A brief disclaimer, I am an american who has now been living in Brazil for the last three years.
Microsoft is just following what the game industry has been doing for the past few years here.
The huge amount of pirated software and DVD's, and CD's at places around Brazil has actually caused the prices of the legitimate versions to drop dramatically. Piracy it seems does make a difference.
I can get a legitimate copy of any top shelf PC game in Brazil now for about $10 US. The only difference is it comes with a Brazil manual and a huge sticker saying NOT FOR SALE OUTSIDE OF THAILAND.
Buying a pirate copy of that same game costs: $6. (so if it's a 2 CD game, then the price is $9. if it's a 4cd game it's MORE expensive to buy the pirate version!)
Apparently the manufacturers think they can still make a profit selling games for $10 USD. They are actually trying to compete with pirates, rather than arrest them, and it seems to be working. People are buying more games, and less pirated ones.
That's not to say if Brazil wasn't blessed with an incredibly corrupt and ineffectual law enforcement, things wouldn't be different.;)
A stripped down version of Windows XP and Office XP could be infinitely better than the full versions in the USA if the right features were removed- remove active scripting and VBA from these products, take out a good percentage of the obscure features of Office that no one uses, and presto- a less bloated, more secure computing environment that just happens to have the MS logo on it. It would be a bargain provided Clippy was left out.
Hell, for 38 bucks I would give it a try if they rolled it out here and made it USABLE. Of course they won't do that, because this whole tactic is about training the next generation of PC owners (developing nations) to become dependant upon MS crack.
I've read several stories about this stripped version of Windows, and what they all fail to mention is that it also lacks Product Activation. Sure, Product Activation in Asia is like duct taping your BMW's door shut in Detroit, but it's still significant.
People in Brazil can share their copies with their friends and family. But those of us in the rest of the non-Starter-Edition cannot. It just makes NO sense.
This is the software equivalent of those first cigarettes behind the toilet block. You know, the ones that get you hooked for life.
Take me for example. I wanted to play old games with people across the internet which required an IPX network. Microsoft's home grown solution is their VPN client/eserver package which is naturally built into the entire user/security system. Anyway I wanted to use this system for gaming, just one problem: I had/have windows xp professional. This version of windows has an arbitrary limit of one VPN connection. If I want multiple VPN connections I need to buy Advanced Server. Now coming from their point of view there might be some sort of reason for this cripple ware, but coming from my point of view they want me to pay a couple thousand bucks to play old games.
How does this make me feel? Infuriated. I have yet to find a suitable replacement (there used to be a few online services which created IPX networks but you had to play by their rules and pay monthly fees). Thank you Microsoft, for dangling the carrot in front of my face, letting me smell it, and then ripping it away. The final snub is (I am told) when installing Advanced Server it asks you how many connections you want to be able to accept.
Ah well it really just comes down to me complaining, but it sure doesn't make me like Microsoft anymore. Remember when Notepad used to have an arbitrary file size limit? (The limit value wasn't arbitrary, the fact that they had it was)... Good times.
People who end up with WindowsXP starter edition do not buy it directly. The OEM does for them.
THis is why I could not stand the arguments like "Consumers chose MS with their wallets..." when the anti trust trial was going on.
Lusers do not know what Linux is or care. All they know is they bought a computer and want to plug it in and use it. Do they even know what an OS is?
I looked at the WindowsXP crippled errr starter edition in the link of the story. It is crippled regardless of what MS may tell you otherwise so they can get you to fork over $200 (alot of money in third world countries) if you want features like resolutions above 800 x 600. The users in these countries never owned a pc so they have no concept of features nor care.
My point is training video's will help users of course learn the os but they will only use what comes with their computer and nothing else. Installing software or requiring them to learn is too much of an effort. Many I bet wont even click the video's because that would be too much of an effort.
The exception would be a dos oriented computer which many OEM's like HP include in the countries that install the starter edition. Since dos requires the users to actually learn commands, most will find a friend to install WindowsXP for them so they can use a mouse with the nice pretty icons.
The restrictions in Starter Edition (low maximum resolution, limited number of applications that can be run at once) are completely arbitrary. Microsoft hasn't put these restrictions in place because it makes the software cheaper, it has put them in place because it wants to force a cheaper version to be less functional.
The problem is that, regardless of whether users would actually need the functionality that Starter Edition doesn't have, people won't like it. People are simply averse to buying products that have been deliberately crippled. It doesn't matter whether the restrictions affect them, they feel insulted by being offered something that has been willfully hobbled.
