I think they're heading in the right direction. They should also review and classify all websites on the internet as they can be downloaded to mobile phones as well. Shockingly, these so-called internet applications can even be downloaded to computers in even higher resolution. I wonder if they know that there are much more than 80,000 internet applications on just the world wide web alone. On top of this, they get regularly updated! Should keep a committee busy for a while, I think.
Noob question: IIRC from an earlier thread on this subject, this is supposed to be a high-efficiency but low-thrust engine as opposed to say, conventional rocket engines that are the opposite. I guess this would allow the VASIMR engine to provide sustained acceleration over a long period of time. Does this imply that this would be paired with a rocket engine and would kick in when the rocket is spent? In other words, do the basic characteristics of this engine force it to be only used as an additional engine or is it capable of being the one and only engine of a space shuttle?
I digress from the topic under discussion, but you should buy a Nehalem processor laptop (Core i7), install VMPlayer, and run XP as a VM. Alternately, you can wait a few days for Windows 7, which has XP compatibility mode built-in (also running as a VM). The reason why I specifically say Nehalem is because the VM optimization is dramatically better than Core2Duo, and speed-wise, you might still see a performance increase even though you're running your code in a VM. The newer AMD processors are quite good at VMs as well, and in fact, Nehalem only catches up to AMD in VM performance. However, Nehalem will give you a definite edge in terms of int and float number crunching performance.
Please also make sure that your hard-disk is not bottle-necking you. Get an SSD if you can afford it, or at least go for a 7200rpm drive.
Please refer to the excellent Anandtech preview article on Lynnfield that will be the first family of CPUs to use LGA 1156. Lynnfield has uses a dual-channel DDR3 controller instead of using triple-channel integrated memory controller in its uncore like Nehalem does. However, the dual-channel controller should still provide enough bandwidth for most desktop apps (the Nehalem architecture is not bandwidth constrained at all, unlike all previous generation CPUs including Core2 that used massive L2 caches to offset the memory bandwidth bottleneck due to the FSB).
However, the main difference between Lynnfield/LGA 1156 and LGA 1366 used in servers is the fact that it doesn't use QuickPath at all. Instead, it uses a combination of integrated PCIe 2.0 x16 controller (to talk to the graphics subsystem) and a (much slower) DMI controller to talk to everything else. Its an interesting alternative to QuickPath which is frankly expensive overkill for desktops anyway. The key advantage of the new socket will be significantly lower prices of motherboards and CPUs, which will allow Intel to provide some credible alternatives to AMD's current offerings that may be slower than Nehalem but are also much cheaper.
Exactly! This is like saying that throwing apples on the ground is hurting gravity. I also don't understand why we feel the need to associate words like good or bad with evolution. The only thing that is good or bad is when the effect of evolution affects us in some way. Is entropy acting mean today?
As a consultant, VI is my absolute favorite tool. Not on unix projects, on microsoft projects. It always happens eventually. Someone needs to modify a file in a way that screams for regex search with replace, but is a nightmare in visual studio or some other windowy editor. So I have them stand behind me while I write an long, arcane-looking regex line in VI. When I press enter, the entire file instantly morphs into exactly what they want.
I don't want to sound pedantic, but Visual Studio (.NET) has always supported regular expressions in its search and replace function (you need to specify that you want to use Regular Expressions in the options section of the Find and Replace window). It is not as macho as using VI admittedly, but it gets the job done, and there is full feature support for regex syntax. Regex is pretty cool though, and usually dazzles microsoft programmers as they've probably never used it.
The question to ask is if it will run Windows? Dell will probably end up giving XP as an option. However, are they pre-installing Ubuntu because XP will not run satisfactorily with the base system configuration (512MB RAM, etc.), or because XP is more expensive?
I strongly suspect the former, and that Linux flavours and derivatives are being preferred by the OEMs mainly because they're leaner, faster, and offer much better boot times (aka Instant-On versions such as Splashtop) than XP or Vista. This has probably been said before, but it looks like "lightweight PCs" that straddle the space between full PCs and appliances/devices will embrace Linux like nothing else has.
