See my comment above about infant mortality rates. The US counts premature babies, while Cuba was not. So even if the statistics are accurate, it doesn't mean they're telling the whole story.
I get so tired of hearing about the high infant mortality rates in the US. The truth is hiding in the nature of the statistics, which so many people conveniently ignore.
Bottom line: the US counts premature babies that die into the infant mortality rate, while nearly every other country counts a dead baby only if it is a full-term birth. If you compare apples-to-apples, the US has one of the lowest infant mortality rates.
You've obviously never tried to reverse engineer a chip using an electron microscope. If so, you wouldn't be saying it is "relatively simple". You obviously don't realize that modern chips have upwards of 8 layers of wiring stacked on top each other, that cover the local interconnects and transister wiring (poly and active area). Now, let's say you can decompose the chip, layer by layer, snapping photos as you go. With today's 65 and 95nm processes, you can only see a few transistors at a time, given the resolution and field of view of the microscope. These chips have millions of transistors on them. How long do you think it would take to cover a sizeable area of the chip, to the point that you could gain some useful information about it? At best, you could probably look at a few latch circuits at a time... That's like looking at the grains of sand on a beach and trying to map out the coastline of Hawaii. By the time these alleged reverse engineers are done, Nvidia would have released two new architectures. Money and time are much better spent creating rather than copying.
Two years ago you would have been right. But with the downhill bent that Slashdot has been on lately, this story is not only newsworthy, but will be duped sometime later today.
There are now many ink jet printers on the market that cost $49, which is cheaper than the ink replacement cost.
One way to stick it the manufacturers would be to throw away the printer after it runs out of ink, and buy a new one. This would wreck their business model, since they typically sell the printers at a loss.
I bet if enough people started doing this, the manufacturers would relent on ink cartridge prices.
I've known a lot of nerdy guys in their mid-20's who hadn't even kissed a girl. Partially because of this, their self-esteem was essentially zero. Of course, as many girls will tell you, a low self-esteem is not very attractive, thus perpetuating the state of not getting laid for these poor guys.
I for one have dated a couple virgin nerds and subsequently deflowered them. I found that once they got over their issues, they were quite spectacular in bed. Non-nerds can't compete in that arena, IMHO.
Actually there's another interesting thing about thermodynamics...
Many people think that if you leave the refrigerator open, it will cool down the house. However, all a refrigerator does is take heat from its inside and move it to the outside. That's why those coils in the back are warm. Thus, if you open up the fridge to cool the house down, all you'll do is make the place warmer (since the efficiency isn't 100%). Also, you'll probably burn out the motor in your refrigerator.
I'll grant that in your particular comment, putting a fan in front of the freezer would work for a while, because it's already cold. But it wouldn't work for long.
Yeah RedHat benefits but the users benefit too in that they get to try out all the latest and greatest software in a convenient package. RHEL is more stable but it's certainly not on the cutting edge. People have different priorities. And those other distros are nice but the great thing about linux is that each distro has its own style. Some people like fedora's style better than mandriva's, for example.
But all of a sudden, Microsoft should be giving poor people their software, because... it's so great??
If Microsoft suddenly started selling their software for $1 to poor people, people on Slashdot would complain about them using their monopolistic powers to take advantage of the less fortunate.
If Microsoft suddenly made Windows free and open source, like so many people on Slashdot think MS should do, there would also be a huge uproar: Microsoft would suddenly be using unfair competitive practices to undermine the Linux movement.
I have to say that reading about Bell Labs' heyday was part of what inspired me to go to grad school and get into research. Do you know that the transistor was invented at Bell Labs? How many corporate research labs outside of IBM would still sponsor that kind of work? The transistor didn't see success for a good 10-15 years. A company like HP would've under Carly Fiorina would've killed the project. The next best thing I can think of is Xerox PARC, but look what happened to them.
Why don't you RTFA first? Then you'd realize that the stuck rover is nothing like a car being stuck in the snow. They had to do things completely differently.
But taking Altivec out of the picture (which gives the MacOS and selectively written apps such a boost) probably takes away a big chunk of the performance differential.
Congratulations, you can read Apple's ad copy.
In the real world, Intel's SIMD extensions (SSE, SSE2, SSE3) are almost identical to Altivec. It's just that Intel's solution doesn't have a catchy name, and they don't market it as much as Apple.
If I had nickle for every time someone brought up that Intel doesn't have Altivec OR VMX, I'd be a trillionaire.
