This is the kind of bean-counter math that makes engineers mad. You spend tens of billions of dollars getting the things up there in the first place, and then refuse to pay a pittance (and $4.2m is a pittance) to keep it operational. It doesn't make sense, from an engineering standpoint, or from a business standpoint.
The hippies always do that, largely because the general public has absolutely no understanding of nuclear technology. They did it when Voyager was launched too. Americans' fear of anything "nuclear" is part of the reason why the United States is still in the stone age with regards to nuclear power (as if coal is so much safer), while countries like France get most of their electricity from relatively safe nuclear reactors.
Re:Article Did show if standard Complaint
on
Top Mice Compared
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· Score: 1
That's not true. I've been using MS peripherals with my all-Linux machines for years now. They generally follow HID standards very well.
The Cell's primary processor is nothing like the POWER architecture. The POWER architecture is characterized by an extremely wide design with fairly deep pipelines and extensive out-of-order execution. The Cell's PPE is narrow, has a relatively short pipeline, and is an in-order design.
Part of the advantage of FP is that it can be automatically parallelized much easier than imperative code, and is easier and less error-prone to write than multithreaded imperative code.
That's nothing special about Qt. That's just the GPL. Qt is as GPL as any other piece of GPL software, and as such its as "free" as any other piece of GPL software.
Oh, one more thing. It also runs at 2.4GHz vs 2.6 for the single core chip. Power is linear to clockspeed, so the dual core processor uses 92% of the electricity of the single core processor based on that. 92% of 70% is about 64%. The remaining 14% is from the process optimizations.
Wow. Not a single correct answer to this question:)
The answer is that the single core Athlon in the article runs at 1.5 volts, while the dual cores run at 1.26 volts. Since power increases by the square of the voltage, we can see that the 1.26 volt chip uses only about 70% the power of the 1.5 volt chip. The remaining 20% comes from optimizations to AMD's 90nm SOI process.
That has nothing to do with RISC. SPARC and MIPS CPUs have few transistors because they're exceedingly simple chips. The SPARC is an in-order chip, and the MIPS are rather limited superscaler execution. RISC processors that are actually highly superscaler and out-of-order (PowerPC, Alpha), also require a lot of transistors like x86 chips do. The PPC970 is a good example. Clock-for-clock, its comparable to an Athlon 64 in performance. At the same time, its 58M transistor is comparable to an Athlon64's 68.5M transistor count. The comparison is even more even if you consider that the Athlon64 has 32KB more of L1 cache plus an on-die memory controller.
Choke! Are you seriously arguing that a 400MHz ARM is as fast as a Pentium M at 1200MHz? Pentium M is pretty much the fastest processor, clock for clock, available in the mainstream market. There is no way the ARM is even comparable clock-for-clock!
My info is from Henry Kissinger's book "Diplomacy". He talks about how a lot of foreign policy during the 1970's and 1980's was based on the idea that the Soviets were a military match for the United States, but after the fall of the Soviet Union, it was revealed that this just wasn't true.
You can't just compare technology, you have to compare the whole infrastructure. For example, the Soviets had comparable nuclear missiles, numerically, but a large percentage of them was obsolete, while our stockpile was much more modern.
This was a common belief in the past, but after the fall of the Soviet Union, studies into what happened in the last decades show that the USSR was not a military match for the United States in the last couple of decades of its existance. This is actually one of the big surprises of the resolution of the Cold War, that our foreign policy had been developed based on a wildly overexaggerated impression of the power of the Soviet Union. That the USSR was a military match to the United States was something that few people in the US questioned during the 70's and 80's, but an assumption that turned out to be quite wrong.
Both were government funded. You think it was private dollars that went into building nuclear weapons, advanced aircraft, etc? Yeah right! Its interesting you mention Lockheed. You do realize that the entire defense industry is basically on government welfare, do you not? Whose money do you think Lockheed spends to develop the SR-71, the F-22, etc? We won because our government had more money to throw to our defense industry than their government had to throw to theirs.
As for your market thing --- you're not getting it. It would be nice if you could have breakthrough innovations along with an efficient process, but history and economic theory shows that you can't. Yes, maybe it cost us a huge amount of money to get into space. But we couldn't have gotten into space at all if the government hadn't done it! And if the Soviets had established a domination of space, you can bet it would have been disasterous for the United States.
