Accessibility can mean: 1) able to access, 2) easy to use. When it comes to supercomputers, th former is very much true nowadays, but the latter is not. And it's not just a matter of programming. Pretty much all supercomputers can be programmed with a standard programming environment, say C + MPI + SCALAPACK libraries. (I think more could be done on that side too, but that is a different story).
But the steps required to actually run the programs can be exceedingly difficult. I liken it to the state of desktop linux about 12 years ago... Yes, it was accessible in that PCs were everywhere and you could grab a free copy of Slackware, but the setup process was mind numbing. Setting up X was not for the faint hearted as it required knowing intimate details about your graphics and display hardware. There were stern warnings that using the wrong modeline values could damage your CRT. Nowadays even my grandmother could install Ubuntu and everything would be automatically detected. That's the progress that I think needs to happen on the supercomputer user interface side of things.
While I don't agree that Microsoft Windows HPC Server is the best software to manage a supercomputer, the linux diehards out there should pay attention to a problem that Microsoft is trying to tackle: accessible supercomputing. See one of their case studies as an example.
The bottom line is, these days pretty much anyone has access to a few TFlops of compute power, but the learning curve for getting something running on these machines is pretty intimidating, especially for non-CS based disciplines. I've had to take a 1-2 day class, plus futz around with the clunky command-line tools for a few days or so, on every supercomputer I've used, just to get simple jobs running. In my experience, people learn to game the various batching and queuing systems such that their jobs run faster than everyone else's, further shutting out the newcomers.
HPC vendors would be wise to focus more attention on the tools and interfaces so that Joe-researcher can set the number of nodes and go, rather than having to manually edit loadleveler text files, sending them to the queue, and then coming back next day to find the job failed due to a typo in the startup script.
On multi-TFLOP systems, not everyone needs 99.5% efficiency with all the implementation details that requires. These days, many people just want their job to run reasonably quickly, with no fuss.
The same thing happened several years ago with the move to high level languages like Python and Ruby. Sure, they're slower than C++ and FORTRAN. But for the vast majority of applications, you wouldn't know the difference on modern processors. And the turn around time and user-friendliness on these languages is so much better, using them is a no-brainer.
Hopefully Microsoft can spur the industry in this direction.
The amazing thing about TMI is that, had everyone left things alone and let the automated safety systems do their job, a normal shutdown would have occurred. Instead, the human operators intervened and basically did everything they could to cause a meltdown. Nonetheless, the whole thing went out with a fizzle, with essentially zero radiation being emitted to the outside. You'd probably receive more radiation smoking a pack of cigarettes or flying across country than you would have sitting in TMI's backyard.
Nonetheless I'm sure when the general population hears TMI they think (OMFG! Meltdown!!!!!111)
I TA'ed a hands-on statistics class with a lab component in which the prof did exactly that. In this case, it wasn't rulers, but digital thermocouples tied into a spiffy Labview temperature monitoring interface. The students were asked to report data from two thermocouples: one gave nice, consistent results, and the other was rigged to produce highly unreliable data. Many of them had a hard time reconciling what they saw (bad data!! OMG!) with their pre-conceived notions (digital controllers are always accurate). In the end it made them better engineers though.
In my experience there are two forms of skepticism-- true skepticism, which is healthy and sadly lacking in most people, and what I call "pseudo-skepticism" which is in great abundance. Pseudo-skepticism goes right along with pseudo-science and as is often used as a foundation for a belief system. Example: the 9/11 conspiracy theorists are rabidly skeptical of anything presented by the government or mainstream media (which is good, to a degree), but are completely accepting of the most crackpot theories imaginable. (The more crazy the idea, the better IMHO). They do this while covering their ears and singing LA-LA-LA anytime any one tries to debunk their theories with science or counter-evidence. Both sides of the global warming debate contain pseudo-skeptics as well, and unfortunately, they are the ones making the most noise.
A true skeptic is skeptical of both points of view, and does the critical thinking necessary to form his/her own opinion. This is harder to teach since it comes from experience, which is harder to come by in this sheltered world of ours.
