Yes, and it sounds like shoplifters can now get you to pay for
their stuff by placing items near your shopping cart while you're busy
looking at the chewing gum.
Color me cynical, but I think there will always be a delay at the
checkout (whether necessary or contrived) in order to get you in some way to ogle at
the M&Ms, the TV Guide, the breath mints. Otherwise all of those products will experience a drastic loss of sales.
...3 children/second in the whole world (I assume that's what you meant ?) doesn't sound so very high, actually
It's admittedly an old figure -- that's why I said "at least."
You also need to know the death rate
Only if you don't know that the population has been doubling every 35 or so years, then it becomes obvious the birth rate has been outpacing the death rate for a long time. Since about 1900 it's been about 1, then 2, then 4, then 8 billion... Where does it end?
In any case, if we were over carrying capacity, the population would be decreasing, not increasing
That's a dangerously optimistic definition for carrying capacity. Ask your local fire marshal what the carrying capacity of an auditorium is, and you'll always get a lower number than what is physically possible to fit inside the building. You seem to be waiting for the floor of the building to collapse or for everyone to begin asphyxiating, by which point it will be too late for anyone to leave (especially since on Earth there is nowhere to go...) The carrying capacity of a building or a ship, or aircraft (etc.) refers to the number that can be carried inside with a reasonable margin of safety... not to a margin of certain disaster for some of the occupants.
If that weren't enough, you are also ignoring the millions who have already died from famine (in some areas -- I'm not saying it is likely to happen to you just yet...) and the extinction of species of wildlife due to unsustainable impacts on habitat that was formerly wild or reserved.
Last but not least, there is the matter of the decline in O2 and the increase in CO2 and methane levels in the atmosphere for which it would not be wise to wait until your definition of "carrying capacity" were reached.
It sounds like a benefit, but don't forget the psychological effect.
If you weren't aging at all, would you be in a big hurry to reproduce, or would you be more likely to put it off? If there were no "use it or lose it" biological clock to worry about, I wonder how many people would even bother having children, what with the costly and/or painful aspects of it. You would rather tell yourself that you could have children later and just put it off.
But, if fertility is reduced, you may actually feel pressure to reproduce sooner, "while you still can." Psychologically, this may be a counterproductive feature.
It may be better to completely remove fertility as part of the deal of those who are accepting the "immortality gene," and to delay the puberty of those who just want the "longevity gene"...until retirement age.
BTW, we are already in a population boom with at least 3 children born every second (plop, plop, plop...) and so should therefore be thinking of the right incentives to convince people not to operate this thing on automatic mode, as we are already over the carrying capacity. Offering the above options to people -- honestly -- may ironically be the solution, not the problem.
General: How'd the flight test go, Colonel?
Colonel: Well, we got some good news and some bad news, sir.
General: OK, what are the bad news?
Colonel: Due to some unexpected turbulence, we missed the target and had a friendly fire incident.
General: *Curse*
General: And the good news?
Colonel: The good news are that your
car rental's been upgraded to a convertible without touching the budget.
The Indus Valley Civilization peoples (c. 2600 BC) demonstrate the earliest known physical use of decimal fractions in an ancient weight system
That is far and away not zero, so no cigar. Source continues...
However, whether or not they recognized the "0" as a place holder in any sort of symbolic, written representation of these quantities is unknown
It is kind of a stretch, although I can see how you came to the conclusion you did. Given that the best current evidence shows a date of 400 AD for the earliest inscriptions from India (see earlier post), and that this falls somewhere in the middle of the Mayan period of Mesoamerican history, I would say that at least for zero, it is safest not to attribute this to any geographical area.
when we attribute an invention to someone, we generally mean that our current use comes from them
That is certainly one way of making attributions, but it's not the only way.
For patents (for example), all that's necessary to shoot down a patent application is to show "prior art." That is, it is not necessary to say that our current usage of zero is derived at all from anywhere, as long as proof can be found for it at an earlier date. In the case of zero, it is not such a unique concept that it deserves to be credited as an "invention" IMHO, since, as you point out, several people came up with it independently, or at least could have come up with it independently based on the other skill sets present within those civilizations.
