Simple -- computers do not typically operate in empty space or in cryostats. The most important number to know is "how many degrees over ambient can I allow this device to go." It's true of computing devices every bit as much as for heat engines.
Actually, it does make sense when you consider the most important part of thermal engineering: achieving a certain temperature differential. Ambient temp is typically around 300K, and semiconductors will run in the realm of 400K but not much higher. That's a delta-T of 100K. The ability to run at 500C gives you a delta-T of something like 480K from ambient, so I would agree that the maximum operating temperature is (in some sense) an order of magnitude higher.
Precedings is aesthetically almost identical to Dave Bacon's Scirate. They're both good designs, but I can't help but wonder if Nature took some inspiration from Scirate in their design process.
Sorry to branch off-topic here, but I'm glad people still remember it:)
I'm contemplating a new site with the same theme, now that I'm graduating and will have some free time. I think user-moderation has become an important part of community-driven sites, and the reincarnation of ZZZ would probably tap into that heavily. I'll certainly spread the word when it starts coming together.
Simple. They aren't attached to a ship which costs upwards of $50,000 per day to operate. Their batteries last for months, and allow them to gather data at an unbelievably small fraction of the cost of traditional methods, beaming it back via satellite phone every time they surface.
Since they couldn't get there to measure it before this is that first measurement. Any comparisons are against models.
This is not (generally) correct. Although autonomous submersibles are taking these measurements for the first time, accurate oceanographic surveys have been done using instruments dropped from ships for the good part of a century. The difference is that with gliders these measurements are greatly reduced in cost, so we can get many more of them with greater frequency.
They're not interested in the absolute temperature, they're interested in the change in temperature over both short and long time periods. This type of data allows scientists to make predictions about future temperatures in many other locations (yes, ocean temperature will couple strongly to atmospheric temperature), and if there is enough data it allows them to describe climate change on the global scale.
Yes, the article appears to be unclear on this. What they mean is that in a traditional glider, the compressibility will be either larger or smaller than that of seawater. In either of these cases, maintaining a steady rate of descent requires more ballast pumping to readjust the buoyancy. These gliders have isopycnal hulls, which have very close to the same compressibility of seawater, and thus require very little ballast pumping in order to maintain a constant glideslope.
The paper cites 10nm radius for the cores, which at optimal packing (ie, one core per 20nm square) yields 3.12500 * 10^14 Bytes / m^2. The latest in perpendicular recording gives an areal density of 277.1 Mb/mm^2, which is just 3.46375 * 10^13 Bytes / m^2, an order of magnitude less! Granted, packing is probably not optimal -- the cores probably need to be spaced by at least a multiple of their diameter. But then again, the cores can probably be shrunk, so at the very least this represents a modest improvement over current storage density. At best, it represents at least an order of magnitude improvement (read: 7.5 TB desktop drives).
PS: Slashdot -- please add support for mathml or latex code inserts:)
What are you talking about? Paul Allen buys professional sports teams, islands, spaceships, and has presumably spent much of the past 15 years playing computer games. Clearly, Bill Gates has done something which Allen has not.
If you worked your way from $0 up to the $1B mark, I would challenge you to try - just try - giving away $750 million. Sure, you keep a lot. But don't tell me that that giving away that large of a sum wouldn't faze you.
To be fair, that's not the result of any feature of FW800 -- it's the result of using two different busses. If you used a usb2 device and a fw400 device in the way you've described, you would get the same result. That or just two fw400 busses.
You said it. It is frustrating for an audience comprised largely of computer hardware experts to be patronized by being shown review after review of 'PC Bling'. You know... power supplies with 50 LEDs, mousepads with fans, that sort of thing. They are all gimmicks, and very rarely slashworthy. The only time I don't develop high blood pressure reading a hardware review story on slashdot is when it is about a truly innovative DIY modification or a summary of reviews of a revolutionary new product, (IE nVidia and ATI product launches). It is insulting to see an anonymous submission accepted, when the subject is as mundane as 99% of hardware reviews are. These people are largely kids who get the hardware for free to review, get money from the ads, and in spite of having no expertise or journalistic credibility are encouraged to continue this cycle by hordes of slashdot traffic. I'm sure XYZcomputing, for example, makes hundreds of $$ per month from slashdot.
I'm not sure what brought you to that conclusion...
My reaction, avid OSS user that I am, was basically "Wow. This is actually pretty cool - they've surprised me." I needn't point out that google has said publicly that they have no plans to in any way turn OO.org into a web-based product, so if anyone has an edge here it is clearly the people who just released a beta of their web-based office suite...
