Just what, exactly, constitutes a drug. The Doctor argues that this is a "treatment" or "therapy", no different then a skin-graft or banking your own blood supply, and he makes a valid point.
Well I don't know what the correct legal ruling would be vis a vis the FDA's mandate and the definition of "drug".
What I do know is that I think that treatments and therapies should be required to demonstrate both efficacy and safety in controlled clinical trials before they're allowed to be administered at your physician's discretion. I don't think that this should only apply to drugs, because obviously drugs aren't the only thing that can potentially harm you while providing no benefit.
Take this procedure for example. I would agree that stem cells, particularly your own stem cells, are not a "drug". Yet this procedure carries significant hypothetical risk of cancer, and the actual risk is unknown. But because it's not a drug, it's a "therapy", this shouldn't matter and this doctor should be able to administer it to anyone who wants it?
I don't buy that.
Safety and efficacy are issues that apply to all medical procedures.
The only viable means the Pharma have to compete is growing their own supply and then make it harder to use your own cells. Enter the Lobbyists and FDA Guideline Revisionists.
Okay I hate Big Pharma as much as anyone, but the FDA is not why Big Pharma is your only source for certain drugs and treatments. That's the patent problem you mention. If the FDA approved this procedure, then there's nothing stopping your doctor from extracting your own stem cells and using them without Big Pharma getting involved.
I hope the good Doctor has good lawyers.
I hope that behind the facade of a guy selling treatments for profit and a web page full of schlocky-sounding testimonials, he has a team of good medical researchers performing the actual double-blind studies needed to quantify the risk/efficacy issues, and if the results come out contrary to what he has assumed, that he'll stop.
But since I'm doubting that's the case, yeah, he's going to need good lawyers.
I wonder how these stem cells will respond when moved to a new environment and what the long term effects will be. I guess that FDA sanctioned or not, we're going to find out.
But are we? That's my question.
Somehow I doubt a Doctor who has already decided that their treatment is safe and effective enough to give to paying customers in spite of the FDA is going to be worried about making sure his practice also constitutes a valid long-term scientific.
I mean I don't know exactly what he's doing, but I think we can rule double-blind clinical trials right out. If what he was doing was even close to the kind of research that the FDA requires before approving something, then it seems like it wouldn't be that hard to go the extra mile and apply for approval. Getting FDA approval is expensive, but a lot of that is because valid, meaningful clinical trials are expensive. Which is why I doubt he's doing them.
What I worry about is that when all is said and done, we still won't know anything more than the anecdotal testimonials of his happy customers, and maybe some other anecdotes from people who claim he gave them cancer.
You're a medical researcher, what do you think the odds are that simply looking at a practicing non-research physician's records after ten years will duplicate the work that actual medical research would have produced?
Now realize the cancer rate will NOT be zero, because the cancer rate of human flesh, natural or otherwise, is not zero. Therefore people whom get stem cell therapy will get cancer and die. Therefore, their Drs will get sued out existence. That will be the problem.
Unless they conduct an actual scientific study and determine that the cancer rate for those who received the treatment is the same as in the general population accounting for other risk factors, science yadda yadda.
At which point their Doctors won't be sued out of existence just like they aren't for anything else that could hypothetically cause cancer but, uh, doesn't.
So as far as I'm concerned the problem is "rebels" like this guy fighting the evil FDA who doesn't want to let him administer the treatment merely because there have been no human safety or efficacy trials.
I mean good for him if he helps people by not waiting for the studies to be done. On the other hand fuck him royal if he hurts people by not waiting for the study to be done. And when the first patient gets cancer after receiving treatment, and they sue him out of existence, hey, who's to say that isn't completely appropriate? The whole point is he doesn't know.
You know for sure this guy's malpractice insurance isn't going to cover it if his patients all end up with sudden cases of terminal cancer, and in the meantime his procedures on willing subjects are going to give the FDA tons of useful data.
