Yeah, you can just ignore the movie altogether, but that would be like not reading the last chapter of LOTR. I won't stop doing something because I'm afraid of a possible disappointment, and in any case, for me curiosity will always kill the cat.
Huh? If you stop reading before the last chapter of a book, then you haven't finished the book. When the credits roll, the movie is over and done. The next movie that you're comparing to the last chapter doesn't even exist yet!
Did you stop watching Star War movies after finishing the original trilogy? I don't imagine what else you could have done, since there weren't any more for another 16 years; the end always seems like a good place to finish for me. It stood on its own for all that time.
See, if the last chapter of LotR was really a dance party (the movie was close, minus Sauron:P), that would be a bad book and it would have always been bad. Yet the actual book was good. This is when someone else comes along later, someone who half the time isn't even the same person as who made the original (or is but has been rendered retarded by pride, isolation, and wealth), and tacks on a dance-party ending to the sequel, how does that affect the original work?
But I guess it does somehow. So you can't avoid seeing the movie even though you're sure it will be terrible because of curiosity or a need to "finish" something that was done until the new thing came out, and when it is terrible it ruins everything you've seen before. That seems very sad and self-destructive to me. I'm glad I don't think that way.
Yeah, right. I remember a time they improved their process, and it sped things up too much, so they switched to a different architecture that would slow things back down. It was the P4.
Wait, you think they specifically designed the P4 to be slower than the P3, and since at that time P3 was behind K7, to be slower than the competition? Because their fab tech was so good the P3 would have been dominant? Like they really spent half a decade of wall clock time and however many tens of thousands of man-hours to develop a product with the mandate of "slower than what we had before"? That it was a deliberate strategy to hand AMD the undisputed performance crown for the next few years?
Keeee-rack rock you're smoking there.
The P4 was absolutely designed to be faster than the P3. It wasn't when first launched and paired with SDRAM instead of the RDRAM it was designed around. That was because they had to make design tradeoffs to reduce specs from the original design, and fab problems preventing higher frequencies at launch. They got a lot of these problems fixed, and the P4 eventually started to shine. Not very bright, it was never as good as it was supposed to be and only late in life really put any pressure on AMD. That's called failure, not success.
Then, after a while, they couldn't make that dog's breakfast architecture perform even with the improved fabrication.
But I thought they wanted it to run slow...
Seriously, though, the P4 got dropped because of another failure, this time in their models of future fab tech. Intel had charts projecting possible frequency improvements in P4 architecture as they got newer fab tech, and with all the added pipe stages required and so forth it still gave a good looking performance story. The architecture had a lot of scalability. But it didn't come to pass, because roughly in the 90nm node, leakage balloned up higher than they had expected. When suddenly leakage started taking up half the power budget, their old expectations for ramping clock speeds went out the window and the P4's particular trade-off no longer made any sense at all. Since the problem was only going to get worse, the 65nm Tejas project was scrapped.
It was the ancient "brainiac" vs "speed demon" argument, finally resolved by a factor few if any predicted.
So, they switched back to their previous architecture. That's what we're buying now... P4 era fabrication technology with a slightly polished P3 architecture.
Well if you're going to call the i7 or Core 2 "slightly polished P3 architecture", at least get it right and call them Pentium Pros. That's really the ancestor of these architectures, though they have huge differences from the original. There's much more difference between them and P3 than there was between P3 and PPro. And you certainly couldn't take either a P3 or a PPro and make it in today's tech and have it run as fast (meaning just frequency here, absolutely forget performance-wise). It took years of development at the Israel site to make the Pentium M which really was a polished P3, and years for its successors as well.
"P4 era fab tech" is laughably wrong, btw. They never made 45nm P4s, capiche? Really, ridiculing Intel's fab tech, or implying that they are sandbagging, when they are the leader in fab tech and the next best (eg AMD, IBM) are desperately trying to catch up, is just ridiculous. Are you saying Intel is so great that they can stay on top even though they're holding back 10x improvements, while AMD and IBM trying as hard as they can are unable to keep up with the sandbagged tech? Or is it that AMD wants to be behind, because having slower products and paying the cost-per-die penalty for a larger transistor node is working so well for them right now?