I never said that, and don't pretend I did. I said that the government does fundemental research better than corporations, which is a fact evidenced by both history and economic theory. I don't know what is so hard to understand about that.
And your analogy is retarded. No, the government is not a good investment. Fundemental research isn't a good investment. It has very iffy returns on very large investments. But its necessary. Your 10% compounded annually return from the stock market doesn't matter so much when China develops space lasers and can surgically remove you from 8000 miles away. That's a remote possibility, sure, but the point is how do you think the rest of the world felt when we developed nuclear weapons? Why do you think the USSR (the only other major nuclear power) has been the only country to challenge us in half a century?
Our position in the world is directly tied to our technological edge, which is enormously dependent on government funding. Hell, its government money that developed the guns that soldiers use to shoot enemies, government money that develops the planes that keep our airspace free, and government money that developed the ships that keep our harbors unblockaded. It's government money that made the first world network in history (the internet), and American invention. It's government money that put us in space, making space-based conveniences like XM and DirecTV possible.
"Fundemental" is a word that does not need a definition to anybody familiar with science. "Fundemental research" refers to research that deals with abstract problems with huge, long-term payoffs, as opposed to research that deals with concrete problems with limited, short-term payoffs.
Hell, most people in drug research will tell you that corporate drug research is not fundemental. Heck, fundemental research isn't even profitable. You think the cure for cancer is going to come out of a corporation? Don't bet on it --- it would cost them an enormous amount of money, and there would be no way they could profit from it. Not enough people have cancer to let them charge a low price for the resulting drug, and there is no way they'd get away with charging the $100,000 per dose they'd need to break even...
You think drug research has given us a longer lifespan? You think most people need drugs at some point in their life? Hah! You know what has given us a longer lifespan? Government agricultural and health planning, government supported healthcare, government-dictated sanitation regulations, government sponsored disease control, etc.
Its just a product of the numbers. Not many people have AIDS or cancer. Lots of people drink water. For every person that lives 10 years longer because of some new AIDS drug, there are a thousand kids that don't die at age 10 because of vaccination programs. Which one do you think has a bigger impact on the average life expectancy?
Also, don't conflate 'drug research' with 'medical research'. Medical research has given us enormous advancements, but medical research is also funded in large part either directly by the government (eg: NIH grants), or indirectly by the government (eg: hospitals, who get a lot of money from medicare).
No. The X-Prize is a pittance. A single DARPA program manager has a yearly budget twice that big. America's Space Prize is a good-sized contract for a single small company for a couple of years. Of course, the government hands out thousands of those every year.
Of course, none of that stuff is really 'big'. Its not fundemental research. We've been to space, its a routine thing now. The X-Prize is just trying to get companies to do stuff we can already do, except faster and cheaper. Which is great, because companies are really good at that sort of thing. There is little commercial risk in embarking on a project that you already know is possible. The question you have to ask, rather, is whether it would have been possible to get into space in the first place just by relying on corporations? Or, could fundemental physics breakthroughs that have had huge impacts on our economy (a significant fraction of our economy is possible only thanks to quantum physics), been possible by relying on corporations to build particle accelerators. Would the nuclear age, something that has kept America at the top of the world for half a century, been possible by relying on corporations to do the research? No!
As for the artificial heart, I presume you're referring to the AbioCor replacement project. If so, then this interview with Abiomed's president is particularly interesting to read. I quote:
" Yes. The majority of our research efforts from 1981 until 1996 were funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and that funding contribution has held up over the years. Historically, the artificial heart project is a national mission with government support".
And,
"Yes, funding from the National Institutes of Health supported the major portion of R&D activities for the artificial heart until 1996".
Finally,
"In 1996, our technical team told me that the major technological hurdles for the AbioCor had been overcome, and that we were ready to move the product into a commercial development path".
In other words, government funding sustained the project for 15 years until 1996. At that point, all the really difficult challenges had been overcome, ie: the commercial risk had been minimized, and it was then possible to commercialize the technology.
