If you're cabling up a rack then you should not be delivering low voltages directly to the boards for two main reasons:
1) Losses are I^2R. This means that you have more power loss if you transfer power at low voltages through the same wires, connectors etc. You need switchmode power supplies anyway, so may as well switch down from a from a higher voltage.5V means more current than 12V, meaning thicker wires, higher current connectors etc and less headroom in the system for voltage loss.
I have also hardly bought any CDs of late because I can't find anything I'm motivated to buy and for me suckage has increased. I don't download illegal stuff at all.
Sure, suckage is very subjective. Another possible cause is a shift in demographics. For us people who used to buy CDs, but now don't because of perceived suckage, we have stopped buying. Period. We have not started downloading (well typically anyway). The higher volumes of new releases are now more biased away from people like me to those who like rap or whatever. Perhaps the rap-buying demographic has never been strong in CD purchases, so perhaps that explains a lot, perhaps not.
Analogy alert: if you replace a French resturant into a MacD,then expect your patrons to change and expect your sales numbers to change too. The wine bar next door should also expect changes since your average MacD eater is probably less likely to fit the wine bar profile.
Comparing where we are today to twelve years ago, and expecting the same or greater multiplier is absurd.
In the 80s and early 90s, most of the bus speed limitations were due to capacitance issues (ie. how fast can we switch a transistor and discharge the capcaitance). We can make things faster by reducing capacitance through various measures. Now memory buses and speed are now getting so fast that they're starting to get constrained by the speed of light etc so it is getting harder to find large multiplier improvements.
I think there is still a lot of room for new stuff, maybe twice or four times what we have now. The biggest impovements that can be made, however, are in power reduction etc.
No they don't. Right now I'm building a Linux kernel and it is only using approx 35% of the CPU. Why? Because my memory and disk are not fast enough. If I swapped out the CPU and kept everything else the same, it would not go much faster. Sure, with a faster motherboard etc I could get better speed, but that is very difficult to scale to 80 cores
As I said before.... to get 80 cores working properly is going to require huge amounts of memory as well as hugely wide buses out of the chips (say 512 bit-wide buses), huge increases in disk rw speecd etc.
Nobody is going to design 80 core systems unless someone is prepared to buy them and nobody is going to design 80-core chips if nobody can show how to design effective systems with them.
For people wanting to crank SETI etc, it is going to be way cheaper to build a cluster with 20 4-core systems.
The major limitation to the effectiveness multi-cores is somewhat described in Amdahl's Law.
Things like memory bandwidth are already constraining 2-core chips. The only way to effectively mitigate this is to make wider bus paths. That's relatively easy for 2 core chips, but to get any benefit from 80-core chips you're going to need 40x the memory bandwidth you have now. That means huge pin-outs, huge amounts of RAM, huge everything.
These are not going to be systems that every college department can afford.
Sure people won't care if the cores are there, but they will care about the price if that impacts on the whole system cost.
Quite. Warming is far more complex than just looking at a few thermometers.
Here in New Zeland we've had the coldest June (winter) on record, followed by a very warm spring. Is global warming happening? Well you can't tell by just looking out the window.
Measuring temperatures is also troublesome for other reasons too. Many weather stations are set up at airports (because airports have always had to record/measure pressure, wind etc to tell the pilots how to set their altimeters etc). However, airports have changed a lot in the last 50 years. Gone are the wide open grass landing strips and small-ish buildings. Now we have acres of tarred surfaces and huge airconditioning units etc pouring out heat. Blaming a few-degree temperature change at one of these locations on global warming is a bit unscientific.
OK, IBM did get egg on their face for saying that the world only needed 5 computers, so it is dangerous to predict the future but 80 core chips seem absurd.
The costs to make use of 80 cores (you're going to need hugely complex chips and hugely complex memory buses) mean that these chips will be severe overkill for PCs and will be outside any typical user's price range. They're only going to be useful for a a few servers in very niche applications. If there's only demand for, say, 10,000 of these chips in the world then they're going to be extremely expensive.
I smell marketing horseshit. I think they're just saying this to get people to start thinking of multi-core options. Most people don't see the need for multi-core (even 2 core) systems. By saying you'll get 80 cores in 5 years makes people start thinking that they should start using 2 or 4 cores now.
