I can see the environmental argument, but you're ultimately agreeing with what I said: You're giving the justification IBM will use to ship lower-quality CPUs to me, the consumer - "it's better than throwing them away and hey, it fixes itself just trust it."
Besides - Athlon chips have shown that lower complexity can result in better performance. If Intel has to throw away more than half their super complex, 30-stage CPUs, I'd say they made their own grave rather than being victims of transistor quality.
Here's an even better answer: Sony's new Cell structure. You make a lot of lower-powered CPUs that can work together on instructions. In terms of the FAB, the much simpler CPUs end up with a much lower fail rate, and the ones that do fail are sufficiently small and low-cost that total loss is minimal.
I disagree - you're forgetting AMD. Intel has been pushing clock speed for a long time, and many consumers are still fooled by this engineered-for-marketing strategy.
But AMD very-much uses the x86 architecture, and has long emphasized things other than clock speed. They've already put into action several of the things IBM's Bernie Meyerson seems to think he brilliantly came up with:
Efficiency: Athlons just plain get more performance per clock than an Intel. There are a lot of factors that contribute to this including the length of the pipeline, but the design just gets more done with each tick. That's less complexity and less...
Power usage: Athlons have 10-12 pipeline stages compared to the Pentium 4's 30. Between that increased efficiency, and less need for a large cache (big pipeline means frequent cache hits), it can use far less power than a P4 for the same performance - and consequently generate much less heat.
Interacting with software: Also not new - more recent desktop AMD chips internally clock themselves up and down depending on whether you're idling or running an app. Laptop chips have done this for years. That means the invalid assumption PC novices make that leaving a PC on while they eat lunch will not use much power becomes valid. For the power user, the PC churns out less heat overall since it only pumps heat under peak usage.
There are things the guy lists that are just freakin' out there:
We are even building in the capability for the chip to physically morph, if required. For instance, you spot an excessive number of fails occurring in the memory--we have techniques in software that recognize those errors. But if it turns out that for whatever reason, one segment of the chip drives an extreme amount of correction, one can easily envision the system autonomically issuing a command to remove that segment.
Uh, dude, this isn't an episode of Transformers, it's a CPU. AMD and Intel already resolved this issue by building very strong chips that don't fail. Even if physically modifying the chip to lop off the bad parts is possible, I can only see it leading to a reduction in quality of chips produced, with manufacturers knowing that worst case, if it fails, it'll just lop itself to pieces.
This could be a useful tool if it were added to an Anti-virus program. The AV software could track known portions of the DarkNet, especially behind a Router, and wait for any process to fire off at part of the Dark - if it does, prompt to kill it, or just kill it, depending on a user pref.
Many many viruses prefer random blasting to IPs, even some who mix that with IP collection. It would catch a lot of viruses in the act - partly because a virus would have to be that much more complex, that it would have to have a reliable way of collecting good IPs before attempting to spread.
McAfee? Symantec? Are you listening? Add this instead of big heavy overreaching scans that crash apps. Are you there?
Soundcards have long suffered from insufficient bus bandwidth - Creative's Soundblaster series has suffered since the "64", if you can remember it. Hardcore gamers swear by nForce2 MCP-T boards in part because the onboard sound uses a special dedicated sound channel similar to PCI-X/AGP to talk to the CPU - nVidia smartly bypassed PCI's limitations by including a top-end soundchip and eliminating the need for a PCI card. The increased bandwidth allows nVidia's SoundStorm to produce higher quality sound than any PCI card can offer.
PCI SATA/RAID cards can run into bandwidth issues as well.
It is. As noted earlier, this machine was only good at its one task. If your TI-89 raced it in graphing x^2, it would win, and badly.
"Message was read at 5,000 characters per second. Could carry out 100 Boolean calculations at any one time."
A modern PC opening a large Word document processes hundreds of thousands of characters per second.
It would be cute to see the smallest possible "Colossus" with matching performance built with today's technology - you'd probably have to clock-down a transmeta-based palmtop.
It could be done, just not with much "excitement" in the process for the person running it.
