There's a company that I just recently found out about called Resource Concepts in Texas. Their whole business is refurbishing, remarketing, and recycling electronics. Their website has all the details.
Looks like they even deal with individuals, not just big corporations.
I was using Mozilla and got the usual rejection notice from the buymusic.com site, so I fired up IE on the same machine just to look around. I'm using IE 5.5 and Media Player 9.0 on Windows 2000. Whenever I try to listen to clips or play any of their videos, Media Player attempts to play but immediately stops. The error message is:
"Windows Media Player cannot play the file. The file is either corrupt or the Player does not support the format you are trying to play."
Microsoft stuff is such an irritation. It is not worth another minute of my time trying to figure out why it is broken. I came, I saw, It didn't work, I left.
I have been using the Mozilla junk mail filter for a couple of months now. One pop mail account is one that I started using in 1996. It is a spam magnet. In the time I have been using Mozilla, it has accumulated over 12,000 spam messages. That should be plenty of training for the Bayesian filter.
Mozilla's filter does a reasonably good job at catching spam, but I still get a handful of messages every day that slip through the filter. The ones that slip through seem to be messages that have intentionally munged the spammy words with spaces, numbers, and misspellings. The spammers know that people are filtering, and they are successfully getting through the filter with their dirty tricks. Another trick spammers use is to send a message with nothing but a graphic ad. The filter doesn't have enough words to judge the the spam, so the message slips through.
I also had some 'ham' messages get filtered, so I still have the annoyance of having to check the 'junk' folder periodically for wanted messages. The filtering makes life easier, but it is still not an ideal solution to the spam problem.
Alas, she brought home one piece of information that is useful for pretty much anything having to do with computers, and only one such piece of information: "Read the whole screen".
My mom reads everything on the computer literally. When her Windows machine became unstable (typical Windows rot), she kept getting the requester box with "This program has performed an illegal operation.". She refused to click the "OK", and she would turn off the power. She thought clicking "OK" was an admission of breaking the law. It makes sense from my mom's non-computer-literate perspective. Why does Microsoft use such poor wording? (I ask rhetorically)
I'm always helping my mom use the computer for the most basic things. She really just wants to use email and browsing, but odd system behaviors and setup options keep spoiling her experience. She did switch to an iMac which did get rid of the system crashes, but even the Mac environment has things that are non-intuitive to my mom. She still is unclear about where windows go when they are covered with other windows. Maybe the new Mac "Expose" feature will help, but I shudder to think how a new OS environment might disrupt her understanding.
The Japanese language has a cursive form of writing. If you think that reading Japanese in block characters is hard, cursive Japanese is so hard that many native Japanese can't read it. In Japan, cursive writing is seen more as an artform. It is to be appreciated for its artistically flowing form, not for its practicality. It looks like English cursive is headed in that direction also.
I have thought about a portable device that has a microphone and a live buffer (like Tivo) that would be great for those times that you wished you could replay what you just heard. Pogo and some similar devices have a microphone, but they act more like dictation machines. I have not heard of a device that does what I'm talking about. Perhaps someone knows of one. Or maybe someone could make a "Livo" by recording an exisiting device. "It's not just live, it's Livo. Life, your way."
Imagine having the live buffer running throughout the day capturing everything you hear. You could replay announcements that you missed or misunderstood, resolve you-said-I-said marital arguments (well, maybe), repeat a funny joke you just heard, repeat a conversation you missed because of a cell phone call, confirm instructions from your boss, etc. Tivo users can probably relate to how useful live buffering would be. There are some potential legal issues having to do with audio recordings of conversations, but I haven't thought through those issues.
Wired magazine had an article a couple of months ago about Iceland using geothermal energy to generate hydrogen, I believe through electrolysis. They have started using hydrogen in vehicles and fishing vessels. Since geothermal is minimally polluting, and since they have utilized geothermal extensively, Iceland is able to sell some of their Kyoto Protocol 'pollution credits' to other countries.
