My point had to do with how silly making it look like an either-or scenario is. Intel is very likely doing both with equal zeal, and the market is at a point where it will pay for useful advances in either.
I've just finished pulling apart my E6X00-based gaming box, in favor of a C2D T5500 mobile-on-desktop rig, replacing a fast FSB with a fanless(BIG-heatsink)-CPU and cutting CPU power consumption to almost 1/3. (Yes, I know an 8800 eats 250 Watts on idle. I'm still looking for a way to depower it and use alternative low-power VGA-out when not in use. Mention'em if you can think of'em)
L7200 and L7400's soon to hit the mobile-478-socket CPU market soon (thinkpad X60t's already ship with it), giving the same dual-core mid-range desktop performance for yet another 50% cut in power consumption - ~15 watts in place of ~30W, and knocking another 5W off for losing a fan or two.
Speaking of, any 478-mobile boards out there except for Gigabyte's GA-8I945GMMFY-RH that do both C2D (bumps the Asus N4L-VM) and PCIex16 (bumps the Abit IL-90)?
"Software" (as in all software ever written) is not a monolithic thing. The vast majority of software in use today is not CPU-restricted by modern (and even 5-year-old) commodity hardware.
Of the little bit that does need oompf, Where SMP can be taken advantage of, people have largely been working on doing so for a while now.
Only the little fraction that remains - projects that CAN USE the extra oompf and haven't been developed in that direction yet - need to catch up.
Your statement hardly applies to most software out there.
That's pretty much what I had in mind. I wasn't narrowing it down to ".c" files, but yes. The basic analogy of DNA=filesystem gene=files (that do/whatever/ useful and logically-contained function you want to equate on a PC) junk-DNA=DNA minus genes - here, as you well pointed out, "free space" with "contents of deleted files still present on disk" being very much similar to "defunct genes that may have done something useful once in some distant evolutionary forefather" analogy sticks well. Other junk-DNA is obviously filesystem metadata (think telomeres, introns, UGA/UGG stop sequences, etc).
There is an important difference in the level of complexity that breaks the analogy though (rephrase: that requires stretching the analogy in a creative way I haven't thought of yet. Lack of creativity != Impossibility, though often mistaken for such:-)). Machine memory is spaced in a fixed way. On one hand, stripping out a bit (and shifting the remainder of the drive one bit to the left) does not occur in machines whereas it does in DNA. Directly, this is not a problem, mRNA transcribing data off the strands couldn't care less. They don't even care if you take the gene they came to copy and invert it. HOWEVER, sometimes you get funky folding where mRNA pairs with/itself/, things like palindromes and mirror repeats that give you pinhead loopholes, crucifix folding etc. This is where the data OUTSIDE the file would be crucial the the file being.. err.. loaded and executed. You can consider that data a sort of "file header", but that breaks the gene=file analogy because while that data does get picked up and shipped by the RNA, it does not code for a protein and is thus not part of the gene/file. So to avoid breaking gene=file, that data is a chunk of filesystem metadata bundled together with the file. A Makefile or if you like. So can we equate label that "surrounding" data required for the RNA to pair to itself with metadata? That would ALMOST be correct. Almost because that metadata (as it appears on the DNA) can just as well be doing something else at the same time, a situation whose nearest computerside conceptual relative would be filesystem compression (the use of the same batch of bits to store multiple sets of data). Thus, a "bad sector" in the data belonging to a "deleted file" can easily.. break parts of if not the entire filesystem, and one "Makefile" metadata chunk can address multiple files.
I need a better equivalent than Makefiles. "Directory" would break the usefulness of the analogy because it'd wrongly imply context-driven gathering of files. Some kind of "localized FAT or supernode" maybe.
Oh well. I said these analogies break.
As an anecdote, if you ever meet a creationist, tell him God might be omnipotent, but the filesystems he designed are shit (unless, of course, you take into account the hardware limitations of working with hardware featuring that level of data density, and even then we can, and hopefully soon will, be doing much better with data consistency) God, of course, true to being a developer, and keeping bacteria in mind, would probably claim it's a feature rather than a bug.
Here's the question - is non-gene DNA/machinery/ or/DATA/?
If it's the latter, junk DNA would be conceptually closer to filesystem metadata (and maybe even "free diskspace" in as far as introns etc. go) than the OS. I fail to see how it bootstraps anything. A DNA molecule does not to my best knowledge start proliferating on its own when put on agar. Cellular facilities are required. True, you build said cell facilities from data stored in genes, but still I can't find any underlying principle shared by the bootloader, OS or whatever interpreter on my computer and my non-gene-coding DNA.
FWIW, I'm a coder, a unix sysadmin and a (somewhat late-aged) biochem undergrad student, so feel free to dive as deep as you like into a technical comparison. I've been playing with comparison models of my own for a while (all of which have the annoying habit of breaking at one point or another) and am intrigued to hear more ideas on this.
One thing that I find extremely annoying by DRM is that it makes sharing something with somebody an antisocial act.
If my mother asks me for one of my books, CDs etc, telling her to "go buy her own" *is* antisocial. I perceive it as rather disgusting behavior. None of my friends I've ever asked for any form of digital media ever said "NO, that's MINE, go buy your own". It'd be considered disgusting. Factually, nobody (that I know) behaves this way. People ignore the illegality of the issue and just do what they perceive as right.
This is not new. Microsoft tried capitalizing on this behavior with their share-a-copy-that-expires-in-3-days zune wireless sharing scheme. The problem is that people perceive that as an UNNECCESARY limitation, and it's them, the consumers, who vote for what device they buy, not the RIAA. So Microsoft missed out.
Apple is SMART, and did this in a much better way IMHO: 0. Come to terms that you CANNOT stop social behavior. You will NOT prevent people from giving the song to their mum. Forcing a person to choose between doing something for his mum or for some distant big commercial entity is sheer idiocy. You'll just alienate your clients, turn them against you and lose profits. That's the hole RIAA not only fell into, they're still busy digging, convinced there is something of value to be found underneath. 1. Technically, ALLOW users to behave socially. ALLOW them to give the bloody song to their mum if they so please. Don't technically block them from doing it properly (the hole MS fell into). 2. Place a TRIVIAL and NON-RESTRICTING (i.e. well-known and trivial-to-remove) psychological deterrent from sharing. Assume the vast majority of the population won't bother stripping it , so by large this will remain in place (although I envision an emule or limewire upgrade that automates said stripping by checking a checkbox). Apple doesn't even have to play copyright police and demonize itself. Let the RIAA do that and alienate the labels, while apple capitalizes on the FUD and perceived threat among the public thus created. Fear of the unknown is also a good motivator.
This scores home in two ways. To understand this, think of people one shares files with as two groups - people one acts socially towards - giving mum a song - and people one just give out to because he can, without even knowing them - your upload directory in your favourite p2p app.
They introduce a very mild antimotivator to share your files to just anyone. Low enough antimotivator to be easily overcome by one's desire to share socially, but high enough to make sharing with the world at large to be somewhat deterred (again, on a partial statistical basis, not entirely).
