What's new is that Apple is "getting it". I agree with you, the article makes the Mini Mac out to be a great panacea for all Linux/NetBSD users, but in reality, it's just great hardware in a small box for very cheap.
Also, I cannot stress enough that Apple's Mini Mac probably costs $300 to build as well, the operating system sells for $129, and the rest of the cost is profit margin (albeit small). Every company's gotta make money, and this happens to be a good way to do it. Besides, if you don't use the OS, you still bought it, Apple's still happy, you're free to resell it (if it has a transferable license, which I doubt), or sit and pout while tinkering away with your favorite BSD/Linux.
Apple is a software company; buying their hardware is just the best way for them to insure their software runs exactly the way it was planned.
Can't help you in the pretty box department, because that it most definitely is. If you develop for linux, and you want to run on PPC as well, you're MUCH better off buying an old Whitebox G3 or G4 for $100, than the whole kittenkaboodle of the Mini Mac. If you have a need for speed, throw an accellerator card in it for another 50-100, depending on how drastic that need for speed it... That way you save a good 200$ on money that would have went to pay for the operating system. And if you're having problems locating a box, head to any K-12 school, they should be able to help you out.
Odd, you know what motivated me to buy one of their pretty plastic boxes (iBook G4 as well)? iTunes.
I was so impressed on how well iTunes worked for me, though not being perfect, it seemlessly worked with my iPod and my crappy Riothingy I had at the time. When time came to buy a laptop for college, I looked at my options and saw OS X. Now, I'd seen OS X before; 10.0 disks came with my teacher's G4 desktop (our school's video editing machine), but it wasn't quite the beast I was looking at on Apple's website. I thought, "an entire operating system, as seemless as iTunes, as crashproof as OS X, and good battery life on their laptops." I was sold.
I would have NEVER considered an Apple product had it not been for OS X 10.3. 10.0 was fine and dandy, but it seemed sluggish, nothing seemed to work quite the way it should have, and required expensive hardware to run on. OS X 10.3, however, was stylish, integrated, things Just Work(tm)ed and on top of it all, it was a HELL of a lot cheaper than the Wintel laptop I considered (1300 w/ educational deal, plus 69 for another iPod, vs 2100 for the Dell I would have otherwise got [centrino]).
Everyon'es got an agenda to push. It just so happens this article's trying to push the free software agenda. Sadly, I don't think they do so effectively; the Mini Mac is virtually a perfect desktop computer, it comes with a great, fully functioning and partially Windows/Linux compatible operating system, great hardware support, a decent hard drive for the home user (though lacking for the mid-upper range users we are), and Wifi (if you want it) to integrate seamlessly into your home's wireless network.
I just don't understand the need for better software on the machine, even if it is lacking in the USB/Firewire (read: hardware) department.
The computer's so cheap, Apple's pretty much undercutting themselves in the OS's cost. Those machines probably cost every bit of 2-300$ to build, which would pretty much say the entire profit margin goes to selling their operating system. Apple is a software company, that just so happens to expect the best when it comes to hardware and peripherials.
Yeah we can treat it, but at what cost? I know more people who have cancer than I'd like to have known; practically all have either died of the cancer being non-responsive to chemo, or die because the chemo reduced their immune response so severely that an ordinary sinus infection or the flu killed them.
Once again, Slashdot obscures the meaning of "Our". If you look at deathrates of the United States, Cancer is up at the top of the list, next to heart disease. Heart disease can be dealt with by simply eating better, no need to fix our genes there, but cancer, we can simply give people a highly toxic drug cocktail, and tell them goodluck.
Forgive me for not believing in your esoteric views of this "God" character nobody has any proof of, but I feel genetic manipulation is going to be one of the few things that allow us (the human race) to continue existing.
As time goes on, we defeat simple diseases such as the bubonic plague, then upgrade to tougher ones like smallpox. We're now at the point where the only communicable diseases that are seriously fatal are biologically engineered bacteria, and viruses. On top of that, we've still got Cancer to worry about, which is kicking our asses.
While it may be cheaper to produce drugs for everyone alive and distribute them to everyone, no company in their right minds would do this. But if we could figure out genetically how to teach our immune systems to deal with cancer, and certain foreign invaders, we could save millions simply by changing our children's genes.
I think the biggest paranoia attributed to genetic engineering is the fear of change; just because we know how something works now, and we assume that it'll continue working the same way into the future, we give up the notion that we can change things for the better or for the worse. Yes, we are foulable creatures, but at the same time, we now know how to clean up our mistakes. It's far past time we take our fates into our own hands. Why use medicines that can screw up other things in our bodies when we can simply prevent the problem from occuring naturally?
