Someone who has more of an interest in what is Right rather than that company's success. Someone (or some organization) which has no vested interest in that company.
It definately sounds like a management failure to me. The linked article implies not that the design is faulty, but the actual implementation of the design. (i.e. if the bolts had been properly installed to the designers' specs this wouldn't have happened.)
Clearly there are huge management mistakes involved with the Big Dig. I wouldn't even come close to claiming it was one of the largest engineering mistakes ever - There are plenty of other such situations where the design itself was flawed and caused far more negative effects. See the Tacoma Narrows bridge - Fortunately that one did not involve massive loss of life, but there are many cases where design flaws did lead to massive losses of life (I can't name them off of the top of my head, but there are plenty of examples on the History Channel's "Engineering Disasters" series.)
This isn't a case of RedHat FUDing a competitor - RedHat is a Xen partner and thus has (some sort of) a vested interest in Xen succeeding.
RedHat just doesn't yet feel that the time is right, but unlike other companies who like to FUD their competitors, RedHat wants the time to eventually become right so that they can comfortably include Xen into their products.
"other than unknowns" - like HIV and hepatitis? Those are unknowns that have been present in whole blood before. The risk has been significantly reduced by donor screening, but getting HIV or hep from blood transfusions still happens.
Oh yeah, the fact that whole blood supply is dependent on donations from healthy citizens is a big negative for whole blood. There's barely enough supply for the demand now, and there are any number of things that could cause an increase in demand or a drop in supply. For example, diabetes is becoming an increasingly common illness, I know for a fact that Type Is are ineligible to donate blood due to their treatment regimen of daily injections, and Type IIs might also be ineligible due to their somewhat fouled up blood chemistry.
Most likely, someone saw "Converts iPod into an HD video player" and assumed HD meant "high definition" while in this case it likely means "hard drive" instead, just like there was a/. article a year or so ago talking about a really cheap new "HD video camera" - Everyone (including the editors) automatically though "HD = high def", when in fact, it was "HD = hard drive" (Instead of DVD-R or magnetic tape like most portable video cameras.)
"I've heard this argument before, but there are places in New York and other large metropolises that are just as packed as some of less dense Asian cities and even they don't have bandwidth to compare."
At least in the United States, there are federal regulations mandating subsidizing of rural telephone (and I believe telecom in general) services.
i.e. the telcos were not only permitted, but legally MANDATED to charge high-profit low-cost customers (those in cities) more to subsidize the low-profit high-cost rural customers. I'm not sure if it applies to data services, but I believe (at least currently) that it does and I've seen it on my bill. The end effect is that costs are (at least somewhat) averaged across the country.
Sucks for the urban customers, but great for the rural ones.
I believe (I'm not totally sure but I'm reasonably confident) that both Japan and Korea have significantly higher population density than the U.S. I'm absolutely positive that continental Europe has a much higher population density than the U.S., which also happens to be why mass transit such as the French TGV and German ICE trains are so much more successful than in the U.S., where only a select few passenger routes are profitable for rail companies. (Namely, Amtrak's Northeast Corridor and not much else.) For the same reason mass transit is more practical, it's far cheaper on average to roll out last-mile infrastructure.
Add telecom greed to that and we're screwed. That said, most of the problem is the issue of population density (or lack thereof) and the resulting high last-mile costs.
As to why you see high prices even in cities - The U.S. has laws mandating rural telecom subsidies, effectively averaging the population density across the country as far as telecom prices are concerned.
I played from the start, and quit in approximately a year. For its first year, EVE was a great concept with an utterly crap implementation.
Somehow I decided to give it a second chance, mainly because it seemed to be winning so many awards... It's like a whole different game, and I'm actually having FUN now. The addition of all sorts of new ship classes so as to make the game battleship-dominated has been a huge help.
I wish I could easily find the link to one of the GoonSwarm propaganda videos.