For history courses, you can draw the attribution boundaries any way you want, depending on what the focus of the course is. It may well be not to show a continuous line of development (although this is a popular way to structure it), but rather to show what were the conditions under which innovation occured, and to explain why there were any disconnections or lapses.
"No problem," responds the man, bending down to grab a handful of clay.
"No, no, no," says God. "You get your own dirt."
"Poof!" Just then the devil appears carrying a briefcase, whispers
something into the scientist's ear and disappears.
"OK," says the man, "you win that one, but I have a tougher challenge for You."
"What?" God replies confidently.
"Let's see who is the first to make a man out of freshly made feces."
"Pshaw, that's easy," dismisses the deity.
So the man stoops down to begin making the materials, and just then
receives a tap on the shoulder.
"Uh, let Me have some of that..."
"No, no, no," says the man "you're so perfect, let's see you make your own $!*#."
The Mayan civilization lasted from about 1200BC to 900 AD and had the concept of zero in their writing system, as you can see
here.
If you want to learn more about Mayan civilization, you can do that
here.
You claim that 0 was "invented" in Asia, but your source says:
The first inscriptions using 0 in India have been traced to approximately AD 400
So, India's other mathematical achievements notwithstanding, what additional information do you have that leads you to believe that zero was "invented" in India (assuming it makes sense at all to think of a number being invented)? Are you trying to patent it or something:) ?
Use algae to build a motherboard?
on
Algae Can Carry Cargo
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Shine the pattern of an electronic circuit (e.g. a
motherboard) down, until algae collect on the lighted parts.
Flash the UV light to make the algae drop their cargo, nominally a
conductor, but possibly a semiconductor.
Shine light back to a repository of insulator so they return to
pick up the next load.
While that's going on, "Cook" the circuit to set the conductor,
cool it and then place it back precisely where it was.
Use the algae to lay down a layer of insulator uniformly over the
conductor, except at the layer-to-layer contact points.
Repeat until an entire 3-D circuit is built.
Only low density stuff could be produced this way, but maybe it is more environmentally friendly ?
Sorry to step on your eggshells, but you need to get your historical facts straight. The supposed netscape "fox egg" came before the supposed IE chicken. The browser wars started out as MS reacting to NN's popularity, not NN "attacking" MS by resorting to open source. I hope your post isn't representative of the sorts of facts that are to be "agreed" upon in a back room.
Perhaps the real fox is the one that is trying to keep the truth from being posted through some form of censorship? The slashdot story, titled
Microsoft asks Slashdot to remove Readers' Posts would certainly argue that a free airing of facts and opinions isn't what the PR types are going to be aiming at. Not a very good gesture in support of free speech or a very great confidence in people to decide on their own what the facts may be about the Kerberos standard and other stuff like that...
What would be the point of a discussion like this one if all of the "facts" to be aired were pre-decided? No need to use your brain, just sit back and get your spoon feeding? Instead, we will prepare "safe" controversies for you to argue about that do not impinge on anything.
There is no reason for me to think that this is going to be any different, seeing what they tried to do with their "Get the Facts" campaign, and it turned out to be anything but facts, more like made-to-order TCO studies that applied to atypical application niches.
Hollywood: We've been chugging out sequel after sequel and they're
just not making very much money. We notice that you guys in the game
industry are doing well. So, since we have run out of ideas, we think
you should pay us licensing fees so that you can use our stale
ideas in your games and add the same sorts of restrictions and
ads that we claim people enjoy to death in their DVDs.
Game Maker: ROFL.... So, you want me to pay you a bunch of fees,
charge higher prices and piss off my customer base, just so you can
keep stuffing those tired old ideas into peoples' neurons, in the
hopes that a dim memory will work as a hook to get them to go see one of your remakes
someday? What do I get out of it?
Hollywood: We will release your tired old ideas in a movie
version.
Game Maker: But if all we're doing is recycling each other's old
ideas, where will the new ideas come from?