Wikipedia's already been the target of spammers; the admins will just have to do a great job of watching over their data segments. It might eventually lead to a more secure submitting system (probably using human verification by image, like most places).
You know what's odd? I strangly like yagoohoo!gle. It gives you a side by side comparison of the two search engines, allowing you to see easily which one returns better results.
Although I'm pretty sure that's gotta be some kind of copyright violation or something with the images.. I guess you could claim parody on that.
What I don't get is why can't NASA do the same thing Boeing does; retire the current standing shuttle fleet, bust out and dust off the blueprints from the 70's, look to see what little tweaks they can make (such as replacing some of the incredibly aged internal support structures with lighter metals/composite materials, replacing the AGED shuttle computers with newer and faster technology for better telemetry and a more complex sensory network across the entire vehicle), take these tweaked blueprints to some contractors, get a few bids, and ask the general public to chip in an effort to build STS Mark II.
Yes, all of that will cost money. And lots of it. But I can assure you that if they diverted the costs from the current maintainance of the shuttle fleet, and designed the newer shuttle fleet to be somewhat forward compatiable (parts designed to go on STS Mark I could be retrofitted to put on STS Mark II), that we could do more work with less shuttles and less maintainance time from landing to liftoff. The whole idea is to keep up with technology.
And one last note; why doesn't NASA subsidize? All the big companies of Corporate America learned a long time ago that it's cheaper to send labor somewhere else than to do it all yourself. NASA's fucking HUGE. Why don't they simply sell off the whole Aerospace division to the highest bidder (Boeing?), take the money from the proceeds and build betters satellites, rovers, and keep telescopes and such running. Turn the National Aeronautics and Space Administration into the National Space Foundation.
Okay moderators, if this is redundant I apologize.
As far as I know, they're claiming that Google's the first to integrate mapping software with satellite imagery, in a way that they are both manupulated by the same easy to use interface. I don't know if it's true or not, but I don't care at this point; it gets the job done, and as far as I'm concerned I'm not going to use Mapquest again.
Also, I wonder if google will add a third view; Map and Satellite data composited. Of course there are a hundred billion programs available today with an interface that allows you to see the roads to take, GPS units in cars, mapquest; they all use the same data from the USGS. But what I haven't seen yet is a program that lets you type two locations, and get a map, showing you the buildings and landmarks you should pass by. Normally when we humans give directions we include LOTS of these context clues ("Oh it's just past the white house on the hill", etc), and it would be very conducive for mapping software to include some way of telling just where the white house on the hill is.
Of course, that's still not as useful as a "car's eye view" would be, but it's a hell of a lot more useful than what we've got now.
Does NOT require ActiveX. It does require one of the following: IE 5.5+ (Windows)
Firefox 0.8+ (Windows, Mac, Linux)
Netscape 7.1+ (Windows, Mac, Linux)
Mozilla 1.4+ (Windows, Mac, Linux)
Probably because the code makes extensive use of the XMLHttpRequest feature (""Ajax" to some), though that doesn't explain why it doesn't work with Safari outright. Through a quick view source, I can detect they're using XSLT, and that's probably why Safari can't. But none of this matters, as Tiger's coming out very soon and we can expect Safari 2.0 to support a lot that it couldn't before.
Alright, fair enough. The reason I would say Apple xServes is because they're most likely the next computer to get said technology (Freescale's a PPC shop, could easily see them licensing the technology to IBM to use in the G*, which would go to an Apple machine before it would arrive in any other machine). The reason I said Pixar is because they're the most likely to buy Apple hardware.
It is your opinion that Pixar is passe, but you must realize that development on the films you mentioned (The Incredibles, Robots [which isn't even a Pixar film]) started years ago. The Incredibles was incredible (hah) because of it's textures; did you see the almost perfect metals, glasslike and shiny (looked raytraced), and the water surfaces. Tie that in with human characters (something that once again hadn't happened in animation sans Final Fantasy), and you get a fun, believeable story. Just because you are more impressed with Advent Children and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, doesn't mean that everyone is (take a good look at the grossing of the films if you want to see a good example).
Alright, Ima wind down this rant. Just because it doesn't seem like Pixar is innovating, they are really an industry force, taking the bottom up approach (starting with animation, going to film) of computer animation instead of the top down (starting with film and making it animated, and then putting it back on film). I can't wait to see more movies using the lighting systems like in Robots and The Incredibles..
