How short our memories. This idea pops up every few months. Somebody gets the idea that because wire is wire, you can piggyback twisted-pair ethernet like signals over the power wires. And you can. In the lab. With no surge surpressors on the line. No light-dimmers. No Touch-lamps. No taxicab radios in use nearby. and 500KW TV station within 5 miles. No subways or streetcars closer than a block. No biker bar nearby. Works about good enough to convince the latest incarnation of venture capitalists. Yep, works real good.
Programmer: Hi Cindy, did you test my WinFS?
Cindy: Little glitch, WinFS needs SQL, which wouldnt install cause I only have 3GB free on C: and it won't install anywhere else. Also the SQLinstaller needs Java 1.3b, I have 1.3c. And you can't backup a patch level. Then the Java installer thinks my new 300GB disk has -133GB of free space. Then the SQL script that makes the default database wants to make a 40GB rollback partition on C:. Then SQL can't find MFC70.DLL. Then SQL complains that my OS doesnt let it open up listeners on ports 4331, 7334, 4337, 7443 and 4773. Then SQL starts up and promptly dies,something about it can't find the authorization service running. Which it doesnt tell me what the name of it is, or how or why it isnt running. The help page doesnt tell you how to get it running, but does have a link to an animation of a cute doggy pawing through a book.
It also triggers a 2GB expansion of my VM file, and dumps a 512MB core file.
---
Programmer: Oh yeah, that's the hash table. MOVE OVER, let me drive.
(Hour later: Okay, it's up now)
Cindy: Why is my computer so slow and the disk light on all the time?
Programmer: It's indexing every file. Which requires unzipping every zip file and cab archive and calling upon special document translators to extract the text therefrom. It all goes into a big hash table in RAM or VM more likely.
Cindy: Why is it really slow for about a day after I install this other app?
Programmer: Well, it had to index all the installed files, including all the help files that are already indexed by the help file system. But don't worry, you can set a checkbox for "low priority indexing".
Cindy: So this gloabl index of everything may be hours of days out of date?
Programmer: Wellllll, yep.
Cindy: Hmm, maybe it's not quite ready for the average Joe yet?
After seeing how completely incompetent and pants-wetting funny awful Microsoft is at file searching with the little doggie, I can't wait to experience having a few more unnecessary, superfluous, extravagant, and bloated layers HELPING me.
Let's do the math: we use about 1000 million tons of oil a year.
We grow about 300 mllion turkeys a year. Assume 30 pounds/turkey, 30% guts, 20% of that extracted as oil, crunch crunch crunch, turkey guts will produce a bit under 0.03% of our oil needs. Turkey poop you say? Turkeys generate about 3 pounds of poop per pound of body weight, so that only improvs things by a factor of 3, up to 0.1% of our needs.
About as close to insignificant as you can get.
Even if you found TEN TIMES more waste from other animals, we're still not talking about anything significant. Less than one year's energy growth.
Issue press releases and lobby the govt for bandwith is exactly what the IP over power lines folks tried to do. And the noise issues there are much worse.
Maybe it's just me, but my attitude has evolved to: "if it has to be advertised, it's probably not very good".
Yes, one would want to use plenty of filters, error-detecting and correcting codes, a good modulation scheme, plus TCP/IP checksums and retries over that. The question is: how much thruput is left after all that redundancy; and how many volts do you have to pump through Joe Blow to get the signal up to a decent level above the noise; how well does it work in noisy environments, like when you turn on a vacuum cleaner, or your neighbor starts arc welding in her garage? They never seem to mention little details like that in press releases.
Hmm, next time you're near an oscilloscope, try touching your finger to the input. Inspect the signal. Should be about 2 volts of 60 cycle hum, with maybe 10% ragged noise superimposed. Raise your other hand toward the ceiling lights-- the voltage should go up to maybe five volts of raggedy hash. Now touch something grounded-- the voltage should go down to maybe a tenth of a volt, now mostly high-frequency hash.
