Question on how PRAM works and is manufactured
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Intel Set To Demo PRAM
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· Score: 4, Interesting
A lay question, and I had asked this question in the previous/. thread about PRAM, but did not get an answer..
How are Intel and others managing this chalcogenide glass manufacturing in their usual silicon DRAM process? Is this glass fused/bonded to silicon or something? Or is it an alloy.. and if so, is it a non-silicon alloy (silicon is a non-metal)?
I tried the wikipedia entry on this subject (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-change_memory) , but couldn't completely understand:- a. How it really works in an electronic circuit and in a microprocessor (how do you control the heating/cooling at the chip level so that phase change occurs)? b. How it is supposed to be volume manufactured? Would they require a new fab entirely to manufacture PRAM (if they do decide to commercialize this technology), or can an existing fab be retro-fitted to support this manufacturing process?
Appreciate any insights on this subject. At a high level, this does sound like a very exciting new technology.
I don't think I would attend a school that tried to restrict my internet access or had a poor infrastructure. If I'm going to school, and paying a fortune to attend
A fair comment, IF you're paying the school a fortune. Education in the IITs is highly subsidized, and is ridiculously low, if compared to an American engineering school. If a government subsidized computer network is being misused by the students, it isn't too unfair of the government to try and curb it.
I expect to have access to every tool I might need any time I might need it (barring physical limitations)
Your college/school is not a hermetically sealed self-sustaining universe that is obligated to provide you with unlimited internet bandwidth. If you want your facilities, feel free to live outside the campus and buy your gadgets and do your thing. I don't understand why the school needs to provide you absolutely every convenience you desire. Think conversely. If the school could reduce these "extras", it could easily cut the tuition fee substantially (OK, only a hypothesis). Think how much more that would benefit the bright students who don't go to a good school because they can't afford it.
Generally speaking, cost will be similar to NOR flash, if volume manufacturing picks up, and especially if Intel, Samsung, and other biggies get into the act. The key questions to ask are reliability/life of data and speed (and power consumption, if it is drastically different). From Intel's claims, reliability (or longevity) of data looks amazing for PRAM, but speed is still an unanswered question... both read and write speeds.
My other lay question is how Intel and others are managing this chalc* glass manufacturing in their usual silicon DRAM process. Is this glass fused/bonded to silicon or something?
I have a slightly different view on this, and not necessarily the opposite of yours. I actually LIKE the fact that my work life is clearly separated from my personal life. My previous job gave me a laptop, free home connectivity, and official permission to "work from home" a day a week. My new job has given me a workstation. Surprisingly, I'm enjoying the fact that I don't carry my work (laptop) home every day (even if I wouldn't have opened my laptop at home). It enables me to mentally "switch off" the instant I leave my office. So, even though I end up working slightly longer hours, I'm mentally at work ONLY when I'm physically at work.
Best of all, the fact that I cannot "work from home" forces me to be extra disciplined during my work-day, and I make sure that I prioritize my tasks and complete all my important tasks before I head for home. Admittedly, this is a generalization and may not be true for everyone, but it works for me.
Conversely, if I went back home at 6 sharp (because I had the ability to carry my work home) and still had some pending work for the day, I would never be able to truly unwind at home until the pending work has been completed. A beer tastes way better when you're tired and satisfied.
"Please note, I'm only slightly outside of the age range where that site is most popular."
and you have a 4-digit slashdot ID??
Jokes apart, you ARE right. While MySpace might be some kind of a phenomenon among teens, tweens, weens and insert-your-demographic-here, I don't know of ANYONE in my group of friends (late 20s-early 30s) who has a MySpace account (unless they don't want to admit it!). Ryze, yes. On a side note, Orkut is way more popular in India... and one disgusting snot of jargon that it has spawned is a "scrap".
"Firstly, India did not start everything from scratch after the British left. Anyone who has attempted to negotiate the beaurocracy (for example negotiating the release of a container from customs or getting a telephone line installed) can see the shadows of the British establishment that were left behind."
Yes, but bureaucracy is not exactly progress, is it? The real and meaningful progress that India has made has been in the last 10 odd years, after the economy was opened up and a lot of government controlled industries were privatized. Since then, India's economy has been growing by 8-10%. Before this, India was placidly chugging along at a 3-4% growth rate (and they called it the Hindu growth rate) which was taking the country nowhere. The only reason why China is way ahead of India today is that they had the foresight to liberalize and open up their economy a few decades before India has done.
"are you intending to gloss over the recent period of BJP-dominated politics which was, in my opinion, one of the darkest moments of Indian political history and saw aggression against Pakistan increase SIGNIFICANTLY?"
