As an avid non-reader of the actual article I must say that this snippet is rather disappointing. I fully expected armor suits at the very least. Armored suits? I was expecting armored polar bears.
Surely they must be protecting their production processes to still be the only ones in asia to produce that. Why did you think they still produce the swords?
There's no need to plan anything solid, when after pulling just one stunt, anyone with power intends to use that fear for his/her/its own ends and magnify it. Only once the general fear dies down again do they need to cause major havoc again. I hear this talk of fear, but I am curious... who, exactly IS scared? Nobody I know considers "terrorism" to be a valid threat, and they are certainly not afraid of it. Especially those who travel.
It wouldn't be for science... it would be for the pride of being the Mother of a New World. Eve on Mars, if you will. That, and for the chance of banging astronauts.
Nice idea, but far more useful would be a P2P-style (C2C - Car To Car) radio network. Something where each car transmits it's speed to the others, so rather than needing line-of-sight, your car would know if it's faster or slower than the surrounding cars. Combined with GPS and your car could easily have a real-time "traffic radar" on the dash, showing traffic density and so on, advising you to speed up or slow down to improve the traffic flow. It removes the "speed limit" part, and lets the traffic flow more naturally.
Unfortunately, the police would abuse such a system, and so would the assholes who get their kicks by a) self-righteously causing congestion by sticking the posted limit, or b) masturbating their egos by driving faster than everyone else on their scope.
You're both half-wrong. Yes, you can get Linux running on a Cell just fine. No, software that was not written specifically with the Cell in mind (read: almost everything) uses the co-processors (SPU/SPE whatever) anywhere near capacity. And in fact, almost all of the software that is written for the Cell processor still doesn't use the co-processors anywhere near capacity. It is a very difficult platform to program for, and because of the inherent design of the Cell, it simply performs poorly compared to SMP for a large class of problems. And by difficult, I mean that you have to sit there trying to figure out how to fit your 17k of code and 512k of data into a unified 256k buffer (information theory comes in handy), because going outside the local buffer and using DMA is not only a huge pain in the ass to code up, it is also a huge performance hit. Programming for the Cell is a step backwards from the ideal computer science goal of abstracting the hardware from the code.
I work in the games industry, and I recently saw the performance timer graphs of a very popular racing game that was very recently released for the PS3, a second-generation PS3 title. It was using the co-processors at about 10% of their capacity, and that only came in regular-interval spikes. And this is a piece of software that the Cell was specifically designed to run. Interesting to hear a perspective from the gaming industry. Disappointing results though, as someone who's played with the Cell in an academic environment.
Software that's custom made for the cell chip barely exploits all the parallel compute power, so I doubt gcc would compile Linux to make use of it (if it can even compile to cell, which I'm not sure of). IOW, you have no idea what you're talking about.:-) There are out-of-the-box distributions of Linux for Cell platforms (Yellow Dog, Fedora, Ubuntu even), and the gcc supplied in IBM's SDK is quite happy to compile for the PPE and SPE cores. Yes, I've played with all this on the PS/3. PCI and Blade hardware is available from Mercury and IBM, but it's pricey... you could drop one of Mercury's Cell PCI cards into a small IBM xSeries...
Anyway, I agree with the OP, this is a killer chip for many many of the applications we use today, and IBM should talk Lenovo (or, oh please, SUN) into selling a Cell-based Linux (or, oh please, Solaris) workstation. That would be ridiculous for software development if it had a Java SDK to go with it.
The HomerCar was one man's vision. This is supposed to "harness the wisdom of crowds" or something similarly buzzwordy.
This of course assumes several things: 1) A representative cross section of the user community responds 2) the developers can implement the suggests in a meaningful timeframe.
Some of them just ain't gonna happen (ATI drivers that Just Work) while others will be conflicting (make Thunderbird default email vs make Balsa default email), and some won't wash with the establishment (drop the Server edition - focus on core desktop competency) so on. Some probably will make it though (eg ZFS support) so who knows what the end result will be. Still, that's the point, isn't it? One person doesn't know, but collectively they hope to find an good solution.