Personally I'm not going to assume that a guy who is willing to ignore the FDA and start administering this treatment and advertise it with vacuous testimonials is going to make sure that he follows all the proper procedures to ensure that hs work constitutes a valid study that can be reviewed by the FDA and others.
There's a big difference between the way in which your personal doctor diagnoses and treats your ailments, and how this would be done within the context of medical research. Your doctor is making use of the results of medical research to do their best to make your life better, but your interaction with them does not constitute a valid way to recreate that research.
This guy seems to be operating in the mode of physician, not researcher. He seems to already be convinced that his treatment works and is safe, and not trying to falsifying either of those hypothesis as a researcher does.
Not in terms of the vacuous testimonials on this site, but in terms of "we don't know how big the risk really is yet, because we don't do this a lot in humans."
"Because we don't do this a lot in humans, and because what we are doing doesn't constitute a valid risk assessment study."
I really, really hope the procedure does turn out to be safe since I don't get the impression he's out to find out if it isn't.
Because they only have one sig fig, of course they're round. I'm sure they could have provided estimates with more sig figs, but one it's an estimate and everyone would be ragging on them for predicting exactly 49.4% improvement over the nebulously defined base-line, and two it's journalism not a technical specification so round numbers are sufficient to get the idea across.
If you believe the device works as intended, then I'm not sure why you wouldn't believe that the efficiency improvement would be within the range specified by the given precision. Though personally I think they'll end up being optimistic, simply because that's always the way it goes even with the best of intentions.:)
Actually, that's exactly why one should be skeptical: at heart it's just a Diesel engine.
I'm no automotive engineer, but compressing/heating the fuel prior to injection sounds a lot different than compressing/heating the fuel in the combustion chamber itself.
I'm skeptical of the claim that this is "just a Diesel engine", merely because it shares a high-level characteristic (fuel compressed enough to ignite without a spark).
Even [Berlin-based hematologist Gero] Huetter says bone-marrow transplants, which kill about a third of patients, are so dangerous that "they can't be justified ethically" in anything other than desperate situations like late-stage leukemia.
Yeah, I had a dear family friend who was almost at that stage and the best marrow donor found at that point gave him something like a -- geeze it was years ago but I wanna say -- 20% chance of survival? If he'd gone into the acute stage they would have pulled the lever, but they weren't about to do it until they absolutely had to. That 1/3rd fatality rate is after accounting for the fact that marrow transplants only take place after extensive searches for genetic matches starting with close relatives then working out into the general bone marrow registry (where the odds of a good match are insanely low). Even an ideal match is pretty sketchy, because after the transplant you have no immune system at all and the mildest cold will kill you.
So I can see what they're saying when they imply that staying on drugs for the rest of your life is a saner choice than getting a marrow transplant, even if it turns out to be a reliable and complete cure for AIDS.
But by the same token, my friend lucked out and his relatively rare form of leukemia turned out to be not just treatable but curable with drugs, which at the time were experimental and he was lucky enough to get in on a study. The results astonished the researchers they were so successful, and they were scrambling to move people from the placebo group to active group without invalidating the study. Now it's the standard treatment for the disease and the prognosis is overall quite good.
Here's hoping that this new knowledge can help us find a real cure that isn't as lethal as the disease.
Also known as the human immunodeficiency virus virus.
Wait a minute, that gives me an idea... *runs off to lab with microscope* Yes, yes, it all checks out! It's so simple, I don't know why we didn't think of it before.
The Human Immunodeficiency Virus can infect itself!
My God, this changes everything! We'll finally be able to defeat this scourge, and we owe it all to Slashdot Pedants. Here's to you!/salute
So the only logical conclusion is that likely all cells are infected, but do not commonly produce viruses.
The only logical conclusion is the one that requires the biggest leap? Okay...
There are a number of possible conclusions, but I'd say the most logical one is the one that requires the fewest leaps and best fits the evidence.