Maybe in the coming days of Longhorn, Microsoft should sell a standard Shorthorn version, with built-in limitation.
I believe normal users don't really know/care the differences, but if you tell them A is a standard version, it has xx features, they can also buy B with x features, people tend to choose former.
However, if you tell consumers A is a standard version with x features, they can also buy a premium version with xx features, people still tend to choose the former, but some of them will upgrade to the latter simply because it is better.
Oh by the way, naming it Shorthorn is just as bad as XP Starter, MS should have the standard Longhorn with fewer features, and come out market Longerhorn as the premium.
Frankly, I'm bewildered at the responses here resisting the change to SMP. I've never understood the focus on pure MHz as opposed to parallelism and MHz. Anyone on an SMP box that is multitasking sees the benefits of SMP immediately. You can work with a completely responsive system even when you have a compute-intensive non-SMP-aware process hogging a CPU. This is not the case with single CPU sysems.
What we have here is simply the fact that, as always, software is years behind the hardware it runs on. This is a classic chicken-and-the-egg situation. "There's no SMP software, so why by a dual?" vs. "Nobody has SMP hardware, so why write SMP-aware apps?".
Thankfully, there are many SMP-aware apps available, not even getting to the fact that with single-threaded apps on SMP you can for example encode video and do other CPU-intensive tasks simultaneously and at their "native" speeds.
Games are probably the worst example to use for touting SMP benefits because they are written with the single-CPU mindset. This is a software shortcoming, yet many posters see this is a flaw of SMP? Silly. If you're using games as an SMP detraction, then you're not the target for SMP until the software is written to take advantage of SMP. Again, this is a software shortcoming, not a hardware flaw.
Then we have the "well office-type users have no need for SMP". Well, that may be true, but so is the fact that office use does not require >1GHz CPU's, yet offices are filled with >1GHz machines. The nature of the "CPU business" is such that your products must constantly improve, or you will soon become irrelevant. You can only make CPU's run so fast in the physical world, so after you've wrung all the easy MHz gains out of a process, what's the next "easy" gain? Parallelism. We don't expect Intel, AMD, et al to just say "Well, that's it, we can make them no faster", do we? Heck no. Instead of more MHz, we now have more cores. The software will follow, and in the meantime the hardware is usuable now.
The fact of the matter is this: there are real, physical limitations to the manufacture of ever higher speed CPU's. We're going to hit the brick wall shortly using current processes, so the next logical step is to parallelize the CPU. If you can't make 'em faster, then you divide and conquer.
As someone who runs a few SMP systems, I, for one, welcome our dual-core overlords. So I can run dual-core? Heck no, that's for the gamers and office-workers;). I'll settle for no less than dual dual-cores, getting more accomplished in a shorter frame of time with little to no effort on my part.
This will lower the barrier of entry for SMP use for the masses. After they are dragged, kicking and screaming to SMP, people will notice a smoother, more productive computing environment. Also, us dual-CPU folk can now move up to quad cores with relatively little additional expense. As SMP moves into the mainstream, the software will follow. Any programmer worth his salt knows that it is trivial to parallelize many compute intensive tasks such as media encoding/manipulation, imaging, rendering etc. Now that the hardware is (almost) here, the apps will follow.
I am sincerely interested in hearing any response to these points I've made.
I would rather have faster processors than multiple cores
The way I see it, every CPU package has essentially a 'thermal envelope' that you can't go beyond without drastically changing case designs or cooling methods. For passively cooled CPU's this would be in the order of 10W, for actively cooled CPU's the ~100W figures for some desktop Pentium 4's are pushing the limit.
Instead of pushing things like BTX cases or watercooling, I'd rather see chipmakers use new technology to improve thermal/power ratio of their chips. I don't need a CPU that's 3 times as fast, upping power consumption once again. Give me a CPU that does twice the work using a smaller amount of energy.
There's lots of room for improvement here. Examples: when a CPU sits idle, does that mean a drastic drop in power consumption? In many cases: no. Win9x systems drop into a full power no-op running loop, and 'halt' state power consumption only works well with newer CPU's when chipsets are configured to enable a low-power state. Often, this isn't the case, for whatever reason. Then take mobile CPU's (in same physical package), and features like varying core voltage with CPU load (Speedstep, PowerNow! or whatever). Nice, but many desktop motherboards or BIOS'es don't support it, or have it disabled. IMHO, chipmakers like AMD or Intel would better focus on improved motherboard/chipset/BIOS support for these things (through co-operation with mobo makers), than just making their CPU's faster.
