.....I'm don't hate religions, I just hate the people that follow them.....
Are you sure of that sig? If so, you must hate everybody, including yourself and all atheists. Atheism is the religion of having no religion, based on belief like all others. Atheists don't KNOW there is no God, but BELIEVE this just as all other religions are based on belief.
.....You could use that much floating point for voice recognition without taxing your machine very much........
Do you really think that then we'd get a machine that anyone could talk English into and an always CORRECT Chinese would come out the other end as spoken by a native person from China? This would go for any other languages of course. The hardware could probably do this alright, but is there ANYONE who knows how to write such a program? Phone companies would love such a device.
....drive for creating a parallizing compiler would be massive.....
In the end though, either the compiler or the programmers who wrote the compiler would have to know how to break down a large number of jobs into components that can be done in parallel. In the real world however, whether done by people or computers, most jobs are serial, rather than parallel. Such an 80 core computer would be ideal for certain special jobs, but not for what most computers do today.
Even then, there has to a supervisor that controls the communications between and collates and delivers the output to a human at the end of the chain. Programming the supervision and control of only a few cores is already hard. Supervising 80 cores makes for a tough software job. If one extrapolates how long it took to bring out VISTA, how long might it be until someone (maybe even MS) comes out with an OS that will efficiently program an OS that can herd 80 processors? Doing this with cats may be easier.
.......As I said before.... to get 80 cores working properly is going to require huge amounts of memory as well as hugely wide buses out of the chips.........
So put however many terabytes of RAM and whatever other electronics needed on the chip. A whole supercomputer on a single chip with an optical I/O port.
The computer bottleneck is not in the hardware, but in the software that makes a computer more than a doorstop. As VISTA has shown by its (non)-appearance, programming powerful general purpose systems is not so easy. Software not only has to do a good job, but the system must be resistant to malicious programming and random errors. Even the best software designers are finding this to be a tough nut to crack.
Because of this, limited specialized software may be able to utilize such hardware for a few applications, but not for general purpose computing such as is done with PCs today. Even for people, problems cannot be easily broken down so that many workers can get a job done more quickly than only a few. Putting 80 people to work digging a 20 foot ditch would be slower than if there were only a few, say 4, for example. Most things we encounter in the real world are that way. In most jobs the output of one worker becomes the input of the next one. There are not that many jobs that can be done in parallel.
.... these chips will be severe overkill for PCs and will be outside any typical user's price range......
I wouldn't be so sure of that. After all, a modern laptop has more computing power than ALL the mainframes IBM made up to 1975 or so.
The production, and to a degree, the design of hardware can be automated. Much of the building of physical stuff is done by machines, but software is a pure product of mind. Products of mind, software, literature, music, photos and video etc. cannot be automated much, if at all. Therefore, with the (bad) example of VISTA before us, it may be that writing software to utilize such hardware may elude us. Even the fanciest hardware, without commensurate software, would make such a computer with 80 cores nothing more than a very expensive doorstop.
There are certainly problems that, theoretically at least, such computers could solve, but actually telling them to do this (programming) will be very hard. Maybe much more research needs to be done how we use that fancy computer between our ears, before we can program such massive computers effectively.
Just one example: How do we recognize MEANING and in doing so react with joy, anger, surprise or so many other ways to our understanding of what was communicated? Nobody really knows how WE do this, so it is not likely that without such knowledge it would be possible to program a computer to do this or other things that even a three year old knows how to do.
No, I was saying that it takes between 300 and 500 watt-hours of real energy delivered to the wheels of a car like a Civic to travel on level ground at 60mph for each mile. Hilly terrain takes more, even with regenerative braking recovering part of the energy when going downhill. 170kwh is on the low end for small cars to go 500 miles.
However, most cars don't go much over 50 miles a day most of the time. That daily energy use can come out of an electric stove sized outlet, overnight in anybody's house. For long distance travel and large vehicles, some kind of fuel driven engine is the only known practical alternative even on the distant horizon. Bio-diesel motors or hydrogen fuel cells should work for this. Both could get us away from fossil fuels and possible man caused global warming troubles.
