Intel and others are already integrating functions to off-load some of TCP/IP's more costly aspects from the CPU. At that point, adding a connection count throttle only requires a few extra transistors to recognize incoming/outgoing connects and count them.
But the connect limit would have to be configurable to accomodate people's usage patterns... and if the limits are programmable, nothing is stopping a virus from altering them even if the limiting itself is done in hardware.
When plasma displays warm up, their materials expand. When they cool, they contract. This gradually weakens the seal between cells and lets the gases leak out.
I wonder how well the first generation of large commercial OLED displays will fare compared to current plasmas.
Rental prices are also increasing... it looks like buying DRM-infested HD-DVD will soon become the most cost-effective movie experience even for single viewings.
There is a simple fix for CDROM&all lock-out: lock the computers away in a secure room and use a KVM extender. With no physical access, there are far fewer things to worry about and makes centralized control of data transfers that much more convenient.
Building really secures computers... you probably heard the stories about walls being erected around equipment with people later wondering where the print server or other such have gone to: still online and working but nowhere to be found in accessible office space. Secure by obsolescence, physically secure behind walls and secure by obscurity because no one knows the actual location!
The P4 vs A64 gaming benchmarks were not always as nearly one-sided as they have become over the last year.
I do not pay much attention to benchmarks since I have no plan to upgrade or get new PCs for the next 2-3 years... unless what I have now fails beyond practical repair or runs out of expansion options.
Balancing is not applicable to single-ended circuits... it is only applicable to split (like NA's 2x115) and multi-phase circuits.
As for the three phase distribution, this is international common practice and completely irrelevant here.
The point of my original post was that domestic power is ~230V in NA too, it is simply split into 2x115V at the distribution panel for the small circuits.
This is supposed to be a multicore, multiprocessor and presumably multi-tasking/threaded benchmark. In this case, the Xeons will choke on the FSB and the Opterons should win most benchmarks hands-down.
After you strip games and media-encoding benchmarks, there are not many Intel-biased benchmarks left.
Yes, there is substantial research being done on pretty much everything... but an increasingly large amount of it is being offshored.
For CPU architecture, most of the good Intel stuff (like the Pentium-M) comes together in Israel, not the USA.
Much of that "relative decline" is due to offshoring. Now, how bad will that get once the chinese high-tech industry has ramped up? Things look bad now and will only keep looking worse for the next many years unless some dramatic and somewhat unexpected changes occur in the near future.
In North America, we do have ~230V... the distribution transformer has a center-tap to ground and the distribution boxes are wired to split the circuit in two balanced serial circuits across the mains bus to minimize ground/neutral current. For 230V appliances (stove, central AC, heating, etc.), we simply 'breaker' them across the buses.
Other than the local electric code and convenience, there is nothing else preventing people from wiring a NA house to have 230V everywhere.
For pharmaceuticals, five years would not get them through clinic trials. The patent would be expired before they get to market... many drugs take close to ten years from discovery to market.
I hope this thing has active PFC to limit inrush current when the thing is initially plugged in and switched on. Otherwise, the inrush with simple thermistor limiters can be about double that much... in this case, it would definitely need its own circuit or at least have to be the first thing switched on. (I can start the AC while the PC is on but doing the opposite often trips.)
In real life, 15A breakers trip somewhere between 17A and 20A. Also, it usually take more than a half-cycle overload to trip them. This is just enough to let me use both the toaster and microwave oven at the same time... if I start the toasts first or during the microwave's magnetron deadtime.
In a casino, real cash is on the table. For MMORPGs, most terms of service specifically say that game items shall not be traded outside the game. So, as far as the game publishers are concerned, the game is never supposed to gross more than actual sales and subscriptions. This is almost certainly far less than many casinos.
The in-game stealing is part of the game while the subsequent trading for real cash of said stolen items is not.
Actually, the game's "Rules of conduct" forbids both BUYING and selling game coins/items/etc. outside the game.
So, both the abusive profiteers and their buyers risk being banned. The main problem lies in determining exactly who bought what from whom while sparing the innocents.
It might be a real violation of the game's terms of use:
Rules of conduct: 11. You may not advertise the intent to or commit the act of buying or selling items for cash or trading items from one server to another.
EULA: 7. [...] You may not sell or auction any Lineage II accounts, characters, items, coin or copyrighted material.
