No, they aren't. Maxwell's equations don't preclude magnetic monopoles or the movement of net magnetic 'charge' (aka 'current'). In fact it's always been a mystery why monopoles didn't appear to exist. There was no theoretical reason why they shouldn't, we have just never found a particle carrying a net magnetic charge. We still haven't exactly, just a crystal structure in which you can find discreet units of net magnetic charge, but that's effectively the same thing. And now we've seen that these units can move through a structure, so magnetic current exists.
In a way this must be a relief. Electricity and magnetism are symmetric in so many ways, it was odd that in this one way they weren't since they're ultimately aspects of the same force (electromagnetism).
That's because the summary is just copypasta of the first paragraph of TFA, which goes on to say that monopole "quasti-particles" had already been observed.
Not really. What do you think would happen if they published their algorithms? Hint: Nothing. It's not 1999 where Google's results are drastically better than Webcrawler's or whatever.
And it's also not 1999, where their only source of advertising revenue was via ads displayed on the Google search engine or other associated services.
Google is currently the King Kong of online advertisement. They were already heading in that direction, and then they bought DoubleClick. The Google.com portal is just one source of revenue. Actually, now I'm wondering just how much... But even still, they have many more services now. Search is not the keystone of their business so much anymore.
Hell, for all we know Cuil or Bing has the greatest algorithm ever. No one will ever know because they don't go there.
How difficult are these things to build? Are we sure you can't cobble a crude but effective one out of a video cell phone, an R/C model aircraft, and a couple of iPods? How long before we see these things over U. S. skies?
Not difficult at all. As the article mentions, you can make UAVs from off-the-shelf components, and they were used by Hezbollah in the recent conflict with the IDF.
Don't worry, the assumption you assume is being made is not.
Hehe. I read that in TFA, and I thought "Are we sure it's that they don't think we can see them? Maybe they're assuming we can!"
"Hey, American watching from your little plane up in the sky! Here's what I think of you! You wanted to see some insurgent action, eh? Well here you go!"
Wikipedia lists the total death count from BOTH bombings by the end of 1945 at 220,000.
The Department of War estimated at the time that an invasion of Japan would result in 400,000 to 800,000 American and five to ten million Japanese fatalities.
I once read a transcript of one of Truman's cabinet meetings shortly before the end of the war, when they were deliberating on what to do. It was actually a pretty fascinating read.
While they were obviously considering every option, and the Department of War had drawn up detailed plans for a possible invasion (which is where the estimate above comes from) it's clear that Truman and his advisers were not seriously considering it at that point. They knew Japan was on the ropes and surrender was inevitable without needing to set foot on the island. With the Japanese navy serving as fish condos, there was nothing they could do to fight back or even feed themselves.
The main options under discussion were:
1 - Drop the bomb on multiple Japanese cities, multiple being important so as to suggest that we could continue doing so ad-infinitum rather than it being a one-off, forcing an unconditional surrender.
2 - Drop the bombs in the ocean as a demonstration. The biggest concern here was that they would not be suitably impressed or think it was somehow a trick, and then we wouldn't have enough to implement option 1.
3 - Wait for the Russians to get involved. Truman and his advisers were convinced that once Russia declared war, Japan would quickly surrender. The big problem here was that we wanted them to surrender just to us, not to the Russians. Cold War politics had already started to enter the picture, and we were "Allies" in name only.
4 - Accept conditional surrender. The Japanese had already made an offer to surrender, but due to communication problems the actual terms of this surrender were unknown. Certainly anything that allowed the Japanese to wage war again was completely unacceptable. It turns out all they really wanted was to retain a ceremonial role for the Emperor to save face, something which General MacArthur wisely gave them anyway. But at the time of the discussion, they didn't know. In any case, it was decided that no matter what the terms, nothing less than complete unconditional surrender would do for the enemy who had initiated the war.
There weren't really any good options.
Such is war.
By the way, my point isn't to second guess Truman. It was a difficult decision with no good options as you say, and as another poster mentioned he wasn't really aware of the impact the bomb would have in terms of radiation sickness etc. I don't think anyone really understood. Neither is my point to say with the benefit of hindsight that it was the wrong decision. I can't speak for the Japanese, but I have to imagine they were better off surrendering to us than ending up with a North Japan/South Japan situation.
My point is that the situation was much more complicated than the simple moral calculus implied by "drop the bombs and kill 200,000, or invade and kill millions". The real decision was not that clear-cut, and I think it dose a disservice both to the people who made it, and to ourselves in our efforts to learn from history, to pretend that it was.
Human beings can survive perfectly fine on a diet that does not include meat as a matter of biology.
So veganism is only a viable choice in the modern world of vitamin-enriched foods, but that's not vegetarianism. Luck thing a large portion of humanity evolved the ability to process milk sugars as adults, am I right?
But they're vegetarian velociraptors! They don't eat meat! Hardly ever! Only on special occasions. Or when they're really hungry. Or when the humans drop their guard- damn!
Excuse me, what is the difference? Perhaps the meat available to you (at least as far as your body knows) isn't very good, and so your body makes you want to eat vegetables. You think that it's a conscious decision because people like to analyze stuff, but that doesn't mean that you actually made a conscious decision. I'm not saying you didn't, but I argue that it's more likely that you're rationalizing something.
