As usual, media is making a bigger deal out of this than what it really is worth. After looking at the details in the articles linked above, Cell looks to me like a combination of two well known technologies: SIMD units integrated with a microprocessor and MIMD geometry engines that is used in all modern GPUs. STI team must have figured out that moving the geometry engines from the graphics coprocessor to the main CPU may provide performance benefits in terms of processing 3D data structures.
As for the 4+ GHz clock speed, this is more likely the pipeline clock speed for the SPEs and the embedded PPC core on this device would probably run from a much slower (2.4GHz?) clock. Current Intel P4 processors use 1.5X core clock in some parts of the floating point unit, so you should consider a 3.8GHz P4 to be a "5.7GHz" chip to make a fair comparison to the speculated clock speeds for the cell chip.
Again. If I pay for music I should be able to play it on any hardware I own capable of audio reproduction, not just the files "authorized" for that piece of hardware. Or conversely, not just on the peice of hardware "authorized" for those files
This is why I still buy CDs instead of downloads from iTunes, etc. Music industry's attempts at switching to various copy-protected CD formats seemed to have failed over and over again. Ripping CDs to the digital format of your choice is just a few minutes worth of effort per CD.
One of the basic reasons why this package is so small is it does not include a real-time MPEG2 encoder. DBV-S cards just tune to a digital channel and send the demultiplexed MPEG2 stream directly on the PCI bus. This is typically not much data (6-10Mb/s) which can be easily handled by a program like LinVDR.
For people in US, it should be relatively easy to add support for analog NTSC tuner cards with built-in MPEG2 encoders (such as Hauppauge PVR150/PVR250/PVR350) which generate MPEG2 streams on the PCI bus just like the DVB cards. MythTV already has drivers for these cards, so it is just a matter of porting from MythTV to LinVDR.
Actually, it should be relatively easy to add support for analog tuner cards with built-in MPEG2 encoders (such as Hauppauge PVR150/PVR250/PVR350) which generate MPEG2 streams on the PCI bus just like the DVB cards.
Most of the new corporate PCs being sold are notebooks. IBM had a pretty good product in this space with the ThinkPads. Apple also has very good notebook platforms. The partnership may be primarily in the context of IBM reselling Apple notebooks.
The challenge is how to manage the transition. Most companies will end up with a large base of ThinkPad (and other brand) Wintel notebooks and phasing in PowerBooks will be non-trivial. However, if there is one company that can manage something like this (both in terms of convincing the customers and delivering the solution) it is probably IBM.
Also, note that IBM will make additional profit with every unit sold if IBM processors and chips are inside these boxes. A PowerBook transition to G5 may somewhat be tied-in with a deal like this.
Even though IBM's market cap is in excess of $160B, Apple's current valuation of $25B is a bit too much for a straight merger. A close partnership which involves IBM reselling some Apple products under IBM brand name is more likely.
IBM has wanted to get rid of Microsoft for the last 20 years or so without much success. Microsoft takes a big chunk of the profit in the low margin corporate PC business which does not leave much money on the table for HW vendors. IBM is a company that built its brand recognition on (at least perceived) quality, reliability and security of its products. Being forced to rely on a Microsoft OS as the most user visible part of a corporate IT solution is a disaster. The latest round of security problems with Windows XP and IE over the last year may have pushed IBM over the edge.
For the server side of the corporate IT market, IBM can rely on Linux or internal IBM OS variants. For desktops and notebooks there is really no option to Microsoft since the death of OS2.
If IBM chooses to offer Apple desktops and notebooks as part of their corporate solution portfolio, this will immediately make Apple products more acceptable from the perspective of CIOs. OSX user interface is easy to learn and use and OSX already supports the Microsoft Office suite, which is pretty much the only desktop (un)productivity suite used by most corporate customers.
There is a very low probability that IBM will introduce a new PC product line based on PowerPC processors and Linux or OSX once they get rid of their legacy PC business. IBM is getting rid of the legacy PC business because of low margins. Selling PCs is a very low margin business because most of the margin goes to Intel and Microsoft. With all the talk about Windows security holes, this may be the perfect timing for IBM to dissociate completely from Microsoft. Linux for corporate desktop applications is still not a very practical solution, but IBM may be able to pull a deal with Apple to ship OSX on IBM branded Mac clones.
Turkish also has two forms of past tense - one for giving information which is known to be true, the other for passing on information of unknown accuracy from other sources.