I suspect that MSFT is already feeling the proverbial kick in the backside, and is probably in a "containment" mode right now with its OEM vendors. You wanna bet that they aren't already working on an "XP-Lite" version to counter this threat?
Re:That was definitely...
on
Real Snail Mail
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Gives new meaning to digesting RSS feeds. Would you like garlic with that? A much better protocol implementation would have been to teach the snails to drive, and then equip them with a fleet of Mercedes.
Besides the latency improvement, you would have the satisfaction of hearing people say, "Dude, look at that S-car go"
...if I ordered a burrito yesterday, and my neighbor ordered one today,... does that mean in 40 more days, all one trillion people on earth will have had one? It depends... do you believe in global warming?
32G chips and put them in 4 slots on my 64 Bit PC before talking about 'massive memory' Can't you already do that with a server motherboard? Even if you're looking for a PC, Skulltrail supports gobs of RAM and 8 cores. On the server side, Intel is coming out (soon) with Dunnington, which will be a 6-core single-die CPU with a monster cache... AND you can put 4 of them on a motherboard, giving you a 24-core machine. Then, you can also get custom workstations (Tyan?) that support multiple motherboards in a single box with a high speed interconnect. This is only going to get better when CSI/QPI gets released later this year, and in a couple of years, Larrabee (large number of simple cores).
In my opinion, the benefits of parallelism can be more easily extracted at the VM or OS level, rather than at the application level. If you see how programming is evolving, it is clear that low level implementation details are increasingly being made transparent to the programmer. Heck, they're even abstracting out your CPU and application processes and instead using platform virtual machines (JVM/CLR) and application domains. After all this, it just doesn't makes sense to have programmers start coding/optimizing for multiple cores. You might as well ask them to write in assembly (however studly it may be).
..I expect the Intel-AMD duopoly leaves Intel some scope to cripple its processors to maintain price differentials... Interestingly, of late, it is AMD that is trying to create product differentiating by crippling their processors, or at least by selling processors with one core switched off. They're trying to do this by selling "tri-core" processors based on their Barcelona/Phenom cores, which are nothing much an actual quad-core with a core turned off, either deliberately, or because it is defective. They probably want to position this as a mid-range offering, to make it more competitive to Intel's relatively cheaper quad-cores.
When Paul Otellini was asked about this, he said that he would rather prefer selling processors in which all the cores are working. Didn't expect Paul to have a funny bone.
Of course, Intel has done this in the past as well (remember 386DX/SX??). However, it looks like Intel is moving away from this strategy, which is evident in the fact that many of their cheaper CPUs with lower cache are actually different designs, and not just CPUs with defective cachets (is this correct usage?). Again, this is probably because Intel is much more confident about their process than AMD is, and is hence, not too bothered in dealing with partially defective cores.
Having said this, all these examples are of CPUs with cores/cachets permanently disabled. It would an intersting marketing strategy for a mass-production CPU companies such as AMD and Intel to deploy many-core processors, and turn it on-off via say, the internet (deploy bios updates?). Processing power, in this case, could easily become a subscription service, instead of a fixed asset.
If you take this concept to the logical extreme however, you again go back to the days of central processing and dumb terminals, similar to what Google is trying to do. After all, why go through the hassle of physically installing a many-core processor in your personal computing device, when you can subscribe to the processing power from a service provider.
Yeah. Interestingly, they've only artificially throttled the top speed so that according to Indian road regulations, this will not be considered a motor vehicle, and will not require a license, registration, or road tax.
Yo has another model called Yo Speed that has much more sensible specifications. This one is a lot sturdier and heavier, has a top speed of 45kmh/30mph (again artificially throttled) with a payload capacity of 130kg, which is quite decent!
An interesting hack would be to disable the artificial top speed cap.
As an interesting aside, check out the all-electric scooters sold by "Yo Bykes" (ugh!) in India.