The secondary effect is on the person being socially-shared to. A healthy percent of the time, that person will not go sharing the song giving to him by a friend or relative, for fear of getting friend/relative in trouble. Again, true some of the time, but my guess would be, reasonably significant to the point of not wanting to share that song using p2p (again, excluding the % of population who will go to the trouble of removing the tag and details). In fact, apple may be better off if Joe buys, shares with 10 friends of whom 5 don't share further to avoid hurting Joe, than if 10 friends acquire a non-joe-signed copy of the song (from Joe or otherwise) and 10 now 10 friends are sharing. If joe shares socially, availability of the song on p2p drops. They actually gain something from social sharing.
The reason apple is smart is because their solution is not aimed to be hermetic. They're not to win (over p2p), but for a more favorable tie/stalemate than they already have. They've realized and come to terms with the fact that hermetically sealing usage is not doable in this day and age, and is anything but good for your profits. Instead, they engineered a solution that is less perfect, but may very well strike closer to the sweet spot between making more profits with some mild success in mitigating illegal p2p, while not scaring off your paying customers by tying them down.
Humans are already playing god. We've been playing god since we discovered penicillin and started interfering in the natural order of things. Consequently, two things happened: 1. Humans formed societies where any form of dangerous technology, be it electricity, nuclear power, dangerous diseases, dangerous chemicals, and yes, genetic selection are regulated, so as to derive the good while strongly mitigating the possibility of the bad.
2. Humans prospered.
The bottom line is that humans will play god, will do it better and better with time, will do it to do more good than evil, and will use this technology and will presumably prosper.
Besides, what's wrong with playing god? I don't mind playing god, being god, becoming something that previous generations would deem a god. We already are that. Yes, you too. Capabilities that you take for granted - from communication, to locomotion, to the ability to overcome physical trauma or disease or what have you, to live over twice what people use to not too long ago, would make you what they might have called a god. So? Personally I don't believe in any form or kind of god (as per religious claims), thus striving to elevate myself to a higher level of manipulating my environment does not strike me as some form of forbidden sacrilege. It strikes me as a clearly proven strategy to make things better for us, as what we should be doing to make the world a better place for the next generation, and what it should do for the generation after that. Playing god is a perfectly legitimate and desirable pursuit.
I'm reading all the morals police comments here, and I'm quite surprised.
Will someone PLEASE explain to me how the ability to diagnose diseases better and earlier is a BAD thing?
There are numerous eggs and numerous sperm to make numerous children by any couple. When one of each gets a chance at life, a lot of others don't. One lives, others die. If we leverage genetics and choose zygote X where naturally Y would have gotten, it's a zero-sum morals game. A different one lives. As they're not yet anywhere near development, putting morals on this is akin to calling masturbation genocide. LOTS of potential human beings never get to live. It's the natural order of things. Forcing morals onto this and blaming people for it is nothing short of lunacy.
The other side of the coin is, of course, that a LOT of life-ruining conditions (not only for the affected individual, but quite often for his entire family) are simply side-stepped.
Discarding 41st-week pregnancies due to a disliked color of hair is easily avoidable using legal regulation where otherwise sane laws don't exist (say, laws allowing the mother the first part of her pregnancy to decide whether she is ready to commit and allowing her to abort, yet disallowing non-medically-motivated abortion once a certain reasonable point in the pregnancy is crossed, much like you can't just kill your 3-year-old because you don't want to commit to growing him).
Yet how do these mild, pathetic and trivial-to-overcome "dangers" reason to bash the enabling technology that would save so much grief?
>> Genetic selection is strictly an environmental thing, so why humans have to get involved is way beyond me
After your entire family wastes a lifetime and unimaginable amounts of money catering to a chronic disease, comes out ravaged (parents split up, both nervous wrecks), sorta like cancer only without the affected individual dying after a reasonably short period of time and relieving the load off the rest of the family, when all this could have been avoided by choosing another of the available zygotes and given the rest of the family a chance at a normal life over the course of 3 decades, you might get the answer to your utterly lame-ass question figured out.
Ask me how I know.
Just because someone in Hollywood can figure out how to script a movie with all the bad things of a technology wildly amplified and all the good things muted using an overemotionalized one-case-scenario doesn't make the technology a bad thing. It makes people who judge the technology based on said emotional manipulation narrow-minded idiots though.
Further, if you think it is not already done today (I've undergone testing for Taisachs markers, and ethnic high-risk conditions statistics matching before me and my wife proceeded to have children, just so we will know what we're at higher risk of and be on the lookout), you should really get out more often (IMHO if you don't get genetic counseling where such is available to you, notifying you of things you should be on the lookout for based on modern-day statistics, ethnic profiling, let's just say it doesn't make you a smart person)
Ignorance and risking 3 or more decades of your and your partner's life and every penny you will make during most of your mature lifespan in the name of "morals" is sheer idiocy.
>> such assertion being made in response to mention of Gordon Bells assertion that startups should not depen... and me adding that it does not apply to startup in question due to its business model being based on mid-term not directly-elevator-related CNT ventures.
>> Both are motivated to believe in something out of a desire that it be so rather than by evidence You're either very close to falling down the scientistengineer trap, or you have already done so.
When an Engineer takes on a novel not-yet-done engineering task, he goes on partial, unproven, risky ground. That's how new big things are born. This does NOT equate him to a church-goer because the risky part of his venture not hitherto proven to be feasible (read: built) is based on belief. When you set out developing an 80-core CPU, you're risking it turning out to be unfeasible for some reason, just as when you set out to develop technology to eventually build an ultralight 50GPA cable, you hope and do your best, but can never be certain. Are intel Engineers churchgoers too?
If you want to dig even deeper, belief does not solely characterize churchgoers. Scientists believe in things too. Believing in something doesn't make you religious.
That really depends what you refer to as investment.
What most people (including people who write dictionaries, most human beings, myself, etc) call investment is putting money in a place and for the purpose of generating returns.
What Michael Laine is looking for is effectively not investors per-se but contributors to a long-term semi-ideological cause (advocating getting to space cheaply via SE), his company being the vessel of such. Simply put, it's a company that is run by ideology rather than greed.
While his model IS built around nearer-term profits - a point you seem to be ignoring - (he is trying to engage in all manner of of non-SE-related nanotube-production so as to gain knowhow, experience and contribute to the commercialization and development of SWNT's thus furthering the longer-term elevator goal), in the grander scheme of things the company seems more keen on pursuing the SE as its ultimate goal rather than making money as an ultimate goal. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, and I'm not calling him a fraudster either (I doubt he is that), but it's not exactly your regular company. More like a glorified church gift shop.
Vista came out and the whole world did not run to the nearest PC corner store to buy a new PC, everybody just chugging along wherever they are in their PC's natural life cycle, upgrades just continuing as per the usual rate.
Let's collectively all act wildly surprised.
The majority of people will probably switch to vista, but it will happen when they feel its time to upgrade, not "at the moment vista is released" (Especially in light of the fact everyone including the non-technical crowd is well aware - quite possibly even over-worried with or without justifiable cause about - the potential rigors of immediate post-release adoption). And that's without mentioning that this round linux and MacOS present viable alternatives to a bigger slice of the crowd than they ever did.
If you are on the MS marketing group (and I seriously doubt any such people read slashdot), I have an old wall-street adage for you:
"Never buy into your own hype".
So people will just go on buying new computers, and at some point their percentage will outweigh that of XP. As things always were. Nothin to see here, move along.