So, selling stuff would definitely warrant a ban. Inconveniencing people only to sell their non-resellable stuff for profit afterwards might also turn into charges of fraud or theft - people who paid for items will be pissed when their items are voided or returned to their last known legitimate owners. If the rules of conduct are applied verbatim, buyers would be banned as well, everybody loses.
If the game allows stealing, then they should implement an in-game way of handling theft. If they do not or people find a way of working around that and every attempt (patch) at fixing the backdoor/loop-hole, they still have the option of applying the virtual 'death penalty' in the form of account bans.
Games are only that, games. If this continues, online gamers will need a hotline to their lawyer(s) before signing on.
Some athletes ran into pretty big troubles from blogging and posting their own videos during the last olympic "games". The big media went pretty far out of their way to clamp down on everything and it really sucks. Almost every event is locked down with regional exclusivity deals.
If you go to the games, any written, photographic, audio and video content you may acquire must be for your own exclusive use only or you risk having the media lawyers on your back.
My guess is that this will only get much worse before some sense is knocked back in this messy circus act.
Including GPS in VoIP would be great for terrorists... if the protocol is plain-text or has weak encryption (for tapability), it would be simple to substitute the GPS data for any other location of your choice.
Commercial grade stuff has ~10% efficiency and costs well under $1k per square meter. Aerospace grade stuff has efficiency typically exceeding 30% and can cost well over $25k per square meter.
Solar cells exist in various grades. 150W for a panel that is over one square meter in surface means these panels are made using some of the worst solar cells on the market, with efficiency close to 10%. Aerospace grade cells have efficiencies around 35% and these cost a small fortune, around $20 per square inch last time I heard about them, roughly $25k per square meter. Solar cells' prices shoot up pretty fast for cells that do better than 15%.
How does one fit 25 square meters of low-efficiency cells on a car with a coverable hood area under eight square meters anyway?
With less than eight square meters, the low-efficiency panel would generate about 1kW, barely enough to compensate for the extra drag and load.
A decent solar panel will also set you back anywhere between $50k and $500k. And even with a $500k panel, one gets only 3-4kW out of it under best circumstances, barely enough to sustain an effort in the 4-5HP area.
But when operating from combined panel and battery power for initial acceleration, many solar cars can do 0-100km/h in less than 15 seconds with their 10-15HP electric motors. Using a motor capable of substantially more than what can be sustainably used would add significant extra dead weight for most of the ride. Solar car competitions are long-range races since short-range would run mostly off batteries.
If someone fitted four 30HP motor-wheels on a solar car, it would fly: there is not enough weight (most of these things weight under 500kg, batteries and pilot included) to keep it on the ground since most solar car "wings" are designed to produce lift for road friction and drag reduction. That aside, the power-to-weight ratio of such a solar car would be much higher than most cars... but power ratings are mostly meaningless if they cannot be sustained.
Solar cars are a quest for efficiency and the least efficient part of commute (after braking and idling) is acceleration. So optimizing for acceleration in a solar race is pointless beyond meeting qualification requirements.
It does prove that propagation delays within the P4 have enough margin to go well beyond 4GHz. Trace propagation delays do not change much from -200C to +100C but CMOS transistors' and copper traces' conductivities do improve quite a bit.
So the devil's in the transistors and trace losses. I wonder how this will pan out at 65nm... smaller transistors are potentially faster but they have to be large enough to drive the nets and the loads these nets represent scale less than linearly with process technology. Static power is also likely to increase substantially.
I would not be surprised if phase-change cooling became common within the next 10 years, along with CPUs designed and manufactured specifically to run in sub-zero environments for the mid/high-end. I am having a hard time imagining progress much beyond 65nm (maybe 45nm) without phase-change: leakage, conduction losses, thermal noise and other temperature-dependent parameters will be major show-stoppers. Getting closer to atomic transistors is trimming noise and leakage tolerances.
Well, someone could be even more "crazy stupider" and repeat the experiment using either liquid helium (much more expensive than nitrogen) or hydrogen (kinda flammable/explosive)... they could probably reach 8.5GHz this way.
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Intel and others are already integrating functions to off-load some of TCP/IP's more costly aspects from the CPU. At that point, adding a connection count throttle only requires a few extra transistors to recognize incoming/outgoing connects and count them.
But the connect limit would have to be configurable to accomodate people's usage patterns... and if the limits are programmable, nothing is stopping a virus from altering them even if the limiting itself is done in hardware.
