It's possible they'd kill it off, but it's more likely they'd backburner it and try and rewrite it in 100% Pure Java and/or use the JNI. I'd expect a speed reduction if they did the former, and I honestly can't remember if IBM implemented JNI on OS/2 or not...and if they did, whether or not they did a good JOB of doing it...and of course, finally, whether or not Sun would maintain a JNI port to OS/2 -- the answer, sadly, is probably no.:(
He had ideas of placing a nuclear reactor in space, then beaming the energy down to the globe. I also seem to remember something about placing a black hole in orbit and harnessing the power generated by matter/antimatter collisions...
Actually, there's more information about this at NASA, in an article entitled Integrated thin-film solar power satellite. It goes into more detail about the part we care about -- the satellite and its uses -- instead of the robot being developed at CMU to help construct the darn thing. It even has a couple of MacPaint-like pictures of what this thing might look like.
What about (as someone else mentioned) flying objects which end up in the path of the beam? Even if it would pass through us, it would get absorbed by rain clouds (making it just as effective as those solar panels we were all promised in the late '70s), or worse yet, by birds, airplanes, and other flying objects... Certainly, the danger of the solar collector crashing to the ground is less than that of an orbiting nuclear reactor or black hole...but it still seems a bit unsafe. For this thing to be useful at all, it's got to transmit multi-megawatts of energy from point A to point B, and that energy will inevitably get absorbed by SOMETHING in the area. And if the levels are low enough to be "human-safe," then they're barely going to be able to light a bulb, let alone run something useful (like a section of a power grid).
That's why NASA is looking at using these things more to transmit power to lunar bases, Mars missions, and the like. In these controlled environments, something like a giant orbiting solar panel make a heck of a lot of sense:
However, it is quite likely that some of the most important applications, and certainly some of the initial applications, will be in space. Here atmospheric attenuation does not limit the frequency choices and transmission distances may be less. Further, because of the high total mass of the power systems (including storage, PMAD, thermal control and structures) and the high transportation costs, existing power sources for use in space provide power at a considerably higher effective price ($800/kW-hr) than terrestrial power sources ($.10/kW-hr)
P.S. Anyone reading this remember when parts of your 'Net link were transmitted by microwave? Our link in college used to go down regularly, and a call to MIT confirmed that their microwave link to BU (or was it BC? I can never remember) was down due to rain. Sure adds another dimension to the concept of "Internet Weather Forecasting!":)
They've been threatening a tax on mail order stuff for a while -- this would simply enforce that same tarriff on stuff ordered over the 'net. Simple, really, they're looking for another way to (as George Carlin would put it) "bend you over and insert their big floppy..."
Let's face it -- those of us doing interstate orders and not getting charged tax from fatbrain, cdnow, and the like have known that we're getting a free ride. Sooner or later, some form of sales tax was bound to drop down on us out of DC. To be honest, I expected it to come earlier in Clinton's presidency sometime, before Newt came to his brief-lived power.
But the martial law nugget is simply ridiculous. If you truly believe that all computerized transactions will fall apart, and that people will forget how to use a pencil and paper to take an order, deposit a check, or write a letter, then you've truly forgotten the ingenuity of the human spirit. People continue to go on with their lives. There won't be a run on food (unless the conspiracists get too vocal and scare everyone into storming the stores, like what happens in the South just before a hurricane hits the land), there won't be problems getting your $$ out of the bank, and/. will still be online after the big 2000.
Hey, I'm not saying it can't be done! Your analogy between my post and a 1921 newspaper article neglects the fact that I'm an interested party and am willing to help. The Flapper-era naysayer simply took a pot-shot and denounced the entire idea. I honestly believe this can work, given the right additional technological advances.
Both of the other replies to this were quite insightful, and much appreciated. I have been out of the loop since 1995, after all.:) I'm glad to see people focusing on the interconnect issue, and wish that this news article perhaps took a bit closer of a look at the real technological challenges rather than those which have been solved in many creative ways prior to this research's publication.