And yes, I do know AMD is on the right track here with their x86-64 chips ('Cool 'n Quiet'). Maybe one reason their desktop market share is doing so well lately? I'd go for it, anyway.
Few people realize that Moore's Law is just one component of an even greater overall exponential trend which has been called The Law of Accelerating Returns (by Ray Kurzweil).
Basically, it has been observed that any evolutionary process (including technology) will progress exponentially as it builds on past progress, with barely perceptable slow-down/speed-up "S-curves" as paradigm shifts occur.
Moore's Law is certainly an important component of this trend, as it relates to computing power and eventual AI/IA accelerating to Singularity in ~25 years, but there are many others in parallel: storage space, networking bandwidth, # of internet nodes, transportation speed, etc.
One thing that certainly ISN'T keeping pace with our technology is our old evolutionary psychology; hopefully we can fix some of the more disgusting aspects of human nature before it's too late.
It seems you are forgetting that fiction has an important role in society. It looks like you think that anything fictitious is not worth any effort whatsoever.
But in fact, science fiction and other forms of speculation DO have an important role to play. If you watch PBS a lot (as do I) you know that they will frequently run documentaries on subjects such as the Apollo lunar program. While the documentaries will focus on the 'how it was done' aspect and interview scientists and researchers and other individuals who worked on those projects, they will also sometimes mention the inspiration for them. And it's important to pay attention to those things.
Take the case of Jules Verne, for instance. Verne was a prodigious science fiction writer who imagined Project Apollo to an amazing degree of accuracy -- his ship looked roughly like Apollo's command and service modules, was roughly the same size, carried a three-person crew, was named Columbia, and was launched from the coast of Florida. This is almost exactly how the Apollo program operated by the time the first actual manned lunar mission was launched in 1968 (Apollo 8; no landing actually occurred until 1969.)
Now, while it is true that many people did not believe such a thing was possible (Robert Goddard was laughed at for believing that a rocket would function in a vacuum, for instance) and Verne's stories were dismissed as fantasy (nuclear-powered submarines!? Are you crazy!?) they came true, in time.
Going back to Project Apollo, you may or may not remember that the first few crews to visit the Moon were quarantined upon their return to make sure that there were no dangerous organisms on them or their clothing or in their spacecraft. The fear of a possible contamination of Earth was raised, in part, by Michael Crichton's novel The Andromeda Strain, as well as by points raised by the scientific community. As a result, quarantines continued until we had enough experience with returning Apollo crews to believe that they were no longer necessary. (Apollo 12's recovery of Surveyor hardware, and the subsequent discovery of terrestrial bacteria surviving on some of that equipment, proved that organisms could survive for long periods of time in space.)
We have also been influenced by other major works of science fiction (War of the Worlds' radio broadcast, for instance, has long been held as an example of how we might react to the idea of hostile alien life, and ET is an example of how we could react to more friendly aliens.)
For something to happen, it has to be imagined first. Sometimes, that takes the form of science fiction stories. Not worth it? Far from it. We'll be forever stuck in the present and never stop to imagine what might come in the future without the ideas that come from those who dare to say "Hey, what if this was possible?"
Man, remember all those people "flaming" over the freedom of tools on the lists? What was with them, anyway? Aren't they just starting a "religious war?" Who cares if this tool is free. It didn't cost me anything. Those crazy license zealots.
But wait.
Now, look what happened. The company (or individual) that was your friend a couple of years ago, decides today that you've offended them. Now they are taking their ball and going home.
Now you are stuck. You need to replace what they gave you. Oh, it'll cost you: manpower, lost opportunities, potentially a pile of pesos... Get ready for a painful transition. And as annoying and dangerous as this is for source control in mainline kernel development, there are many, many scenarios where this kind of manuevering will screw you much worse - alienating your customers, stranding years of development, the whole works.
This is why freedom matters.
And what is BitMover so upset about? That anyone would dare compete with them?
The audacity!
Does any vendor of a commercial product have a moral high ground to complain when a competitor appears? And whose problem is it if they are trying to charge money for something other will do for free?
If this holds it may begin to show that the profits from spamming are just too risky, and others may not wish to try it. On the other hand, bankruptcy is often just a shield to protect assets. Maybe with a combination of civil and criminal action we will one day see a reduction in spam.
