Just about all ASUS socket AM3 motherboards support ECC RAM, and all Phenom, Phenom II, and Athlon II CPUs also support ECC memory. Put the two together and you have an inexpensive way to support ECC RAM that does not involve buying a workstation board (although ASUS's AM3 790FX board is just about as expensive as a workstation board.)
Fuel shouldn't be much different in the U.K. than in the U.S. except for the amount of tax that is placed on the fuel and possibly the amount of alcohol in the fuel. Europeans think their fuel is higher quality because the fuel octane is rated just by the RON instead of the (RON+MON)/2 method in the U.S. The MON is a smaller number than the RON due to a higher test engine load and RPM for the MON testing. This makes U.S. fuel look like its octane rating is 3-4 points lower than European fuel of the same quality. I am also pretty sure the 15 ppm ultra-low-sulfur diesel fuel available in the U.S. is pretty similar to what's available in Europe as well.
The term "gasoline" refers to what Europeans call "petrol." "Petroleum" over here in the U.S. is generally used to refer to crude oil and its products (e.g. certain organic solvents being "petroleum distillates.") We call diesel fuel diesel fuel, just like you do.
USB3 is pretty marginal for connecting a monitor. Your average single-link DVI interface has up to 3.96 Gbps of bandwidth, which a typical 1920x1080 LCD @ 60 Hz nearly saturates. USB3 is rated at 5 Gbps but if it's anything like USB2, you'll probably see ~2 Gbps of actual throughput and a huge CPU load. USB2 is horrible as a display interface as it is really only good for connecting small secondary displays to display static 2D images. You have only 480 Mbps of theoretical bandwidth, which is enough to drive only a 640x480 monitor at typical 24-bit color and 60 Hz. If you figure in the fact that USB2 maybe has 200 Mbps in real bandwidth, you see there's a huge bandwidth problem.
USB2 is okay for 100 Mbps Ethernet and there are a lot of USB2 10/100 Ethernet dongles and docks out there. I have one and it works as well as any PCI-based 10/100 Ethernet interface. However, most computers have gigabit Ethernet connections because 12 MB/sec won't cut it for transferring files any more. USB2 won't even come close to cutting it for a GbE replacement, which is why you don't see any USB GbE dongles, only the 10/100 ones.
USB does well for connecting relatively low-speed peripherals like mice, keyboards, printers, and small flash memory devices. It's just not a good replacement for high-bandwidth connections, which will continue to have specialized and much faster cables and connectors.
How else are they going to gouge you for an adapter to hook an Apple notebook to just about anything besides a USB device if they get rid of all of those other ports?
Optical may have outlived its usefulness for storage and backup, but it hasn't outlived its usefulness as a distribution medium. It is a lot cheaper for a software vendor to ship out their software on ~10-cent DVDs rather than ~$5 SD cards or USB drives. Entertainment firms especially like optical disks because in addition to being cheaper, they are also more fragile and harder to use with computers rather than locked-down, purpose-built, stand-alone players. Computers can better do unwanted things like skip the mandatory 30 minutes of previews, transfer the files to another medium, or strip out DRM altogether, so the entertainment firms want to discourage the playback of their files on computers as much as possible. The obvious distribution method of using the Internet is even more unappealing to software and entertainment distributors as they think it makes piracy easier and makes their ridiculous pricing schemes based on "scarcity" look that much more ridiculous.
So while putting things on optical media may be pretty much useless for customers, suppliers love it and that's why we won't see optical media die for a good, long time.
Not true. You're thinking of antibiotic resistance. Disinfectants usually physically break apart the bacteria and the common methods of antibiotic resistance don't protect against this. The main cause of staph infections is by people not washing their hands.
And then it's only in people who are REALLY immunocompromised. MAC doesn't generally show up until you have a CD4+ T-cell count of 50/mcL. A normal healthy person has more than 10 times that number of CD4+ T-cells.
Insurance payment is determined by a bunch of bean counters sitting in a basement somewhere. They don't care about spite, they only care about their actuarial tables and the balance sheet. The insurance companies are willing to pay more for a device without any non-medical functions because it will end up costing them less in the long run. If they start to cover stuff like iPhones, then people who want an iPhone will lie to and badger a doctor into diagnosing them with an illness they don't really have just so they can get a "free" iPhone from their insurer.
Or, if you want me make a scenario:
1. There are 1000 patients that actually need the device. The insurance company decides to only approve the $20k medical device, so they spend $20M.
