While the idea of dual core cpus is really cool, and will take over shortly due in part to the fact that we need something to do with all those extra transistors, I wonder why the focus of the industry is on chip multi-processors (CMP).
While CMP processors can give us rougly the same performance of a standard SMP system (somewhat faster due to interprocessor communication and shared memory, but also slower due to a larger memory bottleneck) I don't think that a CMP system would compete with a simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) solution.
While Intel's response to SMT (hyperthreading) has some benifits the performance of it is rather lackluster. The reason has more to do with their particular implementation. If you've read about the initial observations on SMT an 8-way SMT processor was shown to outperform a 4-way CMP processor. Now, I must note that the 8-way smt processor had more functional units then the cores in the 4-way CMP processor, but the overall area of the 8-way SMT processor would be much much smaller (far less structures need to be duplicated for SMT as opposed to CMP). For more information on this check out some of the papers at http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/smt/.
What I don't understand is the insistance of the industry to use CMP first. From everything I've read, an 8-way SMT processor should take up less die space then a two way CMP processor. Even assuming that the 8 way processor contains more functional units. It kind of makes sense that a CMP processor is faster when there aren't enough threads to fully utilize a SMT processor (say only 2 or 3 threads that want full cpu usage). I guess SMT is a big chance in the model of programming and application development (I'm currently running research on the subject which is why I'm so interested in it). Is the reason to embrace CMPs simply because there's less new technology to add (they "just" have to interconnect two cores as opposed to adding the extra logic for SMT).
Does anyone else have any other opinions regarding this matter, or any idea why no one seems to be fully embracing SMT's potential.
Alright, I think you people have missed the point of what I was saying. It's not that games aren't multithreaded, its that on PCs they traditionally don't run faster when on an SMP/SMT machine. Sure there are threads for sound, and disk I/O etc. I won't deny that, but a thread that is almost always blocking doesn't need its own dedicated processor.
The next great reply was about how games on the PS2 were cpu limited. Again, we're talking about a different problem domain here. The PS2 is a traditional console system, the xbox is not. The xbox is a glorified pc. Compare the actual speeds of the xbox's processor and the speed of the ps2's processor (from int performance to fpu performance, etc). The problem mentioned simply isn't relevant. Besides, a single 2ghzish G5 processor should be fast enough not to be the limiting factor considering the video card being used. Granted its a fast card, but currently the cpu performance of a top of the line machine will be video card limited. Look at benchmarks out there, the cpu's aren't making a hell of a lot of difference. multiple threads won't benifit by having their own processor unless they original processor is being heavily loaded (sure, maybe somewhat in response time, but the difference would hardly be noticable). The only other advantage for all that processing power would be to allow sloppy coders, but that doesn't seem logical.
Then I love reading people saying maybe the other two g5s are dumbed down ones with small caches etc. That just wouldn't make sense. A G5 is architectures around a highly pipelined and superscalar architecture. Without a large enough cache it will hardly be able to do anything.
I just fail to be convinced that anyone sane would release a gaming machine like this. Its just so over powered (then again so was the xbox) for its purpose.
The real problems come from a systems engineering standpoint. Computer Engineers do things in powers of 2. ... We don't use 3 cpus because it would waste an address. The real question is why? Games generally aren't written as multi-threaded applications (what games give performance gains on dual cpu rigs even?) Its just not a paradign that game designers have been exposed to; not to say they can't do it. The article goes on to say they may be using a dual core architecture, as well as SMT. . . That works out to 12 threads of execution. Plus, with that many threads you'll have some blocking at any given time. So to fully utilize it you're looking at 15-20 threads needed. Now programmers may be able to adapat to writing a game in 2-4 threads, but 15-20 is just nuts (if you believe in the SMT/dual core rumors). Concurrency alone in a game would more then offset the advantages. Gaming threads simply require too much communication.
the other problem with it is. . . why??? It's been routinely shown that for pcs (which this is) the cpu does not limit gaming performance very much. That's limited by the gpu. A 1.2 ghz athlon is about as fast at gaming as a 2 ghz Athlon given that the rest of the system is the same (ie high end video card). Granted the 2 ghz system is faster, but by maybe 10-20% in most games . ..If that. So why 3 cores?