Capacitors, ultra or otherwise, can accept and deliver their energy very rapidly, explosively in fact. Even a capacitor with enough energy stored to drive a small car only 50 miles could be as dangerous as about 35 pounds of dynamite. Like so much of technology, there are up-sides and downsides.
.....There currently isn't enough reserve capacity to handle a massive buildout of electric vehicles......
Not really true, if the charging is done at off peak times. Take a look at the California electric load curve and you can see how much extra power could be available to charge cars.
Most cars don't drive more than maybe 50-60 miles in a day and could easily be re-charged over night with a 10-15KW charger. An electric stove outlet would provide enough current for such a charging device. If there are enough such chargers, the curve would be flat or even reverse, shifting the peaks to the night time hours.
....Adding a few million electric vehicles into the mix would bring our power system to its knees.......
This would only be true if everybody wanted to charge their car in 5 minutes from fully dead to fully charged. If the average daily drive is about 50 miles and the time to charge is over night (8-10hrs) the average house and the grid could carry that amount of power. Use at night is down anyway, so this would even out the daily grid load fluctuations. Recharging on a long trip would still be problematic however. Making a hybrid with a bio-diesel engine would solve that problem. After about 200 miles the engine would start and keep the capacitor storage system at that level. Around town the engine would never run.
....The individual capacitors were only charged to about 2.5 V, which I understand is typical for ultracaps. (The whole bank was in series, for a total of 270V)......
The amount of energy stored in a capacitor goes up with the square of the voltage and linearly with the capacitance. The capacitance in turn is related to the internal area of the capacitance elements. The stored energy is generally measured in Joules. Putting capacitors in series is difficult and if not done precisely right, will cause one of them to short because it gets too much voltage. This can start a cascade effect where the entire bank can quickly blow out, like a set of falling dominoes.
A set of ultra-capacitors with the same energy storage and size as one of the infamos Sony laptop batteries we read about recently, would discharge its energy many times faster than the chemical reaction of the battery in case of a short and likely kill the owner in a spectacular blast. Charged capacitors are very dangerous devices, if they store significant amounts of energy.
....Actually, I've seen a fully-charged ultracapacitor explode: it's not really that impressive.......
How much total energy was stored in that capacitor you saw blow up? The amount of energy in a tank full of fuel is quite large. Suddenly releasing it will make for a devastating explosion. The Oklahoma Federal Building was essentially destroyed by the energy from fuel in a quantity which was about what a normal semi-truck might carry. The fuel was caused to burn very rapidly (explode) by adding an oxidizer. An ultra capacitor would have to store a similar quantity of energy.
Capacitors in general, including ultra capacitors have a very low impedance and can therefore deliver their stored energy extremely rapidly to any load including a dead short. That's why they use large capacitor banks to power monster lasers, such as they have at Livermore National Laboratories. Driving a car with one of these inside would be like having 350-550lbs of dynamite rattling around in the trunk. A normal car gas tank may also explode under the right conditions, but if it does, it will not wipe out the better part of a city block.
.....A much better measure of security is how many days the users spend being vulnerable.......
The best measure is how many computers of a given OS actually get hacked each year. By that only real measure that matters, OSX is still the safest OS that anyone can own and operate without being a hacker themselves.
Don't anybody come with the old saw about Macs having only a small fraction of the market. If my house is safer against intruders than other houses, does it really matter WHY it is safer? The safest OS "house" is still a Mac running OSX.
......those materials are pretty darn toxic and have disposal issues too....
Since you brought up the issue of safety, here is another one:
If that fully charged capacitor shorts and dumps all its energy suddenly, a blast like that made by about 350 pounds of dynamite would occur. Here we have the newest terrorist weapon. Set the car in a likely spot and short out its capacitor. Ka-booom!
For a small car it takes about 170kwh to go 500 miles on average. That means If there were 12 electrical "gas pumps" to charge 12 such ultra capacitor cars in 5 minutes, it would take a power line that could carry 24 million watts of electricity to service ONE such station!
