Ironically... it is a bad example... the Mafia is usually actually concerned about your business' success. Even they know that it's important to be even handed and fair. If they extorted every last cent, they would run out of store owners to extort. Sure some bad bosses may have operated that way... but as understand it, most mature organized criminal organizations that used the "protection" racket also "encouraged" the surrounding community to frequent the businesses they protected.
Most mature organized criminal organizations are actually led by shrewd and skilled business men... if you look at the successes that organized crime has brought to the Irish, Italian, and many other communities, and you will realize that it's one way that a discriminated-against minority can pool it's resources and force the surrounding communities to respect and even value relationships with them. Just think about the Italian climb from a depressed immigrant community to basically owning law enforcement and construction in NYC... without organized crime they probably would still be discriminated against.
I don't mean to defend it at all, only to point out that most mature organized crime organizations are more concerned with the well being and success of their "customers" than the RIAA.
Spreadsheets are right for much of what you state... but surely one could use another tool to generate the data and simply import the data into Excel to perform more basic operations.
For some things, especially complex math, spreadsheets simply are much less efficient and completely unnecessary.
I think what the GP was saying is literally "point source"... not a 10" driver that will produce the full range of frequencies and be subject to intermod.
If complete sound waves propagate from a single point in space (and are not reflected) there is no possibility for intermod.
Why do we specify that a system needs 99.9999% uptime and yet people don't miss it when it's down.
I thing VMWare has a new product they need to provide with their virtualization... the ability for racks of servers to scale themselves based on load. For example, perhaps I have a datacenter with 1000 servers to manage the day to day operations of my company... funny thing is though, all the servers are only under load Monday-Friday from 7am to 6pm. With virtualization, I should be able to have the the number of online machines reduced to 10 or 20 servers and have all of the others power down completely. Perhaps the data center could be partitioned out and as it scales down for the evening and weekend loads, portions of it shut down completely (no network equipment, no AC, no lights, no backup power, etc.) As the load increases the next morning, datacenter wakes up to meet the demand.
Just imagine the potential cost savings for a datacenter that went green like that!
We may be creating technology which will gradually make us a non-contemplative people, living only in the moment. And if you live in the moment, you forget the past, allowing those in control to make you repeat it.
Your quote shows that we are not... as I assume you are pretty well immersed in technology since your posting on slashdot.
I would argue that technology has actually made us a more contemplative people.
Visit a farm someday, someplace rural and 'backward', and you will find that as a whole the people there are much simpler and much less likely to question the nature of our existence.
On the flip side, some of the most profound things I have heard said in recent times have come from the mouths of some text messaging, youtubing, myspace obsessed teens. Apparently there is something gained by having all of this technology at our disposal, and much of it is in the area of deeper thought.
It is true that something is lost when we allow computers to simplify some of the old, character building, exercises in patience that were done in the past... but I believe that the losses are more than made up by a greater amount of creativity, ability, and openness.
The one thing that no amount of technology can replace is the human mind's ability question the world around us... technology has only allowed us to move past much of the mundane stuff in pursuit of higher goals.
I hope that someday mathematics would be a conceptual course like most science courses. With computers and calculators able to do the math, lets let non-mathematicians focus on understanding what math does, where it's used, and how to apply it and then give them a calculator to actually do the math. Perhaps an association of Mathmaticians could be formed that would design, test, and certify software or calculating devices as being accurate... so that an aspiring engineer could focus instead on learning the principals of engineering.
I made it through an engineering degree with a great calculator and a piss poor command of Trig and Calculus. I wish the 8 math classes I had to take had been less about solving equations and more about forming equations. As a working adult I find that what I really need to know is how to look at what I do know and use it to find what I don't. Sure I can solve the equation, but little good it does me if I don't know the equation in the first place. Had I spent more time on math application theory and less on memorizing rules and tricks to solve the problem I would be far better off now because I could let the computer solve the problem for me once I formed it.
It used to be that the right was all about a smaller FEDERAL government (not necessarily smaller government). Then as time went on, both parties used scare tactics to gain votes. The right convinced us we would all die, the world would end, and our children would all be crippled unless...
