Another way to look at Moore's "Law" is from the point of view of wafer manufacturing economics. Typically you can shrink processes in stages of not much more than 30% at a time. The time it takes to shrink and tune the process is going to be on the order of 6 months to a year. Plus the wafer processing equipment has to be stretched out to last until it's paid for itself and then some. So even if the techies could shrink the process even faster, it's uneconomical as it would mean buying a whole new set of wafer making equipment long before the previous generation was amortized.
It's the same thing with disk drive density, the techies can often move faster than the economics can accomodate.
This is a useless comparison. Vista will grow in share as there are bazillions of consumers that are running older versions of Windows and have a compulsion to "upgrade". Mac OSX doesnt.
Whopdee doo. You can do the same thing by tuning your FM radio to an unused spot. The hiss you get is the amplified QUANTUM NOISE of the first RF amplifier stage.
If you need more bandwidth, tune your TV card to an unused channel. That'll give you about six megabits per second of really good noise.
* Ventilation. People sweat. You need a constant flow of air across the skin to take away the humidity, otherwise it's like wearing all-polyester clothes. Very uncomfortable after five minutes.
>Air? We don't need no steenking air! Has it occurred to you that several light-years of vacuum is about as good as it gets in terms of removing bodily outgassing?
Neither the vacuum nor its thickness is of any relevance AFAICT. Vacuum doesn't suck, so I'm having considerable difficulty coming up with a way for a suit to be permeable to H2O and not to air.
>In an emergency with the current suits, you're screwed. They aren't exactly quick-on devices either.
Different situations and imperatives. Much of the time in putting on current suits is in making sure nothing is going wrong in the process. You don't want, under normal conditions, to put on the suit and then remember you forgot to clip on your toe switch. This cascades, and you spend even more time on the checklist because you've already invested a lot of time on the checklist. Also you go slow as you don't want to break anything.
In an emergency the rules change-- you use the emergency checklist, which is much, much shorter.
* Joints. If the elbows are not constant-volume, you waste energy bending your elbows. oops.
Most of the problem from current suits comes from the fact that they aren't form-fitting.
>Your elbow is already constant-volume, after all.
Well, after the facts anyway.
Having worn all kinds of tight clothing, I'm having trouble picturing how you could bend an elbow with any degree of comfort when it's encased in something so form-fitting that it applies 5PSI. Do an experiment-- put a couple tight turns of duct tape over your elbow and a few inches either way. Try bending it. Ouch. To simulate those fabled directions of equal whatever, use string instead of duct tape. Not much better. Lots of challenges here.
One might think that chafing and rubbing might be major issues. Perhaps future astronauts will have to get sheep-dipped in silicone grease before slipping into a suit. Sounds very sensual. Congress will object.
It's a fascinating direction for research, but IMHO still lots of hurdles.
You can't just focus on one aspect of suit design.
If you do, then, sure, you can optimize the heck to meet your goals, at the expense of everything else. Whopee ding.
But in the real world, astronauts will be happy to trade off style for function. Especially life-saving functions.
These spandex suits may look keen, but you've traded away:
Cooling and heating. The body has a very narrow temp range that is comfortable.
You are not going to be comfortable in spandex with your sunward side near boiling and your shadowed side near absolute zero.
Ventilation. People sweat. You need a constant flow of air across the skin to take away the humidity, otherwise it's like wearing all-polyester clothes. Very uncomfortable after five minutes.
Speed of access. If your craft springs a leak it might be crucial to be able to do this stuff in a hurry. Ever try putting on a wet swimsuit when you're already wet?
Joints. If the elbows are not constant-volume, you waste energy bendig your elbows. oops.
Hiyall folks, I'm Electra and for the next hour we have a special on Dimondellia fuel cells. Plug them into your SUV and you can zoom off to the mall! Call the number on the screen... what's that Jeff, ? Sure put her on.... Ionia, can you hear us."? Oh hes, hello Electra, maybe you remember I bought a dozen of these last sunday night during your T.J Hooker countdown of Power? And I'm sooo happyyy with them!!! The protons released like you said and they really glitter as they go into tri-covalent catalysys! Now my husband and I drive everywhere and sometimes he lets me.. oh wait, I gotta go, looks like I need to pour more Dimondellia into the ion-exchange beds....