It was basically 200 people zerging with Velators. (In EVE, that's the noob ship for one of the four races) They did some SERIOUS damage despite using a horde of basically week-old (or less) characters.:)
Most of Bell Labs went with Lucent, which wasn't part of that brutal competitive environment. Lucent was doing extremely well until the end of the decade, at which point a combination of less-than-competent (and from what I remember hearing, somewhat corrupt) management combined with the crash of one of Lucent's "bread and butter" business areas, optical networking. In short, the economics of laying fiber (laying 100 fibers was only slightly more expensive than laying 1, due to the fact that almost all of the cost was installation labor and not materials) resulted in huge amounts of "dark fiber" - Who cared if shiny new equipment from Lucent could push a hundred gigabits/second through a single fiber when you were already doing 25 with much cheaper equipment and had 99 more fibers to light up? Around 1999-2000, pretty much all of the optical networking companies (Lucent, JDS Uniphase, Corning) tanked and as far as I can tell never really recovered.
For one, AT&T (and then Lucent, which acquired MOST of AT&T's R&D assets including the Murray Hill facility, which is now Lucent's HQ) began calling all of their product development divisions "Bell Labs" - More and more the term "Bell Labs" was used to describe standard product development instead of the classic "blue sky" research. That said, even around 2000, there was still a reasonable amount of "blue sky" work being done at Lucent Murray Hill - I was quite proud to intern there back then. I happened to be the only person in the entire department without a Ph.D. (with the exception of one other intern who was an M.S. student).
Since then, that entire department has been disbanded, and from all I've heard, Murray Hill is a husk of what it used to be even five to six years ago. It's been the victim of both Lucent's overall decline due to a combination of mismanagement and the crash of the optical networking industry, and of the general change in corporate attitudes to "blue sky" research.
You get a crippled piece of silicon that costs far more than an Intel GMA950, but has almost no performance benefits over aforementioned crippled chipset.
There's a reason Intel's graphics chipsets have fully open-source drivers - It is because the chip is so crippled that it isn't subject to any of the intellectual property problems pervasive with higher performing chipsets. I would not be surprised if there is EXTENSIVE cross-licensing of technology in the graphics industry, where every company is using another company's technologies under license. S3TC is just the earliest (and most visible due to the Unreal Tournament 2003 + Linux + ATI fiasco) example.
In my experience, the WORA model was broken from the beginning.
The majority of "interesting" Java applications I've seen were restricted to a single platform for various reasons, mostly because they apparently (somehow) were making platform-specific system calls. (I don't know the exact details of this, all I DO know is that there are plenty of Java applications out there that are restricted to a single platform for whatever reason. I may be wrong about the reasons, but the fact is that WORA failed on the desktop)
What about WORA for J2ME (i.e. on mobile devices)? The situation seems even worse. If you go to the download site for nearly any Java game designed for mobile phones, they will list different downloads for every model of phone they support, with varying filesizes. Not a single Java application designed for other phones has worked with the JVM available for PalmOS 5 devices such as my Treo 650.
If WORA had ever actually worked, I'd accept Java's unwillingness to break it. Unfortunately for that excuse, it's hard to break something that is already broken.
"There's a slight chance that AMD might be smart and release hardware specs for ATI cards, or make the drivers Free Software. If either of those things happen, this would be a very good thing, in my opinion."
There's a good chance that they legally have no ability to do so, thanks to technologies that are licensed from other companies. (The example I can recall at the moment is S3 Texture Compression, support for which is the main "new" feature ATI's first binary drivers for Linux had over the previously fully functional open-source drivers.)
That's because their chipsets are so limited that they don't run into any issues with patent licensing that require their drivers to be closed source. Even an old GeForce 4MX outperforms the GMA series integrated graphics chipsets in performance and functionality. For all practical purposes, the GMA series chipsets are 2D-only. (Yes, they officially support 3D features, but the 3D functionality is so limited that it may as well not be there.)
If I recall correctly, this is why ATI went from being fully documented to binary-only for full functionality under Linux - The first issue was S3 Texture Compression, which is why for a while UT2003 (or was it 2004?) only ran on NVidia cards - Until the binary ATI drivers for Linux were released, the open source ones didn't (and legally couldn't) support S3TC.
"[1] Not that a power failure should ever happen in a datacentre anyway. All of the ones I've used have had multiple power feeds from different suppliers, entering on opposite sides of the building, plus redundant UPSes with diesel generators for when the UPS runs out. If you're still having power outages with that sort of infrastructure in place, then something's seriously wrong. And if you don't have that sort of infrastructure in place, then you've chosen the wrong datacentre."