Hollywood: *shrugs* Dunno.
Game Player: Scrabble anyone?
Hollywood: I've got it! We'll make "Scrabble -- The Movie."
The MS naysayers would say that the MS implementation is locked to Microsoft, however that just isn't the case
You haven't listened closely enough to the "naysayers" to understand what they've been saying.
What they've been saying is that MSFT itself seems to have designs on XML subsets, enough so to want to patent some of them, as this previous slashdot story points out:
"News(.com)+ reports that Microsoft has filed for patents in multiple jurisdictions to control the way other applications use Office's new XML-based file formats. Musings from pundits suggest that OpenOffice.org and other applications might be blocked from interoperating with Office.
Given those plans, I wouldn't be surprised that some people are concerned about the usual embrace & extend into other areas of the spec people thought were "open." Will a future patent limit the way numbers are highlighted in SVG, for instance? To avoid wasting productivity going through hoops, it may be more effective to work on something that isn't likely to conflict with MSFT IP-grabbing activities.
Don't blame the developers, or reflexively insult them with the label "naysayers" -- they just want to build on a firm foundation that won't suddenly find them having to fork over royalties or make unfunded code changes. What's wrong with that? Nobody wants to build on a foundation of sliding mud. If nothing else, that's just good Tao.
if they are trying to tie a piece of DRM music to only one machine, they don't want me swapping my keys about.
Minor correction: It's their keys they don't want you swapping about. Technically, the EULA should state what they are currently claiming as their property, though it isn't always clear, because they often advertise media as if you could "own" it by paying some amount, but even with those the fine print insists that you only own a license to use it.
Putting a rootkit, or a rootkit-enabler key onto a TPM protected computer would be more difficult, but if anyone could put it on there it would be an official vendor under the guise of some legitimate-sounding "remote maintenance" type of deal, which, if something goes wrong, could end up collecting more information about you than they let on during the EULA acceptance phase. How much information about you was given out, however, could be perfectly hidden away from your prying eyes, even though the data itself may reside on your "own" computer.
As bad as current rootkits are, it has always been possible to recover from them without waiting on hold on a support hotline, or without having to repurchase all of your existing licenses, simply by reinstalling.
I've not heard of any proposal for nonvolitile storage for Palladium
A TPM (trusted platform module) to be included on all computers and peripherals to be sold from now on (let me know if you find an exception...), whether onchip or as an external chip, has the following capabilities:
Tamper-resistant secure key storage
Key management
Random number generation
Key generation
Boot process hashing
The storage part sounds pretty nonvolatile to me...
Do multiple AltiVec cores on a single G5 processor suffer more or less from memory bandwidth issues than a pair of Intel (whatevers) in a dual processor machine sharing a memory bus?
Depends on the typical workload of course, but general purpose instructions are almost always more memory intensive than FP or vector code. The name Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) is actually a very good clue to what's happening. A vector instruction is fetched and, since it is to operate on several memory words, no further instructions need to be fetched from the bus until the vector instruction is finished. Only a stream of data needs to be brought in. So, for large sets of vectors and workloads with lots of vector instructions it should (theoretically) benefit from having several Altivec cores.
The same benefit doesn't apply to normal CPU instructions and CPU cores since they typically require another intruction+data fetch right after finishing the previous instruction. A well-designed onboard memory controller helps, but obviously not to the degree of cutting in half (or so) the number of fetches to the external memory bus.
There will be diminishing returns to increasing the number of general purpose CPU cores on a die, as eventually the memory bus will get saturated. Vectorizing as much of the instruction stream as possible seems to be the most effective way to postpone that bottleneck.
How about an exercise bike that runs a generator that charges a bank of 12V capacitors? You then flip a switch to release the built up charge as you try to start the car? I think it should be possible for anything except a really big behemoth vehicle.
Batteries produce less amps during cold weather. The distinction between cranking amps and cold cranking amps (CCA) may even be labelled on the battery itself. The CCA number is always lower. So, to start a car, all you need is a few more amps added in.
