Isn't a Toxin Toxic to people. Or is it just Toxic to the Snail? Another way to look at it is read what the submitter really meant. You often have to translate slashdot stories. "Unlike essentially all existing pain relievers, conotoxin seems to suppress pain without side effects." really means "Like all existing drugs that haven't been through large scale trials, conotoxin appears to be free from side-effects. The toxicity is probably dependent on the dose, the patient, the length of usage and about a million other (currently) unknown factors.
Yes. His previous basis for comparison was an unlimited plan in the US. Regardless of which country it was in, he still didn't know the going rate for data transfer.
How is it a good deal in the circumstances? The circumstances are that they quoted him a rate 100 times less. In those circumstances it is a shit deal.
When music creation becomes unprofitable, only those who seek to do it out of love will persist. Correction: When music creation becomes unprofitable, only those who can afford to do it out of love will persist. So what you're saying is that you want a generation of musicians with paying day-jobs (as somebody points out above), or that all music should be made by trust-fund kids. Is that really going to improve the quality?
Of all the comments that you could have cut and pasted from the second page of YouTube comments you had to go and pixk the dumbest. People who actually listened to the recording know that one of his main bones of contention was that he was on an unlimited plan previously, so had no basis for comparison. When he did think it was too cheap at the beginning the sales rep emphasized the rate and wrote it into the contract.
Their outlier started using a mobile 21 years ago, he must have been a real early adopter. 52k people had been using mobiles for 10 years or more. So 7/8 of the study has been using a mobile for less than 10 years. Makes any conclusions on the longterm effects very dubious. In particular (as someone further up noted) usage patterns have changed drastically over the past few years. Rather than an occasional call, many people now use mobile phones almost constantly. It will be another 20 years before we have longterm data on whether or not modern usage is dangerous.
I've worked in this kind of environment for about five years. It started during my PhD, and then continued when I decided that I would stay within academia. The most important thing is how you measure output; measuring time in the office is a shitty metric that doesn't gain you anything. The article sounds as if Best Buy have this angle nailed, so they can measure productivity even if their staff are flitting in and out. In academia it's easy - you keep an eye on how many papers someone delivers.
Meetings can be tricky, but it comes down to people finding spots in their calendars that overlap. This is harder when person A tends to work 8-4 and person B tends to work 5-12 but people just make allowances and come in early / late. Community isn't such an issue. When people are going through a patch of working with each other their daily schedules tends to synchronise, and then destabilise again afterwards. There is plenty of email / IM for people to set things up, and the habit of expecting an instant response is easy to break. It does take more personal disciple and timekeeping to make it work - but the rewards are worth it.
I think it's most likely that Anderson has discovered some specific, important problems in optics(which involves some very high-powered mathematics, BTW, much more so than most engineering disciplines) that can be simplified by postulating a nullity, and that he published the work in an appropriate journal to an appreciative audience.
Not quite. It's most likely that Anderson is a crank. He has cobbled together some halfbaked assumptions and slung them past an easy audience. If there was a real application for this then a) he would have mentioned it in the paper b) put the paper in a relevant conference and c) not written the discussion section of the paper as if he had reinvented mathematics. He does compare his own paper to the invention of the concept of zero. There is no mention of an optics application anywhere. Further crank-points are earnt by postulating a solution to AI on the frontpage of his site. "Solving the mind-body problem" and whoring his "paper" before the media rather than through credible peer-review. Yes, the SOIP is a very respectable conference, but this is nowhere near their field and why are they publishing something that they are not capable of reviewing?
From what I've seen H.264 does appear to be *at least* six times as efficient as MPEG-2 at encoding. The comparison that I would make is various DVD rips of about 700MB that cannot be distinguished from the DVD where the MPEG-2 stream is 4-7GB. This includes some fairly tricky films (smoke, fog, subtle graduations of colour) like King Kong. I was quite dubious about the codec until I watched a few films that had been encoded really well in it. It is hard to explain just how much better than MPEG-2 it is.