The second part of the body after the blood that we find is infected is the bone marrow, which is responsible for producing blood, and is vastly more difficult to inspect that parts of the body that have so far shown no infection, like the skin. A logical conclusion would therefore be that HIV infects the blood and bone marrow which produces blood, and not other parts of the body which have not shown any infection despite being easier to investigate.
Another logical conclusion would be that since the infected bone marrow cells are dormant and inactive until they become blood cells, and only bone marrow cells become blood cells, that fighting the infection in the marrow (e.g. via a transplant though that's a big hammer) would be sufficient and any "infection" in the rest of the body would be irrelevant. Oh and hey there's some evidence that this actually works too.
You could of course be right and the entire body has its DNA re-written and that every cell in the body could potentially start creating new viruses. That's certainly not the only logical conclusion, nor do I think it's the most logical (since observation seems to go against it), but it's possible.
But ultimately the most logical conclusion that you or I can reach is that we should wait for the fine folks doing the research to continue to do their good work rather than assuming we've already got it all figured out.:P
From TFS's mention of "up to 8 CPUs or more with third-party node controllers" I'm(perhaps optimistically) assuming that that means all the RAM in an up to 8 socket system wouldn't be more than one hop away from any core.
The block diagram in TFA shows 4 QPI interfaces, so theoretically yes.
In practice almost certainly not, because that theoretical setup has no interfaces left to hook any I/O devices up to it and so is kinda useless. So at least one core has to dedicate at least one link to hook up a PCIe bridge or such. In a large server, you probably don't want all your I/O going through one link (where it then has to fan out from the least-connected CPU to wherever it is needed), so there'll be several CPUs that are not maximally connected.
Even more practically, routing all those links across each other to connect all the CPUs together on the mobo, while also making room for the rather ginormous amount of DRAM channel traces is going to be prohibitive. I'm betting they use no more than 3 QPI links for CPU-CPU interconnect per core, making a 2-hop system (which is still a challenge).
Even MORE practically, the 8-socket market is minuscule, anyone buying into it certainly has a specific application in mind, and you'll get way more bang for your buck making sure your application/OS are NUMA-aware than by trying to minimize hops by doubling the number of layers in your mobo.
That 24 MB of cache is there because it helps even in a 1-socket system, and of their many strengths Intel's greatest is their manufacturing capacity, so it only makes sense to flex that muscle. It's like how they used to get crazy Specfp2000 scores for the Itanium because they could put huge caches on it and that version of specfp should really have been called speccache. Unlike Itanium, though, that giant cache isn't just a layer of polish on a turd.
But in any case, is the Nehalem system architecture "substantially improved" from the P4 shared bus? Oh fuck yes.
There are about 25 million PCs sold per month. I guess ATI is happy to have sold 8% of that monthly amount over the several months their 5xxx have been available, that's 3-4% of PC sales. Congrats to them, but still, fairly marginal.
Oh I'm quite certain they are exceedingly happy, and I think you'll find that margin is exactly why.;)
Discrete cards have always been better than IGPs. I don't really get your point. Only recently (definitely way after the pentium 1) have IGPs become good enough to display all video files, or handle Aero.
Aero didn't exist in Pentium 1 days, nor did anything consumer level that required OpenGL, nor could the highest-of-high-end consumer cards handled it anyway. Videos were generally small and low resolution, and only had to be decoded, not decrypted. People were doing different things with their computers.
The point is that IGP (or before integrated graphics, the bottom-of-the-line cards that came with budget computers) has been fine for most users for most of the history of the PC.
You say "standby fossil fuel generation has to be provided".
Fossil fuel companies hear "less fossil fuel generation has to be provided".
The fact that wind farms cannot replace all other forms of power generation is immaterial to people on either side of the issue. More renewable power is better than less renewable power to environmentalists, and less fossil fuel burning is worse than more fossil fuel burning. The "can't provide base load" argument is just a talking point used by the anti-wind-farm crowd who are hoping their audience will be unable to distinguish between "some" and "none".
