Ah yes, there are many many options and thread level parallelism will almost always yield better performance on the perfect application, when the programmer is willing to spend tons of time working on the code. Better yet, we could use FPGAs with custom written hardware kernels running on them. This will yield even higher performance. Of course development might take a couple extra years, and the cost... well what does that matter, THIS THING WILL BE FAST!!! We can end up with superfast computers, it's just a lot of work. Basically the problem comes down to do we spend a lot of money on hardware, or do we spend a ton of money on software, or do we balance the two? Most of the time the balance works best. Out of order execution wastes the majority of it's hardware trying to improve performance by tiny amounts, yet for most of the workloads people run, it's been considered worthwhile. Good computer architects have learned that they have to balance the needs of the programmer before they can make a successful architecture.
Whoever thought this story was worthy of slashdot is a moron. There's nothing new here, it's just that stack machines are good for some low power applications. Move along, and consult someon who has actually done some research on computer architecture before posting some random persons worthless presentation.
If you're a gamer, a $50 video chip sucks. If you're not a gamer, there's no real advantage to a $50 chip over the GMA950. I bought a MacBook, and am actually happy they went with an integrated solution instead of a separate graphics processor. The MacBook is a mobile computer. As such, the machines power consumption is important. Even if a dedicated $50 chip used up only 3W more of static power (not an unreasonable assumption for many of these "low power" chips), this would significantly reduce battery life.
The MacBooks battery has ~5100mAh @12V. Under normal usage condition we get 4 hours of use. This works out to the machine using 5100*12/4=~15.3Watts. If we increased this to account for a non-integrated graphics card, we'd see ~18Watts (conservatively). 5100*12/18=3.4 hours, or about 36 minutes less of battery power. Plus the MacBooks already run warm, now we have to run further cooling, etc.
Most users of the MacBook however do not require high-end graphics. The GMA950 is good enough for all of Quartz's 3D graphics, and should be fine for all of 10.5's 3D effects. Also, all these gamers who complain about macs having underpowered graphics like this don't take into account that they're not in apples target audience anyhow. They would never want to buy a mac simply because OSX doesn't have the games for it that Windows does, and won't unless they get a much larger market share. Personally I'm very happy with apples decisions.
And by your reasoning MSDOS also has 100% marketshare! As does Linux, the BSDs, hell even Minix has 100% market share, as they run on all x86 PC hardware. This logic is just plain wrong! Whoever modded this post as informative is a moron. Just because windows runs on macs does not mean every mac has windows installed on it. Plus, even if someone dual boots between the the two, it doesn't mean they use windows or OSX more. Enough people have installed Linux on their pcs, or used a knoppix cd once or twice. Does that mean their market share numbers should count equally to windows and linux? What matter is what's used, and more importantly (to the company's short term) is did they buy the software.
Of course it would be used at campaign time. Do you remember the commercials showing chains behind a pickup truck, implying the george bush approved of criminals who dragged blacks behind pickup trucks? This was because he turned down hate crime legislation (what gets me is the fact that I consider most every murder to be a hate crime, as why else would you murder someone). The same could easily hold true with this myspace law.
That said, I hope the supreme court has the decency to overturn this law. The law is unconstitutional, not because of the 1st ammendment, but rather because of the 10th ammendment. The federal government was never given the power to control schools and libraries (in fact I think that much of Bush's education funding for schools is unconstitutional). How is congress spinning the constitutionality of this law? Are they arguing that this law effects interstate commerce (they tried passing a rape bill a while back under the interstate commerce clause, but the courts overturned it). Saddly, they can probably get away with this for the same reason the federal government can control the drinking age in every state. The federal government has expanded it's powers by redistributing tax money to the states. Now that they are funding local schools, they can threaten to pull funding unless they accept these provisions. So, basically laws like this are what happen when you allow the federal government to fund state and local programs.
That doesn't really change a thing. Needing to recursively read papers references was my point. You can not come in straight out as a ugrade and start reading the upper level papers. You must first solidfy the basis further. What you describe is simply doing it without taking classes, and yes, I've done it, and I'm sure plenty of other students have done it. However, my point still stands in that how many grad students in the advanced fields have papers ready (where they're the primary author) before the end of their second year? The first year is essentially spent getting yourself up to speed, and depending on the course requirements at the university, the second year is often spent doing this as well. There are obviously exceptions to this (I'd consider myself one of the exceptions), but it tends to hold true.
As for the comment about this stopping people from doing research... It may stop some people. The industry can live without many of those people. Research is not intended to be easy. However once you get through those initial hurdles things get easier.
I think you miss a key part of research... The scope of it. 50 years ago the scope of engineering research was a lot more broad than it was today. In the computer industry, we can go back 30 years and see it. A computer architect 30 years ago likely knew more about electrical signals than todays. However the work on it could be started right after finishing an undergraduate degree. After an undergraduate degree you could undestand how transistors work, understand boolean logic, and put together a few thousand transistors to create a processor. State of the art research would have been in ALU design, datapaths, etc. Advance a few years and the research is focusing more on pipelining processors, parallelization, branch prediction etc. Granted much of this work had been done priorly with supercomputers, but going back even further similar progress had been made.
A little further down the road more work is being done in cache structures and deep pipelining, multiprocessor memory concurrency etc. The amount of knowledge needed is immense. In order to work on any of these features researchers needed a background in electrical engineering (although, they have cut back some of the detailed analog work necessary), they need to understand the workings of boolean logic, take the basic circuits courses, understand computer programming, know how to fully design "simple" processors, know how all the advanced features in the processor work, and then concentrate on a single component, and try to improve upon it. Much of this knowledge isn't obtained until their graduate career. Only then can they start reading papers on their specialization, and later they can hopefully contribute papers to the field.
The low hanging fruit just isn't as available in well established fields. Granted there are fields (even within computer engineering thankfully) where little work has been done, and large gains can be had. However even these fields all require significant background knowledge of all the complex systems involved.