Warming means adding heat, not necessarily increasing temperature. Since there's a lot of permanent ice about (glaciers, ice caps etc). Temperature fluctuations are not a good indicator of what is happening. If you take a pot and fill it with ice cubes and water, then put it on the heat, you'll be seeing zero C, or thereabouts, for a long time but once the ice has all melted the temp will start to rise.
Rather than try look for temperature indicators, changes in amounts of ice are a far better indicator of global warmining for a long time still.
Discussing GPL3 for Linux is pointless as it is not a legal option. One might as well argue as to whether you want there to be gravity or not
Many people have contributed code to Linux, and those people retain the rights to that code and every one would have to agree to move to GPL3. Linus cannot just say "all Linux code becomes GPL3".
He could say that all **future** Linux code becomes GPL3 otherwise it does not get gitted, but that cannot be retospectively applied to existing code and would mean that the majority of the Linux code would remain GPL2 for a long time.
And what about those who want the loopholes? Well they can just use any Linux up to the transition point with no problems since the GPL3 cannot be retrospectively applied (since you cannot "unGPL2" code that has already been released).
Considering that a lot/most of Linux usage is in embedded space, where the GPL2 "loopholes" are important, moving to GPL3 would force a fork aand nobody really sees any benefit in that.
How to score at a college party? Come late. Girls are drunk and horny. Guys are to drunk to take advantage.
MS has been using lateness as a business model for a long time and it has worked for them. Let someone else soften up the marketplace. Let the competitior burn themselves out. Come late and you can throw the big pile of cash around to get what you want. If the model is working, why change it?
22 seconds, then you have to stop, sets serious limits to what you can really do. Don't want a weightless bleeder squirting weightless blood all over the place.
What is the point of a GPS navigation system that people should not use while driving? Sounds like a raincoat with a "don't get wet" label.
If you really wanted to make the system safer etc, you could use the GPS to determine if you're moving or not and shut down the menus etc while the car is moving.
Too much "innovation", too little scope for change
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GUIs Get a Makeover
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· Score: 1
For the most part, the competition seems to be in trying to "innovate" without really focussing on improved user interaction.
There's a lot of eye candy etc that does not make things better, but just adds clutter and confusion.
Unfortunately too, people learn bad habits and build up expectations that will be with us forever. For example Start/Shutdown is so logically broken, but once people have learnt about the Start button, they expect to see it there. First impressions count a lot, so if you take away the Start button most people will feel a bit lost and will have a negative experience. Thus people won't want to let go of Start even if it is in their longer term interests to learn something better.
Since it is using 512Mb flash for storage, though you could add on more via USB perhaps, it sounds like this is more likely to be a "thinnnish client" than a full-blown PC. By thinnish client, I mean a device somewhere between a full PC and a thin client Xterm. In other words, something that you can also use to interact with local peripherals, but primarily uses back-end servers for its main function.
Linux is pretty well suited to this model of operation. It can be stripped to a reduced configuration. Since most people won't be doing very complicated things on the device itself, the "Linux-ness" of the device should not become a usability issue for most people.
Blow the dust off all those AI research papers left over from the 1970's/early 80s.
Of course universities will be scrambling to help. Big dollars, imprecise goals..... and many of the professors would have done research in related fields.
I want a dupe free slash dot contributor
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Hypoallergenic Cats
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· Score: 0, Redundant
And since I expect most/. contributors are not likely to participate in breeding, selective or otherwise, I'm prepared to soften my anti-GM stance to get one!
IIRC, it makes a good story anyway, the use of pinning etc was pioneered by military medics as a way to quickly heal limbs and recycle soldiers faster. Previous to that, an "accidentally" damaged leg was a ticket back to home comforts and safety.
Seriously though, this trend is likely to not improve. Vista etc is going to chew harder on batteries, meaning that designers will try do more and more extreme things with batteries to get hours.
How about going the other way? How about designing software and hardware that uses less power and can operate with NiMH?
Every now and then I throw a box out because it is getting too sluggish for use with a regular Linux distro.
I agree with your sentiments btw. To install something on somebody's box (Firefox etc) when they don't want it [even if they've said yes under pressure], is wrong, IMHO.