There are plenty of vegetarians who like meat, but choose not to eat it for a variety of reasons. So as you would put it their body "makes them want to eat meat", but they choose not to.
So unless you're trying to raise the whole Free Will philosophical discussion, the difference is blatantly obvious.
There are no indigenous vegetarians. None. You might reflect on that for a time. Plants have nervous systems and memories. I know a former raw food vegan fascist who had a revelation when she cried over murder of a food plant (I promise you I am not making this up, I think it was a broccoli of all things) and went back to feeding her body what it needed, a complete diet. Life feeds on life and we've evolved to eat meat.
Human beings can survive perfectly fine on a diet of just vegetables as a matter of biology, your opinion. Being capable of doing so as a matter of practical reality is different, which is why you don't find indigenous peoples who are strictly vegetarian. Because food scarcity means they have to take whatever food sources they can. In the modern world, it's a viable choice. We're not omnivores because we evolved to need meat, we're omnivores because it expanded our potential nutrition sources.
Oh and yeah, I feel the same way about killing plants for food as I do animals. They do have far more "consciousness" than most give them credit for. So I kill things to survive, including tasty animals, and don't feel bad about it. But I don't tell myself that I need to eat animals. Because I don't, either in a biological sense nor a practical sense. That would just be a rationalization.
Bullshit, you invite the attention. At least, you did with this comment. It doesn't bug you, it gratifies you. Perhaps you're a vegetarian just to annoy people, and you don't even know it.
I think the conspicuously vegetarian who are doing it for social posturing (regardless of whatever other motivations) are extremely annoying. But simply talking about it in a discussion of a "vegetarian" spider isn't "inviting" attention in the way you imply anymore than someone saying that they are gay in a discussion of animal sexuality is inviting attention. It's only inviting your attention because you are annoyed by someone claiming they made a choice. The question is: Did you choose to to be annoyed by the concept of free will and thus invite attention to your point of view with these asinine comments, or is it just nature? I see a pot here calling the kettle black.
Instead of going faster, cores became more optimized and doubled, quadrupled, and octocores are around the corner if not here already. However, the "Turbo" mode in the i5/i7 shows that cranking up the clock frequency still helps for single/low threaded applications.
For any given architecture, yes, higher clock speed will mean more performance. That's a given. But that doesn't mean it's worth chasing after by modifying the architecture, which is why there's been a "ceiling" on frequency in favor of more efficient architectures and yes Multi-core Mania.
So, why don't we have 8, 16, or 24 GHz clock frequencies? Is this only because of limitations (memory) bus speeds or is this because of silicon heat dissipation problems?
Not so much memory speeds, since memory bandwidth/latency can be a bottleneck for any high-performance design whether it goes the "speed demon" or "brainiac" route.
As you surmise, power is important. Dynamic power is proportional to clock frequency, and having to add extra flip-flops to store intermediate values in a long pipeline only exacerbates the issue. Those flops also burn static power, which has become a significant portion of the overall chip power budget (part of what doomed the P4 architecture). Power budgets are also much more constrained, and the manufacturers are trying to target fixed power budgets for different market segments. This means extra power burned may actually hurt your clock frequency, partially negating the gains of a high-frequency design. With performance-per-watt becoming a major metric for customers, and yes heat dissipation also being an issue, it doesn't make a lot of sense to chase high performance by also burning lots of power as high frequency designs naturally do.
So with that in mind, the "speed demon" vs "brainiac" debate leans towards the brainiac side. Though the number of gates per pipe stage is already pretty low. Getting it down further means substantially hurting IPC, without necessarily gaining tons of frequency. Branch mispredicts still happen. Having slightly more gates per stage, doing a better job of predicting branches or shuffling data around, having larger caches and TLBs, smarter schedulers, ends up being a better idea.
But as you say, frequency still matters. So I'd look to future chips trying to eek out as much frequency as possible within a given power envelope, not just by looking at the number of active threads/cores, but also by looking at the actual dynamic power situation and adjusting frequency accordingly. TDP values are worst-case scenarios for OEMs to design cooling solutions around. When the actual power usage is less than the worst case, when you have e.g. an integer-only app where the floating point units are unused, you can afford to crank up the frequency some and get extra performance.
It's all about being smart with your power budget these days. That's why 24GHz processors don't make any sense. Intel had very convincing data showing they could scale the P4 up that high and get good performance, but if you've seen the cooling solutions for the P4 Prescott, then you know why that ended up being a dead end.
" with hints of males helping to care for eggs and young, another behavior that is virtually unknown among spiders. "
Yeah... considering the number of species where the male gets the hell out of dodge as soon as they fertilize the female so they don't get eaten, I'm not so sure a species where the male is confident enough to stick around is a sign of emasculation.:)
To be fair, back in the day of the 386 and 486, AMD processors were essentially clones of their Intel counterparts. The only real difference between the AMD and Intel offerings was bus speed, processor speed, and external clock multiplier.
Well at the time AMD was literally a "second source" supplier because back then companies like IBM actually cared about that sort of thing. I don't think AMDvsIntel really mattered a lot, since nobody knew of AMD's existence. Hell, I owned two computers with AMD processors and didn't know it until over a decade later.
When the Pentium was eventually launched, AMD no longer produced a direct clone, and started releasing their processors with 'Performance Rating' (PR) numbers instead of clock speed, effectively claiming that their K5 processors were as efficient as a higher clocked Pentium.