Granted, if MS does go this route, I'll be picking one up, as thats a lot of cpu power. The other question is... this is MS bedding with IBM, kind of an interesting combination there. We already have linux on a G5 architecture, and I'm sure IBM supports it, so why would MS want to do this? Sounds like with 3 chips they're just throwing money at the problem.. But when you have 50billion at your disposal, I guess you can.
You start to wonder why a label like this is such a slashdottable thing. There are other non-evil records that have been around for years. Part of the problem is these labels can't get the same distribution as others. One label I'm a big fan of is bloodshot records (http://www.bloodshotrecords.com). While bloodshot is a niche fanbase, for its particular scene, they're much more realistic in their approach. And many slashdotters probably wouldn't like them, because they aren't big fans of p2p file downloaders. However they're decent about it. They do not respect the right of people to steal their music at will, but don't have anything inherently wrong with letting users preview songs, even allowing it on their website for certain songs. But they are serious about not being a charity case record label. They're still trying to make money. They can't just let people take their product for free. However unlike most of these "good" labels they actually have a couple artists who some people may have heard of. No one who's sold tons of albums, but an artist is doing really great in this business if they're simply selling over 50,000 copies of a cd, and some of them are probably over the 100,000 mark. Enough to make a living off it (after touring). But what makes this magnature unique? I guess i should read more on it.
I know at my school our procedure against the worm is rather interesting. We have recently installed new cisco switches in most of the dorms. In an effort to block the worm we have already blocked all incoming traffic of the blaster and Welchia worm (actually the Welchia worm has probably generated more problems then blaster). Then on the switch level we are blocking all pings to prevent blaster from scanning to spread itself. However it is still a complete mess. These measures have isolated the problem so as not to overwhelm the network. Our plans are currently considering removing the blocks from a set switch, scanning to get a list of all the infected/unpatched machines. With this list we can e-mail the students who live in a room that has a computer in it with the worm. Our other measure is that we are currently running Novell and students can login to the novell network (for installing certain apps etc). However a large percentage of students do not use this, and are unaffected by scripts that we run to scan every machine logging on for blaster and welchia etc. Of course this method also has the problem of user ignoring which is just as disastrous. Users have grown accustomed to closing 20 different windows at once when starting their computer and ignore them.
There's really no easy way to fix an outbreak, but to try and contain it from affecting the main networks. Of course this requires expensive equipment, but I'm sure the University is quite glad that they were buying this already.
That is exactly what I'm doing. You don't take out 19k a year in loans because your parents are paying your way. I'm more upset about the fact that they cut my aid after telling me it would be 19k freshmen year.
Anymore I don't expect aid, although it would be nice to have. Its just bullshit the way its distributed.
I currently plan on graduating with about $60k in loans. Much more then that when I'm done with grad school. As for working my way through school.. . Right; like flipping burgers at $6 an hour will make a dent in my loans, I'm better concentrating on my studies.
financial aid.. . What a joke. My parents aren't rich by any means either, probably about the same yours are. A simple family of 4. At my school (if you can't figure that out on your own, you don't belong on slashdot) tuition is something like $28k/year. I think estimated cost of attendance for a year is closer to $36k/year. Now, I don't know how they come by the figures they get, but there's no way in hell my parents could remotely pay this much. After taxes this figure would be about half my parents income. My college education at an overpriced educational institution is not there responsibility.
Now for me to get on to why the financial aid system sucks. I came here partially because of aid. ... But aid is a load, and don't ever trust a figure they give you. Freshmen year I was getting $19.5k/year and tuition was only $21k or so a year. So sure it was $10,000 a year I had to pay, and for that I took out loans, but it wasn't too bad. I planned on graduating with maybe $25-$30k in debt. Oh, one more thing I didn't mention, I'm hispanic, so the school really wanted me to come here and bolster their percentages. What should happen a year later though is that the school somehow magically didn't see some of my parents income freshmen year, and my aid was cut to about $12k/year ... Lovely. Get me going here with one expected cost of education and then cut it down.