Last time, Caltech students hacked the 1961 Rose Bowl game:
One Caltech student posed as a reporter and 'interviewed' the director of the University of Washington card stunts (such stunts involve people in the stands who hold up colored cards to make pictures). The reporter learned exactly how the stunts were operated, and also that the director would be out to dinner later.
While the director was eating, the students (who called themselves the 'Fiendish Fourteen') picked a lock and stole a blank direction sheet for the card stunts. They then had a printer run off 2300 copies of the blank. The next day they picked the lock again and stole the master plans for the stunts -- large sheets of graph paper colored in with the stunt pictures. Using these as a guide, they made new instructions for three of the stunts on the duplicated blanks. Finally, they broke in once more, replacing the stolen master plans and substituting the stack of diddled instruction sheets for the original set.
The result was that three of the pictures were totally different. Instead of 'WASHINGTON', the word 'CALTECH' was flashed. Another stunt showed the word 'HUSKIES', the Washington nickname, but spelled it backwards. And what was supposed to have been a picture of a husky instead showed a beaver (nature's engineer-- the Caltech mascot).
...is to get this developed to the point where it could replace a wheelchair. The psychological advantage to a person who'd lost the use of his legs to actually stand up and interact with the world "eye to eye" would have to be powerful. It probably also doesn't hurt to keep the muscles moving and the appropriate neural pathways firing.
The reason no one has ever actively pursued exoskeletons is because they would be so inefficient. Tanks and such are built with a low profile, and if you ask frontline soldiers, they are only useful in limited roles. My army friend much prefers the new strykers because of their flexibility and reliability.
A mecha would be standing 20 feet in the battlefied, an open and tempting target to everything from bombers to tanks to helicopters and to RPGs. It would have limited mobility, be extremely difficult to keep in working condition, and will have less load capacity than its tracked or wheeled counterparts. In short, it would look cool, but would be a useless coffin.
In BattleTech, they make up for the obvious disadvantages of a mecha by giving them advantages over vehicles. Mecha are more reliable, more maneuvarable, able to take more damage and continue to function, and can carry more weapons. Even then, if you pit a balanced vehicle force against a balanced mecha force, ton for ton, credit for credit, the vehicles can easily overpower the mecha in most circumstances.
I don't want to discourage this project. After all, how many inventions were made when there was no necessity, but a necessity was found at a later time? But I do want folks to exercise a bit of common sense. If exoskeletons were such a great idea, we'd have used them in WWII. We certainly had the technology to build them back then.
-- Grab a Free PSP And a Free DS (or PS2/GC/XB). Proof It Works (and more info)
Sure, it wouldn't be as "sexy" as the X-Prize, but wouldn't some privately sponsored prize money do wonders for this longtime human dream? Call it, say, the Mecha Prize, and offer a few million bucks to whoever builds the first mecha that can go a half mile, pick up a Dodge Neon and move it in the air for 50 feet, then return to the starting line. Or something similar.
I have no doubt that someone as creative as Rutan is out there, and with a little incentive and the promise of some real financial gain could use modern actuators and pressure pads and gyro sensors and so forth to finally create a useful mecha.
..is to build a big robot exoskeleton you can use to crush your enemies... Now this is news for nerds!!
But seriously, robots like this have been science fiction for decades, it's interesting to see respectable institutions taking this seriously. I imagine successful implementation of this technology would again change the face of warfare. With anti-aircraft missles easily mountable on each soilder, perhaps air power will not always be king?
Before this gets too far, somebody should call NORAD and ask them how many of the 2500+ satellites and other odd bits of junk traveling at 17551mph (LEO) cross the Equator (ascending and descending nodes) and might present a collision hazard. I could be wrong, but shouldn't the answer should be "Almost all of them."
This reminds me of the asteroid/comet problem, the probability of a significant impact might be low, but it only takes one.
What provides the orbital speed of the cargo?
on
Space Elevator Update
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Something I never heared anybody about: Where does the kinetic energy come from that the cargo gains when ascending into orbit? Somehow the cargo needs to gain a huge amount of kinetic energy, because the top of the elevator moves several km/s faster then the bottom. If nothing compensates for this energy, the counter weight would gradually slow down and deorbit, so there must be some kind of propulsion in the counterweight, pushing it prograde whenever cargo ascends and pushing retrograde when cargo descends. Anybody got more info on this?
Slashdot Mirror
lol dumbass. gg.
A prototype of the later is believed to the world's smallest flying web server.
Latter, not later. Hey editors, maybe you should try reading your stories before posting them.
I've actually used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Hah, I think I'm going crazy! I've forgotten this before.