I've heard AMDers call the K5 "the highest IPC x86 part ever", with a wry smirk because just like how MHz isn't everything, neither is IPC, and it never lived up to those Markethertz numbers in terms of real performance.
Funnily enough the Pentium showed the weakness of MHz as a raw metric without taking AMD into account. When the Pentium 60 and 75 were released, there were 486 DX4 100s (okay these were actually made by AMD but like I said who knew or cared?), and the P-75 was a better performer. Granted most of my friends were nerds, but many of them understood this concept back then.
I'd say AMD and the 486 compatible market had as much responsibility for the MHz war as intel.
To be sure, AMD only started talking about overall performance instead of just MHz when it started to hurt them. Forget the 486, in the P3 vs K7 days it was all about clock speed and the race to 1GHz. Sure, the architectures were still fairly similar and thus somewhat comparable by clock speed, but that hardly told the whole story.
It's taken a while for the market to get passed comparisons based on clock speed, and I'm glad to see the performance rating numbers dropped.
They're only semi-dropped. They were still used as relative-frequency indicators relative to Intel's offering from the K7 Palomino through most of the life of K8. Now that the P4 was dropped, and Intel switched to a completely opaque numbering scheme, AMD has switched to a non-comparison-based numbering scheme as well.
MHz is still a valuable comparison tool, but people seem to understand that you can only compare clock speed within a family of processors.
Yeah if you don't count the person I first replied to.:P
While Tarantula Hawks are awesome, it's not quite as crazy as what these other wasps do. The T-Hawk's victim is simply paralyzed to serve as food. The argyraphaga victim actually remains mobile, but does the wasp's bidding by first building a specialized web just to hold the larva's cocoon, then waiting patiently in the middle of the web to serve as a snack. It's a zombie minion.
You can keep 'observing' particles until you get the one you want, then stop. Th reciever would no what the alst one you did. Of course, you would have to know precisely when to look.
The receiver has no idea whether or not you've measured your particle or not.
Entanglement is just a correlation between states after collapse. When you measure yours, you know what the other person would see when they measured theirs. You don't know if they have done so or not, and vice versa. You cannot use it to transmit information. Any information transferred was transferred when you moved the particles apart at sub-light speeds.
On the plus side, you can use entanglement to create a secure sub-light speed communication channel. You can transmit information about the correlations you observe, and if they ever stop holding true, then you know someone tried to read your communication and thus broke the entanglement.
OTOH if we can get to the point where we can separate particles over vast distances, then it won't matter anyways.
I'm not sure how that follows. Seems to me that over truly vast distances, the lack of FTL communication would be a bigger problem.
looks like we've almost reached that point now. We've had Xeon 3.0GHz cpus for over 5 years now, and they're still coming out with brand new 3ghz processors. That's a long time to not see a jump in speed, what happened to "doubling every 18 months"? We should be around 24ghz by now.
Performance != MHz.
Those 3GHz Pentium 4 Xeons suck balls compared to even a Core 2, forget about an i7.
The only way the P4 got to what were at the time extremely high frequencies was by having a craptastic architecture. It was driven by marketing, which when the P4 was released was all about MHz. People thought MHz == Performance, so they cranked up the MHz for minimal gain in performance. AMD tried like hell to convince people otherwise, but fat lot of good it seemed to do. And now Intel is suffering for their previous emphasis on MHz over all.
All he's concerned about is quoting how many components can fit on a single integrated circuit. One can see this propagated to processing speed, memory capacity, sensors and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras but his observation itself is about the size of transistors -- not speed.
The title should be "The Ultimate Limit of Computing Speed" not Moore's Law.
Meh.
While technically correct, the performance corollary of Moore's Law -- which is roughly "more transistors generally means smaller and thus faster transistors rather than exploding die sizes, plus more to do computation with, so performance also increases exponentially, and we observe that this is the case" -- is strong enough that it's often simply called Moore's Law even among the engineers in the chip design industry. It's just understood what you're talking about, even though the time constant is different.
You'll occasionally see Intel (the company Moore founded) show charts with historical performance and future projections, and they'll include a line labeled "Moore's Law" to show how they're doing relative to the observation. Because technically it is just an observation, and it holds true only to the extent that engineers of the computer, electrical, and material science variety bust their asses to make it true.
So maybe the layman thinks Moore's Law is about performance, and that's not technically true, but it's correct enough that even the engineers directly affected by it refer to it as if it meant performance. So I say the the title is fine.
I just want to point out one thing about this, and how it relates to the article in question.
It's the physics of the situation that makes it impossible to communicate FTL.
Not that the physics says quantum entanglement lets you communicate FTL, so in order to prevent time paradoxes the universe sets it up so every time we try to use our Quantum Phone it mysteriously blows up before we can send anything.
It might be that the Higgs Boson exists but it is impossible to observe it. If so, then the LHC will fail to observe it. That has nothing to do with magnets breaking, coolant leaking, or any other problems getting it working.
You're only thinking in three dimensions. The concept is that the universe doesn't end when the Higgs boson is created, it's that the universe cannot take on a structure such that an event affects one that precedes it.
Yeah I realize I said "see the universe end". But I'm not thinking three dimensionally, and thus "was never allowed to be" is not in any way a better answer.