Just like I said. The article was crappy-- the writer was too lazy to even do a Googling to provide background or links.
And some of us, after trying to get anything meaty or balanced out of Wikipedia, have pretty much given up on Wp as a source of anything more reliable than reviews of every Simpson episode.
Even there, I'd rate the episode where Homer sees a Japanese commercial with his image on it much higher.:)
In particular the aforementioned article is long on big chemical words, very short on any balanced holistic economic analysis.
First the story's lead is total crap. The State of Georgia could print licenses for Interstellar Fusion Drives, for what it's worth. Which is nothing.
So ignore the lead.
Now for the meaty guts of the story..... cellulose to alcohol. Searching, searching,...... Nope, not the teensy tiniest clue re : how they're doing it. Usually you'd see some words like "chemical process", "patent pending", or names and links to competent colleges, scientists, or chemical companies. Not a one.
As to actual verifiable facts, here's only one, and it's non-sensical:: a 100 million gallon a year pilot plant.
So lacking the tiniest foothold, and plenty of nonsense, we'll have to assume this is all PR crapola.
I imagine she can't hit that many keys per second, so the data must be incoming not outgoing.
And since there are maybe ten movies a year worth watching, maybe 60GB of data her connection is going to be running full tilt for about a second a year.
>would require 64 bit counters to nanosecond level.
... which is exactly what the x86 RDTSC instruction does, actually, to the clock cycle level.
IMHO every CPU should have a nice wide clock cycle counter register.
Mildly interesting side-note: RDTSC can take up to 40 clock cycles! Perhaps Intel implemented the counter as the dumbest ripple-carry architecture, so it can take a considerable time to propagate all the carries. Or maybe it takes that long to ensure all the previous instructions have finished. Whatever, it's a very useful feature for real-time work, too bad it's a little bit lethargic in some implementations.
So Sony is going to court and admitting that whoever set up this scheme from their end never asked, and was never told in writing that there might be some issues with this security scheme?
All it's going to take is one document from the rootkit folks to sink this lawsuit.
I'm assuming there's a paragraph somewhere saying "Our system is superb, but it has a few implementation details that might piss off every consumer"
I seem to recall usenet discussions about this circa the time of !uucp!newsglop!.....
It seemed the Unix scheduler would let certain IO operations hog the CPU. And if you somehow installed your app as a IO driver or IO completion routine, then your app could hog the CPU.
Similarly since day one of Windows soundcards you could set your app to realtime_priority and everything else would suffer.
Not exactly smokin' hot off the press.
>The value of the Hutter Prize is the epistemological implications of the compressed human knowledge: What constructs/concepts did it reify in order to achieve better compression of human knowledge and how much did they contribute? That tells us a lot about the human conversation we can't get any other way.
Perhaps you're misunderstanding what a computer can and can't do. Computers are good at searching out literal patterns, really poor at understanding and digesting.
Computer compression schemes can see really obvious patterns and repetitions. But that's got nothing to do with anything like concepts or epistemology. We're not going to learn a thing along those lines.
For example, compression schemes can see when a text repeats over and over and over and over and over the same exact text, and they can compress that down very nicely. But something as simple as saying hello, verbalizing greetings, expressing salutations, giving you a shout-out, conveying warm acknowledgement of one's existence-- no computers are unlikely to ever be able to really deeply understand the similarities there and do any useful compression of information. Liekewise any old human can find irrelevant sentences that by the way my sister Susie is prone to include, why she almost flunked out of Defenestration U for that, and many other things too like staying out too late. And human editors can snip that stuff out without even thinking but I'd bet several kilobucks or as we call them in Dismal Seepage, Ohio, "not spare change I tell ya buddy", no computer is within 50 years will be able to do a comparable job.
