As an engineer I'm intrigued with what they can do. As a consume, I don't need another gadget, computer, laptop, or tablet. Where is this chip going to go?
Sure people could use batteries in a dangerous way, but at least there are others that could do something about the fire/damage. Down with the checked luggage, I assume the plane would not react until things were much worse...
It is a stupid comment because one could then argue that they should never see a film in a movie theater with a much larger screen and higher resolution.
Seems like the average joe/jane only believes in contracts when they get ALL the benefits with no downside. Don't get me wrong, I think there needs to be some more checks and balances with the carriers, but a contract is a contract. If you don't agree to it, don't sign it. If you don't care to read and understand it (or can't understand it - find help!) that's your own damn fault! Only in the USA can we blame everyone else for our own problems.
My mortgage...how was I supposed to know that I can't afford to live next to a wealthy CEO even though I have an entry level job. Must be the someone else fault I got myself into that situation without even giving it a rational thought!
Too good to be true? Not if the village idiot can convince the village to follow them
It is more like getting something out of the glove box while driving around. There's no wind out in space...oh and there's no one else on the road so you don't really have to "drive".
BS! Most Grandma's don't have a clue what a GB is and I'd go further to say most don't even have internet. It is true they would pay more per bit, but overall I think they should pay less.
The fixed cost argument is also BS. Look at water, electricity, gas, etc. Have a similar breakdown and use metered billing. This would give the providers the incentive to have faster speeds so that those who actually use the darn thing could generate more income.
Why would we expect an industry that competes to point where they set prices that cause them to lose money would adopt policies and procedures that are in the best interest of the majority? My feeling is that a couple high paying business people would be willing to pay extra for the right. One airline would adopt and the rest would try to follow. According to the CNBC show on American Airlines, some flights are profitable by a few hundred dollars. One less passenger and it is a loss. Charging for cell phones would probably have a significant impact on their bottom line....
Since many people have 2 year contracts, I think it is very difficult to make any conclusions about the iPhone's impact on Verizon. All this says is that people have not paid the early termination fee and jumped ship. It also does not say they will in the future.
Since it isn't a pure electric car, your question has a very easy answer. Fill it up and drive until empty. Do some simply math and figure out your MPG. Your question is implying some gimmick where they fill up the tank and only charge the batteries via plug-in. I've seen some dumb specs in the past, but I'm pretty something like that won't fly.
Your question makes sense for a pure electric car. For that version, they only spec the range. I think people should better focus on cost per mile, or something similar. People may be surprised that even premium gas may be more economical for a car that requires it than going with the cheap regular gas to save short-term dollars.
It really scares me how such "great" ideas like this seem sane, when the original technology was probably safer.
It also bugs me, as an engineer, when people want better, faster, cheaper, but then refuse change. I hear numerous stories from my coworkers who used to design parts for the automotive industry. Apparently they had to come up with improvement plans and present them only to have the "what we have works, why change it?" mentality. Follow this with, now do it for less because we are going to buy the same system for less money each year...but remember, don't change or improve anything. Sounds dumb? Obviously the company no longer makes those parts.
Easier to bribe? Not sure what country you are from, but all the local governments I've seen get more corrupt as the more local you go. Want to be a cop? Better know someone. Problem with our plumbing codes in our condo complex - town can't find the records and the building inspector quit after being charged with taking kick backs. At least at the state level they make more money and would require large bribes. I'm not saying officials at the state level are completely honest either (I am from NJ of all places), but at least a state-wide item has more publicity which can get more people involved. Because of these local franchises, my friend in the next town over gets more cable channels, faster internet and VoIP phone and still pays less than me. It you do the compare, my town is 30-40% more expensive for cable. The towns are in the same county and the standard of living are almost identical. Someone tell me how my local government is looking out for my best interest the best they can?
US can say it is expensive because we have built our economy around and expected (right or wrong)cheaper gas. Mass transit will always compete with individual transportation. For most of the time and for most of the US, it cannot compete at all. We built a spread out country and need to commute a good amount of distance. This was all easily done with gas the current economy. Now that gas has tripled in the last 7 years, people now find it difficult to move their offices closer or even find a train, bus, or subway station within a 30 min of walk of their office.
Lets look at the reverse situation. Say, all of a sudden, gas goes to $0.1 per gallon. Who's laughing now as all those in Europe and Japan, etc get to jam themselves into small trains etc while we commute with at least elbow room. Not that this is going to happen, but you can see how lifestyles are developed over time and people make use with what they have.
