Delivery date will be end of January here in Germany, can't wait. I hope they will introduce a 10-inch version at some point, I guess it would be too expensive to make now and they wait until the laws of mass production have brought the manufacturing price down. In the mean time, the 7 inch screen will have to do. I do have a good-old 20 inch CRT heater:) in my room, so for higher resolutions I can always hook it up. Also I will look around for an external DVD writer and a nice NAS/USB-drive to compensate for the small HD. With a bit of luck I could have an EEE as a main computer:D (Maybe I'm expecting a bit too much here)
What I like most about the thing is that it is cheaper than a VGA, still uses a normal-form-factor keyboard (I have small fingers , I hope that'll help. I don't think I ever learned myself to use the right shift key anyway) and that it's light! So many laptops are so damned heavy, my back just refuses to carry them around.
Sorry people, but I'll go for the EEE pc. It will be the first PC I'll buy in 7 years, I've been waiting for it all that time:) It delivers a small, lightweight, laptop with limited capabilities, but still all the features you'd like a computer to have. Also, it is DEAD CHEAP. I recently looked at a site selling subnotebooks from Japan, all where going for 1200 dollars or more. Why would anyone buy those? Normally these machines were limited to upper-management people, but finally any normal person can also buy them, with an EEE and they WILL!!! Sorry if I sound like a fanboy, but if sony would have sold a 300 PC with the specs of an EEE, I would have bought it from them. Knowing Sony, they would have screwed it up badly anyway, using some strange sony-only form-factor (memory stick?). Asus was just the first to come with the right mix, and I hope many will follow.
I don't agree completely. I'm not much of a hardcore gamer, didn't play an FPS since Heretic. But since someone showed me the UT demo on Linux I started to like it a lot. It's not a dumb FPS, the variation in game play is good enough to make it an interesting game for a long time. I can imagine that there are a lot of FPS games out there that are interesting for the 'hardcore' FPS people but not for me.
Sorry, I tried installing silverlight, or whatever it is called, because a windows-fanatic friend of mine was making a website with it. Guess what, it didn't install on XP on my PC. Just an 'the OS or browser is not supported' error.
If they will make their apps based on directx 10 and vista and huge.net libraries and all that shizzle, it won't work on most of that 80% of PCs either.
I used a touch-screen ATM today, where the amount of money was chosen via the touch screen instead of via buttons at the side of the screen. STILL, even though they had a probably 2-3 times as expensive touch screen compared to a normal screen, they had included a numeric keyboard, and it's easy to understand why. Just a small flaw in the touch-screen interface and you'll be typing the pin-code wrong more often than you want, ending up with a lot of angry people at the bank desk the next day, wanting their cards back.
And a more practical point... Who will prevent 'others' (i.e. those who are not 'we') from removing these detection grids. Stuff left lying around in international waters will probably be a case of 'finders keepers'.
But, since America also needs China for its economic growth (where else are they going to have their cheap products made), this more or less means the US needs China more than China needs the US. Or did you see China get into trouble after stopping to buy US dollars.
They were not attacking. They were just protecting the material the US bought with their money. Since in a way, it's their property, they probably wouldn't want something to go wrong with it. They're just acting like a good godfather should.
I'm running XP on a VIA C3, 512 MB, and a way crappier GPU than this one (some 4 MB shared memory piece of junk). I can watch youtube sort of fluently if I use the 'smaller screen' button for it. DVD is out of the question after I replaced the CPU fan with a northbridge heatsink, but it can handle the TV-card signal on full screen, I just plugged a DVD player into the S-video port.
I am fully convinced that this PC will run XP like a charm. I wonder when it will be available in the EU, wal-mart recently was renamed into Real,- here in Germany. They sell lindows or linuxOS pcs every now and then, by the way.
Indeed! It's probably just a question of getting used to it, but I cannot imagine having to type on a different keyboard then my own. I have a few IBM rapid access keyboards just to make sure I'll have a spare one when one breaks. I'm typing on it since probably 7 years now and it's just irreplaceable. The pulse rest is a bit cracked (tape on the back side), but it just has this sturdy typing feeling that I don't have on a logitech keyboard. Microsoft may be a bit better on this respect.
There is a theory for grad students doing computational simulations that they might as well do nothing the first two years, and then perform all calculations in the last few years, without losing time. Also, this is 162 years for a single core, in reality, problems like this will be done on a parallel machine.
That said, just as 'cancer research' is a way to get easy funding, 'grid computing' is not much more. The theory is very nice, work on a machine anywhere in the world from your own desktop without having to worry about which machine it is. In the end, you'll actually have to recompile your program for any different architecture. If you do science, your program will change a lot, and you'll have to do the recompiling a lot.