Have there really been large numbers of layoffs in the tech industries? I thought many tech companies, particularly those with large overseas businesses, were doing pretty well. See IBM for example.
This whole question reeks of someone wanting the Slashdot community to do their research for them, starting with some pretty questionable assumptions. Maybe the answer to this question is better served by looking at how past recessions hit the tech industry and their innovation output.
Care to provide any data to back up those claims? Where are you getting that 97% number from? I have lights flickering all the time in my house and yet not a single electronic device has failed. Some are 5+ years old.
Just for comparison, the state of New Jersey covers 8722 square miles.
Take a look at all those mountain top and strip mining operations that environmentalists are all up in arms about. They cover relatively small amounts of area. How would this be any better? Yeah, the southwest has lots of mostly unpopulated space, but I'm sure environmentalists would find plently of rare desert rodents and plant species that would be obliterated from such an operation.
Um, yeah. I guess since iPods came out that no one wants to listen to music on speakers anymore, or listen to the same stuff as other poeple any more. Speakers are obsolete! Of course it's kind of a pain, when my husband and I want turn on some dinner music, that we each need separate iPods. We really don't might eating with headphones on and having a hard time hearing each other. And I'm sure that headphones providing bass that I can feel are right around the corner.
Yeah, but if you extrapolate to where things are going, we're going to have CPUs with dozens if not hundreds of cores on them. (See Intel's 80 core technology demo as an example of where their research is going). Can you write or use general purpose software that takes advantage of that many cores? Right now I expect there is a bit of panic because it's relatively easy to build these behemoths, but not so easy to use them efficiently. Outside of some specialized disciplines like computational science and finance (that have already been taking advantage of parallel computing for years), there won't be a big demand for uber-multicore CPUs if the programming models don't drastically improve. And those innovations need to happen now to be ready in time for CPUs of 5 years from now. Since no real breakthroughs have come however, the chip companies are smart to be rethinking their strategies.
Offtopic: I have Ubuntu running on a 915G system and while the compiz and video seem to work well, browsing with Firefox feels like I'm running a 100% CPU process in the background. The page scrolls are jerky and you can forget about any Flash content. My daugther likes to play Flash games on sites like noggin.com and they are unplayable on Linux. Meanwhile, they are perfectly smooth on Windows. This is the only reason I still have Windows installed on the machine.
For those saying that we should boycott eBay: Don't bother... It will have almost zero effect, and only indirectly attacks the Church of Scientology.
A better plan is to fight fire with fire: Create new eBay ids and just flood the place with sales of E-meters and anti-Scientology stuff. Anything you can think of. The assholes monitoring the eBay database will see that, and you're more likely to get the attention of CoS, eBay, the news media, and (hopefully) legislators.
But don't stop there... post E-meters for sale in every city on Craigslist. Use the local scientology office's phone number for the posting.
Oddly, this is one of the more intelligent posts for this story. Slashdot and its readership is turning into Digg at an amazing rate. The only thing preventing Slashdot from catching up to Digg is that Digg is continuously striving to reach new lows.
The more that lawmakers continue to be in bed with corporate interests, the faster a revolution will come. Why don't you give online gamblers the death penalty while you're at it?
Well, but you're not part of the core demographic of the Wii or of Spore.... The fact that you own all three consoles tells me you're not a casual gamer. I have a Wii, and my wife plays it more than I do. She wouldn't touch the other consoles with a ten foot pole, but she loves the Wii games. Even the simple ones that you're disparaging. The "audio quality, screen size, screen resolution, and general graphics quality" don't really matter to her as much.
True gamers have never liked titles like The Sims or Spore because they don't have an end goal. You actually have to be creative in these games to enjoy them; it has little to do with "involved skill".
You know, I just read your comment history. I used to be a troll like you. I just posted whatever the hell came to my mind whether it be random crap or songs about my penis or just a quick "frist psot". It was a small release, a little bit of humor in my otherwise boring life.
