It always surprises me that people treat Marc Andreessen as a "visionary". As I see it, he's a programmer of some talent who happened to be in the right place at the right time to be tapped by Jim Clark (the REAL visionary) to take his browser (which he did not invent, but merely polished the creation of Tim Berners-Lee) and try and make a new industry with it. Without Jim Clark (not just his money, but his business sense and entrepreneurial spirit), nobody would know Marc Andreessen today.
Out of curiosity, were you around on the Internet in 1993-1994? Marc was the lead developer who came up with this incredibly addictive toy whose usage was doubling every month and generating a huge stir. I avoided it for six months in late 1993 and early 1994 having heard how cool and addictive it was, lest I further neglect my studies. It was really the first piece of software that blended three elements: hypertext information retrieval, GUI ease-of-use, and layering that on the worldwide Internet infrastructure. (A decent account of what he did, and which elements were new, can be found at MIT's Inventor's Dimension.) Don't underestimate that GUI component, which was Marc's main contribution; it's what made the Internet accessible to the masses.
Clark was a techie turned capitalist who, having failed to figure out how to take the 3D graphics technology he had pioneered at SGI and make money in the upcoming PC 3D graphics revolution (which he foresaw, but ducked: full 3D on a chip costing $20 and selling on PCs for $30-200) was looking for some new arena where he could 'win' and turned his attention to how to make a buck on this new "Mosaic" thing. He succeeded brilliantly, but as with SGI, he never figured out how to take a technology he had pioneered and turn it into a business with a defensible end-game. Clark has some business sense but I think his virtues are a lot more a shrewd sense of timing and trends than an ability to build a sustainable business. This might be too harsh on him; perhaps it was an impossible task given his "competition": the leverage of Microsoft. But the failures at SGI and Netscape were failures of business vision and strategy, his responsibility, not failures of the technology guys, Mark Andreesen (or, say, Kurt Akeley).
I'd agree with you that Jim Clark was responsible for giving Marc the name recognition that he has today... Clark did this I presume since he recognized that anyone could go build a browser, but only one company would have the "inventor of the browser" on their staff and the insight, marketing, and recruiting advantages that would bring. Without that, Marc would only be as famous as, say, Tim Berners-Lee. You've heard of him, I notice. And I'd agree that Marc Andreesen noticed the missing pieces in part because he was at the right place at the right time, developing software at a university that was a supercomputing center hooked into the physics community of Tim Berners Lee, etc. But it was Marc who saw how to turn a hypertext system for publishing physics papers and linking footnotes into a mass medium.
Marc's vision was innovative and technical and it succeeded. Jim Clark's vision was business-oriented and capitalistic (which is no crime) and it failed after making a few rich. Now who deserves accolades as the visionary?
--LinuxParanoid, who didn't have enough vision to accept that offer to attend University of Illinois in the early 90s...
nVidia had the opportunity, ALL ALONG to drive the development of the next generation of OpenGL so that it could be capable of supporting the features that nVidia wants.
A lot of key nVidia personnel came from SGI. They know this. They also know that OpenGL's openness, while useful versus other workstation vendors, didn't help them (SGI) combat Microsoft very much, given Microsoft's OS + programming tools monopoly. There's no reason that shoving their key vertex shader technology interfaces into OpenGL would substantially help them sell more units or compete more effectively versus ATI or forestall Microsoft market power. In contrast, getting their interfaces into DirectX potentially helps them sell more units (by lowering the barriers for the largest set of developers using shaders, a key upgrade-driving feature), compete more effectively versus ATI (whose vertex shaders no doubt work a bit differently from nVidia), and forestall Microsoft's market power (since, by offering such technological gems, they can get various concessions on other issues or IP licensing fees from Microsoft).
3Dlabs deserves major kudos for delivering the OpenGL spec. Given that 80+% of their CAD/workstation base predominately uses OpenGL, it makes sense that they'd push programmer interfaces to their IP through OpenGL. And for a similar reason, it makes sense for nVidia to insure interfaces to their hardware are in DirectX. IMHO.
And its not just nVidia and ATI, it's even more likely to be earlier 3D players who had more fundamental, less esoteric patents. Companies like Lockheed Martin, SGI and Evans and Sutherland.
In particular, I believe Lockheed Martin had some fundamental patents on texture mapping that I recall were particularly impossible to get around. Perhaps someone with more knowledge of them can confirm or deny that?
I have just one question: can you run an SSH session with them? (For a system administrator or programmer who gets a call about the webserver/application being down and wants to securely login to one over his cell phone...)
The argument that "At some time, there will be a real crisis" is not a very compelling one. You need to explain the nature of the crisis, as well as show that it is better for us to address it now, rather than later. Given the law of unintended consequences, attacking a not-well-understood global problem with a global all-out effort seems likely to end up sub-optimal to me, particularly if the short term consequences are minor and the likelihood that we'll understand a lot more in a decade are major. For example, can you explain to me why the satellite readings from the last 20 years show no warming of the earth's surface, despite other ground-level thermometer increases in various locations?
