I doubt that maglev would be cheaper, safer, or more convenient for everyone.
Although maglev means no power losses from the wheels, drag from sea-level air will be much worse than the drag experienced by a plane at 35,000 feet. Add the power required to create levitation and deal with eddy current dissapation and I doubt that maglev trains are all that energy efficient . Add to that the inefficiencies of getting power to the train and you have a not so efficient mode of transportation.
Construction costs are also an issue. Although airports are expensive infrastructure, they are probably less expensive than maglev trains. Planes leverage the existence of air - you don't need to lay track on every mile of every route in the air.
Although maglevs can't fall out of the sky, like a plane can, I suspect that a maglev crash would be just as fatal (derailing at several hundred km/hr would not be pleasant). Moreover, maglev is in its infancy -- it took air travel decades to learn how to operate at extremely low levels of fatalities/bazillion passenger miles. Although the French have a remarkable safety record with the TGV, the British experience with even ordinary rail is not too comforting.
I doubt that maglevs would be able to come into the city in many places (most current cities are too dense). Thus, one is faced with the same "getting to the airport/remote train station" problems. I also suspect that these trains might also need extra security. Maglevs would seem to be a nice terrorist target -- hitting either the track or planting a suicide bomber onboard. Thus, we can expect some of the same queues and delays at a maglev station as at an airport.
The reliability of the maglev track is also a concern. The track is a significant single-point of failure mode. While aircraft can fly around a storm (being only limited by the conditions at the takeoff and destination airports), maglev would be subject to the vagaries of weather and damage along the entirety of its route.
Maybe maglev can work, but the advantages of it are not as obvious as proponents would have us believe.
Seriously...how can people really think that asking on/. is the best method to get legal or medical advice?!
I think everyone can agree that people should not rely entirely on Ask Slashdot for life-critical legal or medical advice. Yet this forum does have several valuable uses.
Foreknowledge: People would do well to remember that doctors and lawyers are only said to "practice" in their field. The medical and legal fields are so complex and people's problems are so idiosyncratic that you cannot trust any given doctor or lawyer to do a good job. YMMV based on the quality and experience of that doctor or lawyer. Finding a "good" doctor or lawyer is not easy. With information gleaned from Ask Slashdot, an informed person can winnow out inexperienced doctors and lawyers.
BOF support: Ask Slashdot also provides much needed social support to people facing serious problems. Finding out that others have had the same problem and how they coped with it can be a comforting boon to the poster.
Cost:. I suspect the poster does not want to spend a $1000 on some lawyer only to discover that the answer was an obvious "no." If the ADA is black and white on the issue of protections for contractors vs. employees, then you don't need to pay a lawyer to research the case. Its not that the poster is a cheapskate, they just don't want to throw good money after bad.
Although I would adhere to the parent's advice to Get a lawyer, I would also recommend that people continue to Ask Slashdot as part of a multipronged knowledge gathering strategy.
Although supersolid He4 does not seem like a solid, by some definitions it is. At any given instant, the atoms in the material appear to be in a crystalline lattice (not bouncing around like the atoms in a liquid). But if you exert any force on that supersolid, the vacancies and defects in the lattice instantly shift to let the solid move. This gives the "solid" a shear strength of zero even if the atoms seem like they are arranged in what appears to be a rigid crystal structure.
The problem with commonsense notions of "solid" vs. "liquid" is that they don't reflect all the possible states of matter, only the ones that occur at room temperatures. Science usually finds these counterintuitive phenomena outside the usual conditions of everyday life (like when physicists proved that Newton's centuries old laws only work for "slow" speeds, so we need Eistein's equations to understand higher speeds).
% of people who upgrade?
on
Upgrade Your eMac
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Most people want a computer they can improve, much like people that mod and tune their cars.
I wonder if the percentage of upgraded computers is really that high? I know people think they "want" expandability, but I doubt that many consumers actually take the plunge and upgrade anything. Likewise, I wonder how many large corporations routinely upgrade the hardware on their desktops (rather than replacing them with all new models).
As with cars, I suspect that a small minority actually modify their machines. I'd bet that the vast majority of computers get discarded with the same hardware that they came with. I know that most of the old computers that I see at garage sales are factory stock.