It's unlikely your body is going to make a good data path. Ungrounded, it's a walking antenna for all kind of noise. Grounded, it's a pretty good short to ground.
These folks are trying to make filet-mignon out of road-kill-- not very likely to succeed.
The nightmare continues. It goes something like this: Some drooling "computer scientist" is too dumb to do anything useful, so they speculate" "Wouldnt it be nice to free up this $XXXX CPU from this humdrum task (choose: moving bits/bytes/pixels/ or packets)". He finds a brain-addled silicon-stuffer to design a chip to do just that. All rejoice at the increased efficiency.
Except:
The silicon-stuffer only has access to the slow processes of maybe two silicon generations back, unlike the CPU which paid for the latest whizzy xx picofurlong process. So the supposedly whizzy chip is still not particularly faster than the CPU.
The whizzy chip shows up late, just about when the associated CPU is going to take a 2x speed hike.
The chip is on the I/O bus, requiring many slow I/O cycles, with interrupts masked, to get its commands.
Said whizzy bit-banger doesnt have any software support from the main operating systems.
The silicon-etcher guy can't write english worth a damm, so nobody can understand the spec sheet.
And oh, he didnt know the bus was active-low, so all the data packets have to be inverted.
And sometimes byte-reversed too.
The chip designer doesnt know or care about the whole system, so the chip does several things that spoil the overall performance, like hogging the bus, saturating the bus snoop logic, poisoning the cache, interrupting too often, etc.
The droolers forgot to think about the multi-processor option, so the chip doesnt share well with multiple CPU's.
The chip is all hard-wired gates, so there's no way to fix the problems.
Finally some software wizard finds a way of speeding up the code that runs in the CPU so it's now faster than the separate chip, so the chip is now useless and just an extra power waster.
We've seen successive waves of this concept, none of them have had much success. Graphics processors are one partial exception, and it took almost a decade of mis-designs of those before they became stable enough to be usable.
IIRC this happens all the time-- you have a big chemical plant with kilofeet of pipes. You have fuel rods dissolved in hot acid. You have various chemical reactions going on, some jangled a bit by radioactive effects. You have bored, semi-skilled technicians working three shifts. You end up with various soups containing hopefully separated chemical elements. You have your basic bits of Murphy's laws, resulting in vapor deposition, electrochemical deposition, sedimentation, gunk getting stuck in valve sleeves and filters, stuff condensing out in unexpectedly cool pipes, the whole gamut of undesireable side efects and reactions. And all this is happening behind several feet of concrete, inside opaque pipes, retorts, valves, pumps, and widgets.
What percentage of the stuff is going to get stuck in the various gadgets? What percent of solid X is going to quietly end up in solution Y, then thrown away? I'd guess a 3% loss rate would be rather good.
My poorly-stated point was: This isnt science if they don't know or more likely, carefully profess ignorance of, the very basic quirks of their inputs, all well documented for over 50 years. Occam's razor suggests one look at simpler explanations, like electromagnetic or radiative influences, not speculate about weird chrono-synclaptic infudibulums.
"We have an agreement with the bank, they don't make pizzas and we don't cash checks"
Going to Business Week for accurate technical articles is like going to Phrack to get the latest prime rate prediction. Like having Paris Hilton teach string theory (not the -bikini kind). Like asking Janet Jackson to teach classes in modesty. Like having Dick Cheney lead the Andes 10-mile run.
As Richard Fenman said more than once: "THIS is SCIENCE?"
If you read far enough, you'll see that their random number generators are: (get the Pampers ready)
A proprietary box, probably using a noisy Zener diode.
Another design, using a noisy resistor.
Another Zener diode.
In case you havent guessed, all of the above devices are very sensitive to temperature, light, nuclear radiation, and electromagnetic interference.
Those devices have been extensively studied, and every EE knows that even if they are shielded from all those influences, they generate several different kinds of noise: white noise, 1/f noise, and "popcorn noise:". Funny, but that information doesnt show up in The Fine Articles.