All that means nothing if something (fire alarm/suppression system) causes the emergency shutdown to kick in, or if that emergency shutdown is activate manually (someone hit the Big Red Button).
Another poster mentioned the LiveJournal outage - At least LJ was honest that it was because someone in the datacenter (note, NOT a direct employee of LJ, an employee of the datacenter LJ was renting space/bandwidth/power from) hit the Big Red Button when they shouldn't have.
Re:could someone do back-of-envelope calculation
on
Growing Insulin
·
· Score: 1
Unless you have a health condition that causes unusual sensitivity to certain artificial sweeteners (phenylketonuria comes to mind), any health hazards connected to artificial sweeteners are FUD and paranoia, just like the whole "saccharin causes cancer" scare is a load of crap. If I recall correctly, in the study where scientists induced cancer in rats with saccharin, what most people DIDN'T pass on was the fact that if the scientists had fed the rats an equivalent amount of sugar the rats would have died within hours rather than developing cancer.
Of course, in the case of saccharin, it simply tasted like crap which is why you almost never see it used except in REALLY cheap diet sodas nowadays.:)
I've been drinking diet sodas rather than regular for over a decade with not a single ill effect.
I wasn't even thinking of USB readers - I've seen reports that the Palm Treo 600 (and possibly the 650, I can't be sure) had issues with extremely high speed cards such as the SanDisk Extreme III series because they were too fast.
Some specs allow for variation in performance. For example, if the raw performance of the memory cells is expected to increase significantly, the spec will be designed to allow for the highest speed expected to ever be achieved (or the highest speed economically feasible), but to allow devices to negotiate a slower speed by doing things such as inserting delays. i.e. the spec defines compatibility and not performance, AS LONG as performance can be negotiated to be the lowest common denominator of two devices.
I have heard stories of some of the highest speed cards breaking in older readers, perhaps the autonegotiation was designed with the assumption that cards would always be slower than a reader's capabilities, or those readers aren't fully meeting the specification and no one noticed.
It doesn't matter. In fact, most "brushless DC" motors are actually an AC motor with an offboard motor controller.
Thus, if you consider the motor itself and its control electronics, it effectively becomes a DC motor.
Whether or not you want to nitpick these details, there are two facts:
a) The input source to the propulsion system is DC from a battery b) The voltage of that DC must be much higher than in a laptop due to the high power levels involved. If the voltage weren't high, resistive losses in the controller/power cables/etc would kill efficiency. It's the same reason long-haul power transmission is done with voltages on the order of tens or even hundreds of kilovolts.
It isn't. The original linked article pointed out that while Intel's quad-core approach may suffer performance penalties compared to 4x4, BUT will likely provide more "bang for the buck".
AMD (sadly) seems to have forgotten that x86 SMP was around for at least a decade before the Athlon 64 X2, and due to cost issues, it was always a niche technology.
Dual-core-in-a-single package chips have managed to change that in the span of 2-3 years... SMP has gone from a a niche technology installed in probably less than 1% of computers sold to something present (in the form of dual-core CPUs) in what is likely 75% or more of new machines in a VERY short time. Simply put, multiprocessor in multiple sockets does NOT sell except to the extreme high end. Keep in mind how well dual-core has done despite the fact that it has clear performance penalties in most situations compared to two seperate CPUs.
In short, 4x4 isn't really going to get AMD anywhere in my opinion. Unlike dual core technology, it'll stay as a small market share niche item just like classic SMP systems did.
Hopefully for AMD, they can remain profitable even after the massive price cuts they're going to have to do (and apparently will be doing shortly) in order to remain competitive.
Re:could someone do back-of-envelope calculation
on
Growing Insulin
·
· Score: 5, Informative
For the case of Type I insulin-dependent diabetics which are the primary group this technology advance would benefit: None
There are two main types of diabetes (with a couple of oddball variants that are rare, diabetes mellitus describes the final symptom of elevated bloodsugar, there are a few possible root causes of that symptom, which determine the type). Type I is known as insulin-dependent or juvenile diabetes (because it is rarely diagnosed past the age of 20). It is caused by the immune system attacking the beta cells of the pancreas. Eventually all beta cells die and the body can no longer produce any insulin, so it must be provided from an external source. Type I is generally considered to be the "severe" form of diabetes because of this fact. Prior to the discovery of insulin, average life expectancy after diagnosis was 1-2 years, and the disease killed younger children faster than teenagers. Oh, it was a rather slow, painful, and unpleasant death too. Essentially no matter how much you ate and drank, your body would slowly dehydrate and starve.