2. There are 1000 patients that actually need the device. The insurance company decides to approve $500 iPhones. They spend $500K on iPhones for the legitimate patients. Word gets out that the insurance company pays for iPhones, so 100,000 people now "need" this device. The insurance company is now out $50.5M to treat the 1000 people who actually needed the device instead of the previous $20M.
Spite has nothing to do with it; it's all about minimizing risk.
You may see police trying to illegally search a house, but if you read TFA you would know that wiretapping goes on at the telco's facilities and not at anybody's house. You're never going to see wiretapping unless you are a telco employee.
Yeah, that's the "four-wire arrangement" if I am not mistaken. I have not worked with such a setup as the only stuff I've worked with is 120/240 single-phase and then higher-voltage stuff like 480Y/277 and 600Y/347 at various places of work. It was pretty neat to be working with the 600-volt stuff for a 100-horse pump motor. You walked into a room plastered with a bunch of very ominous-looking "Danger! Risk of electrocution!" and "Danger! Toxic chemicals!" signs and grabbed the crowbar-sized disconnect switch. You threw it with a big "thunk!!" and the lights would all dim as the motor fired up. It was awesome, but for some reason I was the only one anybody could get back in there to turn the pump on. I guess engineers are attracted by signs warning of imminent doom while most others are scared away by them:D
Yes, most software running on current 2.5-3 GHz dual-core and quad-core CPUs with a lot of SIMD and FPU power isn't CPU-bound. That probably won't be the case on a ~1 GHz single or dual-core ARM CPU. Anybody using a Web browser on a smartphone or PDA to browse typical websites today can tell you the little 400-800 MHz ARM CPU gets hammered pretty heavily.
What do you mean by "true 64-bit processor" or "32-bit processor with 64-bit extensions?" A CPU is either a 32-bit CPU (can only use at most 32-bit instruction words) or it is a 64-bit CPU (can use 64-bit instruction words). The CPU in question is based on the AMD Athlon 64, which was the original x86_64 CPU. These CPUs can execute 16, 32, or 64-bit code, depending on the OS that is installed. If it's running a 64-bit OS, the CPU runs in 64-bit mode, where is uses 64-bit instruction words. I would say it as well as all x86_64 CPUs are "true" 64-bit CPUs.
Most point-of-sale systems I have seen run Windows XP underneath the POS program. You would need an x86 CPU far more powerful than the MC68000 to run such a setup. Yes, a 68k would be more than enough if you hand-coded a simple but functional POS system for that hardware. POS makers want easy rather than efficient, so they slap together their frontend on Visual Basic and then make the register run Windows XP on a relatively powerful CPU to make up for their programming laziness. AMD's CPU would be a good fit for that sort of use, although you are 100% correct in that you shouldn't need a near-2 GHz K8 to run a frigging cash register.
However, 3D performance on a media center box is usually not very important. The fact that the unit just uses the AMD 780G integrated graphics is testament to that- if they cared much about 3D, they'd use a much more powerful discrete GPU. Media center units need to display the TV application's GUI and then play back video smoothly without tearing. The current xorg-video-ati drivers have excellent video playback through Xv and good 2D performance. Unless you're running some very high-bitrate 1080p H.264/MPEG-4 video, no remotely modern CPU needs GPU hardware decoding assist. Most of what you'd be seeing is MPEG-2, which just about any CPU made in the past half-decade can decode without any GPU assistance.
It is true that AMD still sells a lot of 65 nm parts (such as all of their notebook chips), but so does Intel. The comment about Intel being ahead of AMD in process technology is a moot point now that AMD proper is a fabless company. They spun off their fabs to GlobalFoundries and are free to use GF or any other foundry to make their processors, such as how they had Chartered Semiconductor to make some of their chips for them in the past. Thus the process technology Intel has means little for AMD unless they have a big advantage over *every* foundry out there.
You got a bunch of numbers screwed up. Most of AMD's current desktop and server CPUs are 45 nm (Phenom II, Athlon II, Opteron >2360/8360), while the laptop CPUs are 65 nm and will be going to 45 nm in a couple of months. AMD's GPUs are mostly 55 nm (Radeon HD 3xxx and 4xxx, except the HD 4770) with one 40 nm unit (HD 4770.) Most of Intel's CPUs are 45 nm, but all of the Celerons and some Pentium Dual Core and Core 2 Duo units are still 65 nm. Intel is going to the 32 nm process, but nothing 32 nm from them is going to ship for some time.