By the way, there are theories about North American Indians being descendants of Turkish tribes that used to live in Central Asia several thousand years ago. Apparently, they walked across the Bering Strait during a period of severe drought in Central Asia...
It would be almost impossible to build something like this using materials and technology available in Leonardo's time. However, using modern materials and technology, it is not entirely impossible.
Modern materials make it possible to build a strong enough frame and wings at a small fraction of what something like this would have weighed using materials from 500 years ago. The most important weight contribution to the total weight of an ornithopter would be the body weight of its driver.
The most common mistake in I have seen in many unsuccessful historical ornithopter attempts is trying to use the arms to power the device. Even the "governator" (in his younger days) did not have sufficient power and stamina in his chest and shoulder and upper back muscles to provide sufficient energy to lift his own body weight plus the weight of the machine. Humans have much stronger leg muscles with much better stamina, so a machine like this which needs to be human powered needs to use legs.
There has been several successful attempts at building human powered aircraft using fixed wings and some kind of a pedal-driven propellar system, so we know that the human body can actually generate and sustain sufficient energy for flight - at least over short distances.
It will all come down to how efficiently energy created by a pedal-crank system can be converted to wing-motion for an ornithopter to fly.
Looks like yet another material for overpriced speaker wire to squeeze more cash out of audiophiles. Can't wait to see ads for "Monster Carbon Nanatube" for only $100/foot...
And for home theater applications, you don't need speaker mounts any more, just hang your speakers down from the ceiling with carbon nanotubes...
As long as Republicans have the majority in the congress, a large scale investigation of the 2004 elections will never happen and we will not switch to open source electronics voting systems with mandatory paper trail. Unless we have open source electronic voting systems will paper trail, Republicans will keep their majority in the congress.
Three instances of a 62Msps A/D converter like the National ADC12L063 wouldbe sufficient to sample component video inputs. Feed these to an FPGA that sits on a 64-bit PCI or PCI-X card, and you have yourself a nice uncompressed HDTV capture card.
For more enterprising (and cost sensitive) HW hackers, the ultimate geeky solution would be to use a Gigabit Ethernet PHY as a A/D front ent.
Good point. Even if the bandwidth problem is solved using 64-bit PCI, PCI-X or PCI-Express, you still have the problem of writing the data to a hard disk fast enough. Uncompressed 1080i signal transmits more than 60 million pixels worth of information every second. Even assuming a minimalistic 8-bits of color information per pixel, you have to write more than 60MB/s into the hard disks. This is a challange for most standard hard drives, so you would need some type of a RAID system to keep up.
Even if you could write the data fast enough, you accumulate data at an alarming rate. At 60MB/s, you would generate 3.6GB per minute or about 216GB of data per hour of uncompressed HDTV signal with minimal color resolution.
The only feasible solution to this problem would be to use a real-time MPEG2 encoder on the capture card that can reduce the data stream to somewhere around 20Mb/s. I am not aware of any commercially available such chips, though there is at least a couple of proprietary real time encoders used in JVC (720P) and Sony (1080i) HD camcorders.
Until about a few years back, Lego was in quite a bit of trouble. They had decided to go down the merchandising route, but the Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc. sets did not sell anywhere near as expected, resulting in large losses for the company which had been historically profitable.
After a few executive changes, Lego did the right thing: Focus on basic sets that let children build countless different creations. Lego was able to offer these new sets at lower prices since they did not have to pay any merchandising fees to studios, etc. The new Designer and Creator sets from Lego are much more suited to letting the imagination of the kids dictate the play.
Several people brought up questions about a Snow Crash or Cryptonomicon movie. The general consensus on this forum appears to be that such a movie is unlikely at this point. A Baroque Cycle movie would probably be even less likely. I can't even imagine a US Cable and/or TV network taking on the challenge of creating a Baraque Circle series. However, BBC may be both willing and able to pull something like this off, though the financial incentive to Stephenson would most likely be limited other than an additional round of book sales some time in the future.
Neal, would you be interested in a project like this that can spread the popularity of the Baroque Circle series beyond the current set of fans? Or are we going to have to wait until the ages between The System of the World and Cryptonomicon are bridged by some of your future works?
I definitely agree that Diamond Age is the most fascinating and visionary Sci-Fi book by Stephenson. I spent several sleepless nights because of that book.