>> You can't use computer miniaturization to make predictions about any other engineering field... Of course not, and I am not doing that. I'm trying to make a point through an example that swings the other way, not suggesting we make predictions about SWNT based on computer component progress rate. That, as you correctly suggest, would be utterly silly.
>> But some things have a much higher probability than others >> You seem to think that everything has an equal probability. Absolutely not, I'm simply not ignorant of my inability to foresee that probability, as it appears to me you are. I'm not the one pulling numbers, ballpark estimates or impossibility predictions out of my hat. I'd suffice with an "it's possible", and do what NASA does, which is prepare for either outcome.
I'm just trying to show you that claiming what you claim is just as risky as claiming something *will definitely* be overcome. One paper predicting a problem that cannot be overcome is hardly an assurance it will not.
This is actually an interesting topic for debate. When we try and make decisions today, we do that making an educated guess as to how we anticipate the future will develop.
Say, you and I kick off a PC game company that wants to make a game that requires 1TB of diskspace. Fact is, people today DO NOT HAVE 1TB of disk-space available on their PC's. On the other hand, we're aiming at what people will have 4 years from now, when we ship the product. Can we or can we not assume people will have 1TB of storage? Numerous companies made assumptions about future platforms as part of their business models. Some were right, some went dead.
Where does the assumption it will be there become reasonable? Always? Never? Circumstantial? Somewhere in between?
It's important to realize that assuming it will NOT be there is just as much as guess - it is an assumption too. You're just staking your bets on something else, with its own risk/gain ratio. The position you're advocating is neither bulletproof nor loss-safe either, as losses or gains are relative terms. So what's a safer assumption, that progress in a certain technology will STOP and STAY STOPPED, or that it will progress in the same manner it was progressing until now?
The answer is, of course, not black or white. Like investment, there is a risk factor, and a subsequent payoff. I chose hard-drives because they are a classic case of a technology that keeps evolving.
What this boils down to is "Do you anticipate technological evolutionary progress will progress until it reaches the red line, or will it stop short"? It's all guessing, and both yay-sayers and nay-sayers can pull historical examples out of their hat. Neither proves nothing.
However, the question of "Do we want the other time-consuming technologies ready, in case technology will progress sufficiently to the point application is feasible?" was answered by NASA with a YES, seeing as they're putting money on the table for both powerbeaming/climber competitions, and the tether ones.
It's not so much a vote of confidence in the (yet nonexistent) technology as it is admitting the possibility it will provide exists and should be planned for. And if they see it there, hey, I do too.
And no, I don't need 100% proof or assurances it will come. I do understand it may not.
And last, I don't just wave my hands. I've kicked my sorry ass back to school after a 12-year coding/sysadmin IT career to study... more IT... of the molecular wet kind, so I can actually contribute something to all of this.
Unobtainium is nice. Only problem is, it was said about so many things to date (heavier-than-air flight, nanomechanics, small transistors, cheap IC's, dense storage, etc) that all it amounts to is a synonym for "I have nothing useful to contribute".
I repeat what I said,
"Never assume you can tell apart impossibility from your own lack of imagination. Always state the latter".
Actually, according to the NIAC papers, perfect SWNT's are 300GPa.
Second, you can build an elevator with less, you'd just need a hell of a lot more material, and a hell of a lot more hassle to get the thing deployed. That side of things may be addressed by a couple of decades of mass production and consequently radical price reductions on the material.
I don't think we're in any particular shortage of carbon atoms, just the means to assemble them cheaply with very few faults.
Keep in mind the old adage: When an old scientist claims something is impossible, he is most likely wrong. When a young scientist claims something is possible (henceforth thought not to be), he is most likely right.
Another adage that I made up for work is "Never assume you can tell apart impossibility from your own lack of imagination. Always state the latter" (that's mine if you want to quote it).
Physical limitations can and will be engineered around in chemistry as well as in many other fields. That's what engineering is all about.
Only question is how long it will take, and whether anything better will have come along by then.
Hundreds of breakthroughs? You're clearly speaking ignorance out of your ass, not having bothered to catch up with the work already put into this.
Just because nobody built a submergeable car doesn't mean that building one requires a breakthrough. The technology for building one is readily available if you hire some engineers and throw the associated requirements at them, it's just that nobody bothered making one yet as nobody yet has found the need.
This goes for the second and third elevator challenges - climber and powerbeaming. No fundamental breakthroughs are required.
Tether is another matter. Let me put some numbers for you: I don't know what Laine was doing in the last 4 years, but I've always doubted he'd be able to come up with anything more than nice marketing material. He just never seemed anywhere on-par, resourcewise, with other parties interested in the same nanotech, be it for elevator purposes or not. (I think I was a bit humbled a while back when I read a few articles about huge Japanese companies buying SWNT patents and investing billions in future mass-prodction of the above).
However, what you do have is: 1. Very long and imperfect SWNT's that give tensile strengths marginally better than existing high-strength composites. 2. Very short SWNT's that have been measured to have a tensile strength of ~60GPa. Theoretical is ~300GPa (for a theoretically unlimited length fiber).
Now, you don't build a composite out of these alone. Spinning a cable means connecting SWNT molecules using weak non-covalent bonds (pi and Van Der Waals), meaning the end result carries only a fraction of the strength of the SWNT's you use.
You need to attain a cable that can do ~100GPa, or ~50GPa is also fine if you're ok with using an order of magnitude more material. Neither is unfeasible.
To oversimplify a bit, there are three relevant pursuits here - a. Manufacture higher quality SWNT's (whether in the short&strong or long&weak camps or any camp in between)
b. Retain the highest N% of the orininal strength as you weave SWNT's from camp X into sheets that can spread load. (Over the past decade or so, X was slowly progressing towards the short&strong camp), while N was also increasing steadily.
c. Ramp up manufacturing capacity of SWNT's by orders of magnitude. (in as far as we care about, of camp X SWNT's, but since tomorrow camp Y may perform better in [b] than camp X today, overall increase in SWNT production capability, thus making SWNT costs cheaper, is crucial.
So what do we have? A static red line that needs to be crossed as a result in development of [a] and [b], and possibly the radical lowering of the red line with enough progress in [c].
Where are we today? ~3GPa cables. Google Elevator2010. Nasa's offering some hard cash if you can come up with better in its annual competition (purse for this year's elevator challenges is 1M$)
This is hardly hundreds of breakthroughs, especially as we already KNOW what the molecules we need look like, have proved they/can/ be manufactured and simply need to evolve that capability.
It's totally something we don't know how to do yet, but in light of nanomechanics, evolving atomic assembly technologies, ever improving chemistry etc, it's not unreasonable to assume these will be met in the foreseeable future, just as it is not unreasonable to believe 10 Terabyte 3.5'' harddrives will be made, even though nobody knows how to make them today. An elevator would be "something we can build once the SWNT equivalents of 50 Terabyte harddrives can be built".
We can of course argue that every insight an engineer has as to how to evolve the technology a bit further (how to make 1.2 TB harddrive instead of existing 1TB ones) is a "breakthrough", but that would be a pointless semantic debate.
And you think that your country's servicemen, when tasked with protecting their country in foreign land and faced with an enemy that cynically exploited your morals against you and deliberately operated out of populated areas (I'm guessing you're American so I may just mention Vietnam), did any better? That they had no accidents from (possibly justifiable, due to life-threatening conditions) itchy trigger fingers?