What is it about sketchy Israeli "startups" (quotes because I doubt most of these are even legitimate companies) that convinces slashdot editors of the legitimacy of whatever vaporware they are pushing, as opposed to their seemingly effective BS filters on sketchy PR releases from US companies? Sure, Israel is home to lots of technological innovation... but for every legitimate company, there is some guy in his basement trying to get 'VC funding' from private individuals who don't have effective spam filters. This is true of EVERY country.
There should seriously be a dedicated "science" editor who has at the very least a demonstrated knowledge of chemistry and physics, and has to approve all articles of this nature before they are posted (unless the source is, say, Nature or Science).
Has anyone else noticed that dowloading directly from the Ubuntu site gives you a file called "ubuntu-6.10..." rather than 5.10? If it weren't my favorite open source group, I would think this was a little fishy... Hm.
... Time really needs to get its story straight with regards to scientific reporting. This method is a) not innovative b) not practical and c) REQUIRES SIGNIFICANT ENERGY INPUT.
Vortex tubes have been around forever, and they are not some form of perpetual motion. It is a well-understood effect, and one which does not violate any of thermodynamics. You put in a lot of energy via compressed air, and get output in the form of a thermal differential. The key point is that you need a lot of high pressure input...where is this going to come from? Electricity. Unless you use a combustion engine to turn the crank on a compressor, in which case that's your energy source. What are villagers in rural india going to do? Blow really hard through the tube?
Why not simply buy fifteen CHEAP Samsung laser printers and spool off to them in parallel. That would give you 22*15=330ppm for only 15*$60=$900. This is less than 1/1000th the cost of IBM's printer, and apparently performs just as well. Am I missing something?
If you are going to submit an article from your own website, at least have the balls to say it like it is and submit it as yourself. There's a reason it says "Anonymous Coward".
To slashdot editors: Please stop accepting every article submitted by this and other small sites. If they come up with something innovative or have an exclusive review of something new, post it. Otherwise, let the RSS newsfeeds at anandtech/hardocp/etc handle this crap.
I think the problem is that this stereotype fulfills itself as soon as kids are told that this is the way it is. In high school, I started out as a geek, but was drawn into jockism because I was big. Somehow, to me and to my coaches/teachers/advisors, being good at sports suddenly precluded me from needing to do well at school, and my grades suffered. The truth is that sports are good for the body and mind, but they should be kept totally distant from education so that their influence does not warp the perception you or your teachers have of your academic merits.
You're crazy. Know how I know? Because Dell's top of the line gaming laptop, with a fast p-m, and a 6800 ultra mobile video card costs only $1649 right now. A non-gaming ultralight, loaded with basically the same components you listed, is well under $1k right now. What you're missing is that it is completely normal for Dell to offer huge discounts. I don't remember a time when I couldn't get at least 25% off and a number of free upgrades for a Dell laptop.
This is typical of the current US public education system way of doing things: desperate for results, throw money at new ways of teaching things, rather than learning to teach properly in the first place. Huge sums of money used for inter-publisher arguments about things like including creationism in biology texts should be spent on funding more faculty (or properly paying the current faculty!)
Show me a public school in the US in which every student who has taken chemistry can accurately describe the logic behind the Mendelev arrangements, and I'll agree that we are qualified to take the more difficult step of teaching to a spiral table.
Maybe it is time to stop all this "China is catching up" paranoia.
Maybe you need a reality check, but the US GDP is barely growing at all. Look at the dollar, which is worth half of what it was 2 years ago vs. the euro, for evidence of this. We are in a recession - well, maybe not a full blown one, but we are barely creeping forward. In the meantime, china is beginning to overcome the technological gap that has been the only thing keeping them making cheap plastic household goods instead of our expensive microchips and cars.
Yes, the US has a massive GDP, but this is just residual. Do you really think that Rome circa 400BC had a "GDP" (whatever the roman equivalent would be) smaller than any other nation? Doubtful, but they sure as hell disappeared pretty quick right around that time.
I'm sick of america's work ethic going to shit, and I hope news like this gives us a wakeup call. America cannot survive in the 21st century with a workforce with 150 million underemployed college graduates with bloody communications degrees.
TFA refers to running firefox under rosetta emulation. This feeds instructions translated from G3 architecture into something that x86 can handle. Sort of like running a playstation 2 game on an xbox 360 through a playstation 1 emulator.
I would say that running firefox that fast under emulation is a pretty big deal.