This is a concern to Intels desktop market why? Intel doesn't care that the minute percent of users who are using linux are doing. Many of them are AMD fanboys anyways, so it doesn't matter what they do. It's just not a large enough market, and those people aren't buying from the large vendors for the most part anyhow.
Also, the AMD64 bit architecutre was not successful because it was 64bit. It was successful because it was more cost effective, and obtained more performance/watt than Intel's netburst architecture. When machines started approaching 2GB of RAM, Intel knew it was time to start looking at 64bit chips. Intel did, and besides some bad press generated about them using AMDs extensions, things worked fine. Despite that Intel's mobile chips still use 32 bit processors (well for a little bit anyways). The reason: mobile machines until now could generally not install more than 2 gigs of ram. Why waste the silicon and burn extra power for a feature that maybe 1% of users need. Even if it only saved 5% of power (when running in 32 bit land), this move makes perfect sense.
There is a reason Intel is trouncing AMD in the mobile market. AMD does not have an effective low power processor (the Turion doesn't cut it). The only place where AMD really saw damage due to the 64bit move was the server market. And this was because Intel thought they could convince people to buy Itaniums.... They couldn't.
While most of the products on that page are ridiculous or overkill, those ipod gloves look tempting. For anyone who lives in really cold enviornments, and uses their ipod they'll know the feeling. When it's below zero outside the thought of taking off gloves to control an iPod is not fun at all. Even the 10 seconds it takes to adjust an iPod is extremely uncomfortable. I actually bought a pair of hunting mittens for the purpose of iPod control (so I could just leave my finger tips exposed when I want to control my iPod. However even this option wasn't very good, as I find mittens to be too bulky to work with, and besides I could barely get them under the handle of my coffee mug with my hands in them. I'm seriously considering these gloves for next winter. Of course that does make me wonder what the effects of subzero temperatures are on an iPod itself. I know from experience that you can't wrap up the headphones outside for fear of snapping them in that weather.
First, the study showing the discrepancy in wages has one major flaw in it. In 2000 the percent of people working in manufacturing jobs was a fairly small proportion of the US workforce. A much smaller percentage of the workforce than it was in 1990, smaller than 1980 etc. If you looked at that statistic in 1960 it may have been a fair measurement, but today? How many people do you know who still work in manufacturing? The few left are getting laid off. Fact of the matter is we're producing far more goods than we were even ten years ago, and we require far fewer people to make those goods. The modern economy has shifted and the average american works in higher paying service industry jobs.
Additionally, one argument about the growing discrepancy that's amusing is comparing incomes of the highest and the lowest % of people. In fact it could even be argued that having a large percentage of people earning very little is a good thing!!! How? Well consider a middle class worker 50 60 years ago. They generally worked till close to the end of their life. Many middle class workers today don't! There are more important things to them then money, and so they chose to live off their savings instead.
The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer arguments also fail when you go beyond raw statistics and look at the people. First of all the upper 1% are getting richer faster than the poorest 1% etc. This is true, but is it bad? If the rich gain 20% and the poor gain 5% is it bad? What if the alternative is the rich gaining 5% and the poor gaining 2%? Or, if we want to be communistic we could have the rich lose 10% and the poor stagnate (although in reality many communist countries ended up slaughtering too many people for those statistics to be meaningful). Examining the people involved in these studys, it's interesting to see what percentage of the people in the bottom 10% 10 years ago are still in the bottom 10%? Same with the upper 1% or 10% or whatever. I know from observation most people tend to make more money as they get older, hence they tend to climb up to the higher income brackets.
All these statistics add up and show that maybe there really isn't a problem. The problem is the people in the bottom 10% that are still there 10 years later. Most of those people tend to be a result of government programs. It's fair to say that far more people have been kept in poverty by the governments policies (drug war, affirmative action, etc) than have been helped by government programs (the only exception to the rule that I can think of is the military, as it generally offers the disadvantaged an oppurtunity to earn skills and discipline if they don't get blown up in the process).
how can Congress say that the president may have inherent constitutional authority to spy on Americans when the Supreme Court already disagreed in East District of Michigan v. Nixon?
What part of "foreign powers and agents of foreign powers" wasn't clear? This whole article, and the fact that it's on slashdot is stupid. Of course such a line would be inserted into any bill. Congress CAN NOT ever pass a law that limits the powers of the president if those powers are allowed by the constitution (including powers the courts have ruled the constitution has granted him). If the law stated that the president had extra powers or something, maybe that would be newsworthy. Although I guess considering how rarely congress follows the constitution, maybe a law where they state they don't violate it is a good start.
Unless there are versions of windows I don't know about, that really isn't an option. For auto control systems you need to have a real-time OS (RTOS) that supports hard and/or soft deadlines. The windows kernel offers no such features that I know of. While it could be extended in a manner similar to the versions of real-time linux available, those aren't really a good solution (I want to say real-time linux doesn't support hard RTOS guarantees, but I could be wrong). Engine management control software has critical sections that can not miss their deadlines, and constructing such a system can be difficult. Personally I'd adopt for a hardware/software approach, perhaps using a Xilinx Virtex chip with embedded PPC processors.
Either way, my point is that a general purpose OS can not be used to create a RTOS. I imagine in this situation MS will do what they do best and buy code from someone else (if they haven't already done that for another project) to support this project.
As for someones comment about using a real test race to test the controller, that'll take out major bugs, but those are rarely the issue. The hard bugs to find are the extremely rare ones that occur when 10 different things happen just the right way etc. The simulation profiles are extremely complex, and many research labs are dedicated to testing.
oops, I meant to say as the cost to convert would be fat too great (likely in the trillions). The number of companies that would leave is irrelevant, as it's total dollar figures that matter.
As for the comments about eventually software converting to mac/linux, that might be true, and they probably would, however there is a large extra cost required of all the developers to port applications to multiple OS's and keep them supported. Do you think this cost wouldn't be paid by the consumers in some way shape or form?
Besides, while the long term is important, a short term (a year or two) upset of all of the EUs computer systems would have a devastating effect on the countrys economy. The EU can not afford a deppression over a software vendor.