I agree that in its current form, this on-demand computing model will probably fail. Utility computing is mostly a vision put together by a bunch of executives that believe they can build a revenue stream analogous to power companies. They push the vision through the marketing department who make the vision all glossy and ready to sell to other companies. Research and Development teams are then instructed to come up with an implementation of the utility computing vision. From that directive you get the research guys writing papers about "computons". The rest of what gets developed looks pretty much like the bad-old-days of timeshare computer systems (charged by time and storage usage) from over 20 years ago. So far I have not seen any revolutionary technologies for utility computing, just rehashes of old ideas on modern hardware. It is still users connecting through a network to a bunch of servers with some software to account for usage. In the end, utility computing is just a name for bunch of people in suits selling IT services to a bunch of people in suits.
OpenTV provides various middleware-type products to companies looking to build and deploy interactive television services. The don't provide anything directly to end-users, so far as I know.
OpenTV is used in some of the newer Dish Network receivers. From what I've seen on my receiver, it's slow and clunky. It reminds me of what late 1980's computer user interfaces were like. I dread it when I accidentally push the wrong buttons on the remote and select their interactive features. It's painful.
Back in 1988, I remember seeing x86 based Suns running SunOS. It wasn't called Solaris back then. SPARC RISC based workstations weren't available then. The bulk of the Sun workstations were Motorola 68xxx based. Sun came out with an 80386 workstation called the 386i.
I had the opportunity to touch one when they first came out. A coworker was all excited that they were moving all their CAD software to the 386i, and he took me to their lab to show me the new machines. I wiggled the mouse, and it immediately crashed. That was the extent of my exposure.
As far as I can tell, the Sun 386i flopped. Linux was not around yet. SPARC came along a couple years later, and Sun migrated totally to SPARC. Perhaps their first attempt at x86 was a good idea, but poorly executed.
George Heilmeier, Texas Instruments, and AI
on
AI Going Nowhere?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
From 1983 through 1991, George Heilmeier was the Chief Technical Officer at Texas Instruments. He pushed TI into massive investments in AI R&D. Some of the best technical people I knew at TI thought the AI stuff was a waste of time, but it was being pushed by Heilmeier and the executives. Marvin Minsky was one of the experts brought in as an AI consultant, and he appeared in various TI propaganda. At the time the Japanese were pushing "fifth generation computing" which included AI, so there was a push to compete with the Japanese. TI developed AI hardware and software and tried to force fit it into various applications. They claimed various successes applying AI to industry problems, but eventually is all collapsed into a big waste of time and money. Heilmeier left at the end of the collapse.
Today you can find Heilmeier all over the place on various corporate boards and winning various awards for technical excellence. It is interesting that in most of the the bios that you can find on the web about Heilmeier, you don't find references to how he lead TI down the AI path to a deadend.
There isn't much detailed information about the exact conditions that bring out the bug, but they do state that the bug is electrical, that some unspecified combination of instructions and data pattern are needed, and that reducing the clock frequency avoids the problem. I can think of several things that might cause the bug. These are just guesses.
One possibility is that there is a slow timing path in the logic that is marginally meeting the 900MHz or 1GHz clock speed. Going to 800 MHz gives the slow path more margin. This is the easy answer.
Another possibility is that they have some part of the chip that has insufficient metal to deliver power to the logic gates. The right combination of activity might cause enough voltage droop to cause logic errors. Slowing the clock reduces the power consumption in CMOS chips.
They might have a crosstalk problem between some signals that could flip bits when the right activity and frequency are combined. Slowing the clock can shift the relative positions of signal transitions.
Eventually more details might surface, but Intel is probably keeping it quiet so that people don't write code to maliciously crash servers.
Re:Origami for geometrical constructions and a plu
on
Origami and Math
·
· Score: 1
Wow. I haven't thought about hexaflexagons in a long long time. When I was in middle school (in the early 1970's), I read the Piers Anthony science fiction book, Ox, which featured not only a hexaflexagon, but also a sentient being based on Conway's Game of Life. In the book, a hexaflexagon was used as a map to show the path through dimensional doorways.