I've also seen a Lost episode that was 1GB, in H.264 with AC5.1 sound. This was 40 minutes of video, encoded in 720p, and well within the limits of an 8Mb connection. As for 1080p - I haven't seen any content so I can't comment on how well H.264 handles it. It does seem feasible to store an hours 1080p in 3.6GB which is about satuation for an 8Mb line - on the basis that H.264 handles an hours worth of DVD in ~600MB.
OTOH, hardly anyone has the bandwidth to stream HD content anyways; that's what Internet2 is all about. If you want HD video, for now, you're going to have to wait, and I think the people that really want HD video will understand that.
I don't think that's true anymore. 8Mb broadband is quite common in the UK now, don't know about other countries. On my ISP I can max out the connection if the far end has the bandwidth to supply. If the video is in a sensible codec (ie a variant of h264) then that is more than enough bandwidth for video. 60MB/min or 3.6GB per hour is a lot of h264 video...
You both seem to be arguing moot points. There is no theoretical reason that a VM that exectutes remote code from an untrustable source is insecure. I agreee with you on that. It's not easy, but it definitely not impossible. However the cynicism that the other poster displays warrents some inspection. ActiveX, incorrect glyph rendering in X - it's not just Microsoft. People make mistakes, and mistakes make security holes. One can magnify the other.
There another point though. If the.NET VM has a fine-grained security model (before you ask, I don't know I haven't used it, I'm making gross assumption here) then the other possible whole is not an attack on the VM, or the underlying libraries - it's the user. After a million dialogue boxes that say "Applet Y wants access to resource X" most people will just press yes. This tendancy drives most worms and trojans today. If you don't ask the user then how do you make the security model flexible enough, and yet powerful enough to allow *real* application to be deployed?
What you've suggested is pretty well thought out - but it would still fail. If you set any static criteria for determining what is spam and what is not then you can't win. The spammers have almost infinite patience to jump through hoops placed in front of them. Whitelsting stable sites will just mean that spammers park domains for 6-12 months before turning them into link farms. Sites that come up as valid results for large numbers of queries are keyword farms - these were really common when Altavista was the dominant search engine. Human verification is not possible - Google would need 1000s of times more staff to implement that. Their entire business model is based on automating the tasks in providing search.
We had a speaker from Google give a talk at work a couple of weeks back and he made a really interesting comment. Google would *love* to publish the criteria that they use for detecting spam but they can't because they would lose the game. If somebody could come up with a Cryptographic protocol for a detection method that they could use publically - with a proof that the spammers couldn't game it - they would pick it up instantly. They're not into security through obscurity, but at the moment this method is the best that they have.
The RIAA doesn't have a contract for music distribution in Russia. AllOfMp3 does. In fact the RIAA has no recourse under Russian law whatsoever. So for a Russian vendor - yes it does give them the right to go ahead and sell their music anyway
Thanks for taking the time to write a detailed answer. The distinction that you make between being the law, and rising above it is quite an interesting distinction. It's certainly one that hadn't occured to me before. I'll have a read of the links that you provided, they look quite interesting.
Interesting, you don't seem to be able to tell the difference between the party and the state. Oh wait, you're an American. Sorry, that explains everything.
OK, my comments were kneejerk - just before lunch and I did find what you said quite offensive. Hunger and rational thought don't really mix well for me.
Could you explain what you mean by the difference in being "above the law" and being the law. Specifically in the context of a dictator. Surely they are the same thing?
The (lack of) "intelligence" that led to his downfall was the point that I was making. His grip on power was not created from the intelligence network. It was the brutal and ruthless application of force to hold the population in check.
Most of your comments are wrong but not really worth responding to. IE obviousness - yes, I was discussing small communities, not camera surveilance in an urban setting. Private companies are not the government and that is a separate debate etc. By railing against cctv you are buying into the illusion that we ever had any privacy in public spaces. My point was simply that the illusion is false. It is not cctv that is removing privacy - it never existed.