Oh, I got tips from gracious girls in college after helping them with computers. Many of those girls would go up to the professor with the whole "oh, I'm just a dumb little girl, please help me with the material" schtick and wangle a bunch of exam/assignment information out of them in the process. If I ever got stuck on an assignment or wanted to know what to study for the exam, they were more than willing to tell me since I'd been nice and fixed their machines. Not all favors from women have to be of the Penthouse Letters variety, you know.
Nobody will do that. What you will see is USB 3.0 USB sticks. That should give you about the same bandwidth as eSATA, plus it is an always-powered port.
There is a lot of positive support for nuclear energy as it has the potential to allow us to live a comfortable life without a lot of real or perceived consequences. Very few sane people actually want to have to scrimp on energy usage. They want to set the A/C and heater at a level that is comfortable to them rather than at temperatures that are mandated by politics or costs. They want to be able to drive as much as they care to. The list goes on. The current overseas political landscape makes oil and gas less desirable as the prices are set by an unfriendly cartel. The current domestic political landscape makes oil, gas, and then the one fossil fuel we have in abundance, coal, a less-than-desirable prospect due to things like cap-and-trade and taxes. Hydroelectric isn't terrifically popular due to the interference of river flows and fish migration. Wind power isn't terribly economically competitive and not all places are well-suited to windmills due to weather conditions. The things are also finding political trouble as more are starting to regard them as bird-killing eyesores. Solar is also starting to be on the chopping block as people realize it takes a lot of nasty heavy metals to make the photovoltaic cells, plus it is also limited by geographic location. Other proposed methods of power generation aren't mature enough to even make much of a judgment on. That pretty much leaves nuclear as the only other well-known option that has been proven to work in the scale we need, can work just about anywhere, and is economically competitive.
Lots of those exploits are for older versions of programs. The Debian ssh snafu was one of the newer exploits on that site, and that was fixed quite some time ago. That's not surprising as patches for security issues in *nix programs come pretty quickly and it is widely known that it is a Really Bad Idea (tm) to use out-of-date versions of programs.
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Just about all ASUS socket AM3 motherboards support ECC RAM, and all Phenom, Phenom II, and Athlon II CPUs also support ECC memory. Put the two together and you have an inexpensive way to support ECC RAM that does not involve buying a workstation board (although ASUS's AM3 790FX board is just about as expensive as a workstation board.)
Fuel shouldn't be much different in the U.K. than in the U.S. except for the amount of tax that is placed on the fuel and possibly the amount of alcohol in the fuel. Europeans think their fuel is higher quality because the fuel octane is rated just by the RON instead of the (RON+MON)/2 method in the U.S. The MON is a smaller number than the RON due to a higher test engine load and RPM for the MON testing. This makes U.S. fuel look like its octane rating is 3-4 points lower than European fuel of the same quality. I am also pretty sure the 15 ppm ultra-low-sulfur diesel fuel available in the U.S. is pretty similar to what's available in Europe as well.
The term "gasoline" refers to what Europeans call "petrol." "Petroleum" over here in the U.S. is generally used to refer to crude oil and its products (e.g. certain organic solvents being "petroleum distillates.") We call diesel fuel diesel fuel, just like you do.
USB3 is pretty marginal for connecting a monitor. Your average single-link DVI interface has up to 3.96 Gbps of bandwidth, which a typical 1920x1080 LCD @ 60 Hz nearly saturates. USB3 is rated at 5 Gbps but if it's anything like USB2, you'll probably see ~2 Gbps of actual throughput and a huge CPU load. USB2 is horrible as a display interface as it is really only good for connecting small secondary displays to display static 2D images. You have only 480 Mbps of theoretical bandwidth, which is enough to drive only a 640x480 monitor at typical 24-bit color and 60 Hz. If you figure in the fact that USB2 maybe has 200 Mbps in real bandwidth, you see there's a huge bandwidth problem.
USB2 is okay for 100 Mbps Ethernet and there are a lot of USB2 10/100 Ethernet dongles and docks out there. I have one and it works as well as any PCI-based 10/100 Ethernet interface. However, most computers have gigabit Ethernet connections because 12 MB/sec won't cut it for transferring files any more. USB2 won't even come close to cutting it for a GbE replacement, which is why you don't see any USB GbE dongles, only the 10/100 ones.
USB does well for connecting relatively low-speed peripherals like mice, keyboards, printers, and small flash memory devices. It's just not a good replacement for high-bandwidth connections, which will continue to have specialized and much faster cables and connectors.
How else are they going to gouge you for an adapter to hook an Apple notebook to just about anything besides a USB device if they get rid of all of those other ports?
