The reason I say this is that the performance of Intel instruction set architectures has already reached a point of diminishing returns, and the rate of progress has slowed considerably. Intel's own parts are no longer doubling in performance every two years; they're improving marginally every two years instead (I'll throw up a completely made up number that is only very roughly accurate for the purposes of this post - let's say 20%).
The amount of money necessary to drive substantial improvements in desktop processor technology no longer meets the amount of money available in the market to pay for such improvements:
- The desktop processor market share is shrinking - For the vast majority of use cases, CPUs from several years ago were already "good enough" - We are nearing the end of the "easy" node shrinks, and possibly nearing the end of the "possible" node shrinks
All of these combined means that there just isn't enough money in the market to drive significant performance increases anymore.
The amount of money that AMD has to spend to get closer and closer to parity with Intel is less than the amount of money that Intel has to spend to stay ahead of Intel; thus, AMD will eventually catch up.
The release of Beema and Mullins are evidence of this.
How long will it take AMD to catch up? My guess is 2 - 3 years more years.
At that point, Intel will no longer be able to easily have any competitive advantage over AMD because it would cost them far too much to move significantly ahead of AMD. Intel will be forced to gut its margins to stay competitive.
Once you know a beginner's algorithm for solving the cube, it's amazingly easy to do. I was a kid in the 80's and all my life I thought it required serious brains to be able to solve it. Now I know that the guys who figured out how to solve it had brains, but for the rest of use, there are extremely easy algorithms that can be used to do it. In a way, it's taken the mystery out of the puzzle for me.
I taught my son how to solve it when he was 5 (last year). Solving the cube is in fact so easy that a kid can do it.
I've read a couple of your posts. You have an odd way of thinking about these things.
For example, you seem to be suggesting that specific conditions like geography and climate were necessary for humanity to develop space flight technology. It's as if you conclude that if things didn't happen exactly as they did, we wouldn't have achieved what we have. As if what we've achieved is the pinnacle of possible achievement in the timespan involved.
But I have no idea why you would assume that as a precondition of your argument. What if the dark ages hadn't happened? We'd probably have had space travel in the 1700s. What if different accidents of geography 50,000 years ago had caused human technology to develop even faster than it did? Maybe we've actually been held back by these accidents, and would be significantly more advanced than we are had they not happened.
Who can say? Pretty much no one. Which is why the basis of your argument is so absurd.
But when the cop says they smelled marijuana, and conduct a search, and there is no marijuana present, would a suspect's complaint to the police department that illegal searches are being conducted on the pretense of fabricated evidence have any standing?
It is my assumption that they would, which is why I don't see the problem; the cops have to be honest about what they believe they smell or else they can be held accountable. They can't fake these things too often or else the pattern becomes clear.
However, if there is in fact no way in which faking such evidence can come back to bite the cop, then I agree there is a problem, since they can just make stuff up without consequence.
I personally don't know which is true, having very little direct experience with law enforcement.
Am I the only person in the USA with kids under 10 who has not bought an iPad (or any pad?). I know they're great pacifiers but I tend to avoid pacifiers. No cell phone that can play games either. When I take my family to dinner, we talk, joke, and draw with crayons and pencils. When we're at home, the kids play inside or outside. They don't sit and stare at iPads or cell phones in either context.
I'm trying really hard not to be judgemental because I know that everyone has their own way of doing things and there is no single right way. And certainly a moderate amount of pad/phone use is fine, similarly to how just about everything in moderation is fine.
But when I go to restaurants and I see 90% of the kids just sitting there watching or playing on a pad and not interacting with anyone, I just can't help but feel like there is something wrong. And when my kids go over other kids houses and I see how much of those other kids lives revolves around playing games or watching things on handheld devices like pads and phones, I conclude that for some kids, being pacified with these devices is a regular part of the daily routine.
And so to avoid ever even being able to get into that rut, I haven't bought any such device and do not intend to do so.