I'm surprised that spam filtering software doesn't just just run a quick spellchecker on the email. So much spam tries to evade literal word filtering by clever spellings of p3nis and \/iagra. But if we filter out emails with too many spelling errors (and punctuation-addled non-words) in the subject and body, then all those clever ploys are for nought. (As a side benefit, more people would be careful about spelling in legitimate e-mails).
Fitering out misspelled emails puts spammers in a real quandry -- spell words correctly (and get filtered) or misspell (and get filtered).
Although it wil never disappear, film will become less and less used as time goes on. This trend will accelerate as camera makers transistion to professional grade digital cameras that are not compatible with 35 mm systems. After some time, only the large-format professional photographers, advanced hobbyists, and a fraction of Hollywood cinematographers will stick with film.
When consumers stop using film, expect the price to climb steadily for both film, film processing, and film cameras. The price will rise as the industry loses its economies of scale and the remaining customers become less price-sensitive (professionals don't look for the cheapest film, lenses, and cameras). This will create a bit of a downward spiral as fewer budding photographers choose to jump from high-quality digital to expensive film.
Film won't die, but it become more and more expensive and the mass market shifts to digital.
Why do they have to put copies of the tracks in both formats on the disk? Why can't the labels create a small software application that hides the raw data tracks from PCs and "allows" the CD owner to create DRMed files? This would bypass the "pay royalties twice for distributing two copies of each track" problem.
100-year old drug means no patents. No patents means no profits.
The AC is wrong on two levels. First, the pharmaceutical industry is full of manufacturers that make generic drugs. These companies make profits through efficient manufacturing and distribution (versus through patents and R&D). Most people don't know about these makers because the companies have no reason to advertise.
Second, because this is a 100-year old drug, it's approved and out there. Although nobody can advertise that the drug works for Alzheimer's until somebody does all the expensive regulatory clinical studies, any doctor can prescribe the drug of any "off-label" use. If enough web-enabled family members of Alzheimer's victims learn of the drug, they will demand the treatment from doctors, find a doctor who will give this treatment, or find an online pharmacy that wil provide the drug.
The bottomline line is that we don't need the big pharma companies to create either supply or demand for a drug.
I wonder how long it will take sleazy e-commerce sites and p0rn sites to game WebFountain and turn it into SpamFountain?
I suspect that this tool (and any like it) must make a core assumption -- that each webpage is about one semantic thing and that the creators are trying to communicate that one thought. In contrast, people who try to boost their page rank have no compuction about misleading people (or algorithms). Clever tagging and misleading verbage should be able to fool IBM's analyzer into clustering a site where it does not belong (but where the site owner wants it). The result is pages look like it is about another thing (some popular search term)while being about soemthing else (selling their junk or porn).
Next will come high-priced consultants that tell you how to make you site pace highly on WebFountain (like the ones that currently game Google).
This is the type of technology that could either ensure or derail Google's future (I'm not saying that it will, only that it could). Semantic analysis and clustering of web pages could improve search. I hope Google gets to use/create this type of tech.
One of the ugly little side effects of dementia correcting drugs is that they eventually stop working. The drug helps the patient for a while (they regain functioning) but then the mind inevitably succumbs to age a second time. Patients and family get to suffer through the process of losing their mind, memories, and personality a second time.
I can only hope that this drug helps patients before they suffer a decline in mental faculties -- going through it once is bad enough, losing your mind twice is hell for both the patient and their loved ones.
Raw performance will ALWAYS be an issue. If you can handle 100,000 hits per day on the same hardware that I can handle 1,000,000 (and these are not made up numbers, we see this kind of discrepency in web applications all the time), then I clearly will be able to do MORE business than you and do it cheaper.
You raise excellent points. For many enterprise and server applications, performance is an issue. But I never said one should care nothing abut performance, only that in many applications the cost of the coder also impacts financial results.
For the price of one software engineer for a year (call it 50k to 100k burdened labor rate), I can buy between 20 to 100 new PCs (at $1000 to $3000 each). If the programmer is more expensive or the machines are less expensive, then the issue is even more in favor of worring about coder performance.