Ah, but see, that right there tells you why PhysX is doomed. The PhysX-equivalent from the early days of consumer 3D was 3DFX's GLIDE library. By the accounts I've heard a fine library, and it certainly did its job of enabling game developers to support 3DFX cards. Using it made good sense, even though I'm sure 3DFX payed some developers to do it, because at the time Voodoo was the only game in town. Nobody else provided consumer/gaming 3D capabilities on par. So that was good, for a time.
But then as soon as other graphics card manufacturers started making cards with similar capabilities, suddenly the value proposition for a game developer changed. Soon, you basically the choice of OpenGL, Direct3D, and GLIDE, and they broke down like this:
OpenGL: Runs on any platform. Direct3D: Runs on any Microsoft platform. GLIDE: Runs on any platform with a 3DFX card, and then still mostly Microsoft-only.
You can argue back and forth about the merits of Direct3D vs OpenGL and giving up non-MS platforms -- if you're including consoles, then maybe not a great idea, but if you're targeting the PC, then MS-only is still 95% and hell lots of games decide to be MS-only before the graphics API decision even gets made. But to go after only the subset of PCs that have a 3dfx and not an NVidia, ATI, or Matrox card? Yeah right! GLIDE dropped off the face of the planet.
PhysX is in the same boat. It's a library that should be replaced by an open standard like OpenCL that AMD is pushing, but may instead be replaced by Microsoft's DirectCompute or whatever they call it, or possible an ecosystem where both exist. Either way, unless PhysX somehow becomes the new MS library, it's going away and in 10 years nobody will remember it.
Two, it kills a LOT of cats! You get the code right, and BAM! dead cat.
I always suspected that all this "entangling photon pairs" and "quantum encryption channel" stuff was just a bunch of scientists jerking off, but I didn't think they were actually euphemisms for spanking it!
That's all good, but the major discovery here is actually anti-hypernucleons made with anti-strange quarks. So yeah, they will annihilate on contact with normal matter just like non-strange anti-matter.
I'm guessing that with a name like "negatively strange antihypernucleic antimatter", Star Trek et al. will be all over this. Countdown until the term appears in sci-fi shows...
Probably... But what I'm really hoping is that scientists -- and by extension sci-fi shows -- adopt El Reg's proposed term for negative strangeness "hypermundanity".
Just imagine Data saying that. "Captain, the gaseous anomaly we've entered contains high levels of hypermundanity."
"*yawn* Tell me about it, Commander."
Re:This guy sounds out of touch
on
There Is No Cyberwar
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The curent attacks on the US infrastructure are simply finding our many weaknesses and no matter of sticking our heads in the sand will stop it. The only way to stop it is to start taking a proactive approach, shoring up our weaknesses, and start doing the same to our enemies.
Huh, that sounds like a familiar sentiment. Where have I heard it? Oh yeah, TFA!
"We can't sit there and be waiting for the next intrusion attempts to take place," Schmidt said. "We need to become stronger in what we are doing so we are better able to resist the things that are being thrown at us."
Get it? "Shoring up our weaknesses" is exactly what he's talking about. What he's also saying is that you don't have to cry "Oh my god we're in a CYBERWAR!" and then use that to justify destroying privacy on the internet like McDonnel wanted to do.
Re:This guy sounds out of touch
on
There Is No Cyberwar
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I don't see how emailing your post to the white house could fail to do the job. I mean "sounds out of touch"? How can anyone read that and not know he's not suited for the job?
Seriously, focusing on online crime and espionage without re-engineering the internet to eliminate anonymity, instead of focusing on a Cyber-War buzzword with all the "but we're at war!" excuses for doing whatever they want? That's no way to exercise executive power! You're so right; how incompetent can you get?!
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Just what, exactly, constitutes a drug. The Doctor argues that this is a "treatment" or "therapy", no different then a skin-graft or banking your own blood supply, and he makes a valid point.
Well I don't know what the correct legal ruling would be vis a vis the FDA's mandate and the definition of "drug".
