How much for the dual Xeon system they were comparing that too? Yeah, you can build a P4 for $900, but not a dual Xeon.
I asked this myself earlier today and hit pricewatch. I came up with $1800 for an E7505 based dual Xeon box in an aluminum case that would be the x86 equivalent of Apple's flagship G5 at $3,300 (I had to bump the stock video card up as I couldn't find 64MB 9600s on pricewatch). Run the numbers yourself. What you believe about the lower expense of high end Macs just isn't true.
Well, the 1 MFLOP thing just gives us a point of comparison. In this benchmark a 2.66GHz P4 = a 2.0GHz G5.
One interesting conclusion we can gather from these numbers comes from the normalization values in Figure 2. Assume that performance will scale linearly with clockspeed. Intel's latest, at 3.2GHz would score 307 MFLOPS on this test (3,200 X 0.096). That is 120% of the best G5 we will see in September. So how will Prescott score on this?
... again with the word "smoke". I know you're just expressing your impression of the G5 (I like it too, though I won't be buying one) and aren't a fanatic, but ever since I started following Apple hardware developments I've been struck by the way their CPUs "smoke" the competition when someone claims they they are faster.
I especiallly love the way G4s used to "smoke a Pentium" in Apple magazines and advertisements. You know what else "smokes" a Pentium? A PII.
Are you sure about your definitions? I've always been under the impression that there is a subtle difference between the two. Certainly they are closely related, but calling them "exact" equivalents doesn't seem right to me. "Ethics" connotes process, conduct, "what to do", while "morals" concern what is right in an absolute, internal sense. I can imagine an immoral lawyer who behaves ethically. This page discusses the difference, and this search a least shows that people like to talk about it.
I think this article was written to soften up an audience that won't want to hear it's conclusions. The very notion of sending astronauts into orbit in the name of science has been under critical fire from scientific bigwigs for quite a while. Those who oppose the Shuttle do so because they believe more science could be done if we weren't wasting so much money on what they see as a PR mission -- money that could have been spent on a supercollider.
Their response to your combustion experiment might involve pointing out that two shoeboxes still can't take nearly as much engineering and finacial resources as supporting a human in space and that preventing launch induced leaks couldn't take more effort than that put into Shuttle rocket engines and life support systems.
Everytime the Shuttle gets a story in Slashdot this "we need to explore space" thing comes up as if it were the natural opinion of the scientifically curious. I want Astronomy to continue its advance, but I don't give a shit about putting people out into the void. If an astronaut really wants to learn about the Universe he can get a degree and access to Hubble. The thought of colonizing the Moon or Mars seems, frankly, quite stupid. I wouldn't even go there for free.
The research is getting the humans to Mars & back intact. That would be the payoff in a manned expedition to Mars.
Cool. I can't wait for better Velcro and Tang II.
If while collecting data, there needs to be some form of followup experiment, you will need to design a new mission and send a new probe designed to do what the previous one wasn't designed to accomplish.
...scientific equipment that, by its nature, was designed for finding that which was being sought?
Oh come on, just because microscopes are designed to "see" small things only that doesn't mean a biologist will miss the big picture (pardon the pun).
...the perception and judgement of a human being that was able to see something that was unfathomed?
Uhh, what makes you think there wouldn't be humans looking at our solar system through these instruments? You seem to think that being on site in one of Nature's frontiers is the only path to discovery. If this were true then sub-atomic physics is being held back because we can't shrink a guy to the size of an electron. If you want the world to know that you think putting people in space is neeto just say so. There's no need to hide it behind this wierd argument. Honestly now bud, exactly what has Neil Armstrong contributed to Astronomy?
When was the last time you saw infrared light, or a red blood cell? Do you think an orbiting human can tell us more about the universe by looking out the window than a radio telescope? The "human perception" is already done here on the ground. The robotic sensors come later -- after we've asked questions and designed the tools to bring us the answers our hands and eyes can't.
Certainly I can understand the romantic, humanistic spirit of your attitude, but you are forgetting that technology can extend our grasp further into the scope of our reach, and that there is no lack of "human perception" in reading a spectrograph here on terra firma.
I know you don't want to be told that sensors are more usefull in space than people, but they are and you know it.