Each frame could itself be divided into a grid, for example of 8px x 8px squares. These squares could be pseudorandomly rendered on client machines. The data sent would have to be "culled" before sending - that is, all polygonal and texture data not essential to that 8x8 square would not be sent, just as is done now internally on 3D boards, and in software within large 3D apps like 3D Studio Max.
The culling would still be intensive for the servers involved, but culling would have to happen anyway and is a very small fraction of the total rendering cost.
If the client software used GPU set-math capabilities, without actually placing the 8x8 portion of the scene into the card's memory, it would be minimally CPU-intensive and still avoid giving hackers the 3D model itself - or at least make it much more difficult to obtain.
The pseudorandom distribution of the 8x8 squares would prevent any one hacker, and probably any group of hackers, from capturing even one complete frame, so long as at least one honest person was busy rendering as well. If the movie studio itself participates in the project with a few computers, this seals the deal.
The hackers would have an easier time collecting the data for the models, but they would be skin-only, with no bone structure - the models would be a great deal of work away from producing your own Shrek movie.
The person running it would receive a very small bit of benefit... various 8x8 chunks of varying frames, rendered slowly onto their screensaver. It might be a cute way to "clue" at the movie, though, and try to guess what chunk you're looking at.
It is recycling, with one exception - you are in some sense deriving power from the sun, just very indirectly. The needed power to grow that grass is not man-made, and nearly everything powering that cow and this byproduct comes from that grass.
These products like 321 [backup software] allow people to be free riders... It raises the prices for legitimate copies and it also reduces the availability of the copies.
Absolutely. I mean, just look at the way CD prices have shot up since MP3 trading became popular. Wait - CD prices were on a steady rise until it was popular, then the RIAA lowered prices from $21 to $13 a CD once MP3s were rampant. Hmmmm. Well - the availability argument is definitely true. I mean, if I go to Strawberries I'll definitely find a CD with Nine Inch Nails' "The Mark Has Been Made," live. No, hm, I can't seem to find it there... well I'll definitely never find it on Kaz- oh wait, here it is. Hm.
That previous story on Slashdot included Dimming's relation to Warming - in particular, scientists suspect Mars lost its water in a disastrous event called a "Hot Spot," where one point in the ocean reaches so high a temperature that it begins evaporating so fast it actually magnifies the sun's heating effect at that surface point - causing nearly all the ocean to leave the planet through that spot.
Dimming was suggested as the reason this has not occurred - that although heat is up, average sun exposure to the surface is down, and so, evaporation is down too. The net effect is a constant level of evaporation despite rising temps.
So - is Dimming the buffer that keeps the Earth alive during times of Global Warming? Or is it possible to lose Dimming and keep Warming, rendering us as waterless as Mars? Or, is the Hot Spot theory just hot air in the first place?
I have an LCD TV that I use for both PC and TV. It's from Cornea Systems:
http://corneasystems.com/ct1702t.php
I can say a few things:
1) HDTV support is very iffy. I've been stuck with S-Video, no HiDef, but it's more because of my cable box's inability to support DVI, it seems.
2) The PC side of things is excellent. 1280x1024 max res, no refresh rate issues, clean pixels, strong brightness.
3) Switching between PC and TV is a lesson in bad usability. You have to get through about 4 menus to switch, meaning you've got to really think ahead if you want to use your PC during a commercial and not miss any of the show. During moments like this I wish I had a separate TV - and I would if LCDs were cheaper.
4) The model I have is one of the older TFTs that still looks like crap at any angle outside of 60 degrees ("viewable" at 170 does not mean "good"). Watching for example, DVD or downloaded movies, means anyone in a large group sitting at the edges of the room wishes they weren't there. Long carpeted rooms would do fine though as people could sit lengthwise with many on the floor.
5) Display-wise this monitor is absolutely perfect. Cornea LCD reviews I've read have always raved about LCD quality and it's shown in this display. Never a dead pixel, never a display issue of any sort (but again the menus are irritating).
