I mean the Pentium M processor. Codename Banias. Centrino was the Intel logo marketing for a system with a Pentium M processor and an Intel chipset capable of WiFi. Intel managed to do two things in one stroke with Centrino: one was to get a competitor processor to Transmeta's in the mobile sector, the other was to kill off chipset competition. Only if you bought the Intel CPU/chipset combo could you apply for the logo program, having the Centrino logo meant your company got a money kickback. Even when Intel's WiFi support got long in the tooth (only 802.11b, not 802.11g support), manufacturers still went for the Intel chipset because of the money kickbacks.
I installed Shoutcast on my smartphone once. It was nice, for a while. Then I noticed the radio titles were totally out of whack with what was playing, a lot of the sites played similar music, etc. Plus there were all these other little software quirks. That was when I uninstalled it and started using the system bundled media player instead... But yeah, Shoutcast server alternatives pretty much such took.
TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) covers tips, reviews, news, analysis and opinion on everything Apple. Founded in 2004 and one of the most successful blogs from Weblogs, Inc.
That's funny. I could have sworn Engadget already covered this angle...
SPARC didn't get scuttled because of Itanium. Sun merely bungled up enough times with chip design that they did not have much of a product to compete with Itanium. UltraSPARC V was late, buggy, and canned. Rock, about the same thing. They managed to finish Niagara, but Niagara was mostly good for low end boxes which did web serving: it has lots of threads for doing integer processing, but lousy floating point, and lousy single threaded performance.
Sun fumbled so much with SPARC chip design they had to ask Fujitsu to sell them their SPARC64 IV processors, so they could actually have a high end SPARC server product to sell.
Consider Infineon, which supplies the 3G wireless chipset in the iPhone. In order to stay in Apple’s graces, Infineon must do everything necessary to help the hardware and software play well together, including staffing permanent engineers in Cupertino or sending a team overnight from Germany. Do you think Intel does this for Dell?
Dell is not comparable with Apple in this case. Apple develops the operating system software for the iPhone. Intel also has permanent engineers at Microsoft, just like Infineon has engineers at Apple. Microsoft develops the operating system software for the PC. Intel also funds many Linux driver developers, and has staff working specifically on Linux support.
There are multiple x86 vendors including Intel, AMD, VIA. The reason there is not more competition is that Intel exploits network effects leveraged by their market monopoly which lead to the current situation. It used to be at a time that the chipset was manufactured by different vendors than the CPU. This enabled more rapid progress in some cases (e.g. ALI and VIA had a chipset with onboard 3D graphics long before other vendors). This is no longer the case. In fact it seems chipsets are becoming increasingly irrelevant as more things get integrated in the same chip. Intel is starting to include the graphics card and high speed I/O in the processor chip. Eventually the chipset will be today's equivalent of a slow I/O south bridge. Perhaps it will even vanish completely.
Another reason that mobile devices will not leave the PC industry behind is that Intel has superior manufacturing prowess. Historically Intel has had inferior chip design capabilities: the 8086 was inferior to the 68000, the 486 was inferior to many RISC processors, the Pentium Pro was inferior to the Alpha, etc. None of this mattered because Intel had the ability to deliver in volume and price where its competitors could not. The Pentium Pro, for example, had similar integer performance to Alpha because it had superior manufacturing, even if the hardware design was worse. Today Intel enjoys a healthy manufacturing process lead over all their competitors. It is a matter of time until they develop a specific chip to attack the smartphone market, like they developed Atom to counter the rising MID market, or Centrino to counter Transmeta years before.
Commodore didn't force you to use their distribution channels if you made software.
Re:Oh good! The trolls are out in full force!
on
iOS 4 Releases Today
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· Score: 1
It will be fun when Apple filters all third party advertising in iPhone so you can be force fed with their advertisement platform instead.
Re:Oh good! The trolls are out in full force!
on
iOS 4 Releases Today
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· Score: 1
You are wrong. Consumers have backlashed against totalitarian devices before. Examples include DIVX (no, the *other* one). As for hacking locked devices, you just need to remember the CueCat or TiVo.