Slashdot Mirror
Simple -- computers do not typically operate in empty space or in cryostats. The most important number to know is "how many degrees over ambient can I allow this device to go." It's true of computing devices every bit as much as for heat engines.
Actually, it does make sense when you consider the most important part of thermal engineering: achieving a certain temperature differential. Ambient temp is typically around 300K, and semiconductors will run in the realm of 400K but not much higher. That's a delta-T of 100K. The ability to run at 500C gives you a delta-T of something like 480K from ambient, so I would agree that the maximum operating temperature is (in some sense) an order of magnitude higher.
Precedings is aesthetically almost identical to Dave Bacon's Scirate. They're both good designs, but I can't help but wonder if Nature took some inspiration from Scirate in their design process.
Sorry to branch off-topic here, but I'm glad people still remember it :)
I'm contemplating a new site with the same theme, now that I'm graduating and will have some free time. I think user-moderation has become an important part of community-driven sites, and the reincarnation of ZZZ would probably tap into that heavily. I'll certainly spread the word when it starts coming together.
Simple. They aren't attached to a ship which costs upwards of $50,000 per day to operate. Their batteries last for months, and allow them to gather data at an unbelievably small fraction of the cost of traditional methods, beaming it back via satellite phone every time they surface.
Since they couldn't get there to measure it before this is that first measurement. Any comparisons are against models. This is not (generally) correct. Although autonomous submersibles are taking these measurements for the first time, accurate oceanographic surveys have been done using instruments dropped from ships for the good part of a century. The difference is that with gliders these measurements are greatly reduced in cost, so we can get many more of them with greater frequency.
They're not interested in the absolute temperature, they're interested in the change in temperature over both short and long time periods. This type of data allows scientists to make predictions about future temperatures in many other locations (yes, ocean temperature will couple strongly to atmospheric temperature), and if there is enough data it allows them to describe climate change on the global scale.
Yes, the article appears to be unclear on this. What they mean is that in a traditional glider, the compressibility will be either larger or smaller than that of seawater. In either of these cases, maintaining a steady rate of descent requires more ballast pumping to readjust the buoyancy. These gliders have isopycnal hulls, which have very close to the same compressibility of seawater, and thus require very little ballast pumping in order to maintain a constant glideslope.
How would the amount of brain matter inside of your skull, if it even exists as people say it does, affect the wisdom of your statement?
The paper cites 10nm radius for the cores, which at optimal packing (ie, one core per 20nm square) yields 3.12500 * 10^14 Bytes / m^2. The latest in perpendicular recording gives an areal density of 277.1 Mb/mm^2, which is just 3.46375 * 10^13 Bytes / m^2, an order of magnitude less! Granted, packing is probably not optimal -- the cores probably need to be spaced by at least a multiple of their diameter. But then again, the cores can probably be shrunk, so at the very least this represents a modest improvement over current storage density. At best, it represents at least an order of magnitude improvement (read: 7.5 TB desktop drives).
:)
PS: Slashdot -- please add support for mathml or latex code inserts
What are you talking about? Paul Allen buys professional sports teams, islands, spaceships, and has presumably spent much of the past 15 years playing computer games. Clearly, Bill Gates has done something which Allen has not. If you worked your way from $0 up to the $1B mark, I would challenge you to try - just try - giving away $750 million. Sure, you keep a lot. But don't tell me that that giving away that large of a sum wouldn't faze you.
To be fair, that's not the result of any feature of FW800 -- it's the result of using two different busses. If you used a usb2 device and a fw400 device in the way you've described, you would get the same result. That or just two fw400 busses.
You said it. It is frustrating for an audience comprised largely of computer hardware experts to be patronized by being shown review after review of 'PC Bling'. You know... power supplies with 50 LEDs, mousepads with fans, that sort of thing. They are all gimmicks, and very rarely slashworthy. The only time I don't develop high blood pressure reading a hardware review story on slashdot is when it is about a truly innovative DIY modification or a summary of reviews of a revolutionary new product, (IE nVidia and ATI product launches). It is insulting to see an anonymous submission accepted, when the subject is as mundane as 99% of hardware reviews are. These people are largely kids who get the hardware for free to review, get money from the ads, and in spite of having no expertise or journalistic credibility are encouraged to continue this cycle by hordes of slashdot traffic. I'm sure XYZcomputing, for example, makes hundreds of $$ per month from slashdot.
I'm not sure what brought you to that conclusion...
My reaction, avid OSS user that I am, was basically "Wow. This is actually pretty cool - they've surprised me." I needn't point out that google has said publicly that they have no plans to in any way turn OO.org into a web-based product, so if anyone has an edge here it is clearly the people who just released a beta of their web-based office suite...