Additionally if companies chose to simply violate MS's IP, there would be even more havok laid out. First MS would step up it's antipiratism measurements preventing updates etc, while cracks might work, they represent a major pain for large corporations. Additionally there's the problem of multinational corporations. What are they going to do when MS tells them that they can't do business with them in other countrys (where IP is enforceable) unless they buy legitimate versions of their softwares in the other countries? While clever restructurings might avoid some of those problems, they are costly. MS has ways to strike back if widespread IP violations became government sanctioned. Small businesses might manage alright, but larger ones make up a sizable portion of the EUs economic forces.
Plus the raw power that the EU regulatory comission would have to yield to allow such widespread disregard of IP would definately scare potential companies from moving. Additionally member states of the EU might pull out under local pressures, and the entire EU might end up falling apart.
I really think the ball is in Microsofts court, it's really hard to truely enforce vague notions of anti-trust law.
I don't think the question is whether MS would let the EU default to linuxes and BSDs. That just would not happen. At least no time soon. MS can threaten the EU to remove their product from the market. Sure they make more money then they'd lose, but the EU can't afford for them to back out of their country. The cost of all companies switching over to linux/bsd, not to mention how many companies would leave the EU rather than convert would be far too great (likely in the trillions). While linux is sometimes a better replacement, many applications aren't available. The effect of MS backing out would be disastrous to the economy.
Of course if the government allowed widespread piracy of windows and other MS products, that might stop some of this, but how much would that cost in other companies being afraid of doing business in the EU for fear of the EU allowing their products to be distributed like that. Basically it all boils down to simple economics, the gains to the economy due to MS doing business in the EU is greater than the cost of their products.
On a side note, I will say I am not a windows user. I own a macbook, and a couple linux boxes to run my services and other usages. Personally I find this solution to be better, but obviously most of the world doesn't, and I don't have the right to tell them what they can and can not run.
Uh, I think I know the 14th ammendment, and in case you forgot (which it is apparent you did), here is the relevant portion:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Where does that state that a business can not hire someone for whatever reason they want? I don't condone racism, and I feel it is wrong, but nowhere in the constitution does it say it is illegal. Now, the constitution does state that the government can't make laws that show favortism. And that the courts can't favor someone just for the color of the skin.
I don't know how you start reading into this, but unless you meant actions regarding widespread government racism (which hasn't been seen in 25 years or so), I don't think your statement has any legitimacy.
Since when did the ACLU define rights by what the constitution defined as a right? The ACLU spends much time fighting against percieved racism. Since when was it unconstitutional to hire one person over another for ANY reason whatsoever? It may be against local, state or federal laws, but it is not a constitutional right. The ACLU spends much time attacking percieved first ammendement violations, but then ignores others (such as political contributions etc). It's simply an organization with an agenda. It's never been a non-partisan group either. Their "outrage" over something like this is just retarded. It's simply a chance to attack the war on terror that they feel is wrong, and a further means for them to pursue their political agenda.
The ACLU cares as much about civil liberties as the NAACP cares about actually advancing colored people and improving their lives (they're more concerned with entitlements, and using racism as a blame for all problems effecting blacks).
I don't actually think a tin foil hat would cause a problem. As far as I know tin is non-magnetic. As is alluminum foil (which is actually what most people would wear anyhow as I don't know anywhere you can buy actual tin foil). Of course, i wouldn't reccomend wearing an iron hat (which I wouldn't reccomend wearing anyhow), or a steel-foil (if such a thing exists) hat in an MRI machine. Even then foil is pretty maleable (by definition) and would likely just rip before doing anything to you.
The sad thing is that the courts allowed federal subsidizing of many of these programs to begin with. If you want a free society where the federal government doesn't control everything going on, you can't expect them to foot the bill. There are no if ands or buts about it. He who controls the money paying for policies inevitably controls the policy. How much control they wish to exert is up to them.
The federal government has a long history of using the old "withholding money" trick to enforce federal laws that would otherwise be unconstitutional. The federal government has no business telling states what their legal drinking age is, or what the limit for a DWI or DUI is, and yet they have dictated policy for it. Simply by controlling highway funds. The real sad part is states are damned if you do, and damned if they don't. Their citizens don't have a choice but to pay federal taxes (well, they do, but the other choice isn't exactly sane). If the state accepts federal money they must accept federal strings. If they don't accept the money, then they're throwing away their constituents money.
Of course as long as people believe federal government power should rule (which the Civil War set a precedent for, and it's been greatly expanded ever since), then the states don't really have power. When voters decided they'd rather have the federal government sponsor their state universities, they essentially federalized them.
I bought one of the new MacBooks, and have yet to have any problems. A couple minor ones, but thats about it. Of course this macbook is a replacement for my iBook that died after only 18 months of use (logic board failure). I think the big difference between apple and other companies is just how many apple products sell.
Sure you can claim "But Dell sells far more computers", and that is true. However Dells product line is how many laptops? 20? 30? I have no clue, but a ton. Apple has essentially 3 laptops Macbook, MacBook pro 15", MacBook Pro 17". They sell a ton of these units. Of course you're going to hear about problems with them. That said, I wish the problems were fixed in advance, but that is really hard to do when you have a million people begging for the next big thing from apple to be released.
Tuition and fees... $5k??? Where the hell do you goto school? If it's a public school out of state grad tuition will likely run them $15k/year. Private school, maybe as low as $20-25k (my masters was $950/credit). In state grad tuition (plus fees, books, etc) at a public school might be less than $10k/year.
Food is more likely a bare minimum of $200/month, likely more, I know I spend more per month on that. More realistic housing depends where you live, and more importantly how many people you live with. I have a one room efficiency (with a kitchen) that costs me $475/mont with no utilities included. Then you have to add in heat, electricity (you have to power your computers somehow), internet (a neccessity), and maybe cable. Water may or may not be included with rent.