Seriously, the amount of effort required to advance technology at the exponential rate Moore's Law predicts is a tremendous amount of effort, which everyone knows can't possibly go on foreve
Re:Because you don't need more cycles in biz
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An interface is supposed to do its job. When I play games or when I watch an animation, I want pretty. When I work, I want efficiency. Don't mix that and we'll remain friends.
Even after I took a dump through your moon roof? That's quite magnanimous of you! Very well, I accept.
Re:Bad Logic
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My own opinion is that it sets the limit for where they can stop and relax their efforts, internally.
They can never stop and relax. They're chasing an exponential growth curve.
Given the amount of secrecy in this industry, I'm not certain how you can back this statement up with any fact. My own assumption is that 'they' have developed technology far more capable than what they currently claim to be working on at any given time. I personally believe that what they claim is on the drawing board is actually in prototype, what they claim to be in dev is actually ready for production, and their 'latest and greatest' is already old tech.
I've worked at several processor companies with top-of-the-line fab tech, including Mr. Moore's. While my NDAs probably mean I can't tell you anything specific with regard to scheduling, I can tell you without fear of revealing any secrets that you're way off base. They are not sand-bagging with more advanced tech waiting in the wings.
The only sense in which you are correct is that the 'latest and greatest' thing you can buy is old tech relative to things then under development. That's because there's typically a year give or take (usually give) between receiving the first silicon from the fab in the transistor node the product was designed for and all the validation, bug fixes, and spins on the product before it's ready to be sold. That means the fab tech has to be done and mostly stable by the time you start this process, so go roughly six months back before that where they're making test chips in the new fab to make sure it's working. And development of that fab tech before it's ready to run its first test chip wafer is two or more years before that, with R&D going on for years before that.
So yeah, when you could buy a 65nm CPU in the store, there may have been a 45nm CPU or just a test chip coming out of a fab somewhere, and a 32nm lithography machine being developed somewhere else, and a lab somewhere working out how 22nm lithography would work. But that's not 'sandbagging' because all of those things were years of serious non-stop development away from becoming products! Keeping on the exponential growth curve means that there has to be a constant pipeline of developments, and this pipeline is quite long.
And believe me, if they could increase the rate at which those future techs become available for making product, they would. "Sandbagging" means wasting competitive advantage, and wasting money. The machinery in the fabs for each node cost billions of dollars, and they depreciate rapidly. If they had some new tech working flawlessly, but weren't using it in products and just waiting in the wings, they'd be flushing hundreds of millions down the toilet. Time to market is one of the most important things they look at.
Honestly, if you look at actual press releases and actual product launches, it's much more likely that what they claim is a prototype is really on the drawing board, and what they claim to be ready for production is really still in development -- see the AMD Barcelona for the most recent example. You think they had the Phenom II just waiting in the wings while they got beat up in the press and the market over the launch of Phenom?
Now this isn't to say that they wouldn't sandbag if it were possible, and to some minor extent they have. When K7 had a big leg up over P3 in frequency headroom, or Core 2 vs aging K8s, sure they held back a little to get more margin on a cheaper part. But we're talking a speed grade delayed by a month or two. Barely noticeable noise on the curve. Actually tracking that curve requires non-stop expenditures and execution of R&D, and any significant slip-up could send a company flat on its face. To slow development on purpose? Ridiculous.
In my mind, this is the only way to sustain this curve - by limiting the release of new technology onto the market until Moore's says that it is time for it.
Think about it in terms of l
Re:Bad Logic
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I guess that's what happens when you cut and paste computer science terms from an Economist article. In the next sentence, you state correctly that Moore's "Law" is an observation not a law! It's not that the computer industry (and I think we're only talking hardware here) follows this observation, it's that historically it has held true. No one's going to make a huge leap in R&D to be able to put 10x the number of transistors on a chip only to have engineers come down on them to stop it saying "no one has ever broken Moore's Law and we're not going to start now!" That idea is preposterous. We're limited by our own technology that happens to follow an ok model, it's not a choice!
Yes, that's all true, but if you don't think chip makers throw up graphs with a curve on them for Moore's Law and use that as a guideline for where they should be in the future, which could be called "following"... you're mistaken. Obviously if the observation continues to hold true, that's only because of the advances in R&D that produce new technology. However those advances come as a result of choices, like how much and what kind of R&D to do, and those choices are themselves driven in part by Moore's Law.