What I do know is that I think that treatments and therapies should be required to demonstrate both efficacy and safety in controlled clinical trials before they're allowed to be administered at your physician's discretion. I don't think that this should only apply to drugs, because obviously drugs aren't the only thing that can potentially harm you while providing no benefit.
Take this procedure for example. I would agree that stem cells, particularly your own stem cells, are not a "drug". Yet this procedure carries significant hypothetical risk of cancer, and the actual risk is unknown. But because it's not a drug, it's a "therapy", this shouldn't matter and this doctor should be able to administer it to anyone who wants it?
I don't buy that.
Safety and efficacy are issues that apply to all medical procedures.
The only viable means the Pharma have to compete is growing their own supply and then make it harder to use your own cells. Enter the Lobbyists and FDA Guideline Revisionists.
Okay I hate Big Pharma as much as anyone, but the FDA is not why Big Pharma is your only source for certain drugs and treatments. That's the patent problem you mention. If the FDA approved this procedure, then there's nothing stopping your doctor from extracting your own stem cells and using them without Big Pharma getting involved.
I hope the good Doctor has good lawyers.
I hope that behind the facade of a guy selling treatments for profit and a web page full of schlocky-sounding testimonials, he has a team of good medical researchers performing the actual double-blind studies needed to quantify the risk/efficacy issues, and if the results come out contrary to what he has assumed, that he'll stop.
But since I'm doubting that's the case, yeah, he's going to need good lawyers.
I wonder how these stem cells will respond when moved to a new environment and what the long term effects will be. I guess that FDA sanctioned or not, we're going to find out.
But are we? That's my question.
Somehow I doubt a Doctor who has already decided that their treatment is safe and effective enough to give to paying customers in spite of the FDA is going to be worried about making sure his practice also constitutes a valid long-term scientific.
I mean I don't know exactly what he's doing, but I think we can rule double-blind clinical trials right out. If what he was doing was even close to the kind of research that the FDA requires before approving something, then it seems like it wouldn't be that hard to go the extra mile and apply for approval. Getting FDA approval is expensive, but a lot of that is because valid, meaningful clinical trials are expensive. Which is why I doubt he's doing them.
What I worry about is that when all is said and done, we still won't know anything more than the anecdotal testimonials of his happy customers, and maybe some other anecdotes from people who claim he gave them cancer.
You're a medical researcher, what do you think the odds are that simply looking at a practicing non-research physician's records after ten years will duplicate the work that actual medical research would have produced?
Now realize the cancer rate will NOT be zero, because the cancer rate of human flesh, natural or otherwise, is not zero. Therefore people whom get stem cell therapy will get cancer and die. Therefore, their Drs will get sued out existence. That will be the problem.
Unless they conduct an actual scientific study and determine that the cancer rate for those who received the treatment is the same as in the general population accounting for other risk factors, science yadda yadda.
At which point their Doctors won't be sued out of existence just like they aren't for anything else that could hypothetically cause cancer but, uh, doesn't.
So as far as I'm concerned the problem is "rebels" like this guy fighting the evil FDA who doesn't want to let him administer the treatment merely because there have been no human safety or efficacy trials.
I mean good for him if he helps people by not waiting for the studies to be done. On the other hand fuck him royal if he hurts people by not waiting for the study to be done. And when the first patient gets cancer after receiving treatment, and they sue him out of existence, hey, who's to say that isn't completely appropriate? The whole point is he doesn't know.
You know for sure this guy's malpractice insurance isn't going to cover it if his patients all end up with sudden cases of terminal cancer, and in the meantime his procedures on willing subjects are going to give the FDA tons of useful data.
Personally I'm not going to assume that a guy who is willing to ignore the FDA and start administering this treatment and advertise it with vacuous testimonials is going to make sure that he follows all the proper procedures to ensure that hs work constitutes a valid study that can be reviewed by the FDA and others.
There's a big difference between the way in which your personal doctor diagnoses and treats your ailments, and how this would be done within the context of medical research. Your doctor is making use of the results of medical research to do their best to make your life better, but your interaction with them does not constitute a valid way to recreate that research.
