Go figure. Star Trek used flashy lights to get people's attention but in the words of Joss Whedon, "I don't know much about science but what I do know about science fiction is that flashy lights means....science."
That's about as science-y as it gets. You focus too much on making it within the realm of plausible extrapolation and you end up losing sight of things like interesting story arc, plausible plot turns and characters and you end up randomly writing your characters into roles and ending your series with some cliche reset-button-style let's-just-get-back-to-nature conclusion.
Why yes, I'm still bitter about BSG, why do you ask?
It wouldn't have the low-drop-out properties of a superconductor. Even a ~10% drop translates to about 500kW of burned energy that not only is lost, but also has to be cooled off (and my knowledge of that part of the area tells me that's not an easy task in and of itself).
You'll actually get reactance (imaginary part of impedance, specifically inductance in this case), not resistance. But you don't actually lose energy through reactance like you do resistance (no power is converted to heat) unless there's another magnetic field to interfere. So yes, you could put AC through a superconductor. There's just little reason to when you have very little resistance and DC is usually easier to deal with.
I pointed out it was complete BS to compare the two situations since during each architectural switch, Apple had to switch their entire customer base; of course they'd spend effort making it painless.
Such disingenuous backpedaling. Your exact words were:
"You conveniently did not mention that the Mac underwent it's second major change of architecture about 4 years ago & that Apple's backward compatability after these migrations has been about as pain-free as possible."
Ya, sure sounds like the toned-down "well at least there's some support" you claimed you were saying. No, you were doing a bit of worshiping of how Apple did such a good job with compatibility while changing architectures and then:
"Why don't you ask those who bought Windows on non-Intel architectures how well Microsoft helped them once they decided that they were no longer pertinant for their bottom line?"
Trying to make a contrast between the "we do anything to help you" version of Apple you painted to the big-bad-evil-only-cares-about-profit Microsoft.
I pointed out it was complete BS to compare the two situations since during each architectural switch, Apple had to switch their entire customer base; of course they'd spend effort making it painless.
But no, keep trying to change the argument and personal attacks.
Being in Kindergarden doesn't count junior, you had to be working in the field back then. Your "pretty sure" guestimating back to a period you already have shown to have no experience of also carries little weight.
It's true that non-X86 never amounted to more than 2% of windows licences by volume. The figure broken down by value was higher as these were not your momma's consumer word processor PC's but expensive multi-cpu servers.
So essentially, after all of that condescension, I was pretty much right within +/- 1%.
Now compare how few PowerPC Macs (which were never all that popular compared to Intel Macs) are still around to be penalized by being unable to update to the most recent OS X releases. Easily under 5%. The comparison isn't far fetched at all.
Way to move the goalpost. What percentage were PowerPC Macs of the total Mac market when they switched and had to introduce emulation? Better yet, what percentage were non-x86 Macs when they switched and had to introduce emulation? That's right, 100%.
Apple had to introduce seemless emulation because there were no x86 Mac users at the time. The vast majority of Windows users has always been x86. There was never a point where Microsoft was threatened with a large loss in their customer base by not catering to non-x86 users. Apple could've lost all of their customers if they didn't cater to non-x86 users.
Yes, I was being sarcastic. GTA:SA had the same political/social satire that a lot of games do but its main purpose was entertainment. That includes random acts of violence as well as political/social satire that its main demographic (very liberal leaning) tends to find enjoyable.
I mean, it's so clear to see GTA: San Andreas as a deep, biting commentary on urban poverty and political corruption. It's really quite compelling. I think the Museum of Modern Art should feature footage of it.
I'm pretty sure I lived through the Alpha age. I'm also pretty sure close to 99% of Windows machines was running on Pentiums at the time as well. So again, 1% of Windows clients migrating vs 100% of customer base.
I honestly doubt it's that complicated. From all of these posts I've gathered a few trends:
* Most people who are Mac owners own a Macbook. * These people have desktop PC's. * It seems a minority have a desktop Mac.
Considering how popular Apple's notebooks are, this makes sense. People buy a Macbook because it's nice, shiny, does what they want a notebook to do (mostly email, word, etc.) and let's face it, they really aren't priced that badly compared to equivalent Dells.
On the desktop side, things are a bit different. Very few own a powerhouse desktop. Most likely they got some sub-$500 machine to do basic computing tasks.