It'll be an interesting experiment in asking the customer what they want.
You forgot to mention the other guy, Sean Sturgeon, who was also close to the victim. The dude who has confessed to killing 8 (yes, eight) people, and was dating Nina (Hans' wife). IMHO, it's more likely that Hans was reading up on how to kill Sean (or even how to avoid being killed by Sean) than how to kill Nina.
Whereas for me, ATI hasn't had usable XV support since 8.35.5 (or thereabouts), and the 3D rendering is buggy as hell... which kinda defeats the purpose of using a dedicated GPU. Go look at the known issues in the release notes - it reads like an alpha dev-snapshot. I regret fitting ATI to my laptop for the sake of a supposed performance advantage over the Nvidia option, and my next machines will absolutely be NVidia Quadro (Sun workstation, yes Nvidia even provides drivers for Solaris x86) or Intel integrated (ultraportable notebook).
Yes, corn ethanol has a very low yield and has no business being used for fuel - this is very well known. As the article states, "Searchinger said the only possible exception he could see for now was sugar cane grown in Brazil, which takes relatively little energy to grow and is readily refined into fuel." which is entirely unsurprising to anyone who's looked at this stuff before. Corn is only popular in the US, and only because it's subsidized.
How about a discussion on SVO (Straight Vegetable Oil) from crops like Chinese Tallow, and the newer algae production processed instead.
True enough, but if r could be varied dynamically, the roll rate could be varied as well. Eg, wings that can tuck in and out quickly for manoeuvring. Applied to all wings on the aircraft, you could have a very very agile aircraft.
You'll lose nearly every person this article is intended for if you mention "vendor lock-in". Normal people don't care. It's worse than that. Some people perceive vendor lock-in as a good thing, because it suggests greater compatibility and stability than a heterogeneous software collection. Eg, MS-everything.
The answer to the first question is very clearly yes--they are/were SELLING a calendar by exploiting the the Ford marks. In some sense, it doesn't make sense for them to do it any other way. Are they bone stock Mustangs? No. They're selling the calendar by exploiting their OWN customizations and work, that built upon the Ford design (mark).
The second answer also seems to be likely "yes." A consumer picking up the calendar about Ford Mustangs might think that the goods originated with Ford or someone authorized to use. It's clearly sold as a club venture, to a niche market, so speculating that a consumer might think differently is insulting to their more knowledgeable customer-base... Unless you did a repeatable survey of their customers, I'd say your into WAG territory with intent to inject FUD.
The only reason corn has been chosen as the main crop for getting ethanol in the US is because of the strong corn lobby Is "strong corn lobby" a US euphemism for bribery? 'Cause that's the only way I can make sense of the phrase.
Every Windows version has included this feature. The "Frustration Detected" value is set to "ON" on the installer by default. There's no known way to turn it off, so it's 100% accurate. Actually, this was first implemented on the Mac circa 1995. As every DTP shop can attest, early Macintoshes had a sensor embedded in the mouse that detected operator frustration. As deadlines approached and the operator became more worked-up, the machines would promptly freeze up, presumably to give the operator some time to calm down.
I agree that transportation is central to sustaining an economy. I strongly disagree that transportation is necessarily equivalent to cars; Moving people and goods around simply does not require them... Indeed, if the goal *was* to promote wealth generation (for people other than Tata) they wouldn't be producing the worlds cheapest car, they'd be producing the world's cheapest light truck or van platform instead. A working vehicle, not a 4-door sedan.
"We should be able to create a new market that does not exist," said Ratan Tata. There's nothing altruistic going on here, they just want to sell more cars.
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It wouldn't be for science... it would be for the pride of being the Mother of a New World. Eve on Mars, if you will. That, and for the chance of banging astronauts.
Nice idea, but far more useful would be a P2P-style (C2C - Car To Car) radio network. Something where each car transmits it's speed to the others, so rather than needing line-of-sight, your car would know if it's faster or slower than the surrounding cars. Combined with GPS and your car could easily have a real-time "traffic radar" on the dash, showing traffic density and so on, advising you to speed up or slow down to improve the traffic flow. It removes the "speed limit" part, and lets the traffic flow more naturally.