You're correct in the fact that the Gujrat riots were a blot on the country and more so on the party. However, "aggression against Pakistan" should be reworded "firm against Pakistan". Pakistan sends and funds hardcore terrorists, and their intelligence wing, the dreaded ISI (along with their armed forces) completely work hand in hand with the Al Qaeda. They train thousands of terrorists along the border areas and these terrorists camps are well documented and imaged. Most of these terrorists land up in India, and these terrorists kill more people in India every year than the 9/11 attacks.
Unfortunately, the leadership in India has been too weak to take a firm stand on this issue and the USA turns a blind eye on this issue, as these terrorists do not kill americans (yet) and because they need Pakistan to gain access to neighbouring Afghanistan. Note that these terrorists almost fomented an India-Pakistan war a few years ago and when the Indian army retaliated, the terrorists captured or killed were roughly 50% Pakistani soldiers and 50% terrorists.
Oh, by the way, what I've said is not a biased point of view, and can very easily be verified on the internet, if you dig around for facts and impartial writings on the India-Pakistan situation.
So, the BJP was not exactly aggressive against Pakistan but was simply being firm. In fact, BJP went out of its way to mend relationships with Pakistan and introduced bus services between the two countries. Some of the good things about the BJP are their firm leadership, liberal and capitalistic economic policies, and good external affairs. The only reason why they lost the previous election was because their campaign (so-called India Shining campaign) did not connect with the poor Indian at all. Their campaign ended up alienating the poor farmer and poor labourer, who are the ones that actually vote in India, and instead focused on the middle and rich class who like to crib more and rarely vote. Their election loss had no other reason. So many people die in India every year that the average Indian stopped giving a shit about the Gujrat riots after a year or so, even though a few thousands died. Heck, more farmers commit suicide every year because of chronic indebtedness and because of hunger. And see, religion (and casteism and what not) IS the opiate of the masses, especially when the masses are chronically hungry and stare at despair every night.
Re:Glad they're calling in the pros
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The Google Phone?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
From TFA, it looks like the Big G is mainly focusing on optimizing bandwidth by compression, and i'm guessing, by using a Google proxy. On a side note, I think that two of the biggest problems with surfing the internet via a cellphone are 1. Small display 2. Input interface
The first is getting bigger, but there's only so much room to grow, especially if you want to keep the form factor within reasonable limits so that the damn thing will fit in your pocket.
Regarding the second, i was thinking that it might be a good idea to have a good voice recognition software to do the user input instead of using the microscopic cellphone buttons. Alternately, if a good touch-sensitive interface can be built that lets us write text directly into the URL window or textboxes, it would make surfing so much easier. This can be made better if the UI recognizes that we're trying to type into a small textbox, and automatically zooms the textbox for us.
Perhaps, someone's already done all this, as i'm a bit of a cellphone luddite, but does this make sense?
"her work does require a powerful system since she does financial work.." "she runs Mathematica and Maple and the fancy graphical displays of those programs"
IMHO, it looks like your friend would have been better off with a high-end workstation than a high-end gaming box. Admittedly, the box itself would have probably not suited your friend's aesthetic sensibilities, but a good solid workstation would have given way better performance and reliability than a gamer's godbox. With a Dual Woodcrest 3.0GHZ, ECC RAM, and a high-end workstation graphics card, she would get way better 2D rendering and multi-monitor support than with a SLI something. On a sidenote, i'm a little curious myself if a workstation card would be capable of running a modern 3D game at decent resolutions.
If so, aren't they "doing evil" when the law forces them to do something? After all, if they didn't think it evil, they would have done it without the law forcing them.
I think you're missing the point. What would be evil would be to start censoring objectionable stuff. The act of interfering (unless forced to by the law) or being the "thought police" by itself is evil. On the other hand, what you're saying is that Google should start actively policing stuff based on their own sense of morality.
By definition, laws are based on a sense of morality and fairness. In a civilized society, it is the law that defines what is evil and what is not. Now if a country's laws are based on religious principles or are oppressive, we just have to live with that. Imposing our own sense of morality on what an entire other nation believes in is, at best, condescending. The only place where i would draw a distinction between illegality and evil is when people are gaming the system or are using the letter of the law and not the intent. Even in this case, the intent of the law usually wins out over a period of time.
"if they sought to do no evil either they would leave the blogs online no matter what"
You are now defining "evil" by your own standards. Even in the same society, a traditional hacker's ethos and value system is very different from that of an ordinary person or even a new-age hacker. Furthermore, different people, societies, and countries have their own concept of evil/moral or good/bad.
The only realistic way in today's world for a Google to retain its "integrity" is to do exactly what it is currently doing. Don't censor anything (or worse, knowingly compromise your users' privacy) until you're forced to do so by law. If people have a problem with some content on the internet, they need to take legal recourse, not start a witch hunt because their sensibilities have been offended.