When even Microsoft used to be more open about their platform, you know you are a totalitarian asshole of a company. Just because the regime is wrapped into a layer of propaganda does not make it less so.
I think that people who have a desktop replacement laptop will buy something like an iPad. But people who have a netbook, or a small form factor notebook, won't.
Your first reference is wrong in several aspects. The Russians, or rather the Soviet Union, did in fact make a staged combustion LOX/LH2 engine named RD-0120, which was used in Buran in parallel with staged combustion LOX/Kerosene engine RD-170. RD-0120 had similar performance to the SSME except it was designed to be non-reusable, with much cheaper construction using less parts.
Also several things have happened after that article was written. ESA has been working on a staged combustion LOX/LH2 engine codenamed VEDA. The Russians have recently switched the Soyuz second stage to the staged combustion LOX/Kerosene RD-0124 engine and have in fact proposed replacing all Soyuz engines with staged combustion variants. Atlas V uses the staged combustion RD-180 LOX/Kerosene engine. Angara and Long March 5 are planned to use staged combustion technology. Taurus II is planned to use the NK-33 staged combustion LOX/Kerosene engine.
The fact is staged combustion technology has been increasingly used in space launch applications contrary to what the article claims.
A solid rocket is propellant in a tube. However the way you mix and cast the propellant is much more complex and error prone than fueling a liquid rocket. Small manufacturing errors can lead to cracks in the solid fuel which can cause the whole thing to explode. The oxidizer (e.g. ammonium perchlorate) is mixed together with the fuel (e.g. some kind of rubber). If you make one mistake during the mixing process, the whole thing can explode. Solid propellant is much more expensive per kg than liquid propellant such as LOX/Kerosene.
In a liquid fuel rocket most of the expense is in the engine, rather than the fuel. If you reuse the engine N times, you are reducing engine cost by a similar proportion.
SSME is expensive, but if you consider the fact that the engine is reused, it costs about the same as other engines in the same engine thrust class. SSME has had several revisions. The latest revision is able to do 10 or more flights between overhauls. As time went by and the SSME was upgraded, its costs kept decreasing while solid rocket costs kept increasing. You can read about that here in the Shuttle Operations funding requirement in page 23, here. The cost of External Tank+SSME is lower than Reusable Solid Rocket Motor+Solid Rocket Booster. In fact even manufacturing the expendable external tanks costs more than SSME.
RD-171 (Zenit), RD-180 (Atlas V), RD-191 (Angara) are staged combustion engines with higher performance than a gas generator design such as SpaceX's. The issue with a staged combustion engine is that it is much more complicated to design and expensive to manufacture than a gas generator design.
Pegasus is awfully expensive per kg of payload. Most people who need to launch in that payload category, and do not have issues with where their payload is launched from, use one of the small Russian launchers made from second hand ICBMs. Taurus II promises to be much cheaper per kg of payload. We will see. Orbital has a nice track record, they actually deliver, but cheap that they are not.
Yeah. Except SpaceX uses it in the entire vehicle. They also manufacture the stages out of Al-Li and have a composite material interstage. The stages use a design which is lighter than the isogrid design used in Atlas V (which is a pretty modern design). In fact SpaceX manufactured some of the lightest rocket stages in history. This allows them have a two stage LOX/Kerosene vehicle with a decent payload, where the Russians usually employ three stage LOX/Kerosene vehicles even when they have higher efficiency engines.
The Falcon 9 Heavy is actually the equivalent of an Ares I. The Ares I was over designed because it was supposed to launch a moon trip capable capsule with loads of passengers. A simple Falcon 9 is enough to launch loads of passengers to ISS.
Solid rockets have significantly cheaper R&D costs. The per flight costs are not better. Especially when you are comparing versus a reusable liquid fueled stage.
Boeing has Delta IV. Lockheed has Atlas V. These are satellite launchers. They do not do many commercial launches since Proton is cheaper and Ariane 5 does not have ITAR limitations either.
I agree. Broadcast TV is fine. In case of an emergency it will likely be one of the few things left working. Just narrow down the bandwidth requirements by using compression. It does not even need to be high quality. IMO HDTV is over hyped, especially when a lot of people are still wishing they were watching SDTV on Youtube...