The trade-off between the hardware cost of the code and the wetware cost is not obvious in every case. A small firm that can double its server capacity for less than the price of a coder. or the creators of an infrequently-used application may not need high performance. On the other hand, a large software seller that sells core performance apps might worry more about speed. My only point is that ignoring the cost of the coder is wrong.
These different languages create a choice of whether to throw more hardware at a problem or throw more coders at the problem.
Given the ever accelerating clockspeed of processors, is the raw performance of langauges that big an issue? Except for CPU-intensive programs (3-D games, high-end video/audio editing), current CPUs offer more than enough horsepower to handle any application. (Even 5-year old CPUs handle almost every task with adequate speed). Thus, code performance is not a big issue for most people.
On the other hand, the time and cost required by the coder is a bigger issue (unless you outsource to India). I would assume that some languages are just easier to design for, easier to write in, and easier to debug. Which of these langauges offers the fastest time to "bug-free" completion for applications of various sizes?
I have four Hitachi/IBM microdrives (the oldest is 2 and half years old) and have never had any problems at all. I've even had my camera crash (dead batteries) during writes without trashing the disk. Although I'm not too hard on my stuff, they have been dropped occassionally and x-rayed innumerable times without ill effect.
Others have found them reliable too. They even been used by NASA on at least two shuttle missions according to this review
I've always thought that legged vehicles where an obvious solution to all-terrain travel and transport. Rubber tires become increasingly inefficient at the terrain becomes rougher (absorbing energy in all the deflections from rocks, etc.). And walkers can go where no wheeled vehicle can pass. The problem has always been designing legged motion systems that have the fluidity of biological walkers (the jerky move-stop-move motion of oldstyle robots is too slow and inefficient). But with faster embedded processors and sensors, true fluid walking and running are possible.
I wonder if this presages the return of true calvary -- robotic-horse mounted soliders.
it seems to me that a lot of firms over there that file for Chapter 11 protection eventually emerge from it and become successful again
Yes, as explained here, Chapter 11 bankruptcies allow the company to reorganize and keep going. It is up a judge to decide if this is in the best interests of the creditors. If the company can make a good case that continuing the business would help them pay off more of the creditors, then that's the route they will go. Companies in chapter 11 can even get funding with debtor-in-possession deals that sign the assets of the company over to whoever is providing the money. Chapter 7 bankrupties (more like true bankruptcies) liquidate the assets of the company and divide the procedes among the creditors.
With both types of bankrupties the creditors get pennies on the dollar and the shareholders get nothing.
I'm surprised that the Berkeley people grew the tubes on the semiconducting substrate (and skeptical that this is the way to go). Unless I am misreading the article (always a possibility), they have created a very expensive way to evaluate only thousands or millions of tubes per manufacturing cycle. I would think that the real key to low-cost nanotube circuits is to use bulk chemical processes.
Using bulk chemical processes, one might grow a big batch of nanotubes, harvest them, sort them by size (centrifuge), chemically modify them to have certain electronic properties (i.e., attach functional groups to the surfaces or tube ends), and sort them electrochemically (perhaps with eletrophoresis). I can envision any number of interesting bulk chemical processes that simultaneously modify, test, or sort nanotubes. These bulk processes would yield batches of trillions or quadrillions of near-uniform, high-quality semiconducting nanotubes with each cycle of the process.
And instead of using lithographic techniques (printing an accurate pattern of circuits on a wafer), I would expect nanotube circuits to be chemically deposited using self-organizing chemical films. These self-structured films can have feature dimensions far smaller than anything semiconductor maker can fabricate. The only need for lithography is at the edges -- creating an interface between the macroscopic off-chip interconnects and the nanoscopic fields of nanotube memory zones.
Launch Den Mother and Launch Den Puppy are a distributed computing application pair for older Macs. You can download a 68k version despite their claims of requiring a Power Mac.
Its not as automagical as XGrid and you will have to write your own multiprocessing code, but it is a way to do distributed processing on old hardware. Clustering a bunch of LC520s may not be the best use of time and electricity, but then who said that a hack must be cost-effective.
You say that every frame must be read out from main memory. This is true if the shared memory system has 0 memory (caching issues aside), but don't shared memeory systems have at least a single buffer to store at least the last frame? I mean, how much can 3 Meg of RAM cost these days (i.e. 1024 x 728 @ 32 bit)?