Assuming we overlook the fact that the majority of the costs for Hubble were from flying it on the Space Shuttle, then I will agree that it is a NASA success story. Otherwise, I think it is a decent PR success for NASA but poorly executed from the beginning (aka when they decided to launch it on the shuttle). I thought I hard something like up to 6 Hubble's could have been launched (5 blown up) and we would have the exact same functionality as the current one, as long as we used an unmanned rocket. As much as I love NASA, lets not give them a pass for over engineering the launch - it did NOT require the shuttle. Fitting the thing in the cargo bay and manging the weight were probably difficult compromises that had to be made. And yes, it could have still be serviceable. Then again, I guess they needed to justify the stupid shuttle.
I would think CMOS voltage levels are more a function of threshold voltage control than the bandgap. Right now they vary Vt from 200mV to 1.2V in my current process at work. The problem lies with how the transistor behaves around Vt. At one point, and it still may be, Vt was defined as the Vgs voltage required to induce a strong enough channel to allow Ids= 1uA. Well, that is obviously a ton of current if we scale things to a billion transistors. As you lower Vt, there is a finite probability that carriers could flow through the device even though we instructed it to be off. With strained silicon and new gate materials, looks like Intel is making progress. So, I don't think Vbg is the issue. They may need to move to slight negative voltage as a 0 to ensure the channel is off.
I'm glad you put your money behind your beliefs. However, if you talk to anyone who does not read slashdot, you'll soon find out you are so far in the minority (those that hate the RIAA enough to stop buying their music) that no one really needs to count those lost sales. Actually, I would even venture a guess that people who do the same as you would be far less than any inaccuracies in their accounting/books.
Try not making universal statements when you don't have the experience. Both Patriot Media (former RCN, a small company in NJ) and Comcast, both using similar motorola boxes, have ads in the Guide data and other parts of the UI.
As for the HD DVR Tivo, why would you have any more cables? Plug cable card in (no cable). Plug coax into that, use power cord and coax. Sounds the same.
Considering the fact that I work in the DC buck regulator industry and work with a few of the guys who developed this topology, do not underestimate marketing. We currently offer 4-6 phase solutions for VRM11 and VRM11.1. These are the Intel spec on how tight the Vcore voltage needs to be. We typical run 30A per phase. Find me a CPU that requires 12x30A = ~500Watts for just the CPU (multiprocessors may have more than one regulator). From what I see, the only complex upgrade for the core 2 duo's is the tighter voltage tolerance, lower Vcore, and work on improving idle efficiency. Since Intel did a lot of work on improving the efficiency of their CPUs, overall power consumption has not increased (probably decreased). I should point out that our 4-6 phase controllers have a more advanced implementation for adjusting for load transients (aka CPU goes from 0% to 100%). It is possible that Gigabyte figured out a way to pay for 12 phases cheaply instead of 6 phases that are more intelligent. Here's one of our parts: http://www.intersil.com/cda/deviceinfo/0,1477,ISL6 327,0.html/
What is the profit motive on the Green side of the fence and how does that come close to the profit motive on the ExxonMobil side of the fence?
I'll agree that the profits are no where near Oil yet, but at the same time people are willing to pay for Green more than the product is actually worth. That is fine, but it does translate into profit motive and greed. For most people, they cannot justify the extra cost of a Hybrid. (The extra cost of a Hybrid does not completely offset the MPG and the money saved over the life of the batteries - it can for people who drive above average). They do it because they think it is more green, which it may be. Either way, they are paying more than is economically justified. This "moral" decision to be more green is starting to be exploited for profit.
In addition, we are now seeing laws and other rules about light bulbs and various other consumer products. If we ban non-green items, it artificially inflates demand for a more expensive product. Although I use CFL type bulbs, I do it because they last longer. I'm not convinced they are priced properly. Could be.
Isn't speed relative? I mean we can catch the Space Station or Hubble without a problem and they contain more mass than a chip of paint.
This is also the reason I roll my eyes when they talk about working in space at 17,600 MPH. Yes they are, but so is what they are working with. People don't seem to have any issue picking up their cell phone while driving 80MPH - simply because the phone is going 80 MPH too.
Man has walked on the moon, so there is proof in that concept. How come it isn't cheaper now? One can do almost anything with a virtually unlimited budget. As I say at work, the difference between an engineer and a scientist is economics. Yes this guy proved it can be done, which I never doubted. He also proved that this probably not even close to a viable solution.
Many phones for Verizon now have a variant of a secure digital card. Yes this does not give you sync abilities, but it does let you move music and pictures for free. That said, I too hate verizon's mindset of lock the phone down. Verizon guy at Circuit City tried to convince me that they cripple the phones to prevent viruses.