Wind is intermittent but there is always some wind blowing somewhere. Across a vast continental area, such as the US, there should always be some wind generated somewhere. The problem is there is no viable continental energy transmission grid. For now. Also AFAIK California suffers from having a lot of its wind power generated by obsolete 1980s turbine technology.
The pebble bed reactors seem like a usable alternative to PWR once pebble manufacturing defects are reduced. Also, lead-bismuth fast reactors should be doable. The Soviet Union used this technology in nuclear submarines and they worked fine. There is the slight annoyance of the coolant turning solid at ambient temperature, but at least it is not corrosive, or explosive, like molten sodium. The problem is lack of investment. PWRs presently work fine and fuel is cheap.
There are alternatives to solar photovoltaic such as solar thermal. This is cheaper for utility grade power generation.
Tidal power could work if someone actually managed to fix the maintenance issues. Which seem to be many.
Ethanol is a terrible fuel. Low density. Even if they managed to manufacture it for cheap, it is still lousy. Manufacturing it from corn is wildly irrealistic. There is not enough farmland in the US to grow corn ethanol in any reasonable quantity.
So yes, coal, tar sands, and natural gas for you and me.
IMO China is like one/two decades behind in technology compared to Western powers. It varies according to the sector you examine. It should take them a generation to close that gap (it used to be worse). The thing is sometimes they have a lot more industrial capacity to actually build products. China has been rapidly increasing silicon solar cell production because this can be a particularly dirty industry and environmental regulations are somewhat lax in China. They have been rapidly ramping up wind power capacity, but I think GE still does it better, and the US is also increasing wind power production a lot in Texas, etc. Besides the top wind turbine manufacturers are European, not Chinese.
Actually the plan for moving to resources other than oil was expounded by the much maligned Nixon (try googling "nixon project independence"), and expanded by Ford and Carter after the 1970s oil crisis. It is just that Republicans prefer to pretend Nixon never supported alternatives to oil since Reagan was against such measures given his myopic strategic economic views. Who cares about energy security eh?
There is no single source of electrical power, or even of transportation fuels. The thing is that whatever is economically cheaper will be most used. As should be.
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I mean the Pentium M processor. Codename Banias. Centrino was the Intel logo marketing for a system with a Pentium M processor and an Intel chipset capable of WiFi. Intel managed to do two things in one stroke with Centrino: one was to get a competitor processor to Transmeta's in the mobile sector, the other was to kill off chipset competition. Only if you bought the Intel CPU/chipset combo could you apply for the logo program, having the Centrino logo meant your company got a money kickback. Even when Intel's WiFi support got long in the tooth (only 802.11b, not 802.11g support), manufacturers still went for the Intel chipset because of the money kickbacks.
I installed Shoutcast on my smartphone once. It was nice, for a while. Then I noticed the radio titles were totally out of whack with what was playing, a lot of the sites played similar music, etc. Plus there were all these other little software quirks. That was when I uninstalled it and started using the system bundled media player instead... But yeah, Shoutcast server alternatives pretty much such took.
TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) covers tips, reviews, news, analysis and opinion on everything Apple. Founded in 2004 and one of the most successful blogs from Weblogs, Inc.
That's funny. I could have sworn Engadget already covered this angle...
Sun fumbled so much with SPARC chip design they had to ask Fujitsu to sell them their SPARC64 IV processors, so they could actually have a high end SPARC server product to sell.
Pretty well considering I am running the regular Ubuntu 64-bit distro inside a virtual machine.
I point to this fallacy:
Consider Infineon, which supplies the 3G wireless chipset in the iPhone. In order to stay in Apple’s graces, Infineon must do everything necessary to help the hardware and software play well together, including staffing permanent engineers in Cupertino or sending a team overnight from Germany. Do you think Intel does this for Dell?
Dell is not comparable with Apple in this case. Apple develops the operating system software for the iPhone. Intel also has permanent engineers at Microsoft, just like Infineon has engineers at Apple. Microsoft develops the operating system software for the PC. Intel also funds many Linux driver developers, and has staff working specifically on Linux support.