Unfortunately, the police would abuse such a system, and so would the assholes who get their kicks by a) self-righteously causing congestion by sticking the posted limit, or b) masturbating their egos by driving faster than everyone else on their scope.
I work in the games industry, and I recently saw the performance timer graphs of a very popular racing game that was very recently released for the PS3, a second-generation PS3 title. It was using the co-processors at about 10% of their capacity, and that only came in regular-interval spikes. And this is a piece of software that the Cell was specifically designed to run. Interesting to hear a perspective from the gaming industry. Disappointing results though, as someone who's played with the Cell in an academic environment.
Anyway, I agree with the OP, this is a killer chip for many many of the applications we use today, and IBM should talk Lenovo (or, oh please, SUN) into selling a Cell-based Linux (or, oh please, Solaris) workstation. That would be ridiculous for software development if it had a Java SDK to go with it.
The HomerCar was one man's vision. This is supposed to "harness the wisdom of crowds" or something similarly buzzwordy.
This of course assumes several things:
1) A representative cross section of the user community responds
2) the developers can implement the suggests in a meaningful timeframe.
Some of them just ain't gonna happen (ATI drivers that Just Work) while others will be conflicting (make Thunderbird default email vs make Balsa default email), and some won't wash with the establishment (drop the Server edition - focus on core desktop competency) so on. Some probably will make it though (eg ZFS support) so who knows what the end result will be. Still, that's the point, isn't it? One person doesn't know, but collectively they hope to find an good solution.
It'll be an interesting experiment in asking the customer what they want.
Yup. If it's obvious, whoever makes the biggest noise gets to claim ownership. See: Wright Brothers vs Richard Pearse.
You forgot to mention the other guy, Sean Sturgeon, who was also close to the victim. The dude who has confessed to killing 8 (yes, eight) people, and was dating Nina (Hans' wife). IMHO, it's more likely that Hans was reading up on how to kill Sean (or even how to avoid being killed by Sean) than how to kill Nina.
Whereas for me, ATI hasn't had usable XV support since 8.35.5 (or thereabouts), and the 3D rendering is buggy as hell... which kinda defeats the purpose of using a dedicated GPU. Go look at the known issues in the release notes - it reads like an alpha dev-snapshot. I regret fitting ATI to my laptop for the sake of a supposed performance advantage over the Nvidia option, and my next machines will absolutely be NVidia Quadro (Sun workstation, yes Nvidia even provides drivers for Solaris x86) or Intel integrated (ultraportable notebook).
Yes, corn ethanol has a very low yield and has no business being used for fuel - this is very well known. As the article states, "Searchinger said the only possible exception he could see for now was sugar cane grown in Brazil, which takes relatively little energy to grow and is readily refined into fuel." which is entirely unsurprising to anyone who's looked at this stuff before. Corn is only popular in the US, and only because it's subsidized.
How about a discussion on SVO (Straight Vegetable Oil) from crops like Chinese Tallow, and the newer algae production processed instead.
True enough, but if r could be varied dynamically, the roll rate could be varied as well. Eg, wings that can tuck in and out quickly for manoeuvring. Applied to all wings on the aircraft, you could have a very very agile aircraft.
It'll be Japanese market only, but mandatory for real-time censoring of porn with unpixelated genitalia.
I agree that transportation is central to sustaining an economy. I strongly disagree that transportation is necessarily equivalent to cars; Moving people and goods around simply does not require them... Indeed, if the goal *was* to promote wealth generation (for people other than Tata) they wouldn't be producing the worlds cheapest car, they'd be producing the world's cheapest light truck or van platform instead. A working vehicle, not a 4-door sedan.
"We should be able to create a new market that does not exist," said Ratan Tata. There's nothing altruistic going on here, they just want to sell more cars.
No, not enterprise like THIS. Enterprise and opportunity, sure... but more cars? Please.