Who exactly are you accusing of "depeding on non-renewable resources without looking for alternatives?" Surely not the US government which spends between $500m and $1b of taxpayer dollars every year to investigate renewable energy research. You may argue that we should spend more; if so, at least lets be accurate in saying where things stand now.
I do not think a "major shift in the way the world works" is necessarily a crisis nor that it is likely to be one. There was a major shift from coal to oil from the 1800s to 1900s, and we are undergoing a largely unheralded shift from oil to natural gas (which burns a lot cleaner by the way) as we enter this century. I'm not sure it's a crisis or that a crisis is inevitable.
I guess sometimes the signals of affection are a bit too subtle? (See page 2 of chapter 8 of our Vice President's (in)famous energy policy to see what I mean...)
--LP
P.S. FYI, Canada and the oil sands are mentioned explicitly on page 8 in that chapter. P.P.S. By the way, whoever came up with naming gummy tar "oil sands" deserves a marketing medal in my book.
I am deeply curious if any of us here know how much oil is left.
Nobody knows how much oil is left. The best we have are "estimates", which themselves have have significant degrees of uncertainty. Based on my reading, I'd say the amount of actual known reserves might vary by a factor of 2-3x due to various players hiding their cards and understating or overstating their known/suspected reserves. It's not in each players' interest to disclose how little or large their reserves are.
And I'd guess current estimates of reserves could underestimate actual supply by 10-1000x based on what we don't know about geological areas around the world, about how oil is formed, about how to efficiently extract it. While these might not effect "reserves" under a strict version of your definition, they obviously would affect "supply" which I think was what your initial question was asking ('how much oil is left?')
With those caveats in mind, I offer you two links to address your question.
a mid-2001 analysis of defining and analyzing the primary sources of global reserve figures by Jean Laherrere. I can't vouch for his analysis (the chart on the bottom of page 5 shows reported reserves going up but his analysis of them going down, something I haven't read closely enough to understand) since I've only run across it today, and a website named oilcrisis.org might indicate some bias, but I've seen his name before and its a resource worth checking out if you want to know how much oil is left.
Interesting. Glad to hear things are going well up there in Alberta. Posts like yours are why I still read Slashdot.
Do you have a verifiable external source for that $7 figure by the way? (I haven't seen that one before and I'd like something more specific to quote to others other than "I read it on the Internet/Slashdot...".
Closest thing I could find browsing around the links you posted was a Syncrude FAQ webpage that said "At below $18 (Cdn.) a barrel, Syncrude's operating costs are comparable to finding and developing new sources of conventional crude oil. Since 1984, Syncrude has more than doubled its output of crude oil per year and cut unit operating costs in half." (This works out to about $11.50 USD by my calculations.) Any pointers or suggestions where I should look?
I shouldn't have been so lazy. I didn't remember the author, but I did find it on Amazon after remembering part of the subtitle. The author is "Peter Schweizer".
We kiss Saudi tush because they are the only major oil "swing producer". A swing producer is someone who has a large amount of excess capacity who can influence world oil supply (and thus prices) significantly by turning on their pumps. Within weeks, if they want, the Saudis can start pumping a lot more oil and thus they can cause the spot price of oil to drop a lot. (They did this for six months right after 9/11 by the way, which had the nice effect of mitigating its' impact on our economy. Give em some credit.)
The Saudis could also swing the other way easily, reducing their oil exports and thus causing oil prices to go up (since nobody else has much spare capacity to make up for the lack of supply). However the Saudi's ability drive up prices this way has constricted somewhat since the 1970s due to a number of factors: 1) the Saudi's domestic welfare program has greatly expanded and still requires oil revenues to keep their citizens happy, 2) Saudi Arabia is now a net debtor nation so net revenue shortfalls require borrowing and creditors, 3) the number of oil substitutes at a given price has risen, 4) long term price rises drive conservation response which reduces long-term demand, not in the Saudi interest 5) the US has a Strategic Petroleum reserve at its disposal that was not present in 1973.
As for ignoring friends to the north, I'm not sure we do. (If we did, I'd agree it'd be a stupid mistake.) The northern Alberta oil sands are great, and I think they are novel enough to have not really entered the generic political dialogue. Since I've had people in the oil industry mention them to me since 9/11, I'm sure the oil crowd in power in Washington knows about them. I suspect we just don't advertise it, unless we're in private talks and want to wield a big stick.
The other problems with the oil sands are, as you noted, that it only supplies 2% of our oil and it can't expand production rapidly (without throwing vast sums of money at it, as one might do in a world war.) And while the reserves are apparently huge, they can't all be extracted at that $7 price you mention. It'll get more economical as chemists and others learn how to extract the tar and refine it more efficiently, no doubt. But that takes time. And the Saudis can turn the spigots on or off at their whim, and nobody else has lots of spare capcity they can bring online rapidly at that lower price.
Except perhaps the Russians, as they start exporting more and building more facilities. This came to light a little bit more when certain middle-eastern countries started talking about using the 'oil weapon' against the US a month or two back. Iraq cut its shipments for a month, and I believe Russia boosted theirs. Which is clearly the implied threat we've been delivering to the Saudis since 9/11. Don't screw us or we'll turn to the Russians (and ensure that they have enough pipelines?) to make them the second major swing producer.