The Earth is old and tends to forget a lot of things. Give her a break. Perhaps she's amnesiac because she chooses to be. What with all the shit we do to her... relentlessly
"My point was you don't setup and depend on a shop in a place like India or such if they're not a stable enough region in terms of political, economical and academic senses."
Political stability: India's been a pure democracy since its Independence (~60 years). What instability are you concerned about? Yes, the politicians can get a tad more interfering than in USA. However, this is usually restricted to sectors where the politicians have a vested interest, such as power, infrastructure etc. Software and IT is considered as the golden goose in India, and most political parties bend over backwards to accomodate the IT industry. Or let me put it this way: Your money and investment is safe in India, unless you happen to be in a business that has an environmental or social impact (think power plants that dislocate entire villages). India also has a very solid and old financial, banking, and legal system, and best of all, your investment in India typically grows at a rate that is about 4-5 times higher than in the US.
Economical stability: Again, India has been a capitalistic country for a very long time, with very decent regulatory and legal systems in place. Yes, India was more socialistic about 10 years ago, but that only means that the government owned a large number of industries, and placed a lot of regulations in infrastructure industries. Even in those days, it was not that the private companies did not enjoy a capitalistic system. This has also changed dramatically over the last 10 years, and in any case, the IT and high-tech sectors have always enjoyed open access to markets and money.
Academic concern: OK, India cannot be remotely compared to the US in terms of the quality of its universities, but i do say that our high school education is far superior to that of the US. An average Indian kid who's just finished high school will usually walk over any average american or european kid, when it comes to "hard" sciences and subjects such as math, science, logic, and analytical skills. Here's perspective: About 1 in 200 students are able to get into the IITs, and just for curiosity, you should take a look at any IIT entrance exam paper. Most of the questions are brain-benders. There are also quite a few universities like the IITs, IIMs, and NITs, that have very good quality in terms of education and infrastructure (not in research, though).
I agree with the parent and grandparent's views as well. Sony always positioned itself as a "cutting-edge" premium brand, and priced itself accordingly. The difference between then and now was that in those days, Sony's products were THAT good that people were willing to pay even double for the brand.
We still have a Sony Trinitron television that is is over 10 years old but still runs as good as new. Those trinitron picture tubes were truly revolutionary and the quality of electronics that went in was excellent as well, which is why they still run like new and give the best of LCDs a run for their money. Looking at a product like that, i would gladly pay through my nose for it. The modern day equivalent would be, i guess, to drop $500 for a pair B&W (or equivalent) speakers, i guess.
The problem is, these companies end up suffering from hubris more often than not, and things get dramatically worse if say, they miss a couple of key innovations. Now, you have a company that's a little behind the technology curve, and is still pricing itself way more than the market. Perhaps, the company will ride on the strength of its brand for a few years but not for too long.
Intel is, i feel, in a very similar situation. Like Sony, it too considers itself not as a market competitor but as a market creator or as a visionary. Both these companies actually walked the talk for quite some time, but slid real bad when they missed a couple of key market signals. The only difference is that Intel has a sufficiently strong senior management to learn from its mistakes, or at least from the really horrible ones. It's really trying to turn itself around after it has got shafted in the backside with its NetBurst offerings. In fact, i predict that it will come back stronger than ever after it successfully ramps on Woodcrest, Conroe, and Merom. I'm not so sure if Sony ever will recover OTOH, but then i only say that with the stereotype of Japanese bureaucracy in mind.
Lastly, i see this growing trend of flaming or dissing companies like Sony or Intel. Remember, these might be giants poised to fall, but its only a very very lucky and nimble David that manages to beat a very dumb and complacent Goliath. Another thing is that these Goliaths have also been responsible for creating markets and pioneering technology. Give them some respect for that, at the very least. It's easy to leech off market share AFTER a market is created, but the pioneer at least deserves the credit for having the cojones to take the first step.
The best thing about the 805 is that the motherboards are so cheap as well! There are definitely bigger and better CPU to lust after, even in terms of price/performance. But then, picking a decent motherboard for say a Dothan or Core Duo that is stable usually takes you to the enthusiast territory and the total system ends up costing much more than you intended. Athlon is an exception, of course. However, overclocking a 805 is like buying a dirt cheap supercompact or hatch, modding the engine, and getting a kick out of everytime your 10k car stays neck to neck with 50k sporty cars:-D
Sorry for adding to the cesspool of odious car similies!
I don't have mod points but... this has to be one of the funniest threads i've read on/. in a while:-)
Re:Wave of the future...