You think that YOU, placed with this grim, dirty, dangerous, life-threatening and disaster-prone task, on a daily basis for many years, would do any better? You think the IDF are trained to shoot pregnant women in basic training?
Bah.
I call bullshit and you a sorry hypocrite for judging the servicemen there. I served in the IDF, and I am an Israeli national. Not a single IDF serviceman I ever met with would deliberately shoot a pregnant woman on purpose. Israel puts people who do that in institutions and jails, just like any country in the world. War sucks, lady. It sucks for ANY troops of ANY nation in ANY war. Sad accidents like this happened in every war that ever took place, and this one is not an exception.
The only thing you will get by taking whatever really happened in this or any similar situation in any other war and judging on insufficient or misinformation (have you heard the Nahal's debreif? do you know WHY soldiers were pointing arms at said building in the first place? What the risks in the mission were? Where hostile forces were supposed to be?)
I'm not justifying what happened. I'm displaying an ability you apparently can't: the ability to say "I don't know enough to pass judgement". In light of this, passing judgement anyway would only amount to pathetic self-serving rhetoric, overemotionalized in your case (I could do the same the other way easily enough).
The only thing I will suggest is that there is a DAMN GOOD REASON Palestinian life is cheap. Nobody believes them (they lied to one camera too many), when they claim to suffer on one hand but perpetually attempt to remain in a suffering state and do all required effort to remain there. When "10 civilians were killed" nobody really knows if this was 10 innocents or 10 provocative militants with guns (notice when a battle between IDF and palestinian forces always yields very few palestinian "combatant" deaths. Ever wonder why?) There was a story about a boy who cried wolf, it applies here.
It's obvious to both you and me that a pregnant woman is not a combatant. However, the press and many people developed a numbness for palestinian casaulties simply because statistically, a high proportion of it is hyperbole, thus it gets underreported in its entirety, even in extreme cases such as this. IMHO, the underreporting bit you can place squarely on the Palestinian's own plate. They brought it upon themselves by lying too much.
You may have gotten the strategic oil bit sorted out, and you're slowly coming to terms with history, but this whole "using HTML" thing looks like it's getting the better of you. Maybe you shouldn't be trying so hard.
Plus, there may be ten times more Americans than Canadians as you say, but looking at your mentality, looking at your ignorance-promoting culture, looking at your president, looking at your policies and hell, looking at you, population numbers aside, the overall amount of brain cells seems to be about the same on either side of your Canadian border.....
Mate, pull your head out of yer arse. Who the FUCK (bar 3rd world refugees) would WANT to be an American? Why do you think people in other countries strive to be there? Gimme a break. The best advantage Australia has over Canada is the fact that America is much further away from you dumb-ass Americans.
Done. Mod me to hell, American Fanboys. My karma can take it.
Most people use whatever stock cooler they get when they buy the CPU, which in this day and age is both reasonably quiet and keeps your CPU reasonably cool, without either the need to actively monitor or actively tweak it.
People who want a faster gaming rig buy faster graphics cards and more graphics cards. People who want more CPU power buy faster CPUs and more cores.
Ignoring for the moment the bare few whose environmental conditions/really/ warrant custom cooling, most people I've met who buy this shit are people who could have gotten more benefit with one tenth the hassle by putting their money where it mattered. What we collectively and commonly term "idiots".
What DOES give value to many people today, however, is:
[a] QUIET [b] Low power consumption (which, for me at least, translates into hundreds of dollars a year saved, plus some warm fuzzies for being eco-friendly)
Now if they were to review worthwhile solutions to THAT, both me and most of my geek friends would be getting much much more value and useful information out of said "journalism". Too bad they're still stuck in 1998 catering to overclocking pissing contests.
I recon I can do better, so here goes:
CPUs break up into the following catogories:
Desktop - 60-120Watts Laptop - ~30 Watts (Most mobile core duo/core 2 duos- 5x00, 7x00 fit here) LV - ~10 Watts (Celeron M xx8) ULV - ~5 Watts (Celeron M xx3, Via C7, AMD Geode NX [1.5GHz ULV AthlonXP] "REALLY REALLY" ULV - 5 Watts AMD Geode GX/LX [p2/3 class CPUs]. See Jetway 8x00 boards.
The latter three can use passive cooling.
Now consider the following suggestions:
Core desktop platform: Kontron 986 board+CPU. ~900US$. A bit tricky to source, but can be done. Uses a Yonah-based 1.06GHz ULV CPU (what you find in ultraportable laptops). ENTIRELY SOLID-STATE. Being mini-itx, uses all standard ATX cases and PC hardware (RAM, PCIe, IDE, SATA, etc) fast 16GB CF card for OS ~ 200US$. (remember to tweak XP/Vista to disable on-access writes, or you'll kill the flash card in a matter of months). PicoPSU-120 - 60$. 60 or 90 Watt power brick - ~20$.
Machine profile: 30-40 Watts. Core platform has NO MOVING PARTS (fans, drives, etc), hence SILENT.
For >16GB storage: replace CF with harddrive. For casual gaming: Even being a low-clock CPU, it's still a Yonah core, has resonable L2 and a PCIe slot. Add Geforce 8800GTS-320 and any 450Watt PSU (the rest of the machine takes almost nil), it'll kick ass, just note that an 8800 eats 250Watts on idle, closer to 350 when under load. If you're concerned about power consumption, I'd start powering the machine down when not using it.
For less casual gaming: bump up the CPU from a 5Watt profile to a 30 Watt profile. Consider mini-itx solutions that can take some form of a T5x00 or T7x00 (Merom, dual-core) CPU and have PCIe. This will give you the rough equivalent of an E6400 (or even more) for half the power, and *MIGHT* even be palatable with some silly 2kg passive copper brick to keep the thing quiet.
For living room PC:
Via EPIA EN-12000 (1.2GHz C7 CPU) with GbE - ~300$ (Mobo + CPU). PicoPSU 120. 12V/5A power brick. 2GB Flash with Winows XP. Use networked RAID as storage. Add haupage PCI card to make it a PVR. Plays back MPEG2, DivX, what have you. Core platform has NO MOVING PARTS (fans, drives, etc), hence SILENT. Machine profile: 30-40 Watts.
For Fileserver:
Jetway J7F4 12000. (2xGbE, 1.2GHz CPU, 2 SATA). ~200$. OS: 2GB CF with whatever server OS floats your boat. PCI 4-port SATA card - 30$ Core platform has NO MOVING PARTS (fans, drives, etc), hence SILENT. Add 4-6 400GB (or whatever cheaply-available sweet-spot drives you can find). Option to make it nice and tidy: Cheap removable rack for ~100$. Movi
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My point had to do with how silly making it look like an either-or scenario is.
Intel is very likely doing both with equal zeal, and the market is at a point where it will pay for useful advances in either.
I second that.
I've just finished pulling apart my E6X00-based gaming box, in favor of a C2D T5500 mobile-on-desktop rig, replacing a fast FSB with a fanless(BIG-heatsink)-CPU and cutting CPU power consumption to almost 1/3. (Yes, I know an 8800 eats 250 Watts on idle. I'm still looking for a way to depower it and use alternative low-power VGA-out when not in use. Mention'em if you can think of'em)
L7200 and L7400's soon to hit the mobile-478-socket CPU market soon (thinkpad X60t's already ship with it), giving the same dual-core mid-range desktop performance for yet another 50% cut in power consumption - ~15 watts in place of ~30W, and knocking another 5W off for losing a fan or two.