A brief disclaimer, I am an american who has now been living in Brazil for the last three years.
;)
Microsoft is just following what the game industry has been doing for the past few years here.
The huge amount of pirated software and DVD's, and CD's at places around Brazil has actually caused the prices of the legitimate versions to drop dramatically. Piracy it seems does make a difference.
I can get a legitimate copy of any top shelf PC game in Brazil now for about $10 US. The only difference is it comes with a Brazil manual and a huge sticker saying NOT FOR SALE OUTSIDE OF THAILAND.
Buying a pirate copy of that same game costs: $6. (so if it's a 2 CD game, then the price is $9. if it's a 4cd game it's MORE expensive to buy the pirate version!)
Apparently the manufacturers think they can still make a profit selling games for $10 USD. They are actually trying to compete with pirates, rather than arrest them, and it seems to be working. People are buying more games, and less pirated ones.
That's not to say if Brazil wasn't blessed with an incredibly corrupt and ineffectual law enforcement, things wouldn't be different.
A stripped down version of Windows XP and Office XP could be infinitely better than the full versions in the USA if the right features were removed- remove active scripting and VBA from these products, take out a good percentage of the obscure features of Office that no one uses, and presto- a less bloated, more secure computing environment that just happens to have the MS logo on it. It would be a bargain provided Clippy was left out.
Hell, for 38 bucks I would give it a try if they rolled it out here and made it USABLE. Of course they won't do that, because this whole tactic is about training the next generation of PC owners (developing nations) to become dependant upon MS crack.
I've read several stories about this stripped version of Windows, and what they all fail to mention is that it also lacks Product Activation. Sure, Product Activation in Asia is like duct taping your BMW's door shut in Detroit, but it's still significant.
People in Brazil can share their copies with their friends and family. But those of us in the rest of the non-Starter-Edition cannot. It just makes NO sense.
This is the software equivalent of those first cigarettes behind the toilet block. You know, the ones that get you hooked for life.
Take me for example. I wanted to play old games with people across the internet which required an IPX network. Microsoft's home grown solution is their VPN client/eserver package which is naturally built into the entire user/security system. Anyway I wanted to use this system for gaming, just one problem: I had/have windows xp professional. This version of windows has an arbitrary limit of one VPN connection. If I want multiple VPN connections I need to buy Advanced Server. Now coming from their point of view there might be some sort of reason for this cripple ware, but coming from my point of view they want me to pay a couple thousand bucks to play old games.
How does this make me feel? Infuriated. I have yet to find a suitable replacement (there used to be a few online services which created IPX networks but you had to play by their rules and pay monthly fees). Thank you Microsoft, for dangling the carrot in front of my face, letting me smell it, and then ripping it away. The final snub is (I am told) when installing Advanced Server it asks you how many connections you want to be able to accept.
Ah well it really just comes down to me complaining, but it sure doesn't make me like Microsoft anymore. Remember when Notepad used to have an arbitrary file size limit? (The limit value wasn't arbitrary, the fact that they had it was)... Good times.
People who end up with WindowsXP starter edition do not buy it directly. The OEM does for them.
THis is why I could not stand the arguments like "Consumers chose MS with their wallets..." when the anti trust trial was going on.
Lusers do not know what Linux is or care. All they know is they bought a computer and want to plug it in and use it. Do they even know what an OS is?
I looked at the WindowsXP crippled errr starter edition in the link of the story. It is crippled regardless of what MS may tell you otherwise so they can get you to fork over $200 (alot of money in third world countries) if you want features like resolutions above 800 x 600. The users in these countries never owned a pc so they have no concept of features nor care.
My point is training video's will help users of course learn the os but they will only use what comes with their computer and nothing else. Installing software or requiring them to learn is too much of an effort. Many I bet wont even click the video's because that would be too much of an effort.
The exception would be a dos oriented computer which many OEM's like HP include in the countries that install the starter edition. Since dos requires the users to actually learn commands, most will find a friend to install WindowsXP for them so they can use a mouse with the nice pretty icons.
The restrictions in Starter Edition (low maximum resolution, limited number of applications that can be run at once) are completely arbitrary. Microsoft hasn't put these restrictions in place because it makes the software cheaper, it has put them in place because it wants to force a cheaper version to be less functional.
The problem is that, regardless of whether users would actually need the functionality that Starter Edition doesn't have, people won't like it. People are simply averse to buying products that have been deliberately crippled. It doesn't matter whether the restrictions affect them, they feel insulted by being offered something that has been willfully hobbled.