But trolling became an addiction to me... soon I was doing everything I could to get a rise out of fellow netizens. I basically spent all my time trolling Slashot and other various forums. Of course Slashot was my favorite trolling venue because the demographic was a perfect fit for me. Imagine the endless sources of amusement Slashot gave to someone like me, a self-hating sociophobe who enjoyed nothing more than hating other people just like myself. So, for example, I would sit in front of my computer on a Friday night and blast anyone on Slashot that would post something. I would call them losers for not having anything better to do than reading Slashdot on a Friday night! Classical projection at its finest.
Of course, all addicts have to hit a rock bottom before they become willing to change their behavior. That happened to me on July 6, 2003. I remember it like it was yesterday. I had found my ultimate prey: a seasoned Slashdot poster who just couldn't resist feeding the trolls. I basically "stalked him"... hitting refresh countless time waiting for him to make a comment, then instantly posting a personal attack. He never failed to respond, which just fed my addiction. But then one day, I got a knock on my door from the FBI, cybercrimes division. Apparently this poster I had stalked was an in real life an FBI agent. He had emailed the Slashdot staff and gotten my IP address. It was then a simple matter for him to trace the messages back to me. Here I was, never in trouble with the law before, with an FBI agent staring me down. Although I had done nothing wrong, he didn't waste any time giving me a 3rd degree questioning. It was only 20 minutes, but felt like hours. He left me with standing in the doorway with a pale face and shit in pants.
Needless to say, I cleaned up my act and worked on becoming a normally functioning member of society. I started seeing a therapist, got many of my self-hate and anger issues resolved (I still have lots more to work on) and started actively trying to make friends online. Its amazing how much my life has turned around. Before that day, I was friendless, both in the real world and online, had never had a romantic relationship that lasted more than 3 months, and was a virgin. Now, I have a wife with a baby on the way, have lots a friends at work and in my community, and enjoy reading and discussing views with a variety of online buddies.
I'm posting this because I sense that your trolling is a cry for help, one that I know well. I hope that some day you can find happiness like I did.
As the parent implied, Moore's Law will likely not end because of technological constraints but rather economic ones.
We reached a wall a few years ago in terms of transistor speed, mostly due to the thin gate oxides giving rise to significant leakage current, which translates into heat. The upcoming high-k metal gate technology mitigates but doesn't eliminate this problem. Thus, Intel and the like are putting those smaller transistors to work in redudant cores rather than faster, monolithic circuits. However, Moore's law is still marching on, from 65nm, to very soon 45nm, and then 32nm and 22nm. Each technology node effectively halves the area requirement, or (more realistically) doubles the number of transistors that can fit in the same area. This translates into lower cost per transistor. 32nm technology is in the final stages of development, and 22nm is believed to be possible, although much more difficult. The real limit right now is the optical lithography process used to pattern the circuits. There is no high-volume solution available for the 16nm node. We can certainly make patterns this small (using electron beam lithography, for example), but it would be prohibitively expensive (each chip would take many hours to expose, compared to SFIL but the industry isn't really putting money into them. My belief is that the 2-year cycle we're on will be ending after 22nm, or possibly 16nm. Circuits will probably continue to get smaller, but at a slower pace, as development and technology costs become prohibitive. Even now, there is debate in the industry about whether to delay 22nm and instead do a 28nm "half node". If this was to occur in the entire industry, the 2-year Moore's Law as we know it would end.
BTW, "45nm" and "32nm" don't directly refer to the size of the transistors, but rather to 70% of the current half-pitch being printing with lithography. Thus, the 45nm node has a 65nm half-pitch, which means the wires are spaced at 130nm. This spacing decreases to 90nm and 65nm for the 32 and 22nm nodes, respectively. The actual transistor size (channel length) can be much smaller than the currently technology node designation.