I would too, but the fact is, we don't have the computational power to cure diseases, and protein folding has yet to provide anything useful. But, if you want to spend multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars on machines that will take literally a year to produce any result at all (whether or not it would be valid could easily take another two or three years to confirm), go right on ahead.
Fact: protein folding is best implemented via grid computing. That way, as newer techonologies come available, you can online entire new processors without loosing time. Stopping and upgrading to a faster cluster is a waste of time and money.
Well the answer to that one's quite simple: Don't let your battery get exposed to heat; leave it inside a cooler area in your home, don't leave it in the car overnight, etc.
Besides, if the battery's rugged enough to be used in the next generation of hybrid cars, I'd say they've worked out potential heat issues.
If you read the article, you'd see that the battery looses 1% of life after 1000 charge cycles. So you can see they already last quite a bit longer than typical Li-Ion batteries.
When can I expect one of these beasts in my iPod!!??
Of course, natural languages wouldn't be good for something such as Music. The Music Langauge is the description of microvibrations in the air, something that is not very well described in a language. So instead, we give the different pitches of vibrations different names, which, for readability's sense, are letters. This creates a whole complete alphabet, a "word" (chord) and "sentence" (measure) structure, and allows for great variation within the language.
What natural languages are good at describing are menial tasks. "From a set of all the files on my computer, I would like to select those of the Word file format. From that set, I would like to select those with a name similar to, or containing, "trees". I would like to select from that group the file containing "Trees are good"." And really, it's as simple as that.
When we humans communicate with computers, we too often build languages in which we describe things in the sense of how they work. For example, programming languages like C/C++ are adapted with the idea of "pointers" or locations of something in memory. Well, sure, this works fine for a computer because not only is it's memory a finite size, it's also fairly trivial to randomly seek within it. Us humans on the other hand, build memories off of association, and therefore when we remember one thing, we tend to remember things that are related to it. So when we go "Oh, to make this presentation I used a spreadsheet containing this data, and this word file with definitions", a computer just sees three files laying in a directory.
I think in order for us to stay productive while using computers (and not simply end up playing games all day, as we typically do), we need to distance ourself from them, and they need to learn how to communicate with us, on our terms. Sitting in front of a monitor all day leads to deadtimes with nothing more to do than play a video game. And when it does come time for us to do something, we often spend a great deal of time either finding the file, searching within databases for information, or plugging along, clicking checkboxes, pressing buttons, etc.
Instead, we should simply have to ask our computer for the file, ask the database for the information directly, and not even have to bother with a million different buttons. We should spend time on teaching the computers of today a functional, natural language, in which anyone can use. We should work on Speech-to-Text, making our auditory words become software words. Once the computer knows how to listen, teaching it how to speak is just one more step. And of course, this won't abolish the good old keyboard and monitor, nor the mouse any time soon. But it's something we should definitely look forward to in our lifetime.
The biggest advantage I could see coming from this would be an external or memory bus using an optical interconnect. Since light waves can be pushed a lot closer together than electron channels, and not interfere with each other in the processes, you could build quite the large memory bus. Imagine running 16 pipes of this technology, even clocked at 5GHz. That's a 80GHz memory bus.
No offense, but we're more likely to see this kind of technology being used to make movies before video games. Hear me out.
When newer processor technologies are developed, they're almost always deligated to server processors before they trickle down to desktop processors. (Of course, there are exceptions: MMX and its spawn, etc). br.
I can't wait to see Pixar pick up the Apple Xserves based on an optical interconnected chip. The movies they'd makewould only get more spectacular.
Indeed. I don't think they offer a shred of evidence to back up their 10GHz claim either. Which is sad, because if they've got processes 10x faster than Intel, it's saying something about Intel's R&D into this particular sector. Of course, it says nothing at all if they have no proof.
Truthfully, I'd love to see optical processor technology, but I don't think we're ready. But if this company can provide, then I will consume:-)
I seriously though the same thing when I read the blurb: "What is this article about, pushing a new technology to put you in a movie, or a plug for the author?"
I'm not going to waste my time bashing on how/. needs more editorial review, but whomever submitted this article, please make it seem less like a TV commercial for the author next time.
Slashdot Mirror
What's new is that Apple is "getting it". I agree with you, the article makes the Mini Mac out to be a great panacea for all Linux/NetBSD users, but in reality, it's just great hardware in a small box for very cheap.