Even Linus can only lay claim to approx 10% of the code. To legally change the license would require going back to all the contributors (thousands??) and getting them to agree to a new license. Miss a few contributors and you open Linux up to SCO-hell many times over.
Even if the future code base could be moved to GPL3, that would not stop people forking the current codebase to retain the current licensing. That would break the reasons for RMS's big motivation behind GPL3, particularly in how it applies to mobile/embedded devices. A forked codebase might lose the "official" tag, but that is not very limiting. Consider than many,many embedded devices still use 2.4.x, so being "official" is not really a big deal.
It would if most corporations are sane and rational, but they aren't. Here are the big arguments you'll hear from most companies when it comes to funding OSS:
"It is supposed to be free". No matter the value, people have a problem paying for stuff that they think should be free and feel screwed when they are asked to pay for it. I have tried to convince a company that I work with that they should make voluntary contributions to the FSF. This company doesn't blink about paying hundreds or thousands of dollars per seat for Microsoft development tools licenses or much more for some other embedded tools, but won't even consider making a $100 per seat donation for all the gcc seats it uses.
"I won't pay to help my competitors". Even though your taxes are helping to build the roads your competitors use.
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1) Losses are I^2R. This means that you have more power loss if you transfer power at low voltages through the same wires, connectors etc. You need switchmode power supplies anyway, so may as well switch down from a from a higher voltage.5V means more current than 12V, meaning thicker wires, higher current connectors etc and less headroom in the system for voltage loss.
Sure, suckage is very subjective. Another possible cause is a shift in demographics. For us people who used to buy CDs, but now don't because of perceived suckage, we have stopped buying. Period. We have not started downloading (well typically anyway). The higher volumes of new releases are now more biased away from people like me to those who like rap or whatever. Perhaps the rap-buying demographic has never been strong in CD purchases, so perhaps that explains a lot, perhaps not.
Analogy alert: if you replace a French resturant into a MacD,then expect your patrons to change and expect your sales numbers to change too. The wine bar next door should also expect changes since your average MacD eater is probably less likely to fit the wine bar profile.
In the 80s and early 90s, most of the bus speed limitations were due to capacitance issues (ie. how fast can we switch a transistor and discharge the capcaitance). We can make things faster by reducing capacitance through various measures. Now memory buses and speed are now getting so fast that they're starting to get constrained by the speed of light etc so it is getting harder to find large multiplier improvements.
I think there is still a lot of room for new stuff, maybe twice or four times what we have now. The biggest impovements that can be made, however, are in power reduction etc.
No they don't. Right now I'm building a Linux kernel and it is only using approx 35% of the CPU. Why? Because my memory and disk are not fast enough. If I swapped out the CPU and kept everything else the same, it would not go much faster. Sure, with a faster motherboard etc I could get better speed, but that is very difficult to scale to 80 cores
As I said before.... to get 80 cores working properly is going to require huge amounts of memory as well as hugely wide buses out of the chips (say 512 bit-wide buses), huge increases in disk rw speecd etc.
Nobody is going to design 80 core systems unless someone is prepared to buy them and nobody is going to design 80-core chips if nobody can show how to design effective systems with them.
For people wanting to crank SETI etc, it is going to be way cheaper to build a cluster with 20 4-core systems.
Things like memory bandwidth are already constraining 2-core chips. The only way to effectively mitigate this is to make wider bus paths. That's relatively easy for 2 core chips, but to get any benefit from 80-core chips you're going to need 40x the memory bandwidth you have now. That means huge pin-outs, huge amounts of RAM, huge everything.
These are not going to be systems that every college department can afford.
Sure people won't care if the cores are there, but they will care about the price if that impacts on the whole system cost.
Here in New Zeland we've had the coldest June (winter) on record, followed by a very warm spring. Is global warming happening? Well you can't tell by just looking out the window.
Measuring temperatures is also troublesome for other reasons too. Many weather stations are set up at airports (because airports have always had to record/measure pressure, wind etc to tell the pilots how to set their altimeters etc). However, airports have changed a lot in the last 50 years. Gone are the wide open grass landing strips and small-ish buildings. Now we have acres of tarred surfaces and huge airconditioning units etc pouring out heat. Blaming a few-degree temperature change at one of these locations on global warming is a bit unscientific.
