of electricity."
Besides, the term is used even when the "dose" is not fatal. A distant relative of mine was very badly injured at his construction job when some steel pipes he was carrying grounded out a crane that was obviously malfuntioning. He was brain damaged, but he did not die for many years afterwards. So was he electrocuted or not?
Just one question for you:
Do you think that Iraq being able to buy a supercomputer is a good thing or a bad thing?
Re:It's not about cost-effectiveness
on
Extreme Cooling
·
· Score: 1
The numbers start looking really good when you realize that a decent compressor should last 10 years or more. That way you can amortize the initial $500 dollar "investment" over all the cpus it cools in its lifetime. So you can buy CPU's at the flatter part of the price/performance curve, and get the performance of CPU's at the more vertical part of the curve. Say you get and "extra $200" worth of performance from each cpu you buy by using this, and you buy 5 cpus over it's lifetime. Thats a net $500 dollars of CPU power you save. I think thats a bit conservative, actually, at least for Intel's notoriously overpriced high-end. Try $300 per CPU and 10 cpus, and I think I just talked myself into buying one of these;-)
Actually, you could remove the glass dome, but then you would have to be VERY careful not to get whacked by the screen spinning at 1440 RPM. Best to leave it on.
just multiply by 1024/38. It comes to about 81.
IBM said that the areal density of those tapes is 900mbits/inch^2. Sony has announced a new record areal tape density of 11 Gb/in^2, so the IBM tape could hold 12.2 terabytes, so his number would be 988.2. DAMN
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"For Windoze software, it's actually very impressive"
WTF is that supposed to mean? I can understand an anti-Windows stance, but saying that sofware written FOR Windows is usually lame is a bit fanatical. I don't see why software written to run on Linux should be inherently better than sofware written for Windows.
Oh, and calling it "Windoze" is not clever, rather it makes you sound foolish.
Please. Stalin. Mao. Hitler. Mussolini. Pol Pot Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong. Hussein. Hoxha. Ceausescu. All of these were/are not motivated by religion.
http://www.moller.com/. Very sweet engineering, but after The Twin Towers (and Pentagon) Tragedy (not suppsoed to call it nine-eleven anymore, didn't ya know?)I just can't see having these become as common as cars are today being a good thing. Packed with C4, one of these would be a terroist's dream.
From Sci-Fi Wire:
"WB To Adapt Bear SF Novels
Warner Brothers will develop Greg Bear's SF novel The Forge of God as a feature film, to be adapted by writer Ken Nolan (Black Hawk Down), Variety reported. The film is the envisioned as the first of three, which would include films based on Bear's sequel novel Anvil of Stars and a third book that the author has yet to write, the trade paper reported.
Ralph Vicinanza and Vince Gerardis will produce. Bear's first novel deals with hostile aliens who come to Earth lured by signal probes sent over the years."
The Forge of God should be easy to make a movie out of, maybe even a good one, but I don't think that their can be any way to make a movie out of Anvil of Stars.
Their are many things that are going to be impossible to put on film. The alien race the humans rescue consist of individuals who are amalgamations of samller worm like creatures who communicate with a combination of odour and sound, and are psychologically incapable of not using double pronouns like "I we" (I would love to see a good CGI of one of these. It would be a nic antidote to Jar Jar).
one great big mother of a fan: any fan capable of generating static pressure sufficient to overcome the tensile streangth of the materials commonly used in PC cases. Use you imagination.
Um, I thought the whole point of asynch chips was to eliminate the need for a power hungry clock. If this chip is truly asynch, how can you say it runs at 120MHz?
So what? I have a hard time imagining other countries redesigning their currency because American tourists can't tell the bills apart. I am sorry, but I just can't feel sympathy for anyone who is too stupid to look at the bill BEFORE he spends it to make sure it isn't a 20 instead of a one.
I learned that the hard way. Was outbid by one damn dollar on an item at eBay. Very, very annoying. Always use a unusual number when using the automated bid system.
Um, 256MB of RAM seems AWFUL low. I read something about how RAM actually turns out to be cheaper for Google than hard drives in the final analysis due to it being about a million times faster, and that Google was using special machines that had a 36 bit segmented adressing scheme to get past the 4 gig limit on RAM. 256 MB per machine comes to about 5 terabytes total, but Google's index is actually in the petabyte region due to redundency, so it does seem a bit small.
It would bother and annoy me, but I'm not sure what I could do about it. Maybe sue you for harrasment?
It all comes doen to inter-cpu bandwidth needs for the particular piece of code you need to run. A render farm has pretty much no need for interprocessor bandwidth, wheras crays have it in the 100's of GBs/s because the kind of numerical physics simulation that is usually run on these beasties needs all the bandwidth it can get, and a little beowulf cluster of x86 toys just ain't gonna gut it.