Also, I cannot stress enough that Apple's Mini Mac probably costs $300 to build as well, the operating system sells for $129, and the rest of the cost is profit margin (albeit small). Every company's gotta make money, and this happens to be a good way to do it. Besides, if you don't use the OS, you still bought it, Apple's still happy, you're free to resell it (if it has a transferable license, which I doubt), or sit and pout while tinkering away with your favorite BSD/Linux.
Apple is a software company; buying their hardware is just the best way for them to insure their software runs exactly the way it was planned.
Can't help you in the pretty box department, because that it most definitely is. If you develop for linux, and you want to run on PPC as well, you're MUCH better off buying an old Whitebox G3 or G4 for $100, than the whole kittenkaboodle of the Mini Mac. If you have a need for speed, throw an accellerator card in it for another 50-100, depending on how drastic that need for speed it... That way you save a good 200$ on money that would have went to pay for the operating system. And if you're having problems locating a box, head to any K-12 school, they should be able to help you out.
Odd, you know what motivated me to buy one of their pretty plastic boxes (iBook G4 as well)? iTunes.
I was so impressed on how well iTunes worked for me, though not being perfect, it seemlessly worked with my iPod and my crappy Riothingy I had at the time. When time came to buy a laptop for college, I looked at my options and saw OS X. Now, I'd seen OS X before; 10.0 disks came with my teacher's G4 desktop (our school's video editing machine), but it wasn't quite the beast I was looking at on Apple's website. I thought, "an entire operating system, as seemless as iTunes, as crashproof as OS X, and good battery life on their laptops." I was sold.
I would have NEVER considered an Apple product had it not been for OS X 10.3. 10.0 was fine and dandy, but it seemed sluggish, nothing seemed to work quite the way it should have, and required expensive hardware to run on. OS X 10.3, however, was stylish, integrated, things Just Work(tm)ed and on top of it all, it was a HELL of a lot cheaper than the Wintel laptop I considered (1300 w/ educational deal, plus 69 for another iPod, vs 2100 for the Dell I would have otherwise got [centrino]).
Everyon'es got an agenda to push. It just so happens this article's trying to push the free software agenda. Sadly, I don't think they do so effectively; the Mini Mac is virtually a perfect desktop computer, it comes with a great, fully functioning and partially Windows/Linux compatible operating system, great hardware support, a decent hard drive for the home user (though lacking for the mid-upper range users we are), and Wifi (if you want it) to integrate seamlessly into your home's wireless network.
I just don't understand the need for better software on the machine, even if it is lacking in the USB/Firewire (read: hardware) department.
The computer's so cheap, Apple's pretty much undercutting themselves in the OS's cost. Those machines probably cost every bit of 2-300$ to build, which would pretty much say the entire profit margin goes to selling their operating system. Apple is a software company, that just so happens to expect the best when it comes to hardware and peripherials.
Yeah we can treat it, but at what cost? I know more people who have cancer than I'd like to have known; practically all have either died of the cancer being non-responsive to chemo, or die because the chemo reduced their immune response so severely that an ordinary sinus infection or the flu killed them.
Once again, Slashdot obscures the meaning of "Our". If you look at deathrates of the United States, Cancer is up at the top of the list, next to heart disease. Heart disease can be dealt with by simply eating better, no need to fix our genes there, but cancer, we can simply give people a highly toxic drug cocktail, and tell them goodluck.
Forgive me for not believing in your esoteric views of this "God" character nobody has any proof of, but I feel genetic manipulation is going to be one of the few things that allow us (the human race) to continue existing.
As time goes on, we defeat simple diseases such as the bubonic plague, then upgrade to tougher ones like smallpox. We're now at the point where the only communicable diseases that are seriously fatal are biologically engineered bacteria, and viruses. On top of that, we've still got Cancer to worry about, which is kicking our asses.
While it may be cheaper to produce drugs for everyone alive and distribute them to everyone, no company in their right minds would do this. But if we could figure out genetically how to teach our immune systems to deal with cancer, and certain foreign invaders, we could save millions simply by changing our children's genes.
I think the biggest paranoia attributed to genetic engineering is the fear of change; just because we know how something works now, and we assume that it'll continue working the same way into the future, we give up the notion that we can change things for the better or for the worse. Yes, we are foulable creatures, but at the same time, we now know how to clean up our mistakes. It's far past time we take our fates into our own hands. Why use medicines that can screw up other things in our bodies when we can simply prevent the problem from occuring naturally?