I think if you extend that to four dimensions, you sort of get this outcome: anything that causes a particle to move backwards through time is impossible. Therefore, the universe will not take on such a shape.
That's a great explanation for why FTL travel/communication is impossible. It could be a good explanation for why directly observing the Higgs is impossible.
It's a lousy explanation for why the magnets on the LHC suddenly break to prevent it from seeing the Higgs.
I think the real issue here is that people would like to see us as distinct from the universe - that somehow our actions are elective, not the result of natural processes.
Much like the question of whether a hypothetical machine that appears intelligent is really intelligent or just aping it perfectly, I think the question is moot. Also it has nothing to do with my objection.
I don't really buy the many worlds theory, or at least, if there are many worlds, it follows that there are in fact worlds that cannot exist. Not worlds that stop existing when they violate natural laws, impossible worlds that do not exist because their existence would violate natural laws. Structural laws about arrangement of objects in space-time.
Yes, that's more akin to my reference to the Uncertainty Principle, where you cannot measure both velocity and position beyond a certain precision because the very definition of 'momentum' and 'position' of a wave depend on contradictory factors. It's simply physics that says you can't do both. That's fine. If someone comes up with a similar principle or theory which shows the Higgs Boson cannot be observed, that's great.
This isn't like that. This is like you have a device that can measure position and velocity to infinite precision, but every time you try to turn it on, the velocity-measurement component of the device mysteriously catches fire.
Or it's like you have a space ship that all known physics says could travel faster than light and violate causality, and rather than it failing because the physics was wrong, it fails because the ignition switch snaps off when the astronaut tries to flick it. And when you fix it and try again, it turns out the second-rate repair crew didn't screw a PCB down tight enough so it shakes loose before the engine fully warms up. And then you fix that, but right as you hit the ignition it turns out the only rat on the entire orbital ship yard got into the conduit and chewed through a wire and fried itself and the system. And so on, and so on.
The whole idea here is that the LHC would work correctly and detect the Higgs Boson, so somehow "the universe" has to prevent it from ever firing up by breaking things that don't directly have anything to do with the Higgs at all.
That's fucking ridiculous.
It's either impossible to detect, or it isn't. If it's impossible, then when the LHC is finally up and running (and seriously, the setbacks have not been that unusual and are certainly not evidence of some kind of Cosmic Karma), then it simply won't detect the Higgs and we'll be left to scratch our heads as to whether it doesn't exist, or can't be observed by the LHC, or can't be observed at all.
Put it this way. Of all alternate Earths, the surviving ones (and, if you are reading this, you are in one of those) are the ones that never managed to produce one.
That's basically an appeal to the Anthropic Principle, and I find it deeply unsatisfying in this case.
It's fine and dandy as an answer to the big question "Why?", as in "Why does the universe exist, and why does it take the form it does?" This is essentially a philosophical question not a physics question, and as such "Because otherwise you wouldn't be here to ask" is a valid answer.
But this is more an issue of "How?" of the more mundane mechanical kind that physics is designed to answer. If creating the LHC causes the universe to implode or whatever, how is it that we haven't been able to do it? It's only suffered a few setbacks, nothing particularly unusual for bleeding-edge technology and physics, though they're of a fairly mundane nature, i.e. not involving the theoretical physics its designed to study. So when they fix those problems and turn it on, will the universe cease to be? Or is the idea that something will somehow break it again? How likely is it that these otherwise perfectly normal failures keep occurring, and thus how likely is it that I, in my version of "alternate earth", will see the universe end?
If there were actually a principle in physics that would prevent observation of the Higgs, I would expect it to be more like the Uncertainty Principle. Somehow the attempt to measure it would change it such that it is no longer where we expect it and thus we can never see it. Not that every time we fix the LHC and turn it on, the coolant leaks, or the power plant breaks down, or a rat chews through wires. That just makes no sense, and "well if that didn't happen the universe would end so you wouldn't be here to say it doesn't make sense" is a philosophical answer where a physics answer should be.
My spanish may be failing me, but "tres amiga" is just wrong. Should've been "tres amigas"
No you're right. I mean, it's the same as in English. "The Three Friend"? It's a typo in the summary; in TFA you can see it's spelled correctly.
But it's Amigas, so it's feminine. Lucky Day still works (if you want your daughter to be a stripper). Ned could be Nadine. And Dusty? I guess that could be a woman's name?
Has there ever been an instance of an entire regional grid going out? I mean it certainly made the news when a large portion of California had rolling blackouts, so I'm just assuming that if the entire Western Grid went out, I would have heard of it, and I haven't.
BTW, knocking this section out doesn't take all 3 grids down.
You mean it doesn't necessarily take all 3 grids down, if it's not designed to.
Well, I would design it to. And I would have a big switch where one setting was "America On" and the other would say "America Off". And it would be on the outside of the fence.
Which is probably why they never let me design anything.:(
The utility to me personally for this happening is minuscule.
The utility of switching a single house is minuscule, but so is the cost to you. Increase it to enough where you don't have to build a coal plant, which by the way are also frequently subsidized, and the utility to you is much more significant.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they aren't. Maxwell's equations don't preclude magnetic monopoles or the movement of net magnetic 'charge' (aka 'current'). In fact it's always been a mystery why monopoles didn't appear to exist. There was no theoretical reason why they shouldn't, we have just never found a particle carrying a net magnetic charge. We still haven't exactly, just a crystal structure in which you can find discreet units of net magnetic charge, but that's effectively the same thing. And now we've seen that these units can move through a structure, so magnetic current exists.