The Yo Smart model sells for about $800, and does ~75km/40mi per charge. While its performance is fairly anemic, it is cheap, small, and convenient enough for short distances. Imagine the benefit to the environment (and money saved!) if more people started using these electric bikes/scooters instead of their big-ass cars and SUVs for short errands.
and now it seems more and more likely that the majority of computing needs in the future will be met by terminals connected to mainframes via virtualization. That is indeed Big Irony.
Few businesses would dare double their research just to reduce their risks. It's a matter of affordability, and Intel can afford to have two rival design teams working in parallel on the same project. While this strategy proves to be a hedge on a risky bet, it has its disadvantages. Firstly, the design team can tend to slack off as it realizes that failure will not mean the death of the company. Secondly, they end up competing with each other instead of the competition, which can lead to some unhealthy internal politics, and it DOES! Intel managed to rise above the internal backbiting and politicking ONLY because AMD was whupping them in the NetBurst daze and it became a do or die situation.
thought the "TickTock" process of developing a technology two different ways was a really neat innovation. Having said that, the TickTock strategy only ensures that major design changes do not overlap with process upgrades. It has nothing to do with having multiple design teams.
why so many *Americans* have trouble grasping Darwin's theory of evolution IMHO, the reason why this is so difficult is because of the awe and wonder (and fear!) we feel when we see the magnificent complexity and interconnectedness in the nature around us. We are today not very different from our cavemen ancestors in the sense that we still go through most of our lives in a state of bewilderment, and most of our efforts focus on bringing some measure of control and understanding over the complexity that is bombarding us every minute! Technological evolution for that matter is not very different from biological evolution. The only advantage we have with technological evolution is that it is evolving in our lifetime. Trying to make your grandparent understand modern technology is probably as difficult as making them understand evolution and the related nuances such as game theory and Nash equilibrium. This is merely because the said technology of our time did not evolve with our grandparents, but with us. For our grandparents, this is simply a case of trying to cope with future evolution instead of past evolution as is the case with the Darwinian/Dawkinsian theory.
What is happening today to the common man is that he/she is getting immune to technology, which leads us to the possibly false premise that the lay person understands technology any better than say, evolution. Given this assault of seemingly illogical and complex information (which completely undermines a person's ego, mind you), religion provides a very convenient framework to make life simple, seemingly secure, and less fragile. Religion is hence, more of a survival tool for a society that shields away a person's insecurities. For that matter, that is the reason why societies and families formed in the first place, which is to increase the probability of our survival and proliferation. For the common man, religion and society practically mean the same thing, and hence interchangeably attribute the positive aspects of one with the other. This is also why they are willing to put up with the restrictions and rules of religion, just as we do for society's laws and restrictions!
The similarities between software development and Evolution are striking. As this article states, software tends to progress slowly, building upon the previous generation, improving on it and occationally adding new features to give it the advantage over it's competition. Hey, that sounds like my relationship! Since it is not intelligent design, it is probably evolution.
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I think they're heading in the right direction. They should also review and classify all websites on the internet as they can be downloaded to mobile phones as well. Shockingly, these so-called internet applications can even be downloaded to computers in even higher resolution. I wonder if they know that there are much more than 80,000 internet applications on just the world wide web alone. On top of this, they get regularly updated! Should keep a committee busy for a while, I think.
Noob question: IIRC from an earlier thread on this subject, this is supposed to be a high-efficiency but low-thrust engine as opposed to say, conventional rocket engines that are the opposite. I guess this would allow the VASIMR engine to provide sustained acceleration over a long period of time. Does this imply that this would be paired with a rocket engine and would kick in when the rocket is spent? In other words, do the basic characteristics of this engine force it to be only used as an additional engine or is it capable of being the one and only engine of a space shuttle?
I digress from the topic under discussion, but you should buy a Nehalem processor laptop (Core i7), install VMPlayer, and run XP as a VM. Alternately, you can wait a few days for Windows 7, which has XP compatibility mode built-in (also running as a VM). The reason why I specifically say Nehalem is because the VM optimization is dramatically better than Core2Duo, and speed-wise, you might still see a performance increase even though you're running your code in a VM. The newer AMD processors are quite good at VMs as well, and in fact, Nehalem only catches up to AMD in VM performance. However, Nehalem will give you a definite edge in terms of int and float number crunching performance.