Once again, trying hard not to be judgemental, but as everyone who has kids probably knows already, child rearing decisions are some of the hardest things *not* to be judgemental about, as they are so personal and the stakes feel so high.
(although truth be told, any account 5000 or so is basically equivalent; when they first made ids available, I'm sure almost everyone did what I did, which was to not bother to sign up for one until you wanted to post a comment with your own name, which means that the time that you actually signed up was not a function of how long you'd been using slashdot, but when you happened to see an article you wanted to post on in that first week or so that ids were available)
I've read lots of your comments here, and you keep beating the same drum.
The police are allowed to pull someone over on an anonymous tip. They didn't even have to trail the person for 15 minutes to try to find other evidence of impairment. Just because they did that does not mean that they are no longer allowed to pull them over.
Just in the same way that pulling them over and then asking, "Are you impaired?" and getting a "no" answer does not mean that they are not allowed to ask further questions.
The search was conducted because of the smell of marijuana, which neither you nor I nor anyone else can prove was present, so continuing to question it is just pointless for the purposes of this discussion. However, there is the indisputable fact that marijuana *was* present, 30 freaking pounds of it, so I don't know how anyone could suggest that it was more likely that the cops made up the fact that they smelled it, than that they actually smelled it.
Whenever I read accounts like this, I always, ALWAYS assume that there is much more to the story than the clean and simple explanation given. Obviously there is much more to this story than you are telling, because there are so many incongruous aspects to it (not the least of which is, how could the judge's decision possibly have stood on appeal if your acquaintance was so clearly wronged here?).
The Leaf is a better comparison to your CRV than the Tesla is; the Tesla is in a totally different segment of the market than the CRV.
The CRV has tons more working parts than a Leaf does (gas engines have lots and lots of complex moving parts; the drivetrain of a Leaf is incredibly simple in comparison). I would expect that on average a CRV would require much more maintenance over its lifetime than a Leaf would.
This would, to some degree, mitigate the battery replacement cost of the Leaf. Additionally, depending upon your locale, the Leaf's charging costs may be close to zero; here in Silicon Valley it's very common for workplaces to provide free charging stations for electric cars. I am pretty sure that at least a dozen of my co-workers pay nothing for recharging since they just plug in at work and recharge there every day.
The fuel costs of a CRV would be somewhere north of $1,000 per year, so the equivalent $0 charging cost of a Leaf would more than pay for a battery replacement over the lifetime of the car.
Of course, not everyone will get free charging for their Leaf. But my point is just that the CRV is not guaranteed to be cheaper to run over its lifetime than a Leaf is; and in some situations, the Leaf will definitely come out ahead.
I have ridden in one co-worker's leaf quite a few times for lunch trips and it's really a nice car. But butt ugly:)
Why do they bother with all of the ridiculous security protocols for airline passengers when apparently it's pretty easy to sneak a 16-year-old-kid-sized bomb into the wheel well of an aircraft on the tarmac?
So much neater and easier than trying to sneak weapons through airport security. And the best part is, you don't have to commit suicide to take the plane down.
Seriously, airplane security is clearly full of holes and the sham of passenger security checks is just that, a sham meant to make us 'feel' safe while wasting our time and shoveling tons of dollars to the TSA.
Not uncommon enough that she mentioned it to me as something that she thought was extremely wasteful. Exactly how often it occurred I cannot say, but the impression I was given was that it was something that happened multiple times per week. And she saw it herself, she worked in the hospital. I did say she was a doctor didn't I?
I don't believe that ambulance crews have the authority to refuse service to someone who has called and claimed they need an ambulance. Even if they did, why would they? They get paid for their services when they pick someone up and bring them to the hospital.
Anyway this was in 1998. Things may have changed since then, I don't know.
And you're welcome for my perspective. Talk is free, after all.