The biggest problem with these Angstrom-sized computing elements is the interconnect. Back during my undergrad days at Yale, I worked with Prof. Mark Reed -- a man once named one of Fortune Magazine's 10 most promising scientists. Mark was researching novel quantum semiconductor devices, the sort where a memory bit was determined by a single quantum "dot" -- capable of either holding an electron within its well or being empty.
We even worked on some transistors with I-V (that's current-voltage to you non EE types) curves which had two or three plateaus on them. Theoretically, this means that you could have a transistor which has three states instead of two (0, 1, and 2!)
The biggest problems in making these chips commercially viable -- oh, and by the way, we had Motorola fabricate the devices to our specifications -- were that most of them only exhibited their nifty behavior at low temperature (liquid nitrogen temps, or, if you were extremely unlucky, liquid helium temps of ~4 Kelvin) and that if you wanted to make an array of these things, you had to find a way of accessing all of them. Now, according to scientists like Prof. Reed, the temperature problem may be tractable through the use of high-temperature superconductive materials, but as for interconnect...
Traditional methods of accessing rows of transistors in memory cells don't work. You can't simply select a row and a column and expect the answer to trickle down to your buffers when the stored charge is a single electron. The same is probably true of a single molecule. We experimented with laser scanning & optical techniques, traditional silicon metal layers, and other even more bizarre means -- in the end, we had to use silicon interconnect, which meant that the wires which connected to these devices were thousands of times larger than the devices itself.
I hate to be a party-pooper, but until some sort of discovery occurs in the interconnect field, it won't matter if we can represent a binary state with a single lepton!
Well, millions of gigabytes is probably an overstatement, but a film like Titanic or Pleasantville (see the Making-Of featurette on the DVD) eats thousands of GB. The Pleasantville creators, I believe, needed about 10TB to store the entire film, as they were constantly mixing their B&W footage with color footage. But since their Avid digital video editing system couldn't keep nearly that much data on HD at any given time, they were ALWAYS swapping out to DLT. Fascinating story...but Be is still kidding themselves if they think anyone seriously works with petabyte files yet.:)
I don't think you see the big picture. Sure, if you base every Macintosh judgement on the Toolbox, and other "bloated" system resources, then yes -- the Mac can suffer from performance problems.
But to put the blame on the PowerPC is just plain wrong. The PowerPC consistently smokes the x86 architecture in benchmarks, especially floating point ones. As an assembly-level programmer of SPARC and PA-RISC architectures, I can tell you that it's much more useful to have real sets of general registers, instead of the namby-pamby x86 registers which require certain operands to be in specific registers. Rather than spend my time spilling registers left and right to cached memory, I can simply move over to another set and start anew there.
While I don't mean to restart the idiotic (and worthless) RISC vs. CISC discussion again, there is merit in cleanly supporting a nearly orthogonal instruction set, a well-implemented OoO (out of order) execution paradigm, speedy and plentiful functional units, and an appropriately-long pipeline.
Rather than making baseless remarks regarding the performance of one sort of computer over another, you'd do better to learn some basic concepts of computing hardware first. Comparing the architecture of a mid-80s vintage 68000-based "Fat Mac" to one of today's G3 machines solely on the basis of inefficient OS routines overlooks the most important issues...
Let me guess, you're a UNIX head, right? Do you even REALIZE that MacOS X is UNIX-based? That's right, Jeff, when Jobs is back at the helm of Apple, you can be damn sure that he won't let his NeXT technologies go to waste. A version of CMU's Mach kernel is now hiding inside of that Macintosh...shouldn't you at least be HAPPY that Apple is even thinking about putting UNIX inside their machines? No, you'd rather spew forth a tired invective about "x86/Alpha is better than Mac."
Hopefully, no one else here takes your comments seriously; rather, they are trying to understand how this problem potentially affects their Mac's security, and are working to solve the problem.