As much as the Prophets of Jobs exclaim, it really isn't a big deal to "switch". You don't realize some epiphany when using OSX for the first time; some technically nearsighted guy putting on glasses for the first time. You find which buttons to push to start up your browser, Word, mp3 players, etc. and you double click. To your average person, they're all just computers; they're to be used for computer stuff like listening to music, watching movies, writing documents, surfing the web, etc.
So when they go to buy something, they see the shiny Macbook and want it. They then want a secondary computer and see the cheapo desktop PC (and let's face it, you don't care about what those look like) and buy that.
Bingo, you have both a Mac and a PC in your house. And guess what, most people don't care and don't think the two are going to somehow attack each other in a battle royal during the night.
There's far more to your computer than just the major addons and components. There are literally dozens if not a hundred devices in there that you really have no idea about. The software needs to support them all. Most of them follow some type of standard so you don't need to go out of your way to download a driver. The problem is, Windows still needs to support them all.
Remember PAE? Windows for consumers disabled that because allowing a larger address space screwed up a good number of drivers. These drivers assumed a flat 32-bit address space and didn't take into account extended bits, so they mapped themselves to the upper bits and stayed there.
On the OSX platform, Apple would simply not include devices that contain these types of drivers. Windows can't do that.
You're honestly comparing how Apple supports 100% of its customer base moving to x86 to how sub-1% of Windows users got supported? Seems like a foregone conclusion. And really, when has Windows even been on a non-x86 system that wasn't a small side-experiment?
Re:Appallingly mediocre.
on
Stargate Universe
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Exactly. I wish I had mod points atm for you. What made SG1 and Atlantis good shows was entirely in its "oh wow...another sci-fi cliche huh, ya well let's get it over with" style of meta-humor. Let's face it, the stories, plots, acting, etc. weren't ground-breaking. They were cliche, guilty-pleasure sci-fi elements.
The "big bad guy" each season; the unfaltering hero; the strong-but-secretly-vulnerable female lead who had constant, unspoken sexual tension with the unfaltering hero; the comic relief side genius guy who would develop a spine throughout the series. Atlantis and SG1 was pretty much just this over and over. But it was fun, it was still compelling and most importantly, it didn't take itself too seriously.
McGuiver was classic. Towards the end, you could almost see that he wasn't in character at all. It was like he was reading his lines in this "God, this again? Really?" voice. Even the unfaltering hero had a goofy, self-deprecating wit about him. This is what made Mal of Firefly so endearing and it's something that so many writers these days don't seem to understand. The days of the Rambo-like tough guy hero are over.
All devices with a LiON battery have charge controllers built in. The USB merely provides a voltage, the software on the other side has no control over it. Regulation is done internal to the phone most likely by an ADI, Maxim or Linear chip.
Those people don't really run governments. As religiously extreme as the Ayatollah is, he's still a political man. Now the argument could be made of the what-if situation where fundamentalist suicide groups manage to get their hands on a nation's nuclear weapons. The far more sensible solution would be to help the security and policing efforts of each nation protect their nuclear arsenal.
Slowing nuclear proliferation seems like a fairly futile effort in this day and age. It's just far too easy to learn how -- and acquire the materials for -- a basic a-bomb.
This all, however, seems all too familiar. It wasn't that long ago that everyone was harping on how the world would end when those evil, soul-less, suicidal Russians would launch their arsenal of missiles at the U.S. and the world would end.
Turns out, nobody really wants to see the world end -- well, aside from Evangelists -- and that even if you have the capability, just about any government would choose not to use their nuclear arsenal but still want desperately to have one.
Those other countries already think so. Hell, it isn't rocket science. No nation can compete with the western powers using a conventional military. So the only safe-guard against becoming the next Iraq is to have a nuclear arsenal.
Iran, on the other hand, has repeatedly declared it's desire for the total annihilation of the the nation of Israel (among others).
I'm sure given the opportunity, they'd love to have Israel gone. My question is why you think they'll be the scary boogiemen who'll launch a nuke as soon as they have one, knowing full well their country will be annihilated about 10sec afterwards.
"The ally's only alternative" would be to not attack said country that contains nuclear weapons. Honestly, why does this option seem to allude people? The reason no major country has been invaded in the past ~50 years is plain and simple: mutually assured destruction.
Iran wants that kind of protection. Now, one can argue that its leaders probably wouldn't shed a tear if some terrorist group "accidentally" got a hold of these things and managed to sneak one into Israel. So there's still reason to not want them to have it. But acting like the whole country -- and its leaders -- are somehow suicide bombers when it comes to nukes is pretty paranoid.