Now as far as going faster and getting 10x more transistors on a chip, sure that's not much of a choice. That's because the industry is already busting its ass to maintain the current exponential trend. For that very reason I'd never take the phrase "following Moore's Law" to mean intentionally limiting technology advancement. Au contraire, if anything I take it to mean we're "following" in the sense that you'd be "following" Usian Bolt in the 200m dash -- if you're anywhere near keeping up, you're a bad ass. The only motivation would be to drop off that pace.
Which, to some extent, we've already seen in the 00's. It's still exponential growth, but the time factor has increased somewhat. I can't remember the data I saw, but it appeared to have gone from a doubling every 18 months to 24?
By the way, I agree the examples are pretty poor. For virtualization you want the newest beefiest processor with the best hardware support for virtualization you can get. The whole idea is that you want a single machine to appear as though it is a plethora of machines each with enough horsepower to do whatever that specific machine needs to do. This is the opposite of just wanting to do the same thing cheaper, it's wanting to do the same thing times a plethora, so you need a machine that is at least one plethora times as powerful. Being cheaper overall is just a desirable side effect. I hope you agree that "plethora" is a great word.
You should never take chances. It's safer that way.
If you're so sensitive that watching a bad movie will actually damage your love for a different movie, and this is actually painful for you... Then yeah. You should probably not take many chances in life, due to insufficient stomach for the most pathetic of consequences.
There is nothing Blade Runner 2 can do that will reduce my enjoyment of Blade Runner. I pity anyone who can't say that.
Processor + host chipset + GPU, on the other hand, is a bigger chunk of cash. If AMD don't have a competitive CPU, then that market will go to Intel at the low end and Intel + Nvidia at the high end.
That's really only one extra chip since the GPU will be integrated on the chipset, still with razor thin margins. That's really not any better, since what's important is the margin they can get for a given piece of silicon. Selling an extra hunk of silicon with a tiny margin makes no more sense than selling just the CPU.
And there's no such thing as a 'high end' netbook. That would just be a mainstream laptop, and AMD is competing there.
On the other hand, demand for chips like the Atom in netbooks is so high at the moment, AMD must be mad to be pulling out of this market.
Think less about units sold and think more about gross margins, and you'll see why a company with limited R&D resources like AMD may not be mad to let the netbook market go. Despite their popularity, the actual amount of money to be made selling netbook processors isn't that big.
Though I wouldn't expect them to be out of it forever. As the size of the netbook market grows, it will make more sense to try to take a chunk out of it. Right now, though, getting whatever 10-20% of the market they could get would not result in enough revenue to warrant large expenditure of R&D.
... how about Alzheimer's? That seem worth worrying about?
This isn't some dreadlocked dude outside the "tobacco accessories" store telling you about an article they read in High Times or equivalent blog. It's a medical study conducted by a university. Maybe there's promise in this particular study, maybe there's not, fact is for some people this is serious. Many people in the medical community see a lot of potential in marijuana, but because "everyone is mean to marijuana", specifically the government, they have had a lot of difficulty studying it.
That sounds like something worth bellyaching about to me. But hey, I guess I should just keep my sophomoric mouth shut and abide the status quo.
Well yeah, because they'd already put a lot of attention to detail into it! For instance if you recall, at the beginning of the movie his bat costume was bullet proof, but not dog proof, and he had to make the very realistic sacrifice of mobility to gain the all-important dog-proofing.
Hey, I still like Tron... even though it hurts my brain to pretend any part of it is plausible it's worth it to watch David Warner chew scenery... end of line.
Actually, I think the best part about Tron is that it is blatantly computer-based fantasy. I mean, it's one thing to say "I'll crack the government database with Visual Basic" or "I'll upload the virus to the alien computers with my Mac". It's another to say "inside the computer is a virtual world where programs walk around like people and use laser tanks to fight each other and have romances". One is a silly attempt to do something computers "actually" could do. The other just jumps right off the deep end and creates a fantasy world.
It's way easier to take "Oh, you're a bit!" in stride when you've already got accounting programs playing gladiatorial games than it is to hear "This isn't just a multi-monitor setup. It's a Hydra(tm)(r)!" in a movie that's trying to 'seriously' depict hacking.