Please also make sure that your hard-disk is not bottle-necking you. Get an SSD if you can afford it, or at least go for a 7200rpm drive.
Thanks for the correction. Yes, I meant to say that Nehalem is not bottlenecked.
Please refer to the excellent Anandtech preview article on Lynnfield that will be the first family of CPUs to use LGA 1156. Lynnfield has uses a dual-channel DDR3 controller instead of using triple-channel integrated memory controller in its uncore like Nehalem does. However, the dual-channel controller should still provide enough bandwidth for most desktop apps (the Nehalem architecture is not bandwidth constrained at all, unlike all previous generation CPUs including Core2 that used massive L2 caches to offset the memory bandwidth bottleneck due to the FSB).
However, the main difference between Lynnfield/LGA 1156 and LGA 1366 used in servers is the fact that it doesn't use QuickPath at all. Instead, it uses a combination of integrated PCIe 2.0 x16 controller (to talk to the graphics subsystem) and a (much slower) DMI controller to talk to everything else. Its an interesting alternative to QuickPath which is frankly expensive overkill for desktops anyway. The key advantage of the new socket will be significantly lower prices of motherboards and CPUs, which will allow Intel to provide some credible alternatives to AMD's current offerings that may be slower than Nehalem but are also much cheaper.
I would like to apologize again, like I have countless times before, but it will fall on deaf ears.
Are you married?
Well, in Soviet Russia....
In Soviet Russia, celery stalks you?
Exactly! This is like saying that throwing apples on the ground is hurting gravity. I also don't understand why we feel the need to associate words like good or bad with evolution. The only thing that is good or bad is when the effect of evolution affects us in some way. Is entropy acting mean today?
<bofh> up scotty is the last place I'd want to be beamed.
Yeah, you don't want to get kilt.
As a consultant, VI is my absolute favorite tool. Not on unix projects, on microsoft projects. It always happens eventually. Someone needs to modify a file in a way that screams for regex search with replace, but is a nightmare in visual studio or some other windowy editor. So I have them stand behind me while I write an long, arcane-looking regex line in VI. When I press enter, the entire file instantly morphs into exactly what they want.
I don't want to sound pedantic, but Visual Studio (.NET) has always supported regular expressions in its search and replace function (you need to specify that you want to use Regular Expressions in the options section of the Find and Replace window). It is not as macho as using VI admittedly, but it gets the job done, and there is full feature support for regex syntax. Regex is pretty cool though, and usually dazzles microsoft programmers as they've probably never used it.
They had the domain crusoe.com, which they bought from a friend of mine for somewhere around $5K. Maybe he can buy it back now.
That would be a good idea. After all, no man is an island.
But does it run linux?
The question to ask is if it will run Windows? Dell will probably end up giving XP as an option. However, are they pre-installing Ubuntu because XP will not run satisfactorily with the base system configuration (512MB RAM, etc.), or because XP is more expensive?
I strongly suspect the former, and that Linux flavours and derivatives are being preferred by the OEMs mainly because they're leaner, faster, and offer much better boot times (aka Instant-On versions such as Splashtop) than XP or Vista. This has probably been said before, but it looks like "lightweight PCs" that straddle the space between full PCs and appliances/devices will embrace Linux like nothing else has.
I suspect that MSFT is already feeling the proverbial kick in the backside, and is probably in a "containment" mode right now with its OEM vendors. You wanna bet that they aren't already working on an "XP-Lite" version to counter this threat?
Besides the latency improvement, you would have the satisfaction of hearing people say, "Dude, look at that S-car go"
(shamelessly ripped from Callahans)
(Trying to figure out why I think it is so funny but it just cracks me up...)
Too late. His wife probably DDoSed him a long time ago. Why else do you think he's selling all his stuff?