I never said only government funds science --- I said that corporations are usually too risk-averse to do anything 'big'. Which is true. Drug companies spend a lot of money on drug research. How much of that research is fundemental? How much of that research is likely to change the world, in the way the government's research into nuclear technology in the middle of this century changed the world? Usually, that research is very concrete and specific, and tailored to developing drugs that offer a good return on investment.
Now, corporations do conduct some fundemental research. But look at where the money comes from for those projects. You can trace a lot of it back to the government, to entities like DARPA, the DoD, the NRL, NASA, the DoE, the NSF, etc.
This is really not an argument worth having. Its fairly well accepted by economists that the free market naturally underspends on fundemental research and development. Look at Hong Kong. Why did it get so rich in such a short amount of time? Largely because the government spent a lot of money getting corporations to do fundemental R&D.
While this is strictly true, it's also a bit misleading to those (most people) who don't understand how science works in the modern world.
Science has become an exceedingly expensive business. Effectively, scientists are *not* free to research whatever they want, because they are limited by funding. Most endeavors in science have become so expensive that there are only two types of entities that can fund them: governments, and large private corporations. The latter are far too risk-averse to actually do anything *big*, so its pretty much left up to governments. By cutting off government funding for a particular avenue of research, you have effectively dictated that scientists in your country are not to persue that research.
Now, that is perfectly within the rights of governments, to decide how their research money should be spent. But there is always the niggling question of "the rest of the world". If our government is unwilling to fund crucial research for certain moralistic reasons, other governments unfettered by such restrictions will do so, and will make advancements.
Americans in general seem rather oblivious to the very real "race" between nations that exists. The high standard of living in the United States is directly related to its position as an economic and military superpower. The military preeminance can exis only as long as the economic one does, for defense too has become an exceedingly expensive business. The ramifications of China or Europe making a crucial breakthrough in medicine due to stem cells would be enormous. As long as we were locked out of that technology, we would be beholden to them for any of the benefits that it would provide. The result would be billions of dollars leaving the United States for China or Europe, to purchase these services unavailable in the US. If the US bans such purchases, a black market will form, one that will be very expensive and time-consuming to combat. Either way, we risk our position as an economic superpower, and once we lose that position, we can say goodbye to the style of life to which we have become accustomed.
Programmers? Multimedia people? Scientific computing folks? There are quite a few markets that can use dual-core right now. Basically, anybody who buys a PowerMac:) Moreover, in the future, everyone will have to move to dual core (including gamers), because AMD and Intel cannot ramp up the clockspeed of single core chips. So AMD's strategy makes quite a bit of sense. Sell dual-core chips to the high-end now (notice how all of these CPUs are high-end chips that carry quite a price premium), and start getting the ball rolling on multithreaded software.
Try using your head. People jump on Bush for "misstating" things, because he does it all the time. If someone misspeaks often, it is natural to assume that it wasn't just a mistake, there is an underling problem with speech. If someone misspeaks on occasion, its much easier to just accept it as an accident.
However, when Clinton lies, people don't just dismiss it. They tie it back to all the lies he's ever told. They should do that, because past behavior establishes a pattern that can be used to understand future behavior.
Re:4.0.0 broke backward compatibility big time
on
A Review of GCC 4.0
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· Score: 1
Microsoft forces upgrade for the sake of forcing upgrades. GCC forces upgrades for the sake of fixing broken shit. That's a good thing, and the only way to ensure a quality product.
I have no patience for morons who can't write proper code. If you have to "make huge patches" to adhere to the standards, then your code was fucked to begin with. The C++ standard is now the better part of a decade old. Good, standards-compliant compilers have been available for four or five years. If your five year old code requires huge changes to compile on GCC 4.0, it was broken by design. There is no excuse for this sort of thing --- make sure your code compiles with a number of compilers before calling it done, and your code will generally be more compliant and more maintainable.
And I hope you realize, in retrospect, the idiocy of rewriting standards to kowtow to every moron who couldn't write a line of standards-compliant C code. Could you imagine the clusterfuck that would be the codebase of a compiler supporting such a standard?