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Ageia PhysX Tested
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm not so sure about that. Down the years, the trend has usually been that companies have always released specialized chipsets or mini-CPUs that can take over some part of the CPU's workload. While this has worked in the short run (think math coprocessor), the CPU has become sufficiently powerful over time to negate the advantage. Look at it this way: If Intel/AMD releases a quad-core or octa-core CPU, in which each core is more powerful than the fastest single-core today, any of those cores could take up the physics processing workload. Best of all, this can happen without sacrificing performance on the other threads that're running. Furthermore, if Intel/AMD realizes that physics processing is becoming increasingly important, they will add special processing units for it in the future CPUs and come out with an additional instruction set, just like they've done for MMX/SSE. This would almost totally negate the value of having these specialized co-processors, albeit only in the long run. This will work as a quick fix for an immediate problem though.
To cut a long story short, i think that these specialized chips solve today's problem, not tomorrow's. I predict that this company will get bought over by either nVidia/ATI or Intel/AMD.
[quote]
No - Sun manage to get four multithreading cores in their Niagra, and only run at 72 watts with 32 threads. see this
However, with Intel's cores, I expect be able to have a hot dinner faster than you can say Microwave".
[/quote]
Oh, do you expect to fry an egg with a 31W (TDP) Sossaman, or do you expect to do it with a (TDP not confirmed officially) 80W Woodcrest? I can understand faboi comments like these, but for it to get modded to 4-Interesting is seriously lame.
I'm curious to know why the battery life benchmarks given in the review are so low. According to the reviewer, 3.5 hrs. seems to be the highest figure, while my guesstimate would have been a good hour more. I'm fairly sure that it's not Core Duo (Yonah) that's at fault here, because the new Napa platform is supposed to be more efficient than its predecessor. Nor could it be the USB bug because AFAIK, it's happening because of an MS driver bug (it doesn't allow the CPU to reach the deeper-sleep state because it keeps polling). Is it the brighter display that's sapping up the power? Or is the current avatar of OSX not optimized on the new platform yet?
Furthermore, i think the benchmarks could have been more thorough, especially considering that it's hosted on ars. Anandtech does an excellent job in this department, IMO. This review came across as an easy-reading article, not a technical review.
This is different. Agreed, internal competition can actually damage morale in a company. However, what Apple has done is reward open source contribution for individuals who didn't expect the reward in the first place. This is a good thing, as it encourages open-source hackers by giving them recognition as well as by giving them an unexpected reward. Everybody likes to get recognized and rewarded, especially for something that they take intellectual pride in. Hats off to the people who take the time off from their regular work and participate in such projects, simply because they want other people to benefit and learn from their skills and contributions. They thoroughly deserve such rewards.
Back to your example, where your company screwed up was in the fact that they confused incentive/recognition with unhealthy internal competition. It takes a very good people manager to instil a culture of competitiveness while making sure that it doesn't get degenerated into a political dog-eat-dog culture. The first encourages employees to benchmark themselves against their (better) peers and helps them pull up their socks when they feel they're sliding. The key here is that the manager should balance out the weaker employees' efforts with the company's goals, and make sure that they too are recognized and rewarded, along with the star performers. The second, OTOH, makes the weaker contributors feel a sense of futility, which makes them resort to cheating or give up the race. In my experience, i've met very very few people managers who can pull off this balancing act with success.
You have a valid point that all contributors should be rewarded and duly recognized. However, the key contributors also need to be rewarded more than the others, for that is the essence of meritocracy.
In all the flamewars that will ensue, i think the one thing to note is that the CPU industry is very much a cyclical one, especially for the big players. While a design mistake by a small company might potentially be fatal (or get taken over by a bigger competitor), big companies can afford some minor slip-ups and still come back strong. The only problem is, the cycle is usually big (at least in internet terms, which is more like dog-years), and it easily takes a large corporation a few years to do this. All said and done, both these companies have their traditional strengths and selling points that are fairly distinct (process technology vs architecture, features and stability vs performance and value for money) etc. Given these unique USPs and perceptions that these companies have developed and nurtured over the years, it will always be a see-saw battle, IMHO. Of course, these perceptions also change over time, but again, it takes time and even this is cyclical as well.
One more thing: Can we please have a genuinely unbiased discussion/argument, for a change, please??
I agree with you that weblogs or personal/corporate journals are still niche. However, i feel that the sheer number of weblogs (millions) warrant a TLD. Furthermore, it makes even more sense for corporations. Say, Apple decides to start corporate blogs. They could keep Apple.com as their corporate website, and host all their blogs in Apple.blog.