Snow Crash seems to be the best known, if not the most popular one of your "pure" sci-fi books. Do you have an understanding of why this is? Is it because the release of Snow Crash was perfectly aligned with the rise of the cyber-punk genre? I always found Diamond Age to be a much more fascinating and visionary novel than Snow Crash. Do you happen to like any one of these two books better than the other one? Or asking an author to choose between to books is like asking a mother to choose betwen two kids?
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As usual, media is making a bigger deal out of this than what it really is worth. After looking at the details in the articles linked above, Cell looks to me like a combination of two well known technologies: SIMD units integrated with a microprocessor and MIMD geometry engines that is used in all modern GPUs. STI team must have figured out that moving the geometry engines from the graphics coprocessor to the main CPU may provide performance benefits in terms of processing 3D data structures. As for the 4+ GHz clock speed, this is more likely the pipeline clock speed for the SPEs and the embedded PPC core on this device would probably run from a much slower (2.4GHz?) clock. Current Intel P4 processors use 1.5X core clock in some parts of the floating point unit, so you should consider a 3.8GHz P4 to be a "5.7GHz" chip to make a fair comparison to the speculated clock speeds for the cell chip.
This is why I still buy CDs instead of downloads from iTunes, etc. Music industry's attempts at switching to various copy-protected CD formats seemed to have failed over and over again. Ripping CDs to the digital format of your choice is just a few minutes worth of effort per CD.
Has Sony invented anything that is original AND decent since Trinitron?
Sounds like you have found the solution to the population explosion problem...
One of the basic reasons why this package is so small is it does not include a real-time MPEG2 encoder. DBV-S cards just tune to a digital channel and send the demultiplexed MPEG2 stream directly on the PCI bus. This is typically not much data (6-10Mb/s) which can be easily handled by a program like LinVDR. For people in US, it should be relatively easy to add support for analog NTSC tuner cards with built-in MPEG2 encoders (such as Hauppauge PVR150/PVR250/PVR350) which generate MPEG2 streams on the PCI bus just like the DVB cards. MythTV already has drivers for these cards, so it is just a matter of porting from MythTV to LinVDR.
Actually, it should be relatively easy to add support for analog tuner cards with built-in MPEG2 encoders (such as Hauppauge PVR150/PVR250/PVR350) which generate MPEG2 streams on the PCI bus just like the DVB cards.
Most of the new corporate PCs being sold are notebooks. IBM had a pretty good product in this space with the ThinkPads. Apple also has very good notebook platforms. The partnership may be primarily in the context of IBM reselling Apple notebooks. The challenge is how to manage the transition. Most companies will end up with a large base of ThinkPad (and other brand) Wintel notebooks and phasing in PowerBooks will be non-trivial. However, if there is one company that can manage something like this (both in terms of convincing the customers and delivering the solution) it is probably IBM. Also, note that IBM will make additional profit with every unit sold if IBM processors and chips are inside these boxes. A PowerBook transition to G5 may somewhat be tied-in with a deal like this.
IBM has wanted to get rid of Microsoft for the last 20 years or so without much success. Microsoft takes a big chunk of the profit in the low margin corporate PC business which does not leave much money on the table for HW vendors. IBM is a company that built its brand recognition on (at least perceived) quality, reliability and security of its products. Being forced to rely on a Microsoft OS as the most user visible part of a corporate IT solution is a disaster. The latest round of security problems with Windows XP and IE over the last year may have pushed IBM over the edge.
For the server side of the corporate IT market, IBM can rely on Linux or internal IBM OS variants. For desktops and notebooks there is really no option to Microsoft since the death of OS2.
If IBM chooses to offer Apple desktops and notebooks as part of their corporate solution portfolio, this will immediately make Apple products more acceptable from the perspective of CIOs. OSX user interface is easy to learn and use and OSX already supports the Microsoft Office suite, which is pretty much the only desktop (un)productivity suite used by most corporate customers.
There is a very low probability that IBM will introduce a new PC product line based on PowerPC processors and Linux or OSX once they get rid of their legacy PC business. IBM is getting rid of the legacy PC business because of low margins. Selling PCs is a very low margin business because most of the margin goes to Intel and Microsoft. With all the talk about Windows security holes, this may be the perfect timing for IBM to dissociate completely from Microsoft. Linux for corporate desktop applications is still not a very practical solution, but IBM may be able to pull a deal with Apple to ship OSX on IBM branded Mac clones.