When info known for over 50 years and taught in every third-year EE class doesnt show up in an allegedly scientific study, one wonders.
You'll notice they don't use a truly unjoggable source of random numbers, such as a beta emitter.
Oh, and of course, it's no trick to look back and find a spike AFTER a momentous event.
Uh, no, according to the guy in charge, they didnt know the mirror was flawed. It wasnt kept in a dark warehouse, it was a lighted and temp controlled clean room. And no, they didnt "forget" about the problem with the mirror.
So, let's do a little rough math:
1984: My 8MHz 128K Mac took about 22 seconds to start up MacWrite. From a 400K floppy with a 20KB/Sec transfer rate..
2004: My 2300MHz 512MB Duron takes 7 seconds to start up MS Word. From a 40GB disk with a 20MB/sec xfer rate.
Clock rate: 300x
Memory: 4000x
Disk: 10,000x size and 1000x speed.
App: Starts up 3x faster, responds slower.
So at a rough estimate, simple word processing hasnt gotten noticeably better even as the hardware got mighty whizzier than before.
Great, they'll hire David Spade "No" Guys...
on
eBay Begins A Change
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
As a long-time eBay seller, I have mixed feelings.
On the one hand, one suspects they'll just hire a bunch of David Spade "No" Guys... Many times I've reported obviously fake sellers. They write back that they won't do anything until 3 cases have been confirmed against the seller. I round up two other badly screwed buyers and submit the info... They reply that's still not good enough, case closed.
---
On the plus side, I've received over 500 personal checks as payment from eBay buyers, and NOT ONE has bounced.
And the original gyros were not too reliable, so they gotta be replaced.
And new solar panels are de-riguer, to replace the floppy and destabilizing originals.
And of course the whole structure and layout has to be redone cause the original had many balance and center of gravity problems.
And better shielding for the electronics from radiation.
Oops, that upsets the balance again, gotta relocate a few things.
Sounds like Grandpa's old axe. I still have it. Well, Dad had to replace the handle in '68. And the head wore out in '92, so had to replace that too. But it's still Grandpa's axe.
And oh, don't forget, a lot of the glitches in the original were due to time constraints.
Is it a good idea to even HAVE a deadline for this kind of project?
Yep, but you cant make these crossbar thingies much smaller.
And the fact that they only last for 100 ops and slow ones at that suggests this could be an electrochemical effect, not a quantum one. Just my 2 cents.
One of their minor obstacles is going to be finding some way of heating up their reaction mass to fantastic temperatures while not simultaneously heating whatever is containing it.
And forget about nano-tech.
The basic laws of scale are working really hard against them. The volume being heated is miniscule, while the surface area is much larger in proportion, so it's effectively impossible to heat anything very small. Think of the smallest flame you've ever seen. You just can't make them any smaller.
Sure, you can say profits have doubled, if last quarter was unusually bad, or you took some large charges last quarter, or if there was some non-recurring windfall this quarter. And IIRC they were losing money on xbox hardware, how can they make that up on volume? Hmmmm...
{ I recall talking to a TI salesman, in the glory days ( Sept 15-17, 1983 ) of the TI-99 computer. He managed to keep a straight face, admitting they lost money on each one, but would make it up on volume. }
Well, you should notice an improvement after 5 to 10 cycles. About half the time the phone is going to run a little bit longer. About half the time it's going to run a little bit shorter. After 5 to 10 cycles the odds of it NOT lasting a bit longer than average are something like 2^10.
There's also the effect that if you've spent $XX dollars on a gadget, you're likely to be much more attentive to your phone's needs. Sorta like getting one of those mileage-enhancing cow-magnets-- it's hard to NOT drive with a gentler foor on the gas.
I don't see where these comclusions came from. Single-sourced chips from TI are likely to be MORE expensive than more generic chips. The cost of the chips is dwarfed by the costs of marketing the phones. None of this is likely to lead to a $25 phone.
one way to look at it is: The people that hire and sign the paychecks just want to get though the next project. They can either hire three 22-yr old guys that will work for $33,000/yr, or you with wide-ranging experience, good judgement, stability for $99,000.