Wikipedia's already been the target of spammers; the admins will just have to do a great job of watching over their data segments. It might eventually lead to a more secure submitting system (probably using human verification by image, like most places).
You know what's odd? I strangly like yagoohoo!gle. It gives you a side by side comparison of the two search engines, allowing you to see easily which one returns better results.
Although I'm pretty sure that's gotta be some kind of copyright violation or something with the images.. I guess you could claim parody on that.
What I don't get is why can't NASA do the same thing Boeing does; retire the current standing shuttle fleet, bust out and dust off the blueprints from the 70's, look to see what little tweaks they can make (such as replacing some of the incredibly aged internal support structures with lighter metals/composite materials, replacing the AGED shuttle computers with newer and faster technology for better telemetry and a more complex sensory network across the entire vehicle), take these tweaked blueprints to some contractors, get a few bids, and ask the general public to chip in an effort to build STS Mark II.
Yes, all of that will cost money. And lots of it. But I can assure you that if they diverted the costs from the current maintainance of the shuttle fleet, and designed the newer shuttle fleet to be somewhat forward compatiable (parts designed to go on STS Mark I could be retrofitted to put on STS Mark II), that we could do more work with less shuttles and less maintainance time from landing to liftoff. The whole idea is to keep up with technology.
And one last note; why doesn't NASA subsidize? All the big companies of Corporate America learned a long time ago that it's cheaper to send labor somewhere else than to do it all yourself. NASA's fucking HUGE. Why don't they simply sell off the whole Aerospace division to the highest bidder (Boeing?), take the money from the proceeds and build betters satellites, rovers, and keep telescopes and such running. Turn the National Aeronautics and Space Administration into the National Space Foundation.
Okay moderators, if this is redundant I apologize.
As far as I know, they're claiming that Google's the first to integrate mapping software with satellite imagery, in a way that they are both manupulated by the same easy to use interface. I don't know if it's true or not, but I don't care at this point; it gets the job done, and as far as I'm concerned I'm not going to use Mapquest again.
Also, I wonder if google will add a third view; Map and Satellite data composited. Of course there are a hundred billion programs available today with an interface that allows you to see the roads to take, GPS units in cars, mapquest; they all use the same data from the USGS. But what I haven't seen yet is a program that lets you type two locations, and get a map, showing you the buildings and landmarks you should pass by. Normally when we humans give directions we include LOTS of these context clues ("Oh it's just past the white house on the hill", etc), and it would be very conducive for mapping software to include some way of telling just where the white house on the hill is.
Of course, that's still not as useful as a "car's eye view" would be, but it's a hell of a lot more useful than what we've got now.
Does NOT require ActiveX. It does require one of the following:
IE 5.5+ (Windows)
Firefox 0.8+ (Windows, Mac, Linux)
Netscape 7.1+ (Windows, Mac, Linux)
Mozilla 1.4+ (Windows, Mac, Linux)
Probably because the code makes extensive use of the XMLHttpRequest feature (""Ajax" to some), though that doesn't explain why it doesn't work with Safari outright. Through a quick view source, I can detect they're using XSLT, and that's probably why Safari can't. But none of this matters, as Tiger's coming out very soon and we can expect Safari 2.0 to support a lot that it couldn't before.
Name one; I'm using my iBook as of current, and I can see almost anything I would need to use a second click for in a menu somewhere.
That particular researcher works for Pixar, making it Pixar's work. ;)
Alright, fair enough. The reason I would say Apple xServes is because they're most likely the next computer to get said technology (Freescale's a PPC shop, could easily see them licensing the technology to IBM to use in the G*, which would go to an Apple machine before it would arrive in any other machine). The reason I said Pixar is because they're the most likely to buy Apple hardware.
It is your opinion that Pixar is passe, but you must realize that development on the films you mentioned (The Incredibles, Robots [which isn't even a Pixar film]) started years ago. The Incredibles was incredible (hah) because of it's textures; did you see the almost perfect metals, glasslike and shiny (looked raytraced), and the water surfaces. Tie that in with human characters (something that once again hadn't happened in animation sans Final Fantasy), and you get a fun, believeable story. Just because you are more impressed with Advent Children and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, doesn't mean that everyone is (take a good look at the grossing of the films if you want to see a good example).
Alright, Ima wind down this rant. Just because it doesn't seem like Pixar is innovating, they are really an industry force, taking the bottom up approach (starting with animation, going to film) of computer animation instead of the top down (starting with film and making it animated, and then putting it back on film). I can't wait to see more movies using the lighting systems like in Robots and The Incredibles..