This is what they call burn-in.
When plasma displays warm up, their materials expand. When they cool, they contract. This gradually weakens the seal between cells and lets the gases leak out.
I wonder how well the first generation of large commercial OLED displays will fare compared to current plasmas.
Rental prices are also increasing... it looks like buying DRM-infested HD-DVD will soon become the most cost-effective movie experience even for single viewings.
There is a simple fix for CDROM&all lock-out: lock the computers away in a secure room and use a KVM extender. With no physical access, there are far fewer things to worry about and makes centralized control of data transfers that much more convenient.
Building really secures computers... you probably heard the stories about walls being erected around equipment with people later wondering where the print server or other such have gone to: still online and working but nowhere to be found in accessible office space. Secure by obsolescence, physically secure behind walls and secure by obscurity because no one knows the actual location!
The P4 vs A64 gaming benchmarks were not always as nearly one-sided as they have become over the last year.
I do not pay much attention to benchmarks since I have no plan to upgrade or get new PCs for the next 2-3 years... unless what I have now fails beyond practical repair or runs out of expansion options.
Balancing is not applicable to single-ended circuits... it is only applicable to split (like NA's 2x115) and multi-phase circuits.
As for the three phase distribution, this is international common practice and completely irrelevant here.
The point of my original post was that domestic power is ~230V in NA too, it is simply split into 2x115V at the distribution panel for the small circuits.
This is supposed to be a multicore, multiprocessor and presumably multi-tasking/threaded benchmark. In this case, the Xeons will choke on the FSB and the Opterons should win most benchmarks hands-down.
After you strip games and media-encoding benchmarks, there are not many Intel-biased benchmarks left.
Yes, there is substantial research being done on pretty much everything... but an increasingly large amount of it is being offshored.
For CPU architecture, most of the good Intel stuff (like the Pentium-M) comes together in Israel, not the USA.
Much of that "relative decline" is due to offshoring. Now, how bad will that get once the chinese high-tech industry has ramped up? Things look bad now and will only keep looking worse for the next many years unless some dramatic and somewhat unexpected changes occur in the near future.
In North America, we do have ~230V... the distribution transformer has a center-tap to ground and the distribution boxes are wired to split the circuit in two balanced serial circuits across the mains bus to minimize ground/neutral current. For 230V appliances (stove, central AC, heating, etc.), we simply 'breaker' them across the buses.
Other than the local electric code and convenience, there is nothing else preventing people from wiring a NA house to have 230V everywhere.
For pharmaceuticals, five years would not get them through clinic trials. The patent would be expired before they get to market... many drugs take close to ten years from discovery to market.
AFAIK, patents are already non-extensible.
I hope this thing has active PFC to limit inrush current when the thing is initially plugged in and switched on. Otherwise, the inrush with simple thermistor limiters can be about double that much... in this case, it would definitely need its own circuit or at least have to be the first thing switched on. (I can start the AC while the PC is on but doing the opposite often trips.)
In real life, 15A breakers trip somewhere between 17A and 20A. Also, it usually take more than a half-cycle overload to trip them. This is just enough to let me use both the toaster and microwave oven at the same time... if I start the toasts first or during the microwave's magnetron deadtime.
"So they're locking down DVI before the rippers have a chance to get started."
Only problem with this lock-down is that as the GP mentionned, HDCP has apparently already been broken.
Search for "Spatz", the first commercial HDCP-to-DVI box.
In a casino, real cash is on the table. For MMORPGs, most terms of service specifically say that game items shall not be traded outside the game. So, as far as the game publishers are concerned, the game is never supposed to gross more than actual sales and subscriptions. This is almost certainly far less than many casinos.
The in-game stealing is part of the game while the subsequent trading for real cash of said stolen items is not.
Actually, the game's "Rules of conduct" forbids both BUYING and selling game coins/items/etc. outside the game.
So, both the abusive profiteers and their buyers risk being banned. The main problem lies in determining exactly who bought what from whom while sparing the innocents.
It might be a real violation of the game's terms of use:
Rules of conduct:
11. You may not advertise the intent to or commit the act of buying or selling items for cash or trading items from one server to another.
EULA:
7. [...] You may not sell or auction any Lineage II accounts, characters, items, coin or copyrighted material.