Wait, let me guess...you get all your chip info on x86 faboy websites...
Fuck off x86 clown.
Wow... this story has obviously sparked a nerve.
It's pretty clear that Apple fanboys are the ones needing validation. The fact that an x86 based Mac is suddenly unappealing to the fanboys shows they care more about being different than about the actual Mac "experience."
I love Macs. I've used them for 10 years. And I also trust Steve... If he thinks that Intel is the way to go, I'll support that. I don't really care what goes on inside my Mac box. It's everything else--design, MacOS X, software, etc.--that matters. That won't change with an Intel CPU.
Re:Europe is really going downhill
on
A Gamer's Manifesto
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
France is the number one maker of computer games outside Japan and the US.
Care to quote your figures?
The EU constitution put Europe in a much stronger position to leverage the world gaming market and push superior products into the channels.
Again, care to back it up?
Being in the UK, it irks me that people can be so selfish... the French are basically pissed at Chirac so they have to go punish Europe, and the gaming world, at large.
Although anger at the French government probably played a part, the voters were also pissed that their taxes were going to fund programs in the poorer Eastern European nations (added to the EU without their consent BTW), at the same time these nations were stealing their jobs. With unemployment so high in France, this is not an appealing situation. And the Netherlands is next, along with the UK, in voting NO for similar reasons.
Well said... it amazes me that Apple zealots still think Altivec is the only game in town, and that Intel only has MMX. It's true that SSE2 and SSE3 don't have catchy names, but they do the same thing as Altivec and VMX
You must be a zealot, if you think that Altivec makes the Mac special. Yes, it's true that MMX is not used by developers, but that's only because there are better instruction sets now, like SSE2 or SSE3, that do exactly the same thing as Altivec or VMX They just don't have as catchy a name, which I guess is the only thing that matters to zealots. Do yourself a favor and lookup SIMD on Google. You might be surprised that Apple didn't invent it.
MOD PARENT UP. How many times do we have to beat it into your thick zealot heads that Altivec is not the only game in town?? This argument should have been resolved about 6 or 7 seven years ago when Intel got SSE. But here we are.
First, Moore's Law has nothing to do with hard drive storage space. That said, hard drive capacities have been growing at a pace exceeding Moore's Law for several years now. If that rate slows down, it'll probably still be a pretty fast pace. Besides, these are fast SCSI hard drives. You have to look at IDE hard drives to really see storage space improvements.
Second, Intel cancelled their 4GHz CPU because of heat problems. It turns out that Intel's engineers just can't get the leakage current down to low enough levels. But again, Moore's law has nothing to do with clock speed... the metric is the number of transistors on the chip. In this regard, Moore's law is still on track. To counter the heat issue, logic designers will have to rethink their designs to do more work per clock cycle. AMD already does this with their chips. Intel is going down this route too with its Pentium M. Same with IBM's G5. The Pentium 4 is a horrendous example because Intel designed it to be inefficient so they could ramp its clock speed. Well now the consequences of that stupidity is showing.
You know, I've heard that the human brain operates at about a 10Hz frequency, has 100Bln neurons, and trillions of interconnections. Amazingly, its power dissipation is at around 40W. (And its MIPS rating is on the order of 10^15 instructions per second). Clearly mother nature got it right for efficient computation.
I don't know what version of VB you were using, but at least since Visual Studio.NET 2002, you can fix the component's coordinates and/or size to the form's dimensions.
I can't believe this is marked as informative. The SOI layer is very thin, so it contributes very little to the overall conductance of the Si substrate. And, one of the biggest advantages of SOI is that you get less leakage current, i.e. less wasted power, and less heat dissipation.
Everyone seems to be missing the point of this article. Pioneer's technology is for making the master discs, which are used to stamp the read layers of DVDs. This technology is not for burning high capacity media.
It is essentially the same tech that the semiconductor industry has been using for years (decades?) to create masks for photolithography.
I can't imagine how an electron beam recording system would make it into a consumer product. These systems have essentially the same precision technology that scanning electon microscopes have, i.e. they ain't cheap. Plus, it's not just a matter of throwing a master disc "blank" into the unit and pressing go. There are several process steps.
Slashdot Mirror
See my comment above about infant mortality rates. The US counts premature babies, while Cuba was not. So even if the statistics are accurate, it doesn't mean they're telling the whole story.
I get so tired of hearing about the high infant mortality rates in the US. The truth is hiding in the nature of the statistics, which so many people conveniently ignore.