Of course over the years the aid has been cut more, but one more point of note.. . What ever happened to merit scholarships, and when did they become worthless? I have a $10k/year deans scholarship from the school. Now this sounds great (and now when its the only "aid" I get it is a good thing, as they can't cut that), but until my aid was cut below the $10k point it was meaningless. If you were eligible for $15k/year in financial aid and had a scholarship for $10k from the university you got 5k/year in aid. While the same isn't true for outside scholarships, its pretty close. I think for every $3 of outside funding you get $2 cut from your financial aid. So you start looking and realize whats the point in a $1000 scholarship from outside sources. They're lots of work, and you get next to nothing for it. One reason no one bothers.
But back to my original point. . . Financial aid sucks. While you need some way to help poorer families get students into college, this is not the way. this is just horrible. Graduating with $60k in loans doesn't sound like fun. and unfortuantely its what I'm doing. . . Which reminds me, time to finish filling out my loan paperwork for the $20k im taking out this year.
phil
they just want your tuition money.. . .
Right. . . and I bet thats why many institutions offer free degrees (especially in engineering/computer science) to PHD students. ... They give free tuition and the $10-20k a year stipends for being a phd student, and normally not to masters students. Universities that do research get higher rankings, its more prestigous. Why do you think they want the grad students. They're not getting money from them. ..What grad student have you ever met that had money? I'm currently a senior undergraduate in computer engineering and am seriously looking into a phd solely because im more likely to get that funded then a masters.
Phil
Actually, unless the designers of an LED flashlight are complete morons you shouldn't have that problem. There is always the possibility that they have a 1.5V LED that is made to work at exactly that voltage, but chances are good its more like 1.4V or something slightly off. With LED's IV curves, a difference in.1 Volts can change the current tremendously, so they most likely have a resister in series with the LED to prevent this problem. Also, if they don't have a resistor in series, the voltage the battery would supply would end up being much less, because I don't think a standard battery could supply the current necessary for a 1.5V LED running at 3.6 volts, the current would just be enormous. Sorry for rambling and being a bit off topic, but the EE training in my won't allow myself not to respond.
what I don't understand is how this company claims to be able to make any profit. The motion picture companies have the right to charge what they want for a movie, after all how else are we going to get 200 million dollar blockbusters? What doesn't make sense is selling tickets this cheap. Sure if you plan on making money off concessions you can get away with it. But their website even said that they encourage people to bring their own sodas and popcorn. They mentioned that most theaters are only 20% full. Makes sense, as most people can't make showings at 2 in the afternoon on a work day. But regardless of how cheap tickets are people still can't make the showings. They talk about making money in the margins, but it doesn't seem logical. If they have to pay a fee to the movie company for each viewer of it, then there's no possible way this makes sense. Who knows, maybe theirs some brittish law that forces motion picture companies to sell tickets in a certain manner. If this is true, and they'd be paying less pre viewer, then I understand why the MPAA or whoever would be angry, and not want them to sell tickets. As the information I see shows though, it just looks like a business model that will follow the dot coms to a massive crash.
Philip
I bought a new laptop recently over christmas break; and IBM thinkpad 600. It seems to run great; although I had to replace the battery in it initially (see prior slashdot issues on that). anyhow. The machine i have is a P2-300 MHZ machine. It can't even supply the dvd rom drive it has decently enoguh to decode them. However the machine does more then enough to run gnome2.2 on, and runs everything I need perfectly fine.br. Sure I won't have top of the line stuff. And i definately won't have IEEE 1394 support, but what linux box truely does? As for stuff like 802.11B. . buy a cheap card or ebay. works great.
Philip
I think self-censorship is one of the best ideas a scientist can have. Some scientists have realized from the past that there are some things the world is better off not knowing. There are also scientists who feel that they shouldn't research certain areas for fear of the horrors it creates.