What is it about sketchy Israeli "startups" (quotes because I doubt most of these are even legitimate companies) that convinces slashdot editors of the legitimacy of whatever vaporware they are pushing, as opposed to their seemingly effective BS filters on sketchy PR releases from US companies? Sure, Israel is home to lots of technological innovation... but for every legitimate company, there is some guy in his basement trying to get 'VC funding' from private individuals who don't have effective spam filters. This is true of EVERY country.
There should seriously be a dedicated "science" editor who has at the very least a demonstrated knowledge of chemistry and physics, and has to approve all articles of this nature before they are posted (unless the source is, say, Nature or Science).
Has anyone else noticed that dowloading directly from the Ubuntu site gives you a file called "ubuntu-6.10..." rather than 5.10? If it weren't my favorite open source group, I would think this was a little fishy... Hm.
Oh my cosh, lighten up. Derivatives are a sinh.
... Time really needs to get its story straight with regards to scientific reporting. This method is a) not innovative b) not practical and c) REQUIRES SIGNIFICANT ENERGY INPUT. Vortex tubes have been around forever, and they are not some form of perpetual motion. It is a well-understood effect, and one which does not violate any of thermodynamics. You put in a lot of energy via compressed air, and get output in the form of a thermal differential. The key point is that you need a lot of high pressure input...where is this going to come from? Electricity. Unless you use a combustion engine to turn the crank on a compressor, in which case that's your energy source. What are villagers in rural india going to do? Blow really hard through the tube?
Why not simply buy fifteen CHEAP Samsung laser printers and spool off to them in parallel. That would give you 22*15=330ppm for only 15*$60=$900. This is less than 1/1000th the cost of IBM's printer, and apparently performs just as well. Am I missing something?
If you are going to submit an article from your own website, at least have the balls to say it like it is and submit it as yourself. There's a reason it says "Anonymous Coward". To slashdot editors: Please stop accepting every article submitted by this and other small sites. If they come up with something innovative or have an exclusive review of something new, post it. Otherwise, let the RSS newsfeeds at anandtech/hardocp/etc handle this crap.
I think the problem is that this stereotype fulfills itself as soon as kids are told that this is the way it is. In high school, I started out as a geek, but was drawn into jockism because I was big. Somehow, to me and to my coaches/teachers/advisors, being good at sports suddenly precluded me from needing to do well at school, and my grades suffered. The truth is that sports are good for the body and mind, but they should be kept totally distant from education so that their influence does not warp the perception you or your teachers have of your academic merits.
You're crazy. Know how I know? Because Dell's top of the line gaming laptop, with a fast p-m, and a 6800 ultra mobile video card costs only $1649 right now. A non-gaming ultralight, loaded with basically the same components you listed, is well under $1k right now. What you're missing is that it is completely normal for Dell to offer huge discounts. I don't remember a time when I couldn't get at least 25% off and a number of free upgrades for a Dell laptop.
This is typical of the current US public education system way of doing things: desperate for results, throw money at new ways of teaching things, rather than learning to teach properly in the first place. Huge sums of money used for inter-publisher arguments about things like including creationism in biology texts should be spent on funding more faculty (or properly paying the current faculty!)
Show me a public school in the US in which every student who has taken chemistry can accurately describe the logic behind the Mendelev arrangements, and I'll agree that we are qualified to take the more difficult step of teaching to a spiral table.
Maybe it is time to stop all this "China is catching up" paranoia.
Maybe you need a reality check, but the US GDP is barely growing at all. Look at the dollar, which is worth half of what it was 2 years ago vs. the euro, for evidence of this. We are in a recession - well, maybe not a full blown one, but we are barely creeping forward. In the meantime, china is beginning to overcome the technological gap that has been the only thing keeping them making cheap plastic household goods instead of our expensive microchips and cars.
Yes, the US has a massive GDP, but this is just residual. Do you really think that Rome circa 400BC had a "GDP" (whatever the roman equivalent would be) smaller than any other nation? Doubtful, but they sure as hell disappeared pretty quick right around that time.
I'm sick of america's work ethic going to shit, and I hope news like this gives us a wakeup call. America cannot survive in the 21st century with a workforce with 150 million underemployed college graduates with bloody communications degrees.
TFA refers to running firefox under rosetta emulation. This feeds instructions translated from G3 architecture into something that x86 can handle. Sort of like running a playstation 2 game on an xbox 360 through a playstation 1 emulator.
I would say that running firefox that fast under emulation is a pretty big deal.