Bottom line: the US counts premature babies that die into the infant mortality rate, while nearly every other country counts a dead baby only if it is a full-term birth. If you compare apples-to-apples, the US has one of the lowest infant mortality rates.
You've obviously never tried to reverse engineer a chip using an electron microscope. If so, you wouldn't be saying it is "relatively simple". You obviously don't realize that modern chips have upwards of 8 layers of wiring stacked on top each other, that cover the local interconnects and transister wiring (poly and active area). Now, let's say you can decompose the chip, layer by layer, snapping photos as you go. With today's 65 and 95nm processes, you can only see a few transistors at a time, given the resolution and field of view of the microscope. These chips have millions of transistors on them. How long do you think it would take to cover a sizeable area of the chip, to the point that you could gain some useful information about it? At best, you could probably look at a few latch circuits at a time... That's like looking at the grains of sand on a beach and trying to map out the coastline of Hawaii. By the time these alleged reverse engineers are done, Nvidia would have released two new architectures. Money and time are much better spent creating rather than copying.
"unlike two of the last four orbiters NASA sent to Mars"
Another way of saying it would be "just like two of the last four orbiters NASA sent to Mars".
As a female, I take offense to this. I believe the smell is closer to tuna fish. :)
clearly not /. worthy news :(
Two years ago you would have been right. But with the downhill bent that Slashdot has been on lately, this story is not only newsworthy, but will be duped sometime later today.
There are now many ink jet printers on the market that cost $49, which is cheaper than the ink replacement cost.
One way to stick it the manufacturers would be to throw away the printer after it runs out of ink, and buy a new one. This would wreck their business model, since they typically sell the printers at a loss.
I bet if enough people started doing this, the manufacturers would relent on ink cartridge prices.
Well aren't you special.
I've known a lot of nerdy guys in their mid-20's who hadn't even kissed a girl. Partially because of this, their self-esteem was essentially zero. Of course, as many girls will tell you, a low self-esteem is not very attractive, thus perpetuating the state of not getting laid for these poor guys.
I for one have dated a couple virgin nerds and subsequently deflowered them. I found that once they got over their issues, they were quite spectacular in bed. Non-nerds can't compete in that arena, IMHO.
Actually there's another interesting thing about thermodynamics...
Many people think that if you leave the refrigerator open, it will cool down the house. However, all a refrigerator does is take heat from its inside and move it to the outside. That's why those coils in the back are warm. Thus, if you open up the fridge to cool the house down, all you'll do is make the place warmer (since the efficiency isn't 100%). Also, you'll probably burn out the motor in your refrigerator.
I'll grant that in your particular comment, putting a fan in front of the freezer would work for a while, because it's already cold. But it wouldn't work for long.
Yeah RedHat benefits but the users benefit too in that they get to try out all the latest and greatest software in a convenient package. RHEL is more stable but it's certainly not on the cutting edge. People have different priorities. And those other distros are nice but the great thing about linux is that each distro has its own style. Some people like fedora's style better than mandriva's, for example.
Yeah that happens to me too.
TACO WHAT IS GOING ON??
Anyone?
But all of a sudden, Microsoft should be giving poor people their software, because... it's so great??
If Microsoft suddenly started selling their software for $1 to poor people, people on Slashdot would complain about them using their monopolistic powers to take advantage of the less fortunate.
If Microsoft suddenly made Windows free and open source, like so many people on Slashdot think MS should do, there would also be a huge uproar: Microsoft would suddenly be using unfair competitive practices to undermine the Linux movement.
I guess my disbelief of the parent article made me forget to click on the back button. Sorry. Anyway, like I said, Bell Labs is cool.
I have to say that reading about Bell Labs' heyday was part of what inspired me to go to grad school and get into research. Do you know that the transistor was invented at Bell Labs? How many corporate research labs outside of IBM would still sponsor that kind of work? The transistor didn't see success for a good 10-15 years. A company like HP would've under Carly Fiorina would've killed the project. The next best thing I can think of is Xerox PARC, but look what happened to them.
Why don't you RTFA first? Then you'd realize that the stuck rover is nothing like a car being stuck in the snow. They had to do things completely differently.
But taking Altivec out of the picture (which gives the MacOS and selectively written apps such a boost) probably takes away a big chunk of the performance differential.
Congratulations, you can read Apple's ad copy.
In the real world, Intel's SIMD extensions (SSE, SSE2, SSE3) are almost identical to Altivec. It's just that Intel's solution doesn't have a catchy name, and they don't market it as much as Apple.