No, these systems have no separate frame buffer - main RAM is the buffer. Even when nothing is changing on the screen, the video subsystem is reading data at the full frame rate from RAM.
Although 3 MB of RAM chips might seem cheap, every component adds cost (most system designers try to minimize the total number of components). More importantly, space on the motherboard (especially in a laptop or miniATX) is a precious commodity. The most cost efficient and space efficient way to have 3 MB of video memory in a PC is to borrow it from the 256 MB DIMM that you will be putting in there anyway.
Borrowing from main RAM may incur a slight performance penalty, but the systems that use this approach are not sold for their performance. Low cost or extreme compactness drive the designer to avoid adding special video memory buffers. And with DDR RAM, the memory bandwidth is sufficently high to not cause too much of a performance hit.
Impact on Google revenues & profits
on
Yahoo to Dump Google
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· Score: 5, Interesting
"Might be time to rethink that IPO?"
You're kidding me. I can't remember the last time I ever bothered using Yahoo!'s search function.
The issue of Yahoo dumping Google has nothing to do with whether Yahoo sucks or not. Instead, this is an issue of Google's long-term business outlook. Google is partially dependent on large contracts from major portals like Yahoo and Google also faces the potential of losing to another search engine provider.
As wonderful as Google is now, it is in a very risky industry. The fact that search sites like Yahoo, AltaVista, Excite, etc. can go from darling to moribund suggests that the industry has high turnover. And then there is Microsoft which has expressed interest in competing with Google.
Were Google publically traded right now, this news would create a major hit to the stock price. This suggests that any potential buyers of Google IPO stock should think long and hard about the likelihood of expecting more unexpected bad news.
Does the video card trace through memory every time the screen is refreshed? Therefore consuming a ton of memory bandwidth? If this is the case then the higher the resolution and the higher the refresh rate, the lower the performance of the system, right?
Yes. The pixels on the screen are read out every single frame time (i.e., 60 to 75 times each second). The DAC (Digital to Analog Convertor) must be fed the pixel data every time -- with video in main RAM, there is no other place to store this image data because the main memory is this buffer. The product of the frame rate, resolution, and color depth tells you how much bandwidth is consumed.
The exact performance impact is not easy to predict though. Where it gets tricky is with CPUs that have large L1, L2, and L3 caches. It is possible for the CPU to be running at 100% while the video is being read if the CPU is finding all the data and instructions in the cache. But if the CPU must access main RAM, then there will be competition.
WiFi & Flash Memory combo cards look more promising for wireless downloading of decent resolution digital images. Although intended for PDAs, these cards might be adopted for use in cameras (if the vendor will support them and if they will fit in the camera). Or, you might wait for Fuji's Wifi digicam. Anyone know of others?
Either way, I'd look for a Wifi solution, not Bluetooth.
If you do buy Google on day 1, don't use a market order (especially in the first minutes). If the IPO becomes a feeding frenzy, you could easily end up paying 2 or 3 times what you expected (and yes, your broker WILL hold you to that price, no matter how bad it is). Instead, use a buy limit order to ensure that you pay no more than your target price for the stock. With a limit order it is possible that you will get no shares (if the stock blows past your price). On the other hand, you are ensured that you won't get shares at some outrageous price.
I'm surprised that spam filtering software doesn't just just run a spellchecker on the email. So much spam tries to evade literal word filtering by clever spellings of p3nis and \/iagra. But if we filter out emails with too many spelling errors (and punctuation-addled non-words) in the subject and body, then all those clever ploys are for nought. (As a side benefit, more people would be careful about spelling in legitimate e-mails).
Fitering out misspelled emails puts spammers in a real quandry -- spell words correctly (and get filtered) or misspell (and get filtered).
What about independent online support forums?
on
Windows 98 Phased Out
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Do Win98 users really need official support from MS? I know nothing about M$ world, but if it is anything like the Mac world, then there should be a healthy range of thriving independent online support forums for obsolete hardware and software (You can even get support for ancient 68k Macs at places like Applefritter and 68k Mac Liberation Army. Official support from the official vendor is not really needed as long as someone out there has the answer to your question or can help point you in the right direction.