In a way this must be a relief. Electricity and magnetism are symmetric in so many ways, it was odd that in this one way they weren't since they're ultimately aspects of the same force (electromagnetism).
That's because the summary is just copypasta of the first paragraph of TFA, which goes on to say that monopole "quasti-particles" had already been observed.
Not really. What do you think would happen if they published their algorithms? Hint: Nothing. It's not 1999 where Google's results are drastically better than Webcrawler's or whatever.
And it's also not 1999, where their only source of advertising revenue was via ads displayed on the Google search engine or other associated services.
Google is currently the King Kong of online advertisement. They were already heading in that direction, and then they bought DoubleClick. The Google.com portal is just one source of revenue. Actually, now I'm wondering just how much... But even still, they have many more services now. Search is not the keystone of their business so much anymore.
Hell, for all we know Cuil or Bing has the greatest algorithm ever. No one will ever know because they don't go there.
What are those? I'll have to google them. :)
people in the Antarctic, where nobody's sweaty and probably people are generally somewhat calmer.
It's the penguins, isn't it? Nobody can be stressed around penguins.
Uh... I guess unless it's your job to shovel the penguin shit. But nobody has to do that in the Antarctic. So it's pure relaxing penguin bliss.
How difficult are these things to build? Are we sure you can't cobble a crude but effective one out of a video cell phone, an R/C model aircraft, and a couple of iPods? How long before we see these things over U. S. skies?
Not difficult at all. As the article mentions, you can make UAVs from off-the-shelf components, and they were used by Hezbollah in the recent conflict with the IDF.
Don't worry, the assumption you assume is being made is not.
"They just don't think we can see them."
Hehe. I read that in TFA, and I thought "Are we sure it's that they don't think we can see them? Maybe they're assuming we can!"
"Hey, American watching from your little plane up in the sky! Here's what I think of you! You wanted to see some insurgent action, eh? Well here you go!"
Okay probably not.
Wikipedia lists the total death count from BOTH bombings by the end of 1945 at 220,000.
The Department of War estimated at the time that an invasion of Japan would result in 400,000 to 800,000 American and five to ten million Japanese fatalities.
I once read a transcript of one of Truman's cabinet meetings shortly before the end of the war, when they were deliberating on what to do. It was actually a pretty fascinating read.
While they were obviously considering every option, and the Department of War had drawn up detailed plans for a possible invasion (which is where the estimate above comes from) it's clear that Truman and his advisers were not seriously considering it at that point. They knew Japan was on the ropes and surrender was inevitable without needing to set foot on the island. With the Japanese navy serving as fish condos, there was nothing they could do to fight back or even feed themselves.
The main options under discussion were:
1 - Drop the bomb on multiple Japanese cities, multiple being important so as to suggest that we could continue doing so ad-infinitum rather than it being a one-off, forcing an unconditional surrender.
2 - Drop the bombs in the ocean as a demonstration. The biggest concern here was that they would not be suitably impressed or think it was somehow a trick, and then we wouldn't have enough to implement option 1.
3 - Wait for the Russians to get involved. Truman and his advisers were convinced that once Russia declared war, Japan would quickly surrender. The big problem here was that we wanted them to surrender just to us, not to the Russians. Cold War politics had already started to enter the picture, and we were "Allies" in name only.
4 - Accept conditional surrender. The Japanese had already made an offer to surrender, but due to communication problems the actual terms of this surrender were unknown. Certainly anything that allowed the Japanese to wage war again was completely unacceptable. It turns out all they really wanted was to retain a ceremonial role for the Emperor to save face, something which General MacArthur wisely gave them anyway. But at the time of the discussion, they didn't know. In any case, it was decided that no matter what the terms, nothing less than complete unconditional surrender would do for the enemy who had initiated the war.
There weren't really any good options.
Such is war.
By the way, my point isn't to second guess Truman. It was a difficult decision with no good options as you say, and as another poster mentioned he wasn't really aware of the impact the bomb would have in terms of radiation sickness etc. I don't think anyone really understood. Neither is my point to say with the benefit of hindsight that it was the wrong decision. I can't speak for the Japanese, but I have to imagine they were better off surrendering to us than ending up with a North Japan/South Japan situation.
My point is that the situation was much more complicated than the simple moral calculus implied by "drop the bombs and kill 200,000, or invade and kill millions". The real decision was not that clear-cut, and I think it dose a disservice both to the people who made it, and to ourselves in our efforts to learn from history, to pretend that it was.
Fine.
Human beings can survive perfectly fine on a diet that does not include meat as a matter of biology.
So veganism is only a viable choice in the modern world of vitamin-enriched foods, but that's not vegetarianism. Luck thing a large portion of humanity evolved the ability to process milk sugars as adults, am I right?
But they're vegetarian velociraptors! They don't eat meat! Hardly ever! Only on special occasions. Or when they're really hungry. Or when the humans drop their guard- damn!
Excuse me, what is the difference? Perhaps the meat available to you (at least as far as your body knows) isn't very good, and so your body makes you want to eat vegetables. You think that it's a conscious decision because people like to analyze stuff, but that doesn't mean that you actually made a conscious decision. I'm not saying you didn't, but I argue that it's more likely that you're rationalizing something.