Type II is usually referred to simply as adult-onset diabetes, because until recently, it has been unheard of for young people to develop it. (A high prevalence of childhood obesity is changing this). In Type II diabetes, the body does produce insulin, but for various reasons it is not enough, whether it is due to reduced capacity or increased demands beyond normal capacity, or a combination of both. Most of the time, once diagnosed, Type II diabetes can be managed solely with oral medication which increases the body's sensitivity to the insulin it does produce, and in many cases controlled solely with diet and exercise. (Losing weight can often cause Type II diabetes to disappear.) It is extremely rare for Type II to require external insulin rejections. Interestingly enough, while Type II is less "severe", this very fact makes it far more dangerous because it frequently goes undiagnosed for long periods of time, and the elevated bloodsugars do damage to various parts of the body.
This is definately an interesting development, but how will this company deal with patented "designer" insulins such as Lantus (from Aventis Pharmaceutical, a special "peakless" insulin used to provide a long-acting baseline insulin dose), and Novolog/Humalog, two "extremely rapid acting" insulins that actually take effect FASTER than injecting normal human insulin. FYI, "human insulin" is insulin produced by genetically engineered bacteria that is identical to human insulin, it is NOT extracted from humans, unlike pork and beef insulins which were extracted from the pancreases of pigs and cows respectively. While I'm sure their technology will work with Lantus and Humalog/Novolog, I don't know how the companies that produce the above three will react to this. Most likely they'll license the technology from this new company (if it works) or vice versa... I hope so.
Yeah. In the case of Skype, legality of reverse engineering the protocol would depend on the EULA of the software being reverse engineered.
I'm sure Skype's EULA forbids reverse engineering the protocol, thus Skype has legal grounds to sue whoever reverse engineers the protocol for violating the license agreement.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone who has more of an interest in what is Right rather than that company's success. Someone (or some organization) which has no vested interest in that company.
An organization such as... hmm... The SEC?
A hint you should be familiar with:
"Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation"
It definately sounds like a management failure to me. The linked article implies not that the design is faulty, but the actual implementation of the design. (i.e. if the bolts had been properly installed to the designers' specs this wouldn't have happened.)
Clearly there are huge management mistakes involved with the Big Dig. I wouldn't even come close to claiming it was one of the largest engineering mistakes ever - There are plenty of other such situations where the design itself was flawed and caused far more negative effects. See the Tacoma Narrows bridge - Fortunately that one did not involve massive loss of life, but there are many cases where design flaws did lead to massive losses of life (I can't name them off of the top of my head, but there are plenty of examples on the History Channel's "Engineering Disasters" series.)
This isn't a case of RedHat FUDing a competitor - RedHat is a Xen partner and thus has (some sort of) a vested interest in Xen succeeding.
RedHat just doesn't yet feel that the time is right, but unlike other companies who like to FUD their competitors, RedHat wants the time to eventually become right so that they can comfortably include Xen into their products.
Lemme guess - Dell?
Sounds exactly like the XP MCE install DVD that came with my new laptop.
"other than unknowns" - like HIV and hepatitis? Those are unknowns that have been present in whole blood before. The risk has been significantly reduced by donor screening, but getting HIV or hep from blood transfusions still happens.
Oh yeah, the fact that whole blood supply is dependent on donations from healthy citizens is a big negative for whole blood. There's barely enough supply for the demand now, and there are any number of things that could cause an increase in demand or a drop in supply. For example, diabetes is becoming an increasingly common illness, I know for a fact that Type Is are ineligible to donate blood due to their treatment regimen of daily injections, and Type IIs might also be ineligible due to their somewhat fouled up blood chemistry.
Most likely, someone saw "Converts iPod into an HD video player" and assumed HD meant "high definition" while in this case it likely means "hard drive" instead, just like there was a /. article a year or so ago talking about a really cheap new "HD video camera" - Everyone (including the editors) automatically though "HD = high def", when in fact, it was "HD = hard drive" (Instead of DVD-R or magnetic tape like most portable video cameras.)