All of which is sort of ironic since we used the Saudis to squeeze the Russian economy to collapse back during the Gorbachev era (search Amazon or another equivalent for the book "Victory!" for the full story on that one.)
Verify what I say; I'm not an expert, but I have definitely been reading up on all this and thinking about it more since 9/11.
The main point of the pentium4 architecture is to scale to 4+GHz. Can we assume anything similar for the itanium?
I don't follow this too closely any more, but I would presume they'll get to 2+ GHz, maybe 3 GHz, but probably not 4 GHz. A 4x jump is a lot to ask for without some additional redesign, especially if you are talking 4-way SMP running at those rates.
Given that they're claiming a 2x boost in SPECint2000 and SPECfp2000 from Itanium, on the same.18 micron process, the successor chips (Madison/Deerfield) on.13 micron should get them another 2-3x. Those are due sometime in 2003 I think.
Refresh rate matters for CRTs because low refresh gives you "flicker". Refresh is irrelevant with LCDs because there is no "flicker" because there is no electron gun lighting one pixel at a time.
I've long had problems with monitor flicker, even 85 Hz refresh. (I like having both high refresh and high resolution so I never really did the 120Hz thing...) I haven't had any problems with refresh since getting a LCD.
Your point about larger screen size reducing eyestrain remains relevant with LCDs however.
If you want a damn good techie white paper on the basic physics and engineering of LCD technology, I recommend the mildly dated but still highly informative SGI 1600SW white paper.
Their display used to have the unique advantage of a very low pixel response rate, great for avoiding ghosting in video, but I can't seem to confirm that in their specs nowdays.
Hmm, they did cross-link to Heroine Warrior, whose site says:
After a long period of deliberation on the matter, Broadcast 2000 has been removed from public access due to excessive liability.
We've already seen several organizations win lawsuits against GPL/warranty free software writers because of damage that software caused to the organization. Several involved the RIAA vs mp3/p2p software writers. Several involved the MPAA vs media player authors. You might say that warranty exemption has become quite meaningless in today's economy.
While not related to either of these cases the distribution of Broadcast 2000 enhanced to unacceptable levels the risk of an individual experiencing significant financial damage due to the extremely expensive nature of high end video production and the high risk inherent in professional video business marketing.
This has forced us to reconsider our liability protection at this time. We still plan to continue offering minor works for download and in the coming years, as the liability issues surrounding open source software are resolved, we expect to issue newer major works.
Broadcast 2000, "the software the competition fears", is the revolutionary Open Source Linux software package created by Heroine Warrior (and now being carried on in development and service by LMA)...
So why can't I find the source or binaries on their website?
--LP, who just wanted to check what parts were truly free
3DRAM has been around 4-5 years or so. It is nice technology, but to answer your rhetorical question, adding logic operations to memory adds significantly to the expense of the RAM. (It's a non-commodity part made by Mitsubishi, and at the very least must be tested, and I think manufactured, in custom ways.)
It also reduces memory flexibility; you can't just take some of that huge texture memory you have and start using it as the frame+Z buffer of a dual-head display for example, unless the right amount of 3D RAM was spec'ed in the hardware design to begin with.
Also, at least in the early days, some blending modes were supported and others weren't.
Reducing Z buffer bandwidth is pretty nice though, don't get me wrong. But most of the industry has stuck with the volume economics of more conventional RAM types.
Attempting to apply the four factors there, while some could be argued either way, I can see that on balance, you both might be right. I could probably make a stronger case that it doesn't qualify as fair use, than that it does, based on those four factors. I think I was focusing over-much on the "amount taken" criteria and overlooking the others.
I think you are confusing plagarism, and a violation of copyright. I am primarily concerned with the legal issue of Copyright violation raised by the previous poster, not an amorphous ethical one.
As Bitlaw points out, under the Copyright Act, four factors are to be considered in order to determine whether a specific action is to be considered a "fair use." These factors are as follows:
1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; 2) the nature of the copyrighted work; 3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and 4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Slurping a sentence or two from an 5-25 paragraph article and quoting it with attribution is considered fair use, right?
I'm not clear on if they're quoting and attributing it sufficiently to meet a legal challenge however. IANAL. But it's not the open and shut case you make it out to be as far as I can tell.
Currently, the XVR-1000 targets primarily the engineering and CAD markets, as opposed to 3D animation, given the rather limited fillrate. However, Sun intends to use the MAJC-5200 to scale the performance of its graphics solutions to higher levels in the future (as seen in this older roadmap), so we may yet see a solution attacking the 3D animation market at some point in the future.
The MAJC-5200 will improve geometry performance (number of triangles, floating point math required), not fillrate (number of pixels/texels shaded, integer math).
Animation requires better fillrate, and more MAJC-5200s won't provide that. MAJC-5200 *will* provide Sun with stronger geometry performance (FLOPS, remember?), which is just what Sun's core engineering and CAD markets most want. Lots of small triangles to accurately show the precise shape of things of digitally-created parts. Nothing about MAJC-5200 will strengthen Sun's penetration into new SGI markets per se. That'd be dependent on some other, presumably fill-rate enhancing, technology.