There are multiple x86 vendors including Intel, AMD, VIA. The reason there is not more competition is that Intel exploits network effects leveraged by their market monopoly which lead to the current situation. It used to be at a time that the chipset was manufactured by different vendors than the CPU. This enabled more rapid progress in some cases (e.g. ALI and VIA had a chipset with onboard 3D graphics long before other vendors). This is no longer the case. In fact it seems chipsets are becoming increasingly irrelevant as more things get integrated in the same chip. Intel is starting to include the graphics card and high speed I/O in the processor chip. Eventually the chipset will be today's equivalent of a slow I/O south bridge. Perhaps it will even vanish completely.
Another reason that mobile devices will not leave the PC industry behind is that Intel has superior manufacturing prowess. Historically Intel has had inferior chip design capabilities: the 8086 was inferior to the 68000, the 486 was inferior to many RISC processors, the Pentium Pro was inferior to the Alpha, etc. None of this mattered because Intel had the ability to deliver in volume and price where its competitors could not. The Pentium Pro, for example, had similar integer performance to Alpha because it had superior manufacturing, even if the hardware design was worse. Today Intel enjoys a healthy manufacturing process lead over all their competitors. It is a matter of time until they develop a specific chip to attack the smartphone market, like they developed Atom to counter the rising MID market, or Centrino to counter Transmeta years before.
It will stop ASCII sorting properly once we reach year 10000. Yeah, I know I'm being pedantic.
Commodore didn't force you to use their distribution channels if you made software.
It will be fun when Apple filters all third party advertising in iPhone so you can be force fed with their advertisement platform instead.
You are wrong. Consumers have backlashed against totalitarian devices before. Examples include DIVX (no, the *other* one). As for hacking locked devices, you just need to remember the CueCat or TiVo.
When even Microsoft used to be more open about their platform, you know you are a totalitarian asshole of a company. Just because the regime is wrapped into a layer of propaganda does not make it less so.
I think that people who have a desktop replacement laptop will buy something like an iPad. But people who have a netbook, or a small form factor notebook, won't.
Your first reference is wrong in several aspects. The Russians, or rather the Soviet Union, did in fact make a staged combustion LOX/LH2 engine named RD-0120, which was used in Buran in parallel with staged combustion LOX/Kerosene engine RD-170. RD-0120 had similar performance to the SSME except it was designed to be non-reusable, with much cheaper construction using less parts.
Also several things have happened after that article was written. ESA has been working on a staged combustion LOX/LH2 engine codenamed VEDA. The Russians have recently switched the Soyuz second stage to the staged combustion LOX/Kerosene RD-0124 engine and have in fact proposed replacing all Soyuz engines with staged combustion variants. Atlas V uses the staged combustion RD-180 LOX/Kerosene engine. Angara and Long March 5 are planned to use staged combustion technology. Taurus II is planned to use the NK-33 staged combustion LOX/Kerosene engine.
The fact is staged combustion technology has been increasingly used in space launch applications contrary to what the article claims.
A solid rocket is propellant in a tube. However the way you mix and cast the propellant is much more complex and error prone than fueling a liquid rocket. Small manufacturing errors can lead to cracks in the solid fuel which can cause the whole thing to explode. The oxidizer (e.g. ammonium perchlorate) is mixed together with the fuel (e.g. some kind of rubber). If you make one mistake during the mixing process, the whole thing can explode. Solid propellant is much more expensive per kg than liquid propellant such as LOX/Kerosene.
In a liquid fuel rocket most of the expense is in the engine, rather than the fuel. If you reuse the engine N times, you are reducing engine cost by a similar proportion.
SSME is expensive, but if you consider the fact that the engine is reused, it costs about the same as other engines in the same engine thrust class. SSME has had several revisions. The latest revision is able to do 10 or more flights between overhauls. As time went by and the SSME was upgraded, its costs kept decreasing while solid rocket costs kept increasing. You can read about that here in the Shuttle Operations funding requirement in page 23, here. The cost of External Tank+SSME is lower than Reusable Solid Rocket Motor+Solid Rocket Booster. In fact even manufacturing the expendable external tanks costs more than SSME.