I've been using the things for a couple of years now, and I still don't like them. They're to "indecisive" for my taste. I'm rather partial to Cherry's keyboards, myself.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the kind of bean-counter math that makes engineers mad. You spend tens of billions of dollars getting the things up there in the first place, and then refuse to pay a pittance (and $4.2m is a pittance) to keep it operational. It doesn't make sense, from an engineering standpoint, or from a business standpoint.
The hippies always do that, largely because the general public has absolutely no understanding of nuclear technology. They did it when Voyager was launched too. Americans' fear of anything "nuclear" is part of the reason why the United States is still in the stone age with regards to nuclear power (as if coal is so much safer), while countries like France get most of their electricity from relatively safe nuclear reactors.
That's not true. I've been using MS peripherals with my all-Linux machines for years now. They generally follow HID standards very well.
The Cell's primary processor is nothing like the POWER architecture. The POWER architecture is characterized by an extremely wide design with fairly deep pipelines and extensive out-of-order execution. The Cell's PPE is narrow, has a relatively short pipeline, and is an in-order design.
Part of the advantage of FP is that it can be automatically parallelized much easier than imperative code, and is easier and less error-prone to write than multithreaded imperative code.
Dude. I'm an AE major at gatech and even I know who Olin Shivers is...
That's nothing special about Qt. That's just the GPL. Qt is as GPL as any other piece of GPL software, and as such its as "free" as any other piece of GPL software.
Oh, one more thing. It also runs at 2.4GHz vs 2.6 for the single core chip. Power is linear to clockspeed, so the dual core processor uses 92% of the electricity of the single core processor based on that. 92% of 70% is about 64%. The remaining 14% is from the process optimizations.
Wow. Not a single correct answer to this question :)
The answer is that the single core Athlon in the article runs at 1.5 volts, while the dual cores run at 1.26 volts. Since power increases by the square of the voltage, we can see that the 1.26 volt chip uses only about 70% the power of the 1.5 volt chip. The remaining 20% comes from optimizations to AMD's 90nm SOI process.
That has nothing to do with RISC. SPARC and MIPS CPUs have few transistors because they're exceedingly simple chips. The SPARC is an in-order chip, and the MIPS are rather limited superscaler execution. RISC processors that are actually highly superscaler and out-of-order (PowerPC, Alpha), also require a lot of transistors like x86 chips do. The PPC970 is a good example. Clock-for-clock, its comparable to an Athlon 64 in performance. At the same time, its 58M transistor is comparable to an Athlon64's 68.5M transistor count. The comparison is even more even if you consider that the Athlon64 has 32KB more of L1 cache plus an on-die memory controller.
Qt passes the "free" test because it's GPL. It's as free as the Linux kernel, or GCC or Emacs.
Choke! Are you seriously arguing that a 400MHz ARM is as fast as a Pentium M at 1200MHz? Pentium M is pretty much the fastest processor, clock for clock, available in the mainstream market. There is no way the ARM is even comparable clock-for-clock!
My info is from Henry Kissinger's book "Diplomacy". He talks about how a lot of foreign policy during the 1970's and 1980's was based on the idea that the Soviets were a military match for the United States, but after the fall of the Soviet Union, it was revealed that this just wasn't true.
You can't just compare technology, you have to compare the whole infrastructure. For example, the Soviets had comparable nuclear missiles, numerically, but a large percentage of them was obsolete, while our stockpile was much more modern.
This was a common belief in the past, but after the fall of the Soviet Union, studies into what happened in the last decades show that the USSR was not a military match for the United States in the last couple of decades of its existance. This is actually one of the big surprises of the resolution of the Cold War, that our foreign policy had been developed based on a wildly overexaggerated impression of the power of the Soviet Union. That the USSR was a military match to the United States was something that few people in the US questioned during the 70's and 80's, but an assumption that turned out to be quite wrong.
Both were government funded. You think it was private dollars that went into building nuclear weapons, advanced aircraft, etc? Yeah right! Its interesting you mention Lockheed. You do realize that the entire defense industry is basically on government welfare, do you not? Whose money do you think Lockheed spends to develop the SR-71, the F-22, etc? We won because our government had more money to throw to our defense industry than their government had to throw to theirs.