They'll probably figure they'll get more out of the three guys, all frantically flailing around, going down dead ends you would have avoided, working late to recover files you'd never have lost, etc..
It's happened to me and many others. There's some unwritten law that managers figure three guys of IQ = 50 equal one guy IQ = 150. I don't think it works that way.
problem with making a quantum computer, you have to somehow isolate a bunch of particles so they have absolutely no interaction with each other or with anything else. Kinda hard to do. It's been done for very small numbers of particles, for very short times. And if the theory is correct, there are really steep limiting curves to how many and how long you can have particles in the proper state before they decohere. So I wouldnt expect to see a quantum computer at Wal-Mart for many many decades.
One has to take the figures on press releases with skepticism.
The weight itself isnt of much interest to anyone, except runway designers. What would be more useful is how much weight it can lift in terms of passengers and cargo, and for what distance.
The range mentioned is often the maximum range, with minimal, i.e. uneconomical load.
Slashdot Mirror
How short our memories. This idea pops up every few months. Somebody gets the idea that because wire is wire, you can piggyback twisted-pair ethernet like signals over the power wires. And you can. In the lab. With no surge surpressors on the line. No light-dimmers. No Touch-lamps. No taxicab radios in use nearby. and 500KW TV station within 5 miles. No subways or streetcars closer than a block. No biker bar nearby. Works about good enough to convince the latest incarnation of venture capitalists. Yep, works real good.
(Hour later: Okay, it's up now) Cindy: Why is my computer so slow and the disk light on all the time? Programmer: It's indexing every file. Which requires unzipping every zip file and cab archive and calling upon special document translators to extract the text therefrom. It all goes into a big hash table in RAM or VM more likely. Cindy: Why is it really slow for about a day after I install this other app? Programmer: Well, it had to index all the installed files, including all the help files that are already indexed by the help file system. But don't worry, you can set a checkbox for "low priority indexing". Cindy: So this gloabl index of everything may be hours of days out of date? Programmer: Wellllll, yep. Cindy: Hmm, maybe it's not quite ready for the average Joe yet?
After seeing how completely incompetent and pants-wetting funny awful Microsoft is at file searching with the little doggie, I can't wait to experience having a few more unnecessary, superfluous, extravagant, and bloated layers HELPING me.
We grow about 300 mllion turkeys a year. Assume 30 pounds/turkey, 30% guts, 20% of that extracted as oil, crunch crunch crunch, turkey guts will produce a bit under 0.03% of our oil needs. Turkey poop you say? Turkeys generate about 3 pounds of poop per pound of body weight, so that only improvs things by a factor of 3, up to 0.1% of our needs.
About as close to insignificant as you can get.
Even if you found TEN TIMES more waste from other animals, we're still not talking about anything significant. Less than one year's energy growth.
Maybe it's just me, but my attitude has evolved to: "if it has to be advertised, it's probably not very good".
Yes, one would want to use plenty of filters, error-detecting and correcting codes, a good modulation scheme, plus TCP/IP checksums and retries over that. The question is: how much thruput is left after all that redundancy; and how many volts do you have to pump through Joe Blow to get the signal up to a decent level above the noise; how well does it work in noisy environments, like when you turn on a vacuum cleaner, or your neighbor starts arc welding in her garage? They never seem to mention little details like that in press releases.
Regards,
A_H
Hmm, next time you're near an oscilloscope, try touching your finger to the input. Inspect the signal. Should be about 2 volts of 60 cycle hum, with maybe 10% ragged noise superimposed. Raise your other hand toward the ceiling lights-- the voltage should go up to maybe five volts of raggedy hash. Now touch something grounded-- the voltage should go down to maybe a tenth of a volt, now mostly high-frequency hash. It's unlikely your body is going to make a good data path. Ungrounded, it's a walking antenna for all kind of noise. Grounded, it's a pretty good short to ground. These folks are trying to make filet-mignon out of road-kill-- not very likely to succeed.