Welcome to the world of Motorola. I used to work for Motorola and was thus somewhat loyal to their brand. The StarTac was great. But then every other Moto phone I tried after it had horrible software bugs. The T720 was actually so bad that Verizon sent everyone a text message saying to come into the nearest store to get a replacement. Even the replacement sucked, with frequent crashes and graphics corruption. I vowed never to buy a Motorola since, regardless of how cool they looked. And I'm glad that I stuck with that vow. Everyone I know with a Motorola phone complains about it crashing and having other software bugs. It's amazing to me that review sites don't play around with these phones long enough to find the problems... Many Moto phones are highly rated.
Is it just me or does it seem like every new memory technology disappoints? I've built systems since before EDO-DRAM was all the rage, and we've seen lots of advances since... Burst EDO, SDRAM, RDRAM, DDR, DDR2, DDR3... but every time one of these supposed breakthroughs debuts, the review sites quickly go to work and reveal (at most) 5-10% performance increases over the previous generation. Often it's in the 1-2% benefit range. It seems like its very difficult to squeeze extra performance out of memory without changing everything around the memory as well... bus speeds, chipsets, processor speeds, timings, etc. This will likely take a while before DDR3 actually becomes benficial.
No kidding... They are using this mobility fee to help people stomach the car's price. I don't know how car buying works in Europe, but at least in the U.S. many people view a car's price just by the monthly payment they need to make. (I just bought a car recently, and the salesperson tried to deal by quoting me monthly payment amounts. He seemed surprised when I asked for the actual amount financed).
A 5-year loan on a $15000 car will be around $300/mo (5% APR). That extra $200/mo adds 66% to the total monthly payment.
Dell succeeded because they simplified and streamlined the computer buying process, and had good prices for PCs with reasonable features, compared to the rest of the market.
Other than possibly streamlining the car buying process, how does electric car company compare to Dell? It's not like people in the US are jumping to replace their SUVs and trucks with little electric cars.
Slashdot Mirror
Accessibility can mean: 1) able to access, 2) easy to use. When it comes to supercomputers, th former is very much true nowadays, but the latter is not. And it's not just a matter of programming. Pretty much all supercomputers can be programmed with a standard programming environment, say C + MPI + SCALAPACK libraries. (I think more could be done on that side too, but that is a different story).
But the steps required to actually run the programs can be exceedingly difficult. I liken it to the state of desktop linux about 12 years ago... Yes, it was accessible in that PCs were everywhere and you could grab a free copy of Slackware, but the setup process was mind numbing. Setting up X was not for the faint hearted as it required knowing intimate details about your graphics and display hardware. There were stern warnings that using the wrong modeline values could damage your CRT. Nowadays even my grandmother could install Ubuntu and everything would be automatically detected. That's the progress that I think needs to happen on the supercomputer user interface side of things.
While I don't agree that Microsoft Windows HPC Server is the best software to manage a supercomputer, the linux diehards out there should pay attention to a problem that Microsoft is trying to tackle: accessible supercomputing. See one of their case studies as an example.
The bottom line is, these days pretty much anyone has access to a few TFlops of compute power, but the learning curve for getting something running on these machines is pretty intimidating, especially for non-CS based disciplines. I've had to take a 1-2 day class, plus futz around with the clunky command-line tools for a few days or so, on every supercomputer I've used, just to get simple jobs running. In my experience, people learn to game the various batching and queuing systems such that their jobs run faster than everyone else's, further shutting out the newcomers.
HPC vendors would be wise to focus more attention on the tools and interfaces so that Joe-researcher can set the number of nodes and go, rather than having to manually edit loadleveler text files, sending them to the queue, and then coming back next day to find the job failed due to a typo in the startup script.
On multi-TFLOP systems, not everyone needs 99.5% efficiency with all the implementation details that requires. These days, many people just want their job to run reasonably quickly, with no fuss.
The same thing happened several years ago with the move to high level languages like Python and Ruby. Sure, they're slower than C++ and FORTRAN. But for the vast majority of applications, you wouldn't know the difference on modern processors. And the turn around time and user-friendliness on these languages is so much better, using them is a no-brainer.