There are plenty of vegetarians who like meat, but choose not to eat it for a variety of reasons. So as you would put it their body "makes them want to eat meat", but they choose not to.
So unless you're trying to raise the whole Free Will philosophical discussion, the difference is blatantly obvious.
There are no indigenous vegetarians. None. You might reflect on that for a time. Plants have nervous systems and memories. I know a former raw food vegan fascist who had a revelation when she cried over murder of a food plant (I promise you I am not making this up, I think it was a broccoli of all things) and went back to feeding her body what it needed, a complete diet. Life feeds on life and we've evolved to eat meat.
Human beings can survive perfectly fine on a diet of just vegetables as a matter of biology, your opinion. Being capable of doing so as a matter of practical reality is different, which is why you don't find indigenous peoples who are strictly vegetarian. Because food scarcity means they have to take whatever food sources they can. In the modern world, it's a viable choice. We're not omnivores because we evolved to need meat, we're omnivores because it expanded our potential nutrition sources.
Oh and yeah, I feel the same way about killing plants for food as I do animals. They do have far more "consciousness" than most give them credit for. So I kill things to survive, including tasty animals, and don't feel bad about it. But I don't tell myself that I need to eat animals. Because I don't, either in a biological sense nor a practical sense. That would just be a rationalization.
Bullshit, you invite the attention. At least, you did with this comment. It doesn't bug you, it gratifies you. Perhaps you're a vegetarian just to annoy people, and you don't even know it.
I think the conspicuously vegetarian who are doing it for social posturing (regardless of whatever other motivations) are extremely annoying. But simply talking about it in a discussion of a "vegetarian" spider isn't "inviting" attention in the way you imply anymore than someone saying that they are gay in a discussion of animal sexuality is inviting attention. It's only inviting your attention because you are annoyed by someone claiming they made a choice. The question is: Did you choose to to be annoyed by the concept of free will and thus invite attention to your point of view with these asinine comments, or is it just nature? I see a pot here calling the kettle black.
Instead of going faster, cores became more optimized and doubled, quadrupled, and octocores are around the corner if not here already. However, the "Turbo" mode in the i5/i7 shows that cranking up the clock frequency still helps for single/low threaded applications.
For any given architecture, yes, higher clock speed will mean more performance. That's a given. But that doesn't mean it's worth chasing after by modifying the architecture, which is why there's been a "ceiling" on frequency in favor of more efficient architectures and yes Multi-core Mania.
So, why don't we have 8, 16, or 24 GHz clock frequencies? Is this only because of limitations (memory) bus speeds or is this because of silicon heat dissipation problems?
Not so much memory speeds, since memory bandwidth/latency can be a bottleneck for any high-performance design whether it goes the "speed demon" or "brainiac" route.
As you surmise, power is important. Dynamic power is proportional to clock frequency, and having to add extra flip-flops to store intermediate values in a long pipeline only exacerbates the issue. Those flops also burn static power, which has become a significant portion of the overall chip power budget (part of what doomed the P4 architecture). Power budgets are also much more constrained, and the manufacturers are trying to target fixed power budgets for different market segments. This means extra power burned may actually hurt your clock frequency, partially negating the gains of a high-frequency design. With performance-per-watt becoming a major metric for customers, and yes heat dissipation also being an issue, it doesn't make a lot of sense to chase high performance by also burning lots of power as high frequency designs naturally do.
So with that in mind, the "speed demon" vs "brainiac" debate leans towards the brainiac side. Though the number of gates per pipe stage is already pretty low. Getting it down further means substantially hurting IPC, without necessarily gaining tons of frequency. Branch mispredicts still happen. Having slightly more gates per stage, doing a better job of predicting branches or shuffling data around, having larger caches and TLBs, smarter schedulers, ends up being a better idea.
But as you say, frequency still matters. So I'd look to future chips trying to eek out as much frequency as possible within a given power envelope, not just by looking at the number of active threads/cores, but also by looking at the actual dynamic power situation and adjusting frequency accordingly. TDP values are worst-case scenarios for OEMs to design cooling solutions around. When the actual power usage is less than the worst case, when you have e.g. an integer-only app where the floating point units are unused, you can afford to crank up the frequency some and get extra performance.
It's all about being smart with your power budget these days. That's why 24GHz processors don't make any sense. Intel had very convincing data showing they could scale the P4 up that high and get good performance, but if you've seen the cooling solutions for the P4 Prescott, then you know why that ended up being a dead end.
" with hints of males helping to care for eggs and young, another behavior that is virtually unknown among spiders. "
Yeah... considering the number of species where the male gets the hell out of dodge as soon as they fertilize the female so they don't get eaten, I'm not so sure a species where the male is confident enough to stick around is a sign of emasculation. :)
To be fair, back in the day of the 386 and 486, AMD processors were essentially clones of their Intel counterparts. The only real difference between the AMD and Intel offerings was bus speed, processor speed, and external clock multiplier.
Well at the time AMD was literally a "second source" supplier because back then companies like IBM actually cared about that sort of thing. I don't think AMDvsIntel really mattered a lot, since nobody knew of AMD's existence. Hell, I owned two computers with AMD processors and didn't know it until over a decade later.