Speaking of, any 478-mobile boards out there except for Gigabyte's GA-8I945GMMFY-RH that do both C2D (bumps the Asus N4L-VM) and PCIex16 (bumps the Abit IL-90)?
"Software" (as in all software ever written) is not a monolithic thing. The vast majority of software in use today is not CPU-restricted by modern (and even 5-year-old) commodity hardware.
Of the little bit that does need oompf, Where SMP can be taken advantage of, people have largely been working on doing so for a while now.
Only the little fraction that remains - projects that CAN USE the extra oompf and haven't been developed in that direction yet - need to catch up.
Your statement hardly applies to most software out there.
While CPUs with massive internal implicit parallelism, obviously, have their use, the future belongs to electric cars, IMHO.
That's pretty much what I had in mind. I wasn't narrowing it down to ".c" files, but yes. The basic analogy of /whatever/ useful and logically-contained function you want to equate on a PC)
:-)). /itself/, things like palindromes and mirror repeats that give you pinhead loopholes, crucifix folding etc. This is where the data OUTSIDE the file would be crucial the the file being.. err.. loaded and executed. You can consider that data a sort of "file header", but that breaks the gene=file analogy because while that data does get picked up and shipped by the RNA, it does not code for a protein and is thus not part of the gene/file. So to avoid breaking gene=file, that data is a chunk of filesystem metadata bundled together with the file. A Makefile or if you like. .. break parts of if not the entire filesystem, and one "Makefile" metadata chunk can address multiple files.
DNA=filesystem
gene=files (that do
junk-DNA=DNA minus genes - here, as you well pointed out, "free space" with "contents of deleted files still present on disk" being very much similar to "defunct genes that may have done something useful once in some distant evolutionary forefather" analogy sticks well. Other junk-DNA is obviously filesystem metadata (think telomeres, introns, UGA/UGG stop sequences, etc).
There is an important difference in the level of complexity that breaks the analogy though (rephrase: that requires stretching the analogy in a creative way I haven't thought of yet. Lack of creativity != Impossibility, though often mistaken for such
Machine memory is spaced in a fixed way. On one hand, stripping out a bit (and shifting the remainder of the drive one bit to the left) does not occur in machines whereas it does in DNA. Directly, this is not a problem, mRNA transcribing data off the strands couldn't care less. They don't even care if you take the gene they came to copy and invert it.
HOWEVER, sometimes you get funky folding where mRNA pairs with
So can we equate label that "surrounding" data required for the RNA to pair to itself with metadata?
That would ALMOST be correct. Almost because that metadata (as it appears on the DNA) can just as well be doing something else at the same time, a situation whose nearest computerside conceptual relative would be filesystem compression (the use of the same batch of bits to store multiple sets of data).
Thus, a "bad sector" in the data belonging to a "deleted file" can easily
I need a better equivalent than Makefiles. "Directory" would break the usefulness of the analogy because it'd wrongly imply context-driven gathering of files. Some kind of "localized FAT or supernode" maybe.
Oh well. I said these analogies break.
As an anecdote, if you ever meet a creationist, tell him God might be omnipotent, but the filesystems he designed are shit (unless, of course, you take into account the hardware limitations of working with hardware featuring that level of data density, and even then we can, and hopefully soon will, be doing much better with data consistency)
God, of course, true to being a developer, and keeping bacteria in mind, would probably claim it's a feature rather than a bug.
Not quite. Your analogy appears somewhat broken.
/machinery/ or /DATA/?
Here's the question - is non-gene DNA
If it's the latter, junk DNA would be conceptually closer to filesystem metadata (and maybe even "free diskspace" in as far as introns etc. go) than the OS.
I fail to see how it bootstraps anything. A DNA molecule does not to my best knowledge start proliferating on its own when put on agar. Cellular facilities are required. True, you build said cell facilities from data stored in genes, but still I can't find any underlying principle shared by the bootloader, OS or whatever interpreter on my computer and my non-gene-coding DNA.
FWIW, I'm a coder, a unix sysadmin and a (somewhat late-aged) biochem undergrad student, so feel free to dive as deep as you like into a technical comparison. I've been playing with comparison models of my own for a while (all of which have the annoying habit of breaking at one point or another) and am intrigued to hear more ideas on this.
One thing that I find extremely annoying by DRM is that it makes sharing something with somebody an antisocial act.
If my mother asks me for one of my books, CDs etc, telling her to "go buy her own" *is* antisocial. I perceive it as rather disgusting behavior. None of my friends I've ever asked for any form of digital media ever said "NO, that's MINE, go buy your own". It'd be considered disgusting. Factually, nobody (that I know) behaves this way. People ignore the illegality of the issue and just do what they perceive as right.
This is not new. Microsoft tried capitalizing on this behavior with their share-a-copy-that-expires-in-3-days zune wireless sharing scheme. The problem is that people perceive that as an UNNECCESARY limitation, and it's them, the consumers, who vote for what device they buy, not the RIAA. So Microsoft missed out.
Apple is SMART, and did this in a much better way IMHO:
0. Come to terms that you CANNOT stop social behavior. You will NOT prevent people from giving the song to their mum. Forcing a person to choose between doing something for his mum or for some distant big commercial entity is sheer idiocy. You'll just alienate your clients, turn them against you and lose profits. That's the hole RIAA not only fell into, they're still busy digging, convinced there is something of value to be found underneath.
1. Technically, ALLOW users to behave socially. ALLOW them to give the bloody song to their mum if they so please. Don't technically block them from doing it properly (the hole MS fell into).
2. Place a TRIVIAL and NON-RESTRICTING (i.e. well-known and trivial-to-remove) psychological deterrent from sharing. Assume the vast majority of the population won't bother stripping it , so by large this will remain in place (although I envision an emule or limewire upgrade that automates said stripping by checking a checkbox). Apple doesn't even have to play copyright police and demonize itself. Let the RIAA do that and alienate the labels, while apple capitalizes on the FUD and perceived threat among the public thus created. Fear of the unknown is also a good motivator.
This scores home in two ways. To understand this, think of people one shares files with as two groups - people one acts socially towards - giving mum a song - and people one just give out to because he can, without even knowing them - your upload directory in your favourite p2p app.
They introduce a very mild antimotivator to share your files to just anyone. Low enough antimotivator to be easily overcome by one's desire to share socially, but high enough to make sharing with the world at large to be somewhat deterred (again, on a partial statistical basis, not entirely).
The secondary effect is on the person being socially-shared to. A healthy percent of the time, that person will not go sharing the song giving to him by a friend or relative, for fear of getting friend/relative in trouble. Again, true some of the time, but my guess would be, reasonably significant to the point of not wanting to share that song using p2p (again, excluding the % of population who will go to the trouble of removing the tag and details). In fact, apple may be better off if Joe buys, shares with 10 friends of whom 5 don't share further to avoid hurting Joe, than if 10 friends acquire a non-joe-signed copy of the song (from Joe or otherwise) and 10 now 10 friends are sharing. If joe shares socially, availability of the song on p2p drops. They actually gain something from social sharing.