"Any marketing distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced"
It used to be that technology invariably described some new and
impossible idea, like flying or walking on the moon or cloning. But,
the dirty secret is that few people can tell the difference anymore
between a truly new idea and just clever repackaging of an old one.
So, it is possible to make money on "technology" without creating
anything new by supplying hyped-up buzzwords, as long as enough people remain oblivious to the
marketing magic.
The Times should not be surprised if some of us are becoming underwhelmed by technology. Less and less can a term be equated to magic while new ways
to dilute it are being legitimized.
Drawing squares around numbers
"technology."
Single-click "technology."
Some-obscure-buzzword
"technology" that has no measurable effect.
At some point, you notice your capabilities
reduced from what they were and even the fancy buzzwords don't stop you from
questioning if you're really getting this year's equivalent of a moon
ride.
Not really relevant, but usually the presumption is one-to-one for sake comparison
Well, it could be relevant to an Altivec user if a CPU has multiple Altivec cores, say 3 or 6 or 8, and so can complete most vector operations sooner than an the chip that only has 1 Altivec core. Image processing typically lends itself well to parallelism due to the single-instruction multiple-data nature of operations on it.
I agree that comparisons between SSE and Altivec can be difficult, but I guess what I'm asking is how much better is SSE3? Is it approximately 3 times better, or just slightly better?
If you could fill the Martian air with enough O2 so
that you could go outside and breathe it, the odor of sulfur would still be
unmistakable. The whole place would smell distractingly like rotten
eggs. On your trip back, people would say "you've visited Mars recently, haven't you?" Mars will need a lot of work even after it is livable just to get rid of the smell.
Trees would make it look nicer in the meantime, but they would look better
inside enclosed greenhouses, where the smell of a pine forest would likely be very much sought after by the cavern dwellers, and the O2 they produce can be kept from escaping the planet's atmophere.
As to Biosphere 2, all of the pictures I've seen of it make me think that it needed a larger proportion of ocean in order to come to a CO2/O2 balance. Maybe that's what the Mars caverns will need? Large greenhouse-enclosed ponds? They could either use concentrator mirrors to raise the temperature, or if the scale is too large, be stocked with Antarctic sea creatures to keep a balanced environment while there are no people there (and while we still have any Antarctic sea creatures left).
Unless my math has an error, it sounds as if it could already be
cost competitive.
First of all, I assume that electricity costs anywhere from 2-15
cents per kilowatt hour.
A 25mpg car running for one hour at 50 mph goes 50 miles and
therefore uses up 2 gallons of fuel, which at roughly $3 a gallon
costs $6.
Assume that the 25mpg car needs 50 horsepower to keep the car
moving at 50 mph. Using the units command supplied standard with Linux I find that 50 horsepower
is 37.285 kilowatt. So if 37kW were needed to do the same thing for
an hour using an electric, the electricity would cost you:
37kW*.15 = $5.55 in a place where electricity costs 15 cents per
kW*h.
37kW*.10 = $3.70 in a place where electricity costs 10 cents per
kW*h.
37kW*.05 = $1.86 in a place where electricity costs 5c/kW*h.
37kW*.02 = $0.75 in a place where electricity costs 2c/kW*h (probably off-peak, and that's approximately the cost of wind-generated power IIRC.)
All of those sound attractive compared to $6 for two gallons (and rising).
Of course, for this to be a real comparison, a lot of other things
would have to be taken into consideration, such as engine efficiency,
battery efficiency, electric motor efficiency, transmission line
versus fuel transport efficiency, weight considerations, the need to
make separate trips to gas/petrol stations whereas electrics charge at home, regenerated braking energy, spills and evaporation, etc...
So expect lots of vulacanism. What's lots? I have no idea.
Is the vulcanism an effect of a receding Ice Age, or is it the cause? I find more references to it being the cause than the effect, but it may simply be a convenient assumption that is just carried along without being questioned. Wikipedia claims that the causes of ice ages is still controversial.
Of course there is also the possibility that vulcanism is triggered by both edges. Simply interfering with the existing contact points of tectonic plates and disrupting an equilibrium that had been largely "set in stone" might be enough to create new volcanoes at new locations while turning "off" active volcanoes for a while.