But your final quote really does need some dissecting. The notion that what made Saddam Hussein powerful was information is false, offensive and dangerous bullshit. What made him powerful was being above the law in a dictatorship backed by heavily armed militant thugs. Information about potential dissadents may have been useful - but it certainly was not what kept him in power. If you doubt this then consider the nature of his removal.
Why do you assume that when people watch you in a public place they are acting as individuals? Think of a neighbourhood watch scheme - obviously they share information about who they've seen in their local piece of public space. Just because you one guy amongst others doesn't mean that you are not being observed. Maybe people don't care enough to do something with their observations, but anything that you do in a public space is free to be seen by other people, and they are able to pool those observations.
Your first point is a fundamental cultural difference between Americans and Europeans. The ability to do what the government doesn't want us to do isn't called freedom over here, it's called lawbreaking. The root cause is that we don't see our governments as exclusive 'others' who are oppressing us. The rule of law within society is a contract acceptable to the majority. At the moment that majority feels that the potential lawbreaking is more damaging to society than the effect of not having an "escape-value" to let people act against their government.
I don't "hide behind" a nickname on slashdot. I have a popular name, and it was long taken by the time I opened an account. I'm not naive enough to believe in privacy on the internet: anyone interested in who I am could find out in a few minutes with the aide of Google and the internet archive.
Privacy != Freedom. Maybe it was 200 years ago, but this is no longer the case. Privacy was an illusion that briefly flourished during the industrial revolution. Prior to that we (mostly) lived in small communities where the modern concept of privacy was unknown. Now we live in a society with the information technology to show that privacy is an illusion in our large-scale communities.
Once privacy was seen as a support for freedom - if you don't know what somebody is up to then you can't stop them. In more uncertain political times this was seen as a necessity to stop political repression. In more unstable parts of the world it is still a necessity today for certain groups of dissadents.
This is not necassarily the best balance in a stable society. We guarantee political freedom through the rule of law, and it seems to work reasonably well. So privacy is not necessary in the way - which is not to say that we don't need it at all. Privacy can be split into two types (I think I'm refering to Mann here although to be honest I forget the reference):
Personal Privacy
Public Privacy
Personal Privacy is your right not to be observed when you are in a private space, such as your own home. The majority of people would be uncomfortable with this type of invasion, and this the disturbing part of 1984. The typical slashdot kneejerk reaction that the GP refered to is confusing this with public privacy.
Public Privacy is the "right" not to be observed when you are in a public space - say a shopping mall. This doesn't exist. In public spaces we are observed all of the time by the other people in those public spaces. There is nothing to stop people corrolating that information to track us if they wanted.
Whenever there is a story about "Crazy Brits and their CCTV fetish" on slashdot the two types of privacy are typically confused. In Britain we have a lot of CCTV in public spaces, and people are quite happy about that. It is not impinging on a right to freedom, it is just following through the obvious implication - if you are in a public space you are being observed.
As demonstrated below, (one "single-consistent idea" can still be broken into logical pieces:
Integrating CPU with the GPU? That would be cool, however in the long term I don't really see it happening, or most anything else mentioned here. Rather this 'fusion' of technology will most likely just end up as a new processor, based around a concept similiar to Cell, but probably without an emphasis on the differant 'processing units'. We'll probably end up with a new cpu design, hopefully x86 compatible, (although if they could create a really really good cpu, I mean the next big thing, they really shouldnt feel like they have to work with the x86 ISA), with all these smaller units (not cores) doing everything.