The reason apple is smart is because their solution is not aimed to be hermetic. They're not to win (over p2p), but for a more favorable tie/stalemate than they already have.
They've realized and come to terms with the fact that hermetically sealing usage is not doable in this day and age, and is anything but good for your profits.
Instead, they engineered a solution that is less perfect, but may very well strike closer to the sweet spot between making more profits with some mild success in mitigating illegal p2p, while not scaring off your paying customers by tying them down.
Personally, I applaud them.
Humans are already playing god. We've been playing god since we discovered penicillin and started interfering in the natural order of things.
Consequently, two things happened:
1. Humans formed societies where any form of dangerous technology, be it electricity, nuclear power, dangerous diseases, dangerous chemicals, and yes, genetic selection are regulated, so as to derive the good while strongly mitigating the possibility of the bad.
2. Humans prospered.
The bottom line is that humans will play god, will do it better and better with time, will do it to do more good than evil, and will use this technology and will presumably prosper.
Besides, what's wrong with playing god? I don't mind playing god, being god, becoming something that previous generations would deem a god. We already are that. Yes, you too. Capabilities that you take for granted - from communication, to locomotion, to the ability to overcome physical trauma or disease or what have you, to live over twice what people use to not too long ago, would make you what they might have called a god. So?
Personally I don't believe in any form or kind of god (as per religious claims), thus striving to elevate myself to a higher level of manipulating my environment does not strike me as some form of forbidden sacrilege. It strikes me as a clearly proven strategy to make things better for us, as what we should be doing to make the world a better place for the next generation, and what it should do for the generation after that. Playing god is a perfectly legitimate and desirable pursuit.
I'm reading all the morals police comments here, and I'm quite surprised.
Will someone PLEASE explain to me how the ability to diagnose diseases better and earlier is a BAD thing?
There are numerous eggs and numerous sperm to make numerous children by any couple.
When one of each gets a chance at life, a lot of others don't. One lives, others die. If we leverage genetics and choose zygote X where naturally Y would have gotten, it's a zero-sum morals game. A different one lives. As they're not yet anywhere near development, putting morals on this is akin to calling masturbation genocide. LOTS of potential human beings never get to live. It's the natural order of things. Forcing morals onto this and blaming people for it is nothing short of lunacy.
The other side of the coin is, of course, that a LOT of life-ruining conditions (not only for the affected individual, but quite often for his entire family) are simply side-stepped.
Discarding 41st-week pregnancies due to a disliked color of hair is easily avoidable using legal regulation where otherwise sane laws don't exist (say, laws allowing the mother the first part of her pregnancy to decide whether she is ready to commit and allowing her to abort, yet disallowing non-medically-motivated abortion once a certain reasonable point in the pregnancy is crossed, much like you can't just kill your 3-year-old because you don't want to commit to growing him).
Yet how do these mild, pathetic and trivial-to-overcome "dangers" reason to bash the enabling technology that would save so much grief?
>> Genetic selection is strictly an environmental thing, so why humans have to get involved is way beyond me
After your entire family wastes a lifetime and unimaginable amounts of money catering to a chronic disease, comes out ravaged (parents split up, both nervous wrecks), sorta like cancer only without the affected individual dying after a reasonably short period of time and relieving the load off the rest of the family, when all this could have been avoided by choosing another of the available zygotes and given the rest of the family a chance at a normal life over the course of 3 decades, you might get the answer to your utterly lame-ass question figured out.
Ask me how I know.
Just because someone in Hollywood can figure out how to script a movie with all the bad things of a technology wildly amplified and all the good things muted using an overemotionalized one-case-scenario doesn't make the technology a bad thing. It makes people who judge the technology based on said emotional manipulation narrow-minded idiots though.
Further, if you think it is not already done today (I've undergone testing for Taisachs markers, and ethnic high-risk conditions statistics matching before me and my wife proceeded to have children, just so we will know what we're at higher risk of and be on the lookout), you should really get out more often (IMHO if you don't get genetic counseling where such is available to you, notifying you of things you should be on the lookout for based on modern-day statistics, ethnic profiling, let's just say it doesn't make you a smart person)
Ignorance and risking 3 or more decades of your and your partner's life and every penny you will make during most of your mature lifespan in the name of "morals" is sheer idiocy.
>> such assertion being made in response to mention of Gordon Bells assertion that startups should not depen ... and me adding that it does not apply to startup in question due to its business model being based on mid-term not directly-elevator-related CNT ventures.
>> Both are motivated to believe in something out of a desire that it be so rather than by evidence
You're either very close to falling down the scientistengineer trap, or you have already done so.
When an Engineer takes on a novel not-yet-done engineering task, he goes on partial, unproven, risky ground. That's how new big things are born. This does NOT equate him to a church-goer because the risky part of his venture not hitherto proven to be feasible (read: built) is based on belief. When you set out developing an 80-core CPU, you're risking it turning out to be unfeasible for some reason, just as when you set out to develop technology to eventually build an ultralight 50GPA cable, you hope and do your best, but can never be certain. Are intel Engineers churchgoers too?
If you want to dig even deeper, belief does not solely characterize churchgoers. Scientists believe in things too. Believing in something doesn't make you religious.
I just wrote this a few days ago. May give you something to think about, quite possibly for more than one of the machines you are planning.
You'd run out of shuttles before you hit 100, and your rate will slow down sooner than later due to the fact you'll only have 2, then only 1 left.
That really depends what you refer to as investment.
What most people (including people who write dictionaries, most human beings, myself, etc) call investment is putting money in a place and for the purpose of generating returns.
What Michael Laine is looking for is effectively not investors per-se but contributors to a long-term semi-ideological cause (advocating getting to space cheaply via SE), his company being the vessel of such.
Simply put, it's a company that is run by ideology rather than greed.
While his model IS built around nearer-term profits - a point you seem to be ignoring - (he is trying to engage in all manner of of non-SE-related nanotube-production so as to gain knowhow, experience and contribute to the commercialization and development of SWNT's thus furthering the longer-term elevator goal), in the grander scheme of things the company seems more keen on pursuing the SE as its ultimate goal rather than making money as an ultimate goal.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing, and I'm not calling him a fraudster either (I doubt he is that), but it's not exactly your regular company. More like a glorified church gift shop.
Vista came out and the whole world did not run to the nearest PC corner store to buy a new PC, everybody just chugging along wherever they are in their PC's natural life cycle, upgrades just continuing as per the usual rate.
Let's collectively all act wildly surprised.
The majority of people will probably switch to vista, but it will happen when they feel its time to upgrade, not "at the moment vista is released" (Especially in light of the fact everyone including the non-technical crowd is well aware - quite possibly even over-worried with or without justifiable cause about - the potential rigors of immediate post-release adoption). And that's without mentioning that this round linux and MacOS present viable alternatives to a bigger slice of the crowd than they ever did.
If you are on the MS marketing group (and I seriously doubt any such people read slashdot), I have an old wall-street adage for you:
"Never buy into your own hype".
So people will just go on buying new computers, and at some point their percentage will outweigh that of XP. As things always were. Nothin to see here, move along.
Tactile feedback is a non-issue.
I was concerned about the lack of tactile feedback on my CarPC 8'' monitor when I build the machine about a year and a half ago.