Anyway, the point is, it's not that the fearful gravitate to the right, but that the right uses fear to attract the fearful. After all, when you were afraid of the dark as a child you didn't want your parents to tell you there was nothing to be afraid of. You wanted them to hide under your covers with you. (Most parents fall somewhere in the middle).
People who are afraid of something are usually most comforted by those who are afraid of the same thing... that way they can watch each others back.
Ever wonder why social conservatives lean right politically? Wouldn't large government and lots of regulation be better to enforce socially conservative ideals? After all the more control a government has, the more they are likely to force morals on their people (look at the middle east, China, Nazi's). The more free we are of government influence, the more free we are to express ourselves socially. Regulating anything (abortion, marriage, sex education, etc...) are all very leftist ideas! But the right was always about fear... fear big government, fear taxes, fear communists, fear, fear, fear. Social conservatism is all about fear too... fear change, fear uniqueness, fear god, fear science, fear fear fear.
Yep... deserts are net consumers of C02. I say you plant vegetation on the edge of a desert and keep a near constant irrigation with CO2 and water. I'm sure that with enough of both you could create a very fertile environment for growth... slowly expand inland and create a forest where there was only sand before.
NOOOOOOOO That's what is so fucked up with our country now... people seem to think that the Federal government is the boss and the states must follow it's lead.
This is the United STATES of America. The individual states agreed to give some of their sovereign power to a governing body that would facilitate trade, provide mutual protection, and so on... they did not agree that the Federal government could determine how their state's government worked, how their state chose delegates to represent their state in national elections, or how their state functioned in any way.
I hate how people seem to think that anything worth doing must be done at the federal level. Fuck that... move the power back to the states, counties, and municipalities. Make local elections more important than federal ones. So we can all shake the hand of the person who most directly effects our local economy.
I say the states need to rise up and demand their rights back.
I believe that an amendment should be made that prevents the federal government from taxing citizens directly... instead they should tax the state's and the states should tax it's citizens. That way, the states could develop a tax policy that makes sense for their state. For example, some states would tax income, while some would go straight sales tax. If that were the case, you would actually see the Federal government become far less wasteful because a congressman could make a name for themselves by reducing the burden on his state with saving money at the federal level.
The framers of the constitution viewed the US as a collection of governments who sent a representative delegation to a seperate power to provide for a common defense and to manage trade with other nations.... not really unlike the United Nations. Imagine if we shifted all the power to the UN... how much influence would your vote have then?
Keep the power close to home, make the federal government answer to the states!
Re-read what I wrote... if you reduce the cabinet space by 50% and place 2 cabinets back to back... you essentially have the same volume of cabinet and same volume of aisle. Now, because no device is more than 1/2 as deep as the deepest server, the aisles can be made smaller because I don't need 5 ft of aisle to install a 2ft deep server.
Now consider that a lot of rack equipment doesn't need a full cabinet's depth... servers sure, but not switches, panels, etc. Also consider that when designing dense servers, they frequently waste volume to keep a low 1U profile. Going 2 U at 1/2 the depth (with two cabinets in the same or smaller footprint as one) may improve density substantially... especially if the servers are not responsible for their own power and cooling requirements.
Ultimately, the standard server cabinet is very poorly designed in today's data center.
I agree. It's time to overhaul the data center. Here are a few things I would love to change.
- Cabinet power supplies. Why the hell does every piece of equipment need an AC-DC power supply.
- Equipment should be cooled by the cabinet rather than requiring it's own fans. Simply seal the racks with a partition between the front and back, force air out the back with several large, redundant, efficient, and quiet fans.
- Make the cabinets shallower, by at least 1/2, and remove the rear access to them so they can be back to back. All ports could be on the sides of the equipment, with power on one side and data on the other. And the cables would run in vertical channels between cabinets. The equipment would be shallow but tall, meaning things that are currently shallow (patch panels, switches, etc.) would actually waste less space. Things that are currently deep would be made shallow by making them taller, eliminating the need for rails, the need to pull servers out to do maintenance, etc. Additionally the greater vertical footprint would provide more potential for cartridge type maintenance... things like raid controllers, processors, ram modules, etc. could be replaced without screws in carriers like hard drives in most servers. The height would also increase the equipment's exposure to cooling air, shoving enough vents in a 1U server is tough, imagine if the server were 2u but 1/2 as deep... or 3u but 1/3 as deep, you could have more vents, more airflow, and less need for high velocity noisy cooling. Finally, because we would be placing two cabinets in the floor space of one, our density would increase as equipment continued to get smaller. More and more space in cabinets is being wasted because equipment is shallower. Or engineers are making poor design decisions in order to keep things flat and deep to keep densities high.