Primer was a heck of a good movie. It probably could have been tweaked just a bit so you wouldn't need the voiceover to make sense of everything, but all in all it was brilliant for such a low-budget movie.
I don't think Primer could be changed in a way where it was still as great a movie, but made sense on the first viewing (much less minus voiceover). I've only seen it once, btw.;)
My favorite part I think was when I realized that when they had their "first" meeting at the bench outside the university, the guy sitting with the headphone in his ear had already been back in time and was listening to the conversation pre-recorded. Even though when that scene occurred it appeared as though only the other guy actually knew about the working time machine.
the asteroid is coorbital, it's a little misleading to say that it's "passing" within 400,000 miles. what's really interesting is that it will be at more or less that same distance for many months, suggesting that it and earth share a common history.
So earth and this asteroid have a "history" that results in them still orbiting in the same social circles, but generally trying to stay as far apart from one another as they can, though it's always possible that gravity may draw them together in a catastrophic collision.
If you are a decent well learned programmer, essentialy an expert in algorithmic complexity, then surely you understand the comparison O(n) vs O(log n) and why you cannot refute it with horseshit.
Meh. The same thing could be said about Z-buffer, which is O(n), vs Painter's Algorithm, which is O(n log n). Until the hardware became fast enough to overcome the much larger multiplicative constants in Z-buffer, Painter's Algorithm won and that's all there is to it. Not only did it take quite a while until hardware was fast enough that Z-buffer was even feasible, it took a while before hardware was fast enough to have scenes with enough complexity that the scaling factor worked in Z-buffer's favor. It wasn't until z-buffer could render a scene of equal complexity as painter's equally fast that the switch was made.
So the thing is, while anyone can look and say that, at least given the existing options, raytracing is the future and rasterization will be a thing of the past, that reality isn't coming soon. Our rasterization algorithms and software are very good and only getting better. Raytracing only has a chance when scene complexity increases to the point where it can outdo rasterization. However, scene complexity is not going to increase faster than the rate that rasterization itself allows.
It's like sending someone an encrypted message over an insecure channel. Great until you realize you now have to send him the key over the same channel. Sure it's encrypted, but the means of making it useful renders it ineffective.
Sure you can, you just need to use public key encryption. So I guess you're saying we need public key quantum entanglement?
Thank you for the explanation, that was very helpful.
One more question, about measurement. Is there any way to know that measurement has taken place at the other end and your local qubit has collapsed? Or would determining that constitute a measurement in and of itself, meaning if it hadn't been collapsed it then would be so you wouldn't know what happened? I mean, I know the answer is you can't communicate instantly, I'm just figuring out why (mostly to help explain to people with roughly my same layman's understanding of physics why instant communication is impossible).
Yes. Setting up the entangled state here requires both atoms to emit photons, so that occurs at light speed. It follows the same old rules. Although the state of one atom, once measured, will affect the other atom instantaneously, there's no possibility for FTL communication.
Okay, can you clarify for me why exactly you can't? Is it because you can't actually control what state the measured atom, and thus the distant atom, will take?
Well, I think that's roughly the essence of why you can't send information instantly. All information about the qubits is actually sent with the qubit itself as you separate them to whatever arbitrary distance you're going to do your 'teleportation' trick. It's a little less obvious to me exactly why that is... my understanding is that it's kinda like you have both a black and red marble and you send one around the world, well when one guy checks and sees that his marble is red, the other guy instantly knows that his marble is black. But the first guy doesn't get to pick black or red, and you always knew that the one marble would be the opposite color of the other, so you don't really know anything you didn't before.
But I'm not really sure if what I'm saying there is even close to right.
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I was making a more general point, but ok.
Sure, but the GP wasn't.
Yeah, you can just ignore the movie altogether, but that would be like not reading the last chapter of LOTR. I won't stop doing something because I'm afraid of a possible disappointment, and in any case, for me curiosity will always kill the cat.
Huh? If you stop reading before the last chapter of a book, then you haven't finished the book. When the credits roll, the movie is over and done. The next movie that you're comparing to the last chapter doesn't even exist yet!