So to sum, if you're looking at LCDs for dual-purpose consider:
Reviews of the display - manufacturers lie
What inputs it supports, and what resolutions it supports from those inputs (not always clear)
Try to get a newer TFT that looks good at an angle
Figure out what you'll do during commercials for normal TV watching - if the answer is PC (most likely), make sure switching views is very fast, or get another display.
It might be worth hearing that I'm a "Green" - if by "green" you mean environmentalist. And, I don't think Conservation is the answer here. A later reply suggests Conservation is always the answer - well, it's always a good idea to suggest to your population how they can help the environment - and help them to do so by making it convenient. But it's not a very good fix for a long-term shortage (this isn't a drought, this is a growth in population that has no end).
I agree desalination might be a good answer (I live in Boston, so the answer is quite relevant...). And perhaps if it was combined with construction of one of the newer Nuke plants being sold around nowadays, it would have an obvious source of clean energy to put environmental concerns to rest. A "Snail" wave plant would also be a great option, partly because of its unobtrusive installation local to the desalination plants. An obtrusive wave plant off the coast of Cape Cod has been held up by local politicking we don't need another round of....
Violating thermodynamics would be an efficiency of infinity (power usage 0). The technical explanation is quite sound - the static magnets repulse the fan blades as they normally would, and the electric magnets combined with the momentum in the blades push the blades past the spots of repulsion that would reverse their course.
The trick is that the fan has to suck more power to start - changing the fan blade inertia - once the blades are in motion, inertia is on your side.
1) Make a valid MP3 file 2) Make the beginning of the file a JMP instruction (assembly code) that tells it to jump to the point in the MP3 where the ID3 tag is stored. 3) Put a virus in the ID3 tag.
What's to prevent this from working on Windows? It's a brilliant, and scary plan... . It would be especially effective if linked on a website, as Windows accepts MIME-types first and extensions second now.
That's a reasonable argument but not necessarily true. And there's an important distinction between what I said and how you read it:
I said: Products target a JVM
You said: Products ship with a JVM
There's a big difference. The ones that target a JVM are tested on a specific version - usually the latest point-release of a minor version they want to support - and if it runs in another version you already have, wahoo, but they don't support it. So, if the customer wants any reasonable use of the product, they've got to install multiple JVMs.
Now, would everyone target one JVM if Windows always shipped with a JVM? Chances are it wouldn't keep shipping with the same one - as mentioned already about Windows - so, it'd be a moving target, first of all. But, that said, maybe it would reduce the number of JVMs "required for support" out there.
Yes precisely. It seems unimaginable but that's because it's never happened, because of trade barriers. It happens simply by people of the world to feel less confident about their spending, and so stocks plummet, spending turns downwards sharply - that's a recession. There's nothing preventing it from happening worldwide. I think you're confusing "recession" with "dropping national currency," which are not the same thing - our currency can lose value without a recession, and a recession can happen on many scales regardless of the value of currency.
Thank you for the informative reply, but I'm talking about a depression worldwide - something tariffs would not "fix" as it would be too late. The tariffs you're talking about were meant to isolate our depression, which of course, lead to worse depression. Globalization allows the entire world economy to go into recession all at once - something we've never seen before.
Since you're an AC you'll never see this reply - but for the sake of those reading and learning:
"Ever seen a decent full-featured e-mail editor inside a thin client solution which is NOT using Java?"
Yes, it's called Outlook. Mozilla's XUL provides similar capabilities.
"The applet is cached on the client side, so the initial download hit (around 5 secs) goes down to below 1 second after the first usage."
This really is flamebait. The time to download the Crapplet is a meaningless figure - the time to initialize the JVM and get the thing running in your browser is the killer. No one wants to sit through their hard drive grinding and the little coffee cup icon loading into their system tray once for every applet instance, just to get your "amazing feature" that could have easily been done using Javascript.
"Misusing HTML as an exact layout language and trying to create decent applications with it."
Although using HTML/Tables for layout is a bad idea, using HTML/CSS for layout is a good idea. Please learn about something before you criticize it.