One prime example is the scientists working on the Manhattan Project, and after seeing its tremendous destructive force wished they had never participated, or had grave concerns over what they did.
Believe it or not you have some moral responsibility for helping someone else kill other people. Now of course there are vastly different degrees of this, but it exists. If you're a scientist who is working in sensitive areas, I don't see anything wrong with trying to keep the information you're dealing with out of the wrong hands. Some people just don't need easy access to this material. If I worked for the government and knew flaws in our security system that would allow others to gain access to nuclear materials, I wouldn't go right out and post it to the world. That would be stupid. Sure, I'd do what I can to get things changed, but giving away secrets to the enemy is rarely the same.
Philip
I think a lot of us tend to be overlooking the real problem at work. Why should congress even be involved with this research in the first place. Someone will always be trying to influence the science thats produced with their money (lets face it how many people try to silence the studies showing that lax gun regulations lead to fewer murders etc). The real problem is that hte government has the power to control what gets researched. The government should not be involved in scientific research beyond that which is required for the military (which is clearly defined in the constitution).
I have yet to see anywhere in the constitution that gives the government the right to spend billions of dollars on scientific research for biased projects to appease those in power. It was not an option back then. Science should be funded by those who want the science done. Naturally standardization and scientific bureaus would end up springing forward to review them. but it is not the governments place to say what should and shouldn't researched.
People need to realize that the government can't be a cureall for anything. For every problem they solve a million more are normally created. Thats why the constitution tried to limit the governments intervention with private affairs.
Unfortunately too many people tend to be idealists and discount human nature. They don't think people are going to vie for power, or abuse the power they have, or be greedy and take advantage of the system. Idealism is just a silly joke though. No matter how much you say "in a perfect world government funding for medicine or science won't be biased" it won't take away the fact that we live in an imperfect world, and have to deal wtih the cards dealt to us. We can't always assume the ideal model is correct.
Philip Garcia
While EE's may have P-SPICE to verify their calculations that use ideal models, no such thing works for modeling humanity.
I know Lehigh University recently (last year) signed an agreement with MS which granted a liscence of MS office and Windows XP to all the students. I found it completely wrong that I'm forced to pay tons of extra money to buy software I don't even use (as I'm a linux user). Microsoft loves the deals because most of the students either have their own copy of that software already, or would have pirated a copy from the guy down the hall from them. I imagine the main reason the universities agree not to give out the information is they don't want people to see how much they're paying to get copies of MS products. I imagine MS probably uses the threat of "stopping piracy on campus" as part of the reasoning to get the university to cough over the money for the liscencing. I hate it as much as the next guy. Whats particularly ridiculous is that I know people with 3 legitimate windows copies now. The one that came with their computer, the one the school paid for, and the one that they get from the CSE departments subscription to the MSDN (which is a great deal for both the department and MS as we get free software, and they get their software to be used educationally). Hopefully some day our administration will come to its senses regarding this.
Philip Garcia
Computer Engineer
Lehigh University '03/4
I'm also a Tampa resident, and I must say that this is a complete waste of money. I proudly voted against the rail. It was put before the voters as "do you want a high speed rail built" more or less like that. Might as well ask someone "would you like a new BMW?" Very few people are going to say no to such a proposal, however if they said "would you like to pay $45,000 for a BMW most people would say no as they can't afford it. It's just like the lawmakers to get something passed without specifying any estimate whatsoever. Anyhow, the federal government set up the constitution to protect the citizens of the country from the whims of the majority. Floridas constitution is sort of the opposite. Its made so the majority can on a whim do whatever they please. Don't get me wrong, a maglev train would be really cool to run across the state, but the state has more then enough expenses the way it is without spending billions on a rail system that would essentially ignore the population of all of northern florida and the panhandle (who would also be paying equally for it). Guess thats government for you.
Philip Garcia
Slashdot Mirror
While the idea of dual core cpus is really cool, and will take over shortly due in part to the fact that we need something to do with all those extra transistors, I wonder why the focus of the industry is on chip multi-processors (CMP).