Ox inspired me to dig deeper into the mathematics presented in the book. I made hexaflexagons when I was bored in class, and would give them out to friends for their amusement. I'd also do Game of Life by hand on graph paper (home computers were not around yet). I sure had a lot of free time back then.
Reading through the survey results, I see nothing surprising about why people aren't on the internet. The population of people who have the computer skills and the financial resources to access the internet is saturating, and those who are left have the computer barrier to cross.
My mom would probably not be on the internet today if I hadn't set up her computer for her. Originally she had a MS Windows based PC, and knew just enough to open the browser and email applications. Anything else was way to difficult for her. She later switched to a new iMac which is a little easier for her to use, but it's still complex enough to baffle her. My sister, who is otherwise quite intelligent, has problems using a computer, and currently is not on the internet at all. Partly it is the financial barrier of buying a computer, and partly it is the lack of knowledge on how to set up a cheaper used computer.
Simpler 'appliances' like WebTV and Audrey attempt to make the barrier lower through lower prices and better ease of use, but they have not really been well accepted. I think the appliance concept could be the solution for more people accessing the internet, but I've been underwhelmed with the implementations and service costs so far.
This is not only in trial in many places, but in full-scale production.
A friend works at a company called Satius. They are working on power-line networking equipment, and he mentioned how most of their sales are overseas. Apparently there are more competing technologies in the U.S., so the interest level isn't as high as overseas.
Re:A way out of the MS tax
on
Barebones Notebook
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
this looks like an excellent way to avoid paying for Windows and all the other bundled software that people don't want or need.
As a middle ground, it would be interesting if vendors would sell you a notebook computer with everything but the hard drive. I just upgraded my notebook hard drive, and it was very easy to do. Without the hard drive, there can't be any software pre-installed, so no MS Tax.
So what is the performance of a mesh network built out of 802.11 nodes? Many people would say 11 Mbps to 54 Mbps minus the usual overhead depending on the type of 802.11 being used, but raw bandwidth is only a piece of the overall performance.
I would think that latency would be the main limiter of a mesh network. The nodes would have to be placed relatively close together if built with off-the-shelf 802.11 equipment, so it would take quite a few hops to traverse any long distance. Each node would have to analyze and route the traffic which adds further latency.
I also wonder what the scalability of a such mesh network is. As the mesh grows to a large number of nodes, I imagine that congested hot spots will develop which will add latency as traffic waits to be processed or has to route around the congestion. I wouldn't be surprised if packets could take minutes to get across country if only a mesh network is used.
For a small number of nodes, the mesh probably provides a reasonable solution for small networks and for providing the "last mile" from a conventional wired internet connection. For latency tolerant applications like email, a larger mesh might be acceptable (anyone remember Fidonet?). I have my doubts that a large mesh could be used as an equivalent replacement for a wired internet.
My god, I thought they had trouble scaling Linux that far. Seriously. How the hell do you do that when "stock" linux doesnt like 8 CPUs?
I often see this misconception about multiprocessor machines. Some machines have a true tightly coupled multiprocessor architectures with a shared memory space, like big iron machines from SGI, Sun, and HP. These can be used to run a multithreaded process to speed up time-to-solution for a task. The speed-up is subject to the usual Amdahl's Law restrictions. The blade server machines, like Pixar is using, are 'tightly bolted' multiprocessors which share mechanical components and power supplies, but they effectively look like separate computers. Possibly some of the blades have shared multiprocessors, but no more than a 2-4 cpus per blade. Separate instances of the OS run on each blade.
For easy to partition tasks like computer graphic rendering, each frame render task can be run single threaded, and there can be many tasks running at the same time. The time-to-solution for a single rendered frame is not reduced by parallelization, but the overall throughput is increased by multiple tasks.
Nine women cannot make a baby in one month, but nine women can make nine babies in nine months.
Looking through the Media PC screenshots, it looks somewhat more complex to use than Tivo, which I love dearly. Unfortunately Tivo does not pass the "Mom" test, and the Media PC is even worse. The plethora of buttons on the Media PC remote also looks like it would not pass the Mom test.
