What's more insane is that all of this probably still works on the mainframes IBM is selling right now. What's the likelihood that your program will still run in 40 years worth?
Maybe it's me being paranoid but how in the world are jobs leaving this country they way they are and yet the cost of living goes up every single year?
You mean, how is it that we're spending more every year while wages are going up? Excess liquidity and a credit bubble and a negative savings rate...
I agree. Too late. Admissions folks at the top colleges either attach a lot of weight to the GPA your school assigns (well-regard public, or private), or they nearly disregard it if you attend a public school with a huge number of peers in that 95-100 range. What you need to do to convince them that your true knowledge reflects your GPA and not the laxness of your school's curve is take subject-specific standardized tests. As many as possible. Based on comparable students in my class and in others it wasn't my grades or extracurriculars that gave me the extra advantage, it was taking as crapload of APs and SAT2s. My large public high school give anyone who barely tries a 96. I don't think enough students at similar schools realize that the subject test are an extremely useful benchmark to turn the 97 that you and all of your friends have into something meaningful in a national pool of applicants. But it's too late for this year.
And yeah, I did kind of figure that if we went to the trouble of putting a rover on mars that we might bother to keep a dish pointed at it all the time. When we send people there is it going to be too much trouble too?
almost as fast in what way, bandwidth or latency? i see the former being really easy. the latter... not so much. SRAM still beats the fastest DRAM in latency by an order of magnitude, easily.
Some big examples? PS2, Nintendo Gamecube, Wii, Xbox 360. All these consoles use eDRAM for their GPU's on-chip framebuffers to enhance their performance, and that goes back to at least the year 2000 when the PS2 came out.
Some will be quick to say "no, the Nintendo consoles use 1T-SRAM, not DRAM". Yeah, right, but even 1T-SRAM (despite its name) is a form of embedded-DRAM.
First, it is news because IBM is announcing that the performance is on par with SRAM, and because they have integrated their deep-trench eDRAM process with the SOI process used for their Power CPUs. The result? 3x the cache on the die. IBM has offered embedded DRAM with bulk technologies for a few generations, but this is the first real SOI annoucement.
Second, the consoles that have issued PR about using "embedded DRAM" with their GPUs don't actually embed DRAM on the GPU die. The "embedded DRAM" is a process offered by NEC that is separate from the Sony and TSMC processes used to fab the GPUs that supposedly have "embedded DRAM." I am pretty sure that all of the consoles you mention include a separate custom DRAM chip in the same package as the GPU. I am certain this is the case for the XBox 360. I am unsure about Sony. That DRAM process substantially modifies the back end wiring to make room for a MIM cap between the FETs and the first level of metal.
IBM is the real winner in the console wars by supplying chips to all the participants. This seems to be what they are best at. Their software? Not so good, at least not by their track record. I can't see this getting anyone in the industry excited.
As someone who works for IBM's chip development group, I find this statement pretty amusing. We've certainly had some historically great quarters recently, but the software group is growing revenues at a good clip, and their margins are like 80%.
It's really amazing to see all the opinions about IBM fly by here on Slashdot... you know, how IBM only sells services, but is the second-largest software company (yes, in terms of software revenues) after Microsoft. Or how it doesn't make computers any longer, even though it's the largest server and supercomputer seller, and leading in sales of blade computers.
And that only speaks to sales misconceptions, to say nothing of whether 18 gagillion patents are evil weaponry, a defensive posture, truly valuable, a load of crap, or good for the defense of open standards... Or how it forced customers into proprietary systems in the 1960s, but hasn't End-of-Lifed those ancient architectures, or forced radical change to the systems running applications developed 30 or 40 years ago.
You can pretty much say two opposite things about IBM in any regard and have them both be true. Anyways, back to working for my dying-since-1982 east coast anachronism of a company...
I'm pretty sure the rise in diagnosis of autism correlates with a decline in the number of women smoking while pregnant and a rise in women having children later in life, so we should stop getting immunized AND start smoking more AND have more premarital sex.
The "editor plan" as you call it is as scalable as anything can be. It's not unreasonable to think that a person can review a CV in about 10 minutes. Multiply that by 10 people approving CVs at an hour a day, and we can have 60 new editors a day without breaking a sweat.
Based upon prior experience with the Open Directory process, I don't believe that it will scale. You need a system where changes have nearly zero transaction cost, and you need a system where changes are committed when no one wants to review them. The number of contributions awaiting review will outpace the ability of editors to review them, even with only a limited number of articles under editorial control.
If you credential only those who have proven themselves trustworthy, you greatly limit the universe of both good and bad contributors. If you lose all those uncredentialed good contributors, you've lost the ability to keep up with the growth in bad contributions awaiting review.
Almost a 100% windows monoculture (really), because they standardised on an ActiveX control for secure banking etc before SSL was standardised, and everything still needs it
Huh, and here I was thinking it was because of StarCraft.