Did you stop watching Star War movies after finishing the original trilogy? I don't imagine what else you could have done, since there weren't any more for another 16 years; the end always seems like a good place to finish for me. It stood on its own for all that time.
See, if the last chapter of LotR was really a dance party (the movie was close, minus Sauron :P), that would be a bad book and it would have always been bad. Yet the actual book was good. This is when someone else comes along later, someone who half the time isn't even the same person as who made the original (or is but has been rendered retarded by pride, isolation, and wealth), and tacks on a dance-party ending to the sequel, how does that affect the original work?
But I guess it does somehow. So you can't avoid seeing the movie even though you're sure it will be terrible because of curiosity or a need to "finish" something that was done until the new thing came out, and when it is terrible it ruins everything you've seen before. That seems very sad and self-destructive to me. I'm glad I don't think that way.
Yeah, right. I remember a time they improved their process, and it sped things up too much, so they switched to a different architecture that would slow things back down. It was the P4.
Wait, you think they specifically designed the P4 to be slower than the P3, and since at that time P3 was behind K7, to be slower than the competition? Because their fab tech was so good the P3 would have been dominant? Like they really spent half a decade of wall clock time and however many tens of thousands of man-hours to develop a product with the mandate of "slower than what we had before"? That it was a deliberate strategy to hand AMD the undisputed performance crown for the next few years?
Keeee-rack rock you're smoking there.
The P4 was absolutely designed to be faster than the P3. It wasn't when first launched and paired with SDRAM instead of the RDRAM it was designed around. That was because they had to make design tradeoffs to reduce specs from the original design, and fab problems preventing higher frequencies at launch. They got a lot of these problems fixed, and the P4 eventually started to shine. Not very bright, it was never as good as it was supposed to be and only late in life really put any pressure on AMD. That's called failure, not success.
Then, after a while, they couldn't make that dog's breakfast architecture perform even with the improved fabrication.
But I thought they wanted it to run slow...
Seriously, though, the P4 got dropped because of another failure, this time in their models of future fab tech. Intel had charts projecting possible frequency improvements in P4 architecture as they got newer fab tech, and with all the added pipe stages required and so forth it still gave a good looking performance story. The architecture had a lot of scalability. But it didn't come to pass, because roughly in the 90nm node, leakage balloned up higher than they had expected. When suddenly leakage started taking up half the power budget, their old expectations for ramping clock speeds went out the window and the P4's particular trade-off no longer made any sense at all. Since the problem was only going to get worse, the 65nm Tejas project was scrapped.
It was the ancient "brainiac" vs "speed demon" argument, finally resolved by a factor few if any predicted.
So, they switched back to their previous architecture. That's what we're buying now... P4 era fabrication technology with a slightly polished P3 architecture.
Well if you're going to call the i7 or Core 2 "slightly polished P3 architecture", at least get it right and call them Pentium Pros. That's really the ancestor of these architectures, though they have huge differences from the original. There's much more difference between them and P3 than there was between P3 and PPro. And you certainly couldn't take either a P3 or a PPro and make it in today's tech and have it run as fast (meaning just frequency here, absolutely forget performance-wise). It took years of development at the Israel site to make the Pentium M which really was a polished P3, and years for its successors as well.
"P4 era fab tech" is laughably wrong, btw. They never made 45nm P4s, capiche? Really, ridiculing Intel's fab tech, or implying that they are sandbagging, when they are the leader in fab tech and the next best (eg AMD, IBM) are desperately trying to catch up, is just ridiculous. Are you saying Intel is so great that they can stay on top even though they're holding back 10x improvements, while AMD and IBM trying as hard as they can are unable to keep up with the sandbagged tech? Or is it that AMD wants to be behind, because having slower products and paying the cost-per-die penalty for a larger transistor node is working so well for them right now?
Seriously, the amount of effort required to advance technology at the exponential rate Moore's Law predicts is a tremendous amount of effort, which everyone knows can't possibly go on foreve
An interface is supposed to do its job. When I play games or when I watch an animation, I want pretty. When I work, I want efficiency. Don't mix that and we'll remain friends.
Even after I took a dump through your moon roof? That's quite magnanimous of you! Very well, I accept.
My own opinion is that it sets the limit for where they can stop and relax their efforts, internally.