Think of the latest 8800 GTX, it has 128 unifed 'Streaming Processors',that were previously known as pixel shader units (or a variation thereof). Graphics cards also have/had vector shader units, and the ability to use geometry shaders, however these (at least for g80) are all unified now, in the sense that these 128 'Streaming Processors' (notice the name change AND it's significance) can on-the-fly change their function to either of the three categories. Cool idea for the GPU, but it also hints at where things are going. The Voodoo2 is more of a 'graphics processor' than g80, IMHO, in the sense that gpus are just essenestially becoming 128 'tiny'-cored general purpose coprocessors, that area really good at floating point math, (essential for graphics).
As far as today's graphics cards go we can run C code on these things. Sounds more like an auxillary, differant, type of CPU, that's all today's graphics cards are. check it out... http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cuda.html/ [nvidia.com] So the wheel of reincarnation has started. It began with GLQUAKE, with an addon card (that was an addon to your 2D card...) and will now end with either a CPU w/ GPU (fusion) or even better, a CPU that incorporates processing concepts from the GPU into a new design that is really really good, especially in the areas needed for Quake VI.
PPSh-41: Well still have pci-e express, and better still we'll probably have PCIe x16 slots too. Whether or not the consolidated market will still continue to sell graphics coprocessors is beyond my skill of intuition, however they wont stop selling them for at least 6 years. Another possible scenario is an Intel/NVIDIA buyout (I like nvidia, dont buy them out, in fact just establish a partnership). In that case, I'd venture to say that with each cpu/gpu maker in their own business couplings the GPU as we know it (as of right now) is dead.
Remember what tim sweeney said, "something something blah blah blah, what we'll find is that [graphics] is a problem that turns out was just general computing". That definatly seems like the case, when you consider the ps3's graphics (which are probably good, havent checked it out, not that I'd buy a console). If a new (more than just an extention to the x86 spec) cpu comes out of all this technology, I really really doubt well be using a GPU, as it'd be kinda like just having another CPU, but in a pci slot, with a two slot cooler, loud noise, more cords, bigger cases, more heat etc etc. Provided the new cpu specification can be used buy both companies to make compatible cpus, well all see the extinction of the GPU, as well as numerous benefits mentioned a second ago. So bottom line, and in my best hopes, a Slashdot reading Dual Core, Dual GPU fat person, will eventually have a new box in 2012, right before the world ends. It will be running GNU/Linux), and will no more than the size of a mid tower. However the CPU in the system will be a really really fast, and will have hundreds of the 'streaming processors' (that are the basis of out latest gpu's processing ability) that can be used for games, graphics, or anything else, or even porn.
Seriously though, you did just hit HTML formatted by accident. Come on you're amongst men now, you can admit it bravely...
Slashdot Mirror
to translate slashdot stories. "Unlike essentially all existing pain relievers,
conotoxin seems to suppress pain without side effects." really means "Like all
existing drugs that haven't been through large scale trials, conotoxin appears
to be free from side-effects. The toxicity is probably dependent on the dose, the
patient, the length of usage and about a million other (currently) unknown
factors.
Yes. His previous basis for comparison was an unlimited plan in the US. Regardless of which country it was in, he still didn't know the going rate for data transfer.
How is it a good deal in the circumstances? The circumstances are that they quoted him a rate 100 times less. In those circumstances it is a shit deal.
Seriously, how many pieces of flair does a robot need to have to express personality? Is it seventeen?
It would easiest if you post the address here and slashdot and tell us when you're going to be away...
Oh dear. How embarassing for you. Do you need someone to explain it to you, or did you work it out after you posted?
Of all the comments that you could have cut and pasted from the second page of YouTube comments you had to go and pixk the dumbest. People who actually listened to the recording know that one of his main bones of contention was that he was on an unlimited plan previously, so had no basis for comparison. When he did think it was too cheap at the beginning the sales rep emphasized the rate and wrote it into the contract.
Their outlier started using a mobile 21 years ago, he must have been a real early adopter. 52k people had been using mobiles for 10 years or more. So 7/8 of the study has been using a mobile for less than 10 years. Makes any conclusions on the longterm effects very dubious. In particular (as someone further up noted) usage patterns have changed drastically over the past few years. Rather than an occasional call, many people now use mobile phones almost constantly. It will be another 20 years before we have longterm data on whether or not modern usage is dangerous.