To put the impracticality of this hare-brained scheme another way: If that fully charged capacitor shorts and dumps all its energy suddenly, a blast like that made by about 350 pounds of dynamite would occur. Of course capacitors, unlike Microsoft Windows, never fail catastrophically!
......to install Win XP on another computer........
Isn't it still Windows XP with a little bit of customization and configuration that any user might do? Exclusivity to a particular make also has something to do with their license agreements they have with MS. A retail store copy of XP should allow for the same kind of things.
.....Linux is a customer choice, a solution created by customers for customers precisely becuase the current model is not considered desirable over the long term........
It could also happen that if Apple gets say 30-35% market share, they will let selected other manufacturers build Mac clones again and license OSX to them. Once they get that much of the market, their profitability would not be threatened nearly as much as if the licensed their OS today.
To users other than/. geeks, what is the difference between Linux and OSX, other than that OSX works out of the box for everybody, not just computer experts. Both have the same Unix heritage, but OSX has many more easy to install and set up programs.
Neither will they support XP or VISTA forever. Most people, (/.ers excepted) when they need new functionality, will NOT upgrade their existing computer, but just buy a new one with all the bells and whistles. Meanwhile, the older computers will just keep on chugging away, until their owners need fatter, better nicer etc. systems. Some of these folks are getting Macs.
.....As far as I can tell, people who still use 2000 by choice are either ignorant or just dumb......
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Win2k the users just don't want to beg MS for permission to let them re-install a product they legally purchased whenever they made a significant change in their system or got a new computer after the old one went up in smoke? Win2k is the last OS from MS that doesn't ask a legit user for such permission and neither does OSX from Apple. Getting permission to re-install WINXP is like having to ask Ford to allow the refilling of the gas tank of the car they sold me.
......ALL MacOS X intel versions are intentionally crippled by Apple to prevent them from running on generic PC hardware......
Why is it that smart/. users STILL cannot get it through their heads that Apple is a HARDWARE maker who happens to make their own OS. There is nothing that prevents HP, Dell or any other hardware company from doing this also. if the did, would HP customers clamor to run the Dell operating system? Do Ford users clamor for Mercedes engines in their cars? Why should Apple write their OS do it would run on a Dell or other brand?
...Wether this is stupid to do or not should be entirely up to the copyright holder......
COPYright is not the same as INDEX right. A library may not COPY a book, but they may index it in their catalog so a user may find that book in the stacks. A librarian does not have to ask the publisher for permission to put the book's vital locating info into a catalog. Google does NOT copy a site, but only indexes it just the same as a library would a book so a user can find the site. Why should *any* site be able to prevent this indexing? Copyright is not involved, since there is no copying of the content. How is what Google is doing with web sites and different than what a librarian does with books?
....When was the last time you did a search for Amazon.com or BarnesAndNoble.com?.....
Not a direct search of course, but I have searched for stuff I wanted to buy and their site was among the top to show that I could get it form them, among others. There are also sites for shopping comparisons which help users find things.
....The only way around this, is for the news outlets to lobby for mandatory compensation within the law.....
What makes newspapers any different than other businesses? Why not pass a law that forces all phone companies to publish all businesses that have a phone in their yellow pages and pay each business for being listed? What makes a search engine different from the yellow pages? Are they not anything more than a world wide electronic yellow pages?
.....Original content needs to be generated somewhere.....
Content providers and search engines need each other. Anyone can create all sorts of cool content, but if it cannot be found, what good is it? Google is to the internet as the yellow pages to a phone book. A business has to PAY in order to be listed in the yellow pages. Here these businesses are complaining that they get listed for FREE. Free advertising almost always helps the bottom line of any business.
.....Isn't it obvious that these are competitors....
If they are competitors, then search engines such as Google should just de-list that publisher from ALL their searches until further notice from that publisher that they want to be listed after all. If said publisher notices a precipitous drop in their page views, they WILL come crawling back on their hands an knees to be re-instated.
Slashdot Mirror
.....I'm don't hate religions, I just hate the people that follow them.....
Are you sure of that sig? If so, you must hate everybody, including yourself and all atheists. Atheism is the religion of having no religion, based on belief like all others. Atheists don't KNOW there is no God, but BELIEVE this just as all other religions are based on belief.