I'm sure I could come up with more, but those few things would really help to increase density and improve cooling, maintenance, and noise levels in data centers.
Wouldn't a chimney cause resistance. I would think having under floor intake and above ceiling output, with some exhaust fans in the ceiling space to draw the air through the cabinets and push it outside would force plenty of air across the equipment.
If you use a chimney, you essentially would be reducing the volume of air that can be exhausted, but you would be increasing the speed of the air.
A good, macroscopic, analogy would be a mountain. Sure it's only 10 miles to the other side as the crow flies, but it would be a much greater distance if you climbed up the mountain and back down again. If you compared the surface area of 10sq miles of lake to 10sq miles of mountain... the mountain has a lot more SURFACE area.
Doesn't work... I quit playing Oblivion when I realized that you can beat it as a level 2-3 character FAR easier than if you fully develop your character.
Also, what do you do about situations where a player has played a game to certain spot and starts over... the game would assume that this player is far more advanced that he really is as he didn't make a single wrong move up to that point... then he can't seem to get past that spot on any subsequent plays.
User selectable skill levels where the levels increase in difficulty in unpredictable ways are the best. Perhaps enemy's spawn slightly faster, perhaps mazes have more dead ends, maybe ammo is more sparse, maybe weather plays a more significant effect in visibility and movement speed. Keep enemies the same, make the game play more difficult through external influences which require that the player use strategy that can only be achieved through previous play of the game.
This all assumes that all of the different players' PU's are binary compatible... at which point there can be very little innovation in hardware except to make things smaller or add more of them. Think x86.
yeah the the binary "program" that generates the explosion, must then be compiled for each different processor... or processors must standardize on one instruction set... the first way makes it difficult for game developers... the second slows hardware innovation because it limit's hardware designers (make a processor that doesn't conform and it fails because no older software can use it).
API's solve both weaknesses with very little trade off. As long as the API is upgraded frequently to support new features, and is kept backward compatible to support old software, neither the developers nor the hardware designers are limited. One gpu can be really good at raytracing, while another might support all of the same features but excel at 2d video presentation (scaling, denoising, mpeg, etc...).
Sure there is a cost for an API... it does limit developers to what is allowed by the API, it does mean that code is not necessarily optimized for the gpu, it does provide another layer of complexity and potential points of failure, and there is always the chance that API's are mired in corporate muck or hardware vendors fail to support them fully. But those are political and social issues, not technological ones. API's are the best way for graphics to work... the current API's are the problem.
There is no such thing as "hardware that's capable of running general-purpose code"... in fact there is no such thing as "general-purpose code". Code is nothing but a language that is either interpreted by a processor, or can be compiled such that can be interpreted by a processor (or virtual machine). Either way, all code is highly dependant upon the capabilities of the hardware.
It's easy to throw Intel and AMD out there as though they provide an example of how it might work... however that analogy only works because they both use the same instruction set. If you consider all of the non-x86 processors out there, and you realize that all of the "code" needed to render scenes now must be provided in binary form for each manufacturer's gpu, perhaps even multiple different binaries as the gpu's feature set changes, it starts to look bleak.
Sure, right now with just Intel, AMD, and Nvidia in the market, you can imagine that they might be able to keep it pretty simple. Each manufacturer could provide a compiler for different languages for their gpu's that game developers would use. But what happens when Nvidia releases their next great processor that isn't binary compatible with their previous ones? Do the game developers need to provide 2 binary versions?
I think API's are a great way of allowing hardware and software to advance as quickly as possible. I also think that the current graphics API players, GL and Directx, completely fail in their responsibilities. OpenGL is nearly, for lack of a better word, obsolete, while DirectX isn't open, and develops much too slow. Give us a cross platform, open, powerful, and well managed graphics API and let the hardware makers truely innovate.