Oh dear, I got busted. ;^) I promise never to do it again...
I've worked in this kind of environment for about five years. It started during my PhD, and then continued when I decided that I would stay within academia. The most important thing is how you measure output; measuring time in the office is a shitty metric that doesn't gain you anything. The article sounds as if Best Buy have this angle nailed, so they can measure productivity even if their staff are flitting in and out. In academia it's easy - you keep an eye on how many papers someone delivers.
Meetings can be tricky, but it comes down to people finding spots in their calendars that overlap. This is harder when person A tends to work 8-4 and person B tends to work 5-12 but people just make allowances and come in early / late. Community isn't such an issue. When people are going through a patch of working with each other their daily schedules tends to synchronise, and then destabilise again afterwards. There is plenty of email / IM for people to set things up, and the habit of expecting an instant response is easy to break. It does take more personal disciple and timekeeping to make it work - but the rewards are worth it.
From what I've seen H.264 does appear to be *at least* six times as efficient as MPEG-2 at encoding. The comparison that I would make is various DVD rips of about 700MB that cannot be distinguished from the DVD where the MPEG-2 stream is 4-7GB. This includes some fairly tricky films (smoke, fog, subtle graduations of colour) like King Kong. I was quite dubious about the codec until I watched a few films that had been encoded really well in it. It is hard to explain just how much better than MPEG-2 it is.
I've also seen a Lost episode that was 1GB, in H.264 with AC5.1 sound. This was 40 minutes of video, encoded in 720p, and well within the limits of an 8Mb connection. As for 1080p - I haven't seen any content so I can't comment on how well H.264 handles it. It does seem feasible to store an hours 1080p in 3.6GB which is about satuation for an 8Mb line - on the basis that H.264 handles an hours worth of DVD in ~600MB.
I don't think that's true anymore. 8Mb broadband is quite common in the UK now, don't know about other countries. On my ISP I can max out the connection if the far end has the bandwidth to supply. If the video is in a sensible codec (ie a variant of h264) then that is more than enough bandwidth for video. 60MB/min or 3.6GB per hour is a lot of h264 video...
You both seem to be arguing moot points. There is no theoretical reason that a VM that exectutes remote code from an untrustable source is insecure. I agreee with you on that. It's not easy, but it definitely not impossible. However the cynicism that the other poster displays warrents some inspection. ActiveX, incorrect glyph rendering in X - it's not just Microsoft. People make mistakes, and mistakes make security holes. One can magnify the other.
.NET VM has a fine-grained security model (before you ask, I don't know I haven't used it, I'm making gross assumption here) then the other possible whole is not an attack on the VM, or the underlying libraries - it's the user. After a million dialogue boxes that say "Applet Y wants access to resource X" most people will just press yes. This tendancy drives most worms and trojans today. If you don't ask the user then how do you make the security model flexible enough, and yet powerful enough to allow *real* application to be deployed?
There another point though. If the
What you've suggested is pretty well thought out - but it would still fail. If you set any static criteria for determining what is spam and what is not then you can't win. The spammers have almost infinite patience to jump through hoops placed in front of them. Whitelsting stable sites will just mean that spammers park domains for 6-12 months before turning them into link farms. Sites that come up as valid results for large numbers of queries are keyword farms - these were really common when Altavista was the dominant search engine. Human verification is not possible - Google would need 1000s of times more staff to implement that. Their entire business model is based on automating the tasks in providing search.
We had a speaker from Google give a talk at work a couple of weeks back and he made a really interesting comment. Google would *love* to publish the criteria that they use for detecting spam but they can't because they would lose the game. If somebody could come up with a Cryptographic protocol for a detection method that they could use publically - with a proof that the spammers couldn't game it - they would pick it up instantly. They're not into security through obscurity, but at the moment this method is the best that they have.