You have valid point that weblogs are often not dedicated. However, isn't the purpose of a TLD to provide effective categorization? Isn't the fact that weblogs are currently lacking a TLD of their own, leading to this whole mess in the first place? A few thousand weblogs would be manageable, but a few million, and going strong, will eventually lead to further erosion of the existing TLDs such as ".com", on which weblogs are currently hosted.
IMHO, a ".blog" TLD makes so much more sense. There are millions of weblogs anyway, and they're only growing at an exponential rate. This categorization will also, in one fell swoop, largely alleviate the trackback link problem that so many search engines are facing, and allow spiders/bots to easily differentiate between a weblog and a regular content/news site.
Slashdot Mirror
A lay question, and I had asked this question in the previous /. thread about PRAM, but did not get an answer..
) , but couldn't completely understand:-
How are Intel and others managing this chalcogenide glass manufacturing in their usual silicon DRAM process? Is this glass fused/bonded to silicon or something? Or is it an alloy.. and if so, is it a non-silicon alloy (silicon is a non-metal)?
I tried the wikipedia entry on this subject (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-change_memory
a. How it really works in an electronic circuit and in a microprocessor (how do you control the heating/cooling at the chip level so that phase change occurs)?
b. How it is supposed to be volume manufactured? Would they require a new fab entirely to manufacture PRAM (if they do decide to commercialize this technology), or can an existing fab be retro-fitted to support this manufacturing process?
Appreciate any insights on this subject. At a high level, this does sound like a very exciting new technology.
Generally speaking, cost will be similar to NOR flash, if volume manufacturing picks up, and especially if Intel, Samsung, and other biggies get into the act. The key questions to ask are reliability/life of data and speed (and power consumption, if it is drastically different). From Intel's claims, reliability (or longevity) of data looks amazing for PRAM, but speed is still an unanswered question... both read and write speeds.
My other lay question is how Intel and others are managing this chalc* glass manufacturing in their usual silicon DRAM process. Is this glass fused/bonded to silicon or something?
Look at the bright side... this will help you wok from home much more effectively.
"I am guessing in this context "discrete" means seperate [sic] from the motherboard."
:-)
It means that the graphics chip won't get in your way when you're setting up your motherboard, unlike some video cards I know.
I have a slightly different view on this, and not necessarily the opposite of yours. I actually LIKE the fact that my work life is clearly separated from my personal life. My previous job gave me a laptop, free home connectivity, and official permission to "work from home" a day a week. My new job has given me a workstation. Surprisingly, I'm enjoying the fact that I don't carry my work (laptop) home every day (even if I wouldn't have opened my laptop at home). It enables me to mentally "switch off" the instant I leave my office. So, even though I end up working slightly longer hours, I'm mentally at work ONLY when I'm physically at work.
Best of all, the fact that I cannot "work from home" forces me to be extra disciplined during my work-day, and I make sure that I prioritize my tasks and complete all my important tasks before I head for home. Admittedly, this is a generalization and may not be true for everyone, but it works for me.
Conversely, if I went back home at 6 sharp (because I had the ability to carry my work home) and still had some pending work for the day, I would never be able to truly unwind at home until the pending work has been completed. A beer tastes way better when you're tired and satisfied.
"Please note, I'm only slightly outside of the age range where that site is most popular."
and you have a 4-digit slashdot ID??
Jokes apart, you ARE right. While MySpace might be some kind of a phenomenon among teens, tweens, weens and insert-your-demographic-here, I don't know of ANYONE in my group of friends (late 20s-early 30s) who has a MySpace account (unless they don't want to admit it!). Ryze, yes. On a side note, Orkut is way more popular in India... and one disgusting snot of jargon that it has spawned is a "scrap".
On top of it, they decide to hedge their investment by buying 10% of FootLocker.
"Firstly, India did not start everything from scratch after the British left. Anyone who has attempted to negotiate the beaurocracy (for example negotiating the release of a container from customs or getting a telephone line installed) can see the shadows of the British establishment that were left behind."
Yes, but bureaucracy is not exactly progress, is it? The real and meaningful progress that India has made has been in the last 10 odd years, after the economy was opened up and a lot of government controlled industries were privatized. Since then, India's economy has been growing by 8-10%. Before this, India was placidly chugging along at a 3-4% growth rate (and they called it the Hindu growth rate) which was taking the country nowhere. The only reason why China is way ahead of India today is that they had the foresight to liberalize and open up their economy a few decades before India has done.
"are you intending to gloss over the recent period of BJP-dominated politics which was, in my opinion, one of the darkest moments of Indian political history and saw aggression against Pakistan increase SIGNIFICANTLY?"