They will be. That this message comes from the former Intel boss doesn't come as a surprise. They want to become big in household medical equipment to make self-support by handicapped and elderly easier. This is big business, with an ever increasing group of consumers and very high financial margins.
To OP: A virtual lab is a joke. If anything, doing chemistry is learning how to deal with mistakes, learning from them, preventing them. Even when doing computer simulations of chemical processes, most of the time is lost with finding out what went wrong with your simulation, and trying to understand how the physical model could get closer to the beautiful mystery that the world around us is.
Yeah, apple does the same: number in dollars = number in euros.
It can't be transportation costs, these things come from china/taiwan/korea anyway.
The law of supply and demand results in companies asking for their products what they can get for it.
Apparently, European people are willing to put up paying 40% (!) more for their tech products than people in the US.
As an unrelated point: This money is easily earned back by drinking fine wines. From what I've heard the supermarket prices for (crappy) wine in the US are like the restaurant prices for a (decently-tasting) bottle of wine in Europe.
Point is, you shouldn't compare it with the value of the previous quarter alone, you should compare it with the value of the previous quarter + expected increase! The fact that it didnt increase is rather telling, if you take into account that it is pretty difficult to buy a PC without vista nowadays. That the number didn't increase must mean that a lot of people are doing a lot of effort to make sure they don't get vista.
I would not call this a troll, it's a damn serious human rights issue. Who can you stand up to for inhumane abuse of these systems?
Why shouldn't they go around and shoot at running kids, the movements kids make are quite probably similar to that of someone who is suddenly attacking.
Who will be held responsible? I admit, already now it is a problem and you will most likely not see any justice as a (family member of a) victim, but at least at the moment, any attack done is a human decision. Also remember that back in the day, it was a human operator in a Russian Rocket base who decided the incoming rockets was a technical error, and didn't press the button.
In no way should a robot or computer make decisions about life or death issues. We humans have a conscience for a reason.
70 eurocents... But that isn't all good news. A lot of european companies still do trade in Dollars and lose a lot there, or depend on America as an export market, for which they are becoming too expensive. Exception are high-quality high-cost products that are almost without competition (think: "made in Germany" - the funny thing about that label is that it was meant as a way to have British costumers buy less German goods, but it ended up having the opposite effect).
Ah yes, so what couple of papers did you publish in the mean time? I think it's quite respectable. Furthermore, I am afraid that being able to perform logical thought is indeed already geeky at the moment, partly due to the big lobbies of people who want to press 'the word of god' as superior than 'reason'. Yes they do, look at the photos of the creationist museum in texas, you can find them on flickr.
The consequence of the parent post is that code can be run very fast on a vector machine IF it is written in such a way to take full advantage of the vector architecture, using smartly written loops. Now it is a good idea to have such loops in your high-performance-computing code anyway, but since not everyone is writing a whole scientific software package from scratch each time a new computer is available, most codes used now are optimized for either shared memory or cluster systems. (It would be nice if they were optimized for hybrid systems, but hybrid MPI isn't without problems, and hybrid systems are relatively new).
Realize that most scientific code probably still has lots of code in it written for the original CRAY system it ran on in the 80's, and you see why vector systems will live on for a while: code that was written for one will have to be used on a vector system. One has to have to luck to find a PhD student willing and able to rewrite the code for a new machine.
I really have the experience that the hardware possibilities are growing faster than the (operating) software using it. Just from a practical point of view: Say a research center gets a new cluster. It takes at least half a year to a year to get it configured correctly, find all the broken hardware and replace it, get network problems out of the way. By then it has already dropped 50 places in the top500 and it will still not be used to even half of its full power. Even though supercomputing is as old as computing itself, there is still no 'plug-n-play' solution to get a supercomputer running. And I am not talking about home-made beowulf clusters here, try with Dell, HP, Sun, or IBM, it just won't work out of the package.
And besides that you end up with the next problem, how to get your program to optimally use the shared memory-core nodes AND the interconnected nodes. These are all non-standard solutions. At the moment you can buy a quad core home machine for about 700 euro, but is there any software written for it? It is time for a smart message-passing/shared memory programming style that will automatically optimize for the hardware it is compiled on.
Until these problems are solved, multi-core computing will be suboptimal, and by just looking at the increase in TFLOPS peak performance of a system we will just be fooling ourselves.
Me too! Sometimes this actually ends up by the company using nuclear power, I think this happens in Germany a lot. Not much CO2 costs come from a nuclear plant... Any good provider will tell you where the energy in their 'green energy' plan comes from, though. Point is you have to trust them complying to these rules, maybe there is government control even.