The RIAA doesn't have a contract for music distribution in Russia. AllOfMp3 does. In fact the RIAA has no recourse under Russian law whatsoever. So for a Russian vendor - yes it does give them the right to go ahead and sell their music anyway
Your guesses aren't that wild-assed. Everybody knows that hdtv still won't have caught on by then....
Thanks for taking the time to write a detailed answer. The distinction that you make between being the law, and rising above it is quite an interesting distinction. It's certainly one that hadn't occured to me before. I'll have a read of the links that you provided, they look quite interesting.
Interesting, you don't seem to be able to tell the difference between the party and the state. Oh wait, you're an American. Sorry, that explains everything.
"The point that you and people like you don't seem to get"
"America: God's foreign policy."
Well, at least your view is consistently blinkered.
OK, my comments were kneejerk - just before lunch and I did find what you said quite offensive. Hunger and rational thought don't really mix well for me.
Could you explain what you mean by the difference in being "above the law" and being the law. Specifically in the context of a dictator. Surely they are the same thing?
The (lack of) "intelligence" that led to his downfall was the point that I was making. His grip on power was not created from the intelligence network. It was the brutal and ruthless application of force to hold the population in check.
Most of your comments are wrong but not really worth responding to. IE obviousness - yes, I was discussing small communities, not camera surveilance in an urban setting. Private companies are not the government and that is a separate debate etc. By railing against cctv you are buying into the illusion that we ever had any privacy in public spaces. My point was simply that the illusion is false. It is not cctv that is removing privacy - it never existed.
But your final quote really does need some dissecting. The notion that what made Saddam Hussein powerful was information is false, offensive and dangerous bullshit. What made him powerful was being above the law in a dictatorship backed by heavily armed militant thugs. Information about potential dissadents may have been useful - but it certainly was not what kept him in power. If you doubt this then consider the nature of his removal.
Why do you assume that when people watch you in a public place they are acting as individuals? Think of a neighbourhood watch scheme - obviously they share information about who they've seen in their local piece of public space. Just because you one guy amongst others doesn't mean that you are not being observed. Maybe people don't care enough to do something with their observations, but anything that you do in a public space is free to be seen by other people, and they are able to pool those observations.
Your first point is a fundamental cultural difference between Americans and Europeans. The ability to do what the government doesn't want us to do isn't called freedom over here, it's called lawbreaking. The root cause is that we don't see our governments as exclusive 'others' who are oppressing us. The rule of law within society is a contract acceptable to the majority. At the moment that majority feels that the potential lawbreaking is more damaging to society than the effect of not having an "escape-value" to let people act against their government.
I don't "hide behind" a nickname on slashdot. I have a popular name, and it was long taken by the time I opened an account. I'm not naive enough to believe in privacy on the internet: anyone interested in who I am could find out in a few minutes with the aide of Google and the internet archive.
Privacy != Freedom. Maybe it was 200 years ago, but this is no longer the case. Privacy was an illusion that briefly flourished during the industrial revolution. Prior to that we (mostly) lived in small communities where the modern concept of privacy was unknown. Now we live in a society with the information technology to show that privacy is an illusion in our large-scale communities.
Once privacy was seen as a support for freedom - if you don't know what somebody is up to then you can't stop them. In more uncertain political times this was seen as a necessity to stop political repression. In more unstable parts of the world it is still a necessity today for certain groups of dissadents.
This is not necassarily the best balance in a stable society. We guarantee political freedom through the rule of law, and it seems to work reasonably well. So privacy is not necessary in the way - which is not to say that we don't need it at all. Privacy can be split into two types (I think I'm refering to Mann here although to be honest I forget the reference):
Personal Privacy
Public Privacy
Personal Privacy is your right not to be observed when you are in a private space, such as your own home. The majority of people would be uncomfortable with this type of invasion, and this the disturbing part of 1984. The typical slashdot kneejerk reaction that the GP refered to is confusing this with public privacy.