This is about the silliest competition imagineable. Think:
Compression has reached a point of diminishing returns, getting less and less return for more and more work. And at best it's asymptotically approaching the theoretical limit. You could offer a billion dollar prize and get back maybe a few percent of improvement, while making any further improvement more difficult.
Meanwhile data storage and data transmission technology keeps improving many percent a year, with each improvement compounding on the previous ones.
In Other Words, IMHO money would be better spent on the second area rather than the first.
We've had generators that work off vibrations for like, over 100 years. They're called "microphones", or "phono cartridges". And yes, they do generate microwatts. A yell into a crystal microphone can put out almost a volt into 100K, thats 1 / 10^5 or 10 microwatts.
I don't see much application for this-- very few circuits can run on microwatts.
WTF! Over 20 parts and hours of work to do *this*?
All you need is a recording of the tones and $34 car CD player. No programming, soldering, or microcomputers required.
I wonder about some of the comments in the "Workaround" sections. Most of the time they weasel and say "no workaround yet". More likely, no workaround is possible in many cases.
Then with some of the user-land problems, like REP MOVSB acting up, they say "BIOS can fix". Huh?
How could the BIOS fix a broken REP MOVSB? I can see the BIOS being able to patch interrupt related bugs, but a straight instruction?
About the only conceivable way would be to have the BIOS load special microcode to emulate the REP MOVSB. But many of the bugs involve what they call the "fast" REP MOVSB which sounds like its done by hardware.
When a wing flexes upwards, by simple geometry, the lift goes down.
When you move an aileron on a flexible wing, the wing flexes as to decrease the angle of deflection.
This was first significant on the B-47, where at high speeds the ailerons became ineffective.
Engines are initially mounted at the best angle. Any flexing can only make a decrease in bestness.
It's a BAD THING to have wings flexing. You lose aileron control effectiveness. You lose lift. The engines get off axis and lose intake efficiency. The flight envelope warps. The wings might be able to flex, but all the contained torque tubes, wiring ducts, landing gear, tanks, pipes, motors and valves have to be specially designed to tolerate the flexing.
This is just the PR geniuses at Boeing making a good thing out of a bad thing. Give them a raise. They've fooled almost everybody.
IF IT RUNS OUT, the printhead will definitely blow out. That's not a problem with one-piece cartridges, but with separate cartridges and printheads, it means you now need a $30-$45 printhead too. Bad thing.
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Another way to look at Moore's "Law" is from the point of view of wafer manufacturing economics. Typically you can shrink processes in stages of not much more than 30% at a time. The time it takes to shrink and tune the process is going to be on the order of 6 months to a year. Plus the wafer processing equipment has to be stretched out to last until it's paid for itself and then some. So even if the techies could shrink the process even faster, it's uneconomical as it would mean buying a whole new set of wafer making equipment long before the previous generation was amortized.
It's the same thing with disk drive density, the techies can often move faster than the economics can accomodate.
This is a useless comparison. Vista will grow in share as there are bazillions of consumers that are running older versions of Windows and have a compulsion to "upgrade". Mac OSX doesnt.
Whopdee doo. You can do the same thing by tuning your FM radio to an unused spot.
The hiss you get is the amplified QUANTUM NOISE of the first RF amplifier stage.
If you need more bandwidth, tune your TV card to an unused channel. That'll give you about six megabits per second of really good noise.
* Ventilation. People sweat. You need a constant flow of air across the skin to take away the humidity, otherwise it's like wearing all-polyester clothes. Very uncomfortable after five minutes.
>Air? We don't need no steenking air! Has it occurred to you that several light-years of vacuum is about as good as it gets in terms of removing bodily outgassing?
Neither the vacuum nor its thickness is of any relevance AFAICT. Vacuum doesn't suck, so I'm having considerable difficulty coming up with a way for a suit to be permeable to H2O and not to air.