The alternative discussed in the article will give us what x86 does now... a complete lack of innovation in the hardware's design that reduces improvements to smaller transistors, more cache, and more cores.
I just browsed the article and it looks like what he's saying is that as GPU's become more like highly parallel cpu's we will begin to see API's go away in favor of writing compiled code for the GPU itself. For example, if I want to generate an explosion, I could write some native GPU code for the explosion, and let the GPU execute this program directly... rather than being limited to the API's capabilities.
So essentially, we will go back to game developers needing to make hardware specific hacks for their games... some games having better support for some cards, etc.
API's are there for a reason... lets keep em and just make them better.
Actually, when I started to form the thought for this post that was the first thing that came to mind. I just forgot it I guess. People often forget that a diesel is far more efficient at idle and during acceleration than a gasoline engine. This allows it to score higher at lower speeds and stop and go city driving... however for highway cruising I believe a gasoline engine wins.
Also, you can't forget to recognize that the MPG figures stated are probably Miles Per imperial Gallon rather than Miles per US Gallon... a significant difference (about 18% reduction in output for US gallons) so US MPG might only be ~53MPG.
"Focusing only on quarterly reports is what got them into this mess in the first place."
That is one of the most insightful comments I have seen on/. in a long time... you should have just written that.
Our greatest problem is that our stock market has had two great positive turns which made investors demand high gains from even (traditionally) slow gaining and low risk stocks. As such, the big 3 had to constantly spend money and make huge profits to satisfy their investors.
I would bet that within the big 3, some sensible person was chanting "shouldn't we invest in the future? This can't last forever". Unfortunately, had Ford said 3 years ago that they were switching to smaller, more efficient, and LOWER PROFIT vehicles, their stock would have looked this bad 2.9 years ago.
It's easy to blame the automakers, but the blame really lies with the investors and their failure to accept that some stocks just aren't made to get rich quick.
Large companies are not agile, they take a long time to adapt to a changing marketplace and/or economy. However, they usually have the resources to make the change, no matter how slow. In this case, they simply don't have the resources to recover because they spent them all to satisfy investors when the getting was good.
45MPG isn't such a big deal. You could probably pull it off with little more than a lawnmower engine and a bicycle. The difficulty is achieving 45MPG+ in a package that meets safety, emissions, and financial limitations. I would imagine that the fact that it is diesel is the largest issue. Also, I imagine it is being assembled by cheaper labor, with cheaper raw materials, and lower taxes/fees. Perhaps it wouldn't be cost effective here in the US... remember, diesel averages 20 cents per gallon more here in the US. May not seem like much, but it cuts the MPG savings down a bit.
Look at your viewing preferences page (http://tech.slashdot.org/my/comments)... you can actually apply an adjustment between -6 and +6 to any moderated comment based upon it's moderation.
I would avoid using large adjustments... but a -1 to funny and a +1 to insightful, interesting, and informative can make a huge difference. For example... I don't like that a +1 insightful can be modded down with a single -1 troll or whatever... so having the extra +1 to insightful means that it takes two negatives to offset a positive. It's pretty rare that comment will ever be marked both positively and negatively and not be worth reading.
Additionally, I usually give at least a +1 to Karma, though I have found that doing a +2 for karma nearly eliminates really bad posts when my threshold is at 3 or 4.
Your right... however there should be a penalty for deceptions like this. The FCC does very little testing themselves, instead allowing the manufacturer and owner of the spectrum to police themselves. If T-Mobile were to start lying about their test results, they could also be creating overpowered transmitters, not respecting interference regulations, etc.
I would hope that there is some penalty for falsifying test results... perhaps no so much in this case... but in other cases where they are required to certify their equipment.
I was simply responding the the GP and arguing that just because Jerry is in a MS ad, it doesn't mean that Jerry is pro MS. More than likely, he has no real opinion on the matter.
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Ironically... it is a bad example... the Mafia is usually actually concerned about your business' success. Even they know that it's important to be even handed and fair. If they extorted every last cent, they would run out of store owners to extort. Sure some bad bosses may have operated that way... but as understand it, most mature organized criminal organizations that used the "protection" racket also "encouraged" the surrounding community to frequent the businesses they protected.