Maybe in the coming days of Longhorn, Microsoft should sell a standard Shorthorn version, with built-in limitation.
I believe normal users don't really know/care the differences, but if you tell them A is a standard version, it has xx features, they can also buy B with x features, people tend to choose former.
However, if you tell consumers A is a standard version with x features, they can also buy a premium version with xx features, people still tend to choose the former, but some of them will upgrade to the latter simply because it is better.
Oh by the way, naming it Shorthorn is just as bad as XP Starter, MS should have the standard Longhorn with fewer features, and come out market Longerhorn as the premium.
Frankly, I'm bewildered at the responses here resisting the change to SMP. I've never understood the focus on pure MHz as opposed to parallelism and MHz. Anyone on an SMP box that is multitasking sees the benefits of SMP immediately. You can work with a completely responsive system even when you have a compute-intensive non-SMP-aware process hogging a CPU. This is not the case with single CPU sysems.
;). I'll settle for no less than dual dual-cores, getting more accomplished in a shorter frame of time with little to no effort on my part.
What we have here is simply the fact that, as always, software is years behind the hardware it runs on. This is a classic chicken-and-the-egg situation. "There's no SMP software, so why by a dual?" vs. "Nobody has SMP hardware, so why write SMP-aware apps?".
Thankfully, there are many SMP-aware apps available, not even getting to the fact that with single-threaded apps on SMP you can for example encode video and do other CPU-intensive tasks simultaneously and at their "native" speeds.
Games are probably the worst example to use for touting SMP benefits because they are written with the single-CPU mindset. This is a software shortcoming, yet many posters see this is a flaw of SMP? Silly. If you're using games as an SMP detraction, then you're not the target for SMP until the software is written to take advantage of SMP. Again, this is a software shortcoming, not a hardware flaw.
Then we have the "well office-type users have no need for SMP". Well, that may be true, but so is the fact that office use does not require >1GHz CPU's, yet offices are filled with >1GHz machines. The nature of the "CPU business" is such that your products must constantly improve, or you will soon become irrelevant. You can only make CPU's run so fast in the physical world, so after you've wrung all the easy MHz gains out of a process, what's the next "easy" gain? Parallelism. We don't expect Intel, AMD, et al to just say "Well, that's it, we can make them no faster", do we? Heck no. Instead of more MHz, we now have more cores. The software will follow, and in the meantime the hardware is usuable now.
The fact of the matter is this: there are real, physical limitations to the manufacture of ever higher speed CPU's. We're going to hit the brick wall shortly using current processes, so the next logical step is to parallelize the CPU. If you can't make 'em faster, then you divide and conquer.
As someone who runs a few SMP systems, I, for one, welcome our dual-core overlords. So I can run dual-core? Heck no, that's for the gamers and office-workers
This will lower the barrier of entry for SMP use for the masses. After they are dragged, kicking and screaming to SMP, people will notice a smoother, more productive computing environment. Also, us dual-CPU folk can now move up to quad cores with relatively little additional expense. As SMP moves into the mainstream, the software will follow. Any programmer worth his salt knows that it is trivial to parallelize many compute intensive tasks such as media encoding/manipulation, imaging, rendering etc. Now that the hardware is (almost) here, the apps will follow.
I am sincerely interested in hearing any response to these points I've made.
I would rather have faster processors than multiple cores
The way I see it, every CPU package has essentially a 'thermal envelope' that you can't go beyond without drastically changing case designs or cooling methods. For passively cooled CPU's this would be in the order of 10W, for actively cooled CPU's the ~100W figures for some desktop Pentium 4's are pushing the limit.
Instead of pushing things like BTX cases or watercooling, I'd rather see chipmakers use new technology to improve thermal/power ratio of their chips. I don't need a CPU that's 3 times as fast, upping power consumption once again. Give me a CPU that does twice the work using a smaller amount of energy.
There's lots of room for improvement here. Examples: when a CPU sits idle, does that mean a drastic drop in power consumption? In many cases: no. Win9x systems drop into a full power no-op running loop, and 'halt' state power consumption only works well with newer CPU's when chipsets are configured to enable a low-power state. Often, this isn't the case, for whatever reason.
Then take mobile CPU's (in same physical package), and features like varying core voltage with CPU load (Speedstep, PowerNow! or whatever). Nice, but many desktop motherboards or BIOS'es don't support it, or have it disabled. IMHO, chipmakers like AMD or Intel would better focus on improved motherboard/chipset/BIOS support for these things (through co-operation with mobo makers), than just making their CPU's faster.