>In an emergency with the current suits, you're screwed. They aren't exactly quick-on devices either.
Different situations and imperatives. Much of the time in putting on current suits is in making sure nothing is going wrong in the process. You don't want, under normal conditions, to put on the suit and then remember you forgot to clip on your toe switch. This cascades, and you spend even more time on the checklist because you've already invested a lot of time on the checklist. Also you go slow as you don't want to break anything.
In an emergency the rules change-- you use the emergency checklist, which is much, much shorter.
* Joints. If the elbows are not constant-volume, you waste energy bending your elbows. oops.
Most of the problem from current suits comes from the fact that they aren't form-fitting.
>Your elbow is already constant-volume, after all.
Well, after the facts anyway.
Having worn all kinds of tight clothing, I'm having trouble picturing how you could bend an elbow with any degree of comfort when it's encased in something so form-fitting that it applies 5PSI.
Do an experiment-- put a couple tight turns of duct tape over your elbow and a few inches either way.
Try bending it. Ouch. To simulate those fabled directions of equal whatever, use string instead of duct tape. Not much better. Lots of challenges here.
One might think that chafing and rubbing might be major issues. Perhaps future astronauts will have to get sheep-dipped in silicone grease before slipping into a suit. Sounds very sensual. Congress will object.
It's a fascinating direction for research, but IMHO still lots of hurdles.
If you do, then, sure, you can optimize the heck to meet your goals, at the expense of everything else. Whopee ding.
But in the real world, astronauts will be happy to trade off style for function. Especially life-saving functions.
These spandex suits may look keen, but you've traded away:
Hiyall folks, I'm Electra and for the next hour we have a special on Dimondellia fuel cells. Plug them into your SUV and you can zoom off to the mall! Call the number on the screen... what's that Jeff, ? Sure put her on.... Ionia, can you hear us."? Oh hes, hello Electra, maybe you remember I bought a dozen of these last sunday night during your T.J Hooker countdown of Power? And I'm sooo happyyy with them!!! The protons released like you said and they really glitter as they go into tri-covalent catalysys! Now my husband and I drive everywhere and sometimes he lets me .. oh wait, I gotta go, looks like I need to pour more Dimondellia into the ion-exchange beds....
Just like I said. The article was crappy-- the writer was too lazy to even do a Googling to provide background or links.
And some of us, after trying to get anything meaty or balanced out of Wikipedia, have pretty much given up on Wp as a source of anything more reliable than reviews of every Simpson episode. Even there, I'd rate the episode where Homer sees a Japanese commercial with his image on it much higher. :)
In particular the aforementioned article is long on big chemical words, very short on any balanced holistic economic analysis.
So ignore the lead.
Now for the meaty guts of the story..... cellulose to alcohol. Searching, searching, ...... Nope, not the teensy tiniest clue re : how they're doing it. Usually you'd see some words like "chemical process", "patent pending", or names and links to competent colleges, scientists, or chemical companies. Not a one.
As to actual verifiable facts, here's only one, and it's non-sensical:: a 100 million gallon a year pilot plant.
So lacking the tiniest foothold, and plenty of nonsense, we'll have to assume this is all PR crapola.
Maybe this is a bit if a waste?
IMHO every CPU should have a nice wide clock cycle counter register.
Mildly interesting side-note: RDTSC can take up to 40 clock cycles! Perhaps Intel implemented the counter as the dumbest ripple-carry architecture, so it can take a considerable time to propagate all the carries. Or maybe it takes that long to ensure all the previous instructions have finished. Whatever, it's a very useful feature for real-time work, too bad it's a little bit lethargic in some implementations.
So Sony is going to court and admitting that whoever set up this scheme from their end never asked, and was never told in writing that there might be some issues with this security scheme? All it's going to take is one document from the rootkit folks to sink this lawsuit. I'm assuming there's a paragraph somewhere saying "Our system is superb, but it has a few implementation details that might piss off every consumer"
What would be a whole lot more interesting is if they got a license to:
(1) Buy those gamma sources used to radiograph submarine hulls. There's some real zap in those.