Most mature organized criminal organizations are actually led by shrewd and skilled business men... if you look at the successes that organized crime has brought to the Irish, Italian, and many other communities, and you will realize that it's one way that a discriminated-against minority can pool it's resources and force the surrounding communities to respect and even value relationships with them. Just think about the Italian climb from a depressed immigrant community to basically owning law enforcement and construction in NYC... without organized crime they probably would still be discriminated against.
I don't mean to defend it at all, only to point out that most mature organized crime organizations are more concerned with the well being and success of their "customers" than the RIAA.
Is 80 MPH legal anywhere in the USA?
Yep... Oklahoma Turnpike (I40) has 80MPH posted speed limits... or it did a few years ago.
Spreadsheets are right for much of what you state... but surely one could use another tool to generate the data and simply import the data into Excel to perform more basic operations.
For some things, especially complex math, spreadsheets simply are much less efficient and completely unnecessary.
I think what the GP was saying is literally "point source"... not a 10" driver that will produce the full range of frequencies and be subject to intermod.
If complete sound waves propagate from a single point in space (and are not reflected) there is no possibility for intermod.
Funny, but it does make a good point.
Why do we specify that a system needs 99.9999% uptime and yet people don't miss it when it's down.
I thing VMWare has a new product they need to provide with their virtualization... the ability for racks of servers to scale themselves based on load. For example, perhaps I have a datacenter with 1000 servers to manage the day to day operations of my company... funny thing is though, all the servers are only under load Monday-Friday from 7am to 6pm. With virtualization, I should be able to have the the number of online machines reduced to 10 or 20 servers and have all of the others power down completely. Perhaps the data center could be partitioned out and as it scales down for the evening and weekend loads, portions of it shut down completely (no network equipment, no AC, no lights, no backup power, etc.) As the load increases the next morning, datacenter wakes up to meet the demand.
Just imagine the potential cost savings for a datacenter that went green like that!
We may be creating technology which will gradually make us a non-contemplative people, living only in the moment. And if you live in the moment, you forget the past, allowing those in control to make you repeat it.
Your quote shows that we are not... as I assume you are pretty well immersed in technology since your posting on slashdot.
I would argue that technology has actually made us a more contemplative people.
Visit a farm someday, someplace rural and 'backward', and you will find that as a whole the people there are much simpler and much less likely to question the nature of our existence.
On the flip side, some of the most profound things I have heard said in recent times have come from the mouths of some text messaging, youtubing, myspace obsessed teens. Apparently there is something gained by having all of this technology at our disposal, and much of it is in the area of deeper thought.
It is true that something is lost when we allow computers to simplify some of the old, character building, exercises in patience that were done in the past... but I believe that the losses are more than made up by a greater amount of creativity, ability, and openness.
The one thing that no amount of technology can replace is the human mind's ability question the world around us... technology has only allowed us to move past much of the mundane stuff in pursuit of higher goals.
I hope that someday mathematics would be a conceptual course like most science courses. With computers and calculators able to do the math, lets let non-mathematicians focus on understanding what math does, where it's used, and how to apply it and then give them a calculator to actually do the math. Perhaps an association of Mathmaticians could be formed that would design, test, and certify software or calculating devices as being accurate... so that an aspiring engineer could focus instead on learning the principals of engineering.
I made it through an engineering degree with a great calculator and a piss poor command of Trig and Calculus. I wish the 8 math classes I had to take had been less about solving equations and more about forming equations. As a working adult I find that what I really need to know is how to look at what I do know and use it to find what I don't. Sure I can solve the equation, but little good it does me if I don't know the equation in the first place. Had I spent more time on math application theory and less on memorizing rules and tricks to solve the problem I would be far better off now because I could let the computer solve the problem for me once I formed it.
the Republican party.
It used to be that the right was all about a smaller FEDERAL government (not necessarily smaller government). Then as time went on, both parties used scare tactics to gain votes. The right convinced us we would all die, the world would end, and our children would all be crippled unless...