The only reason a computer user needs "official" support is if they have a pinhead boss or are worried about patches for security holes...... Oh, I see the problem now. Even so Win98 should be "usable" for decades to come if its users form a devoted community that provides mutual support.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt that maglev would be cheaper, safer, or more convenient for everyone.
Although maglev means no power losses from the wheels, drag from sea-level air will be much worse than the drag experienced by a plane at 35,000 feet. Add the power required to create levitation and deal with eddy current dissapation and I doubt that maglev trains are all that energy efficient . Add to that the inefficiencies of getting power to the train and you have a not so efficient mode of transportation.
Construction costs are also an issue. Although airports are expensive infrastructure, they are probably less expensive than maglev trains. Planes leverage the existence of air - you don't need to lay track on every mile of every route in the air.
Although maglevs can't fall out of the sky, like a plane can, I suspect that a maglev crash would be just as fatal (derailing at several hundred km/hr would not be pleasant). Moreover, maglev is in its infancy -- it took air travel decades to learn how to operate at extremely low levels of fatalities/bazillion passenger miles. Although the French have a remarkable safety record with the TGV, the British experience with even ordinary rail is not too comforting.
I doubt that maglevs would be able to come into the city in many places (most current cities are too dense). Thus, one is faced with the same "getting to the airport/remote train station" problems. I also suspect that these trains might also need extra security. Maglevs would seem to be a nice terrorist target -- hitting either the track or planting a suicide bomber onboard. Thus, we can expect some of the same queues and delays at a maglev station as at an airport.
The reliability of the maglev track is also a concern. The track is a significant single-point of failure mode. While aircraft can fly around a storm (being only limited by the conditions at the takeoff and destination airports), maglev would be subject to the vagaries of weather and damage along the entirety of its route.
Maybe maglev can work, but the advantages of it are not as obvious as proponents would have us believe.
Seriously...how can people really think that asking on /. is the best method to get legal or medical advice?!
I think everyone can agree that people should not rely entirely on Ask Slashdot for life-critical legal or medical advice. Yet this forum does have several valuable uses.
Foreknowledge: People would do well to remember that doctors and lawyers are only said to "practice" in their field. The medical and legal fields are so complex and people's problems are so idiosyncratic that you cannot trust any given doctor or lawyer to do a good job. YMMV based on the quality and experience of that doctor or lawyer. Finding a "good" doctor or lawyer is not easy. With information gleaned from Ask Slashdot, an informed person can winnow out inexperienced doctors and lawyers.
BOF support: Ask Slashdot also provides much needed social support to people facing serious problems. Finding out that others have had the same problem and how they coped with it can be a comforting boon to the poster.
Cost:. I suspect the poster does not want to spend a $1000 on some lawyer only to discover that the answer was an obvious "no." If the ADA is black and white on the issue of protections for contractors vs. employees, then you don't need to pay a lawyer to research the case. Its not that the poster is a cheapskate, they just don't want to throw good money after bad.
Although I would adhere to the parent's advice to Get a lawyer, I would also recommend that people continue to Ask Slashdot as part of a multipronged knowledge gathering strategy.
Although supersolid He4 does not seem like a solid, by some definitions it is. At any given instant, the atoms in the material appear to be in a crystalline lattice (not bouncing around like the atoms in a liquid). But if you exert any force on that supersolid, the vacancies and defects in the lattice instantly shift to let the solid move. This gives the "solid" a shear strength of zero even if the atoms seem like they are arranged in what appears to be a rigid crystal structure.
The problem with commonsense notions of "solid" vs. "liquid" is that they don't reflect all the possible states of matter, only the ones that occur at room temperatures. Science usually finds these counterintuitive phenomena outside the usual conditions of everyday life (like when physicists proved that Newton's centuries old laws only work for "slow" speeds, so we need Eistein's equations to understand higher speeds).
Most people want a computer they can improve, much like people that mod and tune their cars.
I wonder if the percentage of upgraded computers is really that high? I know people think they "want" expandability, but I doubt that many consumers actually take the plunge and upgrade anything. Likewise, I wonder how many large corporations routinely upgrade the hardware on their desktops (rather than replacing them with all new models).
As with cars, I suspect that a small minority actually modify their machines. I'd bet that the vast majority of computers get discarded with the same hardware that they came with. I know that most of the old computers that I see at garage sales are factory stock.