Sun still has some customers in the 2D publishing space, who might use images scanned in or color-corrected with greater bit-depth precision.
And theoretically, texturing-intensive entertaiment applications could use it for better results when blending multiple textures. But practically, fill rate is probably not strong enough for those guys to buy the XVR-1000.
Basically, I think it's a penis-comparison match versus PC graphics. "My color depth is bigger than yours." Which Sun hopes will justify the higher price.
It may hit a few niches, but its mostly irrelevant.
--LP, who no longer knows the 3D gory details but still faintly remembers where the bodies are buried
I know that the congressional staffers don't pay too much attention to boilerplate messages, so I rewrote mine to say the following, posted here as just another perspective:
I'm upset that the Fair Use rights of citizens and consumers of copyrighted information are under steady and increasing attack by profit-maximizing and liberty-minimizing corporations.
It'd be nice if some representatives such as yourself stood up for the average Joe's 'pursuit of happiness'.
Specifically, I would appreciate if Congress would grant the right for consumers to 'time-shift' and 'space-shift' our use of legitimately purchased (or licensed) copyrighted materials for personal use. I would like to add my voice to DigitalConsumer.org in calling for a "consumer technology bill of rights" in an attempt to preserve our Fair Use rights. I'm sure you've read their boilerplate, I won't repeat it.
I have a bunch of old cassette tapes. And I have a bunch of CDs. And I listen to a lot of my music and audio on the computer nowdays. And over time my cassettes (and even CDs) degrade for reasons of physics and cheap electronics.
As a software developer who respects intellectual property rights, I have never used Napster (or similar services) to download music I have not purchased. But I dang well *would* like the clear legal right to download MP3s of casettes I purchased 15 years ago, or CDs in my collection, so I don't have to go through the hassle of upgrading my tape deck and connecting it to my computer to try to move songs around. (To be fair to record companies, I would not demand the right to download CD-quality copies of my old cassettes, but CD-quality copies of CDs or low-medium-grade MP3 copies of casettes should be 'fair'.)
I've slowed and stopped purchasing much additional music until the industry comes up with a consumer-friendly way for me to purchase it; something which allows me to recognize a song on the radio, say "hey, I like that song and would like it in my permanent collection" and allows me to download it and play it for the rest of my life, like a book on my shelf.
The record industry wants me to purchase a 'license' to listen to the song when I am online, being tracked, or wants me to purchase a copy on some physical piece of media that they will obsolesce in 15 years.
I don't mind if they attempt to convince the public to do that, but I resent that they are enhancing their ability through highly suspect oligopolistic practices, through high-paid lawyers in the courts, through high-paid lobbiests trying to convince you, my representative.
Copyright was designed by our founders not as a license to print money (although that is a nice side effect when a work is popular). Copyright should be an incentive to create new, great works.
Wouldn't the world be a better place if they focused their massive resources on identifying new, good music? And not on trying to reduce the public's Fair Use rights in an attempt to create pseudo-mandatory upgrades for consumers who just want to listen to the Beatles songs of their youth, 20, 40, and 60 years later without paying copyright holders at every step along the way?
I focus on the music industry because that is closest to my heart, but there are very similar issues with movies, the electronic books of tomorrow, and other media products.
Thank you very much for your attention to this important matter.
--LP (no, I signed it with my real name and address in hopes they'd pay more attention)
Popular Power had a java-based client. It basically ran off a JDK it helped install on your system, not via the browser. (They ran out of money, dunno what happened to the code.) It would run when your screen saver turned on, which I think makes more sense than asking a user to visit a website.
You're missing the real problem with all these distributed approaches. There aren't many corporate commercial computing jobs that are limited by compute speed. High-end server applications are usually most limited by disk I/O rates, which none of these ISOS approaches effectively address.
ISOS is great for compute-bound problems, OK for network-bound problems, and lousy for diskIO-bound problems, while the application portfolio willing to pay for speedup is overwhelmingly the reverse, except for a few scattered niches.
RPM speeds on disk drives don't improve at Moore's Law rates. The CPU isn't the bottleneck, the database is the bottleneck.
For technical computing jobs, this makes great sense.
For commercial computing jobs, as a business with economic incentives for participation, a distributed operating system unfortunately makes little or no sense due to the types of applications that are currently server-limited.
Commercial computing jobs which need "big servers" are typically very database-dependent. You can't distribute the application very well unless you can distribute the database. (And hopefully you aren't crunching terabyte data warehouses, right? That takes a while to send down the pipes...) Besides the inherent difficulty of distributing your database across many nodes, you have the the typical basket of problems the IOS must overcome with a very high degree of assurance: security of your highly-proprietary information, reliability, backup, etc.
Most of the P2P plays a year or two ago discovered this the hard way. The most promising sales approaches ended up being things like distributed caching for search engine companies, which is a niche, not a mainstream business.