Although I agree with the point you make sowellfan, there are still 2 problems with Globalization as it exists today:
Markets are shifting too quickly: People want to live their lives, not have them swept out from under them. The laws have shifted too sharply in favor of outsourcing. The American economy can handle this shift but not this quickly - it's too much too fast. In a sense, this generation is paying dues so that the next generation can thrive. Not cool, because I'm part of this generation.
Trade barriers created buffers: Although Globalization can easily be argued as the most powerful weapon against third-world poverty (why give them a handout when you can give them a job?), the incredible swing and sway of a world market could have disastrous effects on the world - imagine what a Great Depression will be like, world-wide, with no barriers to trade? Further, weak international laws (America is at fault here, for example by pulling out of Kyoto and World Court) harm the ability for governments to ensure fairness in the deals. Lawless trade doesn't help anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Collision was against the rules. Any collision was a disqualification in the Qualifying rounds - some such are mentioned in the CNN article.
I can see the environmental argument, but you're ultimately agreeing with what I said: You're giving the justification IBM will use to ship lower-quality CPUs to me, the consumer - "it's better than throwing them away and hey, it fixes itself just trust it."
Besides - Athlon chips have shown that lower complexity can result in better performance. If Intel has to throw away more than half their super complex, 30-stage CPUs, I'd say they made their own grave rather than being victims of transistor quality.
Here's an even better answer: Sony's new Cell structure. You make a lot of lower-powered CPUs that can work together on instructions. In terms of the FAB, the much simpler CPUs end up with a much lower fail rate, and the ones that do fail are sufficiently small and low-cost that total loss is minimal.
But AMD very-much uses the x86 architecture, and has long emphasized things other than clock speed. They've already put into action several of the things IBM's Bernie Meyerson seems to think he brilliantly came up with:
- Efficiency: Athlons just plain get more performance per clock than an Intel. There are a lot of factors that contribute to this including the length of the pipeline, but the design just gets more done with each tick. That's less complexity and less...
- Power usage: Athlons have 10-12 pipeline stages compared to the Pentium 4's 30. Between that increased efficiency, and less need for a large cache (big pipeline means frequent cache hits), it can use far less power than a P4 for the same performance - and consequently generate much less heat.
- Interacting with software: Also not new - more recent desktop AMD chips internally clock themselves up and down depending on whether you're idling or running an app. Laptop chips have done this for years. That means the invalid assumption PC novices make that leaving a PC on while they eat lunch will not use much power becomes valid. For the power user, the PC churns out less heat overall since it only pumps heat under peak usage.
There are things the guy lists that are just freakin' out there:Uh, dude, this isn't an episode of Transformers, it's a CPU. AMD and Intel already resolved this issue by building very strong chips that don't fail. Even if physically modifying the chip to lop off the bad parts is possible, I can only see it leading to a reduction in quality of chips produced, with manufacturers knowing that worst case, if it fails, it'll just lop itself to pieces.
This could be a useful tool if it were added to an Anti-virus program. The AV software could track known portions of the DarkNet, especially behind a Router, and wait for any process to fire off at part of the Dark - if it does, prompt to kill it, or just kill it, depending on a user pref.
Many many viruses prefer random blasting to IPs, even some who mix that with IP collection. It would catch a lot of viruses in the act - partly because a virus would have to be that much more complex, that it would have to have a reliable way of collecting good IPs before attempting to spread.
McAfee? Symantec? Are you listening? Add this instead of big heavy overreaching scans that crash apps. Are you there?
I mean look at this - that's more of a toe-dip than a transit. Can this possibly be so exciting?
Three words (well, 2 and some ASCII art).
Japan <3 Gadgets.
Soundcards have long suffered from insufficient bus bandwidth - Creative's Soundblaster series has suffered since the "64", if you can remember it. Hardcore gamers swear by nForce2 MCP-T boards in part because the onboard sound uses a special dedicated sound channel similar to PCI-X/AGP to talk to the CPU - nVidia smartly bypassed PCI's limitations by including a top-end soundchip and eliminating the need for a PCI card. The increased bandwidth allows nVidia's SoundStorm to produce higher quality sound than any PCI card can offer.