.....You could use that much floating point for voice recognition without taxing your machine very much........
Do you really think that then we'd get a machine that anyone could talk English into and an always CORRECT Chinese would come out the other end as spoken by a native person from China? This would go for any other languages of course. The hardware could probably do this alright, but is there ANYONE who knows how to write such a program? Phone companies would love such a device.
....drive for creating a parallizing compiler would be massive.....
In the end though, either the compiler or the programmers who wrote the compiler would have to know how to break down a large number of jobs into components that can be done in parallel. In the real world however, whether done by people or computers, most jobs are serial, rather than parallel. Such an 80 core computer would be ideal for certain special jobs, but not for what most computers do today.
.....unless each process has it's own CPU.....
Even then, there has to a supervisor that controls the communications between and collates and delivers the output to a human at the end of the chain. Programming the supervision and control of only a few cores is already hard. Supervising 80 cores makes for a tough software job. If one extrapolates how long it took to bring out VISTA, how long might it be until someone (maybe even MS) comes out with an OS that will efficiently program an OS that can herd 80 processors? Doing this with cats may be easier.
.......As I said before.... to get 80 cores working properly is going to require huge amounts of memory as well as hugely wide buses out of the chips.........
So put however many terabytes of RAM and whatever other electronics needed on the chip. A whole supercomputer on a single chip with an optical I/O port.
The computer bottleneck is not in the hardware, but in the software that makes a computer more than a doorstop. As VISTA has shown by its (non)-appearance, programming powerful general purpose systems is not so easy. Software not only has to do a good job, but the system must be resistant to malicious programming and random errors. Even the best software designers are finding this to be a tough nut to crack.
Because of this, limited specialized software may be able to utilize such hardware for a few applications, but not for general purpose computing such as is done with PCs today. Even for people, problems cannot be easily broken down so that many workers can get a job done more quickly than only a few. Putting 80 people to work digging a 20 foot ditch would be slower than if there were only a few, say 4, for example. Most things we encounter in the real world are that way. In most jobs the output of one worker becomes the input of the next one. There are not that many jobs that can be done in parallel.
.... these chips will be severe overkill for PCs and will be outside any typical user's price range......
I wouldn't be so sure of that. After all, a modern laptop has more computing power than ALL the mainframes IBM made up to 1975 or so.
The production, and to a degree, the design of hardware can be automated. Much of the building of physical stuff is done by machines, but software is a pure product of mind. Products of mind, software, literature, music, photos and video etc. cannot be automated much, if at all. Therefore, with the (bad) example of VISTA before us, it may be that writing software to utilize such hardware may elude us. Even the fanciest hardware, without commensurate software, would make such a computer with 80 cores nothing more than a very expensive doorstop.
There are certainly problems that, theoretically at least, such computers could solve, but actually telling them to do this (programming) will be very hard. Maybe much more research needs to be done how we use that fancy computer between our ears, before we can program such massive computers effectively.
Just one example: How do we recognize MEANING and in doing so react with joy, anger, surprise or so many other ways to our understanding of what was communicated? Nobody really knows how WE do this, so it is not likely that without such knowledge it would be possible to program a computer to do this or other things that even a three year old knows how to do.
.......I assume you're talking input power ......
No, I was saying that it takes between 300 and 500 watt-hours of real energy delivered to the wheels of a car like a Civic to travel on level ground at 60mph for each mile. Hilly terrain takes more, even with regenerative braking recovering part of the energy when going downhill. 170kwh is on the low end for small cars to go 500 miles.
However, most cars don't go much over 50 miles a day most of the time. That daily energy use can come out of an electric stove sized outlet, overnight in anybody's house. For long distance travel and large vehicles, some kind of fuel driven engine is the only known practical alternative even on the distant horizon. Bio-diesel motors or hydrogen fuel cells should work for this. Both could get us away from fossil fuels and possible man caused global warming troubles.