Slashdot Mirror
It always surprises me that people treat Marc Andreessen as a "visionary". As I see it, he's a programmer of some talent who happened to be in the right place at the right time to be tapped by Jim Clark (the REAL visionary) to take his browser (which he did not invent, but merely polished the creation of Tim Berners-Lee) and try and make a new industry with it. Without Jim Clark (not just his money, but his business sense and entrepreneurial spirit), nobody would know Marc Andreessen today.
Out of curiosity, were you around on the Internet in 1993-1994? Marc was the lead developer who came up with this incredibly addictive toy whose usage was doubling every month and generating a huge stir. I avoided it for six months in late 1993 and early 1994 having heard how cool and addictive it was, lest I further neglect my studies. It was really the first piece of software that blended three elements: hypertext information retrieval, GUI ease-of-use, and layering that on the worldwide Internet infrastructure. (A decent account of what he did, and which elements were new, can be found at MIT's Inventor's Dimension.) Don't underestimate that GUI component, which was Marc's main contribution; it's what made the Internet accessible to the masses.
Clark was a techie turned capitalist who, having failed to figure out how to take the 3D graphics technology he had pioneered at SGI and make money in the upcoming PC 3D graphics revolution (which he foresaw, but ducked: full 3D on a chip costing $20 and selling on PCs for $30-200) was looking for some new arena where he could 'win' and turned his attention to how to make a buck on this new "Mosaic" thing. He succeeded brilliantly, but as with SGI, he never figured out how to take a technology he had pioneered and turn it into a business with a defensible end-game. Clark has some business sense but I think his virtues are a lot more a shrewd sense of timing and trends than an ability to build a sustainable business. This might be too harsh on him; perhaps it was an impossible task given his "competition": the leverage of Microsoft. But the failures at SGI and Netscape were failures of business vision and strategy, his responsibility, not failures of the technology guys, Mark Andreesen (or, say, Kurt Akeley).
I'd agree with you that Jim Clark was responsible for giving Marc the name recognition that he has today... Clark did this I presume since he recognized that anyone could go build a browser, but only one company would have the "inventor of the browser" on their staff and the insight, marketing, and recruiting advantages that would bring. Without that, Marc would only be as famous as, say, Tim Berners-Lee. You've heard of him, I notice. And I'd agree that Marc Andreesen noticed the missing pieces in part because he was at the right place at the right time, developing software at a university that was a supercomputing center hooked into the physics community of Tim Berners Lee, etc. But it was Marc who saw how to turn a hypertext system for publishing physics papers and linking footnotes into a mass medium.
Marc's vision was innovative and technical and it succeeded. Jim Clark's vision was business-oriented and capitalistic (which is no crime) and it failed after making a few rich. Now who deserves accolades as the visionary?
--LinuxParanoid, who didn't have enough vision to accept that offer to attend University of Illinois in the early 90s...
nVidia had the opportunity, ALL ALONG to drive the development of the next generation of OpenGL so that it could be capable of supporting the features that nVidia wants.
A lot of key nVidia personnel came from SGI. They know this. They also know that OpenGL's openness, while useful versus other workstation vendors, didn't help them (SGI) combat Microsoft very much, given Microsoft's OS + programming tools monopoly. There's no reason that shoving their key vertex shader technology interfaces into OpenGL would substantially help them sell more units or compete more effectively versus ATI or forestall Microsoft market power. In contrast, getting their interfaces into DirectX potentially helps them sell more units (by lowering the barriers for the largest set of developers using shaders, a key upgrade-driving feature), compete more effectively versus ATI (whose vertex shaders no doubt work a bit differently from nVidia), and forestall Microsoft's market power (since, by offering such technological gems, they can get various concessions on other issues or IP licensing fees from Microsoft).
3Dlabs deserves major kudos for delivering the OpenGL spec. Given that 80+% of their CAD/workstation base predominately uses OpenGL, it makes sense that they'd push programmer interfaces to their IP through OpenGL. And for a similar reason, it makes sense for nVidia to insure interfaces to their hardware are in DirectX. IMHO.
--LP
And its not just nVidia and ATI, it's even more likely to be earlier 3D players who had more fundamental, less esoteric patents. Companies like Lockheed Martin, SGI and Evans and Sutherland.
In particular, I believe Lockheed Martin had some fundamental patents on texture mapping that I recall were particularly impossible to get around. Perhaps someone with more knowledge of them can confirm or deny that?
--LP
I have just one question: can you run an SSH session with them? (For a system administrator or programmer who gets a call about the webserver/application being down and wants to securely login to one over his cell phone...)
--LP
The argument that "At some time, there will be a real crisis" is not a very compelling one. You need to explain the nature of the crisis, as well as show that it is better for us to address it now, rather than later. Given the law of unintended consequences, attacking a not-well-understood global problem with a global all-out effort seems likely to end up sub-optimal to me, particularly if the short term consequences are minor and the likelihood that we'll understand a lot more in a decade are major. For example, can you explain to me why the satellite readings from the last 20 years show no warming of the earth's surface, despite other ground-level thermometer increases in various locations?
Who exactly are you accusing of "depeding on non-renewable resources without looking for alternatives?" Surely not the US government which spends between $500m and $1b of taxpayer dollars every year to investigate renewable energy research. You may argue that we should spend more; if so, at least lets be accurate in saying where things stand now.