When the Pentium was eventually launched, AMD no longer produced a direct clone, and started releasing their processors with 'Performance Rating' (PR) numbers instead of clock speed, effectively claiming that their K5 processors were as efficient as a higher clocked Pentium.
I've heard AMDers call the K5 "the highest IPC x86 part ever", with a wry smirk because just like how MHz isn't everything, neither is IPC, and it never lived up to those Markethertz numbers in terms of real performance.
Funnily enough the Pentium showed the weakness of MHz as a raw metric without taking AMD into account. When the Pentium 60 and 75 were released, there were 486 DX4 100s (okay these were actually made by AMD but like I said who knew or cared?), and the P-75 was a better performer. Granted most of my friends were nerds, but many of them understood this concept back then.
I'd say AMD and the 486 compatible market had as much responsibility for the MHz war as intel.
To be sure, AMD only started talking about overall performance instead of just MHz when it started to hurt them. Forget the 486, in the P3 vs K7 days it was all about clock speed and the race to 1GHz. Sure, the architectures were still fairly similar and thus somewhat comparable by clock speed, but that hardly told the whole story.
It's taken a while for the market to get passed comparisons based on clock speed, and I'm glad to see the performance rating numbers dropped.
They're only semi-dropped. They were still used as relative-frequency indicators relative to Intel's offering from the K7 Palomino through most of the life of K8. Now that the P4 was dropped, and Intel switched to a completely opaque numbering scheme, AMD has switched to a non-comparison-based numbering scheme as well.
MHz is still a valuable comparison tool, but people seem to understand that you can only compare clock speed within a family of processors.
Yeah if you don't count the person I first replied to. :P
While Tarantula Hawks are awesome, it's not quite as crazy as what these other wasps do. The T-Hawk's victim is simply paralyzed to serve as food. The argyraphaga victim actually remains mobile, but does the wasp's bidding by first building a specialized web just to hold the larva's cocoon, then waiting patiently in the middle of the web to serve as a snack. It's a zombie minion.
You can keep 'observing' particles until you get the one you want, then stop.
Th reciever would no what the alst one you did. Of course, you would have to know precisely when to look.
The receiver has no idea whether or not you've measured your particle or not.
Entanglement is just a correlation between states after collapse. When you measure yours, you know what the other person would see when they measured theirs. You don't know if they have done so or not, and vice versa. You cannot use it to transmit information. Any information transferred was transferred when you moved the particles apart at sub-light speeds.
On the plus side, you can use entanglement to create a secure sub-light speed communication channel. You can transmit information about the correlations you observe, and if they ever stop holding true, then you know someone tried to read your communication and thus broke the entanglement.
OTOH if we can get to the point where we can separate particles over vast distances, then it won't matter anyways.
I'm not sure how that follows. Seems to me that over truly vast distances, the lack of FTL communication would be a bigger problem.
looks like we've almost reached that point now. We've had Xeon 3.0GHz cpus for over 5 years now, and they're still coming out with brand new 3ghz processors. That's a long time to not see a jump in speed, what happened to "doubling every 18 months"? We should be around 24ghz by now.
Performance != MHz.
Those 3GHz Pentium 4 Xeons suck balls compared to even a Core 2, forget about an i7.
The only way the P4 got to what were at the time extremely high frequencies was by having a craptastic architecture. It was driven by marketing, which when the P4 was released was all about MHz. People thought MHz == Performance, so they cranked up the MHz for minimal gain in performance. AMD tried like hell to convince people otherwise, but fat lot of good it seemed to do. And now Intel is suffering for their previous emphasis on MHz over all.
All he's concerned about is quoting how many components can fit on a single integrated circuit. One can see this propagated to processing speed, memory capacity, sensors and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras but his observation itself is about the size of transistors -- not speed.
The title should be "The Ultimate Limit of Computing Speed" not Moore's Law.
Meh.
While technically correct, the performance corollary of Moore's Law -- which is roughly "more transistors generally means smaller and thus faster transistors rather than exploding die sizes, plus more to do computation with, so performance also increases exponentially, and we observe that this is the case" -- is strong enough that it's often simply called Moore's Law even among the engineers in the chip design industry. It's just understood what you're talking about, even though the time constant is different.
You'll occasionally see Intel (the company Moore founded) show charts with historical performance and future projections, and they'll include a line labeled "Moore's Law" to show how they're doing relative to the observation. Because technically it is just an observation, and it holds true only to the extent that engineers of the computer, electrical, and material science variety bust their asses to make it true.
So maybe the layman thinks Moore's Law is about performance, and that's not technically true, but it's correct enough that even the engineers directly affected by it refer to it as if it meant performance. So I say the the title is fine.
Naw, the Ubuntu code name is Vegetarian Velociraptor.
I just want to point out one thing about this, and how it relates to the article in question.
It's the physics of the situation that makes it impossible to communicate FTL.
Not that the physics says quantum entanglement lets you communicate FTL, so in order to prevent time paradoxes the universe sets it up so every time we try to use our Quantum Phone it mysteriously blows up before we can send anything.
It might be that the Higgs Boson exists but it is impossible to observe it. If so, then the LHC will fail to observe it. That has nothing to do with magnets breaking, coolant leaking, or any other problems getting it working.