(2) Buy or deal in medical radiactives, like large Cobalt 60 cancer treatment devices.
(3) Transport radioactive wastes from power plants.
Now with those puppies you could make a considerable mess.
Doing the billing on a clock tick sounds like a recipe for failure.
I seem to recall usenet discussions about this circa the time of !uucp!newsglop!..... It seemed the Unix scheduler would let certain IO operations hog the CPU. And if you somehow installed your app as a IO driver or IO completion routine, then your app could hog the CPU. Similarly since day one of Windows soundcards you could set your app to realtime_priority and everything else would suffer. Not exactly smokin' hot off the press.
Sorry, I thought they were compressing text with a computer algorithm, not people.
Perhaps you're misunderstanding what a computer can and can't do. Computers are good at searching out literal patterns, really poor at understanding and digesting.
Computer compression schemes can see really obvious patterns and repetitions. But that's got nothing to do with anything like concepts or epistemology. We're not going to learn a thing along those lines.
For example, compression schemes can see when a text repeats over and over and over and over and over the same exact text, and they can compress that down very nicely. But something as simple as saying hello, verbalizing greetings, expressing salutations, giving you a shout-out, conveying warm acknowledgement of one's existence-- no computers are unlikely to ever be able to really deeply understand the similarities there and do any useful compression of information. Liekewise any old human can find irrelevant sentences that by the way my sister Susie is prone to include, why she almost flunked out of Defenestration U for that, and many other things too like staying out too late. And human editors can snip that stuff out without even thinking but I'd bet several kilobucks or as we call them in Dismal Seepage, Ohio, "not spare change I tell ya buddy", no computer is within 50 years will be able to do a comparable job.
Compression has reached a point of diminishing returns, getting less and less return for more and more work. And at best it's asymptotically approaching the theoretical limit. You could offer a billion dollar prize and get back maybe a few percent of improvement, while making any further improvement more difficult.
Meanwhile data storage and data transmission technology keeps improving many percent a year, with each improvement compounding on the previous ones.
In Other Words, IMHO money would be better spent on the second area rather than the first.
I don't see much application for this-- very few circuits can run on microwatts.
I left out the bit about using a coil of wire instead of a speaker. I just assumed all SD readers could figure that out.
WTF! Over 20 parts and hours of work to do *this*? All you need is a recording of the tones and $34 car CD player. No programming, soldering, or microcomputers required.
I wonder about some of the comments in the "Workaround" sections. Most of the time they weasel and say "no workaround yet". More likely, no workaround is possible in many cases. Then with some of the user-land problems, like REP MOVSB acting up, they say "BIOS can fix". Huh? How could the BIOS fix a broken REP MOVSB? I can see the BIOS being able to patch interrupt related bugs, but a straight instruction? About the only conceivable way would be to have the BIOS load special microcode to emulate the REP MOVSB. But many of the bugs involve what they call the "fast" REP MOVSB which sounds like its done by hardware.
When you move an aileron on a flexible wing, the wing flexes as to decrease the angle of deflection. This was first significant on the B-47, where at high speeds the ailerons became ineffective.
Engines are initially mounted at the best angle. Any flexing can only make a decrease in bestness.
It's a BAD THING to have wings flexing. You lose aileron control effectiveness. You lose lift. The engines get off axis and lose intake efficiency. The flight envelope warps. The wings might be able to flex, but all the contained torque tubes, wiring ducts, landing gear, tanks, pipes, motors and valves have to be specially designed to tolerate the flexing.
This is just the PR geniuses at Boeing making a good thing out of a bad thing. Give them a raise. They've fooled almost everybody.
Although.... I've read that a disappointing percentage of drugs that work really well in mice don't in men.
IF IT RUNS OUT, the printhead will definitely blow out. That's not a problem with one-piece cartridges, but with separate cartridges and printheads, it means you now need a $30-$45 printhead too. Bad thing.