I do not think a "major shift in the way the world works" is necessarily a crisis nor that it is likely to be one. There was a major shift from coal to oil from the 1800s to 1900s, and we are undergoing a largely unheralded shift from oil to natural gas (which burns a lot cleaner by the way) as we enter this century. I'm not sure it's a crisis or that a crisis is inevitable.
--LP
I guess sometimes the signals of affection are a bit too subtle? (See page 2 of chapter 8 of our Vice President's (in)famous energy policy to see what I mean...)
--LP
P.S. FYI, Canada and the oil sands are mentioned explicitly on page 8 in that chapter.
P.P.S. By the way, whoever came up with naming gummy tar "oil sands" deserves a marketing medal in my book.
Nobody knows how much oil is left. The best we have are "estimates", which themselves have have significant degrees of uncertainty. Based on my reading, I'd say the amount of actual known reserves might vary by a factor of 2-3x due to various players hiding their cards and understating or overstating their known/suspected reserves. It's not in each players' interest to disclose how little or large their reserves are.
And I'd guess current estimates of reserves could underestimate actual supply by 10-1000x based on what we don't know about geological areas around the world, about how oil is formed, about how to efficiently extract it. While these might not effect "reserves" under a strict version of your definition, they obviously would affect "supply" which I think was what your initial question was asking ('how much oil is left?')
With those caveats in mind, I offer you two links to address your question.
The US Department of Energy's global reserve estimates, and
a mid-2001 analysis of defining and analyzing the primary sources of global reserve figures by Jean Laherrere. I can't vouch for his analysis (the chart on the bottom of page 5 shows reported reserves going up but his analysis of them going down, something I haven't read closely enough to understand) since I've only run across it today, and a website named oilcrisis.org might indicate some bias, but I've seen his name before and its a resource worth checking out if you want to know how much oil is left.
--LP
Interesting. Glad to hear things are going well up there in Alberta. Posts like yours are why I still read Slashdot.
Do you have a verifiable external source for that $7 figure by the way? (I haven't seen that one before and I'd like something more specific to quote to others other than "I read it on the Internet/Slashdot...".
Closest thing I could find browsing around the links you posted was a Syncrude FAQ webpage that said "At below $18 (Cdn.) a barrel, Syncrude's operating costs are comparable to finding and developing new sources of conventional crude oil. Since 1984, Syncrude has more than doubled its output of crude oil per year and cut unit operating costs in half." (This works out to about $11.50 USD by my calculations.) Any pointers or suggestions where I should look?
--LP
--LP
We kiss Saudi tush because they are the only major oil "swing producer". A swing producer is someone who has a large amount of excess capacity who can influence world oil supply (and thus prices) significantly by turning on their pumps. Within weeks, if they want, the Saudis can start pumping a lot more oil and thus they can cause the spot price of oil to drop a lot. (They did this for six months right after 9/11 by the way, which had the nice effect of mitigating its' impact on our economy. Give em some credit.)
The Saudis could also swing the other way easily, reducing their oil exports and thus causing oil prices to go up (since nobody else has much spare capacity to make up for the lack of supply). However the Saudi's ability drive up prices this way has constricted somewhat since the 1970s due to a number of factors: 1) the Saudi's domestic welfare program has greatly expanded and still requires oil revenues to keep their citizens happy, 2) Saudi Arabia is now a net debtor nation so net revenue shortfalls require borrowing and creditors, 3) the number of oil substitutes at a given price has risen, 4) long term price rises drive conservation response which reduces long-term demand, not in the Saudi interest 5) the US has a Strategic Petroleum reserve at its disposal that was not present in 1973.
As for ignoring friends to the north, I'm not sure we do. (If we did, I'd agree it'd be a stupid mistake.) The northern Alberta oil sands are great, and I think they are novel enough to have not really entered the generic political dialogue. Since I've had people in the oil industry mention them to me since 9/11, I'm sure the oil crowd in power in Washington knows about them. I suspect we just don't advertise it, unless we're in private talks and want to wield a big stick.
The other problems with the oil sands are, as you noted, that it only supplies 2% of our oil and it can't expand production rapidly (without throwing vast sums of money at it, as one might do in a world war.) And while the reserves are apparently huge, they can't all be extracted at that $7 price you mention. It'll get more economical as chemists and others learn how to extract the tar and refine it more efficiently, no doubt. But that takes time. And the Saudis can turn the spigots on or off at their whim, and nobody else has lots of spare capcity they can bring online rapidly at that lower price.
Except perhaps the Russians, as they start exporting more and building more facilities. This came to light a little bit more when certain middle-eastern countries started talking about using the 'oil weapon' against the US a month or two back. Iraq cut its shipments for a month, and I believe Russia boosted theirs. Which is clearly the implied threat we've been delivering to the Saudis since 9/11. Don't screw us or we'll turn to the Russians (and ensure that they have enough pipelines?) to make them the second major swing producer.
All of which is sort of ironic since we used the Saudis to squeeze the Russian economy to collapse back during the Gorbachev era (search Amazon or another equivalent for the book "Victory!" for the full story on that one.)