Basically, if I sat my Mom in front of a device, and if she can figure out how to use it, it passes the Mom test. I think she represents the non-tech-savvy user which is the majority of the population. She is able to use email and web browsing on her Mac, and she can program her VCR, but I don't think she would have the patience to deal with programming a Tivo or Media PC. If it has too many buttons and menu screens, it fails the test.
I would be impressed if someone came out with a low cost and very intuitive PVR/multimedia device that could sell to the common man. The raw technology is there to make all kinds of feature-rich devices, but there needs to be some serious attention paid to the user interface and useability if the devices are to be successful.
yes, this is pricey, but if your looking for a media PC, this will do the trick, and you shouldn't have trouble hooking up your ipod or any other media device to it. Alien Ware Media Center PC
That Alienware box looks suspiciously like the Shuttle barebone PCs which you can buy at newegg.com for less than $400. Do-it-yourselfers could save more than a few bucks making these into an equivalent media PC.
Personally, I like the geometric purity of Unit Origami by Tomoko Fuse. The unit origami creations make great desktop conversation pieces. The objects don't need any explanations about what "real world" object they are trying to look like since they are just geometric shapes. Try a google search for other unit origami resources.
The January Wired magazine has an article about stem cell research and cloning in China. The combination of the US government restricting foreign students from participating in certain research and also restricting certain kinds of biological research has caused a brain drain of Chinese researchers from the US to China.
During the 1980's and 1990's, many Chinese researchers would study in the US, and many would stay in the US after graduating. Now some of those researchers that have been living and working in the US have been moving back to China. New students are staying in China to study since they are developing their own labs backed by the Chinese government.
As the US keeps adding restrictions, they (Congress, etc.) actually encourage foreign countries to develop their own research capabilities that the US cannot control, except by threats like in the case of Korea and Iraq. It will make those countries less dependent and more isolated from the US which will give the US less bargaining power in future diplomatic relations.
Slashdot Mirror
The big story should be about the air conditioning system for this baby.
The Earth Simulator in Japan requires is own power plant in an attached building to power the computer and the air conditioning system.
There's a company that I just recently found out about called Resource Concepts in Texas. Their whole business is refurbishing, remarketing, and recycling electronics. Their website has all the details. Looks like they even deal with individuals, not just big corporations.
I was using Mozilla and got the usual rejection notice from the buymusic.com site, so I fired up IE on the same machine just to look around. I'm using IE 5.5 and Media Player 9.0 on Windows 2000. Whenever I try to listen to clips or play any of their videos, Media Player attempts to play but immediately stops. The error message is:
"Windows Media Player cannot play the file. The file is either corrupt or the Player does not support the format you are trying to play."Microsoft stuff is such an irritation. It is not worth another minute of my time trying to figure out why it is broken. I came, I saw, It didn't work, I left.
I have been using the Mozilla junk mail filter for a couple of months now. One pop mail account is one that I started using in 1996. It is a spam magnet. In the time I have been using Mozilla, it has accumulated over 12,000 spam messages. That should be plenty of training for the Bayesian filter.
Mozilla's filter does a reasonably good job at catching spam, but I still get a handful of messages every day that slip through the filter. The ones that slip through seem to be messages that have intentionally munged the spammy words with spaces, numbers, and misspellings. The spammers know that people are filtering, and they are successfully getting through the filter with their dirty tricks. Another trick spammers use is to send a message with nothing but a graphic ad. The filter doesn't have enough words to judge the the spam, so the message slips through.
I also had some 'ham' messages get filtered, so I still have the annoyance of having to check the 'junk' folder periodically for wanted messages. The filtering makes life easier, but it is still not an ideal solution to the spam problem.
Alas, she brought home one piece of information that is useful for pretty much anything having to do with computers, and only one such piece of information: "Read the whole screen".