Hopefully Microsoft can spur the industry in this direction.
Ah yes, TMI.
The amazing thing about TMI is that, had everyone left things alone and let the automated safety systems do their job, a normal shutdown would have occurred. Instead, the human operators intervened and basically did everything they could to cause a meltdown. Nonetheless, the whole thing went out with a fizzle, with essentially zero radiation being emitted to the outside. You'd probably receive more radiation smoking a pack of cigarettes or flying across country than you would have sitting in TMI's backyard.
Nonetheless I'm sure when the general population hears TMI they think (OMFG! Meltdown!!!!!111)
SourceForge, Inc. files 32,819 DMCA notices against its daughter site, Slashdot.org, for blatantly reproducing its own stories, such as this one.
I TA'ed a hands-on statistics class with a lab component in which the prof did exactly that. In this case, it wasn't rulers, but digital thermocouples tied into a spiffy Labview temperature monitoring interface. The students were asked to report data from two thermocouples: one gave nice, consistent results, and the other was rigged to produce highly unreliable data. Many of them had a hard time reconciling what they saw (bad data!! OMG!) with their pre-conceived notions (digital controllers are always accurate). In the end it made them better engineers though.
In my experience there are two forms of skepticism-- true skepticism, which is healthy and sadly lacking in most people, and what I call "pseudo-skepticism" which is in great abundance. Pseudo-skepticism goes right along with pseudo-science and as is often used as a foundation for a belief system. Example: the 9/11 conspiracy theorists are rabidly skeptical of anything presented by the government or mainstream media (which is good, to a degree), but are completely accepting of the most crackpot theories imaginable. (The more crazy the idea, the better IMHO). They do this while covering their ears and singing LA-LA-LA anytime any one tries to debunk their theories with science or counter-evidence. Both sides of the global warming debate contain pseudo-skeptics as well, and unfortunately, they are the ones making the most noise.
A true skeptic is skeptical of both points of view, and does the critical thinking necessary to form his/her own opinion. This is harder to teach since it comes from experience, which is harder to come by in this sheltered world of ours.
Have there really been large numbers of layoffs in the tech industries? I thought many tech companies, particularly those with large overseas businesses, were doing pretty well. See IBM for example.
This whole question reeks of someone wanting the Slashdot community to do their research for them, starting with some pretty questionable assumptions. Maybe the answer to this question is better served by looking at how past recessions hit the tech industry and their innovation output.
Care to provide any data to back up those claims? Where are you getting that 97% number from? I have lights flickering all the time in my house and yet not a single electronic device has failed. Some are 5+ years old.
Just for comparison, the state of New Jersey covers 8722 square miles.
Take a look at all those mountain top and strip mining operations that environmentalists are all up in arms about. They cover relatively small amounts of area. How would this be any better? Yeah, the southwest has lots of mostly unpopulated space, but I'm sure environmentalists would find plently of rare desert rodents and plant species that would be obliterated from such an operation.
Um, yeah. I guess since iPods came out that no one wants to listen to music on speakers anymore, or listen to the same stuff as other poeple any more. Speakers are obsolete! Of course it's kind of a pain, when my husband and I want turn on some dinner music, that we each need separate iPods. We really don't might eating with headphones on and having a hard time hearing each other. And I'm sure that headphones providing bass that I can feel are right around the corner.
Yeah, but if you extrapolate to where things are going, we're going to have CPUs with dozens if not hundreds of cores on them. (See Intel's 80 core technology demo as an example of where their research is going). Can you write or use general purpose software that takes advantage of that many cores? Right now I expect there is a bit of panic because it's relatively easy to build these behemoths, but not so easy to use them efficiently. Outside of some specialized disciplines like computational science and finance (that have already been taking advantage of parallel computing for years), there won't be a big demand for uber-multicore CPUs if the programming models don't drastically improve. And those innovations need to happen now to be ready in time for CPUs of 5 years from now. Since no real breakthroughs have come however, the chip companies are smart to be rethinking their strategies.