I tried looking for evidence of this, but there are so many glaciation cycles ("little ice ages") within the Pleistocene itself that it would require substantial reams of data to link vulcanism with "ice-weighted continental subduction," (no hits), the best I could find was this, a paper on how the mantle could melt due to decompression (but with no mention of ice caps).
Cracking a not-as-yet-protected OS to run on a plain vanilla X86 is not the same thing as cracking a protected OS that has been matched up with a TPM and booted from a special BIOS (if the full TCG spec is adhered to). There is a lot of confusion out there about this, but the two are vastly different. While the former is like a "do not enter" sign on an unlocked door, the latter is like a castle with a moat and archers ready to shoot at anything that isn't wearing their colors.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and it sounds like shoplifters can now get you to pay for their stuff by placing items near your shopping cart while you're busy looking at the chewing gum.
Color me cynical, but I think there will always be a delay at the checkout (whether necessary or contrived) in order to get you in some way to ogle at the M&Ms, the TV Guide, the breath mints. Otherwise all of those products will experience a drastic loss of sales.
It's admittedly an old figure -- that's why I said "at least."
Only if you don't know that the population has been doubling every 35 or so years, then it becomes obvious the birth rate has been outpacing the death rate for a long time. Since about 1900 it's been about 1, then 2, then 4, then 8 billion... Where does it end?
That's a dangerously optimistic definition for carrying capacity. Ask your local fire marshal what the carrying capacity of an auditorium is, and you'll always get a lower number than what is physically possible to fit inside the building. You seem to be waiting for the floor of the building to collapse or for everyone to begin asphyxiating, by which point it will be too late for anyone to leave (especially since on Earth there is nowhere to go...) The carrying capacity of a building or a ship, or aircraft (etc.) refers to the number that can be carried inside with a reasonable margin of safety... not to a margin of certain disaster for some of the occupants.
If that weren't enough, you are also ignoring the millions who have already died from famine (in some areas -- I'm not saying it is likely to happen to you just yet...) and the extinction of species of wildlife due to unsustainable impacts on habitat that was formerly wild or reserved.
Last but not least, there is the matter of the decline in O2 and the increase in CO2 and methane levels in the atmosphere for which it would not be wise to wait until your definition of "carrying capacity" were reached.
It sounds like a benefit, but don't forget the psychological effect.
If you weren't aging at all, would you be in a big hurry to reproduce, or would you be more likely to put it off? If there were no "use it or lose it" biological clock to worry about, I wonder how many people would even bother having children, what with the costly and/or painful aspects of it. You would rather tell yourself that you could have children later and just put it off.
But, if fertility is reduced, you may actually feel pressure to reproduce sooner, "while you still can." Psychologically, this may be a counterproductive feature.
It may be better to completely remove fertility as part of the deal of those who are accepting the "immortality gene," and to delay the puberty of those who just want the "longevity gene" ...until retirement age.
BTW, we are already in a population boom with at least 3 children born every second (plop, plop, plop...) and so should therefore be thinking of the right incentives to convince people not to operate this thing on automatic mode, as we are already over the carrying capacity. Offering the above options to people -- honestly -- may ironically be the solution, not the problem.
General: How'd the flight test go, Colonel?
Colonel: Well, we got some good news and some bad news, sir.
General: OK, what are the bad news?
Colonel: Due to some unexpected turbulence, we missed the target and had a friendly fire incident.
General: *Curse*
General: And the good news?
Colonel: The good news are that your car rental's been upgraded to a convertible without touching the budget.
From your own source:
That is far and away not zero, so no cigar. Source continues...
It is kind of a stretch, although I can see how you came to the conclusion you did. Given that the best current evidence shows a date of 400 AD for the earliest inscriptions from India (see earlier post), and that this falls somewhere in the middle of the Mayan period of Mesoamerican history, I would say that at least for zero, it is safest not to attribute this to any geographical area.
when we attribute an invention to someone, we generally mean that our current use comes from them
That is certainly one way of making attributions, but it's not the only way.