Oh, and your comment about the iMac -- that's why Apple sells G3 server boxes. In fact, that's the platform chiefly targeted by OSX, not the iMac. The iMac feels consumer-level because......wait for it......it is! Those of us who are here at slashdot, in general, live on the bleeding edge of technology. We're not content with Windows 9x, iMacs, the PS/1, the PC Jr., 640x480x16, a 286 @ 16MHz, and so on. Yet there are those perfectly happy to have a round, blue computer on their desk through which they can browse the web, play a few games, and capture digital images through their USB camera. For what it was designed to do, it does a damn good job -- and Jobs deserves most of the credit for marketing it appropriately.
Finally, as regards porting their UI to other OSes -- don't you realize that's secondary to providing their own hardware with an advanced OS first? Personally, I'd rather have the clean hardware architecture of a Mac any day over the god-awful mess that is my PC. (Granted, Merced might make this discussion somewhat moot, but I learned not to hold my breath about 3 years ago on that one...)
Go back to your Quake server, and leave slashdot to those who can truly make use of it as a informed, technological forum.
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It's possible they'd kill it off, but it's more likely they'd backburner it and try and rewrite it in 100% Pure Java and/or use the JNI. I'd expect a speed reduction if they did the former, and I honestly can't remember if IBM implemented JNI on OS/2 or not...and if they did, whether or not they did a good JOB of doing it...and of course, finally, whether or not Sun would maintain a JNI port to OS/2 -- the answer, sadly, is probably no. :(
Cheers, Joan
Actually, there's more information about this at NASA, in an article entitled Integrated thin-film solar power satellite. It goes into more detail about the part we care about -- the satellite and its uses -- instead of the robot being developed at CMU to help construct the darn thing. It even has a couple of MacPaint-like pictures of what this thing might look like.
What about (as someone else mentioned) flying objects which end up in the path of the beam? Even if it would pass through us, it would get absorbed by rain clouds (making it just as effective as those solar panels we were all promised in the late '70s), or worse yet, by birds, airplanes, and other flying objects... Certainly, the danger of the solar collector crashing to the ground is less than that of an orbiting nuclear reactor or black hole...but it still seems a bit unsafe. For this thing to be useful at all, it's got to transmit multi-megawatts of energy from point A to point B, and that energy will inevitably get absorbed by SOMETHING in the area. And if the levels are low enough to be "human-safe," then they're barely going to be able to light a bulb, let alone run something useful (like a section of a power grid).
That's why NASA is looking at using these things more to transmit power to lunar bases, Mars missions, and the like. In these controlled environments, something like a giant orbiting solar panel make a heck of a lot of sense:
P.S. Anyone reading this remember when parts of your 'Net link were transmitted by microwave? Our link in college used to go down regularly, and a call to MIT confirmed that their microwave link to BU (or was it BC? I can never remember) was down due to rain. Sure adds another dimension to the concept of "Internet Weather Forecasting!" :)
But the martial law nugget is simply ridiculous. If you truly believe that all computerized transactions will fall apart, and that people will forget how to use a pencil and paper to take an order, deposit a check, or write a letter, then you've truly forgotten the ingenuity of the human spirit. People continue to go on with their lives. There won't be a run on food (unless the conspiracists get too vocal and scare everyone into storming the stores, like what happens in the South just before a hurricane hits the land), there won't be problems getting your $$ out of the bank, and /. will still be online after the big 2000.
Just my Y2K-proof $0.02...
Both of the other replies to this were quite insightful, and much appreciated. I have been out of the loop since 1995, after all. :) I'm glad to see people focusing on the interconnect issue, and wish that this news article perhaps took a bit closer of a look at the real technological challenges rather than those which have been solved in many creative ways prior to this research's publication.
We even worked on some transistors with I-V (that's current-voltage to you non EE types) curves which had two or three plateaus on them. Theoretically, this means that you could have a transistor which has three states instead of two (0, 1, and 2!)