You're correct in the fact that the Gujrat riots were a blot on the country and more so on the party. However, "aggression against Pakistan" should be reworded "firm against Pakistan". Pakistan sends and funds hardcore terrorists, and their intelligence wing, the dreaded ISI (along with their armed forces) completely work hand in hand with the Al Qaeda. They train thousands of terrorists along the border areas and these terrorists camps are well documented and imaged. Most of these terrorists land up in India, and these terrorists kill more people in India every year than the 9/11 attacks.
Unfortunately, the leadership in India has been too weak to take a firm stand on this issue and the USA turns a blind eye on this issue, as these terrorists do not kill americans (yet) and because they need Pakistan to gain access to neighbouring Afghanistan. Note that these terrorists almost fomented an India-Pakistan war a few years ago and when the Indian army retaliated, the terrorists captured or killed were roughly 50% Pakistani soldiers and 50% terrorists.
Oh, by the way, what I've said is not a biased point of view, and can very easily be verified on the internet, if you dig around for facts and impartial writings on the India-Pakistan situation.
So, the BJP was not exactly aggressive against Pakistan but was simply being firm. In fact, BJP went out of its way to mend relationships with Pakistan and introduced bus services between the two countries. Some of the good things about the BJP are their firm leadership, liberal and capitalistic economic policies, and good external affairs. The only reason why they lost the previous election was because their campaign (so-called India Shining campaign) did not connect with the poor Indian at all. Their campaign ended up alienating the poor farmer and poor labourer, who are the ones that actually vote in India, and instead focused on the middle and rich class who like to crib more and rarely vote. Their election loss had no other reason. So many people die in India every year that the average Indian stopped giving a shit about the Gujrat riots after a year or so, even though a few thousands died. Heck, more farmers commit suicide every year because of chronic indebtedness and because of hunger. And see, religion (and casteism and what not) IS the opiate of the masses, especially when the masses are chronically hungry and stare at despair every night.
From TFA, it looks like the Big G is mainly focusing on optimizing bandwidth by compression, and i'm guessing, by using a Google proxy. On a side note, I think that two of the biggest problems with surfing the internet via a cellphone are
1. Small display
2. Input interface
The first is getting bigger, but there's only so much room to grow, especially if you want to keep the form factor within reasonable limits so that the damn thing will fit in your pocket.
Regarding the second, i was thinking that it might be a good idea to have a good voice recognition software to do the user input instead of using the microscopic cellphone buttons. Alternately, if a good touch-sensitive interface can be built that lets us write text directly into the URL window or textboxes, it would make surfing so much easier. This can be made better if the UI recognizes that we're trying to type into a small textbox, and automatically zooms the textbox for us.
Perhaps, someone's already done all this, as i'm a bit of a cellphone luddite, but does this make sense?
IMHO, it looks like your friend would have been better off with a high-end workstation than a high-end gaming box. Admittedly, the box itself would have probably not suited your friend's aesthetic sensibilities, but a good solid workstation would have given way better performance and reliability than a gamer's godbox. With a Dual Woodcrest 3.0GHZ, ECC RAM, and a high-end workstation graphics card, she would get way better 2D rendering and multi-monitor support than with a SLI something. On a sidenote, i'm a little curious myself if a workstation card would be capable of running a modern 3D game at decent resolutions.
I think you're missing the point. What would be evil would be to start censoring objectionable stuff. The act of interfering (unless forced to by the law) or being the "thought police" by itself is evil. On the other hand, what you're saying is that Google should start actively policing stuff based on their own sense of morality.
By definition, laws are based on a sense of morality and fairness. In a civilized society, it is the law that defines what is evil and what is not. Now if a country's laws are based on religious principles or are oppressive, we just have to live with that. Imposing our own sense of morality on what an entire other nation believes in is, at best, condescending. The only place where i would draw a distinction between illegality and evil is when people are gaming the system or are using the letter of the law and not the intent. Even in this case, the intent of the law usually wins out over a period of time.
"if they sought to do no evil either they would leave the blogs online no matter what"
You are now defining "evil" by your own standards. Even in the same society, a traditional hacker's ethos and value system is very different from that of an ordinary person or even a new-age hacker. Furthermore, different people, societies, and countries have their own concept of evil/moral or good/bad.
The only realistic way in today's world for a Google to retain its "integrity" is to do exactly what it is currently doing. Don't censor anything (or worse, knowingly compromise your users' privacy) until you're forced to do so by law. If people have a problem with some content on the internet, they need to take legal recourse, not start a witch hunt because their sensibilities have been offended.
The Earth is old and tends to forget a lot of things. Give her a break. Perhaps she's amnesiac because she chooses to be. What with all the shit we do to her... relentlessly
I'll try to be bias-free even though i'm Indian.
"My point was you don't setup and depend on a shop in a place like India or such if they're not a stable enough region in terms of political, economical and academic senses."