I would too, but the fact is, we don't have the computational power to cure diseases, and protein folding has yet to provide anything useful. But, if you want to spend multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars on machines that will take literally a year to produce any result at all (whether or not it would be valid could easily take another two or three years to confirm), go right on ahead.
Fact: protein folding is best implemented via grid computing. That way, as newer techonologies come available, you can online entire new processors without loosing time. Stopping and upgrading to a faster cluster is a waste of time and money.
...I thought of the DARPA project. Or how cool it would be to have a Mac in a car anyways. One button mouse makes it easy to while in a figity car.
I for one welcome our new Mac Mini overlords.
Well the answer to that one's quite simple: Don't let your battery get exposed to heat; leave it inside a cooler area in your home, don't leave it in the car overnight, etc.
Besides, if the battery's rugged enough to be used in the next generation of hybrid cars, I'd say they've worked out potential heat issues.
If you read the article, you'd see that the battery looses 1% of life after 1000 charge cycles. So you can see they already last quite a bit longer than typical Li-Ion batteries.
When can I expect one of these beasts in my iPod!!??
Of course, natural languages wouldn't be good for something such as Music. The Music Langauge is the description of microvibrations in the air, something that is not very well described in a language. So instead, we give the different pitches of vibrations different names, which, for readability's sense, are letters. This creates a whole complete alphabet, a "word" (chord) and "sentence" (measure) structure, and allows for great variation within the language.
What natural languages are good at describing are menial tasks. "From a set of all the files on my computer, I would like to select those of the Word file format. From that set, I would like to select those with a name similar to, or containing, "trees". I would like to select from that group the file containing "Trees are good"." And really, it's as simple as that.
When we humans communicate with computers, we too often build languages in which we describe things in the sense of how they work. For example, programming languages like C/C++ are adapted with the idea of "pointers" or locations of something in memory. Well, sure, this works fine for a computer because not only is it's memory a finite size, it's also fairly trivial to randomly seek within it. Us humans on the other hand, build memories off of association, and therefore when we remember one thing, we tend to remember things that are related to it. So when we go "Oh, to make this presentation I used a spreadsheet containing this data, and this word file with definitions", a computer just sees three files laying in a directory.
I think in order for us to stay productive while using computers (and not simply end up playing games all day, as we typically do), we need to distance ourself from them, and they need to learn how to communicate with us, on our terms. Sitting in front of a monitor all day leads to deadtimes with nothing more to do than play a video game. And when it does come time for us to do something, we often spend a great deal of time either finding the file, searching within databases for information, or plugging along, clicking checkboxes, pressing buttons, etc.
Instead, we should simply have to ask our computer for the file, ask the database for the information directly, and not even have to bother with a million different buttons. We should spend time on teaching the computers of today a functional, natural language, in which anyone can use. We should work on Speech-to-Text, making our auditory words become software words. Once the computer knows how to listen, teaching it how to speak is just one more step. And of course, this won't abolish the good old keyboard and monitor, nor the mouse any time soon. But it's something we should definitely look forward to in our lifetime.
The biggest advantage I could see coming from this would be an external or memory bus using an optical interconnect. Since light waves can be pushed a lot closer together than electron channels, and not interfere with each other in the processes, you could build quite the large memory bus. Imagine running 16 pipes of this technology, even clocked at 5GHz. That's a 80GHz memory bus.
No offense, but we're more likely to see this kind of technology being used to make movies before video games. Hear me out.
When newer processor technologies are developed, they're almost always deligated to server processors before they trickle down to desktop processors. (Of course, there are exceptions: MMX and its spawn, etc).
br. I can't wait to see Pixar pick up the Apple Xserves based on an optical interconnected chip. The movies they'd makewould only get more spectacular.
So it's a processor bus? Makes more sense, but I'd really like to see the proof from this little startup company.
Indeed. I don't think they offer a shred of evidence to back up their 10GHz claim either. Which is sad, because if they've got processes 10x faster than Intel, it's saying something about Intel's R&D into this particular sector. Of course, it says nothing at all if they have no proof.
:-)
Truthfully, I'd love to see optical processor technology, but I don't think we're ready. But if this company can provide, then I will consume
I seriously though the same thing when I read the blurb: "What is this article about, pushing a new technology to put you in a movie, or a plug for the author?"
/. needs more editorial review, but whomever submitted this article, please make it seem less like a TV commercial for the author next time.
I'm not going to waste my time bashing on how