Optical may have outlived its usefulness for storage and backup, but it hasn't outlived its usefulness as a distribution medium. It is a lot cheaper for a software vendor to ship out their software on ~10-cent DVDs rather than ~$5 SD cards or USB drives. Entertainment firms especially like optical disks because in addition to being cheaper, they are also more fragile and harder to use with computers rather than locked-down, purpose-built, stand-alone players. Computers can better do unwanted things like skip the mandatory 30 minutes of previews, transfer the files to another medium, or strip out DRM altogether, so the entertainment firms want to discourage the playback of their files on computers as much as possible. The obvious distribution method of using the Internet is even more unappealing to software and entertainment distributors as they think it makes piracy easier and makes their ridiculous pricing schemes based on "scarcity" look that much more ridiculous.
So while putting things on optical media may be pretty much useless for customers, suppliers love it and that's why we won't see optical media die for a good, long time.
Not true. You're thinking of antibiotic resistance. Disinfectants usually physically break apart the bacteria and the common methods of antibiotic resistance don't protect against this. The main cause of staph infections is by people not washing their hands.
And then it's only in people who are REALLY immunocompromised. MAC doesn't generally show up until you have a CD4+ T-cell count of 50/mcL. A normal healthy person has more than 10 times that number of CD4+ T-cells.
Insurance payment is determined by a bunch of bean counters sitting in a basement somewhere. They don't care about spite, they only care about their actuarial tables and the balance sheet. The insurance companies are willing to pay more for a device without any non-medical functions because it will end up costing them less in the long run. If they start to cover stuff like iPhones, then people who want an iPhone will lie to and badger a doctor into diagnosing them with an illness they don't really have just so they can get a "free" iPhone from their insurer.
Or, if you want me make a scenario:
1. There are 1000 patients that actually need the device. The insurance company decides to only approve the $20k medical device, so they spend $20M.
2. There are 1000 patients that actually need the device. The insurance company decides to approve $500 iPhones. They spend $500K on iPhones for the legitimate patients. Word gets out that the insurance company pays for iPhones, so 100,000 people now "need" this device. The insurance company is now out $50.5M to treat the 1000 people who actually needed the device instead of the previous $20M.
Spite has nothing to do with it; it's all about minimizing risk.
"Medical insurance" in the United States isn't really insurance so much as it is a third-party payer for the vast majority of your medical bills.
You may see police trying to illegally search a house, but if you read TFA you would know that wiretapping goes on at the telco's facilities and not at anybody's house. You're never going to see wiretapping unless you are a telco employee.
Yeah, that's the "four-wire arrangement" if I am not mistaken. I have not worked with such a setup as the only stuff I've worked with is 120/240 single-phase and then higher-voltage stuff like 480Y/277 and 600Y/347 at various places of work. It was pretty neat to be working with the 600-volt stuff for a 100-horse pump motor. You walked into a room plastered with a bunch of very ominous-looking "Danger! Risk of electrocution!" and "Danger! Toxic chemicals!" signs and grabbed the crowbar-sized disconnect switch. You threw it with a big "thunk!!" and the lights would all dim as the motor fired up. It was awesome, but for some reason I was the only one anybody could get back in there to turn the pump on. I guess engineers are attracted by signs warning of imminent doom while most others are scared away by them :D
Voltages of three-phase circuits vary according to the specific utility, but here are apparently the standard-ish ones:
1. 208Y/120
2. 240
3. 480Y/277
4. 600Y/347
5. 2400Y/1385
6. 4160Y/2400
7. 4800Y/2771
8. 11,950Y/6900
9. 12,470Y/7200
10. 13,200Y/7620
11. 22,860Y/13,200
12. 24,940/14,400
13. 34,500Y/20,000
14. 69,000Y/39,800
15. 138,000Y/79,700
Did you even look at your link? The program is the first definition in that list.
Yes, most software running on current 2.5-3 GHz dual-core and quad-core CPUs with a lot of SIMD and FPU power isn't CPU-bound. That probably won't be the case on a ~1 GHz single or dual-core ARM CPU. Anybody using a Web browser on a smartphone or PDA to browse typical websites today can tell you the little 400-800 MHz ARM CPU gets hammered pretty heavily.
Nokia got Flash 9 working on their ARM-powered, Linux-running N8x0 handhelds just fine, so it is certainly doable.