PCI SATA/RAID cards can run into bandwidth issues as well.
It is. As noted earlier, this machine was only good at its one task. If your TI-89 raced it in graphing x^2, it would win, and badly.
"Message was read at 5,000 characters per second. Could carry out 100 Boolean calculations at any one time."
A modern PC opening a large Word document processes hundreds of thousands of characters per second.
It would be cute to see the smallest possible "Colossus" with matching performance built with today's technology - you'd probably have to clock-down a transmeta-based palmtop.
It could be done, just not with much "excitement" in the process for the person running it.
Each frame could itself be divided into a grid, for example of 8px x 8px squares. These squares could be pseudorandomly rendered on client machines. The data sent would have to be "culled" before sending - that is, all polygonal and texture data not essential to that 8x8 square would not be sent, just as is done now internally on 3D boards, and in software within large 3D apps like 3D Studio Max.
The culling would still be intensive for the servers involved, but culling would have to happen anyway and is a very small fraction of the total rendering cost.
If the client software used GPU set-math capabilities, without actually placing the 8x8 portion of the scene into the card's memory, it would be minimally CPU-intensive and still avoid giving hackers the 3D model itself - or at least make it much more difficult to obtain.
The pseudorandom distribution of the 8x8 squares would prevent any one hacker, and probably any group of hackers, from capturing even one complete frame, so long as at least one honest person was busy rendering as well. If the movie studio itself participates in the project with a few computers, this seals the deal.
The hackers would have an easier time collecting the data for the models, but they would be skin-only, with no bone structure - the models would be a great deal of work away from producing your own Shrek movie.
The person running it would receive a very small bit of benefit... various 8x8 chunks of varying frames, rendered slowly onto their screensaver. It might be a cute way to "clue" at the movie, though, and try to guess what chunk you're looking at.
It is recycling, with one exception - you are in some sense deriving power from the sun, just very indirectly. The needed power to grow that grass is not man-made, and nearly everything powering that cow and this byproduct comes from that grass.
Call it Solar Desmellification.
That previous story on Slashdot included Dimming's relation to Warming - in particular, scientists suspect Mars lost its water in a disastrous event called a "Hot Spot," where one point in the ocean reaches so high a temperature that it begins evaporating so fast it actually magnifies the sun's heating effect at that surface point - causing nearly all the ocean to leave the planet through that spot.
Dimming was suggested as the reason this has not occurred - that although heat is up, average sun exposure to the surface is down, and so, evaporation is down too. The net effect is a constant level of evaporation despite rising temps.
So - is Dimming the buffer that keeps the Earth alive during times of Global Warming? Or is it possible to lose Dimming and keep Warming, rendering us as waterless as Mars? Or, is the Hot Spot theory just hot air in the first place?
Maybe - but if you're reading this thread, especially this far down, the "interested in File Systems" requirement has been met ;o)
News at 11.
I have an LCD TV that I use for both PC and TV. It's from Cornea Systems:
http://corneasystems.com/ct1702t.php
I can say a few things:
1) HDTV support is very iffy. I've been stuck with S-Video, no HiDef, but it's more because of my cable box's inability to support DVI, it seems.
2) The PC side of things is excellent. 1280x1024 max res, no refresh rate issues, clean pixels, strong brightness.
3) Switching between PC and TV is a lesson in bad usability. You have to get through about 4 menus to switch, meaning you've got to really think ahead if you want to use your PC during a commercial and not miss any of the show. During moments like this I wish I had a separate TV - and I would if LCDs were cheaper.
4) The model I have is one of the older TFTs that still looks like crap at any angle outside of 60 degrees ("viewable" at 170 does not mean "good"). Watching for example, DVD or downloaded movies, means anyone in a large group sitting at the edges of the room wishes they weren't there. Long carpeted rooms would do fine though as people could sit lengthwise with many on the floor.