You're only thinking in three dimensions. The concept is that the universe doesn't end when the Higgs boson is created, it's that the universe cannot take on a structure such that an event affects one that precedes it.
Yeah I realize I said "see the universe end". But I'm not thinking three dimensionally, and thus "was never allowed to be" is not in any way a better answer.
I think if you extend that to four dimensions, you sort of get this outcome: anything that causes a particle to move backwards through time is impossible. Therefore, the universe will not take on such a shape.
That's a great explanation for why FTL travel/communication is impossible. It could be a good explanation for why directly observing the Higgs is impossible.
It's a lousy explanation for why the magnets on the LHC suddenly break to prevent it from seeing the Higgs.
I think the real issue here is that people would like to see us as distinct from the universe - that somehow our actions are elective, not the result of natural processes.
Much like the question of whether a hypothetical machine that appears intelligent is really intelligent or just aping it perfectly, I think the question is moot. Also it has nothing to do with my objection.
I don't really buy the many worlds theory, or at least, if there are many worlds, it follows that there are in fact worlds that cannot exist. Not worlds that stop existing when they violate natural laws, impossible worlds that do not exist because their existence would violate natural laws. Structural laws about arrangement of objects in space-time.
Yes, that's more akin to my reference to the Uncertainty Principle, where you cannot measure both velocity and position beyond a certain precision because the very definition of 'momentum' and 'position' of a wave depend on contradictory factors. It's simply physics that says you can't do both. That's fine. If someone comes up with a similar principle or theory which shows the Higgs Boson cannot be observed, that's great.
This isn't like that. This is like you have a device that can measure position and velocity to infinite precision, but every time you try to turn it on, the velocity-measurement component of the device mysteriously catches fire.
Or it's like you have a space ship that all known physics says could travel faster than light and violate causality, and rather than it failing because the physics was wrong, it fails because the ignition switch snaps off when the astronaut tries to flick it. And when you fix it and try again, it turns out the second-rate repair crew didn't screw a PCB down tight enough so it shakes loose before the engine fully warms up. And then you fix that, but right as you hit the ignition it turns out the only rat on the entire orbital ship yard got into the conduit and chewed through a wire and fried itself and the system. And so on, and so on.
The whole idea here is that the LHC would work correctly and detect the Higgs Boson, so somehow "the universe" has to prevent it from ever firing up by breaking things that don't directly have anything to do with the Higgs at all.
That's fucking ridiculous.
It's either impossible to detect, or it isn't. If it's impossible, then when the LHC is finally up and running (and seriously, the setbacks have not been that unusual and are certainly not evidence of some kind of Cosmic Karma), then it simply won't detect the Higgs and we'll be left to scratch our heads as to whether it doesn't exist, or can't be observed by the LHC, or can't be observed at all.
Put it this way. Of all alternate Earths, the surviving ones (and, if you are reading this, you are in one of those) are the ones that never managed to produce one.
That's basically an appeal to the Anthropic Principle, and I find it deeply unsatisfying in this case.
It's fine and dandy as an answer to the big question "Why?", as in "Why does the universe exist, and why does it take the form it does?" This is essentially a philosophical question not a physics question, and as such "Because otherwise you wouldn't be here to ask" is a valid answer.
But this is more an issue of "How?" of the more mundane mechanical kind that physics is designed to answer. If creating the LHC causes the universe to implode or whatever, how is it that we haven't been able to do it? It's only suffered a few setbacks, nothing particularly unusual for bleeding-edge technology and physics, though they're of a fairly mundane nature, i.e. not involving the theoretical physics its designed to study. So when they fix those problems and turn it on, will the universe cease to be? Or is the idea that something will somehow break it again? How likely is it that these otherwise perfectly normal failures keep occurring, and thus how likely is it that I, in my version of "alternate earth", will see the universe end?
If there were actually a principle in physics that would prevent observation of the Higgs, I would expect it to be more like the Uncertainty Principle. Somehow the attempt to measure it would change it such that it is no longer where we expect it and thus we can never see it. Not that every time we fix the LHC and turn it on, the coolant leaks, or the power plant breaks down, or a rat chews through wires. That just makes no sense, and "well if that didn't happen the universe would end so you wouldn't be here to say it doesn't make sense" is a philosophical answer where a physics answer should be.
My spanish may be failing me, but "tres amiga" is just wrong. Should've been "tres amigas"
No you're right. I mean, it's the same as in English. "The Three Friend"? It's a typo in the summary; in TFA you can see it's spelled correctly.
But it's Amigas, so it's feminine. Lucky Day still works (if you want your daughter to be a stripper). Ned could be Nadine. And Dusty? I guess that could be a woman's name?
Has there ever been an instance of an entire regional grid going out? I mean it certainly made the news when a large portion of California had rolling blackouts, so I'm just assuming that if the entire Western Grid went out, I would have heard of it, and I haven't.
BTW, knocking this section out doesn't take all 3 grids down.
You mean it doesn't necessarily take all 3 grids down, if it's not designed to.
Well, I would design it to. And I would have a big switch where one setting was "America On" and the other would say "America Off". And it would be on the outside of the fence.
Which is probably why they never let me design anything. :(
The utility to me personally for this happening is minuscule.
The utility of switching a single house is minuscule, but so is the cost to you. Increase it to enough where you don't have to build a coal plant, which by the way are also frequently subsidized, and the utility to you is much more significant.