Anybody any numbers?
I'm surprised that spam filtering software doesn't just just run a quick spellchecker on the email. So much spam tries to evade literal word filtering by clever spellings of p3nis and \/iagra. But if we filter out emails with too many spelling errors (and punctuation-addled non-words) in the subject and body, then all those clever ploys are for nought. (As a side benefit, more people would be careful about spelling in legitimate e-mails).
Fitering out misspelled emails puts spammers in a real quandry -- spell words correctly (and get filtered) or misspell (and get filtered).
Although it wil never disappear, film will become less and less used as time goes on. This trend will accelerate as camera makers transistion to professional grade digital cameras that are not compatible with 35 mm systems. After some time, only the large-format professional photographers, advanced hobbyists, and a fraction of Hollywood cinematographers will stick with film.
When consumers stop using film, expect the price to climb steadily for both film, film processing, and film cameras. The price will rise as the industry loses its economies of scale and the remaining customers become less price-sensitive (professionals don't look for the cheapest film, lenses, and cameras). This will create a bit of a downward spiral as fewer budding photographers choose to jump from high-quality digital to expensive film.
Film won't die, but it become more and more expensive and the mass market shifts to digital.
Why do they have to put copies of the tracks in both formats on the disk? Why can't the labels create a small software application that hides the raw data tracks from PCs and "allows" the CD owner to create DRMed files? This would bypass the "pay royalties twice for distributing two copies of each track" problem.
100-year old drug means no patents. No patents means no profits.
The AC is wrong on two levels. First, the pharmaceutical industry is full of manufacturers that make generic drugs. These companies make profits through efficient manufacturing and distribution (versus through patents and R&D). Most people don't know about these makers because the companies have no reason to advertise.
Second, because this is a 100-year old drug, it's approved and out there. Although nobody can advertise that the drug works for Alzheimer's until somebody does all the expensive regulatory clinical studies, any doctor can prescribe the drug of any "off-label" use. If enough web-enabled family members of Alzheimer's victims learn of the drug, they will demand the treatment from doctors, find a doctor who will give this treatment, or find an online pharmacy that wil provide the drug.
The bottomline line is that we don't need the big pharma companies to create either supply or demand for a drug.
I wonder how long it will take sleazy e-commerce sites and p0rn sites to game WebFountain and turn it into SpamFountain?
I suspect that this tool (and any like it) must make a core assumption -- that each webpage is about one semantic thing and that the creators are trying to communicate that one thought. In contrast, people who try to boost their page rank have no compuction about misleading people (or algorithms). Clever tagging and misleading verbage should be able to fool IBM's analyzer into clustering a site where it does not belong (but where the site owner wants it). The result is pages look like it is about another thing (some popular search term)while being about soemthing else (selling their junk or porn).
Next will come high-priced consultants that tell you how to make you site pace highly on WebFountain (like the ones that currently game Google).
This is the type of technology that could either ensure or derail Google's future (I'm not saying that it will, only that it could). Semantic analysis and clustering of web pages could improve search. I hope Google gets to use/create this type of tech.
One of the ugly little side effects of dementia correcting drugs is that they eventually stop working. The drug helps the patient for a while (they regain functioning) but then the mind inevitably succumbs to age a second time. Patients and family get to suffer through the process of losing their mind, memories, and personality a second time.
I can only hope that this drug helps patients before they suffer a decline in mental faculties -- going through it once is bad enough, losing your mind twice is hell for both the patient and their loved ones.
Raw performance will ALWAYS be an issue. If you can handle 100,000 hits per day on the same hardware that I can handle 1,000,000 (and these are not made up numbers, we see this kind of discrepency in web applications all the time), then I clearly will be able to do MORE business than you and do it cheaper.
You raise excellent points. For many enterprise and server applications, performance is an issue. But I never said one should care nothing abut performance, only that in many applications the cost of the coder also impacts financial results.
For the price of one software engineer for a year (call it 50k to 100k burdened labor rate), I can buy between 20 to 100 new PCs (at $1000 to $3000 each). If the programmer is more expensive or the machines are less expensive, then the issue is even more in favor of worring about coder performance.