You are painting nVidia as a software company that does a kind of reverse "widget frosting". By your accounting, I should be more interested in a driver upgrade than a new video card, or even an nVidia driver for an ATi card, and nVidia should refocus their business on selling drivers for the entire video chipset industry. Perhaps they only write their magic 3D code for a physical product that is really just an aircooled dongle? Suppose someone stole their driver source code and released it into the wild. Do you really think it's only then that ATi and nVidia would compete on hardware sophistication? IIRC, the Radeon 9700 and GeForce FX have transitor counts and a die size that surpass the Athlon XP and P4.
This may be true but it doesn't square with the nvnet module needed on nForce2 motherboards which is a closed binary wrapped with open kernel glue. What possible reason could they have for locking that up? I've been under the impression that register specs for network driver chips aren't something companies need to covet.
Nanotech will certainly make a sudden, revolutionary change in our material world. Imagine furniture, or dishware that can change shape. But, like your other responder, I feel that life will mostly be the same once the impact has been absorbed -- technological advance is mostly 1,000 steps forward, 999 steps back. After all, my chair and my teapot work fine just the way they are right now. Anything more is trivial convenience and gee-whiz-factor.
I am curious about your perceived need for massive amounts of power. Is it that you think we'll be doing more (like making our chairs adjust to our asses when we would have lived with it otherwise), or that we'll be doing things we couldn't before (like vacationing on the Moon by ascending a nano-fiber)? All things being equal, I would think nano-tech affords us an opportunity to make our entire power ecology incredibly efficient. Athlons could be "grown" instead of machined, to pick a blunt example. Even power generation itself could undergo a revolution if this stuff leads to a kind of artificial photosynthesis. What do you have in mind?
Get off this guy's back. His attitude is perfectly reasonable in that it accounts for the fact that most people simply don't give a shit about particle physics. However much private joy he might feel in the intellectual exploration of Nature, he is mature and honest enough to realize that his curiosity is uncommon. He isn't slamming Science at all. He is calling it an end in itself.
So the article mentions the Pandora's Box element of this enterprise. Suppose we add genes from cold water fish to make these creatures more marketable:
"You could end up with strange coloured GM tropical fish in our waters."
Yes. You probably would. And once there they would seem like Gummy Fish to anything looking for an easy snack.
In what way can this exotic plasma be important to nanotech? I don't want to come off like a smart ass. I just can't see any obvious way that something which was stable for only 500 millionths of a second after Time-Zero at temperatures exceeding two trillion degrees centigrade could help in building, say, a turbine the size of a mitochondrion. Do you really think we aren't building such turbines today because we lack the physics? We don't need to build protons or nuclei. We need to take the ones we already have and rearange them.
Slashdot Mirror
I asked this myself earlier today and hit pricewatch. I came up with $1800 for an E7505 based dual Xeon box in an aluminum case that would be the x86 equivalent of Apple's flagship G5 at $3,300 (I had to bump the stock video card up as I couldn't find 64MB 9600s on pricewatch). Run the numbers yourself. What you believe about the lower expense of high end Macs just isn't true.
One interesting conclusion we can gather from these numbers comes from the normalization values in Figure 2. Assume that performance will scale linearly with clockspeed. Intel's latest, at 3.2GHz would score 307 MFLOPS on this test (3,200 X 0.096). That is 120% of the best G5 we will see in September. So how will Prescott score on this?
I especiallly love the way G4s used to "smoke a Pentium" in Apple magazines and advertisements. You know what else "smokes" a Pentium? A PII.
After all, building down instead of up can't be more difficult and it's just as aesthetic as this "Super Friends" anti-terrorist bubble dome.
That's not what he said.
Are you sure about your definitions? I've always been under the impression that there is a subtle difference between the two. Certainly they are closely related, but calling them "exact" equivalents doesn't seem right to me. "Ethics" connotes process, conduct, "what to do", while "morals" concern what is right in an absolute, internal sense. I can imagine an immoral lawyer who behaves ethically. This page discusses the difference, and this search a least shows that people like to talk about it.
Earthlink was founded by a Scientologist. The rumors concern pro-Scientology bias in search queries and subtle evangelism.
Or just being a dick?