Unfortunately, you are probably right. Given the history of EU politicians trying to get software patents through, they are probably in favor of those, too (last time they tried they combined with some rulings about agriculture, and hoped that no-one would look there).
The thing that helps (and at the same time limits) the EU is its amazing diverseness. There are so many parties involved with each their own agenda that the end result of any ruling is nearly impossible to predict. This gives a bit more chance for commercially unpopular measures compared to the US, where the result just depends on how much the lobby paid the election for either the democrats or the conservatives, if there is any difference between those two to begin with.
Well, mostly they just switch to new theories, but don't retract all papers with the outdated theories, just because that would be impractical to do. So in fact, there are still thousands and thousands (millions?) of papers displaying incorrect theories, that you can refer to if you wish. If your goal would be to advance in the sciences for the common could, you would do no such thing of course. Obviously the goals of those citing this outdated paper did not have the advance of sciences in mind.
Slashdot Mirror
What I like most about the thing is that it is cheaper than a VGA, still uses a normal-form-factor keyboard (I have small fingers , I hope that'll help. I don't think I ever learned myself to use the right shift key anyway) and that it's light! So many laptops are so damned heavy, my back just refuses to carry them around.
Sorry people, but I'll go for the EEE pc. It will be the first PC I'll buy in 7 years, I've been waiting for it all that time :) It delivers a small, lightweight, laptop with limited capabilities, but still all the features you'd like a computer to have. Also, it is DEAD CHEAP. I recently looked at a site selling subnotebooks from Japan, all where going for 1200 dollars or more. Why would anyone buy those? Normally these machines were limited to upper-management people, but finally any normal person can also buy them, with an EEE and they WILL!!! Sorry if I sound like a fanboy, but if sony would have sold a 300 PC with the specs of an EEE, I would have bought it from them. Knowing Sony, they would have screwed it up badly anyway, using some strange sony-only form-factor (memory stick?). Asus was just the first to come with the right mix, and I hope many will follow.
I don't agree completely. I'm not much of a hardcore gamer, didn't play an FPS since Heretic. But since someone showed me the UT demo on Linux I started to like it a lot. It's not a dumb FPS, the variation in game play is good enough to make it an interesting game for a long time. I can imagine that there are a lot of FPS games out there that are interesting for the 'hardcore' FPS people but not for me.
If they will make their apps based on directx 10 and vista and huge .net libraries and all that shizzle, it won't work on most of that 80% of PCs either.
I used a touch-screen ATM today, where the amount of money was chosen via the touch screen instead of via buttons at the side of the screen. STILL, even though they had a probably 2-3 times as expensive touch screen compared to a normal screen, they had included a numeric keyboard, and it's easy to understand why. Just a small flaw in the touch-screen interface and you'll be typing the pin-code wrong more often than you want, ending up with a lot of angry people at the bank desk the next day, wanting their cards back.
And a more practical point... Who will prevent 'others' (i.e. those who are not 'we') from removing these detection grids. Stuff left lying around in international waters will probably be a case of 'finders keepers'.
But, since America also needs China for its economic growth (where else are they going to have their cheap products made), this more or less means the US needs China more than China needs the US. Or did you see China get into trouble after stopping to buy US dollars.
They were not attacking. They were just protecting the material the US bought with their money. Since in a way, it's their property, they probably wouldn't want something to go wrong with it. They're just acting like a good godfather should.
I am fully convinced that this PC will run XP like a charm. I wonder when it will be available in the EU, wal-mart recently was renamed into Real,- here in Germany. They sell lindows or linuxOS pcs every now and then, by the way.
Indeed! It's probably just a question of getting used to it, but I cannot imagine having to type on a different keyboard then my own. I have a few IBM rapid access keyboards just to make sure I'll have a spare one when one breaks. I'm typing on it since probably 7 years now and it's just irreplaceable. The pulse rest is a bit cracked (tape on the back side), but it just has this sturdy typing feeling that I don't have on a logitech keyboard. Microsoft may be a bit better on this respect.
That said, just as 'cancer research' is a way to get easy funding, 'grid computing' is not much more. The theory is very nice, work on a machine anywhere in the world from your own desktop without having to worry about which machine it is. In the end, you'll actually have to recompile your program for any different architecture. If you do science, your program will change a lot, and you'll have to do the recompiling a lot.
They will be. That this message comes from the former Intel boss doesn't come as a surprise. They want to become big in household medical equipment to make self-support by handicapped and elderly easier. This is big business, with an ever increasing group of consumers and very high financial margins.