...if I ordered a burrito yesterday, and my neighbor ordered one today,On the server side, Intel is coming out (soon) with Dunnington, which will be a 6-core single-die CPU with a monster cache... AND you can put 4 of them on a motherboard, giving you a 24-core machine. Then, you can also get custom workstations (Tyan?) that support multiple motherboards in a single box with a high speed interconnect. This is only going to get better when CSI/QPI gets released later this year, and in a couple of years, Larrabee (large number of simple cores).
In my opinion, the benefits of parallelism can be more easily extracted at the VM or OS level, rather than at the application level. If you see how programming is evolving, it is clear that low level implementation details are increasingly being made transparent to the programmer. Heck, they're even abstracting out your CPU and application processes and instead using platform virtual machines (JVM/CLR) and application domains. After all this, it just doesn't makes sense to have programmers start coding/optimizing for multiple cores. You might as well ask them to write in assembly (however studly it may be).
..I expect the Intel-AMD duopoly leaves Intel some scope to cripple its processors to maintain price differentials... Interestingly, of late, it is AMD that is trying to create product differentiating by crippling their processors, or at least by selling processors with one core switched off. They're trying to do this by selling "tri-core" processors based on their Barcelona/Phenom cores, which are nothing much an actual quad-core with a core turned off, either deliberately, or because it is defective. They probably want to position this as a mid-range offering, to make it more competitive to Intel's relatively cheaper quad-cores.When Paul Otellini was asked about this, he said that he would rather prefer selling processors in which all the cores are working. Didn't expect Paul to have a funny bone.
Of course, Intel has done this in the past as well (remember 386DX/SX??). However, it looks like Intel is moving away from this strategy, which is evident in the fact that many of their cheaper CPUs with lower cache are actually different designs, and not just CPUs with defective cachets (is this correct usage?). Again, this is probably because Intel is much more confident about their process than AMD is, and is hence, not too bothered in dealing with partially defective cores.
Having said this, all these examples are of CPUs with cores/cachets permanently disabled. It would an intersting marketing strategy for a mass-production CPU companies such as AMD and Intel to deploy many-core processors, and turn it on-off via say, the internet (deploy bios updates?). Processing power, in this case, could easily become a subscription service, instead of a fixed asset.
If you take this concept to the logical extreme however, you again go back to the days of central processing and dumb terminals, similar to what Google is trying to do. After all, why go through the hassle of physically installing a many-core processor in your personal computing device, when you can subscribe to the processing power from a service provider.
Yeah. Interestingly, they've only artificially throttled the top speed so that according to Indian road regulations, this will not be considered a motor vehicle, and will not require a license, registration, or road tax.
Yo has another model called Yo Speed that has much more sensible specifications. This one is a lot sturdier and heavier, has a top speed of 45kmh/30mph (again artificially throttled) with a payload capacity of 130kg, which is quite decent!
An interesting hack would be to disable the artificial top speed cap.
As an interesting aside, check out the all-electric scooters sold by "Yo Bykes" (ugh!) in India.
The Yo Smart model sells for about $800, and does ~75km/40mi per charge.
While its performance is fairly anemic, it is cheap, small, and convenient enough for short distances. Imagine the benefit to the environment (and money saved!) if more people started using these electric bikes/scooters instead of their big-ass cars and SUVs for short errands.
What is happening today to the common man is that he/she is getting immune to technology, which leads us to the possibly false premise that the lay person understands technology any better than say, evolution. Given this assault of seemingly illogical and complex information (which completely undermines a person's ego, mind you), religion provides a very convenient framework to make life simple, seemingly secure, and less fragile. Religion is hence, more of a survival tool for a society that shields away a person's insecurities. For that matter, that is the reason why societies and families formed in the first place, which is to increase the probability of our survival and proliferation. For the common man, religion and society practically mean the same thing, and hence interchangeably attribute the positive aspects of one with the other. This is also why they are willing to put up with the restrictions and rules of religion, just as we do for society's laws and restrictions!