If I had nickle for every time someone brought up that Intel doesn't have Altivec OR VMX, I'd be a trillionaire.
Wait, let me guess...you get all your chip info on x86 faboy websites...
Fuck off x86 clown.
Wow... this story has obviously sparked a nerve.
It's pretty clear that Apple fanboys are the ones needing validation. The fact that an x86 based Mac is suddenly unappealing to the fanboys shows they care more about being different than about the actual Mac "experience."
I love Macs. I've used them for 10 years. And I also trust Steve... If he thinks that Intel is the way to go, I'll support that. I don't really care what goes on inside my Mac box. It's everything else--design, MacOS X, software, etc.--that matters. That won't change with an Intel CPU.
France is the number one maker of computer games outside Japan and the US.
Care to quote your figures?
The EU constitution put Europe in a much stronger position to leverage the world gaming market and push superior products into the channels.
Again, care to back it up?
Being in the UK, it irks me that people can be so selfish... the French are basically pissed at Chirac so they have to go punish Europe, and the gaming world, at large.
Although anger at the French government probably played a part, the voters were also pissed that their taxes were going to fund programs in the poorer Eastern European nations (added to the EU without their consent BTW), at the same time these nations were stealing their jobs. With unemployment so high in France, this is not an appealing situation. And the Netherlands is next, along with the UK, in voting NO for similar reasons.
Well said... it amazes me that Apple zealots still think Altivec is the only game in town, and that Intel only has MMX. It's true that SSE2 and SSE3 don't have catchy names, but they do the same thing as Altivec and VMX
Um... yeah.
You must be a zealot, if you think that Altivec makes the Mac special. Yes, it's true that MMX is not used by developers, but that's only because there are better instruction sets now, like SSE2 or SSE3, that do exactly the same thing as Altivec or VMX They just don't have as catchy a name, which I guess is the only thing that matters to zealots. Do yourself a favor and lookup SIMD on Google. You might be surprised that Apple didn't invent it.
MOD PARENT UP. How many times do we have to beat it into your thick zealot heads that Altivec is not the only game in town?? This argument should have been resolved about 6 or 7 seven years ago when Intel got SSE. But here we are.
The Wall Street Journal had an editorial about this topic on Wednesday:
t ml?id=110006458
/.ers are just now hearing about it.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.h
I'm surprised that
First, Moore's Law has nothing to do with hard drive storage space. That said, hard drive capacities have been growing at a pace exceeding Moore's Law for several years now. If that rate slows down, it'll probably still be a pretty fast pace. Besides, these are fast SCSI hard drives. You have to look at IDE hard drives to really see storage space improvements.
Second, Intel cancelled their 4GHz CPU because of heat problems. It turns out that Intel's engineers just can't get the leakage current down to low enough levels. But again, Moore's law has nothing to do with clock speed... the metric is the number of transistors on the chip. In this regard, Moore's law is still on track. To counter the heat issue, logic designers will have to rethink their designs to do more work per clock cycle. AMD already does this with their chips. Intel is going down this route too with its Pentium M. Same with IBM's G5. The Pentium 4 is a horrendous example because Intel designed it to be inefficient so they could ramp its clock speed. Well now the consequences of that stupidity is showing.
You know, I've heard that the human brain operates at about a 10Hz frequency, has 100Bln neurons, and trillions of interconnections. Amazingly, its power dissipation is at around 40W. (And its MIPS rating is on the order of 10^15 instructions per second). Clearly mother nature got it right for efficient computation.
I don't know what version of VB you were using, but at least since Visual Studio.NET 2002, you can fix the component's coordinates and/or size to the form's dimensions.
I can't believe this is marked as informative. The SOI layer is very thin, so it contributes very little to the overall conductance of the Si substrate. And, one of the biggest advantages of SOI is that you get less leakage current, i.e. less wasted power, and less heat dissipation.
Everyone seems to be missing the point of this article. Pioneer's technology is for making the master discs, which are used to stamp the read layers of DVDs. This technology is not for burning high capacity media.
It is essentially the same tech that the semiconductor industry has been using for years (decades?) to create masks for photolithography.
I can't imagine how an electron beam recording system would make it into a consumer product. These systems have essentially the same precision technology that scanning electon microscopes have, i.e. they ain't cheap. Plus, it's not just a matter of throwing a master disc "blank" into the unit and pressing go. There are several process steps.