Except:
-
The silicon-stuffer only has access to the slow processes of maybe two silicon generations back, unlike the CPU which paid for the latest whizzy xx picofurlong process. So the supposedly whizzy chip is still not particularly faster than the CPU.
- The whizzy chip shows up late, just about when the associated CPU is going to take a 2x speed hike.
- The chip is on the I/O bus, requiring many slow I/O cycles, with interrupts masked, to get its commands.
- Said whizzy bit-banger doesnt have any software support from the main operating systems.
- The silicon-etcher guy can't write english worth a damm, so nobody can understand the spec sheet.
- And oh, he didnt know the bus was active-low, so all the data packets have to be inverted.
- And sometimes byte-reversed too.
- The chip designer doesnt know or care about the whole system, so the chip does several things that spoil the overall performance, like hogging the bus, saturating the bus snoop logic, poisoning the cache, interrupting too often, etc.
- The droolers forgot to think about the multi-processor option, so the chip doesnt share well with multiple CPU's.
- The chip is all hard-wired gates, so there's no way to fix the problems.
Finally some software wizard finds a way of speeding up the code that runs in the CPU so it's now faster than the separate chip, so the chip is now useless and just an extra power waster.We've seen successive waves of this concept, none of them have had much success. Graphics processors are one partial exception, and it took almost a decade of mis-designs of those before they became stable enough to be usable.
IIRC this happens all the time-- you have a big chemical plant with kilofeet of pipes. You have fuel rods dissolved in hot acid. You have various chemical reactions going on, some jangled a bit by radioactive effects. You have bored, semi-skilled technicians working three shifts. You end up with various soups containing hopefully separated chemical elements. You have your basic bits of Murphy's laws, resulting in vapor deposition, electrochemical deposition, sedimentation, gunk getting stuck in valve sleeves and filters, stuff condensing out in unexpectedly cool pipes, the whole gamut of undesireable side efects and reactions. And all this is happening behind several feet of concrete, inside opaque pipes, retorts, valves, pumps, and widgets. What percentage of the stuff is going to get stuck in the various gadgets? What percent of solid X is going to quietly end up in solution Y, then thrown away? I'd guess a 3% loss rate would be rather good.
My poorly-stated point was: This isnt science if they don't know or more likely, carefully profess ignorance of, the very basic quirks of their inputs, all well documented for over 50 years. Occam's razor suggests one look at simpler explanations, like electromagnetic or radiative influences, not speculate about weird chrono-synclaptic infudibulums.
"We have an agreement with the bank, they don't make pizzas and we don't cash checks"
Going to Business Week for accurate technical articles is like going to Phrack to get the latest prime rate prediction. Like having Paris Hilton teach string theory (not the -bikini kind). Like asking Janet Jackson to teach classes in modesty. Like having Dick Cheney lead the Andes 10-mile run.
If you read far enough, you'll see that their random number generators are: (get the Pampers ready)
- A proprietary box, probably using a noisy Zener diode.
- Another design, using a noisy resistor.
- Another Zener diode.
In case you havent guessed, all of the above devices are very sensitive to temperature, light, nuclear radiation, and electromagnetic interference.Those devices have been extensively studied, and every EE knows that even if they are shielded from all those influences, they generate several different kinds of noise: white noise, 1/f noise, and "popcorn noise:". Funny, but that information doesnt show up in The Fine Articles.
When info known for over 50 years and taught in every third-year EE class doesnt show up in an allegedly scientific study, one wonders.
You'll notice they don't use a truly unjoggable source of random numbers, such as a beta emitter.
Oh, and of course, it's no trick to look back and find a spike AFTER a momentous event.
Uh, no, according to the guy in charge, they didnt know the mirror was flawed. It wasnt kept in a dark warehouse, it was a lighted and temp controlled clean room. And no, they didnt "forget" about the problem with the mirror.