5) Display-wise this monitor is absolutely perfect. Cornea LCD reviews I've read have always raved about LCD quality and it's shown in this display. Never a dead pixel, never a display issue of any sort (but again the menus are irritating).
So to sum, if you're looking at LCDs for dual-purpose consider:
Reviews of the display - manufacturers lie
What inputs it supports, and what resolutions it supports from those inputs (not always clear)
Try to get a newer TFT that looks good at an angle
Figure out what you'll do during commercials for normal TV watching - if the answer is PC (most likely), make sure switching views is very fast, or get another display.
I agree desalination might be a good answer (I live in Boston, so the answer is quite relevant...). And perhaps if it was combined with construction of one of the newer Nuke plants being sold around nowadays, it would have an obvious source of clean energy to put environmental concerns to rest. A "Snail" wave plant would also be a great option, partly because of its unobtrusive installation local to the desalination plants. An obtrusive wave plant off the coast of Cape Cod has been held up by local politicking we don't need another round of... .
You're proof AC posting needs some kind of check put in place if Slashdot is ever going to shake its reputation for trash discussions.
Please begin by not assuming I'm American, then see what you can do about not insulting others just because you don't understand something.
Violating thermodynamics would be an efficiency of infinity (power usage 0). The technical explanation is quite sound - the static magnets repulse the fan blades as they normally would, and the electric magnets combined with the momentum in the blades push the blades past the spots of repulsion that would reverse their course.
The trick is that the fan has to suck more power to start - changing the fan blade inertia - once the blades are in motion, inertia is on your side.
The Trojan description is:
1) Make a valid MP3 file
2) Make the beginning of the file a JMP instruction (assembly code) that tells it to jump to the point in the MP3 where the ID3 tag is stored.
3) Put a virus in the ID3 tag.
What's to prevent this from working on Windows? It's a brilliant, and scary plan... . It would be especially effective if linked on a website, as Windows accepts MIME-types first and extensions second now.
That's a reasonable argument but not necessarily true. And there's an important distinction between what I said and how you read it:
I said: Products target a JVM
You said: Products ship with a JVM
There's a big difference. The ones that target a JVM are tested on a specific version - usually the latest point-release of a minor version they want to support - and if it runs in another version you already have, wahoo, but they don't support it. So, if the customer wants any reasonable use of the product, they've got to install multiple JVMs.
Now, would everyone target one JVM if Windows always shipped with a JVM? Chances are it wouldn't keep shipping with the same one - as mentioned already about Windows - so, it'd be a moving target, first of all. But, that said, maybe it would reduce the number of JVMs "required for support" out there.
Yes precisely. It seems unimaginable but that's because it's never happened, because of trade barriers. It happens simply by people of the world to feel less confident about their spending, and so stocks plummet, spending turns downwards sharply - that's a recession. There's nothing preventing it from happening worldwide. I think you're confusing "recession" with "dropping national currency," which are not the same thing - our currency can lose value without a recession, and a recession can happen on many scales regardless of the value of currency.
Thank you for the informative reply, but I'm talking about a depression worldwide - something tariffs would not "fix" as it would be too late. The tariffs you're talking about were meant to isolate our depression, which of course, lead to worse depression. Globalization allows the entire world economy to go into recession all at once - something we've never seen before.
"Ever seen a decent full-featured e-mail editor inside a thin client solution which is NOT using Java?"
Yes, it's called Outlook. Mozilla's XUL provides similar capabilities.
"The applet is cached on the client side, so the initial download hit (around 5 secs) goes down to below 1 second after the first usage."
This really is flamebait. The time to download the Crapplet is a meaningless figure - the time to initialize the JVM and get the thing running in your browser is the killer. No one wants to sit through their hard drive grinding and the little coffee cup icon loading into their system tray once for every applet instance, just to get your "amazing feature" that could have easily been done using Javascript.
"Misusing HTML as an exact layout language and trying to create decent applications with it."
Although using HTML/Tables for layout is a bad idea, using HTML/CSS for layout is a good idea. Please learn about something before you criticize it.