Offtopic: I have Ubuntu running on a 915G system and while the compiz and video seem to work well, browsing with Firefox feels like I'm running a 100% CPU process in the background. The page scrolls are jerky and you can forget about any Flash content. My daugther likes to play Flash games on sites like noggin.com and they are unplayable on Linux. Meanwhile, they are perfectly smooth on Windows. This is the only reason I still have Windows installed on the machine.
Care to share any Xorg settings that might help?
For those saying that we should boycott eBay: Don't bother... It will have almost zero effect, and only indirectly attacks the Church of Scientology.
A better plan is to fight fire with fire: Create new eBay ids and just flood the place with sales of E-meters and anti-Scientology stuff. Anything you can think of. The assholes monitoring the eBay database will see that, and you're more likely to get the attention of CoS, eBay, the news media, and (hopefully) legislators.
But don't stop there... post E-meters for sale in every city on Craigslist. Use the local scientology office's phone number for the posting.
Be creative! But always go directly after CoS!
Oddly, this is one of the more intelligent posts for this story. Slashdot and its readership is turning into Digg at an amazing rate. The only thing preventing Slashdot from catching up to Digg is that Digg is continuously striving to reach new lows.
Great. Another Electric Universe rant.
The more that lawmakers continue to be in bed with corporate interests, the faster a revolution will come. Why don't you give online gamblers the death penalty while you're at it?
Well, but you're not part of the core demographic of the Wii or of Spore.... The fact that you own all three consoles tells me you're not a casual gamer. I have a Wii, and my wife plays it more than I do. She wouldn't touch the other consoles with a ten foot pole, but she loves the Wii games. Even the simple ones that you're disparaging. The "audio quality, screen size, screen resolution, and general graphics quality" don't really matter to her as much.
True gamers have never liked titles like The Sims or Spore because they don't have an end goal. You actually have to be creative in these games to enjoy them; it has little to do with "involved skill".
You know, I just read your comment history. I used to be a troll like you. I just posted whatever the hell came to my mind whether it be random crap or songs about my penis or just a quick "frist psot". It was a small release, a little bit of humor in my otherwise boring life.
But trolling became an addiction to me... soon I was doing everything I could to get a rise out of fellow netizens. I basically spent all my time trolling Slashot and other various forums. Of course Slashot was my favorite trolling venue because the demographic was a perfect fit for me. Imagine the endless sources of amusement Slashot gave to someone like me, a self-hating sociophobe who enjoyed nothing more than hating other people just like myself. So, for example, I would sit in front of my computer on a Friday night and blast anyone on Slashot that would post something. I would call them losers for not having anything better to do than reading Slashdot on a Friday night! Classical projection at its finest.
Of course, all addicts have to hit a rock bottom before they become willing to change their behavior. That happened to me on July 6, 2003. I remember it like it was yesterday. I had found my ultimate prey: a seasoned Slashdot poster who just couldn't resist feeding the trolls. I basically "stalked him"... hitting refresh countless time waiting for him to make a comment, then instantly posting a personal attack. He never failed to respond, which just fed my addiction. But then one day, I got a knock on my door from the FBI, cybercrimes division. Apparently this poster I had stalked was an in real life an FBI agent. He had emailed the Slashdot staff and gotten my IP address. It was then a simple matter for him to trace the messages back to me. Here I was, never in trouble with the law before, with an FBI agent staring me down. Although I had done nothing wrong, he didn't waste any time giving me a 3rd degree questioning. It was only 20 minutes, but felt like hours. He left me with standing in the doorway with a pale face and shit in pants.
Needless to say, I cleaned up my act and worked on becoming a normally functioning member of society. I started seeing a therapist, got many of my self-hate and anger issues resolved (I still have lots more to work on) and started actively trying to make friends online. Its amazing how much my life has turned around. Before that day, I was friendless, both in the real world and online, had never had a romantic relationship that lasted more than 3 months, and was a virgin. Now, I have a wife with a baby on the way, have lots a friends at work and in my community, and enjoy reading and discussing views with a variety of online buddies.