Political stability: India's been a pure democracy since its Independence (~60 years). What instability are you concerned about? Yes, the politicians can get a tad more interfering than in USA. However, this is usually restricted to sectors where the politicians have a vested interest, such as power, infrastructure etc. Software and IT is considered as the golden goose in India, and most political parties bend over backwards to accomodate the IT industry. Or let me put it this way: Your money and investment is safe in India, unless you happen to be in a business that has an environmental or social impact (think power plants that dislocate entire villages). India also has a very solid and old financial, banking, and legal system, and best of all, your investment in India typically grows at a rate that is about 4-5 times higher than in the US.
Economical stability: Again, India has been a capitalistic country for a very long time, with very decent regulatory and legal systems in place. Yes, India was more socialistic about 10 years ago, but that only means that the government owned a large number of industries, and placed a lot of regulations in infrastructure industries. Even in those days, it was not that the private companies did not enjoy a capitalistic system. This has also changed dramatically over the last 10 years, and in any case, the IT and high-tech sectors have always enjoyed open access to markets and money.
Academic concern: OK, India cannot be remotely compared to the US in terms of the quality of its universities, but i do say that our high school education is far superior to that of the US. An average Indian kid who's just finished high school will usually walk over any average american or european kid, when it comes to "hard" sciences and subjects such as math, science, logic, and analytical skills. Here's perspective: About 1 in 200 students are able to get into the IITs, and just for curiosity, you should take a look at any IIT entrance exam paper. Most of the questions are brain-benders. There are also quite a few universities like the IITs, IIMs, and NITs, that have very good quality in terms of education and infrastructure (not in research, though).
I agree with the parent and grandparent's views as well. Sony always positioned itself as a "cutting-edge" premium brand, and priced itself accordingly. The difference between then and now was that in those days, Sony's products were THAT good that people were willing to pay even double for the brand.
We still have a Sony Trinitron television that is is over 10 years old but still runs as good as new. Those trinitron picture tubes were truly revolutionary and the quality of electronics that went in was excellent as well, which is why they still run like new and give the best of LCDs a run for their money. Looking at a product like that, i would gladly pay through my nose for it. The modern day equivalent would be, i guess, to drop $500 for a pair B&W (or equivalent) speakers, i guess.
The problem is, these companies end up suffering from hubris more often than not, and things get dramatically worse if say, they miss a couple of key innovations. Now, you have a company that's a little behind the technology curve, and is still pricing itself way more than the market. Perhaps, the company will ride on the strength of its brand for a few years but not for too long.
Intel is, i feel, in a very similar situation. Like Sony, it too considers itself not as a market competitor but as a market creator or as a visionary. Both these companies actually walked the talk for quite some time, but slid real bad when they missed a couple of key market signals. The only difference is that Intel has a sufficiently strong senior management to learn from its mistakes, or at least from the really horrible ones. It's really trying to turn itself around after it has got shafted in the backside with its NetBurst offerings. In fact, i predict that it will come back stronger than ever after it successfully ramps on Woodcrest, Conroe, and Merom. I'm not so sure if Sony ever will recover OTOH, but then i only say that with the stereotype of Japanese bureaucracy in mind.
Lastly, i see this growing trend of flaming or dissing companies like Sony or Intel. Remember, these might be giants poised to fall, but its only a very very lucky and nimble David that manages to beat a very dumb and complacent Goliath. Another thing is that these Goliaths have also been responsible for creating markets and pioneering technology. Give them some respect for that, at the very least. It's easy to leech off market share AFTER a market is created, but the pioneer at least deserves the credit for having the cojones to take the first step.
The best thing about the 805 is that the motherboards are so cheap as well! There are definitely bigger and better CPU to lust after, even in terms of price/performance. But then, picking a decent motherboard for say a Dothan or Core Duo that is stable usually takes you to the enthusiast territory and the total system ends up costing much more than you intended. Athlon is an exception, of course. However, overclocking a 805 is like buying a dirt cheap supercompact or hatch, modding the engine, and getting a kick out of everytime your 10k car stays neck to neck with 50k sporty cars :-D
Sorry for adding to the cesspool of odious car similies!
I don't have mod points but... this has to be one of the funniest threads i've read on /. in a while :-)
I'm not so sure about that. Down the years, the trend has usually been that companies have always released specialized chipsets or mini-CPUs that can take over some part of the CPU's workload. While this has worked in the short run (think math coprocessor), the CPU has become sufficiently powerful over time to negate the advantage. Look at it this way: If Intel/AMD releases a quad-core or octa-core CPU, in which each core is more powerful than the fastest single-core today, any of those cores could take up the physics processing workload. Best of all, this can happen without sacrificing performance on the other threads that're running. Furthermore, if Intel/AMD realizes that physics processing is becoming increasingly important, they will add special processing units for it in the future CPUs and come out with an additional instruction set, just like they've done for MMX/SSE. This would almost totally negate the value of having these specialized co-processors, albeit only in the long run. This will work as a quick fix for an immediate problem though.