Anyhow, you're basic grad student runs you about $50k/year. The general stipend depends on where you goto school (cost of living mostly), and the average stipend (including summer months) is in the area of $1400-$1600 per month. Add onto that tuition costs, health insurance (technically grad students pay for it in most places, but at a huge discount), student fees (if they're covered), equipment, etc and your grad student costs much more than $10k.
Of course most grad students do purely research oriented project, take much longer than a year to finish the project etc etc. The whole thing doesn't seem like any different than how most grad students are funded. Not a very exciting story really.
Okay your assumptions here are completely wrong. First adobe !=PDF and PDF!=Adobe. The only relation between them is that adobe makes a product that can be used to create pdfs. They also make a reader that is generally used to read pdfs (personally I just use Preview.app for them).
PDFs are made to represent text on a piece of paper. They can be read on a computer screen, but they are best read on paper. I print out many many pdfs a week in doing research. I also regularly create pdfs using LaTeX when I'm writing papers. What makes pdf nice is that it is a great way to represent paper documents on a computer. It is (in general) a read only format, which means I can send someone my resume, or a paper I wrote and there is no easy way for them to modify it (it's not protection against that stuff, but anything that's visible can be duplicated than modified). It lets me send research papers that take up only half a megabyte or space, and still contain many images, tables, etc. It also easily represents 2 column text (well at least LaTeX makes it easy to write 2 column papers), which despite your comments about how it's hard to read, is actually easier to read than single column text (and offers a denser packing of text on a page).
If someone is using pdfs to end you copies of a website, or something like that, than yes they're generally just wasting your time. PDF is a document format, it is made to easily transport and backup printable documents. And I would venture to say that many (if not most) pdf's were not created by adobe products. Considering the volume of research papers available on the web (many need accounts), i'd say that PDFs serve their purpose. While postscript is also a convenient option for printable documents, it tends to have larger files that make network traffic more annoying.
I would say the most important reason is to avoid unfair competition. Imagine this, 2 companies are competing, one a corporation, the other is set up such that one family controls it (and it isn't incorporated). Normally the family controlled business would incorporate to give it limited liability etc. However as it would stand under this situation they'd have a huge advantage.
The family owned business starts sending lobbyists to congress, and gets a law passed that basically makes it such that they're the only ones allowed to do business (and yes congress has done similar such things before), or more likely they have more capital available (as the other company spent theres on upgrading technology etc) and lobbied congress to pass massive pollution control laws . The pollution control laws are laregely irrelevant, but would cost each company billions of dollars in expenses. Luckily the family owned company had "saved up" for a rainy day and previously bought many patents to help with such matters (overpaying in the process because they knew these companies would soon be much more valuable). All of a sudden the corporation goes out of business because the individuals managed to lobby congress for a less efficient economy that they could rule.
Or we could always stop anyone from directly giving money to political campaigns, which of course would mean that the richest people would have an even bigger advantage in running for office (why do you think congress fights attempts to give themselves a bigger salary... yes, to make it so only the richer people have a chance at holding office). Of course you could then start attack problem after problem, but if there's one thing you'll quickly learn (as 70 years of big government has shown us) is that big government is incapable of solving big governments problems. While it still has problems when it's smaller, at least it's just that, smaller.
"To hell with the greedy bastards. Once or twice at the trough was more than enough -- no more."
In that case stop driving a car, stop using the phone, stop using the internet, stop watching tv, stop using electricity, stop using heat, hell pretty much stop using just about everything you have.
By the/. definition, every company is a greedy bastard. Some companies are just greedier than others. What the music industry is trying to do is what most every company is try or has done already. Find a way for the government to declare that they have a right to a profit regardless. It's amusing how people will say these greedy companies are the reason capitalism will fail. The failure isn't capitalism, but rather our entitlement government that allows laws to be passed that help one group out at the expense of others.
That being said if the government rules that ripping cds is illegal, I'll take one of two options: either stop buying cds altogether (and download them) because if I'm going to have to break the law anyhow, I might as well do it for free, or two continue buying cds and ripping them. Of course I doubt the courts would rule on the side of the *AA on something like this, as this is a classic part of the copyright law.
Phil
why not fix the obvious problem first?
on
Polite Cell Phones
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The idea of a smart phone doesn't sound too appealing, there are just too many exceptions to rules, and I am generally better at choosing for myself.
I think before we even get into changing phones so they're smart, why not change them so they're not retarded first? The biggest problem I have with phones is that many of them (the two motorolas I have) beep when you change yourself from "loud" mode to silent. At least when you don't have the phone open. Now what idiot thought up this idea? You're sitting in class, or a theater, and suddenly realize you left your phone on. Now you have to make a decision, do you annoy those around you by having your phone beep at you as you turn the ringer off, or do you run the risk that it might ring.
Also as other people have said, once it rings and you hit the ignore button, don't beep for a voice mail message, or ring again from the same person etc.
While people who use their phones all the time are generally better about remembering to turn off their phones, those of us who get a couple calls a week, and almost never during the day often don't think about the fact that they have their phone with them wherever they are.
Basically, just fix the idiotic notions programmed into cell phones, and then think about smart phones.
One obvious solution that's used to solve the short-term vertical supply slope (or help to) is the buying and selling of oil futures. Buying when the demand is less, and selling when the demand is greater. This essentially lets the supply be adjustable in the short term, although time to market is always an issue.
The thought of a massive war in the middle east would cause a major headache to the entire world. It's funny when Bush is blamed to be "fighting for oil", yet how true that is in a lot of respects. By stabilizing the region we can hopefully help avoid a massive war between the islamist states and israel (or someone else) that would likely end in nuclear blasts ripping apart the region. Such a scenario would likely not occur until many years in the future, however it is not pretty as it would A: Destroy the entire region, and B: cause hell on the rest of the world from not only the nuclear fallout, but also the decrease in energy available (for the reasons you mentioned).
The question of is it worth it to stay in Iraq and try to setup a legitimate government has an obvious answer. It will cost many more billions to stay there, but leaving and letting another sadam (or worse) take over could result in the scenario mentioned above, or even a WWIII. Even if the probability of that happening is small (say 20%), spending money in Iraq now seems like a good investment (compared to the thought of trillions in damages, or worse yet the end of the world as we know it). Of course this digresses from my main point on supply and demand.