After you get used to it, you don't miss it. It's just fine without.
>> You can't use computer miniaturization to make predictions about any other engineering field...
Of course not, and I am not doing that. I'm trying to make a point through an example that swings the other way, not suggesting we make predictions about SWNT based on computer component progress rate. That, as you correctly suggest, would be utterly silly.
>> But some things have a much higher probability than others
>> You seem to think that everything has an equal probability.
Absolutely not, I'm simply not ignorant of my inability to foresee that probability, as it appears to me you are.
I'm not the one pulling numbers, ballpark estimates or impossibility predictions out of my hat. I'd suffice with an "it's possible", and do what NASA does, which is prepare for either outcome.
I'm just trying to show you that claiming what you claim is just as risky as claiming something *will definitely* be overcome. One paper predicting a problem that cannot be overcome is hardly an assurance it will not.
This is actually an interesting topic for debate. When we try and make decisions today, we do that making an educated guess as to how we anticipate the future will develop.
... more IT... of the molecular wet kind, so I can actually contribute something to all of this.
Say, you and I kick off a PC game company that wants to make a game that requires 1TB of diskspace.
Fact is, people today DO NOT HAVE 1TB of disk-space available on their PC's.
On the other hand, we're aiming at what people will have 4 years from now, when we ship the product. Can we or can we not assume people will have 1TB of storage? Numerous companies made assumptions about future platforms as part of their business models. Some were right, some went dead.
Where does the assumption it will be there become reasonable? Always? Never? Circumstantial? Somewhere in between?
It's important to realize that assuming it will NOT be there is just as much as guess - it is an assumption too. You're just staking your bets on something else, with its own risk/gain ratio. The position you're advocating is neither bulletproof nor loss-safe either, as losses or gains are relative terms.
So what's a safer assumption, that progress in a certain technology will STOP and STAY STOPPED, or that it will progress in the same manner it was progressing until now?
The answer is, of course, not black or white. Like investment, there is a risk factor, and a subsequent payoff. I chose hard-drives because they are a classic case of a technology that keeps evolving.
What this boils down to is "Do you anticipate technological evolutionary progress will progress until it reaches the red line, or will it stop short"? It's all guessing, and both yay-sayers and nay-sayers can pull historical examples out of their hat. Neither proves nothing.
However, the question of "Do we want the other time-consuming technologies ready, in case technology will progress sufficiently to the point application is feasible?" was answered by NASA with a YES, seeing as they're putting money on the table for both powerbeaming/climber competitions, and the tether ones.
It's not so much a vote of confidence in the (yet nonexistent) technology as it is admitting the possibility it will provide exists and should be planned for. And if they see it there, hey, I do too.
And no, I don't need 100% proof or assurances it will come. I do understand it may not.
And last, I don't just wave my hands. I've kicked my sorry ass back to school after a 12-year coding/sysadmin IT career to study
Unobtainium is nice. Only problem is, it was said about so many things to date (heavier-than-air flight, nanomechanics, small transistors, cheap IC's, dense storage, etc) that all it amounts to is a synonym for "I have nothing useful to contribute".
I repeat what I said,
"Never assume you can tell apart impossibility from your own lack of imagination. Always state the latter".
You just neglected to do that last bit.
Actually, according to the NIAC papers, perfect SWNT's are 300GPa.
Second, you can build an elevator with less, you'd just need a hell of a lot more material, and a hell of a lot more hassle to get the thing deployed. That side of things may be addressed by a couple of decades of mass production and consequently radical price reductions on the material.
I don't think we're in any particular shortage of carbon atoms, just the means to assemble them cheaply with very few faults.
Keep in mind the old adage:
When an old scientist claims something is impossible, he is most likely wrong.
When a young scientist claims something is possible (henceforth thought not to be), he is most likely right.
Another adage that I made up for work is
"Never assume you can tell apart impossibility from your own lack of imagination. Always state the latter" (that's mine if you want to quote it).
Physical limitations can and will be engineered around in chemistry as well as in many other fields. That's what engineering is all about.
Only question is how long it will take, and whether anything better will have come along by then.
Hundreds of breakthroughs? You're clearly speaking ignorance out of your ass, not having bothered to catch up with the work already put into this.
/can/ be manufactured and simply need to evolve that capability.
Just because nobody built a submergeable car doesn't mean that building one requires a breakthrough. The technology for building one is readily available if you hire some engineers and throw the associated requirements at them, it's just that nobody bothered making one yet as nobody yet has found the need.
This goes for the second and third elevator challenges - climber and powerbeaming. No fundamental breakthroughs are required.
Tether is another matter. Let me put some numbers for you:
I don't know what Laine was doing in the last 4 years, but I've always doubted he'd be able to come up with anything more than nice marketing material. He just never seemed anywhere on-par, resourcewise, with other parties interested in the same nanotech, be it for elevator purposes or not. (I think I was a bit humbled a while back when I read a few articles about huge Japanese companies buying SWNT patents and investing billions in future mass-prodction of the above).
However, what you do have is:
1. Very long and imperfect SWNT's that give tensile strengths marginally better than existing high-strength composites.
2. Very short SWNT's that have been measured to have a tensile strength of ~60GPa. Theoretical is ~300GPa (for a theoretically unlimited length fiber).
Now, you don't build a composite out of these alone. Spinning a cable means connecting SWNT molecules using weak non-covalent bonds (pi and Van Der Waals), meaning the end result carries only a fraction of the strength of the SWNT's you use.
You need to attain a cable that can do ~100GPa, or ~50GPa is also fine if you're ok with using an order of magnitude more material. Neither is unfeasible.
To oversimplify a bit, there are three relevant pursuits here -
a. Manufacture higher quality SWNT's (whether in the short&strong or long&weak camps or any camp in between)
b. Retain the highest N% of the orininal strength as you weave SWNT's from camp X into sheets that can spread load. (Over the past decade or so, X was slowly progressing towards the short&strong camp), while N was also increasing steadily.
c. Ramp up manufacturing capacity of SWNT's by orders of magnitude. (in as far as we care about, of camp X SWNT's, but since tomorrow camp Y may perform better in [b] than camp X today, overall increase in SWNT production capability, thus making SWNT costs cheaper, is crucial.
So what do we have? A static red line that needs to be crossed as a result in development of [a] and [b], and possibly the radical lowering of the red line with enough progress in [c].
Where are we today? ~3GPa cables. Google Elevator2010. Nasa's offering some hard cash if you can come up with better in its annual competition (purse for this year's elevator challenges is 1M$)
This is hardly hundreds of breakthroughs, especially as we already KNOW what the molecules we need look like, have proved they
It's totally something we don't know how to do yet, but in light of nanomechanics, evolving atomic assembly technologies, ever improving chemistry etc, it's not unreasonable to assume these will be met in the foreseeable future, just as it is not unreasonable to believe 10 Terabyte 3.5'' harddrives will be made, even though nobody knows how to make them today. An elevator would be "something we can build once the SWNT equivalents of 50 Terabyte harddrives can be built".
We can of course argue that every insight an engineer has as to how to evolve the technology a bit further (how to make 1.2 TB harddrive instead of existing 1TB ones) is a "breakthrough", but that would be a pointless semantic debate.