My mom reads everything on the computer literally. When her Windows machine became unstable (typical Windows rot), she kept getting the requester box with "This program has performed an illegal operation.". She refused to click the "OK", and she would turn off the power. She thought clicking "OK" was an admission of breaking the law. It makes sense from my mom's non-computer-literate perspective. Why does Microsoft use such poor wording? (I ask rhetorically)
I'm always helping my mom use the computer for the most basic things. She really just wants to use email and browsing, but odd system behaviors and setup options keep spoiling her experience. She did switch to an iMac which did get rid of the system crashes, but even the Mac environment has things that are non-intuitive to my mom. She still is unclear about where windows go when they are covered with other windows. Maybe the new Mac "Expose" feature will help, but I shudder to think how a new OS environment might disrupt her understanding.
do other countries have cursive handwriting?
The Japanese language has a cursive form of writing. If you think that reading Japanese in block characters is hard, cursive Japanese is so hard that many native Japanese can't read it. In Japan, cursive writing is seen more as an artform. It is to be appreciated for its artistically flowing form, not for its practicality. It looks like English cursive is headed in that direction also.
I have thought about a portable device that has a microphone and a live buffer (like Tivo) that would be great for those times that you wished you could replay what you just heard. Pogo and some similar devices have a microphone, but they act more like dictation machines. I have not heard of a device that does what I'm talking about. Perhaps someone knows of one. Or maybe someone could make a "Livo" by recording an exisiting device. "It's not just live, it's Livo. Life, your way."
Imagine having the live buffer running throughout the day capturing everything you hear. You could replay announcements that you missed or misunderstood, resolve you-said-I-said marital arguments (well, maybe), repeat a funny joke you just heard, repeat a conversation you missed because of a cell phone call, confirm instructions from your boss, etc. Tivo users can probably relate to how useful live buffering would be. There are some potential legal issues having to do with audio recordings of conversations, but I haven't thought through those issues.
For those of you who dislike the New York Times subscription requirement, here is a link to a google news search of related articles.
Wired magazine had an article a couple of months ago about Iceland using geothermal energy to generate hydrogen, I believe through electrolysis. They have started using hydrogen in vehicles and fishing vessels. Since geothermal is minimally polluting, and since they have utilized geothermal extensively, Iceland is able to sell some of their Kyoto Protocol 'pollution credits' to other countries.
I agree that in its current form, this on-demand computing model will probably fail. Utility computing is mostly a vision put together by a bunch of executives that believe they can build a revenue stream analogous to power companies. They push the vision through the marketing department who make the vision all glossy and ready to sell to other companies. Research and Development teams are then instructed to come up with an implementation of the utility computing vision. From that directive you get the research guys writing papers about "computons". The rest of what gets developed looks pretty much like the bad-old-days of timeshare computer systems (charged by time and storage usage) from over 20 years ago. So far I have not seen any revolutionary technologies for utility computing, just rehashes of old ideas on modern hardware. It is still users connecting through a network to a bunch of servers with some software to account for usage. In the end, utility computing is just a name for bunch of people in suits selling IT services to a bunch of people in suits.
Buy a designer Shock-Blouse(tm) and hit the clubs. Have a contest with friends to see how many guys you can knock unconcious in a single night.
If that becomes popular, I imagine that designer Insulatorwear(tm) might also find a market.
OpenTV provides various middleware-type products to companies looking to build and deploy interactive television services. The don't provide anything directly to end-users, so far as I know.
OpenTV is used in some of the newer Dish Network receivers. From what I've seen on my receiver, it's slow and clunky. It reminds me of what late 1980's computer user interfaces were like. I dread it when I accidentally push the wrong buttons on the remote and select their interactive features. It's painful.
Back in 1988, I remember seeing x86 based Suns running SunOS. It wasn't called Solaris back then. SPARC RISC based workstations weren't available then. The bulk of the Sun workstations were Motorola 68xxx based. Sun came out with an 80386 workstation called the 386i.
I had the opportunity to touch one when they first came out. A coworker was all excited that they were moving all their CAD software to the 386i, and he took me to their lab to show me the new machines. I wiggled the mouse, and it immediately crashed. That was the extent of my exposure.
As far as I can tell, the Sun 386i flopped. Linux was not around yet. SPARC came along a couple years later, and Sun migrated totally to SPARC. Perhaps their first attempt at x86 was a good idea, but poorly executed.