And yes, I do know AMD is on the right track here with their x86-64 chips ('Cool 'n Quiet'). Maybe one reason their desktop market share is doing so well lately? I'd go for it, anyway.
Basically, it has been observed that any evolutionary process (including technology) will progress exponentially as it builds on past progress, with barely perceptable slow-down/speed-up "S-curves" as paradigm shifts occur.
Moore's Law is certainly an important component of this trend, as it relates to computing power and eventual AI/IA accelerating to Singularity in ~25 years, but there are many others in parallel: storage space, networking bandwidth, # of internet nodes, transportation speed, etc.
One thing that certainly ISN'T keeping pace with our technology is our old evolutionary psychology; hopefully we can fix some of the more disgusting aspects of human nature before it's too late.
It seems you are forgetting that fiction has an important role in society. It looks like you think that anything fictitious is not worth any effort whatsoever.
But in fact, science fiction and other forms of speculation DO have an important role to play. If you watch PBS a lot (as do I) you know that they will frequently run documentaries on subjects such as the Apollo lunar program. While the documentaries will focus on the 'how it was done' aspect and interview scientists and researchers and other individuals who worked on those projects, they will also sometimes mention the inspiration for them. And it's important to pay attention to those things.
Take the case of Jules Verne, for instance. Verne was a prodigious science fiction writer who imagined Project Apollo to an amazing degree of accuracy -- his ship looked roughly like Apollo's command and service modules, was roughly the same size, carried a three-person crew, was named Columbia, and was launched from the coast of Florida. This is almost exactly how the Apollo program operated by the time the first actual manned lunar mission was launched in 1968 (Apollo 8; no landing actually occurred until 1969.)
Now, while it is true that many people did not believe such a thing was possible (Robert Goddard was laughed at for believing that a rocket would function in a vacuum, for instance) and Verne's stories were dismissed as fantasy (nuclear-powered submarines!? Are you crazy!?) they came true, in time.
Going back to Project Apollo, you may or may not remember that the first few crews to visit the Moon were quarantined upon their return to make sure that there were no dangerous organisms on them or their clothing or in their spacecraft. The fear of a possible contamination of Earth was raised, in part, by Michael Crichton's novel The Andromeda Strain, as well as by points raised by the scientific community. As a result, quarantines continued until we had enough experience with returning Apollo crews to believe that they were no longer necessary. (Apollo 12's recovery of Surveyor hardware, and the subsequent discovery of terrestrial bacteria surviving on some of that equipment, proved that organisms could survive for long periods of time in space.)
We have also been influenced by other major works of science fiction (War of the Worlds' radio broadcast, for instance, has long been held as an example of how we might react to the idea of hostile alien life, and ET is an example of how we could react to more friendly aliens.)
For something to happen, it has to be imagined first. Sometimes, that takes the form of science fiction stories. Not worth it? Far from it. We'll be forever stuck in the present and never stop to imagine what might come in the future without the ideas that come from those who dare to say "Hey, what if this was possible?"
Man, remember all those people "flaming" over the freedom of tools on the lists? What was with them, anyway? Aren't they just starting a "religious war?" Who cares if this tool is free. It didn't cost me anything. Those crazy license zealots.
But wait.
Now, look what happened. The company (or individual) that was your friend a couple of years ago, decides today that you've offended them. Now they are taking their ball and going home.
Now you are stuck. You need to replace what they gave you. Oh, it'll cost you: manpower, lost opportunities, potentially a pile of pesos... Get ready for a painful transition. And as annoying and dangerous as this is for source control in mainline kernel development, there are many, many scenarios where this kind of manuevering will screw you much worse - alienating your customers, stranding years of development, the whole works.
This is why freedom matters.
And what is BitMover so upset about? That anyone would dare compete with them?
The audacity!
Does any vendor of a commercial product have a moral high ground to complain when a competitor appears? And whose problem is it if they are trying to charge money for something other will do for free?
If this holds it may begin to show that the profits from spamming are just too risky, and others may not wish to try it. On the other hand, bankruptcy is often just a shield to protect assets. Maybe with a combination of civil and criminal action we will one day see a reduction in spam.
Last time, Caltech students hacked the 1961 Rose Bowl game:
One Caltech student posed as a reporter and 'interviewed' the director of the University of Washington card stunts (such stunts involve people in the stands who hold up colored cards to make pictures). The reporter learned exactly how the stunts were operated, and also that the director would be out to dinner later.