The trade-off between the hardware cost of the code and the wetware cost is not obvious in every case. A small firm that can double its server capacity for less than the price of a coder. or the creators of an infrequently-used application may not need high performance. On the other hand, a large software seller that sells core performance apps might worry more about speed. My only point is that ignoring the cost of the coder is wrong.
These different languages create a choice of whether to throw more hardware at a problem or throw more coders at the problem.
Given the ever accelerating clockspeed of processors, is the raw performance of langauges that big an issue? Except for CPU-intensive programs (3-D games, high-end video/audio editing), current CPUs offer more than enough horsepower to handle any application. (Even 5-year old CPUs handle almost every task with adequate speed). Thus, code performance is not a big issue for most people.
On the other hand, the time and cost required by the coder is a bigger issue (unless you outsource to India). I would assume that some languages are just easier to design for, easier to write in, and easier to debug. Which of these langauges offers the fastest time to "bug-free" completion for applications of various sizes?
I have four Hitachi/IBM microdrives (the oldest is 2 and half years old) and have never had any problems at all. I've even had my camera crash (dead batteries) during writes without trashing the disk. Although I'm not too hard on my stuff, they have been dropped occassionally and x-rayed innumerable times without ill effect.
Others have found them reliable too. They even been used by NASA on at least two shuttle missions according to this review
I've always thought that legged vehicles where an obvious solution to all-terrain travel and transport. Rubber tires become increasingly inefficient at the terrain becomes rougher (absorbing energy in all the deflections from rocks, etc.). And walkers can go where no wheeled vehicle can pass. The problem has always been designing legged motion systems that have the fluidity of biological walkers (the jerky move-stop-move motion of oldstyle robots is too slow and inefficient). But with faster embedded processors and sensors, true fluid walking and running are possible.
I wonder if this presages the return of true calvary -- robotic-horse mounted soliders.
it seems to me that a lot of firms over there that file for Chapter 11 protection eventually emerge from it and become successful again
Yes, as explained here, Chapter 11 bankruptcies allow the company to reorganize and keep going. It is up a judge to decide if this is in the best interests of the creditors. If the company can make a good case that continuing the business would help them pay off more of the creditors, then that's the route they will go. Companies in chapter 11 can even get funding with debtor-in-possession deals that sign the assets of the company over to whoever is providing the money. Chapter 7 bankrupties (more like true bankruptcies) liquidate the assets of the company and divide the procedes among the creditors.
With both types of bankrupties the creditors get pennies on the dollar and the shareholders get nothing.
I'm surprised that the Berkeley people grew the tubes on the semiconducting substrate (and skeptical that this is the way to go). Unless I am misreading the article (always a possibility), they have created a very expensive way to evaluate only thousands or millions of tubes per manufacturing cycle. I would think that the real key to low-cost nanotube circuits is to use bulk chemical processes.
Using bulk chemical processes, one might grow a big batch of nanotubes, harvest them, sort them by size (centrifuge), chemically modify them to have certain electronic properties (i.e., attach functional groups to the surfaces or tube ends), and sort them electrochemically (perhaps with eletrophoresis). I can envision any number of interesting bulk chemical processes that simultaneously modify, test, or sort nanotubes. These bulk processes would yield batches of trillions or quadrillions of near-uniform, high-quality semiconducting nanotubes with each cycle of the process.
And instead of using lithographic techniques (printing an accurate pattern of circuits on a wafer), I would expect nanotube circuits to be chemically deposited using self-organizing chemical films. These self-structured films can have feature dimensions far smaller than anything semiconductor maker can fabricate. The only need for lithography is at the edges -- creating an interface between the macroscopic off-chip interconnects and the nanoscopic fields of nanotube memory zones.
Launch Den Mother and Launch Den Puppy are a distributed computing application pair for older Macs. You can download a 68k version despite their claims of requiring a Power Mac.
Its not as automagical as XGrid and you will have to write your own multiprocessing code, but it is a way to do distributed processing on old hardware. Clustering a bunch of LC520s may not be the best use of time and electricity, but then who said that a hack must be cost-effective.
You say that every frame must be read out from main memory. This is true if the shared memory system has 0 memory (caching issues aside), but don't shared memeory systems have at least a single buffer to store at least the last frame? I mean, how much can 3 Meg of RAM cost these days (i.e. 1024 x 728 @ 32 bit)?