This guy seems to be operating in the mode of physician, not researcher. He seems to already be convinced that his treatment works and is safe, and not trying to falsifying either of those hypothesis as a researcher does.
Not in terms of the vacuous testimonials on this site, but in terms of "we don't know how big the risk really is yet, because we don't do this a lot in humans."
"Because we don't do this a lot in humans, and because what we are doing doesn't constitute a valid risk assessment study."
I really, really hope the procedure does turn out to be safe since I don't get the impression he's out to find out if it isn't.
They seem oddly round.
Because they only have one sig fig, of course they're round. I'm sure they could have provided estimates with more sig figs, but one it's an estimate and everyone would be ragging on them for predicting exactly 49.4% improvement over the nebulously defined base-line, and two it's journalism not a technical specification so round numbers are sufficient to get the idea across.
If you believe the device works as intended, then I'm not sure why you wouldn't believe that the efficiency improvement would be within the range specified by the given precision. Though personally I think they'll end up being optimistic, simply because that's always the way it goes even with the best of intentions. :)
Just a note to whoever is investigating the inevitable carnage... In that circumstance, a Little Debbie snack cake could explode with lethal force.
Actually, that's exactly why one should be skeptical: at heart it's just a Diesel engine.
I'm no automotive engineer, but compressing/heating the fuel prior to injection sounds a lot different than compressing/heating the fuel in the combustion chamber itself.
I'm skeptical of the claim that this is "just a Diesel engine", merely because it shares a high-level characteristic (fuel compressed enough to ignite without a spark).
Even [Berlin-based hematologist Gero] Huetter says bone-marrow transplants, which kill about a third of patients, are so dangerous that "they can't be justified ethically" in anything other than desperate situations like late-stage leukemia.
Yeah, I had a dear family friend who was almost at that stage and the best marrow donor found at that point gave him something like a -- geeze it was years ago but I wanna say -- 20% chance of survival? If he'd gone into the acute stage they would have pulled the lever, but they weren't about to do it until they absolutely had to. That 1/3rd fatality rate is after accounting for the fact that marrow transplants only take place after extensive searches for genetic matches starting with close relatives then working out into the general bone marrow registry (where the odds of a good match are insanely low). Even an ideal match is pretty sketchy, because after the transplant you have no immune system at all and the mildest cold will kill you.
So I can see what they're saying when they imply that staying on drugs for the rest of your life is a saner choice than getting a marrow transplant, even if it turns out to be a reliable and complete cure for AIDS.
But by the same token, my friend lucked out and his relatively rare form of leukemia turned out to be not just treatable but curable with drugs, which at the time were experimental and he was lucky enough to get in on a study. The results astonished the researchers they were so successful, and they were scrambling to move people from the placebo group to active group without invalidating the study. Now it's the standard treatment for the disease and the prognosis is overall quite good.
Here's hoping that this new knowledge can help us find a real cure that isn't as lethal as the disease.
Also known as the human immunodeficiency virus virus.
Wait a minute, that gives me an idea... *runs off to lab with microscope* Yes, yes, it all checks out! It's so simple, I don't know why we didn't think of it before.
The Human Immunodeficiency Virus can infect itself!
My God, this changes everything! We'll finally be able to defeat this scourge, and we owe it all to Slashdot Pedants. Here's to you! /salute
So the only logical conclusion is that likely all cells are infected, but do not commonly produce viruses.
The only logical conclusion is the one that requires the biggest leap? Okay...
There are a number of possible conclusions, but I'd say the most logical one is the one that requires the fewest leaps and best fits the evidence.
The second part of the body after the blood that we find is infected is the bone marrow, which is responsible for producing blood, and is vastly more difficult to inspect that parts of the body that have so far shown no infection, like the skin. A logical conclusion would therefore be that HIV infects the blood and bone marrow which produces blood, and not other parts of the body which have not shown any infection despite being easier to investigate.