They can never stop and relax. They're chasing an exponential growth curve.
Given the amount of secrecy in this industry, I'm not certain how you can back this statement up with any fact. My own assumption is that 'they' have developed technology far more capable than what they currently claim to be working on at any given time. I personally believe that what they claim is on the drawing board is actually in prototype, what they claim to be in dev is actually ready for production, and their 'latest and greatest' is already old tech.
I've worked at several processor companies with top-of-the-line fab tech, including Mr. Moore's. While my NDAs probably mean I can't tell you anything specific with regard to scheduling, I can tell you without fear of revealing any secrets that you're way off base. They are not sand-bagging with more advanced tech waiting in the wings.
The only sense in which you are correct is that the 'latest and greatest' thing you can buy is old tech relative to things then under development. That's because there's typically a year give or take (usually give) between receiving the first silicon from the fab in the transistor node the product was designed for and all the validation, bug fixes, and spins on the product before it's ready to be sold. That means the fab tech has to be done and mostly stable by the time you start this process, so go roughly six months back before that where they're making test chips in the new fab to make sure it's working. And development of that fab tech before it's ready to run its first test chip wafer is two or more years before that, with R&D going on for years before that.
So yeah, when you could buy a 65nm CPU in the store, there may have been a 45nm CPU or just a test chip coming out of a fab somewhere, and a 32nm lithography machine being developed somewhere else, and a lab somewhere working out how 22nm lithography would work. But that's not 'sandbagging' because all of those things were years of serious non-stop development away from becoming products! Keeping on the exponential growth curve means that there has to be a constant pipeline of developments, and this pipeline is quite long.
And believe me, if they could increase the rate at which those future techs become available for making product, they would. "Sandbagging" means wasting competitive advantage, and wasting money. The machinery in the fabs for each node cost billions of dollars, and they depreciate rapidly. If they had some new tech working flawlessly, but weren't using it in products and just waiting in the wings, they'd be flushing hundreds of millions down the toilet. Time to market is one of the most important things they look at.
Honestly, if you look at actual press releases and actual product launches, it's much more likely that what they claim is a prototype is really on the drawing board, and what they claim to be ready for production is really still in development -- see the AMD Barcelona for the most recent example. You think they had the Phenom II just waiting in the wings while they got beat up in the press and the market over the launch of Phenom?
Now this isn't to say that they wouldn't sandbag if it were possible, and to some minor extent they have. When K7 had a big leg up over P3 in frequency headroom, or Core 2 vs aging K8s, sure they held back a little to get more margin on a cheaper part. But we're talking a speed grade delayed by a month or two. Barely noticeable noise on the curve. Actually tracking that curve requires non-stop expenditures and execution of R&D, and any significant slip-up could send a company flat on its face. To slow development on purpose? Ridiculous.
In my mind, this is the only way to sustain this curve - by limiting the release of new technology onto the market until Moore's says that it is time for it.
Think about it in terms of l
I guess that's what happens when you cut and paste computer science terms from an Economist article. In the next sentence, you state correctly that Moore's "Law" is an observation not a law! It's not that the computer industry (and I think we're only talking hardware here) follows this observation, it's that historically it has held true. No one's going to make a huge leap in R&D to be able to put 10x the number of transistors on a chip only to have engineers come down on them to stop it saying "no one has ever broken Moore's Law and we're not going to start now!" That idea is preposterous. We're limited by our own technology that happens to follow an ok model, it's not a choice!
Yes, that's all true, but if you don't think chip makers throw up graphs with a curve on them for Moore's Law and use that as a guideline for where they should be in the future, which could be called "following"... you're mistaken. Obviously if the observation continues to hold true, that's only because of the advances in R&D that produce new technology. However those advances come as a result of choices, like how much and what kind of R&D to do, and those choices are themselves driven in part by Moore's Law.
Now as far as going faster and getting 10x more transistors on a chip, sure that's not much of a choice. That's because the industry is already busting its ass to maintain the current exponential trend. For that very reason I'd never take the phrase "following Moore's Law" to mean intentionally limiting technology advancement. Au contraire, if anything I take it to mean we're "following" in the sense that you'd be "following" Usian Bolt in the 200m dash -- if you're anywhere near keeping up, you're a bad ass. The only motivation would be to drop off that pace.