Anyway, the point is, it's not that the fearful gravitate to the right, but that the right uses fear to attract the fearful. After all, when you were afraid of the dark as a child you didn't want your parents to tell you there was nothing to be afraid of. You wanted them to hide under your covers with you. (Most parents fall somewhere in the middle).
People who are afraid of something are usually most comforted by those who are afraid of the same thing... that way they can watch each others back.
Ever wonder why social conservatives lean right politically? Wouldn't large government and lots of regulation be better to enforce socially conservative ideals? After all the more control a government has, the more they are likely to force morals on their people (look at the middle east, China, Nazi's). The more free we are of government influence, the more free we are to express ourselves socially. Regulating anything (abortion, marriage, sex education, etc...) are all very leftist ideas! But the right was always about fear... fear big government, fear taxes, fear communists, fear, fear, fear. Social conservatism is all about fear too... fear change, fear uniqueness, fear god, fear science, fear fear fear.
Fear attracts fear!
Yep... deserts are net consumers of C02. I say you plant vegetation on the edge of a desert and keep a near constant irrigation with CO2 and water. I'm sure that with enough of both you could create a very fertile environment for growth... slowly expand inland and create a forest where there was only sand before.
Then again, it might not work at all.
NOOOOOOOO That's what is so fucked up with our country now... people seem to think that the Federal government is the boss and the states must follow it's lead.
This is the United STATES of America. The individual states agreed to give some of their sovereign power to a governing body that would facilitate trade, provide mutual protection, and so on... they did not agree that the Federal government could determine how their state's government worked, how their state chose delegates to represent their state in national elections, or how their state functioned in any way.
I hate how people seem to think that anything worth doing must be done at the federal level. Fuck that... move the power back to the states, counties, and municipalities. Make local elections more important than federal ones. So we can all shake the hand of the person who most directly effects our local economy.
I say the states need to rise up and demand their rights back.
I believe that an amendment should be made that prevents the federal government from taxing citizens directly... instead they should tax the state's and the states should tax it's citizens. That way, the states could develop a tax policy that makes sense for their state. For example, some states would tax income, while some would go straight sales tax. If that were the case, you would actually see the Federal government become far less wasteful because a congressman could make a name for themselves by reducing the burden on his state with saving money at the federal level.
The framers of the constitution viewed the US as a collection of governments who sent a representative delegation to a seperate power to provide for a common defense and to manage trade with other nations.... not really unlike the United Nations. Imagine if we shifted all the power to the UN... how much influence would your vote have then?
Keep the power close to home, make the federal government answer to the states!
Re-read what I wrote... if you reduce the cabinet space by 50% and place 2 cabinets back to back... you essentially have the same volume of cabinet and same volume of aisle. Now, because no device is more than 1/2 as deep as the deepest server, the aisles can be made smaller because I don't need 5 ft of aisle to install a 2ft deep server.
Now consider that a lot of rack equipment doesn't need a full cabinet's depth... servers sure, but not switches, panels, etc. Also consider that when designing dense servers, they frequently waste volume to keep a low 1U profile. Going 2 U at 1/2 the depth (with two cabinets in the same or smaller footprint as one) may improve density substantially... especially if the servers are not responsible for their own power and cooling requirements.
Ultimately, the standard server cabinet is very poorly designed in today's data center.
I agree. It's time to overhaul the data center. Here are a few things I would love to change.
- Cabinet power supplies. Why the hell does every piece of equipment need an AC-DC power supply.
- Equipment should be cooled by the cabinet rather than requiring it's own fans. Simply seal the racks with a partition between the front and back, force air out the back with several large, redundant, efficient, and quiet fans.
- Make the cabinets shallower, by at least 1/2, and remove the rear access to them so they can be back to back. All ports could be on the sides of the equipment, with power on one side and data on the other. And the cables would run in vertical channels between cabinets. The equipment would be shallow but tall, meaning things that are currently shallow (patch panels, switches, etc.) would actually waste less space. Things that are currently deep would be made shallow by making them taller, eliminating the need for rails, the need to pull servers out to do maintenance, etc. Additionally the greater vertical footprint would provide more potential for cartridge type maintenance... things like raid controllers, processors, ram modules, etc. could be replaced without screws in carriers like hard drives in most servers. The height would also increase the equipment's exposure to cooling air, shoving enough vents in a 1U server is tough, imagine if the server were 2u but 1/2 as deep... or 3u but 1/3 as deep, you could have more vents, more airflow, and less need for high velocity noisy cooling. Finally, because we would be placing two cabinets in the floor space of one, our density would increase as equipment continued to get smaller. More and more space in cabinets is being wasted because equipment is shallower. Or engineers are making poor design decisions in order to keep things flat and deep to keep densities high.