.
While CMP processors can give us rougly the same performance of a standard SMP system (somewhat faster due to interprocessor communication and shared memory, but also slower due to a larger memory bottleneck) I don't think that a CMP system would compete with a simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) solution.
While Intel's response to SMT (hyperthreading) has some benifits the performance of it is rather lackluster. The reason has more to do with their particular implementation. If you've read about the initial observations on SMT an 8-way SMT processor was shown to outperform a 4-way CMP processor. Now, I must note that the 8-way smt processor had more functional units then the cores in the 4-way CMP processor, but the overall area of the 8-way SMT processor would be much much smaller (far less structures need to be duplicated for SMT as opposed to CMP). For more information on this check out some of the papers at http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/smt/
What I don't understand is the insistance of the industry to use CMP first. From everything I've read, an 8-way SMT processor should take up less die space then a two way CMP processor. Even assuming that the 8 way processor contains more functional units. It kind of makes sense that a CMP processor is faster when there aren't enough threads to fully utilize a SMT processor (say only 2 or 3 threads that want full cpu usage). I guess SMT is a big chance in the model of programming and application development (I'm currently running research on the subject which is why I'm so interested in it). Is the reason to embrace CMPs simply because there's less new technology to add (they "just" have to interconnect two cores as opposed to adding the extra logic for SMT).
Does anyone else have any other opinions regarding this matter, or any idea why no one seems to be fully embracing SMT's potential.
Philip Garcia
Alright, I think you people have missed the point of what I was saying. It's not that games aren't multithreaded, its that on PCs they traditionally don't run faster when on an SMP/SMT machine. Sure there are threads for sound, and disk I/O etc. I won't deny that, but a thread that is almost always blocking doesn't need its own dedicated processor.
The next great reply was about how games on the PS2 were cpu limited. Again, we're talking about a different problem domain here. The PS2 is a traditional console system, the xbox is not. The xbox is a glorified pc. Compare the actual speeds of the xbox's processor and the speed of the ps2's processor (from int performance to fpu performance, etc). The problem mentioned simply isn't relevant. Besides, a single 2ghzish G5 processor should be fast enough not to be the limiting factor considering the video card being used. Granted its a fast card, but currently the cpu performance of a top of the line machine will be video card limited. Look at benchmarks out there, the cpu's aren't making a hell of a lot of difference. multiple threads won't benifit by having their own processor unless they original processor is being heavily loaded (sure, maybe somewhat in response time, but the difference would hardly be noticable). The only other advantage for all that processing power would be to allow sloppy coders, but that doesn't seem logical.
Then I love reading people saying maybe the other two g5s are dumbed down ones with small caches etc. That just wouldn't make sense. A G5 is architectures around a highly pipelined and superscalar architecture. Without a large enough cache it will hardly be able to do anything.
I just fail to be convinced that anyone sane would release a gaming machine like this. Its just so over powered (then again so was the xbox) for its purpose.
Philip Garcia
The real problems come from a systems engineering standpoint. Computer Engineers do things in powers of 2. . .. We don't use 3 cpus because it would waste an address. The real question is why? Games generally aren't written as multi-threaded applications (what games give performance gains on dual cpu rigs even?) Its just not a paradign that game designers have been exposed to; not to say they can't do it. The article goes on to say they may be using a dual core architecture, as well as SMT. . . That works out to 12 threads of execution. Plus, with that many threads you'll have some blocking at any given time. So to fully utilize it you're looking at 15-20 threads needed. Now programmers may be able to adapat to writing a game in 2-4 threads, but 15-20 is just nuts (if you believe in the SMT/dual core rumors). Concurrency alone in a game would more then offset the advantages. Gaming threads simply require too much communication.
.If that. So why 3 cores?