Which, to some extent, we've already seen in the 00's. It's still exponential growth, but the time factor has increased somewhat. I can't remember the data I saw, but it appeared to have gone from a doubling every 18 months to 24?
By the way, I agree the examples are pretty poor. For virtualization you want the newest beefiest processor with the best hardware support for virtualization you can get. The whole idea is that you want a single machine to appear as though it is a plethora of machines each with enough horsepower to do whatever that specific machine needs to do. This is the opposite of just wanting to do the same thing cheaper, it's wanting to do the same thing times a plethora, so you need a machine that is at least one plethora times as powerful. Being cheaper overall is just a desirable side effect. I hope you agree that "plethora" is a great word.
You're right.
You should never take chances. It's safer that way.
If you're so sensitive that watching a bad movie will actually damage your love for a different movie, and this is actually painful for you... Then yeah. You should probably not take many chances in life, due to insufficient stomach for the most pathetic of consequences.
There is nothing Blade Runner 2 can do that will reduce my enjoyment of Blade Runner. I pity anyone who can't say that.
In your opinion... (of course).
I loved T1, thought T2 was a bunch of overblown tiresome crap, and really enjoyed T3.
For me, it was T2 that stunk up the place.
Well yeah, obviously it's all opinion. And I can see both ways, thinking T1 was better than T2, or that T2 was better than T1.
But thinking that T3 was better than either of them?! That just smacks of poor taste.
Processor + host chipset + GPU, on the other hand, is a bigger chunk of cash. If AMD don't have a competitive CPU, then that market will go to Intel at the low end and Intel + Nvidia at the high end.
That's really only one extra chip since the GPU will be integrated on the chipset, still with razor thin margins. That's really not any better, since what's important is the margin they can get for a given piece of silicon. Selling an extra hunk of silicon with a tiny margin makes no more sense than selling just the CPU.
And there's no such thing as a 'high end' netbook. That would just be a mainstream laptop, and AMD is competing there.
On the other hand, demand for chips like the Atom in netbooks is so high at the moment, AMD must be mad to be pulling out of this market.
Think less about units sold and think more about gross margins, and you'll see why a company with limited R&D resources like AMD may not be mad to let the netbook market go. Despite their popularity, the actual amount of money to be made selling netbook processors isn't that big.
Though I wouldn't expect them to be out of it forever. As the size of the netbook market grows, it will make more sense to try to take a chunk out of it. Right now, though, getting whatever 10-20% of the market they could get would not result in enough revenue to warrant large expenditure of R&D.
... how about Alzheimer's? That seem worth worrying about?
This isn't some dreadlocked dude outside the "tobacco accessories" store telling you about an article they read in High Times or equivalent blog. It's a medical study conducted by a university. Maybe there's promise in this particular study, maybe there's not, fact is for some people this is serious. Many people in the medical community see a lot of potential in marijuana, but because "everyone is mean to marijuana", specifically the government, they have had a lot of difficulty studying it.
That sounds like something worth bellyaching about to me. But hey, I guess I should just keep my sophomoric mouth shut and abide the status quo.
Well, thanks, but my geek card has already gone to plaid.
Bearing in mind that this new robot is called STAIR, does that mean it is using gradient descent algorithms ?
Naw, it means that in a fit of irony, they named it after the one thing it couldn't handle.
Well yeah, because they'd already put a lot of attention to detail into it! For instance if you recall, at the beginning of the movie his bat costume was bullet proof, but not dog proof, and he had to make the very realistic sacrifice of mobility to gain the all-important dog-proofing.
That's nice. In either case, what I said shouldn't ruin the movie for anyone.
I think you'd have to give up the game for health reasons even if the drink of choice was water. :P
There's more to the movie than that. :P
Hey, I still like Tron... even though it hurts my brain to pretend any part of it is plausible it's worth it to watch David Warner chew scenery... end of line.
Actually, I think the best part about Tron is that it is blatantly computer-based fantasy. I mean, it's one thing to say "I'll crack the government database with Visual Basic" or "I'll upload the virus to the alien computers with my Mac". It's another to say "inside the computer is a virtual world where programs walk around like people and use laser tanks to fight each other and have romances". One is a silly attempt to do something computers "actually" could do. The other just jumps right off the deep end and creates a fantasy world.