I'm sure I could come up with more, but those few things would really help to increase density and improve cooling, maintenance, and noise levels in data centers.
that 'air conditioning' 'air cooling'.
Sure it's great to have the air cool and all... but I thought that dehumidification was important too?
Wouldn't a chimney cause resistance. I would think having under floor intake and above ceiling output, with some exhaust fans in the ceiling space to draw the air through the cabinets and push it outside would force plenty of air across the equipment.
If you use a chimney, you essentially would be reducing the volume of air that can be exhausted, but you would be increasing the speed of the air.
A good, macroscopic, analogy would be a mountain. Sure it's only 10 miles to the other side as the crow flies, but it would be a much greater distance if you climbed up the mountain and back down again. If you compared the surface area of 10sq miles of lake to 10sq miles of mountain... the mountain has a lot more SURFACE area.
Doesn't work... I quit playing Oblivion when I realized that you can beat it as a level 2-3 character FAR easier than if you fully develop your character.
Also, what do you do about situations where a player has played a game to certain spot and starts over... the game would assume that this player is far more advanced that he really is as he didn't make a single wrong move up to that point... then he can't seem to get past that spot on any subsequent plays.
User selectable skill levels where the levels increase in difficulty in unpredictable ways are the best. Perhaps enemy's spawn slightly faster, perhaps mazes have more dead ends, maybe ammo is more sparse, maybe weather plays a more significant effect in visibility and movement speed. Keep enemies the same, make the game play more difficult through external influences which require that the player use strategy that can only be achieved through previous play of the game.
This all assumes that all of the different players' PU's are binary compatible... at which point there can be very little innovation in hardware except to make things smaller or add more of them. Think x86.
yeah the the binary "program" that generates the explosion, must then be compiled for each different processor... or processors must standardize on one instruction set... the first way makes it difficult for game developers... the second slows hardware innovation because it limit's hardware designers (make a processor that doesn't conform and it fails because no older software can use it).
API's solve both weaknesses with very little trade off. As long as the API is upgraded frequently to support new features, and is kept backward compatible to support old software, neither the developers nor the hardware designers are limited. One gpu can be really good at raytracing, while another might support all of the same features but excel at 2d video presentation (scaling, denoising, mpeg, etc...).
Sure there is a cost for an API... it does limit developers to what is allowed by the API, it does mean that code is not necessarily optimized for the gpu, it does provide another layer of complexity and potential points of failure, and there is always the chance that API's are mired in corporate muck or hardware vendors fail to support them fully. But those are political and social issues, not technological ones. API's are the best way for graphics to work... the current API's are the problem.
There is no such thing as "hardware that's capable of running general-purpose code"... in fact there is no such thing as "general-purpose code". Code is nothing but a language that is either interpreted by a processor, or can be compiled such that can be interpreted by a processor (or virtual machine). Either way, all code is highly dependant upon the capabilities of the hardware.
It's easy to throw Intel and AMD out there as though they provide an example of how it might work... however that analogy only works because they both use the same instruction set. If you consider all of the non-x86 processors out there, and you realize that all of the "code" needed to render scenes now must be provided in binary form for each manufacturer's gpu, perhaps even multiple different binaries as the gpu's feature set changes, it starts to look bleak.
Sure, right now with just Intel, AMD, and Nvidia in the market, you can imagine that they might be able to keep it pretty simple. Each manufacturer could provide a compiler for different languages for their gpu's that game developers would use. But what happens when Nvidia releases their next great processor that isn't binary compatible with their previous ones? Do the game developers need to provide 2 binary versions?