Their response to your combustion experiment might involve pointing out that two shoeboxes still can't take nearly as much engineering and finacial resources as supporting a human in space and that preventing launch induced leaks couldn't take more effort than that put into Shuttle rocket engines and life support systems.
I won't be bothered. You can take my Earth-bound city life away from me when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands.:)
Everytime the Shuttle gets a story in Slashdot this "we need to explore space" thing comes up as if it were the natural opinion of the scientifically curious. I want Astronomy to continue its advance, but I don't give a shit about putting people out into the void. If an astronaut really wants to learn about the Universe he can get a degree and access to Hubble. The thought of colonizing the Moon or Mars seems, frankly, quite stupid. I wouldn't even go there for free.
Could you explain this further? I fail to see how the case can be anything but the opposite.
So what? It takes months to get there as it is.
Cool. I can't wait for better Velcro and Tang II.
If while collecting data, there needs to be some form of followup experiment, you will need to design a new mission and send a new probe designed to do what the previous one wasn't designed to accomplish.
Yeah. So what? Is Mars about to vaporize?
Oh come on, just because microscopes are designed to "see" small things only that doesn't mean a biologist will miss the big picture (pardon the pun).
Uhh, what makes you think there wouldn't be humans looking at our solar system through these instruments? You seem to think that being on site in one of Nature's frontiers is the only path to discovery. If this were true then sub-atomic physics is being held back because we can't shrink a guy to the size of an electron. If you want the world to know that you think putting people in space is neeto just say so. There's no need to hide it behind this wierd argument. Honestly now bud, exactly what has Neil Armstrong contributed to Astronomy?
Certainly I can understand the romantic, humanistic spirit of your attitude, but you are forgetting that technology can extend our grasp further into the scope of our reach, and that there is no lack of "human perception" in reading a spectrograph here on terra firma.
I know you don't want to be told that sensors are more usefull in space than people, but they are and you know it.
That sounds more like plain ol' sarcasm to me.
or check out what this guy has to say.
Say it isn't so.
You are painting nVidia as a software company that does a kind of reverse "widget frosting". By your accounting, I should be more interested in a driver upgrade than a new video card, or even an nVidia driver for an ATi card, and nVidia should refocus their business on selling drivers for the entire video chipset industry. Perhaps they only write their magic 3D code for a physical product that is really just an aircooled dongle? Suppose someone stole their driver source code and released it into the wild. Do you really think it's only then that ATi and nVidia would compete on hardware sophistication? IIRC, the Radeon 9700 and GeForce FX have transitor counts and a die size that surpass the Athlon XP and P4.
This may be true but it doesn't square with the nvnet module needed on nForce2 motherboards which is a closed binary wrapped with open kernel glue. What possible reason could they have for locking that up? I've been under the impression that register specs for network driver chips aren't something companies need to covet.
I am curious about your perceived need for massive amounts of power. Is it that you think we'll be doing more (like making our chairs adjust to our asses when we would have lived with it otherwise), or that we'll be doing things we couldn't before (like vacationing on the Moon by ascending a nano-fiber)? All things being equal, I would think nano-tech affords us an opportunity to make our entire power ecology incredibly efficient. Athlons could be "grown" instead of machined, to pick a blunt example. Even power generation itself could undergo a revolution if this stuff leads to a kind of artificial photosynthesis. What do you have in mind?
I wondered the same thing. Google led me to a page that claimed this plasma needs to be 2 trillion degrees Centigrade.
Get off this guy's back. His attitude is perfectly reasonable in that it accounts for the fact that most people simply don't give a shit about particle physics. However much private joy he might feel in the intellectual exploration of Nature, he is mature and honest enough to realize that his curiosity is uncommon. He isn't slamming Science at all. He is calling it an end in itself.
Yes. You probably would. And once there they would seem like Gummy Fish to anything looking for an easy snack.
In what way can this exotic plasma be important to nanotech? I don't want to come off like a smart ass. I just can't see any obvious way that something which was stable for only 500 millionths of a second after Time-Zero at temperatures exceeding two trillion degrees centigrade could help in building, say, a turbine the size of a mitochondrion. Do you really think we aren't building such turbines today because we lack the physics? We don't need to build protons or nuclei. We need to take the ones we already have and rearange them.