Verify what I say; I'm not an expert, but I have definitely been reading up on all this and thinking about it more since 9/11.
--LP
The main point of the pentium4 architecture is to scale to 4+GHz. Can we assume anything similar for the itanium?
.18 micron process, the successor chips (Madison/Deerfield) on .13 micron should get them another 2-3x. Those are due sometime in 2003 I think.
I don't follow this too closely any more, but I would presume they'll get to 2+ GHz, maybe 3 GHz, but probably not 4 GHz. A 4x jump is a lot to ask for without some additional redesign, especially if you are talking 4-way SMP running at those rates.
Given that they're claiming a 2x boost in SPECint2000 and SPECfp2000 from Itanium, on the same
--LP
Refresh rate matters for CRTs because low refresh gives you "flicker". Refresh is irrelevant with LCDs because there is no "flicker" because there is no electron gun lighting one pixel at a time.
I've long had problems with monitor flicker, even 85 Hz refresh. (I like having both high refresh and high resolution so I never really did the 120Hz thing...) I haven't had any problems with refresh since getting a LCD.
Your point about larger screen size reducing eyestrain remains relevant with LCDs however.
--LP
If you want a damn good techie white paper on the basic physics and engineering of LCD technology, I recommend the mildly dated but still highly informative SGI 1600SW white paper.
Their display used to have the unique advantage of a very low pixel response rate, great for avoiding ghosting in video, but I can't seem to confirm that in their specs nowdays.
--LP
There does appear to be a Sourceforge-related project. The discussions forums have some pointers to non-US (not DMCA affected?) mirrors of the code.
--LP
Hmm, they did cross-link to Heroine Warrior, whose site says:
After a long period of deliberation on the matter, Broadcast 2000 has been removed from public access due to excessive liability.
We've already seen several organizations win lawsuits against GPL/warranty free software writers because of damage that software caused to the organization. Several involved the RIAA vs mp3/p2p software writers. Several involved the MPAA vs media player authors. You might say that warranty exemption has become quite meaningless in today's economy.
While not related to either of these cases the distribution of Broadcast 2000 enhanced to unacceptable levels the risk of an individual experiencing significant financial damage due to the extremely expensive nature of high end video production and the high risk inherent in professional video business marketing.
This has forced us to reconsider our liability protection at this time. We still plan to continue offering minor works for download and in the coming years, as the liability issues surrounding open source software are resolved, we expect to issue newer major works.
Hmm.
--LP
Broadcast 2000, "the software the competition fears", is the revolutionary Open Source Linux software package created by Heroine Warrior (and now being carried on in development and service by LMA)...
So why can't I find the source or binaries on their website?
--LP, who just wanted to check what parts were truly free
3DRAM has been around 4-5 years or so. It is nice technology, but to answer your rhetorical question, adding logic operations to memory adds significantly to the expense of the RAM. (It's a non-commodity part made by Mitsubishi, and at the very least must be tested, and I think manufactured, in custom ways.)
It also reduces memory flexibility; you can't just take some of that huge texture memory you have and start using it as the frame+Z buffer of a dual-head display for example, unless the right amount of 3D RAM was spec'ed in the hardware design to begin with.
Also, at least in the early days, some blending modes were supported and others weren't.
Reducing Z buffer bandwidth is pretty nice though, don't get me wrong. But most of the industry has stuck with the volume economics of more conventional RAM types.
--LP
Dang, clicked the submit button by mistake.
Attempting to apply the four factors there, while some could be argued either way, I can see that on balance, you both might be right. I could probably make a stronger case that it doesn't qualify as fair use, than that it does, based on those four factors. I think I was focusing over-much on the "amount taken" criteria and overlooking the others.
--LP
I think you are confusing plagarism, and a violation of copyright. I am primarily concerned with the legal issue of Copyright violation raised by the previous poster, not an amorphous ethical one.
As Bitlaw points out, under the Copyright Act, four factors are to be considered in order to determine whether a specific action is to be considered a "fair use." These factors are as follows:
1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Why would fair use not be applicable?
Slurping a sentence or two from an 5-25 paragraph article and quoting it with attribution is considered fair use, right?
I'm not clear on if they're quoting and attributing it sufficiently to meet a legal challenge however. IANAL. But it's not the open and shut case you make it out to be as far as I can tell.
--LP
Ace is wrong about one thing:
Currently, the XVR-1000 targets primarily the engineering and CAD markets, as opposed to 3D animation, given the rather limited fillrate. However, Sun intends to use the MAJC-5200 to scale the performance of its graphics solutions to higher levels in the future (as seen in this older roadmap), so we may yet see a solution attacking the 3D animation market at some point in the future.
The MAJC-5200 will improve geometry performance (number of triangles, floating point math required), not fillrate (number of pixels/texels shaded, integer math).
Animation requires better fillrate, and more MAJC-5200s won't provide that. MAJC-5200 *will* provide Sun with stronger geometry performance (FLOPS, remember?), which is just what Sun's core engineering and CAD markets most want. Lots of small triangles to accurately show the precise shape of things of digitally-created parts. Nothing about MAJC-5200 will strengthen Sun's penetration into new SGI markets per se. That'd be dependent on some other, presumably fill-rate enhancing, technology.