So, selling stuff would definitely warrant a ban. Inconveniencing people only to sell their non-resellable stuff for profit afterwards might also turn into charges of fraud or theft - people who paid for items will be pissed when their items are voided or returned to their last known legitimate owners. If the rules of conduct are applied verbatim, buyers would be banned as well, everybody loses.
Exactly.
If the game allows stealing, then they should implement an in-game way of handling theft. If they do not or people find a way of working around that and every attempt (patch) at fixing the backdoor/loop-hole, they still have the option of applying the virtual 'death penalty' in the form of account bans.
Games are only that, games. If this continues, online gamers will need a hotline to their lawyer(s) before signing on.
The media and sponsors act as if they own the athletes and their performances pretty much the same way the *AA&co do with artists, actors and authors.
Olympics were supposed to be universal but the media and sponsors are cheapening the games into common privatised entertainment.
Do not give them ideas so soon, they still have time for amending the law to ban plain shirts and sharpies.
I wonder what they would do to a "Do it yourself, shirts and shapies shop" a few corners away from the games.
Well, yes actually.
Some athletes ran into pretty big troubles from blogging and posting their own videos during the last olympic "games". The big media went pretty far out of their way to clamp down on everything and it really sucks. Almost every event is locked down with regional exclusivity deals.
If you go to the games, any written, photographic, audio and video content you may acquire must be for your own exclusive use only or you risk having the media lawyers on your back.
My guess is that this will only get much worse before some sense is knocked back in this messy circus act.
Including GPS in VoIP would be great for terrorists... if the protocol is plain-text or has weak encryption (for tapability), it would be simple to substitute the GPS data for any other location of your choice.
Not all solar cells are created equal.
Commercial grade stuff has ~10% efficiency and costs well under $1k per square meter. Aerospace grade stuff has efficiency typically exceeding 30% and can cost well over $25k per square meter.
Solar cells exist in various grades. 150W for a panel that is over one square meter in surface means these panels are made using some of the worst solar cells on the market, with efficiency close to 10%. Aerospace grade cells have efficiencies around 35% and these cost a small fortune, around $20 per square inch last time I heard about them, roughly $25k per square meter. Solar cells' prices shoot up pretty fast for cells that do better than 15%.
How does one fit 25 square meters of low-efficiency cells on a car with a coverable hood area under eight square meters anyway?
With less than eight square meters, the low-efficiency panel would generate about 1kW, barely enough to compensate for the extra drag and load.
A decent solar panel will also set you back anywhere between $50k and $500k. And even with a $500k panel, one gets only 3-4kW out of it under best circumstances, barely enough to sustain an effort in the 4-5HP area.
But when operating from combined panel and battery power for initial acceleration, many solar cars can do 0-100km/h in less than 15 seconds with their 10-15HP electric motors. Using a motor capable of substantially more than what can be sustainably used would add significant extra dead weight for most of the ride. Solar car competitions are long-range races since short-range would run mostly off batteries.
If someone fitted four 30HP motor-wheels on a solar car, it would fly: there is not enough weight (most of these things weight under 500kg, batteries and pilot included) to keep it on the ground since most solar car "wings" are designed to produce lift for road friction and drag reduction. That aside, the power-to-weight ratio of such a solar car would be much higher than most cars... but power ratings are mostly meaningless if they cannot be sustained.
Solar cars are a quest for efficiency and the least efficient part of commute (after braking and idling) is acceleration. So optimizing for acceleration in a solar race is pointless beyond meeting qualification requirements.
It does prove that propagation delays within the P4 have enough margin to go well beyond 4GHz. Trace propagation delays do not change much from -200C to +100C but CMOS transistors' and copper traces' conductivities do improve quite a bit.
So the devil's in the transistors and trace losses. I wonder how this will pan out at 65nm... smaller transistors are potentially faster but they have to be large enough to drive the nets and the loads these nets represent scale less than linearly with process technology. Static power is also likely to increase substantially.
I would not be surprised if phase-change cooling became common within the next 10 years, along with CPUs designed and manufactured specifically to run in sub-zero environments for the mid/high-end. I am having a hard time imagining progress much beyond 65nm (maybe 45nm) without phase-change: leakage, conduction losses, thermal noise and other temperature-dependent parameters will be major show-stoppers. Getting closer to atomic transistors is trimming noise and leakage tolerances.
Well, someone could be even more "crazy stupider" and repeat the experiment using either liquid helium (much more expensive than nitrogen) or hydrogen (kinda flammable/explosive)... they could probably reach 8.5GHz this way.