A modern nation will want nuclear weapons. A modern nation with enough determination will get nuclear weapons. Trying to keep every nation out there that disagrees with you from getting nuclear weapons is a futile effort. Making sure they never have reason -- or are too afraid -- to use them is how you can stop Israel from getting nuked.
The article is scarce on information. I agree with all the others who've said that this seems like they re-invented fiber. I'm guessing since they mentioned mobile devices that this is really a low-power, low-cost fiber transmitter that they're talking about. Current electro-optical transceivers at 10gbps are pretty large in form factor and suck up a lot of power (~300mW) which would be inappropriate for mobile devices.
You're talking about coupling capacitance, which is something that can be alleviated by design. The biggest issue is that shrinking wires don't result in faster signals due to the load capacitance remaining relatively the same. This becomes the majority of the delay and the speed of the transistor becomes a smaller part of the equation.
Add to this the fact that transistors themselves aren't getting faster. The speed of a FET is proportional to its gate dielectric thickness. That is 1nm at 45nm and 0.9nm at 32 (for Intel). This can't really shrink much more like it has in the past -- once you're down to a single layer of Hafnium, you can't really cut out any more -- and as a consequence, transistors won't be getting faster at the same rate that they have been in the past (for MOS at least).
Looking at Intel's roadmap, upcoming node shrinks scale in power and size but not in speed.
They aren't talking about shrinking existing MOS transistors (which make up 99.999% of digital circuits); which is what Moore's Law talks about. They're talking about the ability to integrate transistors with better matching characteristics (CMOS is terrible at it) for analog and photoelectric circuits onto existing silicon. This idea has been done again and again from Intel's hybrid silicon laser to Silicon Germanium, which is already widely used in cell phone chips.
This won't make digital circuits smaller and isn't a solution to it so the headline isn't accurate. What this will mean is that potentially, cell phones won't need 4-5 separate chips for RF, digital, baseband, etc. You can integrate all those functions into one. But again, that's nothing new. IBM already provides BiCMOS with a SiGe layer on top for analog circuits. It's not been economical since it usually lags behind their bulk CMOS process for digital-only chips.
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Go figure. Star Trek used flashy lights to get people's attention but in the words of Joss Whedon, "I don't know much about science but what I do know about science fiction is that flashy lights means....science."
That's about as science-y as it gets. You focus too much on making it within the realm of plausible extrapolation and you end up losing sight of things like interesting story arc, plausible plot turns and characters and you end up randomly writing your characters into roles and ending your series with some cliche reset-button-style let's-just-get-back-to-nature conclusion.
Why yes, I'm still bitter about BSG, why do you ask?
It wouldn't have the low-drop-out properties of a superconductor. Even a ~10% drop translates to about 500kW of burned energy that not only is lost, but also has to be cooled off (and my knowledge of that part of the area tells me that's not an easy task in and of itself).
They lack a main deflector dish though.
You'll actually get reactance (imaginary part of impedance, specifically inductance in this case), not resistance. But you don't actually lose energy through reactance like you do resistance (no power is converted to heat) unless there's another magnetic field to interfere. So yes, you could put AC through a superconductor. There's just little reason to when you have very little resistance and DC is usually easier to deal with.
I pointed out it was complete BS to compare the two situations since during each architectural switch, Apple had to switch their entire customer base; of course they'd spend effort making it painless.
Such disingenuous backpedaling. Your exact words were:
"You conveniently did not mention that the Mac underwent it's second major change of architecture about 4 years ago & that Apple's backward compatability after these migrations has been about as pain-free as possible."
Ya, sure sounds like the toned-down "well at least there's some support" you claimed you were saying. No, you were doing a bit of worshiping of how Apple did such a good job with compatibility while changing architectures and then:
"Why don't you ask those who bought Windows on non-Intel architectures how well Microsoft helped them once they decided that they were no longer pertinant for their bottom line?"
Trying to make a contrast between the "we do anything to help you" version of Apple you painted to the big-bad-evil-only-cares-about-profit Microsoft.
I pointed out it was complete BS to compare the two situations since during each architectural switch, Apple had to switch their entire customer base; of course they'd spend effort making it painless.
But no, keep trying to change the argument and personal attacks.
Being in Kindergarden doesn't count junior, you had to be working in the field back then. Your "pretty sure" guestimating back to a period you already have shown to have no experience of also carries little weight.
It's true that non-X86 never amounted to more than 2% of windows licences by volume. The figure broken down by value was higher as these were not your momma's consumer word processor PC's but expensive multi-cpu servers.