From 1983 through 1991, George Heilmeier was the Chief Technical Officer at Texas Instruments. He pushed TI into massive investments in AI R&D. Some of the best technical people I knew at TI thought the AI stuff was a waste of time, but it was being pushed by Heilmeier and the executives. Marvin Minsky was one of the experts brought in as an AI consultant, and he appeared in various TI propaganda. At the time the Japanese were pushing "fifth generation computing" which included AI, so there was a push to compete with the Japanese. TI developed AI hardware and software and tried to force fit it into various applications. They claimed various successes applying AI to industry problems, but eventually is all collapsed into a big waste of time and money. Heilmeier left at the end of the collapse.
Today you can find Heilmeier all over the place on various corporate boards and winning various awards for technical excellence. It is interesting that in most of the the bios that you can find on the web about Heilmeier, you don't find references to how he lead TI down the AI path to a deadend.
There isn't much detailed information about the exact conditions that bring out the bug, but they do state that the bug is electrical, that some unspecified combination of instructions and data pattern are needed, and that reducing the clock frequency avoids the problem. I can think of several things that might cause the bug. These are just guesses.
One possibility is that there is a slow timing path in the logic that is marginally meeting the 900MHz or 1GHz clock speed. Going to 800 MHz gives the slow path more margin. This is the easy answer.
Another possibility is that they have some part of the chip that has insufficient metal to deliver power to the logic gates. The right combination of activity might cause enough voltage droop to cause logic errors. Slowing the clock reduces the power consumption in CMOS chips.
They might have a crosstalk problem between some signals that could flip bits when the right activity and frequency are combined. Slowing the clock can shift the relative positions of signal transitions.
Eventually more details might surface, but Intel is probably keeping it quiet so that people don't write code to maliciously crash servers.
Wow. I haven't thought about hexaflexagons in a long long time. When I was in middle school (in the early 1970's), I read the Piers Anthony science fiction book, Ox, which featured not only a hexaflexagon, but also a sentient being based on Conway's Game of Life. In the book, a hexaflexagon was used as a map to show the path through dimensional doorways.
Ox inspired me to dig deeper into the mathematics presented in the book. I made hexaflexagons when I was bored in class, and would give them out to friends for their amusement. I'd also do Game of Life by hand on graph paper (home computers were not around yet). I sure had a lot of free time back then.
Reading through the survey results, I see nothing surprising about why people aren't on the internet. The population of people who have the computer skills and the financial resources to access the internet is saturating, and those who are left have the computer barrier to cross.
My mom would probably not be on the internet today if I hadn't set up her computer for her. Originally she had a MS Windows based PC, and knew just enough to open the browser and email applications. Anything else was way to difficult for her. She later switched to a new iMac which is a little easier for her to use, but it's still complex enough to baffle her. My sister, who is otherwise quite intelligent, has problems using a computer, and currently is not on the internet at all. Partly it is the financial barrier of buying a computer, and partly it is the lack of knowledge on how to set up a cheaper used computer.
Simpler 'appliances' like WebTV and Audrey attempt to make the barrier lower through lower prices and better ease of use, but they have not really been well accepted. I think the appliance concept could be the solution for more people accessing the internet, but I've been underwhelmed with the implementations and service costs so far.
This is not only in trial in many places, but in full-scale production.
A friend works at a company called Satius. They are working on power-line networking equipment, and he mentioned how most of their sales are overseas. Apparently there are more competing technologies in the U.S., so the interest level isn't as high as overseas.
this looks like an excellent way to avoid paying for Windows and all the other bundled software that people don't want or need.
As a middle ground, it would be interesting if vendors would sell you a notebook computer with everything but the hard drive. I just upgraded my notebook hard drive, and it was very easy to do. Without the hard drive, there can't be any software pre-installed, so no MS Tax.
So what is the performance of a mesh network built out of 802.11 nodes? Many people would say 11 Mbps to 54 Mbps minus the usual overhead depending on the type of 802.11 being used, but raw bandwidth is only a piece of the overall performance.