... this is MS bedding with IBM, kind of an interesting combination there. We already have linux on a G5 architecture, and I'm sure IBM supports it, so why would MS want to do this? Sounds like with 3 chips they're just throwing money at the problem .. But when you have 50billion at your disposal, I guess you can.
the other problem with it is. . . why??? It's been routinely shown that for pcs (which this is) the cpu does not limit gaming performance very much. That's limited by the gpu. A 1.2 ghz athlon is about as fast at gaming as a 2 ghz Athlon given that the rest of the system is the same (ie high end video card). Granted the 2 ghz system is faster, but by maybe 10-20% in most games . .
Granted, if MS does go this route, I'll be picking one up, as thats a lot of cpu power. The other question is
Philip Garcia
You start to wonder why a label like this is such a slashdottable thing. There are other non-evil records that have been around for years. Part of the problem is these labels can't get the same distribution as others. One label I'm a big fan of is bloodshot records (http://www.bloodshotrecords.com). While bloodshot is a niche fanbase, for its particular scene, they're much more realistic in their approach. And many slashdotters probably wouldn't like them, because they aren't big fans of p2p file downloaders. However they're decent about it. They do not respect the right of people to steal their music at will, but don't have anything inherently wrong with letting users preview songs, even allowing it on their website for certain songs. But they are serious about not being a charity case record label. They're still trying to make money. They can't just let people take their product for free. However unlike most of these "good" labels they actually have a couple artists who some people may have heard of. No one who's sold tons of albums, but an artist is doing really great in this business if they're simply selling over 50,000 copies of a cd, and some of them are probably over the 100,000 mark. Enough to make a living off it (after touring). But what makes this magnature unique? I guess i should read more on it.
Philip Garcia
I know at my school our procedure against the worm is rather interesting. We have recently installed new cisco switches in most of the dorms. In an effort to block the worm we have already blocked all incoming traffic of the blaster and Welchia worm (actually the Welchia worm has probably generated more problems then blaster). Then on the switch level we are blocking all pings to prevent blaster from scanning to spread itself. However it is still a complete mess. These measures have isolated the problem so as not to overwhelm the network. Our plans are currently considering removing the blocks from a set switch, scanning to get a list of all the infected/unpatched machines. With this list we can e-mail the students who live in a room that has a computer in it with the worm. Our other measure is that we are currently running Novell and students can login to the novell network (for installing certain apps etc). However a large percentage of students do not use this, and are unaffected by scripts that we run to scan every machine logging on for blaster and welchia etc. Of course this method also has the problem of user ignoring which is just as disastrous. Users have grown accustomed to closing 20 different windows at once when starting their computer and ignore them.
There's really no easy way to fix an outbreak, but to try and contain it from affecting the main networks. Of course this requires expensive equipment, but I'm sure the University is quite glad that they were buying this already.
Phil
uh; i don't think you understand my point.
.. . Right; like flipping burgers at $6 an hour will make a dent in my loans, I'm better concentrating on my studies.
That is exactly what I'm doing. You don't take out 19k a year in loans because your parents are paying your way. I'm more upset about the fact that they cut my aid after telling me it would be 19k freshmen year.
Anymore I don't expect aid, although it would be nice to have. Its just bullshit the way its distributed.
I currently plan on graduating with about $60k in loans. Much more then that when I'm done with grad school. As for working my way through school
Phil
financial aid .. . What a joke. My parents aren't rich by any means either, probably about the same yours are. A simple family of 4. At my school (if you can't figure that out on your own, you don't belong on slashdot) tuition is something like $28k/year. I think estimated cost of attendance for a year is closer to $36k/year. Now, I don't know how they come by the figures they get, but there's no way in hell my parents could remotely pay this much. After taxes this figure would be about half my parents income. My college education at an overpriced educational institution is not there responsibility.
Now for me to get on to why the financial aid system sucks. I came here partially because of aid. . .. But aid is a load, and don't ever trust a figure they give you. Freshmen year I was getting $19.5k/year and tuition was only $21k or so a year. So sure it was $10,000 a year I had to pay, and for that I took out loans, but it wasn't too bad. I planned on graduating with maybe $25-$30k in debt. Oh, one more thing I didn't mention, I'm hispanic, so the school really wanted me to come here and bolster their percentages. What should happen a year later though is that the school somehow magically didn't see some of my parents income freshmen year, and my aid was cut to about $12k/year . .. Lovely. Get me going here with one expected cost of education and then cut it down.