"I've heard this argument before, but there are places in New York and other large metropolises that are just as packed as some of less dense Asian cities and even they don't have bandwidth to compare."
At least in the United States, there are federal regulations mandating subsidizing of rural telephone (and I believe telecom in general) services.
i.e. the telcos were not only permitted, but legally MANDATED to charge high-profit low-cost customers (those in cities) more to subsidize the low-profit high-cost rural customers. I'm not sure if it applies to data services, but I believe (at least currently) that it does and I've seen it on my bill. The end effect is that costs are (at least somewhat) averaged across the country.
Sucks for the urban customers, but great for the rural ones.
Two words: Population density.
I believe (I'm not totally sure but I'm reasonably confident) that both Japan and Korea have significantly higher population density than the U.S. I'm absolutely positive that continental Europe has a much higher population density than the U.S., which also happens to be why mass transit such as the French TGV and German ICE trains are so much more successful than in the U.S., where only a select few passenger routes are profitable for rail companies. (Namely, Amtrak's Northeast Corridor and not much else.) For the same reason mass transit is more practical, it's far cheaper on average to roll out last-mile infrastructure.
Add telecom greed to that and we're screwed. That said, most of the problem is the issue of population density (or lack thereof) and the resulting high last-mile costs.
As to why you see high prices even in cities - The U.S. has laws mandating rural telecom subsidies, effectively averaging the population density across the country as far as telecom prices are concerned.
How long ago was that?
I played from the start, and quit in approximately a year. For its first year, EVE was a great concept with an utterly crap implementation.
Somehow I decided to give it a second chance, mainly because it seemed to be winning so many awards... It's like a whole different game, and I'm actually having FUN now. The addition of all sorts of new ship classes so as to make the game battleship-dominated has been a huge help.
I wish I could easily find the link to one of the GoonSwarm propaganda videos.
:)
It was basically 200 people zerging with Velators. (In EVE, that's the noob ship for one of the four races) They did some SERIOUS damage despite using a horde of basically week-old (or less) characters.
Most of Bell Labs went with Lucent, which wasn't part of that brutal competitive environment. Lucent was doing extremely well until the end of the decade, at which point a combination of less-than-competent (and from what I remember hearing, somewhat corrupt) management combined with the crash of one of Lucent's "bread and butter" business areas, optical networking. In short, the economics of laying fiber (laying 100 fibers was only slightly more expensive than laying 1, due to the fact that almost all of the cost was installation labor and not materials) resulted in huge amounts of "dark fiber" - Who cared if shiny new equipment from Lucent could push a hundred gigabits/second through a single fiber when you were already doing 25 with much cheaper equipment and had 99 more fibers to light up? Around 1999-2000, pretty much all of the optical networking companies (Lucent, JDS Uniphase, Corning) tanked and as far as I can tell never really recovered.
Not anymore...
For one, AT&T (and then Lucent, which acquired MOST of AT&T's R&D assets including the Murray Hill facility, which is now Lucent's HQ) began calling all of their product development divisions "Bell Labs" - More and more the term "Bell Labs" was used to describe standard product development instead of the classic "blue sky" research. That said, even around 2000, there was still a reasonable amount of "blue sky" work being done at Lucent Murray Hill - I was quite proud to intern there back then. I happened to be the only person in the entire department without a Ph.D. (with the exception of one other intern who was an M.S. student).
Since then, that entire department has been disbanded, and from all I've heard, Murray Hill is a husk of what it used to be even five to six years ago. It's been the victim of both Lucent's overall decline due to a combination of mismanagement and the crash of the optical networking industry, and of the general change in corporate attitudes to "blue sky" research.
You know what you get?
You get a crippled piece of silicon that costs far more than an Intel GMA950, but has almost no performance benefits over aforementioned crippled chipset.
There's a reason Intel's graphics chipsets have fully open-source drivers - It is because the chip is so crippled that it isn't subject to any of the intellectual property problems pervasive with higher performing chipsets. I would not be surprised if there is EXTENSIVE cross-licensing of technology in the graphics industry, where every company is using another company's technologies under license. S3TC is just the earliest (and most visible due to the Unreal Tournament 2003 + Linux + ATI fiasco) example.