As for your market thing --- you're not getting it. It would be nice if you could have breakthrough innovations along with an efficient process, but history and economic theory shows that you can't. Yes, maybe it cost us a huge amount of money to get into space. But we couldn't have gotten into space at all if the government hadn't done it! And if the Soviets had established a domination of space, you can bet it would have been disasterous for the United States.
I never said that, and don't pretend I did. I said that the government does fundemental research better than corporations, which is a fact evidenced by both history and economic theory. I don't know what is so hard to understand about that.
And your analogy is retarded. No, the government is not a good investment. Fundemental research isn't a good investment. It has very iffy returns on very large investments. But its necessary. Your 10% compounded annually return from the stock market doesn't matter so much when China develops space lasers and can surgically remove you from 8000 miles away. That's a remote possibility, sure, but the point is how do you think the rest of the world felt when we developed nuclear weapons? Why do you think the USSR (the only other major nuclear power) has been the only country to challenge us in half a century?
Our position in the world is directly tied to our technological edge, which is enormously dependent on government funding. Hell, its government money that developed the guns that soldiers use to shoot enemies, government money that develops the planes that keep our airspace free, and government money that developed the ships that keep our harbors unblockaded. It's government money that made the first world network in history (the internet), and American invention. It's government money that put us in space, making space-based conveniences like XM and DirecTV possible.
"Fundemental" is a word that does not need a definition to anybody familiar with science. "Fundemental research" refers to research that deals with abstract problems with huge, long-term payoffs, as opposed to research that deals with concrete problems with limited, short-term payoffs.
Hell, most people in drug research will tell you that corporate drug research is not fundemental. Heck, fundemental research isn't even profitable. You think the cure for cancer is going to come out of a corporation? Don't bet on it --- it would cost them an enormous amount of money, and there would be no way they could profit from it. Not enough people have cancer to let them charge a low price for the resulting drug, and there is no way they'd get away with charging the $100,000 per dose they'd need to break even...
You think drug research has given us a longer lifespan? You think most people need drugs at some point in their life? Hah! You know what has given us a longer lifespan? Government agricultural and health planning, government supported healthcare, government-dictated sanitation regulations, government sponsored disease control, etc.
Its just a product of the numbers. Not many people have AIDS or cancer. Lots of people drink water. For every person that lives 10 years longer because of some new AIDS drug, there are a thousand kids that don't die at age 10 because of vaccination programs. Which one do you think has a bigger impact on the average life expectancy?
Also, don't conflate 'drug research' with 'medical research'. Medical research has given us enormous advancements, but medical research is also funded in large part either directly by the government (eg: NIH grants), or indirectly by the government (eg: hospitals, who get a lot of money from medicare).
No. The X-Prize is a pittance. A single DARPA program manager has a yearly budget twice that big. America's Space Prize is a good-sized contract for a single small company for a couple of years. Of course, the government hands out thousands of those every year.
Of course, none of that stuff is really 'big'. Its not fundemental research. We've been to space, its a routine thing now. The X-Prize is just trying to get companies to do stuff we can already do, except faster and cheaper. Which is great, because companies are really good at that sort of thing. There is little commercial risk in embarking on a project that you already know is possible. The question you have to ask, rather, is whether it would have been possible to get into space in the first place just by relying on corporations? Or, could fundemental physics breakthroughs that have had huge impacts on our economy (a significant fraction of our economy is possible only thanks to quantum physics), been possible by relying on corporations to build particle accelerators. Would the nuclear age, something that has kept America at the top of the world for half a century, been possible by relying on corporations to do the research? No!
As for the artificial heart, I presume you're referring to the AbioCor replacement project. If so, then this interview with Abiomed's president is particularly interesting to read. I quote:
" Yes. The majority of our research efforts from 1981 until 1996 were funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and that funding contribution has held up over the years. Historically, the artificial heart project is a national mission with government support".
And,
"Yes, funding from the National Institutes of Health supported the major portion of R&D activities for the artificial heart until 1996".
Finally,
"In 1996, our technical team told me that the major technological hurdles for the AbioCor had been overcome, and that we were ready to move the product into a commercial development path".
In other words, government funding sustained the project for 15 years until 1996. At that point, all the really difficult challenges had been overcome, ie: the commercial risk had been minimized, and it was then possible to commercialize the technology.