Of course over the years the aid has been cut more, but one more point of note .. . What ever happened to merit scholarships, and when did they become worthless? I have a $10k/year deans scholarship from the school. Now this sounds great (and now when its the only "aid" I get it is a good thing, as they can't cut that), but until my aid was cut below the $10k point it was meaningless. If you were eligible for $15k/year in financial aid and had a scholarship for $10k from the university you got 5k/year in aid. While the same isn't true for outside scholarships, its pretty close. I think for every $3 of outside funding you get $2 cut from your financial aid. So you start looking and realize whats the point in a $1000 scholarship from outside sources. They're lots of work, and you get next to nothing for it. One reason no one bothers.
But back to my original point. . . Financial aid sucks. While you need some way to help poorer families get students into college, this is not the way. this is just horrible. Graduating with $60k in loans doesn't sound like fun. and unfortuantely its what I'm doing. . . Which reminds me, time to finish filling out my loan paperwork for the $20k im taking out this year.
phil
they just want your tuition money .. . .
Right. . . and I bet thats why many institutions offer free degrees (especially in engineering/computer science) to PHD students. . .. They give free tuition and the $10-20k a year stipends for being a phd student, and normally not to masters students. Universities that do research get higher rankings, its more prestigous. Why do you think they want the grad students. They're not getting money from them. . .What grad student have you ever met that had money? I'm currently a senior undergraduate in computer engineering and am seriously looking into a phd solely because im more likely to get that funded then a masters.
Phil
Actually, unless the designers of an LED flashlight are complete morons you shouldn't have that problem. There is always the possibility that they have a 1.5V LED that is made to work at exactly that voltage, but chances are good its more like 1.4V or something slightly off. With LED's IV curves, a difference in .1 Volts can change the current tremendously, so they most likely have a resister in series with the LED to prevent this problem. Also, if they don't have a resistor in series, the voltage the battery would supply would end up being much less, because I don't think a standard battery could supply the current necessary for a 1.5V LED running at 3.6 volts, the current would just be enormous. Sorry for rambling and being a bit off topic, but the EE training in my won't allow myself not to respond.
no no. . .you're only a terrorist if you pirate software or movies or music. People who do that are the next osama bin laden.
phil
what I don't understand is how this company claims to be able to make any profit. The motion picture companies have the right to charge what they want for a movie, after all how else are we going to get 200 million dollar blockbusters? What doesn't make sense is selling tickets this cheap. Sure if you plan on making money off concessions you can get away with it. But their website even said that they encourage people to bring their own sodas and popcorn. They mentioned that most theaters are only 20% full. Makes sense, as most people can't make showings at 2 in the afternoon on a work day. But regardless of how cheap tickets are people still can't make the showings. They talk about making money in the margins, but it doesn't seem logical. If they have to pay a fee to the movie company for each viewer of it, then there's no possible way this makes sense. Who knows, maybe theirs some brittish law that forces motion picture companies to sell tickets in a certain manner. If this is true, and they'd be paying less pre viewer, then I understand why the MPAA or whoever would be angry, and not want them to sell tickets. As the information I see shows though, it just looks like a business model that will follow the dot coms to a massive crash. Philip
I bought a new laptop recently over christmas break; and IBM thinkpad 600. It seems to run great; although I had to replace the battery in it initially (see prior slashdot issues on that). anyhow. The machine i have is a P2-300 MHZ machine. It can't even supply the dvd rom drive it has decently enoguh to decode them. However the machine does more then enough to run gnome2.2 on, and runs everything I need perfectly fine.br. Sure I won't have top of the line stuff. And i definately won't have IEEE 1394 support, but what linux box truely does? As for stuff like 802.11B. . buy a cheap card or ebay. works great. Philip