--LP
Sun still has some customers in the 2D publishing space, who might use images scanned in or color-corrected with greater bit-depth precision.
And theoretically, texturing-intensive entertaiment applications could use it for better results when blending multiple textures. But practically, fill rate is probably not strong enough for those guys to buy the XVR-1000.
Basically, I think it's a penis-comparison match versus PC graphics. "My color depth is bigger than yours." Which Sun hopes will justify the higher price.
It may hit a few niches, but its mostly irrelevant.
--LP, who no longer knows the 3D gory details but still faintly remembers where the bodies are buried
I know that the congressional staffers don't pay too much attention to boilerplate messages, so I rewrote mine to say the following, posted here as just another perspective:
I'm upset that the Fair Use rights of citizens and consumers of copyrighted information are under steady and increasing attack by profit-maximizing and liberty-minimizing corporations.
It'd be nice if some representatives such as yourself stood up for the average Joe's 'pursuit of happiness'.
Specifically, I would appreciate if Congress would grant the right for consumers to 'time-shift' and 'space-shift' our use of legitimately purchased (or licensed) copyrighted materials for personal use. I would like to add my voice to DigitalConsumer.org in calling for a "consumer technology bill of rights" in an attempt to preserve our Fair Use rights. I'm sure you've read their boilerplate, I won't repeat it.
I have a bunch of old cassette tapes. And I have a bunch of CDs. And I listen to a lot of my music and audio on the computer nowdays. And over time my cassettes (and even CDs) degrade for reasons of physics and cheap electronics.
As a software developer who respects intellectual property rights, I have never used Napster (or similar services) to download music I have not purchased. But I dang well *would* like the clear legal right to download MP3s of casettes I purchased 15 years ago, or CDs in my collection, so I don't have to go through the hassle of upgrading my tape deck and connecting it to my computer to try to move songs around. (To be fair to record companies, I would not demand the right to download CD-quality copies of my old cassettes, but CD-quality copies of CDs or low-medium-grade MP3 copies of casettes should be 'fair'.)
I've slowed and stopped purchasing much additional music until the industry comes up with a consumer-friendly way for me to purchase it; something which allows me to recognize a song on the radio, say "hey, I like that song and would like it in my permanent collection" and allows me to download it and play it for the rest of my life, like a book on my shelf.
The record industry wants me to purchase a 'license' to listen to the song when I am online, being tracked, or wants me to purchase a copy on some physical piece of media that they will obsolesce in 15 years.
I don't mind if they attempt to convince the public to do that, but I resent that they are enhancing their ability through highly suspect oligopolistic practices, through high-paid lawyers in the courts, through high-paid lobbiests trying to convince you, my representative.
Copyright was designed by our founders not as a license to print money (although that is a nice side effect when a work is popular). Copyright should be an incentive to create new, great works.
Wouldn't the world be a better place if they focused their massive resources on identifying new, good music? And not on trying to reduce the public's Fair Use rights in an attempt to create pseudo-mandatory upgrades for consumers who just want to listen to the Beatles songs of their youth, 20, 40, and 60 years later without paying copyright holders at every step along the way?
I focus on the music industry because that is closest to my heart, but there are very similar issues with movies, the electronic books of tomorrow, and other media products.
Thank you very much for your attention to this important matter.
--LP (no, I signed it with my real name and address in hopes they'd pay more attention)
Popular Power had a java-based client. It basically ran off a JDK it helped install on your system, not via the browser. (They ran out of money, dunno what happened to the code.) It would run when your screen saver turned on, which I think makes more sense than asking a user to visit a website.
You're missing the real problem with all these distributed approaches. There aren't many corporate commercial computing jobs that are limited by compute speed. High-end server applications are usually most limited by disk I/O rates, which none of these ISOS approaches effectively address.
ISOS is great for compute-bound problems, OK for network-bound problems, and lousy for diskIO-bound problems, while the application portfolio willing to pay for speedup is overwhelmingly the reverse, except for a few scattered niches.
RPM speeds on disk drives don't improve at Moore's Law rates. The CPU isn't the bottleneck, the database is the bottleneck.
--LP
P.S. Also, writing parallel-efficient applications remains mostly "hard."
For technical computing jobs, this makes great sense.
For commercial computing jobs, as a business with economic incentives for participation, a distributed operating system unfortunately makes little or no sense due to the types of applications that are currently server-limited.
Commercial computing jobs which need "big servers" are typically very database-dependent. You can't distribute the application very well unless you can distribute the database. (And hopefully you aren't crunching terabyte data warehouses, right? That takes a while to send down the pipes...) Besides the inherent difficulty of distributing your database across many nodes, you have the the typical basket of problems the IOS must overcome with a very high degree of assurance: security of your highly-proprietary information, reliability, backup, etc.
Most of the P2P plays a year or two ago discovered this the hard way. The most promising sales approaches ended up being things like distributed caching for search engine companies, which is a niche, not a mainstream business.
--LP