Basically it comes down to the article spouting on about how their will be copper shortages etc etc, when the real point of fact is just that the price of copper will likely increase, and alternatives will start looking much better. Nothing to see here.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah yes, there are many many options and thread level parallelism will almost always yield better performance on the perfect application, when the programmer is willing to spend tons of time working on the code. Better yet, we could use FPGAs with custom written hardware kernels running on them. This will yield even higher performance. Of course development might take a couple extra years, and the cost... well what does that matter, THIS THING WILL BE FAST!!! We can end up with superfast computers, it's just a lot of work. Basically the problem comes down to do we spend a lot of money on hardware, or do we spend a ton of money on software, or do we balance the two? Most of the time the balance works best. Out of order execution wastes the majority of it's hardware trying to improve performance by tiny amounts, yet for most of the workloads people run, it's been considered worthwhile. Good computer architects have learned that they have to balance the needs of the programmer before they can make a successful architecture.
Whoever thought this story was worthy of slashdot is a moron. There's nothing new here, it's just that stack machines are good for some low power applications. Move along, and consult someon who has actually done some research on computer architecture before posting some random persons worthless presentation.
Phil
If you're a gamer, a $50 video chip sucks. If you're not a gamer, there's no real advantage to a $50 chip over the GMA950. I bought a MacBook, and am actually happy they went with an integrated solution instead of a separate graphics processor. The MacBook is a mobile computer. As such, the machines power consumption is important. Even if a dedicated $50 chip used up only 3W more of static power (not an unreasonable assumption for many of these "low power" chips), this would significantly reduce battery life.
The MacBooks battery has ~5100mAh @12V. Under normal usage condition we get 4 hours of use. This works out to the machine using 5100*12/4=~15.3Watts. If we increased this to account for a non-integrated graphics card, we'd see ~18Watts (conservatively). 5100*12/18=3.4 hours, or about 36 minutes less of battery power. Plus the MacBooks already run warm, now we have to run further cooling, etc.
Most users of the MacBook however do not require high-end graphics. The GMA950 is good enough for all of Quartz's 3D graphics, and should be fine for all of 10.5's 3D effects. Also, all these gamers who complain about macs having underpowered graphics like this don't take into account that they're not in apples target audience anyhow. They would never want to buy a mac simply because OSX doesn't have the games for it that Windows does, and won't unless they get a much larger market share. Personally I'm very happy with apples decisions.
Phil
Someone must have forgotten that low end PCs have high end graphics. Sounds like an honest mistake to me.
And by your reasoning MSDOS also has 100% marketshare! As does Linux, the BSDs, hell even Minix has 100% market share, as they run on all x86 PC hardware. This logic is just plain wrong! Whoever modded this post as informative is a moron. Just because windows runs on macs does not mean every mac has windows installed on it. Plus, even if someone dual boots between the the two, it doesn't mean they use windows or OSX more. Enough people have installed Linux on their pcs, or used a knoppix cd once or twice. Does that mean their market share numbers should count equally to windows and linux? What matter is what's used, and more importantly (to the company's short term) is did they buy the software.
Phil
Of course it would be used at campaign time. Do you remember the commercials showing chains behind a pickup truck, implying the george bush approved of criminals who dragged blacks behind pickup trucks? This was because he turned down hate crime legislation (what gets me is the fact that I consider most every murder to be a hate crime, as why else would you murder someone). The same could easily hold true with this myspace law.
That said, I hope the supreme court has the decency to overturn this law. The law is unconstitutional, not because of the 1st ammendment, but rather because of the 10th ammendment. The federal government was never given the power to control schools and libraries (in fact I think that much of Bush's education funding for schools is unconstitutional). How is congress spinning the constitutionality of this law? Are they arguing that this law effects interstate commerce (they tried passing a rape bill a while back under the interstate commerce clause, but the courts overturned it). Saddly, they can probably get away with this for the same reason the federal government can control the drinking age in every state. The federal government has expanded it's powers by redistributing tax money to the states. Now that they are funding local schools, they can threaten to pull funding unless they accept these provisions. So, basically laws like this are what happen when you allow the federal government to fund state and local programs.
Phil
That doesn't really change a thing. Needing to recursively read papers references was my point. You can not come in straight out as a ugrade and start reading the upper level papers. You must first solidfy the basis further. What you describe is simply doing it without taking classes, and yes, I've done it, and I'm sure plenty of other students have done it. However, my point still stands in that how many grad students in the advanced fields have papers ready (where they're the primary author) before the end of their second year? The first year is essentially spent getting yourself up to speed, and depending on the course requirements at the university, the second year is often spent doing this as well. There are obviously exceptions to this (I'd consider myself one of the exceptions), but it tends to hold true.
As for the comment about this stopping people from doing research... It may stop some people. The industry can live without many of those people. Research is not intended to be easy. However once you get through those initial hurdles things get easier.
phil
I think you miss a key part of research... The scope of it. 50 years ago the scope of engineering research was a lot more broad than it was today. In the computer industry, we can go back 30 years and see it. A computer architect 30 years ago likely knew more about electrical signals than todays. However the work on it could be started right after finishing an undergraduate degree. After an undergraduate degree you could undestand how transistors work, understand boolean logic, and put together a few thousand transistors to create a processor. State of the art research would have been in ALU design, datapaths, etc. Advance a few years and the research is focusing more on pipelining processors, parallelization, branch prediction etc. Granted much of this work had been done priorly with supercomputers, but going back even further similar progress had been made.
A little further down the road more work is being done in cache structures and deep pipelining, multiprocessor memory concurrency etc. The amount of knowledge needed is immense. In order to work on any of these features researchers needed a background in electrical engineering (although, they have cut back some of the detailed analog work necessary), they need to understand the workings of boolean logic, take the basic circuits courses, understand computer programming, know how to fully design "simple" processors, know how all the advanced features in the processor work, and then concentrate on a single component, and try to improve upon it. Much of this knowledge isn't obtained until their graduate career. Only then can they start reading papers on their specialization, and later they can hopefully contribute papers to the field.