Another logical conclusion would be that since the infected bone marrow cells are dormant and inactive until they become blood cells, and only bone marrow cells become blood cells, that fighting the infection in the marrow (e.g. via a transplant though that's a big hammer) would be sufficient and any "infection" in the rest of the body would be irrelevant. Oh and hey there's some evidence that this actually works too.
You could of course be right and the entire body has its DNA re-written and that every cell in the body could potentially start creating new viruses. That's certainly not the only logical conclusion, nor do I think it's the most logical (since observation seems to go against it), but it's possible.
But ultimately the most logical conclusion that you or I can reach is that we should wait for the fine folks doing the research to continue to do their good work rather than assuming we've already got it all figured out. :P
From TFS's mention of "up to 8 CPUs or more with third-party node controllers" I'm(perhaps optimistically) assuming that that means all the RAM in an up to 8 socket system wouldn't be more than one hop away from any core.
The block diagram in TFA shows 4 QPI interfaces, so theoretically yes.
In practice almost certainly not, because that theoretical setup has no interfaces left to hook any I/O devices up to it and so is kinda useless. So at least one core has to dedicate at least one link to hook up a PCIe bridge or such. In a large server, you probably don't want all your I/O going through one link (where it then has to fan out from the least-connected CPU to wherever it is needed), so there'll be several CPUs that are not maximally connected.
Even more practically, routing all those links across each other to connect all the CPUs together on the mobo, while also making room for the rather ginormous amount of DRAM channel traces is going to be prohibitive. I'm betting they use no more than 3 QPI links for CPU-CPU interconnect per core, making a 2-hop system (which is still a challenge).
Even MORE practically, the 8-socket market is minuscule, anyone buying into it certainly has a specific application in mind, and you'll get way more bang for your buck making sure your application/OS are NUMA-aware than by trying to minimize hops by doubling the number of layers in your mobo.
That 24 MB of cache is there because it helps even in a 1-socket system, and of their many strengths Intel's greatest is their manufacturing capacity, so it only makes sense to flex that muscle. It's like how they used to get crazy Specfp2000 scores for the Itanium because they could put huge caches on it and that version of specfp should really have been called speccache. Unlike Itanium, though, that giant cache isn't just a layer of polish on a turd.
But in any case, is the Nehalem system architecture "substantially improved" from the P4 shared bus? Oh fuck yes.
I have to say, I've never seen a mock spelling of Obama that was so awesome as to suggest that he's secretly Irish.
There are about 25 million PCs sold per month. I guess ATI is happy to have sold 8% of that monthly amount over the several months their 5xxx have been available, that's 3-4% of PC sales. Congrats to them, but still, fairly marginal.
Oh I'm quite certain they are exceedingly happy, and I think you'll find that margin is exactly why. ;)
Discrete cards have always been better than IGPs. I don't really get your point. Only recently (definitely way after the pentium 1) have IGPs become good enough to display all video files, or handle Aero.
Aero didn't exist in Pentium 1 days, nor did anything consumer level that required OpenGL, nor could the highest-of-high-end consumer cards handled it anyway. Videos were generally small and low resolution, and only had to be decoded, not decrypted. People were doing different things with their computers.
The point is that IGP (or before integrated graphics, the bottom-of-the-line cards that came with budget computers) has been fine for most users for most of the history of the PC.
You say "standby fossil fuel generation has to be provided".
Fossil fuel companies hear "less fossil fuel generation has to be provided".
The fact that wind farms cannot replace all other forms of power generation is immaterial to people on either side of the issue. More renewable power is better than less renewable power to environmentalists, and less fossil fuel burning is worse than more fossil fuel burning. The "can't provide base load" argument is just a talking point used by the anti-wind-farm crowd who are hoping their audience will be unable to distinguish between "some" and "none".
Don't be that person.