I think self-censorship is one of the best ideas a scientist can have. Some scientists have realized from the past that there are some things the world is better off not knowing. There are also scientists who feel that they shouldn't research certain areas for fear of the horrors it creates. One prime example is the scientists working on the Manhattan Project, and after seeing its tremendous destructive force wished they had never participated, or had grave concerns over what they did. Believe it or not you have some moral responsibility for helping someone else kill other people. Now of course there are vastly different degrees of this, but it exists. If you're a scientist who is working in sensitive areas, I don't see anything wrong with trying to keep the information you're dealing with out of the wrong hands. Some people just don't need easy access to this material. If I worked for the government and knew flaws in our security system that would allow others to gain access to nuclear materials, I wouldn't go right out and post it to the world. That would be stupid. Sure, I'd do what I can to get things changed, but giving away secrets to the enemy is rarely the same. Philip
I think a lot of us tend to be overlooking the real problem at work. Why should congress even be involved with this research in the first place. Someone will always be trying to influence the science thats produced with their money (lets face it how many people try to silence the studies showing that lax gun regulations lead to fewer murders etc). The real problem is that hte government has the power to control what gets researched. The government should not be involved in scientific research beyond that which is required for the military (which is clearly defined in the constitution).
I have yet to see anywhere in the constitution that gives the government the right to spend billions of dollars on scientific research for biased projects to appease those in power. It was not an option back then. Science should be funded by those who want the science done. Naturally standardization and scientific bureaus would end up springing forward to review them. but it is not the governments place to say what should and shouldn't researched.
People need to realize that the government can't be a cureall for anything. For every problem they solve a million more are normally created. Thats why the constitution tried to limit the governments intervention with private affairs.
Unfortunately too many people tend to be idealists and discount human nature. They don't think people are going to vie for power, or abuse the power they have, or be greedy and take advantage of the system. Idealism is just a silly joke though. No matter how much you say "in a perfect world government funding for medicine or science won't be biased" it won't take away the fact that we live in an imperfect world, and have to deal wtih the cards dealt to us. We can't always assume the ideal model is correct.
Philip Garcia
While EE's may have P-SPICE to verify their calculations that use ideal models, no such thing works for modeling humanity.
I know Lehigh University recently (last year) signed an agreement with MS which granted a liscence of MS office and Windows XP to all the students. I found it completely wrong that I'm forced to pay tons of extra money to buy software I don't even use (as I'm a linux user). Microsoft loves the deals because most of the students either have their own copy of that software already, or would have pirated a copy from the guy down the hall from them. I imagine the main reason the universities agree not to give out the information is they don't want people to see how much they're paying to get copies of MS products. I imagine MS probably uses the threat of "stopping piracy on campus" as part of the reasoning to get the university to cough over the money for the liscencing. I hate it as much as the next guy. Whats particularly ridiculous is that I know people with 3 legitimate windows copies now. The one that came with their computer, the one the school paid for, and the one that they get from the CSE departments subscription to the MSDN (which is a great deal for both the department and MS as we get free software, and they get their software to be used educationally). Hopefully some day our administration will come to its senses regarding this. Philip Garcia Computer Engineer Lehigh University '03/4
I'm also a Tampa resident, and I must say that this is a complete waste of money. I proudly voted against the rail. It was put before the voters as "do you want a high speed rail built" more or less like that. Might as well ask someone "would you like a new BMW?" Very few people are going to say no to such a proposal, however if they said "would you like to pay $45,000 for a BMW most people would say no as they can't afford it. It's just like the lawmakers to get something passed without specifying any estimate whatsoever. Anyhow, the federal government set up the constitution to protect the citizens of the country from the whims of the majority. Floridas constitution is sort of the opposite. Its made so the majority can on a whim do whatever they please. Don't get me wrong, a maglev train would be really cool to run across the state, but the state has more then enough expenses the way it is without spending billions on a rail system that would essentially ignore the population of all of northern florida and the panhandle (who would also be paying equally for it). Guess thats government for you. Philip Garcia