The low hanging fruit just isn't as available in well established fields. Granted there are fields (even within computer engineering thankfully) where little work has been done, and large gains can be had. However even these fields all require significant background knowledge of all the complex systems involved.
Phil
This is a concern to Intels desktop market why? Intel doesn't care that the minute percent of users who are using linux are doing. Many of them are AMD fanboys anyways, so it doesn't matter what they do. It's just not a large enough market, and those people aren't buying from the large vendors for the most part anyhow.
Also, the AMD64 bit architecutre was not successful because it was 64bit. It was successful because it was more cost effective, and obtained more performance/watt than Intel's netburst architecture. When machines started approaching 2GB of RAM, Intel knew it was time to start looking at 64bit chips. Intel did, and besides some bad press generated about them using AMDs extensions, things worked fine. Despite that Intel's mobile chips still use 32 bit processors (well for a little bit anyways). The reason: mobile machines until now could generally not install more than 2 gigs of ram. Why waste the silicon and burn extra power for a feature that maybe 1% of users need. Even if it only saved 5% of power (when running in 32 bit land), this move makes perfect sense.
There is a reason Intel is trouncing AMD in the mobile market. AMD does not have an effective low power processor (the Turion doesn't cut it). The only place where AMD really saw damage due to the 64bit move was the server market. And this was because Intel thought they could convince people to buy Itaniums.... They couldn't.
phil
While most of the products on that page are ridiculous or overkill, those ipod gloves look tempting. For anyone who lives in really cold enviornments, and uses their ipod they'll know the feeling. When it's below zero outside the thought of taking off gloves to control an iPod is not fun at all. Even the 10 seconds it takes to adjust an iPod is extremely uncomfortable. I actually bought a pair of hunting mittens for the purpose of iPod control (so I could just leave my finger tips exposed when I want to control my iPod. However even this option wasn't very good, as I find mittens to be too bulky to work with, and besides I could barely get them under the handle of my coffee mug with my hands in them. I'm seriously considering these gloves for next winter. Of course that does make me wonder what the effects of subzero temperatures are on an iPod itself. I know from experience that you can't wrap up the headphones outside for fear of snapping them in that weather.
Phil
First, the study showing the discrepancy in wages has one major flaw in it. In 2000 the percent of people working in manufacturing jobs was a fairly small proportion of the US workforce. A much smaller percentage of the workforce than it was in 1990, smaller than 1980 etc. If you looked at that statistic in 1960 it may have been a fair measurement, but today? How many people do you know who still work in manufacturing? The few left are getting laid off. Fact of the matter is we're producing far more goods than we were even ten years ago, and we require far fewer people to make those goods. The modern economy has shifted and the average american works in higher paying service industry jobs.
Additionally, one argument about the growing discrepancy that's amusing is comparing incomes of the highest and the lowest % of people. In fact it could even be argued that having a large percentage of people earning very little is a good thing!!! How? Well consider a middle class worker 50 60 years ago. They generally worked till close to the end of their life. Many middle class workers today don't! There are more important things to them then money, and so they chose to live off their savings instead.
The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer arguments also fail when you go beyond raw statistics and look at the people. First of all the upper 1% are getting richer faster than the poorest 1% etc. This is true, but is it bad? If the rich gain 20% and the poor gain 5% is it bad? What if the alternative is the rich gaining 5% and the poor gaining 2%? Or, if we want to be communistic we could have the rich lose 10% and the poor stagnate (although in reality many communist countries ended up slaughtering too many people for those statistics to be meaningful). Examining the people involved in these studys, it's interesting to see what percentage of the people in the bottom 10% 10 years ago are still in the bottom 10%? Same with the upper 1% or 10% or whatever. I know from observation most people tend to make more money as they get older, hence they tend to climb up to the higher income brackets.
All these statistics add up and show that maybe there really isn't a problem. The problem is the people in the bottom 10% that are still there 10 years later. Most of those people tend to be a result of government programs. It's fair to say that far more people have been kept in poverty by the governments policies (drug war, affirmative action, etc) than have been helped by government programs (the only exception to the rule that I can think of is the military, as it generally offers the disadvantaged an oppurtunity to earn skills and discipline if they don't get blown up in the process).
Phil
Phil
Unless there are versions of windows I don't know about, that really isn't an option. For auto control systems you need to have a real-time OS (RTOS) that supports hard and/or soft deadlines. The windows kernel offers no such features that I know of. While it could be extended in a manner similar to the versions of real-time linux available, those aren't really a good solution (I want to say real-time linux doesn't support hard RTOS guarantees, but I could be wrong). Engine management control software has critical sections that can not miss their deadlines, and constructing such a system can be difficult. Personally I'd adopt for a hardware/software approach, perhaps using a Xilinx Virtex chip with embedded PPC processors.
Either way, my point is that a general purpose OS can not be used to create a RTOS. I imagine in this situation MS will do what they do best and buy code from someone else (if they haven't already done that for another project) to support this project.
As for someones comment about using a real test race to test the controller, that'll take out major bugs, but those are rarely the issue. The hard bugs to find are the extremely rare ones that occur when 10 different things happen just the right way etc. The simulation profiles are extremely complex, and many research labs are dedicated to testing.
Phil
oops, I meant to say as the cost to convert would be fat too great (likely in the trillions). The number of companies that would leave is irrelevant, as it's total dollar figures that matter.
As for the comments about eventually software converting to mac/linux, that might be true, and they probably would, however there is a large extra cost required of all the developers to port applications to multiple OS's and keep them supported. Do you think this cost wouldn't be paid by the consumers in some way shape or form?
Besides, while the long term is important, a short term (a year or two) upset of all of the EUs computer systems would have a devastating effect on the countrys economy. The EU can not afford a deppression over a software vendor.