Capacitors, ultra or otherwise, can accept and deliver their energy very rapidly, explosively in fact. Even a capacitor with enough energy stored to drive a small car only 50 miles could be as dangerous as about 35 pounds of dynamite. Like so much of technology, there are up-sides and downsides.
.....There currently isn't enough reserve capacity to handle a massive buildout of electric vehicles ......
Not really true, if the charging is done at off peak times. Take a look at the California electric load curve and you can see how much extra power could be available to charge cars.
http://www.caiso.com/outlook/SystemStatus.html
Most cars don't drive more than maybe 50-60 miles in a day and could easily be re-charged over night with a 10-15KW charger. An electric stove outlet would provide enough current for such a charging device. If there are enough such chargers, the curve would be flat or even reverse, shifting the peaks to the night time hours.
....Adding a few million electric vehicles into the mix would bring our power system to its knees.......
This would only be true if everybody wanted to charge their car in 5 minutes from fully dead to fully charged. If the average daily drive is about 50 miles and the time to charge is over night (8-10hrs) the average house and the grid could carry that amount of power. Use at night is down anyway, so this would even out the daily grid load fluctuations. Recharging on a long trip would still be problematic however. Making a hybrid with a bio-diesel engine would solve that problem. After about 200 miles the engine would start and keep the capacitor storage system at that level. Around town the engine would never run.
....The individual capacitors were only charged to about 2.5 V, which I understand is typical for ultracaps. (The whole bank was in series, for a total of 270V)......
The amount of energy stored in a capacitor goes up with the square of the voltage and linearly with the capacitance. The capacitance in turn is related to the internal area of the capacitance elements. The stored energy is generally measured in Joules. Putting capacitors in series is difficult and if not done precisely right, will cause one of them to short because it gets too much voltage. This can start a cascade effect where the entire bank can quickly blow out, like a set of falling dominoes.
A set of ultra-capacitors with the same energy storage and size as one of the infamos Sony laptop batteries we read about recently, would discharge its energy many times faster than the chemical reaction of the battery in case of a short and likely kill the owner in a spectacular blast. Charged capacitors are very dangerous devices, if they store significant amounts of energy.
....Actually, I've seen a fully-charged ultracapacitor explode: it's not really that impressive.......
How much total energy was stored in that capacitor you saw blow up? The amount of energy in a tank full of fuel is quite large. Suddenly releasing it will make for a devastating explosion. The Oklahoma Federal Building was essentially destroyed by the energy from fuel in a quantity which was about what a normal semi-truck might carry. The fuel was caused to burn very rapidly (explode) by adding an oxidizer. An ultra capacitor would have to store a similar quantity of energy.
Capacitors in general, including ultra capacitors have a very low impedance and can therefore deliver their stored energy extremely rapidly to any load including a dead short. That's why they use large capacitor banks to power monster lasers, such as they have at Livermore National Laboratories. Driving a car with one of these inside would be like having 350-550lbs of dynamite rattling around in the trunk. A normal car gas tank may also explode under the right conditions, but if it does, it will not wipe out the better part of a city block.
.....The average influx of energy to the "gas" station would be no different than today.......
How much energy a gas pump hose delivers in 5 minutes is very impressive. To do that with electricity is just not practical.
.....A much better measure of security is how many days the users spend being vulnerable.......
The best measure is how many computers of a given OS actually get hacked each year. By that only real measure that matters, OSX is still the safest OS that anyone can own and operate without being a hacker themselves.
Don't anybody come with the old saw about Macs having only a small fraction of the market. If my house is safer against intruders than other houses, does it really matter WHY it is safer? The safest OS "house" is still a Mac running OSX.
......those materials are pretty darn toxic and have disposal issues too....
Since you brought up the issue of safety, here is another one:
If that fully charged capacitor shorts and dumps all its energy suddenly, a blast like that made by about 350 pounds of dynamite would occur. Here we have the newest terrorist weapon. Set the car in a likely spot and short out its capacitor. Ka-booom!
....has anyone done the math here??....
Yes!
For a small car it takes about 170kwh to go 500 miles on average. That means If there were 12 electrical "gas pumps" to charge 12 such ultra capacitor cars in 5 minutes, it would take a power line that could carry 24 million watts of electricity to service ONE such station!