To OP: A virtual lab is a joke. If anything, doing chemistry is learning how to deal with mistakes, learning from them, preventing them. Even when doing computer simulations of chemical processes, most of the time is lost with finding out what went wrong with your simulation, and trying to understand how the physical model could get closer to the beautiful mystery that the world around us is.
What about: "Here's a nickel, now go play outside".
It can't be transportation costs, these things come from china/taiwan/korea anyway. The law of supply and demand results in companies asking for their products what they can get for it. Apparently, European people are willing to put up paying 40% (!) more for their tech products than people in the US.
As an unrelated point: This money is easily earned back by drinking fine wines. From what I've heard the supermarket prices for (crappy) wine in the US are like the restaurant prices for a (decently-tasting) bottle of wine in Europe.
Have you been reading Slashdot again?
Point is, you shouldn't compare it with the value of the previous quarter alone, you should compare it with the value of the previous quarter + expected increase! The fact that it didnt increase is rather telling, if you take into account that it is pretty difficult to buy a PC without vista nowadays. That the number didn't increase must mean that a lot of people are doing a lot of effort to make sure they don't get vista.
Whoa, could this kill you? That would be a cool death, pierced head to toe by serveral micron wide black hole.
Who will be held responsible? I admit, already now it is a problem and you will most likely not see any justice as a (family member of a) victim, but at least at the moment, any attack done is a human decision. Also remember that back in the day, it was a human operator in a Russian Rocket base who decided the incoming rockets was a technical error, and didn't press the button.
In no way should a robot or computer make decisions about life or death issues. We humans have a conscience for a reason.
70 eurocents... But that isn't all good news. A lot of european companies still do trade in Dollars and lose a lot there, or depend on America as an export market, for which they are becoming too expensive. Exception are high-quality high-cost products that are almost without competition (think: "made in Germany" - the funny thing about that label is that it was meant as a way to have British costumers buy less German goods, but it ended up having the opposite effect).
Ah yes, so what couple of papers did you publish in the mean time? I think it's quite respectable. Furthermore, I am afraid that being able to perform logical thought is indeed already geeky at the moment, partly due to the big lobbies of people who want to press 'the word of god' as superior than 'reason'. Yes they do, look at the photos of the creationist museum in texas, you can find them on flickr.
Realize that most scientific code probably still has lots of code in it written for the original CRAY system it ran on in the 80's, and you see why vector systems will live on for a while: code that was written for one will have to be used on a vector system. One has to have to luck to find a PhD student willing and able to rewrite the code for a new machine.
I really have the experience that the hardware possibilities are growing faster than the (operating) software using it. Just from a practical point of view: Say a research center gets a new cluster. It takes at least half a year to a year to get it configured correctly, find all the broken hardware and replace it, get network problems out of the way. By then it has already dropped 50 places in the top500 and it will still not be used to even half of its full power. Even though supercomputing is as old as computing itself, there is still no 'plug-n-play' solution to get a supercomputer running. And I am not talking about home-made beowulf clusters here, try with Dell, HP, Sun, or IBM, it just won't work out of the package.
And besides that you end up with the next problem, how to get your program to optimally use the shared memory-core nodes AND the interconnected nodes. These are all non-standard solutions. At the moment you can buy a quad core home machine for about 700 euro, but is there any software written for it? It is time for a smart message-passing/shared memory programming style that will automatically optimize for the hardware it is compiled on.
Until these problems are solved, multi-core computing will be suboptimal, and by just looking at the increase in TFLOPS peak performance of a system we will just be fooling ourselves.
Me too! Sometimes this actually ends up by the company using nuclear power, I think this happens in Germany a lot. Not much CO2 costs come from a nuclear plant... Any good provider will tell you where the energy in their 'green energy' plan comes from, though. Point is you have to trust them complying to these rules, maybe there is government control even.
The thing that helps (and at the same time limits) the EU is its amazing diverseness. There are so many parties involved with each their own agenda that the end result of any ruling is nearly impossible to predict. This gives a bit more chance for commercially unpopular measures compared to the US, where the result just depends on how much the lobby paid the election for either the democrats or the conservatives, if there is any difference between those two to begin with.
Well, mostly they just switch to new theories, but don't retract all papers with the outdated theories, just because that would be impractical to do. So in fact, there are still thousands and thousands (millions?) of papers displaying incorrect theories, that you can refer to if you wish. If your goal would be to advance in the sciences for the common could, you would do no such thing of course. Obviously the goals of those citing this outdated paper did not have the advance of sciences in mind.