The costs to make use of 80 cores (you're going to need hugely complex chips and hugely complex memory buses) mean that these chips will be severe overkill for PCs and will be outside any typical user's price range. They're only going to be useful for a a few servers in very niche applications. If there's only demand for, say, 10,000 of these chips in the world then they're going to be extremely expensive.
I smell marketing horseshit. I think they're just saying this to get people to start thinking of multi-core options. Most people don't see the need for multi-core (even 2 core) systems. By saying you'll get 80 cores in 5 years makes people start thinking that they should start using 2 or 4 cores now.
Rather than try look for temperature indicators, changes in amounts of ice are a far better indicator of global warmining for a long time still.
Many people have contributed code to Linux, and those people retain the rights to that code and every one would have to agree to move to GPL3. Linus cannot just say "all Linux code becomes GPL3".
He could say that all **future** Linux code becomes GPL3 otherwise it does not get gitted, but that cannot be retospectively applied to existing code and would mean that the majority of the Linux code would remain GPL2 for a long time.
And what about those who want the loopholes? Well they can just use any Linux up to the transition point with no problems since the GPL3 cannot be retrospectively applied (since you cannot "unGPL2" code that has already been released).
Considering that a lot/most of Linux usage is in embedded space, where the GPL2 "loopholes" are important, moving to GPL3 would force a fork aand nobody really sees any benefit in that.
MS has been using lateness as a business model for a long time and it has worked for them. Let someone else soften up the marketplace. Let the competitior burn themselves out. Come late and you can throw the big pile of cash around to get what you want. If the model is working, why change it?
Actually a vasectomy wouldn't be a bad choice.
If you really wanted to make the system safer etc, you could use the GPS to determine if you're moving or not and shut down the menus etc while the car is moving.
There's a lot of eye candy etc that does not make things better, but just adds clutter and confusion.
Unfortunately too, people learn bad habits and build up expectations that will be with us forever. For example Start/Shutdown is so logically broken, but once people have learnt about the Start button, they expect to see it there. First impressions count a lot, so if you take away the Start button most people will feel a bit lost and will have a negative experience. Thus people won't want to let go of Start even if it is in their longer term interests to learn something better.
Linux is pretty well suited to this model of operation. It can be stripped to a reduced configuration. Since most people won't be doing very complicated things on the device itself, the "Linux-ness" of the device should not become a usability issue for most people.
Of course universities will be scrambling to help. Big dollars, imprecise goals..... and many of the professors would have done research in related fields.
And since I expect most /. contributors are not likely to participate in breeding, selective or otherwise, I'm prepared to soften my anti-GM stance to get one!
You're showing gross distrust to the 99% of people who don't steal.
IIRC, it makes a good story anyway, the use of pinning etc was pioneered by military medics as a way to quickly heal limbs and recycle soldiers faster. Previous to that, an "accidentally" damaged leg was a ticket back to home comforts and safety.
How about going the other way? How about designing software and hardware that uses less power and can operate with NiMH?
he'd have that owner satisfaction of knowing it was a Geniune IBM Fire (TM).
Nerd thought balloon: "I wonder if this Google base is better than getting to third base..... if I ever get there"
It is surely dual core FUD... Windows Genuine Advantage FUD.... which is Windows Vista Premium Ready.
I agree with your sentiments btw. To install something on somebody's box (Firefox etc) when they don't want it [even if they've said yes under pressure], is wrong, IMHO.
Even if the future code base could be moved to GPL3, that would not stop people forking the current codebase to retain the current licensing. That would break the reasons for RMS's big motivation behind GPL3, particularly in how it applies to mobile/embedded devices. A forked codebase might lose the "official" tag, but that is not very limiting. Consider than many,many embedded devices still use 2.4.x, so being "official" is not really a big deal.
"It is supposed to be free". No matter the value, people have a problem paying for stuff that they think should be free and feel screwed when they are asked to pay for it. I have tried to convince a company that I work with that they should make voluntary contributions to the FSF. This company doesn't blink about paying hundreds or thousands of dollars per seat for Microsoft development tools licenses or much more for some other embedded tools, but won't even consider making a $100 per seat donation for all the gcc seats it uses.
"I won't pay to help my competitors". Even though your taxes are helping to build the roads your competitors use.