Additionally if companies chose to simply violate MS's IP, there would be even more havok laid out. First MS would step up it's antipiratism measurements preventing updates etc, while cracks might work, they represent a major pain for large corporations. Additionally there's the problem of multinational corporations. What are they going to do when MS tells them that they can't do business with them in other countrys (where IP is enforceable) unless they buy legitimate versions of their softwares in the other countries? While clever restructurings might avoid some of those problems, they are costly. MS has ways to strike back if widespread IP violations became government sanctioned. Small businesses might manage alright, but larger ones make up a sizable portion of the EUs economic forces.
Plus the raw power that the EU regulatory comission would have to yield to allow such widespread disregard of IP would definately scare potential companies from moving. Additionally member states of the EU might pull out under local pressures, and the entire EU might end up falling apart.
I really think the ball is in Microsofts court, it's really hard to truely enforce vague notions of anti-trust law.
Phil
I don't think the question is whether MS would let the EU default to linuxes and BSDs. That just would not happen. At least no time soon. MS can threaten the EU to remove their product from the market. Sure they make more money then they'd lose, but the EU can't afford for them to back out of their country. The cost of all companies switching over to linux/bsd, not to mention how many companies would leave the EU rather than convert would be far too great (likely in the trillions). While linux is sometimes a better replacement, many applications aren't available. The effect of MS backing out would be disastrous to the economy.
Of course if the government allowed widespread piracy of windows and other MS products, that might stop some of this, but how much would that cost in other companies being afraid of doing business in the EU for fear of the EU allowing their products to be distributed like that. Basically it all boils down to simple economics, the gains to the economy due to MS doing business in the EU is greater than the cost of their products.
On a side note, I will say I am not a windows user. I own a macbook, and a couple linux boxes to run my services and other usages. Personally I find this solution to be better, but obviously most of the world doesn't, and I don't have the right to tell them what they can and can not run.
Phil
I don't know how you start reading into this, but unless you meant actions regarding widespread government racism (which hasn't been seen in 25 years or so), I don't think your statement has any legitimacy.
phil
Since when did the ACLU define rights by what the constitution defined as a right? The ACLU spends much time fighting against percieved racism. Since when was it unconstitutional to hire one person over another for ANY reason whatsoever? It may be against local, state or federal laws, but it is not a constitutional right. The ACLU spends much time attacking percieved first ammendement violations, but then ignores others (such as political contributions etc). It's simply an organization with an agenda. It's never been a non-partisan group either. Their "outrage" over something like this is just retarded. It's simply a chance to attack the war on terror that they feel is wrong, and a further means for them to pursue their political agenda.
The ACLU cares as much about civil liberties as the NAACP cares about actually advancing colored people and improving their lives (they're more concerned with entitlements, and using racism as a blame for all problems effecting blacks).
Phil
I don't actually think a tin foil hat would cause a problem. As far as I know tin is non-magnetic. As is alluminum foil (which is actually what most people would wear anyhow as I don't know anywhere you can buy actual tin foil). Of course, i wouldn't reccomend wearing an iron hat (which I wouldn't reccomend wearing anyhow), or a steel-foil (if such a thing exists) hat in an MRI machine. Even then foil is pretty maleable (by definition) and would likely just rip before doing anything to you.
Phil
The sad thing is that the courts allowed federal subsidizing of many of these programs to begin with. If you want a free society where the federal government doesn't control everything going on, you can't expect them to foot the bill. There are no if ands or buts about it. He who controls the money paying for policies inevitably controls the policy. How much control they wish to exert is up to them.
The federal government has a long history of using the old "withholding money" trick to enforce federal laws that would otherwise be unconstitutional. The federal government has no business telling states what their legal drinking age is, or what the limit for a DWI or DUI is, and yet they have dictated policy for it. Simply by controlling highway funds. The real sad part is states are damned if you do, and damned if they don't. Their citizens don't have a choice but to pay federal taxes (well, they do, but the other choice isn't exactly sane). If the state accepts federal money they must accept federal strings. If they don't accept the money, then they're throwing away their constituents money.
Of course as long as people believe federal government power should rule (which the Civil War set a precedent for, and it's been greatly expanded ever since), then the states don't really have power. When voters decided they'd rather have the federal government sponsor their state universities, they essentially federalized them.
phil
I bought one of the new MacBooks, and have yet to have any problems. A couple minor ones, but thats about it. Of course this macbook is a replacement for my iBook that died after only 18 months of use (logic board failure). I think the big difference between apple and other companies is just how many apple products sell.
Sure you can claim "But Dell sells far more computers", and that is true. However Dells product line is how many laptops? 20? 30? I have no clue, but a ton. Apple has essentially 3 laptops Macbook, MacBook pro 15", MacBook Pro 17". They sell a ton of these units. Of course you're going to hear about problems with them. That said, I wish the problems were fixed in advance, but that is really hard to do when you have a million people begging for the next big thing from apple to be released.
phil
Tuition and fees... $5k??? Where the hell do you goto school? If it's a public school out of state grad tuition will likely run them $15k/year. Private school, maybe as low as $20-25k (my masters was $950/credit). In state grad tuition (plus fees, books, etc) at a public school might be less than $10k/year.
Food is more likely a bare minimum of $200/month, likely more, I know I spend more per month on that. More realistic housing depends where you live, and more importantly how many people you live with. I have a one room efficiency (with a kitchen) that costs me $475/mont with no utilities included. Then you have to add in heat, electricity (you have to power your computers somehow), internet (a neccessity), and maybe cable. Water may or may not be included with rent.
Anyhow, you're basic grad student runs you about $50k/year. The general stipend depends on where you goto school (cost of living mostly), and the average stipend (including summer months) is in the area of $1400-$1600 per month. Add onto that tuition costs, health insurance (technically grad students pay for it in most places, but at a huge discount), student fees (if they're covered), equipment, etc and your grad student costs much more than $10k.