I did not work through your calculations, but I'm not sure I follow your argument about heating efficiency. It is true that the PC is not efficient at generating just thermal heat or just doing CPU work. However, another article, which I cannot site at this time, pointed out something interesting. All the thermal energy created by your computer in the winter, IS 100% efficient in that it is all heat. It creates hardly any infrared light, which would be of no use. I work in the PC power business. A safe estimate on a good PC system would be about 75% efficient from wall to input power of the CPU (85% silver box efficiency and about 90% 12V -> Vcore_cpu). The 25% loss would be heat and all of that would go to heating your house. Therefore, in the winter time, a PC can be considered almost 100% efficient (processing power + useful home heating). NOTE: I don't have the CPU efficiency numbers.
Anyway, that previous article I read went on to argue, incandescent lights are betting in the winter time because they generate a small percentage of light, but again a lot of thermal energy. The key is that you want to light your room. Fluorescent lights have very little thermal energy, but their inefficiency is in the form of UV light that is not useful for most people. Therefore, they are considered better in the summer time because you would not be fighting your AC unit to light the room.
The key to these arguments is that you have to want to do the item. That is, you want to use the PC, you want to light the room, etc. Otherwise you waste energy clocking the CPU/MB and generating light.
I agree, but how do you know you have a good teacher with good pay and a bad teacher with too much pay? As you can see, there is no easy solution to this.
As a tax payer, I am pissed at how high property taxes are. However, I am reminded, and do believe, that good school system in my town actually increases my property value. So, I put up with it.
What pisses me off, is that the teachers are in a money hungry union. They have a contract where I have to increase they pay by a fixed amount for, say 5 years. Well, what do you think happened after the dot-com bust? I didn't get as big of a raise, yet the teachers did. I guess they didn't get as big of one during the late 90s.
To make matters worse, these tenured teachers get pay raises based on how long they have been there. I have a friend who is a new teacher and she gets almost no raise. We all remember those teachers we had who we thought lost their minds. They are protected by a union contract, get a nice raise...oh and we cannot fire them.
Although paying for A's is extremely corrupt, it is no worse than the system we have now. Which is, NOT pay for performance.
Lastly, what is the going rate for ultimate job security (aka tenure)in the business world?
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As an engineer I'm intrigued with what they can do. As a consume, I don't need another gadget, computer, laptop, or tablet. Where is this chip going to go?
Sure people could use batteries in a dangerous way, but at least there are others that could do something about the fire/damage. Down with the checked luggage, I assume the plane would not react until things were much worse...
It is a stupid comment because one could then argue that they should never see a film in a movie theater with a much larger screen and higher resolution.
Seems like the average joe/jane only believes in contracts when they get ALL the benefits with no downside. Don't get me wrong, I think there needs to be some more checks and balances with the carriers, but a contract is a contract. If you don't agree to it, don't sign it. If you don't care to read and understand it (or can't understand it - find help!) that's your own damn fault! Only in the USA can we blame everyone else for our own problems.
My mortgage...how was I supposed to know that I can't afford to live next to a wealthy CEO even though I have an entry level job. Must be the someone else fault I got myself into that situation without even giving it a rational thought!
Too good to be true? Not if the village idiot can convince the village to follow them
You honestly think Apply won't care because they'll sell more? They don't seem interested in selling Mac OS standalone...
It is more like getting something out of the glove box while driving around. There's no wind out in space...oh and there's no one else on the road so you don't really have to "drive".
BS! Most Grandma's don't have a clue what a GB is and I'd go further to say most don't even have internet. It is true they would pay more per bit, but overall I think they should pay less.
The fixed cost argument is also BS. Look at water, electricity, gas, etc. Have a similar breakdown and use metered billing. This would give the providers the incentive to have faster speeds so that those who actually use the darn thing could generate more income.
Why would we expect an industry that competes to point where they set prices that cause them to lose money would adopt policies and procedures that are in the best interest of the majority? My feeling is that a couple high paying business people would be willing to pay extra for the right. One airline would adopt and the rest would try to follow. According to the CNBC show on American Airlines, some flights are profitable by a few hundred dollars. One less passenger and it is a loss. Charging for cell phones would probably have a significant impact on their bottom line....
Since many people have 2 year contracts, I think it is very difficult to make any conclusions about the iPhone's impact on Verizon. All this says is that people have not paid the early termination fee and jumped ship. It also does not say they will in the future.