I would think that latency would be the main limiter of a mesh network. The nodes would have to be placed relatively close together if built with off-the-shelf 802.11 equipment, so it would take quite a few hops to traverse any long distance. Each node would have to analyze and route the traffic which adds further latency.
I also wonder what the scalability of a such mesh network is. As the mesh grows to a large number of nodes, I imagine that congested hot spots will develop which will add latency as traffic waits to be processed or has to route around the congestion. I wouldn't be surprised if packets could take minutes to get across country if only a mesh network is used.
For a small number of nodes, the mesh probably provides a reasonable solution for small networks and for providing the "last mile" from a conventional wired internet connection. For latency tolerant applications like email, a larger mesh might be acceptable (anyone remember Fidonet?). I have my doubts that a large mesh could be used as an equivalent replacement for a wired internet.
My god, I thought they had trouble scaling Linux that far. Seriously. How the hell do you do that when "stock" linux doesnt like 8 CPUs?
I often see this misconception about multiprocessor machines. Some machines have a true tightly coupled multiprocessor architectures with a shared memory space, like big iron machines from SGI, Sun, and HP. These can be used to run a multithreaded process to speed up time-to-solution for a task. The speed-up is subject to the usual Amdahl's Law restrictions. The blade server machines, like Pixar is using, are 'tightly bolted' multiprocessors which share mechanical components and power supplies, but they effectively look like separate computers. Possibly some of the blades have shared multiprocessors, but no more than a 2-4 cpus per blade. Separate instances of the OS run on each blade.
For easy to partition tasks like computer graphic rendering, each frame render task can be run single threaded, and there can be many tasks running at the same time. The time-to-solution for a single rendered frame is not reduced by parallelization, but the overall throughput is increased by multiple tasks.
Nine women cannot make a baby in one month, but nine women can make nine babies in nine months.
Looking through the Media PC screenshots, it looks somewhat more complex to use than Tivo, which I love dearly. Unfortunately Tivo does not pass the "Mom" test, and the Media PC is even worse. The plethora of buttons on the Media PC remote also looks like it would not pass the Mom test.
Basically, if I sat my Mom in front of a device, and if she can figure out how to use it, it passes the Mom test. I think she represents the non-tech-savvy user which is the majority of the population. She is able to use email and web browsing on her Mac, and she can program her VCR, but I don't think she would have the patience to deal with programming a Tivo or Media PC. If it has too many buttons and menu screens, it fails the test.
I would be impressed if someone came out with a low cost and very intuitive PVR/multimedia device that could sell to the common man. The raw technology is there to make all kinds of feature-rich devices, but there needs to be some serious attention paid to the user interface and useability if the devices are to be successful.
yes, this is pricey, but if your looking for a media PC, this will do the trick, and you shouldn't have trouble hooking up your ipod or any other media device to it. Alien Ware Media Center PC
That Alienware box looks suspiciously like the Shuttle barebone PCs which you can buy at newegg.com for less than $400. Do-it-yourselfers could save more than a few bucks making these into an equivalent media PC.
Personally, I like the geometric purity of Unit Origami by Tomoko Fuse. The unit origami creations make great desktop conversation pieces. The objects don't need any explanations about what "real world" object they are trying to look like since they are just geometric shapes. Try a google search for other unit origami resources.
The January Wired magazine has an article about stem cell research and cloning in China. The combination of the US government restricting foreign students from participating in certain research and also restricting certain kinds of biological research has caused a brain drain of Chinese researchers from the US to China.
During the 1980's and 1990's, many Chinese researchers would study in the US, and many would stay in the US after graduating. Now some of those researchers that have been living and working in the US have been moving back to China. New students are staying in China to study since they are developing their own labs backed by the Chinese government.
As the US keeps adding restrictions, they (Congress, etc.) actually encourage foreign countries to develop their own research capabilities that the US cannot control, except by threats like in the case of Korea and Iraq. It will make those countries less dependent and more isolated from the US which will give the US less bargaining power in future diplomatic relations.