Turkish also has two forms of past tense - one for giving information which is known to be true, the other for passing on information of unknown accuracy from other sources. By the way, there are theories about North American Indians being descendants of Turkish tribes that used to live in Central Asia several thousand years ago. Apparently, they walked across the Bering Strait during a period of severe drought in Central Asia...
Modern materials make it possible to build a strong enough frame and wings at a small fraction of what something like this would have weighed using materials from 500 years ago. The most important weight contribution to the total weight of an ornithopter would be the body weight of its driver.
The most common mistake in I have seen in many unsuccessful historical ornithopter attempts is trying to use the arms to power the device. Even the "governator" (in his younger days) did not have sufficient power and stamina in his chest and shoulder and upper back muscles to provide sufficient energy to lift his own body weight plus the weight of the machine. Humans have much stronger leg muscles with much better stamina, so a machine like this which needs to be human powered needs to use legs.
There has been several successful attempts at building human powered aircraft using fixed wings and some kind of a pedal-driven propellar system, so we know that the human body can actually generate and sustain sufficient energy for flight - at least over short distances. It will all come down to how efficiently energy created by a pedal-crank system can be converted to wing-motion for an ornithopter to fly.
Looks like yet another material for overpriced speaker wire to squeeze more cash out of audiophiles. Can't wait to see ads for "Monster Carbon Nanatube" for only $100/foot... And for home theater applications, you don't need speaker mounts any more, just hang your speakers down from the ceiling with carbon nanotubes...
As long as Republicans have the majority in the congress, a large scale investigation of the 2004 elections will never happen and we will not switch to open source electronics voting systems with mandatory paper trail. Unless we have open source electronic voting systems will paper trail, Republicans will keep their majority in the congress.
Three instances of a 62Msps A/D converter like the National ADC12L063 wouldbe sufficient to sample component video inputs. Feed these to an FPGA that sits on a 64-bit PCI or PCI-X card, and you have yourself a nice uncompressed HDTV capture card. For more enterprising (and cost sensitive) HW hackers, the ultimate geeky solution would be to use a Gigabit Ethernet PHY as a A/D front ent.
Good point. Even if the bandwidth problem is solved using 64-bit PCI, PCI-X or PCI-Express, you still have the problem of writing the data to a hard disk fast enough. Uncompressed 1080i signal transmits more than 60 million pixels worth of information every second. Even assuming a minimalistic 8-bits of color information per pixel, you have to write more than 60MB/s into the hard disks. This is a challange for most standard hard drives, so you would need some type of a RAID system to keep up. Even if you could write the data fast enough, you accumulate data at an alarming rate. At 60MB/s, you would generate 3.6GB per minute or about 216GB of data per hour of uncompressed HDTV signal with minimal color resolution. The only feasible solution to this problem would be to use a real-time MPEG2 encoder on the capture card that can reduce the data stream to somewhere around 20Mb/s. I am not aware of any commercially available such chips, though there is at least a couple of proprietary real time encoders used in JVC (720P) and Sony (1080i) HD camcorders.
Until about a few years back, Lego was in quite a bit of trouble. They had decided to go down the merchandising route, but the Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc. sets did not sell anywhere near as expected, resulting in large losses for the company which had been historically profitable. After a few executive changes, Lego did the right thing: Focus on basic sets that let children build countless different creations. Lego was able to offer these new sets at lower prices since they did not have to pay any merchandising fees to studios, etc. The new Designer and Creator sets from Lego are much more suited to letting the imagination of the kids dictate the play.
You would have to read the Baroque Circle to find out what is on those cards - only about 3000 pages.
Neal, would you be interested in a project like this that can spread the popularity of the Baroque Circle series beyond the current set of fans? Or are we going to have to wait until the ages between The System of the World and Cryptonomicon are bridged by some of your future works?
I definitely agree that Diamond Age is the most fascinating and visionary Sci-Fi book by Stephenson. I spent several sleepless nights because of that book.
Snow Crash seems to be the best known, if not the most popular one of your "pure" sci-fi books. Do you have an understanding of why this is? Is it because the release of Snow Crash was perfectly aligned with the rise of the cyber-punk genre? I always found Diamond Age to be a much more fascinating and visionary novel than Snow Crash. Do you happen to like any one of these two books better than the other one? Or asking an author to choose between to books is like asking a mother to choose betwen two kids?