In my experience, the WORA model was broken from the beginning.
The majority of "interesting" Java applications I've seen were restricted to a single platform for various reasons, mostly because they apparently (somehow) were making platform-specific system calls. (I don't know the exact details of this, all I DO know is that there are plenty of Java applications out there that are restricted to a single platform for whatever reason. I may be wrong about the reasons, but the fact is that WORA failed on the desktop)
What about WORA for J2ME (i.e. on mobile devices)? The situation seems even worse. If you go to the download site for nearly any Java game designed for mobile phones, they will list different downloads for every model of phone they support, with varying filesizes. Not a single Java application designed for other phones has worked with the JVM available for PalmOS 5 devices such as my Treo 650.
If WORA had ever actually worked, I'd accept Java's unwillingness to break it. Unfortunately for that excuse, it's hard to break something that is already broken.
"There's a slight chance that AMD might be smart and release hardware specs for ATI cards, or make the drivers Free Software. If either of those things happen, this would be a very good thing, in my opinion."
There's a good chance that they legally have no ability to do so, thanks to technologies that are licensed from other companies. (The example I can recall at the moment is S3 Texture Compression, support for which is the main "new" feature ATI's first binary drivers for Linux had over the previously fully functional open-source drivers.)
That's because their chipsets are so limited that they don't run into any issues with patent licensing that require their drivers to be closed source. Even an old GeForce 4MX outperforms the GMA series integrated graphics chipsets in performance and functionality. For all practical purposes, the GMA series chipsets are 2D-only. (Yes, they officially support 3D features, but the 3D functionality is so limited that it may as well not be there.)
If I recall correctly, this is why ATI went from being fully documented to binary-only for full functionality under Linux - The first issue was S3 Texture Compression, which is why for a while UT2003 (or was it 2004?) only ran on NVidia cards - Until the binary ATI drivers for Linux were released, the open source ones didn't (and legally couldn't) support S3TC.
"[1] Not that a power failure should ever happen in a datacentre anyway. All of the ones I've used have had multiple power feeds from different suppliers, entering on opposite sides of the building, plus redundant UPSes with diesel generators for when the UPS runs out. If you're still having power outages with that sort of infrastructure in place, then something's seriously wrong. And if you don't have that sort of infrastructure in place, then you've chosen the wrong datacentre."
All that means nothing if something (fire alarm/suppression system) causes the emergency shutdown to kick in, or if that emergency shutdown is activate manually (someone hit the Big Red Button).
Another poster mentioned the LiveJournal outage - At least LJ was honest that it was because someone in the datacenter (note, NOT a direct employee of LJ, an employee of the datacenter LJ was renting space/bandwidth/power from) hit the Big Red Button when they shouldn't have.
Unless you have a health condition that causes unusual sensitivity to certain artificial sweeteners (phenylketonuria comes to mind), any health hazards connected to artificial sweeteners are FUD and paranoia, just like the whole "saccharin causes cancer" scare is a load of crap. If I recall correctly, in the study where scientists induced cancer in rats with saccharin, what most people DIDN'T pass on was the fact that if the scientists had fed the rats an equivalent amount of sugar the rats would have died within hours rather than developing cancer.
:)
Of course, in the case of saccharin, it simply tasted like crap which is why you almost never see it used except in REALLY cheap diet sodas nowadays.
I've been drinking diet sodas rather than regular for over a decade with not a single ill effect.
I wasn't even thinking of USB readers - I've seen reports that the Palm Treo 600 (and possibly the 650, I can't be sure) had issues with extremely high speed cards such as the SanDisk Extreme III series because they were too fast.
Some specs allow for variation in performance. For example, if the raw performance of the memory cells is expected to increase significantly, the spec will be designed to allow for the highest speed expected to ever be achieved (or the highest speed economically feasible), but to allow devices to negotiate a slower speed by doing things such as inserting delays. i.e. the spec defines compatibility and not performance, AS LONG as performance can be negotiated to be the lowest common denominator of two devices.
I have heard stories of some of the highest speed cards breaking in older readers, perhaps the autonegotiation was designed with the assumption that cards would always be slower than a reader's capabilities, or those readers aren't fully meeting the specification and no one noticed.