What do you mean by "true 64-bit processor" or "32-bit processor with 64-bit extensions?" A CPU is either a 32-bit CPU (can only use at most 32-bit instruction words) or it is a 64-bit CPU (can use 64-bit instruction words). The CPU in question is based on the AMD Athlon 64, which was the original x86_64 CPU. These CPUs can execute 16, 32, or 64-bit code, depending on the OS that is installed. If it's running a 64-bit OS, the CPU runs in 64-bit mode, where is uses 64-bit instruction words. I would say it as well as all x86_64 CPUs are "true" 64-bit CPUs.
Most point-of-sale systems I have seen run Windows XP underneath the POS program. You would need an x86 CPU far more powerful than the MC68000 to run such a setup. Yes, a 68k would be more than enough if you hand-coded a simple but functional POS system for that hardware. POS makers want easy rather than efficient, so they slap together their frontend on Visual Basic and then make the register run Windows XP on a relatively powerful CPU to make up for their programming laziness. AMD's CPU would be a good fit for that sort of use, although you are 100% correct in that you shouldn't need a near-2 GHz K8 to run a frigging cash register.
However, 3D performance on a media center box is usually not very important. The fact that the unit just uses the AMD 780G integrated graphics is testament to that- if they cared much about 3D, they'd use a much more powerful discrete GPU. Media center units need to display the TV application's GUI and then play back video smoothly without tearing. The current xorg-video-ati drivers have excellent video playback through Xv and good 2D performance. Unless you're running some very high-bitrate 1080p H.264/MPEG-4 video, no remotely modern CPU needs GPU hardware decoding assist. Most of what you'd be seeing is MPEG-2, which just about any CPU made in the past half-decade can decode without any GPU assistance.
It is true that AMD still sells a lot of 65 nm parts (such as all of their notebook chips), but so does Intel. The comment about Intel being ahead of AMD in process technology is a moot point now that AMD proper is a fabless company. They spun off their fabs to GlobalFoundries and are free to use GF or any other foundry to make their processors, such as how they had Chartered Semiconductor to make some of their chips for them in the past. Thus the process technology Intel has means little for AMD unless they have a big advantage over *every* foundry out there.
You got a bunch of numbers screwed up. Most of AMD's current desktop and server CPUs are 45 nm (Phenom II, Athlon II, Opteron >2360/8360), while the laptop CPUs are 65 nm and will be going to 45 nm in a couple of months. AMD's GPUs are mostly 55 nm (Radeon HD 3xxx and 4xxx, except the HD 4770) with one 40 nm unit (HD 4770.) Most of Intel's CPUs are 45 nm, but all of the Celerons and some Pentium Dual Core and Core 2 Duo units are still 65 nm. Intel is going to the 32 nm process, but nothing 32 nm from them is going to ship for some time.
Oh, I got tips from gracious girls in college after helping them with computers. Many of those girls would go up to the professor with the whole "oh, I'm just a dumb little girl, please help me with the material" schtick and wangle a bunch of exam/assignment information out of them in the process. If I ever got stuck on an assignment or wanted to know what to study for the exam, they were more than willing to tell me since I'd been nice and fixed their machines. Not all favors from women have to be of the Penthouse Letters variety, you know.
Nobody will do that. What you will see is USB 3.0 USB sticks. That should give you about the same bandwidth as eSATA, plus it is an always-powered port.
There is a lot of positive support for nuclear energy as it has the potential to allow us to live a comfortable life without a lot of real or perceived consequences. Very few sane people actually want to have to scrimp on energy usage. They want to set the A/C and heater at a level that is comfortable to them rather than at temperatures that are mandated by politics or costs. They want to be able to drive as much as they care to. The list goes on. The current overseas political landscape makes oil and gas less desirable as the prices are set by an unfriendly cartel. The current domestic political landscape makes oil, gas, and then the one fossil fuel we have in abundance, coal, a less-than-desirable prospect due to things like cap-and-trade and taxes. Hydroelectric isn't terrifically popular due to the interference of river flows and fish migration. Wind power isn't terribly economically competitive and not all places are well-suited to windmills due to weather conditions. The things are also finding political trouble as more are starting to regard them as bird-killing eyesores. Solar is also starting to be on the chopping block as people realize it takes a lot of nasty heavy metals to make the photovoltaic cells, plus it is also limited by geographic location. Other proposed methods of power generation aren't mature enough to even make much of a judgment on. That pretty much leaves nuclear as the only other well-known option that has been proven to work in the scale we need, can work just about anywhere, and is economically competitive.
Lots of those exploits are for older versions of programs. The Debian ssh snafu was one of the newer exploits on that site, and that was fixed quite some time ago. That's not surprising as patches for security issues in *nix programs come pretty quickly and it is widely known that it is a Really Bad Idea (tm) to use out-of-date versions of programs.