I think API's are a great way of allowing hardware and software to advance as quickly as possible. I also think that the current graphics API players, GL and Directx, completely fail in their responsibilities. OpenGL is nearly, for lack of a better word, obsolete, while DirectX isn't open, and develops much too slow. Give us a cross platform, open, powerful, and well managed graphics API and let the hardware makers truely innovate.
The alternative discussed in the article will give us what x86 does now... a complete lack of innovation in the hardware's design that reduces improvements to smaller transistors, more cache, and more cores.
I just browsed the article and it looks like what he's saying is that as GPU's become more like highly parallel cpu's we will begin to see API's go away in favor of writing compiled code for the GPU itself. For example, if I want to generate an explosion, I could write some native GPU code for the explosion, and let the GPU execute this program directly... rather than being limited to the API's capabilities.
So essentially, we will go back to game developers needing to make hardware specific hacks for their games... some games having better support for some cards, etc.
API's are there for a reason... lets keep em and just make them better.
Actually, when I started to form the thought for this post that was the first thing that came to mind. I just forgot it I guess. People often forget that a diesel is far more efficient at idle and during acceleration than a gasoline engine. This allows it to score higher at lower speeds and stop and go city driving... however for highway cruising I believe a gasoline engine wins.
Also, you can't forget to recognize that the MPG figures stated are probably Miles Per imperial Gallon rather than Miles per US Gallon... a significant difference (about 18% reduction in output for US gallons) so US MPG might only be ~53MPG.
"Focusing only on quarterly reports is what got them into this mess in the first place."
That is one of the most insightful comments I have seen on /. in a long time... you should have just written that.
Our greatest problem is that our stock market has had two great positive turns which made investors demand high gains from even (traditionally) slow gaining and low risk stocks. As such, the big 3 had to constantly spend money and make huge profits to satisfy their investors.
I would bet that within the big 3, some sensible person was chanting "shouldn't we invest in the future? This can't last forever". Unfortunately, had Ford said 3 years ago that they were switching to smaller, more efficient, and LOWER PROFIT vehicles, their stock would have looked this bad 2.9 years ago.
It's easy to blame the automakers, but the blame really lies with the investors and their failure to accept that some stocks just aren't made to get rich quick.
Large companies are not agile, they take a long time to adapt to a changing marketplace and/or economy. However, they usually have the resources to make the change, no matter how slow. In this case, they simply don't have the resources to recover because they spent them all to satisfy investors when the getting was good.
45MPG isn't such a big deal. You could probably pull it off with little more than a lawnmower engine and a bicycle. The difficulty is achieving 45MPG+ in a package that meets safety, emissions, and financial limitations. I would imagine that the fact that it is diesel is the largest issue. Also, I imagine it is being assembled by cheaper labor, with cheaper raw materials, and lower taxes/fees. Perhaps it wouldn't be cost effective here in the US... remember, diesel averages 20 cents per gallon more here in the US. May not seem like much, but it cuts the MPG savings down a bit.
Look at your viewing preferences page (http://tech.slashdot.org/my/comments)... you can actually apply an adjustment between -6 and +6 to any moderated comment based upon it's moderation.
I would avoid using large adjustments... but a -1 to funny and a +1 to insightful, interesting, and informative can make a huge difference. For example... I don't like that a +1 insightful can be modded down with a single -1 troll or whatever... so having the extra +1 to insightful means that it takes two negatives to offset a positive. It's pretty rare that comment will ever be marked both positively and negatively and not be worth reading.
Additionally, I usually give at least a +1 to Karma, though I have found that doing a +2 for karma nearly eliminates really bad posts when my threshold is at 3 or 4.
Your right... however there should be a penalty for deceptions like this. The FCC does very little testing themselves, instead allowing the manufacturer and owner of the spectrum to police themselves. If T-Mobile were to start lying about their test results, they could also be creating overpowered transmitters, not respecting interference regulations, etc.
I would hope that there is some penalty for falsifying test results... perhaps no so much in this case... but in other cases where they are required to certify their equipment.
Sarcasm... just sarcasm.
I was simply responding the the GP and arguing that just because Jerry is in a MS ad, it doesn't mean that Jerry is pro MS. More than likely, he has no real opinion on the matter.