I'm posting this because I sense that your trolling is a cry for help, one that I know well. I hope that some day you can find happiness like I did.
As the parent implied, Moore's Law will likely not end because of technological constraints but rather economic ones.
We reached a wall a few years ago in terms of transistor speed, mostly due to the thin gate oxides giving rise to significant leakage current, which translates into heat. The upcoming high-k metal gate technology mitigates but doesn't eliminate this problem. Thus, Intel and the like are putting those smaller transistors to work in redudant cores rather than faster, monolithic circuits. However, Moore's law is still marching on, from 65nm, to very soon 45nm, and then 32nm and 22nm. Each technology node effectively halves the area requirement, or (more realistically) doubles the number of transistors that can fit in the same area. This translates into lower cost per transistor. 32nm technology is in the final stages of development, and 22nm is believed to be possible, although much more difficult. The real limit right now is the optical lithography process used to pattern the circuits. There is no high-volume solution available for the 16nm node. We can certainly make patterns this small (using electron beam lithography, for example), but it would be prohibitively expensive (each chip would take many hours to expose, compared to SFIL but the industry isn't really putting money into them. My belief is that the 2-year cycle we're on will be ending after 22nm, or possibly 16nm. Circuits will probably continue to get smaller, but at a slower pace, as development and technology costs become prohibitive. Even now, there is debate in the industry about whether to delay 22nm and instead do a 28nm "half node". If this was to occur in the entire industry, the 2-year Moore's Law as we know it would end.
BTW, "45nm" and "32nm" don't directly refer to the size of the transistors, but rather to 70% of the current half-pitch being printing with lithography. Thus, the 45nm node has a 65nm half-pitch, which means the wires are spaced at 130nm. This spacing decreases to 90nm and 65nm for the 32 and 22nm nodes, respectively. The actual transistor size (channel length) can be much smaller than the currently technology node designation.
Can we stop being so f'ing pedantic every time a story mentions Moore's Law?
Re: the Q..
Welcome to the world of Motorola. I used to work for Motorola and was thus somewhat loyal to their brand. The StarTac was great. But then every other Moto phone I tried after it had horrible software bugs. The T720 was actually so bad that Verizon sent everyone a text message saying to come into the nearest store to get a replacement. Even the replacement sucked, with frequent crashes and graphics corruption. I vowed never to buy a Motorola since, regardless of how cool they looked. And I'm glad that I stuck with that vow. Everyone I know with a Motorola phone complains about it crashing and having other software bugs. It's amazing to me that review sites don't play around with these phones long enough to find the problems... Many Moto phones are highly rated.
Is it just me or does it seem like every new memory technology disappoints? I've built systems since before EDO-DRAM was all the rage, and we've seen lots of advances since... Burst EDO, SDRAM, RDRAM, DDR, DDR2, DDR3... but every time one of these supposed breakthroughs debuts, the review sites quickly go to work and reveal (at most) 5-10% performance increases over the previous generation. Often it's in the 1-2% benefit range. It seems like its very difficult to squeeze extra performance out of memory without changing everything around the memory as well... bus speeds, chipsets, processor speeds, timings, etc. This will likely take a while before DDR3 actually becomes benficial.
So Sony is cool again, right?
No kidding... They are using this mobility fee to help people stomach the car's price. I don't know how car buying works in Europe, but at least in the U.S. many people view a car's price just by the monthly payment they need to make. (I just bought a car recently, and the salesperson tried to deal by quoting me monthly payment amounts. He seemed surprised when I asked for the actual amount financed).
A 5-year loan on a $15000 car will be around $300/mo (5% APR). That extra $200/mo adds 66% to the total monthly payment.
Dell succeeded because they simplified and streamlined the computer buying process, and had good prices for PCs with reasonable features, compared to the rest of the market.
Other than possibly streamlining the car buying process, how does electric car company compare to Dell? It's not like people in the US are jumping to replace their SUVs and trucks with little electric cars.