No, these systems have no separate frame buffer - main RAM is the buffer. Even when nothing is changing on the screen, the video subsystem is reading data at the full frame rate from RAM.
Although 3 MB of RAM chips might seem cheap, every component adds cost (most system designers try to minimize the total number of components). More importantly, space on the motherboard (especially in a laptop or miniATX) is a precious commodity. The most cost efficient and space efficient way to have 3 MB of video memory in a PC is to borrow it from the 256 MB DIMM that you will be putting in there anyway.
Borrowing from main RAM may incur a slight performance penalty, but the systems that use this approach are not sold for their performance. Low cost or extreme compactness drive the designer to avoid adding special video memory buffers. And with DDR RAM, the memory bandwidth is sufficently high to not cause too much of a performance hit.
"Might be time to rethink that IPO?"
You're kidding me. I can't remember the last time I ever bothered using Yahoo!'s search function.
The issue of Yahoo dumping Google has nothing to do with whether Yahoo sucks or not. Instead, this is an issue of Google's long-term business outlook. Google is partially dependent on large contracts from major portals like Yahoo and Google also faces the potential of losing to another search engine provider.
As wonderful as Google is now, it is in a very risky industry. The fact that search sites like Yahoo, AltaVista, Excite, etc. can go from darling to moribund suggests that the industry has high turnover. And then there is Microsoft which has expressed interest in competing with Google.
Were Google publically traded right now, this news would create a major hit to the stock price. This suggests that any potential buyers of Google IPO stock should think long and hard about the likelihood of expecting more unexpected bad news.
Does the video card trace through memory every time the screen is refreshed? Therefore consuming a ton of memory bandwidth? If this is the case then the higher the resolution and the higher the refresh rate, the lower the performance of the system, right?
Yes. The pixels on the screen are read out every single frame time (i.e., 60 to 75 times each second). The DAC (Digital to Analog Convertor) must be fed the pixel data every time -- with video in main RAM, there is no other place to store this image data because the main memory is this buffer. The product of the frame rate, resolution, and color depth tells you how much bandwidth is consumed.
The exact performance impact is not easy to predict though. Where it gets tricky is with CPUs that have large L1, L2, and L3 caches. It is possible for the CPU to be running at 100% while the video is being read if the CPU is finding all the data and instructions in the cache. But if the CPU must access main RAM, then there will be competition.
WiFi & Flash Memory combo cards look more promising for wireless downloading of decent resolution digital images. Although intended for PDAs, these cards might be adopted for use in cameras (if the vendor will support them and if they will fit in the camera). Or, you might wait for Fuji's Wifi digicam. Anyone know of others?
Either way, I'd look for a Wifi solution, not Bluetooth.
If you do buy Google on day 1, don't use a market order (especially in the first minutes). If the IPO becomes a feeding frenzy, you could easily end up paying 2 or 3 times what you expected (and yes, your broker WILL hold you to that price, no matter how bad it is). Instead, use a buy limit order to ensure that you pay no more than your target price for the stock. With a limit order it is possible that you will get no shares (if the stock blows past your price). On the other hand, you are ensured that you won't get shares at some outrageous price.
I'm surprised that spam filtering software doesn't just just run a spellchecker on the email. So much spam tries to evade literal word filtering by clever spellings of p3nis and \/iagra. But if we filter out emails with too many spelling errors (and punctuation-addled non-words) in the subject and body, then all those clever ploys are for nought. (As a side benefit, more people would be careful about spelling in legitimate e-mails).
Fitering out misspelled emails puts spammers in a real quandry -- spell words correctly (and get filtered) or misspell (and get filtered).
Do Win98 users really need official support from MS? I know nothing about M$ world, but if it is anything like the Mac world, then there should be a healthy range of thriving independent online support forums for obsolete hardware and software (You can even get support for ancient 68k Macs at places like Applefritter and 68k Mac Liberation Army. Official support from the official vendor is not really needed as long as someone out there has the answer to your question or can help point you in the right direction.
The only reason a computer user needs "official" support is if they have a pinhead boss or are worried about patches for security holes...... Oh, I see the problem now. Even so Win98 should be "usable" for decades to come if its users form a devoted community that provides mutual support.