To put the impracticality of this hare-brained scheme another way: If that fully charged capacitor shorts and dumps all its energy suddenly, a blast like that made by about 350 pounds of dynamite would occur. Of course capacitors, unlike Microsoft Windows, never fail catastrophically!
......to install Win XP on another computer........
Isn't it still Windows XP with a little bit of customization and configuration that any user might do? Exclusivity to a particular make also has something to do with their license agreements they have with MS. A retail store copy of XP should allow for the same kind of things.
.....Linux is a customer choice, a solution created by customers for customers precisely becuase the current model is not considered desirable over the long term........
/. geeks, what is the difference between Linux and OSX, other than that OSX works out of the box for everybody, not just computer experts. Both have the same Unix heritage, but OSX has many more easy to install and set up programs.
It could also happen that if Apple gets say 30-35% market share, they will let selected other manufacturers build Mac clones again and license OSX to them. Once they get that much of the market, their profitability would not be threatened nearly as much as if the licensed their OS today.
To users other than
.....Microsoft won't support W2K forever.....
Neither will they support XP or VISTA forever. Most people, (/.ers excepted) when they need new functionality, will NOT upgrade their existing computer, but just buy a new one with all the bells and whistles. Meanwhile, the older computers will just keep on chugging away, until their owners need fatter, better nicer etc. systems. Some of these folks are getting Macs.
.....As far as I can tell, people who still use 2000 by choice are either ignorant or just dumb......
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Win2k the users just don't want to beg MS for permission to let them re-install a product they legally purchased whenever they made a significant change in their system or got a new computer after the old one went up in smoke? Win2k is the last OS from MS that doesn't ask a legit user for such permission and neither does OSX from Apple. Getting permission to re-install WINXP is like having to ask Ford to allow the refilling of the gas tank of the car they sold me.
......ALL MacOS X intel versions are intentionally crippled by Apple to prevent them from running on generic PC hardware......
/. users STILL cannot get it through their heads that Apple is a HARDWARE maker who happens to make their own OS. There is nothing that prevents HP, Dell or any other hardware company from doing this also. if the did, would HP customers clamor to run the Dell operating system? Do Ford users clamor for Mercedes engines in their cars? Why should Apple write their OS do it would run on a Dell or other brand?
Why is it that smart
...Wether this is stupid to do or not should be entirely up to the copyright holder......
COPYright is not the same as INDEX right. A library may not COPY a book, but they may index it in their catalog so a user may find that book in the stacks. A librarian does not have to ask the publisher for permission to put the book's vital locating info into a catalog. Google does NOT copy a site, but only indexes it just the same as a library would a book so a user can find the site. Why should *any* site be able to prevent this indexing? Copyright is not involved, since there is no copying of the content. How is what Google is doing with web sites and different than what a librarian does with books?
....When was the last time you did a search for Amazon.com or BarnesAndNoble.com?.....
Not a direct search of course, but I have searched for stuff I wanted to buy and their site was among the top to show that I could get it form them, among others. There are also sites for shopping comparisons which help users find things.
....The only way around this, is for the news outlets to lobby for mandatory compensation within the law.....
What makes newspapers any different than other businesses? Why not pass a law that forces all phone companies to publish all businesses that have a phone in their yellow pages and pay each business for being listed? What makes a search engine different from the yellow pages? Are they not anything more than a world wide electronic yellow pages?
.....Original content needs to be generated somewhere.....
Content providers and search engines need each other. Anyone can create all sorts of cool content, but if it cannot be found, what good is it? Google is to the internet as the yellow pages to a phone book. A business has to PAY in order to be listed in the yellow pages. Here these businesses are complaining that they get listed for FREE. Free advertising almost always helps the bottom line of any business.
.....Isn't it obvious that these are competitors....
If they are competitors, then search engines such as Google should just de-list that publisher from ALL their searches until further notice from that publisher that they want to be listed after all. If said publisher notices a precipitous drop in their page views, they WILL come crawling back on their hands an knees to be re-instated.