Since it isn't a pure electric car, your question has a very easy answer. Fill it up and drive until empty. Do some simply math and figure out your MPG. Your question is implying some gimmick where they fill up the tank and only charge the batteries via plug-in. I've seen some dumb specs in the past, but I'm pretty something like that won't fly.
Your question makes sense for a pure electric car. For that version, they only spec the range. I think people should better focus on cost per mile, or something similar. People may be surprised that even premium gas may be more economical for a car that requires it than going with the cheap regular gas to save short-term dollars.
It also bugs me, as an engineer, when people want better, faster, cheaper, but then refuse change. I hear numerous stories from my coworkers who used to design parts for the automotive industry. Apparently they had to come up with improvement plans and present them only to have the "what we have works, why change it?" mentality. Follow this with, now do it for less because we are going to buy the same system for less money each year...but remember, don't change or improve anything. Sounds dumb? Obviously the company no longer makes those parts.
Easier to bribe? Not sure what country you are from, but all the local governments I've seen get more corrupt as the more local you go. Want to be a cop? Better know someone. Problem with our plumbing codes in our condo complex - town can't find the records and the building inspector quit after being charged with taking kick backs. At least at the state level they make more money and would require large bribes. I'm not saying officials at the state level are completely honest either (I am from NJ of all places), but at least a state-wide item has more publicity which can get more people involved. Because of these local franchises, my friend in the next town over gets more cable channels, faster internet and VoIP phone and still pays less than me. It you do the compare, my town is 30-40% more expensive for cable. The towns are in the same county and the standard of living are almost identical. Someone tell me how my local government is looking out for my best interest the best they can?
US can say it is expensive because we have built our economy around and expected (right or wrong)cheaper gas. Mass transit will always compete with individual transportation. For most of the time and for most of the US, it cannot compete at all. We built a spread out country and need to commute a good amount of distance. This was all easily done with gas the current economy. Now that gas has tripled in the last 7 years, people now find it difficult to move their offices closer or even find a train, bus, or subway station within a 30 min of walk of their office.
Lets look at the reverse situation. Say, all of a sudden, gas goes to $0.1 per gallon. Who's laughing now as all those in Europe and Japan, etc get to jam themselves into small trains etc while we commute with at least elbow room. Not that this is going to happen, but you can see how lifestyles are developed over time and people make use with what they have.
Queue the wasteful USA comments...
Assuming we overlook the fact that the majority of the costs for Hubble were from flying it on the Space Shuttle, then I will agree that it is a NASA success story. Otherwise, I think it is a decent PR success for NASA but poorly executed from the beginning (aka when they decided to launch it on the shuttle). I thought I hard something like up to 6 Hubble's could have been launched (5 blown up) and we would have the exact same functionality as the current one, as long as we used an unmanned rocket. As much as I love NASA, lets not give them a pass for over engineering the launch - it did NOT require the shuttle. Fitting the thing in the cargo bay and manging the weight were probably difficult compromises that had to be made. And yes, it could have still be serviceable. Then again, I guess they needed to justify the stupid shuttle.
I would think CMOS voltage levels are more a function of threshold voltage control than the bandgap. Right now they vary Vt from 200mV to 1.2V in my current process at work. The problem lies with how the transistor behaves around Vt. At one point, and it still may be, Vt was defined as the Vgs voltage required to induce a strong enough channel to allow Ids= 1uA. Well, that is obviously a ton of current if we scale things to a billion transistors. As you lower Vt, there is a finite probability that carriers could flow through the device even though we instructed it to be off. With strained silicon and new gate materials, looks like Intel is making progress. So, I don't think Vbg is the issue. They may need to move to slight negative voltage as a 0 to ensure the channel is off.
I'm glad you put your money behind your beliefs. However, if you talk to anyone who does not read slashdot, you'll soon find out you are so far in the minority (those that hate the RIAA enough to stop buying their music) that no one really needs to count those lost sales. Actually, I would even venture a guess that people who do the same as you would be far less than any inaccuracies in their accounting/books.
Try not making universal statements when you don't have the experience. Both Patriot Media (former RCN, a small company in NJ) and Comcast, both using similar motorola boxes, have ads in the Guide data and other parts of the UI.
As for the HD DVR Tivo, why would you have any more cables? Plug cable card in (no cable). Plug coax into that, use power cord and coax. Sounds the same.