It's way easier to take "Oh, you're a bit!" in stride when you've already got accounting programs playing gladiatorial games than it is to hear "This isn't just a multi-monitor setup. It's a Hydra(tm)(r)!" in a movie that's trying to 'seriously' depict hacking.
Primer was a heck of a good movie. It probably could have been tweaked just a bit so you wouldn't need the voiceover to make sense of everything, but all in all it was brilliant for such a low-budget movie.
I don't think Primer could be changed in a way where it was still as great a movie, but made sense on the first viewing (much less minus voiceover). I've only seen it once, btw. ;)
My favorite part I think was when I realized that when they had their "first" meeting at the bench outside the university, the guy sitting with the headphone in his ear had already been back in time and was listening to the conversation pre-recorded. Even though when that scene occurred it appeared as though only the other guy actually knew about the working time machine.
Such a cool movie.
the asteroid is coorbital, it's a little misleading to say that it's "passing" within 400,000 miles. what's really interesting is that it will be at more or less that same distance for many months, suggesting that it and earth share a common history.
So earth and this asteroid have a "history" that results in them still orbiting in the same social circles, but generally trying to stay as far apart from one another as they can, though it's always possible that gravity may draw them together in a catastrophic collision.
I can relate.
Oh, thats right, knowledge is forbidden in this country.
That's right. Including the knowledge that knowledge is forbidden. So if you'll please come quietly, sir.
If you are a decent well learned programmer, essentialy an expert in algorithmic complexity, then surely you understand the comparison O(n) vs O(log n) and why you cannot refute it with horseshit.
Meh. The same thing could be said about Z-buffer, which is O(n), vs Painter's Algorithm, which is O(n log n). Until the hardware became fast enough to overcome the much larger multiplicative constants in Z-buffer, Painter's Algorithm won and that's all there is to it. Not only did it take quite a while until hardware was fast enough that Z-buffer was even feasible, it took a while before hardware was fast enough to have scenes with enough complexity that the scaling factor worked in Z-buffer's favor. It wasn't until z-buffer could render a scene of equal complexity as painter's equally fast that the switch was made.
So the thing is, while anyone can look and say that, at least given the existing options, raytracing is the future and rasterization will be a thing of the past, that reality isn't coming soon. Our rasterization algorithms and software are very good and only getting better. Raytracing only has a chance when scene complexity increases to the point where it can outdo rasterization. However, scene complexity is not going to increase faster than the rate that rasterization itself allows.
It's like sending someone an encrypted message over an insecure channel. Great until you realize you now have to send him the key over the same channel. Sure it's encrypted, but the means of making it useful renders it ineffective.
Sure you can, you just need to use public key encryption. So I guess you're saying we need public key quantum entanglement?
Just kidding, thanks for the clarification. :)
Thank you for the explanation, that was very helpful.
One more question, about measurement. Is there any way to know that measurement has taken place at the other end and your local qubit has collapsed? Or would determining that constitute a measurement in and of itself, meaning if it hadn't been collapsed it then would be so you wouldn't know what happened? I mean, I know the answer is you can't communicate instantly, I'm just figuring out why (mostly to help explain to people with roughly my same layman's understanding of physics why instant communication is impossible).
Yes. Setting up the entangled state here requires both atoms to emit photons, so that occurs at light speed.
It follows the same old rules. Although the state of one atom, once measured, will affect the other atom instantaneously, there's no possibility for FTL communication.
Okay, can you clarify for me why exactly you can't? Is it because you can't actually control what state the measured atom, and thus the distant atom, will take?
Well, I think that's roughly the essence of why you can't send information instantly. All information about the qubits is actually sent with the qubit itself as you separate them to whatever arbitrary distance you're going to do your 'teleportation' trick. It's a little less obvious to me exactly why that is... my understanding is that it's kinda like you have both a black and red marble and you send one around the world, well when one guy checks and sees that his marble is red, the other guy instantly knows that his marble is black. But the first guy doesn't get to pick black or red, and you always knew that the one marble would be the opposite color of the other, so you don't really know anything you didn't before.
But I'm not really sure if what I'm saying there is even close to right.