Like OpenGL -vs- DirectX.... oh... wait... :-P
Ah, but see, that right there tells you why PhysX is doomed. The PhysX-equivalent from the early days of consumer 3D was 3DFX's GLIDE library. By the accounts I've heard a fine library, and it certainly did its job of enabling game developers to support 3DFX cards. Using it made good sense, even though I'm sure 3DFX payed some developers to do it, because at the time Voodoo was the only game in town. Nobody else provided consumer/gaming 3D capabilities on par. So that was good, for a time.
But then as soon as other graphics card manufacturers started making cards with similar capabilities, suddenly the value proposition for a game developer changed. Soon, you basically the choice of OpenGL, Direct3D, and GLIDE, and they broke down like this:
OpenGL: Runs on any platform.
Direct3D: Runs on any Microsoft platform.
GLIDE: Runs on any platform with a 3DFX card, and then still mostly Microsoft-only.
You can argue back and forth about the merits of Direct3D vs OpenGL and giving up non-MS platforms -- if you're including consoles, then maybe not a great idea, but if you're targeting the PC, then MS-only is still 95% and hell lots of games decide to be MS-only before the graphics API decision even gets made. But to go after only the subset of PCs that have a 3dfx and not an NVidia, ATI, or Matrox card? Yeah right! GLIDE dropped off the face of the planet.
PhysX is in the same boat. It's a library that should be replaced by an open standard like OpenCL that AMD is pushing, but may instead be replaced by Microsoft's DirectCompute or whatever they call it, or possible an ecosystem where both exist. Either way, unless PhysX somehow becomes the new MS library, it's going away and in 10 years nobody will remember it.
Theory is coming up with a hypothetical mechanism for incorporating extra information so that it doesn't require a known reference frame.
Engineering is making a device that actually does it reliably.
As my sibling post said, there's no clear dividing line. But this is definitely on the theory-ish side of it.
Two, it kills a LOT of cats! You get the code right, and BAM! dead cat.
I always suspected that all this "entangling photon pairs" and "quantum encryption channel" stuff was just a bunch of scientists jerking off, but I didn't think they were actually euphemisms for spanking it!
Good point, I'd forgotten all about anti-particles only annihilating their twins. :/
But at least all the signs on my current vectors would be pointing the right way!
Actually they're created in the Relativistic Heavy Irony Collider, which is distributed throughout London pubs.
That's all good, but the major discovery here is actually anti-hypernucleons made with anti-strange quarks. So yeah, they will annihilate on contact with normal matter just like non-strange anti-matter.
Sadly yes, and not only that. Your HOA is about to come after you for having a bunch of PCBs sticking out of your yard.
I'm guessing that with a name like "negatively strange antihypernucleic antimatter", Star Trek et al. will be all over this. Countdown until the term appears in sci-fi shows...
Probably... But what I'm really hoping is that scientists -- and by extension sci-fi shows -- adopt El Reg's proposed term for negative strangeness "hypermundanity".
Just imagine Data saying that. "Captain, the gaseous anomaly we've entered contains high levels of hypermundanity."
"*yawn* Tell me about it, Commander."
The curent attacks on the US infrastructure are simply finding our many weaknesses and no matter of sticking our heads in the sand will stop it. The only way to stop it is to start taking a proactive approach, shoring up our weaknesses, and start doing the same to our enemies.
Huh, that sounds like a familiar sentiment. Where have I heard it? Oh yeah, TFA!
Get it? "Shoring up our weaknesses" is exactly what he's talking about. What he's also saying is that you don't have to cry "Oh my god we're in a CYBERWAR!" and then use that to justify destroying privacy on the internet like McDonnel wanted to do.
I don't see how emailing your post to the white house could fail to do the job. I mean "sounds out of touch"? How can anyone read that and not know he's not suited for the job?
Seriously, focusing on online crime and espionage without re-engineering the internet to eliminate anonymity, instead of focusing on a Cyber-War buzzword with all the "but we're at war!" excuses for doing whatever they want? That's no way to exercise executive power! You're so right; how incompetent can you get?!