Of course most grad students do purely research oriented project, take much longer than a year to finish the project etc etc. The whole thing doesn't seem like any different than how most grad students are funded. Not a very exciting story really.
phil
Okay your assumptions here are completely wrong. First adobe !=PDF and PDF!=Adobe. The only relation between them is that adobe makes a product that can be used to create pdfs. They also make a reader that is generally used to read pdfs (personally I just use Preview.app for them).
PDFs are made to represent text on a piece of paper. They can be read on a computer screen, but they are best read on paper. I print out many many pdfs a week in doing research. I also regularly create pdfs using LaTeX when I'm writing papers. What makes pdf nice is that it is a great way to represent paper documents on a computer. It is (in general) a read only format, which means I can send someone my resume, or a paper I wrote and there is no easy way for them to modify it (it's not protection against that stuff, but anything that's visible can be duplicated than modified). It lets me send research papers that take up only half a megabyte or space, and still contain many images, tables, etc. It also easily represents 2 column text (well at least LaTeX makes it easy to write 2 column papers), which despite your comments about how it's hard to read, is actually easier to read than single column text (and offers a denser packing of text on a page).
If someone is using pdfs to end you copies of a website, or something like that, than yes they're generally just wasting your time. PDF is a document format, it is made to easily transport and backup printable documents. And I would venture to say that many (if not most) pdf's were not created by adobe products. Considering the volume of research papers available on the web (many need accounts), i'd say that PDFs serve their purpose. While postscript is also a convenient option for printable documents, it tends to have larger files that make network traffic more annoying.
Phil
I would say the most important reason is to avoid unfair competition. Imagine this, 2 companies are competing, one a corporation, the other is set up such that one family controls it (and it isn't incorporated). Normally the family controlled business would incorporate to give it limited liability etc. However as it would stand under this situation they'd have a huge advantage.
.. yes, to make it so only the richer people have a chance at holding office). Of course you could then start attack problem after problem, but if there's one thing you'll quickly learn (as 70 years of big government has shown us) is that big government is incapable of solving big governments problems. While it still has problems when it's smaller, at least it's just that, smaller.
The family owned business starts sending lobbyists to congress, and gets a law passed that basically makes it such that they're the only ones allowed to do business (and yes congress has done similar such things before), or more likely they have more capital available (as the other company spent theres on upgrading technology etc) and lobbied congress to pass massive pollution control laws . The pollution control laws are laregely irrelevant, but would cost each company billions of dollars in expenses. Luckily the family owned company had "saved up" for a rainy day and previously bought many patents to help with such matters (overpaying in the process because they knew these companies would soon be much more valuable). All of a sudden the corporation goes out of business because the individuals managed to lobby congress for a less efficient economy that they could rule.
Or we could always stop anyone from directly giving money to political campaigns, which of course would mean that the richest people would have an even bigger advantage in running for office (why do you think congress fights attempts to give themselves a bigger salary.
Phil
"To hell with the greedy bastards. Once or twice at the trough was more than enough -- no more."
/. definition, every company is a greedy bastard. Some companies are just greedier than others. What the music industry is trying to do is what most every company is try or has done already. Find a way for the government to declare that they have a right to a profit regardless. It's amusing how people will say these greedy companies are the reason capitalism will fail. The failure isn't capitalism, but rather our entitlement government that allows laws to be passed that help one group out at the expense of others.
In that case stop driving a car, stop using the phone, stop using the internet, stop watching tv, stop using electricity, stop using heat, hell pretty much stop using just about everything you have.
By the
That being said if the government rules that ripping cds is illegal, I'll take one of two options: either stop buying cds altogether (and download them) because if I'm going to have to break the law anyhow, I might as well do it for free, or two continue buying cds and ripping them. Of course I doubt the courts would rule on the side of the *AA on something like this, as this is a classic part of the copyright law.
Phil
The idea of a smart phone doesn't sound too appealing, there are just too many exceptions to rules, and I am generally better at choosing for myself.
I think before we even get into changing phones so they're smart, why not change them so they're not retarded first? The biggest problem I have with phones is that many of them (the two motorolas I have) beep when you change yourself from "loud" mode to silent. At least when you don't have the phone open. Now what idiot thought up this idea? You're sitting in class, or a theater, and suddenly realize you left your phone on. Now you have to make a decision, do you annoy those around you by having your phone beep at you as you turn the ringer off, or do you run the risk that it might ring.
Also as other people have said, once it rings and you hit the ignore button, don't beep for a voice mail message, or ring again from the same person etc.
While people who use their phones all the time are generally better about remembering to turn off their phones, those of us who get a couple calls a week, and almost never during the day often don't think about the fact that they have their phone with them wherever they are.
Basically, just fix the idiotic notions programmed into cell phones, and then think about smart phones.
Phil
One obvious solution that's used to solve the short-term vertical supply slope (or help to) is the buying and selling of oil futures. Buying when the demand is less, and selling when the demand is greater. This essentially lets the supply be adjustable in the short term, although time to market is always an issue.
The thought of a massive war in the middle east would cause a major headache to the entire world. It's funny when Bush is blamed to be "fighting for oil", yet how true that is in a lot of respects. By stabilizing the region we can hopefully help avoid a massive war between the islamist states and israel (or someone else) that would likely end in nuclear blasts ripping apart the region. Such a scenario would likely not occur until many years in the future, however it is not pretty as it would A: Destroy the entire region, and B: cause hell on the rest of the world from not only the nuclear fallout, but also the decrease in energy available (for the reasons you mentioned).
The question of is it worth it to stay in Iraq and try to setup a legitimate government has an obvious answer. It will cost many more billions to stay there, but leaving and letting another sadam (or worse) take over could result in the scenario mentioned above, or even a WWIII. Even if the probability of that happening is small (say 20%), spending money in Iraq now seems like a good investment (compared to the thought of trillions in damages, or worse yet the end of the world as we know it). Of course this digresses from my main point on supply and demand.
Basically it comes down to the article spouting on about how their will be copper shortages etc etc, when the real point of fact is just that the price of copper will likely increase, and alternatives will start looking much better. Nothing to see here.
Phil