To cut a long story short, i think that these specialized chips solve today's problem, not tomorrow's. I predict that this company will get bought over by either nVidia/ATI or Intel/AMD.
[quote] No - Sun manage to get four multithreading cores in their Niagra, and only run at 72 watts with 32 threads. see this However, with Intel's cores, I expect be able to have a hot dinner faster than you can say Microwave". [/quote]
Oh, do you expect to fry an egg with a 31W (TDP) Sossaman, or do you expect to do it with a (TDP not confirmed officially) 80W Woodcrest? I can understand faboi comments like these, but for it to get modded to 4-Interesting is seriously lame.
I'm curious to know why the battery life benchmarks given in the review are so low. According to the reviewer, 3.5 hrs. seems to be the highest figure, while my guesstimate would have been a good hour more. I'm fairly sure that it's not Core Duo (Yonah) that's at fault here, because the new Napa platform is supposed to be more efficient than its predecessor. Nor could it be the USB bug because AFAIK, it's happening because of an MS driver bug (it doesn't allow the CPU to reach the deeper-sleep state because it keeps polling). Is it the brighter display that's sapping up the power? Or is the current avatar of OSX not optimized on the new platform yet?
Furthermore, i think the benchmarks could have been more thorough, especially considering that it's hosted on ars. Anandtech does an excellent job in this department, IMO. This review came across as an easy-reading article, not a technical review.
This is different. Agreed, internal competition can actually damage morale in a company. However, what Apple has done is reward open source contribution for individuals who didn't expect the reward in the first place. This is a good thing, as it encourages open-source hackers by giving them recognition as well as by giving them an unexpected reward. Everybody likes to get recognized and rewarded, especially for something that they take intellectual pride in. Hats off to the people who take the time off from their regular work and participate in such projects, simply because they want other people to benefit and learn from their skills and contributions. They thoroughly deserve such rewards.
Back to your example, where your company screwed up was in the fact that they confused incentive/recognition with unhealthy internal competition. It takes a very good people manager to instil a culture of competitiveness while making sure that it doesn't get degenerated into a political dog-eat-dog culture. The first encourages employees to benchmark themselves against their (better) peers and helps them pull up their socks when they feel they're sliding. The key here is that the manager should balance out the weaker employees' efforts with the company's goals, and make sure that they too are recognized and rewarded, along with the star performers. The second, OTOH, makes the weaker contributors feel a sense of futility, which makes them resort to cheating or give up the race. In my experience, i've met very very few people managers who can pull off this balancing act with success.
You have a valid point that all contributors should be rewarded and duly recognized. However, the key contributors also need to be rewarded more than the others, for that is the essence of meritocracy.
In all the flamewars that will ensue, i think the one thing to note is that the CPU industry is very much a cyclical one, especially for the big players. While a design mistake by a small company might potentially be fatal (or get taken over by a bigger competitor), big companies can afford some minor slip-ups and still come back strong. The only problem is, the cycle is usually big (at least in internet terms, which is more like dog-years), and it easily takes a large corporation a few years to do this. All said and done, both these companies have their traditional strengths and selling points that are fairly distinct (process technology vs architecture, features and stability vs performance and value for money) etc. Given these unique USPs and perceptions that these companies have developed and nurtured over the years, it will always be a see-saw battle, IMHO. Of course, these perceptions also change over time, but again, it takes time and even this is cyclical as well.
One more thing: Can we please have a genuinely unbiased discussion/argument, for a change, please??
I agree with you that weblogs or personal/corporate journals are still niche. However, i feel that the sheer number of weblogs (millions) warrant a TLD. Furthermore, it makes even more sense for corporations. Say, Apple decides to start corporate blogs. They could keep Apple.com as their corporate website, and host all their blogs in Apple.blog.
You have valid point that weblogs are often not dedicated. However, isn't the purpose of a TLD to provide effective categorization? Isn't the fact that weblogs are currently lacking a TLD of their own, leading to this whole mess in the first place? A few thousand weblogs would be manageable, but a few million, and going strong, will eventually lead to further erosion of the existing TLDs such as ".com", on which weblogs are currently hosted.
IMHO, a ".blog" TLD makes so much more sense. There are millions of weblogs anyway, and they're only growing at an exponential rate. This categorization will also, in one fell swoop, largely alleviate the trackback link problem that so many search engines are facing, and allow spiders/bots to easily differentiate between a weblog and a regular content/news site.