So essentially, after all of that condescension, I was pretty much right within +/- 1%.
Now compare how few PowerPC Macs (which were never all that popular compared to Intel Macs) are still around to be penalized by being unable to update to the most recent OS X releases. Easily under 5%. The comparison isn't far fetched at all.
Way to move the goalpost. What percentage were PowerPC Macs of the total Mac market when they switched and had to introduce emulation? Better yet, what percentage were non-x86 Macs when they switched and had to introduce emulation? That's right, 100%.
Apple had to introduce seemless emulation because there were no x86 Mac users at the time. The vast majority of Windows users has always been x86. There was never a point where Microsoft was threatened with a large loss in their customer base by not catering to non-x86 users. Apple could've lost all of their customers if they didn't cater to non-x86 users.
Yes, I was being sarcastic. GTA:SA had the same political/social satire that a lot of games do but its main purpose was entertainment. That includes random acts of violence as well as political/social satire that its main demographic (very liberal leaning) tends to find enjoyable.
I mean, it's so clear to see GTA: San Andreas as a deep, biting commentary on urban poverty and political corruption. It's really quite compelling. I think the Museum of Modern Art should feature footage of it.
I'm pretty sure I lived through the Alpha age. I'm also pretty sure close to 99% of Windows machines was running on Pentiums at the time as well. So again, 1% of Windows clients migrating vs 100% of customer base.
I honestly doubt it's that complicated. From all of these posts I've gathered a few trends:
* Most people who are Mac owners own a Macbook.
* These people have desktop PC's.
* It seems a minority have a desktop Mac.
Considering how popular Apple's notebooks are, this makes sense. People buy a Macbook because it's nice, shiny, does what they want a notebook to do (mostly email, word, etc.) and let's face it, they really aren't priced that badly compared to equivalent Dells.
On the desktop side, things are a bit different. Very few own a powerhouse desktop. Most likely they got some sub-$500 machine to do basic computing tasks.
As much as the Prophets of Jobs exclaim, it really isn't a big deal to "switch". You don't realize some epiphany when using OSX for the first time; some technically nearsighted guy putting on glasses for the first time. You find which buttons to push to start up your browser, Word, mp3 players, etc. and you double click. To your average person, they're all just computers; they're to be used for computer stuff like listening to music, watching movies, writing documents, surfing the web, etc.
So when they go to buy something, they see the shiny Macbook and want it. They then want a secondary computer and see the cheapo desktop PC (and let's face it, you don't care about what those look like) and buy that.
Bingo, you have both a Mac and a PC in your house. And guess what, most people don't care and don't think the two are going to somehow attack each other in a battle royal during the night.
There's far more to your computer than just the major addons and components. There are literally dozens if not a hundred devices in there that you really have no idea about. The software needs to support them all. Most of them follow some type of standard so you don't need to go out of your way to download a driver. The problem is, Windows still needs to support them all.
Remember PAE? Windows for consumers disabled that because allowing a larger address space screwed up a good number of drivers. These drivers assumed a flat 32-bit address space and didn't take into account extended bits, so they mapped themselves to the upper bits and stayed there.
On the OSX platform, Apple would simply not include devices that contain these types of drivers. Windows can't do that.
You're honestly comparing how Apple supports 100% of its customer base moving to x86 to how sub-1% of Windows users got supported? Seems like a foregone conclusion. And really, when has Windows even been on a non-x86 system that wasn't a small side-experiment?
Exactly. I wish I had mod points atm for you. What made SG1 and Atlantis good shows was entirely in its "oh wow...another sci-fi cliche huh, ya well let's get it over with" style of meta-humor. Let's face it, the stories, plots, acting, etc. weren't ground-breaking. They were cliche, guilty-pleasure sci-fi elements.
The "big bad guy" each season; the unfaltering hero; the strong-but-secretly-vulnerable female lead who had constant, unspoken sexual tension with the unfaltering hero; the comic relief side genius guy who would develop a spine throughout the series. Atlantis and SG1 was pretty much just this over and over. But it was fun, it was still compelling and most importantly, it didn't take itself too seriously.
McGuiver was classic. Towards the end, you could almost see that he wasn't in character at all. It was like he was reading his lines in this "God, this again? Really?" voice. Even the unfaltering hero had a goofy, self-deprecating wit about him. This is what made Mal of Firefly so endearing and it's something that so many writers these days don't seem to understand. The days of the Rambo-like tough guy hero are over.