It doesn't matter. In fact, most "brushless DC" motors are actually an AC motor with an offboard motor controller.
Thus, if you consider the motor itself and its control electronics, it effectively becomes a DC motor.
Whether or not you want to nitpick these details, there are two facts:
a) The input source to the propulsion system is DC from a battery
b) The voltage of that DC must be much higher than in a laptop due to the high power levels involved. If the voltage weren't high, resistive losses in the controller/power cables/etc would kill efficiency. It's the same reason long-haul power transmission is done with voltages on the order of tens or even hundreds of kilovolts.
It isn't. The original linked article pointed out that while Intel's quad-core approach may suffer performance penalties compared to 4x4, BUT will likely provide more "bang for the buck".
AMD (sadly) seems to have forgotten that x86 SMP was around for at least a decade before the Athlon 64 X2, and due to cost issues, it was always a niche technology.
Dual-core-in-a-single package chips have managed to change that in the span of 2-3 years... SMP has gone from a a niche technology installed in probably less than 1% of computers sold to something present (in the form of dual-core CPUs) in what is likely 75% or more of new machines in a VERY short time. Simply put, multiprocessor in multiple sockets does NOT sell except to the extreme high end. Keep in mind how well dual-core has done despite the fact that it has clear performance penalties in most situations compared to two seperate CPUs.
In short, 4x4 isn't really going to get AMD anywhere in my opinion. Unlike dual core technology, it'll stay as a small market share niche item just like classic SMP systems did.
Hopefully for AMD, they can remain profitable even after the massive price cuts they're going to have to do (and apparently will be doing shortly) in order to remain competitive.
For the case of Type I insulin-dependent diabetics which are the primary group this technology advance would benefit: None
There are two main types of diabetes (with a couple of oddball variants that are rare, diabetes mellitus describes the final symptom of elevated bloodsugar, there are a few possible root causes of that symptom, which determine the type). Type I is known as insulin-dependent or juvenile diabetes (because it is rarely diagnosed past the age of 20). It is caused by the immune system attacking the beta cells of the pancreas. Eventually all beta cells die and the body can no longer produce any insulin, so it must be provided from an external source. Type I is generally considered to be the "severe" form of diabetes because of this fact. Prior to the discovery of insulin, average life expectancy after diagnosis was 1-2 years, and the disease killed younger children faster than teenagers. Oh, it was a rather slow, painful, and unpleasant death too. Essentially no matter how much you ate and drank, your body would slowly dehydrate and starve.
Type II is usually referred to simply as adult-onset diabetes, because until recently, it has been unheard of for young people to develop it. (A high prevalence of childhood obesity is changing this). In Type II diabetes, the body does produce insulin, but for various reasons it is not enough, whether it is due to reduced capacity or increased demands beyond normal capacity, or a combination of both. Most of the time, once diagnosed, Type II diabetes can be managed solely with oral medication which increases the body's sensitivity to the insulin it does produce, and in many cases controlled solely with diet and exercise. (Losing weight can often cause Type II diabetes to disappear.) It is extremely rare for Type II to require external insulin rejections. Interestingly enough, while Type II is less "severe", this very fact makes it far more dangerous because it frequently goes undiagnosed for long periods of time, and the elevated bloodsugars do damage to various parts of the body.
This is definately an interesting development, but how will this company deal with patented "designer" insulins such as Lantus (from Aventis Pharmaceutical, a special "peakless" insulin used to provide a long-acting baseline insulin dose), and Novolog/Humalog, two "extremely rapid acting" insulins that actually take effect FASTER than injecting normal human insulin. FYI, "human insulin" is insulin produced by genetically engineered bacteria that is identical to human insulin, it is NOT extracted from humans, unlike pork and beef insulins which were extracted from the pancreases of pigs and cows respectively. While I'm sure their technology will work with Lantus and Humalog/Novolog, I don't know how the companies that produce the above three will react to this. Most likely they'll license the technology from this new company (if it works) or vice versa... I hope so.
Yeah. In the case of Skype, legality of reverse engineering the protocol would depend on the EULA of the software being reverse engineered.
I'm sure Skype's EULA forbids reverse engineering the protocol, thus Skype has legal grounds to sue whoever reverse engineers the protocol for violating the license agreement.