So, let's do a little rough math: 1984: My 8MHz 128K Mac took about 22 seconds to start up MacWrite. From a 400K floppy with a 20KB/Sec transfer rate.. 2004: My 2300MHz 512MB Duron takes 7 seconds to start up MS Word. From a 40GB disk with a 20MB/sec xfer rate. Clock rate: 300x Memory: 4000x Disk: 10,000x size and 1000x speed. App: Starts up 3x faster, responds slower. So at a rough estimate, simple word processing hasnt gotten noticeably better even as the hardware got mighty whizzier than before.
As a long-time eBay seller, I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, one suspects they'll just hire a bunch of David Spade "No" Guys... Many times I've reported obviously fake sellers. They write back that they won't do anything until 3 cases have been confirmed against the seller. I round up two other badly screwed buyers and submit the info... They reply that's still not good enough, case closed. --- On the plus side, I've received over 500 personal checks as payment from eBay buyers, and NOT ONE has bounced.
Sounds like Grandpa's old axe. I still have it. Well, Dad had to replace the handle in '68. And the head wore out in '92, so had to replace that too. But it's still Grandpa's axe. And oh, don't forget, a lot of the glitches in the original were due to time constraints.
Is it a good idea to even HAVE a deadline for this kind of project?
Yep, but you cant make these crossbar thingies much smaller. And the fact that they only last for 100 ops and slow ones at that suggests this could be an electrochemical effect, not a quantum one. Just my 2 cents.
- Mean operations til failure: ~100
- Switching speed: ~100/sec
So they just need to improve its reliability by a factor of 10^16 or so, the switching speed only by a factor of 10^7 or so.One of their minor obstacles is going to be finding some way of heating up their reaction mass to fantastic temperatures while not simultaneously heating whatever is containing it. And forget about nano-tech. The basic laws of scale are working really hard against them. The volume being heated is miniscule, while the surface area is much larger in proportion, so it's effectively impossible to heat anything very small. Think of the smallest flame you've ever seen. You just can't make them any smaller.
- Wasnt OpenStep first priced at $10,000; very few takers.
- Then a few years later, marked down to $100; very few takers.
What was the marketplace telling us?Sure, you can say profits have doubled, if last quarter was unusually bad, or you took some large charges last quarter, or if there was some non-recurring windfall this quarter. And IIRC they were losing money on xbox hardware, how can they make that up on volume? Hmmmm... { I recall talking to a TI salesman, in the glory days ( Sept 15-17, 1983 ) of the TI-99 computer. He managed to keep a straight face, admitting they lost money on each one, but would make it up on volume. }
There's also the effect that if you've spent $XX dollars on a gadget, you're likely to be much more attentive to your phone's needs. Sorta like getting one of those mileage-enhancing cow-magnets-- it's hard to NOT drive with a gentler foor on the gas.
I don't see where these comclusions came from. Single-sourced chips from TI are likely to be MORE expensive than more generic chips. The cost of the chips is dwarfed by the costs of marketing the phones. None of this is likely to lead to a $25 phone.
one way to look at it is: The people that hire and sign the paychecks just want to get though the next project. They can either hire three 22-yr old guys that will work for $33,000/yr, or you with wide-ranging experience, good judgement, stability for $99,000. They'll probably figure they'll get more out of the three guys, all frantically flailing around, going down dead ends you would have avoided, working late to recover files you'd never have lost, etc.. It's happened to me and many others. There's some unwritten law that managers figure three guys of IQ = 50 equal one guy IQ = 150. I don't think it works that way.
problem with making a quantum computer, you have to somehow isolate a bunch of particles so they have absolutely no interaction with each other or with anything else. Kinda hard to do. It's been done for very small numbers of particles, for very short times. And if the theory is correct, there are really steep limiting curves to how many and how long you can have particles in the proper state before they decohere. So I wouldnt expect to see a quantum computer at Wal-Mart for many many decades.