$20 for HDMI/DVI converter? Try this http://store.pchcables.com/hdfemadvadgo.html/
Considering the fact that I work in the DC buck regulator industry and work with a few of the guys who developed this topology, do not underestimate marketing. We currently offer 4-6 phase solutions for VRM11 and VRM11.1. These are the Intel spec on how tight the Vcore voltage needs to be. We typical run 30A per phase. Find me a CPU that requires 12x30A = ~500Watts for just the CPU (multiprocessors may have more than one regulator). From what I see, the only complex upgrade for the core 2 duo's is the tighter voltage tolerance, lower Vcore, and work on improving idle efficiency. Since Intel did a lot of work on improving the efficiency of their CPUs, overall power consumption has not increased (probably decreased). I should point out that our 4-6 phase controllers have a more advanced implementation for adjusting for load transients (aka CPU goes from 0% to 100%). It is possible that Gigabyte figured out a way to pay for 12 phases cheaply instead of 6 phases that are more intelligent. Here's one of our parts: http://www.intersil.com/cda/deviceinfo/0,1477,ISL6 327,0.html/
I'll agree that the profits are no where near Oil yet, but at the same time people are willing to pay for Green more than the product is actually worth. That is fine, but it does translate into profit motive and greed. For most people, they cannot justify the extra cost of a Hybrid. (The extra cost of a Hybrid does not completely offset the MPG and the money saved over the life of the batteries - it can for people who drive above average). They do it because they think it is more green, which it may be. Either way, they are paying more than is economically justified. This "moral" decision to be more green is starting to be exploited for profit.
In addition, we are now seeing laws and other rules about light bulbs and various other consumer products. If we ban non-green items, it artificially inflates demand for a more expensive product. Although I use CFL type bulbs, I do it because they last longer. I'm not convinced they are priced properly. Could be.
Isn't speed relative? I mean we can catch the Space Station or Hubble without a problem and they contain more mass than a chip of paint.
This is also the reason I roll my eyes when they talk about working in space at 17,600 MPH. Yes they are, but so is what they are working with. People don't seem to have any issue picking up their cell phone while driving 80MPH - simply because the phone is going 80 MPH too.
Man has walked on the moon, so there is proof in that concept. How come it isn't cheaper now? One can do almost anything with a virtually unlimited budget. As I say at work, the difference between an engineer and a scientist is economics. Yes this guy proved it can be done, which I never doubted. He also proved that this probably not even close to a viable solution.
Many phones for Verizon now have a variant of a secure digital card. Yes this does not give you sync abilities, but it does let you move music and pictures for free. That said, I too hate verizon's mindset of lock the phone down. Verizon guy at Circuit City tried to convince me that they cripple the phones to prevent viruses.
I did not work through your calculations, but I'm not sure I follow your argument about heating efficiency. It is true that the PC is not efficient at generating just thermal heat or just doing CPU work. However, another article, which I cannot site at this time, pointed out something interesting. All the thermal energy created by your computer in the winter, IS 100% efficient in that it is all heat. It creates hardly any infrared light, which would be of no use. I work in the PC power business. A safe estimate on a good PC system would be about 75% efficient from wall to input power of the CPU (85% silver box efficiency and about 90% 12V -> Vcore_cpu). The 25% loss would be heat and all of that would go to heating your house. Therefore, in the winter time, a PC can be considered almost 100% efficient (processing power + useful home heating). NOTE: I don't have the CPU efficiency numbers.
Anyway, that previous article I read went on to argue, incandescent lights are betting in the winter time because they generate a small percentage of light, but again a lot of thermal energy. The key is that you want to light your room. Fluorescent lights have very little thermal energy, but their inefficiency is in the form of UV light that is not useful for most people. Therefore, they are considered better in the summer time because you would not be fighting your AC unit to light the room.
The key to these arguments is that you have to want to do the item. That is, you want to use the PC, you want to light the room, etc. Otherwise you waste energy clocking the CPU/MB and generating light.
I agree, but how do you know you have a good teacher with good pay and a bad teacher with too much pay? As you can see, there is no easy solution to this.
As a tax payer, I am pissed at how high property taxes are. However, I am reminded, and do believe, that good school system in my town actually increases my property value. So, I put up with it.
What pisses me off, is that the teachers are in a money hungry union. They have a contract where I have to increase they pay by a fixed amount for, say 5 years. Well, what do you think happened after the dot-com bust? I didn't get as big of a raise, yet the teachers did. I guess they didn't get as big of one during the late 90s.
To make matters worse, these tenured teachers get pay raises based on how long they have been there. I have a friend who is a new teacher and she gets almost no raise. We all remember those teachers we had who we thought lost their minds. They are protected by a union contract, get a nice raise...oh and we cannot fire them.
Although paying for A's is extremely corrupt, it is no worse than the system we have now. Which is, NOT pay for performance.
Lastly, what is the going rate for ultimate job security (aka tenure)in the business world?