RD-171 (Zenit), RD-180 (Atlas V), RD-191 (Angara) are staged combustion engines with higher performance than a gas generator design such as SpaceX's. The issue with a staged combustion engine is that it is much more complicated to design and expensive to manufacture than a gas generator design.
Pegasus is awfully expensive per kg of payload. Most people who need to launch in that payload category, and do not have issues with where their payload is launched from, use one of the small Russian launchers made from second hand ICBMs. Taurus II promises to be much cheaper per kg of payload. We will see. Orbital has a nice track record, they actually deliver, but cheap that they are not.
Yeah. Except SpaceX uses it in the entire vehicle. They also manufacture the stages out of Al-Li and have a composite material interstage. The stages use a design which is lighter than the isogrid design used in Atlas V (which is a pretty modern design). In fact SpaceX manufactured some of the lightest rocket stages in history. This allows them have a two stage LOX/Kerosene vehicle with a decent payload, where the Russians usually employ three stage LOX/Kerosene vehicles even when they have higher efficiency engines.
The Falcon 9 Heavy is actually the equivalent of an Ares I. The Ares I was over designed because it was supposed to launch a moon trip capable capsule with loads of passengers. A simple Falcon 9 is enough to launch loads of passengers to ISS.
Solid rockets have significantly cheaper R&D costs. The per flight costs are not better. Especially when you are comparing versus a reusable liquid fueled stage.
Boeing has Delta IV. Lockheed has Atlas V. These are satellite launchers. They do not do many commercial launches since Proton is cheaper and Ariane 5 does not have ITAR limitations either.
I agree. Broadcast TV is fine. In case of an emergency it will likely be one of the few things left working. Just narrow down the bandwidth requirements by using compression. It does not even need to be high quality. IMO HDTV is over hyped, especially when a lot of people are still wishing they were watching SDTV on Youtube...
If you like that kind of movie I suggest El día de la bestia.
Wind is intermittent but there is always some wind blowing somewhere. Across a vast continental area, such as the US, there should always be some wind generated somewhere. The problem is there is no viable continental energy transmission grid. For now. Also AFAIK California suffers from having a lot of its wind power generated by obsolete 1980s turbine technology.
The pebble bed reactors seem like a usable alternative to PWR once pebble manufacturing defects are reduced. Also, lead-bismuth fast reactors should be doable. The Soviet Union used this technology in nuclear submarines and they worked fine. There is the slight annoyance of the coolant turning solid at ambient temperature, but at least it is not corrosive, or explosive, like molten sodium. The problem is lack of investment. PWRs presently work fine and fuel is cheap.
There are alternatives to solar photovoltaic such as solar thermal. This is cheaper for utility grade power generation.
Tidal power could work if someone actually managed to fix the maintenance issues. Which seem to be many.
Ethanol is a terrible fuel. Low density. Even if they managed to manufacture it for cheap, it is still lousy. Manufacturing it from corn is wildly irrealistic. There is not enough farmland in the US to grow corn ethanol in any reasonable quantity.
So yes, coal, tar sands, and natural gas for you and me.
IMO China is like one/two decades behind in technology compared to Western powers. It varies according to the sector you examine. It should take them a generation to close that gap (it used to be worse). The thing is sometimes they have a lot more industrial capacity to actually build products. China has been rapidly increasing silicon solar cell production because this can be a particularly dirty industry and environmental regulations are somewhat lax in China. They have been rapidly ramping up wind power capacity, but I think GE still does it better, and the US is also increasing wind power production a lot in Texas, etc. Besides the top wind turbine manufacturers are European, not Chinese.
Actually the plan for moving to resources other than oil was expounded by the much maligned Nixon (try googling "nixon project independence"), and expanded by Ford and Carter after the 1970s oil crisis. It is just that Republicans prefer to pretend Nixon never supported alternatives to oil since Reagan was against such measures given his myopic strategic economic views. Who cares about energy security eh?
There is no single source of electrical power, or even of transportation fuels. The thing is that whatever is economically cheaper will be most used. As should be.