All devices with a LiON battery have charge controllers built in. The USB merely provides a voltage, the software on the other side has no control over it. Regulation is done internal to the phone most likely by an ADI, Maxim or Linear chip.
Those people don't really run governments. As religiously extreme as the Ayatollah is, he's still a political man. Now the argument could be made of the what-if situation where fundamentalist suicide groups manage to get their hands on a nation's nuclear weapons. The far more sensible solution would be to help the security and policing efforts of each nation protect their nuclear arsenal.
Slowing nuclear proliferation seems like a fairly futile effort in this day and age. It's just far too easy to learn how -- and acquire the materials for -- a basic a-bomb.
This all, however, seems all too familiar. It wasn't that long ago that everyone was harping on how the world would end when those evil, soul-less, suicidal Russians would launch their arsenal of missiles at the U.S. and the world would end.
Turns out, nobody really wants to see the world end -- well, aside from Evangelists -- and that even if you have the capability, just about any government would choose not to use their nuclear arsenal but still want desperately to have one.
Those other countries already think so. Hell, it isn't rocket science. No nation can compete with the western powers using a conventional military. So the only safe-guard against becoming the next Iraq is to have a nuclear arsenal.
Iran, on the other hand, has repeatedly declared it's desire for the total annihilation of the the nation of Israel (among others).
I'm sure given the opportunity, they'd love to have Israel gone. My question is why you think they'll be the scary boogiemen who'll launch a nuke as soon as they have one, knowing full well their country will be annihilated about 10sec afterwards.
That is just plain scare tactics.
"The ally's only alternative" would be to not attack said country that contains nuclear weapons. Honestly, why does this option seem to allude people? The reason no major country has been invaded in the past ~50 years is plain and simple: mutually assured destruction.
Iran wants that kind of protection. Now, one can argue that its leaders probably wouldn't shed a tear if some terrorist group "accidentally" got a hold of these things and managed to sneak one into Israel. So there's still reason to not want them to have it. But acting like the whole country -- and its leaders -- are somehow suicide bombers when it comes to nukes is pretty paranoid.
A modern nation will want nuclear weapons. A modern nation with enough determination will get nuclear weapons. Trying to keep every nation out there that disagrees with you from getting nuclear weapons is a futile effort. Making sure they never have reason -- or are too afraid -- to use them is how you can stop Israel from getting nuked.
The article is scarce on information. I agree with all the others who've said that this seems like they re-invented fiber. I'm guessing since they mentioned mobile devices that this is really a low-power, low-cost fiber transmitter that they're talking about. Current electro-optical transceivers at 10gbps are pretty large in form factor and suck up a lot of power (~300mW) which would be inappropriate for mobile devices.
Nanotubes have great tensile strength but very very poor compression/lateral strength. Your cell phone would resemble the rigidity of wool fabric.
You're talking about coupling capacitance, which is something that can be alleviated by design. The biggest issue is that shrinking wires don't result in faster signals due to the load capacitance remaining relatively the same. This becomes the majority of the delay and the speed of the transistor becomes a smaller part of the equation.
Add to this the fact that transistors themselves aren't getting faster. The speed of a FET is proportional to its gate dielectric thickness. That is 1nm at 45nm and 0.9nm at 32 (for Intel). This can't really shrink much more like it has in the past -- once you're down to a single layer of Hafnium, you can't really cut out any more -- and as a consequence, transistors won't be getting faster at the same rate that they have been in the past (for MOS at least).
Looking at Intel's roadmap, upcoming node shrinks scale in power and size but not in speed.
They aren't talking about shrinking existing MOS transistors (which make up 99.999% of digital circuits); which is what Moore's Law talks about. They're talking about the ability to integrate transistors with better matching characteristics (CMOS is terrible at it) for analog and photoelectric circuits onto existing silicon. This idea has been done again and again from Intel's hybrid silicon laser to Silicon Germanium, which is already widely used in cell phone chips.
This won't make digital circuits smaller and isn't a solution to it so the headline isn't accurate. What this will mean is that potentially, cell phones won't need 4-5 separate chips for RF, digital, baseband, etc. You can integrate all those functions into one. But again, that's nothing new. IBM already provides BiCMOS with a SiGe layer on top for analog circuits. It's not been economical since it usually lags behind their bulk CMOS process for digital-only chips.
So Intel developed Atom as an x86 processor because so much software runs on x86 and not, say, ARM.
Then Intel spends money developing a Linux OS for netbooks that's open source.
ARM just got free software from Intel and makes superior processors.