Public Privacy is the "right" not to be observed when you are in a public space - say a shopping mall. This doesn't exist. In public spaces we are observed all of the time by the other people in those public spaces. There is nothing to stop people corrolating that information to track us if they wanted.
Whenever there is a story about "Crazy Brits and their CCTV fetish" on slashdot the two types of privacy are typically confused. In Britain we have a lot of CCTV in public spaces, and people are quite happy about that. It is not impinging on a right to freedom, it is just following through the obvious implication - if you are in a public space you are being observed.
As demonstrated below, (one "single-consistent idea" can still be broken into logical pieces:
Integrating CPU with the GPU? That would be cool, however in the long term I don't really see it happening, or most anything else mentioned here. Rather this 'fusion' of technology will most likely just end up as a new processor, based around a concept similiar to Cell, but probably without an emphasis on the differant 'processing units'. We'll probably end up with a new cpu design, hopefully x86 compatible, (although if they could create a really really good cpu, I mean the next big thing, they really shouldnt feel like they have to work with the x86 ISA), with all these smaller units (not cores) doing everything.
Think of the latest 8800 GTX, it has 128 unifed 'Streaming Processors',that were previously known as pixel shader units (or a variation thereof). Graphics cards also have/had vector shader units, and the ability to use geometry shaders, however these (at least for g80) are all unified now, in the sense that these 128 'Streaming Processors' (notice the name change AND it's significance) can on-the-fly change their function to either of the three categories. Cool idea for the GPU, but it also hints at where things are going. The Voodoo2 is more of a 'graphics processor' than g80, IMHO, in the sense that gpus are just essenestially becoming 128 'tiny'-cored general purpose coprocessors, that area really good at floating point math, (essential for graphics).
As far as today's graphics cards go we can run C code on these things. Sounds more like an auxillary, differant, type of CPU, that's all today's graphics cards are. check it out... http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cuda.html/ [nvidia.com] So the wheel of reincarnation has started. It began with GLQUAKE, with an addon card (that was an addon to your 2D card...) and will now end with either a CPU w/ GPU (fusion) or even better, a CPU that incorporates processing concepts from the GPU into a new design that is really really good, especially in the areas needed for Quake VI.
PPSh-41: Well still have pci-e express, and better still we'll probably have PCIe x16 slots too. Whether or not the consolidated market will still continue to sell graphics coprocessors is beyond my skill of intuition, however they wont stop selling them for at least 6 years. Another possible scenario is an Intel/NVIDIA buyout (I like nvidia, dont buy them out, in fact just establish a partnership). In that case, I'd venture to say that with each cpu/gpu maker in their own business couplings the GPU as we know it (as of right now) is dead.
Remember what tim sweeney said, "something something blah blah blah, what we'll find is that [graphics] is a problem that turns out was just general computing". That definatly seems like the case, when you consider the ps3's graphics (which are probably good, havent checked it out, not that I'd buy a console). If a new (more than just an extention to the x86 spec) cpu comes out of all this technology, I really really doubt well be using a GPU, as it'd be kinda like just having another CPU, but in a pci slot, with a two slot cooler, loud noise, more cords, bigger cases, more heat etc etc. Provided the new cpu specification can be used buy both companies to make compatible cpus, well all see the extinction of the GPU, as well as numerous benefits mentioned a second ago. So bottom line, and in my best hopes, a Slashdot reading Dual Core, Dual GPU fat person, will eventually have a new box in 2012, right before the world ends. It will be running GNU/Linux), and will no more than the size of a mid tower. However the CPU in the system will be a really really fast, and will have hundreds of the 'streaming processors' (that are the basis of out latest gpu's processing ability) that can be used for games, graphics, or anything else, or even porn.
Seriously though, you did just hit HTML formatted by accident. Come on you're amongst men now, you can admit it bravely...