...and then there's virtual conferences. Until the avatars can replicate every facial expression and gesticulation, it will be about as useful as a conference call, and significantly less useful than a regular video conference.
I'd hazard a guess that the amount of energy required to do this would be more than you would actually get from the nuclear reaction. We are in orbit around the Sun, so in order to escape this orbit and fall into the Sun, the waste would have to be decelerated significantly by about the same amount as it would take to increase the orbit from the surface of the Sun to Earth's orbit, as well as escaping the Earth's gravity well in the first place of course.
In Germany, much like other european countries, they charge 99 cents (=69p), and the sales tax is 18.5% ISTR, so we are still paying ~10p more per track. I wouldn't blame Apple, though - most companies charge more in the UK for the simple reason that people will pay more.
Having read a lot about this flaw it's actually amazing that AMD's quality control found the problem in the first place.
The actions needed to cause the problem to arise are so extreme that they'd never happen in the field.
This kind of thing is standard practice. If you want to stress test a piece of hardware, you write specialised test code which will consume the maximum amount of power possible, not a real world program. You have to be sure that nobody will be able to write software which will drive the processor harder than your tests have. Its good that AMD found this fault, and even better that they owned up to it, but it's not remarkable.
It's highly unlikely that MSN.com would be the #3 search engine if it weren't for MSN being the default search engine for IE
An effect they could also achieve by shipping a custom version of firefox, say, with the default search engine and search bar set to MSN. Of course they could never do this at this stage, having positioned IE as a flagship product of sorts.
The Virtex 4 FPGAs can be clocked at up to 500MHz, so we are talking about ~10-15 times slower than the processor, depending on the application. Even a simple digital filter would be faster when implemented in the FPGA, and this would only take a small fraction of the FPGA resources.
another Opteron would likely run at multiples of the clockspeed of that thing, and it would also be able to offload work from the *othewr* Opterons, such as disk I/O etc, giving your overall application more performance.
Clockspeed is not a measurement of performance unless you are comparing similar architectures. With FPGAs you can do everything in parallel, whereas microprocessors are inherently sequential. In effect, you can potentially complete hundreds of instructions per clock cycle, whereas a microprocessor will complete 2 or 3.
In practical terms, this product lends itself to compute intensive tasks such as signal processing, not data serving.
Everything is conductive to some extent, as you know;-)
I actually read this in "The Human Animal" by Desmond Morris, if my memory serves me correctly. There was a hypothesis that humans lost hair because they would have more need to run than apes, and would therefore need to dissipate more heat. Experiments showed, however, that apes were in fact better at dissipating heat because their hair acted as a heat sink. This obviously depends on a lot of factors - polar bear fur is obviously adapted to keeping the body warm - and there are no doubt a lot of other factors affecting the evolution of body hair patterns.
Hair serves as a cooling mechanism by increasing the surface area of the body part in question, thus increasing the rate at which heat is dissipated to the atmosphere.
Why are folks so obsessed with literally reinventing the wheel?
Because when you're making machines at microscopic scales, you get a whole new set of problems. Lubricating bearings is difficult, because conventional lubricants are too viscous. Assembling complex devices is difficult, because you need complex devices to do it. And reliably creating smooth round surfaces is difficult because irregularities in the material cause rough surfaces. Flat surfaces are easy to make - just shear a crystaline material.
I was a little surprised that they didn't say the film had no basis in reality.
You shouldn't be, because James Bond was inspired by Ian Fleming's own work for British Intelligence during world war II. That's not to say that the bond films are in any way realistic, but they are at least inspired by reality.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the knowledge that what you read on Wikipedia may be plainly wrong makes Wikipedia a better educational resource.
Maybe he was the first astronaut to start rewiring the flight controls on the way up?
...and then there's virtual conferences. Until the avatars can replicate every facial expression and gesticulation, it will be about as useful as a conference call, and significantly less useful than a regular video conference.
I think that remains open to debate
Let me guess, that would have been when they argued over the proper definition of "earth".
I predict they will team up with Nike to produce an iShoePhone
I'd hazard a guess that the amount of energy required to do this would be more than you would actually get from the nuclear reaction. We are in orbit around the Sun, so in order to escape this orbit and fall into the Sun, the waste would have to be decelerated significantly by about the same amount as it would take to increase the orbit from the surface of the Sun to Earth's orbit, as well as escaping the Earth's gravity well in the first place of course.
...which is about as big as 12 gazillion Volkswagen Beetles
At first I read that as This simple model made Netflix into a $1.4 bin company.
If we've incorporated the Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites into the government, then they weren't really free elections, were they?
In Germany, much like other european countries, they charge 99 cents (=69p), and the sales tax is 18.5% ISTR, so we are still paying ~10p more per track. I wouldn't blame Apple, though - most companies charge more in the UK for the simple reason that people will pay more.
It's clearly inspired by the MS Windows security model
The actions needed to cause the problem to arise are so extreme that they'd never happen in the field.
This kind of thing is standard practice. If you want to stress test a piece of hardware, you write specialised test code which will consume the maximum amount of power possible, not a real world program. You have to be sure that nobody will be able to write software which will drive the processor harder than your tests have. Its good that AMD found this fault, and even better that they owned up to it, but it's not remarkable.
An effect they could also achieve by shipping a custom version of firefox, say, with the default search engine and search bar set to MSN. Of course they could never do this at this stage, having positioned IE as a flagship product of sorts.
The Virtex 4 FPGAs can be clocked at up to 500MHz, so we are talking about ~10-15 times slower than the processor, depending on the application. Even a simple digital filter would be faster when implemented in the FPGA, and this would only take a small fraction of the FPGA resources.
Clockspeed is not a measurement of performance unless you are comparing similar architectures. With FPGAs you can do everything in parallel, whereas microprocessors are inherently sequential. In effect, you can potentially complete hundreds of instructions per clock cycle, whereas a microprocessor will complete 2 or 3.
In practical terms, this product lends itself to compute intensive tasks such as signal processing, not data serving.
Everything is conductive to some extent, as you know ;-)
I actually read this in "The Human Animal" by Desmond Morris, if my memory serves me correctly. There was a hypothesis that humans lost hair because they would have more need to run than apes, and would therefore need to dissipate more heat. Experiments showed, however, that apes were in fact better at dissipating heat because their hair acted as a heat sink. This obviously depends on a lot of factors - polar bear fur is obviously adapted to keeping the body warm - and there are no doubt a lot of other factors affecting the evolution of body hair patterns.
How about one of these?
Hair serves as a cooling mechanism by increasing the surface area of the body part in question, thus increasing the rate at which heat is dissipated to the atmosphere.
Maybe they're worried that sales would suffer if their product got its ass kicked by a Tivo.
5.) Guerillas would climb onboard mid way, pinch the supplies and pack it full of explosives.
Because when you're making machines at microscopic scales, you get a whole new set of problems. Lubricating bearings is difficult, because conventional lubricants are too viscous. Assembling complex devices is difficult, because you need complex devices to do it. And reliably creating smooth round surfaces is difficult because irregularities in the material cause rough surfaces. Flat surfaces are easy to make - just shear a crystaline material.
You shouldn't be, because James Bond was inspired by Ian Fleming's own work for British Intelligence during world war II. That's not to say that the bond films are in any way realistic, but they are at least inspired by reality.