While the director was eating, the students (who called themselves the 'Fiendish Fourteen') picked a lock and stole a blank direction sheet for the card stunts. They then had a printer run off 2300 copies of the blank. The next day they picked the lock again and stole the master plans for the stunts -- large sheets of graph paper colored in with the stunt pictures. Using these as a guide, they made new instructions for three of the stunts on the duplicated blanks. Finally, they broke in once more, replacing the stolen master plans and substituting the stack of diddled instruction sheets for the original set.
The result was that three of the pictures were totally different. Instead of 'WASHINGTON', the word 'CALTECH' was flashed. Another stunt showed the word 'HUSKIES', the Washington nickname, but spelled it backwards. And what was supposed to have been a picture of a husky instead showed a beaver (nature's engineer-- the Caltech mascot).
I grabbed that one from here, which lists a bunch more hilarious ones. --
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...is to get this developed to the point where it could replace a wheelchair. The psychological advantage to a person who'd lost the use of his legs to actually stand up and interact with the world "eye to eye" would have to be powerful. It probably also doesn't hurt to keep the muscles moving and the appropriate neural pathways firing.
Yea, I know, long way to get there from here, but it's a promising first step. Certainly worth some research dollars in my opinion.
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The reason no one has ever actively pursued exoskeletons is because they would be so inefficient. Tanks and such are built with a low profile, and if you ask frontline soldiers, they are only useful in limited roles. My army friend much prefers the new strykers because of their flexibility and reliability.
A mecha would be standing 20 feet in the battlefied, an open and tempting target to everything from bombers to tanks to helicopters and to RPGs. It would have limited mobility, be extremely difficult to keep in working condition, and will have less load capacity than its tracked or wheeled counterparts. In short, it would look cool, but would be a useless coffin.
In BattleTech, they make up for the obvious disadvantages of a mecha by giving them advantages over vehicles. Mecha are more reliable, more maneuvarable, able to take more damage and continue to function, and can carry more weapons. Even then, if you pit a balanced vehicle force against a balanced mecha force, ton for ton, credit for credit, the vehicles can easily overpower the mecha in most circumstances.
I don't want to discourage this project. After all, how many inventions were made when there was no necessity, but a necessity was found at a later time? But I do want folks to exercise a bit of common sense. If exoskeletons were such a great idea, we'd have used them in WWII. We certainly had the technology to build them back then.
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Sure, it wouldn't be as "sexy" as the X-Prize, but wouldn't some privately sponsored prize money do wonders for this longtime human dream? Call it, say, the Mecha Prize, and offer a few million bucks to whoever builds the first mecha that can go a half mile, pick up a Dodge Neon and move it in the air for 50 feet, then return to the starting line. Or something similar.
I have no doubt that someone as creative as Rutan is out there, and with a little incentive and the promise of some real financial gain could use modern actuators and pressure pads and gyro sensors and so forth to finally create a useful mecha.
I also have no doubt that (unlike Spaceship One) a mecha that could complete the above test would immediately be of great value in quite a few industrial and/or emergency applications.
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..is to build a big robot exoskeleton you can use to crush your enemies... Now this is news for nerds!!
But seriously, robots like this have been science fiction for decades, it's interesting to see respectable institutions taking this seriously. I imagine successful implementation of this technology would again change the face of warfare. With anti-aircraft missles easily mountable on each soilder, perhaps air power will not always be king?
Something to think about... This could be the biggest paradigm shift until they discover a good repulsorlift and make hovertanks.
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A warning label you won't see on the space elevator:
In emergency, USE STAIRS.
Before this gets too far, somebody should call NORAD and ask them how many of the 2500+ satellites and other odd bits of junk traveling at 17551mph (LEO) cross the Equator (ascending and descending nodes) and might present a collision hazard. I could be wrong, but shouldn't the answer should be "Almost all of them."
This reminds me of the asteroid/comet problem, the probability of a significant impact might be low, but it only takes one.
Something I never heared anybody about: Where does the kinetic energy come from that the cargo gains when ascending into orbit? Somehow the cargo needs to gain a huge amount of kinetic energy, because the top of the elevator moves several km/s faster then the bottom. If nothing compensates for this energy, the counter weight would gradually slow down and deorbit, so there must be some kind of propulsion in the counterweight, pushing it prograde whenever cargo ascends and pushing retrograde when cargo descends. Anybody got more info on this?