For patents (for example), all that's necessary to shoot down a patent application is to show "prior art." That is, it is not necessary to say that our current usage of zero is derived at all from anywhere, as long as proof can be found for it at an earlier date. In the case of zero, it is not such a unique concept that it deserves to be credited as an "invention" IMHO, since, as you point out, several people came up with it independently, or at least could have come up with it independently based on the other skill sets present within those civilizations.
For history courses, you can draw the attribution boundaries any way you want, depending on what the focus of the course is. It may well be not to show a continuous line of development (although this is a popular way to structure it), but rather to show what were the conditions under which innovation occured, and to explain why there were any disconnections or lapses.
"No, no, no," says God. "You get your own dirt."
"Poof!" Just then the devil appears carrying a briefcase, whispers something into the scientist's ear and disappears.
"OK," says the man, "you win that one, but I have a tougher challenge for You."
"What?" God replies confidently.
"Let's see who is the first to make a man out of freshly made feces."
"Pshaw, that's easy," dismisses the deity.
So the man stoops down to begin making the materials, and just then receives a tap on the shoulder.
"Uh, let Me have some of that..."
"No, no, no," says the man "you're so perfect, let's see you make your own $!*#."
The Mayan civilization lasted from about 1200BC to 900 AD and had the concept of zero in their writing system, as you can see here. If you want to learn more about Mayan civilization, you can do that here.
You claim that 0 was "invented" in Asia, but your source says:
So, India's other mathematical achievements notwithstanding, what additional information do you have that leads you to believe that zero was "invented" in India (assuming it makes sense at all to think of a number being invented)? Are you trying to patent it or something :) ?
Only low density stuff could be produced this way, but maybe it is more environmentally friendly ?
Is MS necessarily the fox?
Yes.
Sorry to step on your eggshells, but you need to get your historical facts straight. The supposed netscape "fox egg" came before the supposed IE chicken. The browser wars started out as MS reacting to NN's popularity, not NN "attacking" MS by resorting to open source. I hope your post isn't representative of the sorts of facts that are to be "agreed" upon in a back room.
Perhaps the real fox is the one that is trying to keep the truth from being posted through some form of censorship? The slashdot story, titled Microsoft asks Slashdot to remove Readers' Posts would certainly argue that a free airing of facts and opinions isn't what the PR types are going to be aiming at. Not a very good gesture in support of free speech or a very great confidence in people to decide on their own what the facts may be about the Kerberos standard and other stuff like that...
What would be the point of a discussion like this one if all of the "facts" to be aired were pre-decided? No need to use your brain, just sit back and get your spoon feeding? Instead, we will prepare "safe" controversies for you to argue about that do not impinge on anything.
There is no reason for me to think that this is going to be any different, seeing what they tried to do with their "Get the Facts" campaign, and it turned out to be anything but facts, more like made-to-order TCO studies that applied to atypical application niches.
Hollywood: We've been chugging out sequel after sequel and they're just not making very much money. We notice that you guys in the game industry are doing well. So, since we have run out of ideas, we think you should pay us licensing fees so that you can use our stale ideas in your games and add the same sorts of restrictions and ads that we claim people enjoy to death in their DVDs.
Game Maker: ROFL.... So, you want me to pay you a bunch of fees, charge higher prices and piss off my customer base, just so you can keep stuffing those tired old ideas into peoples' neurons, in the hopes that a dim memory will work as a hook to get them to go see one of your remakes someday? What do I get out of it?
Hollywood: We will release your tired old ideas in a movie version.
Game Maker: But if all we're doing is recycling each other's old ideas, where will the new ideas come from?
Hollywood: *shrugs* Dunno.
Game Player: Scrabble anyone?
Hollywood: I've got it! We'll make "Scrabble -- The Movie."
Yes, and IMHO they could go a long way towards it by not using Gartner as an authoritative source on their front page. TCO indeed!
You haven't listened closely enough to the "naysayers" to understand what they've been saying.