And you think that your country's servicemen, when tasked with protecting their country in foreign land and faced with an enemy that cynically exploited your morals against you and deliberately operated out of populated areas (I'm guessing you're American so I may just mention Vietnam), did any better? That they had no accidents from (possibly justifiable, due to life-threatening conditions) itchy trigger fingers?
You think that YOU, placed with this grim, dirty, dangerous, life-threatening and disaster-prone task, on a daily basis for many years, would do any better? You think the IDF are trained to shoot pregnant women in basic training?
Bah.
I call bullshit and you a sorry hypocrite for judging the servicemen there. I served in the IDF, and I am an Israeli national. Not a single IDF serviceman I ever met with would deliberately shoot a pregnant woman on purpose. Israel puts people who do that in institutions and jails, just like any country in the world.
War sucks, lady. It sucks for ANY troops of ANY nation in ANY war. Sad accidents like this happened in every war that ever took place, and this one is not an exception.
The only thing you will get by taking whatever really happened in this or any similar situation in any other war and judging on insufficient or misinformation (have you heard the Nahal's debreif? do you know WHY soldiers were pointing arms at said building in the first place? What the risks in the mission were? Where hostile forces were supposed to be?)
I'm not justifying what happened. I'm displaying an ability you apparently can't: the ability to say "I don't know enough to pass judgement". In light of this, passing judgement anyway would only amount to pathetic self-serving rhetoric, overemotionalized in your case (I could do the same the other way easily enough).
The only thing I will suggest is that there is a DAMN GOOD REASON Palestinian life is cheap. Nobody believes them (they lied to one camera too many), when they claim to suffer on one hand but perpetually attempt to remain in a suffering state and do all required effort to remain there. When "10 civilians were killed" nobody really knows if this was 10 innocents or 10 provocative militants with guns (notice when a battle between IDF and palestinian forces always yields very few palestinian "combatant" deaths. Ever wonder why?)
There was a story about a boy who cried wolf, it applies here.
It's obvious to both you and me that a pregnant woman is not a combatant. However, the press and many people developed a numbness for palestinian casaulties simply because statistically, a high proportion of it is hyperbole, thus it gets underreported in its entirety, even in extreme cases such as this.
IMHO, the underreporting bit you can place squarely on the Palestinian's own plate. They brought it upon themselves by lying too much.
's/the fact that America is much further away from you dumb-ass Americans/the fact that Australia is much further away from you dumb-ass Americans/'
You may have gotten the strategic oil bit sorted out, and you're slowly coming to terms with history, but this whole "using HTML" thing looks like it's getting the better of you. Maybe you shouldn't be trying so hard.
Plus, there may be ten times more Americans than Canadians as you say, but looking at your mentality, looking at your ignorance-promoting culture, looking at your president, looking at your policies and hell, looking at you, population numbers aside, the overall amount of brain cells seems to be about the same on either side of your Canadian border.....
Mate, pull your head out of yer arse. Who the FUCK (bar 3rd world refugees) would WANT to be an American? Why do you think people in other countries strive to be there? Gimme a break. The best advantage Australia has over Canada is the fact that America is much further away from you dumb-ass Americans.
Done. Mod me to hell, American Fanboys. My karma can take it.
You'd be a good person to ask then. :-) nails down the Archon prize for Genomics?
How long do you anticipate before someone (you?
They were saying "5-10 years" when they floated it. Realistic?
Most people use whatever stock cooler they get when they buy the CPU, which in this day and age is both reasonably quiet and keeps your CPU reasonably cool, without either the need to actively monitor or actively tweak it.
/really/ warrant custom cooling, most people I've met who buy this shit are people who could have gotten more benefit with one tenth the hassle by putting their money where it mattered. What we collectively and commonly term "idiots".
People who want a faster gaming rig buy faster graphics cards and more graphics cards.
People who want more CPU power buy faster CPUs and more cores.
Ignoring for the moment the bare few whose environmental conditions
What DOES give value to many people today, however, is:
[a] QUIET
[b] Low power consumption (which, for me at least, translates into hundreds of dollars a year saved, plus some warm fuzzies for being eco-friendly)
Now if they were to review worthwhile solutions to THAT, both me and most of my geek friends would be getting much much more value and useful information out of said "journalism". Too bad they're still stuck in 1998 catering to overclocking pissing contests.
I recon I can do better, so here goes:
CPUs break up into the following catogories:
Desktop - 60-120Watts
Laptop - ~30 Watts (Most mobile core duo/core 2 duos- 5x00, 7x00 fit here)
LV - ~10 Watts (Celeron M xx8)
ULV - ~5 Watts (Celeron M xx3, Via C7, AMD Geode NX [1.5GHz ULV AthlonXP]
"REALLY REALLY" ULV - 5 Watts AMD Geode GX/LX [p2/3 class CPUs]. See Jetway 8x00 boards.
The latter three can use passive cooling.
Now consider the following suggestions:
Core desktop platform:
Kontron 986 board+CPU. ~900US$. A bit tricky to source, but can be done.
Uses a Yonah-based 1.06GHz ULV CPU (what you find in ultraportable laptops). ENTIRELY SOLID-STATE.
Being mini-itx, uses all standard ATX cases and PC hardware (RAM, PCIe, IDE, SATA, etc)
fast 16GB CF card for OS ~ 200US$. (remember to tweak XP/Vista to disable on-access writes, or you'll kill the flash card in a matter of months).
PicoPSU-120 - 60$.
60 or 90 Watt power brick - ~20$.
Machine profile: 30-40 Watts.
Core platform has NO MOVING PARTS (fans, drives, etc), hence SILENT.
For >16GB storage: replace CF with harddrive.
For casual gaming: Even being a low-clock CPU, it's still a Yonah core, has resonable L2 and a PCIe slot. Add Geforce 8800GTS-320 and any 450Watt PSU (the rest of the machine takes almost nil), it'll kick ass, just note that an 8800 eats 250Watts on idle, closer to 350 when under load. If you're concerned about power consumption, I'd start powering the machine down when not using it.
For less casual gaming: bump up the CPU from a 5Watt profile to a 30 Watt profile. Consider mini-itx solutions that can take some form of a T5x00 or T7x00 (Merom, dual-core) CPU and have PCIe. This will give you the rough equivalent of an E6400 (or even more) for half the power, and *MIGHT* even be palatable with some silly 2kg passive copper brick to keep the thing quiet.
For living room PC:
Via EPIA EN-12000 (1.2GHz C7 CPU) with GbE - ~300$ (Mobo + CPU).
PicoPSU 120.
12V/5A power brick.
2GB Flash with Winows XP.
Use networked RAID as storage.
Add haupage PCI card to make it a PVR.
Plays back MPEG2, DivX, what have you.
Core platform has NO MOVING PARTS (fans, drives, etc), hence SILENT.
Machine profile: 30-40 Watts.
For Fileserver:
Jetway J7F4 12000. (2xGbE, 1.2GHz CPU, 2 SATA). ~200$.
OS: 2GB CF with whatever server OS floats your boat.
PCI 4-port SATA card - 30$
Core platform has NO MOVING PARTS (fans, drives, etc), hence SILENT.
Add 4-6 400GB (or whatever cheaply-available sweet-spot drives you can find).
Option to make it nice and tidy: Cheap removable rack for ~100$.
Movi