The biggest problems in making these chips commercially viable -- oh, and by the way, we had Motorola fabricate the devices to our specifications -- were that most of them only exhibited their nifty behavior at low temperature (liquid nitrogen temps, or, if you were extremely unlucky, liquid helium temps of ~4 Kelvin) and that if you wanted to make an array of these things, you had to find a way of accessing all of them. Now, according to scientists like Prof. Reed, the temperature problem may be tractable through the use of high-temperature superconductive materials, but as for interconnect...
Traditional methods of accessing rows of transistors in memory cells don't work. You can't simply select a row and a column and expect the answer to trickle down to your buffers when the stored charge is a single electron. The same is probably true of a single molecule. We experimented with laser scanning & optical techniques, traditional silicon metal layers, and other even more bizarre means -- in the end, we had to use silicon interconnect, which meant that the wires which connected to these devices were thousands of times larger than the devices itself.
I hate to be a party-pooper, but until some sort of discovery occurs in the interconnect field, it won't matter if we can represent a binary state with a single lepton!
I don't think you see the big picture. Sure, if you base every Macintosh judgement on the Toolbox, and other "bloated" system resources, then yes -- the Mac can suffer from performance problems.
But to put the blame on the PowerPC is just plain wrong. The PowerPC consistently smokes the x86 architecture in benchmarks, especially floating point ones. As an assembly-level programmer of SPARC and PA-RISC architectures, I can tell you that it's much more useful to have real sets of general registers, instead of the namby-pamby x86 registers which require certain operands to be in specific registers. Rather than spend my time spilling registers left and right to cached memory, I can simply move over to another set and start anew there.
While I don't mean to restart the idiotic (and worthless) RISC vs. CISC discussion again, there is merit in cleanly supporting a nearly orthogonal instruction set, a well-implemented OoO (out of order) execution paradigm, speedy and plentiful functional units, and an appropriately-long pipeline.
Rather than making baseless remarks regarding the performance of one sort of computer over another, you'd do better to learn some basic concepts of computing hardware first. Comparing the architecture of a mid-80s vintage 68000-based "Fat Mac" to one of today's G3 machines solely on the basis of inefficient OS routines overlooks the most important issues...
Let me guess, you're a UNIX head, right? Do you even REALIZE that MacOS X is UNIX-based? That's right, Jeff, when Jobs is back at the helm of Apple, you can be damn sure that he won't let his NeXT technologies go to waste. A version of CMU's Mach kernel is now hiding inside of that Macintosh...shouldn't you at least be HAPPY that Apple is even thinking about putting UNIX inside their machines? No, you'd rather spew forth a tired invective about "x86/Alpha is better than Mac."
Hopefully, no one else here takes your comments seriously; rather, they are trying to understand how this problem potentially affects their Mac's security, and are working to solve the problem.
Oh, and your comment about the iMac -- that's why Apple sells G3 server boxes. In fact, that's the platform chiefly targeted by OSX, not the iMac. The iMac feels consumer-level because ......wait for it...... it is! Those of us who are here at slashdot, in general, live on the bleeding edge of technology. We're not content with Windows 9x, iMacs, the PS/1, the PC Jr., 640x480x16, a 286 @ 16MHz, and so on. Yet there are those perfectly happy to have a round, blue computer on their desk through which they can browse the web, play a few games, and capture digital images through their USB camera. For what it was designed to do, it does a damn good job -- and Jobs deserves most of the credit for marketing it appropriately.
Finally, as regards porting their UI to other OSes -- don't you realize that's secondary to providing their own hardware with an advanced OS first? Personally, I'd rather have the clean hardware architecture of a Mac any day over the god-awful mess that is my PC. (Granted, Merced might make this discussion somewhat moot, but I learned not to hold my breath about 3 years ago on that one...)
Go back to your Quake server, and leave slashdot to those who can truly make use of it as a informed, technological forum.