What they've been saying is that MSFT itself seems to have designs on XML subsets, enough so to want to patent some of them, as this previous slashdot story points out:
Given those plans, I wouldn't be surprised that some people are concerned about the usual embrace & extend into other areas of the spec people thought were "open." Will a future patent limit the way numbers are highlighted in SVG, for instance? To avoid wasting productivity going through hoops, it may be more effective to work on something that isn't likely to conflict with MSFT IP-grabbing activities.
Don't blame the developers, or reflexively insult them with the label "naysayers" -- they just want to build on a firm foundation that won't suddenly find them having to fork over royalties or make unfunded code changes. What's wrong with that? Nobody wants to build on a foundation of sliding mud. If nothing else, that's just good Tao.
if they are trying to tie a piece of DRM music to only one machine, they don't want me swapping my keys about.
Minor correction: It's their keys they don't want you swapping about. Technically, the EULA should state what they are currently claiming as their property, though it isn't always clear, because they often advertise media as if you could "own" it by paying some amount, but even with those the fine print insists that you only own a license to use it.
Putting a rootkit, or a rootkit-enabler key onto a TPM protected computer would be more difficult, but if anyone could put it on there it would be an official vendor under the guise of some legitimate-sounding "remote maintenance" type of deal, which, if something goes wrong, could end up collecting more information about you than they let on during the EULA acceptance phase. How much information about you was given out, however, could be perfectly hidden away from your prying eyes, even though the data itself may reside on your "own" computer.
As bad as current rootkits are, it has always been possible to recover from them without waiting on hold on a support hotline, or without having to repurchase all of your existing licenses, simply by reinstalling.
I've not heard of any proposal for nonvolitile storage for Palladium
A TPM (trusted platform module) to be included on all computers and peripherals to be sold from now on (let me know if you find an exception...), whether onchip or as an external chip, has the following capabilities:
The storage part sounds pretty nonvolatile to me...
Do multiple AltiVec cores on a single G5 processor suffer more or less from memory bandwidth issues than a pair of Intel (whatevers) in a dual processor machine sharing a memory bus?
Depends on the typical workload of course, but general purpose instructions are almost always more memory intensive than FP or vector code. The name Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) is actually a very good clue to what's happening. A vector instruction is fetched and, since it is to operate on several memory words, no further instructions need to be fetched from the bus until the vector instruction is finished. Only a stream of data needs to be brought in. So, for large sets of vectors and workloads with lots of vector instructions it should (theoretically) benefit from having several Altivec cores.
The same benefit doesn't apply to normal CPU instructions and CPU cores since they typically require another intruction+data fetch right after finishing the previous instruction. A well-designed onboard memory controller helps, but obviously not to the degree of cutting in half (or so) the number of fetches to the external memory bus.
There will be diminishing returns to increasing the number of general purpose CPU cores on a die, as eventually the memory bus will get saturated. Vectorizing as much of the instruction stream as possible seems to be the most effective way to postpone that bottleneck.
How about an exercise bike that runs a generator that charges a bank of 12V capacitors? You then flip a switch to release the built up charge as you try to start the car? I think it should be possible for anything except a really big behemoth vehicle.
Batteries produce less amps during cold weather. The distinction between cranking amps and cold cranking amps (CCA) may even be labelled on the battery itself. The CCA number is always lower. So, to start a car, all you need is a few more amps added in.
"Any marketing distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced"
It used to be that technology invariably described some new and impossible idea, like flying or walking on the moon or cloning. But, the dirty secret is that few people can tell the difference anymore between a truly new idea and just clever repackaging of an old one. So, it is possible to make money on "technology" without creating anything new by supplying hyped-up buzzwords, as long as enough people remain oblivious to the marketing magic.
The Times should not be surprised if some of us are becoming underwhelmed by technology. Less and less can a term be equated to magic while new ways to dilute it are being legitimized.
At some point, you notice your capabilities reduced from what they were and even the fancy buzzwords don't stop you from questioning if you're really getting this year's equivalent of a moon ride.