In one of Stephen Baxter's books, he imagines a nifty successor to the Humvee(Hummer?). It has four electric motors in the HUB of each wheel. I visualize it to be kind of like a giant computer fan, where the motor is wrapped around the axle and instead of fan blades you have a tire attached to it. I always wondered why this slick idea never got more attention. It would have so many advantages. You could replace the entire transmission with wires, witch would improve efficiency dramatically. I would do it this way. Have an ultra-efficient Diesel engine sized to the AVERAGE load of the vehicle. It would only run at one RPM, which makes it easier to make a cleaner and more efficient engine. The engine would turn a high-efficiency DC generator (better than 90%), whose output would be cached in a bank of 2700 Farad ultra-capacitors to handle spikes in demand. (http://www.maxwell.com/ultracapacitors/products/T C2700.html). All this would make the internal combustion engine much more efficient. You could also lose two of the motors and still keep on truckin'.
I read somewhere that a pair of high quality headphones are the best device for 3D audio. Something to do with simplifying the calculations, and the fact that each ear cannot hear what the other is, wich also helps.
Boeing already DOES launch satellites from sea.
BAH! As I type this, I am connected at 24.0 Kbps. Rural life has many advantages, but bandwidth is not one of them.
I have been wondering for a while now why the wicked fast DDR RAM and super wide buses that we are seeing on video cards can't be used as the main system ram and bus. I mean, the next generation of video cards are going to be using 750 MHz DDR RAM and a 256 bit bus, resulting in bandwithes of over 20GB/s, while the actual system bandwidth is stuck at well below 5GB/s. I mean, WTF!?!?
From http://www.au.af.mil/au/database/projects/ay1996/a csc/96-004/hardware/docs/gau8.htm:
The Avenger is an awesome weapon mounted only on the venerable A/OA-10 attack jet. The GAU-8 is a 30mm, 7 barrel gattling gun used primarily in the air to ground role as a soft target killer and tank buster. The Avenger is the only fighter gattling gun that retains its brass for recycle after the slugs are fired. The gun fires 3,900 rounds per minute, with a mix of both armored piercing incendiary (API) and high explosive incendiary (HEI). The entire front one- third of the A-10 consists of the gun. Many joke about the GAU-8 being designed first, with the airplane built around the gun after.
Aside from the jokes, the gun is also very effective in aerial combat against helicopters or fast moving fighter jets getting too close and slow. The gun is deadly accurate and feared by enemy tank commanders worldwide. The gun's performance was demonstrated thoroughly during Desert Storm at the able hands of Hog pilots. The highly maneuverable and agile A-10, combined with the GAU-8, is a force to be both feared and reckoned with on the battlefield.
The avenger could probbably put a few holes in the hull of a carrier, but it has no chance of sinking it, and no chance AT ALL of getting close enough to hit it. All US Navy ships have at least one of these bad boys (from Raytheon's website):
The Phalanx Close-In Weapon System is a rapid-fire, computer-controlled, radar-guided gun system designed to defeat anti-ship missiles and other close-in air and surface threats. The system employs a pneumatically driven 20 mm Gatling gun with a fire rate of 4500 rounds per minute, and closed-loop-spotting radar technology to engage threats. A self-contained package, Phalanx automatically carries out functions usually performed by multiple systems -- including search, detection, threat evaluation, tracking, engagement, and kill assessment.
We have a laser that dumps ~30 Terrawatts in about a billionth of a second 0 A Watt is one joule/second. 30 terrawatts is 30 trillion joules/second, or 30,000 joules/nanosecond. Does a watt/second have any meaning?
I think his point was that Relativity is hardly a "minor" correction.
Than what the hell ARE we supposed to call "a fatal dose of electricity"? "He was accidently electrocuted." might be slightly oxymoronic, but it is a lot nicer than saying "He accidently recived a fatal dose of electricity." Besides, the term is used even when the "dose" is not fatal. A distant relative of mine was very badly injured at his construction job when some steel pipes he was carrying grounded out a crane that was obviously malfuntioning. He was brain damaged, but he did not die for many years afterwards. So was he electrocuted or not?
God damn, mod this up to plus 5, insightful. You really put the smackdown to a lot of selfrightous bs that is constantly flung around here.
Just one question for you: Do you think that Iraq being able to buy a supercomputer is a good thing or a bad thing?
The numbers start looking really good when you realize that a decent compressor should last 10 years or more. That way you can amortize the initial $500 dollar "investment" over all the cpus it cools in its lifetime. So you can buy CPU's at the flatter part of the price/performance curve, and get the performance of CPU's at the more vertical part of the curve. Say you get and "extra $200" worth of performance from each cpu you buy by using this, and you buy 5 cpus over it's lifetime. Thats a net $500 dollars of CPU power you save. I think thats a bit conservative, actually, at least for Intel's notoriously overpriced high-end. Try $300 per CPU and 10 cpus, and I think I just talked myself into buying one of these;-)
Actually, you could remove the glass dome, but then you would have to be VERY careful not to get whacked by the screen spinning at 1440 RPM. Best to leave it on.
just multiply by 1024/38. It comes to about 81. IBM said that the areal density of those tapes is 900mbits/inch^2. Sony has announced a new record areal tape density of 11 Gb/in^2, so the IBM tape could hold 12.2 terabytes, so his number would be 988.2. DAMN