I wonder if the missing part to the submitter's story is that he quit The Planet to move to Softlayer and so The Planet's management, mad that yet another employee was leaving for that company, threatened to sue him. It would jive with the theory that this was a warning to other employees. It will ultimately fail but in the meantime it works as a band-aid for the leakage of employees to the other company.
Wow-- it's supposed to stop the leakage rather than make it worse? If anything I'd be polishing my resume! No stronger indication that it's time to find greener pastures.
It is pretty clear that IBM is desperate. Intel has a ton of momentum, and they have to be stopped somehow
No. Yes. No.
IBM being six months behind Intel in 45nm tech is pretty meaningless unless Intel uses it to somehow grab more Itanium share, which is unlikely. Other than in Power vs. Itanium they're not direct competitors, and even in that arena, it's like calling the Corvettes and Ferraris competitors. Sure, you may end up buying the other thing, but only if you drastically alter your expectations.
No rocket motors for attitude control, I saw upon further research. But none for stationkeeping, either? Every time the satellite moves a handful of meters outside its proper orbital station, someone has to up there and fix it? That has to suck.
The altitude isn't that important, and the attitude is controlled by those gyros that keep failing.
What happens when countries figure out they can launch debris into space.. creating a hostile LEO for everything from spy satellites to civilian stuff.
Nothing, so far. It's another MAD scenario. And if it did happen, countermeasures such as using earth-based lasers to slow the debris down would be developed much faster.
The shuttle internal systems run on obselete crap.
Obselete, incredibly reliable, utterly adequate rock-solid gold. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Launching enormous rockets with software control is possible to screw up. Given the choice, I'd rather fly with the proven computers.
"The implementation of high-k and metal gate materials marks the biggest change in transistor technology since the introduction of polysilicon MOS transistors in the late 1960s" - Gordon Moore
I don't know, I may have to disagree with his eminence on this one... but, parsing his statement a little more finely, he does specifically mention transistor technology. I still view this as an evolutionary refinement of CMOS, and not as big as the transition from bipolar to CMOS for mainstream processors. It is a bigger deal than strained silicon. And by specifying "transistor" he of course sidesteps the comparision to the similar chemical reengineering of the back-end metal stack that came with the introduction of copper and low-k dielectrics. I speculate that like those changes, though, the implementation of the process changes will be relatively transparent to the circuit designers. Yes, the models change, hopefully the subthreshold leakage goes way down, but you've still got the G,D,S,B paradigm... right?
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, in state government they're too busy making the DMV a model of efficiency to save the taxpayers money. Spare no expense.
I agree. Too late. Admissions folks at the top colleges either attach a lot of weight to the GPA your school assigns (well-regard public, or private), or they nearly disregard it if you attend a public school with a huge number of peers in that 95-100 range. What you need to do to convince them that your true knowledge reflects your GPA and not the laxness of your school's curve is take subject-specific standardized tests. As many as possible. Based on comparable students in my class and in others it wasn't my grades or extracurriculars that gave me the extra advantage, it was taking as crapload of APs and SAT2s. My large public high school give anyone who barely tries a 96. I don't think enough students at similar schools realize that the subject test are an extremely useful benchmark to turn the 97 that you and all of your friends have into something meaningful in a national pool of applicants. But it's too late for this year.
Second, the consoles that have issued PR about using "embedded DRAM" with their GPUs don't actually embed DRAM on the GPU die. The "embedded DRAM" is a process offered by NEC that is separate from the Sony and TSMC processes used to fab the GPUs that supposedly have "embedded DRAM." I am pretty sure that all of the consoles you mention include a separate custom DRAM chip in the same package as the GPU. I am certain this is the case for the XBox 360. I am unsure about Sony. That DRAM process substantially modifies the back end wiring to make room for a MIM cap between the FETs and the first level of metal.
It's really amazing to see all the opinions about IBM fly by here on Slashdot... you know, how IBM only sells services, but is the second-largest software company (yes, in terms of software revenues) after Microsoft. Or how it doesn't make computers any longer, even though it's the largest server and supercomputer seller, and leading in sales of blade computers.
And that only speaks to sales misconceptions, to say nothing of whether 18 gagillion patents are evil weaponry, a defensive posture, truly valuable, a load of crap, or good for the defense of open standards... Or how it forced customers into proprietary systems in the 1960s, but hasn't End-of-Lifed those ancient architectures, or forced radical change to the systems running applications developed 30 or 40 years ago.
You can pretty much say two opposite things about IBM in any regard and have them both be true. Anyways, back to working for my dying-since-1982 east coast anachronism of a company...
If you credential only those who have proven themselves trustworthy, you greatly limit the universe of both good and bad contributors. If you lose all those uncredentialed good contributors, you've lost the ability to keep up with the growth in bad contributions awaiting review.
IBM being six months behind Intel in 45nm tech is pretty meaningless unless Intel uses it to somehow grab more Itanium share, which is unlikely. Other than in Power vs. Itanium they're not direct competitors, and even in that arena, it's like calling the Corvettes and Ferraris competitors. Sure, you may end up buying the other thing, but only if you drastically alter your expectations.
Different story for AMD.