Well, it could be relevant to an Altivec user if a CPU has multiple Altivec cores, say 3 or 6 or 8, and so can complete most vector operations sooner than an the chip that only has 1 Altivec core. Image processing typically lends itself well to parallelism due to the single-instruction multiple-data nature of operations on it.
I agree that comparisons between SSE and Altivec can be difficult, but I guess what I'm asking is how much better is SSE3? Is it approximately 3 times better, or just slightly better?
I'm not convinced. Especially as you never posted the "unsolvable formulas" you alluded to.
No -- really.
If you could fill the Martian air with enough O2 so that you could go outside and breathe it, the odor of sulfur would still be unmistakable. The whole place would smell distractingly like rotten eggs. On your trip back, people would say "you've visited Mars recently, haven't you?" Mars will need a lot of work even after it is livable just to get rid of the smell.
Trees would make it look nicer in the meantime, but they would look better inside enclosed greenhouses, where the smell of a pine forest would likely be very much sought after by the cavern dwellers, and the O2 they produce can be kept from escaping the planet's atmophere.
As to Biosphere 2, all of the pictures I've seen of it make me think that it needed a larger proportion of ocean in order to come to a CO2/O2 balance. Maybe that's what the Mars caverns will need? Large greenhouse-enclosed ponds? They could either use concentrator mirrors to raise the temperature, or if the scale is too large, be stocked with Antarctic sea creatures to keep a balanced environment while there are no people there (and while we still have any Antarctic sea creatures left).
Unless my math has an error, it sounds as if it could already be cost competitive.
First of all, I assume that electricity costs anywhere from 2-15 cents per kilowatt hour.
A 25mpg car running for one hour at 50 mph goes 50 miles and therefore uses up 2 gallons of fuel, which at roughly $3 a gallon costs $6.
Assume that the 25mpg car needs 50 horsepower to keep the car moving at 50 mph. Using the units command supplied standard with Linux I find that 50 horsepower is 37.285 kilowatt. So if 37kW were needed to do the same thing for an hour using an electric, the electricity would cost you:
37kW*.15 = $5.55 in a place where electricity costs 15 cents per kW*h.
37kW*.10 = $3.70 in a place where electricity costs 10 cents per kW*h.
37kW*.05 = $1.86 in a place where electricity costs 5c/kW*h.
37kW*.02 = $0.75 in a place where electricity costs 2c/kW*h (probably off-peak, and that's approximately the cost of wind-generated power IIRC.)
All of those sound attractive compared to $6 for two gallons (and rising).
Of course, for this to be a real comparison, a lot of other things would have to be taken into consideration, such as engine efficiency, battery efficiency, electric motor efficiency, transmission line versus fuel transport efficiency, weight considerations, the need to make separate trips to gas/petrol stations whereas electrics charge at home, regenerated braking energy, spills and evaporation, etc...
Is the vulcanism an effect of a receding Ice Age, or is it the cause? I find more references to it being the cause than the effect, but it may simply be a convenient assumption that is just carried along without being questioned. Wikipedia claims that the causes of ice ages is still controversial.
Of course there is also the possibility that vulcanism is triggered by both edges. Simply interfering with the existing contact points of tectonic plates and disrupting an equilibrium that had been largely "set in stone" might be enough to create new volcanoes at new locations while turning "off" active volcanoes for a while.
I tried looking for evidence of this, but there are so many glaciation cycles ("little ice ages") within the Pleistocene itself that it would require substantial reams of data to link vulcanism with "ice-weighted continental subduction," (no hits), the best I could find was this, a paper on how the mantle could melt due to decompression (but with no mention of ice caps).
Cracking a not-as-yet-protected OS to run on a plain vanilla X86 is not the same thing as cracking a protected OS that has been matched up with a TPM and booted from a special BIOS (if the full TCG spec is adhered to). There is a lot of confusion out there about this, but the two are vastly different. While the former is like a "do not enter" sign on an unlocked door, the latter is like a castle with a moat and archers ready to shoot at anything that isn't wearing their colors.
SSE3... is actually somewhat better than AltiVec
On how many Altivec cores?