I never said only government funds science --- I said that corporations are usually too risk-averse to do anything 'big'. Which is true. Drug companies spend a lot of money on drug research. How much of that research is fundemental? How much of that research is likely to change the world, in the way the government's research into nuclear technology in the middle of this century changed the world? Usually, that research is very concrete and specific, and tailored to developing drugs that offer a good return on investment.
Now, corporations do conduct some fundemental research. But look at where the money comes from for those projects. You can trace a lot of it back to the government, to entities like DARPA, the DoD, the NRL, NASA, the DoE, the NSF, etc.
This is really not an argument worth having. Its fairly well accepted by economists that the free market naturally underspends on fundemental research and development. Look at Hong Kong. Why did it get so rich in such a short amount of time? Largely because the government spent a lot of money getting corporations to do fundemental R&D.
Wow. I'm saving that. That was extremely well-written, almost poetic.
While this is strictly true, it's also a bit misleading to those (most people) who don't understand how science works in the modern world.
Science has become an exceedingly expensive business. Effectively, scientists are *not* free to research whatever they want, because they are limited by funding. Most endeavors in science have become so expensive that there are only two types of entities that can fund them: governments, and large private corporations. The latter are far too risk-averse to actually do anything *big*, so its pretty much left up to governments. By cutting off government funding for a particular avenue of research, you have effectively dictated that scientists in your country are not to persue that research.
Now, that is perfectly within the rights of governments, to decide how their research money should be spent. But there is always the niggling question of "the rest of the world". If our government is unwilling to fund crucial research for certain moralistic reasons, other governments unfettered by such restrictions will do so, and will make advancements.
Americans in general seem rather oblivious to the very real "race" between nations that exists. The high standard of living in the United States is directly related to its position as an economic and military superpower. The military preeminance can exis only as long as the economic one does, for defense too has become an exceedingly expensive business. The ramifications of China or Europe making a crucial breakthrough in medicine due to stem cells would be enormous. As long as we were locked out of that technology, we would be beholden to them for any of the benefits that it would provide. The result would be billions of dollars leaving the United States for China or Europe, to purchase these services unavailable in the US. If the US bans such purchases, a black market will form, one that will be very expensive and time-consuming to combat. Either way, we risk our position as an economic superpower, and once we lose that position, we can say goodbye to the style of life to which we have become accustomed.
Programmers? Multimedia people? Scientific computing folks? There are quite a few markets that can use dual-core right now. Basically, anybody who buys a PowerMac :) Moreover, in the future, everyone will have to move to dual core (including gamers), because AMD and Intel cannot ramp up the clockspeed of single core chips. So AMD's strategy makes quite a bit of sense. Sell dual-core chips to the high-end now (notice how all of these CPUs are high-end chips that carry quite a price premium), and start getting the ball rolling on multithreaded software.
Try using your head. People jump on Bush for "misstating" things, because he does it all the time. If someone misspeaks often, it is natural to assume that it wasn't just a mistake, there is an underling problem with speech. If someone misspeaks on occasion, its much easier to just accept it as an accident.
However, when Clinton lies, people don't just dismiss it. They tie it back to all the lies he's ever told. They should do that, because past behavior establishes a pattern that can be used to understand future behavior.
Microsoft forces upgrade for the sake of forcing upgrades. GCC forces upgrades for the sake of fixing broken shit. That's a good thing, and the only way to ensure a quality product.
I have no patience for morons who can't write proper code. If you have to "make huge patches" to adhere to the standards, then your code was fucked to begin with. The C++ standard is now the better part of a decade old. Good, standards-compliant compilers have been available for four or five years. If your five year old code requires huge changes to compile on GCC 4.0, it was broken by design. There is no excuse for this sort of thing --- make sure your code compiles with a number of compilers before calling it done, and your code will generally be more compliant and more maintainable.
And I hope you realize, in retrospect, the idiocy of rewriting standards to kowtow to every moron who couldn't write a line of standards-compliant C code. Could you imagine the clusterfuck that would be the codebase of a compiler supporting such a standard?
I've been using the things for a couple of years now, and I still don't like them. They're to "indecisive" for my taste. I'm rather partial to Cherry's keyboards, myself.