I could have used that cookbook. I bought some dried beans and onions and carrots and stuff once and tried to make soup. Of course because I had no idea how to cook I did not realize that you need some kind of stock to start with. I just put all my ingredients in a pot and boiled them together and ended up with a pot of boiled tasteless vegetables in water. It was disgusting.
In any college town, there are myriad ways to live on the cheap. So "actually poor" college students have as many avenues available to them as I did, which is basically the point. No college student actually starves, and college is a fun time to live cheaply when you are surrounded by other young people living as you are and enjoying a time of life when you can have lots of different kinds of fun that cost basically nothing. And you typically have no dependents to worry about.
It would be more accurate to say that when the service is free, as it more or less is for poor people, then the service is used by those people without consideration for the cost of providing that service.
My wife is a doctor, and has worked in the Bronx and also in low income areas of San Jose. In the Bronx it was not uncommon for people to call an ambulance when they had a cold and wanted to see a doctor to get some cough medicine prescribed, because they didn't have to pay for the ambulance and it was a free ride to a free doctor's visit for a condition that doesn't need an ambulance or a doctor.
In San Jose, she sees tons of drunks and drug users who end up returning to the hospital over and over again because it's the easiest way to milk the system for some attention (I suppose drunks don't get much out of it, but drug users can often badger the system into providing some pills; when presented with a persistent patient with unverifiable claims of pain, after a while the doctors have to prescribe something just to get the person out of the way so that patients with real needs can be seen.
Making everyone pay a nominal amount for every visit is not possible because hospitals cannot refuse anyone, even if they can't pay. But forcing people to get insurance, so that they pay ahead of time, seems like the next best thing.
Also virtually nobody in the USA chooses between a $90 doctor's visit and feeding their family. The choice is usually between a $90 doctor's visit and a $90 cable or cell phone bill.
- A boiled potato with a slice of American cheese - A cup of white rice with a handful of peanuts
I was hungry much of the time the last couple of years in college, but mostly that was from stupidity (losing money for dumb reasons) and hubris (refusing to accept any assistance from my parents).
In Pittsburgh (I went to CMU) there used to be a grocery store that would sell expired food ("Groceries Plus More II" was its name). That was a godsend. You'd never know what you'd get each time you went since their stock was determined by whatever expired goods they could procure that week, but whatever you ended up with was usually for pennies on the dollar. Who cares if a can of spaghetti sauce expired two weeks ago, if it is only a quarter, I'll take it.
Nobody actually starves in college or grad school, and going hungry and living on the cheap is one of the charms of that time of life. So enjoy it.
You must feel like a pretty big idiot for buying a gas guzzler cap van then. Why people buy gas inefficient vehicles and then whine about the price of gas is something that I simply cannot fathom.
I watched a little of that Long Way Round show. All I could think was, how lame it is that they did the whole thing with a truck trailing them with supplies and stuff in case they broke down. What a pussy way to ride a motorcycle around the world. Perhaps they should have just put the bikes up on the pickup truck bed and sat on them while being driven around the world. Would have been just about as authentic.
Because most telecommuters are do-nothings, which is why they are just as "effective" at home as they are at work?
I'm only being slightly facetious here. In my experience, home is almost never a place conducive to doing good work, way too many distractions and way too disassociated from the normal work environment and its easy access to communication with co-workers.
I say this having been a telecommuter myself for a time (not by choice, but by circumstance) and finding it demoralizingly difficult to be effective, and seeing the same thing in just about every person I've ever worked with who was a telecommuter.
Sure I've worked with people who still managed to get good work done from home; but in every case, those were the superstars who actually got *more* good work done at work. Working at home took away some of their productivity as it does for everyone else I've known, but they were so good to begin with that it just knocked them down to better-than-average instead of superstar status.
Er I meant "without being *smart* enought", not "*fast* enough". In this case I guess I was too fast to hit submit. Or maybe just not smart enough to re-read properly before submitting?
By the way Slashdot's post rate limiting is completely dumb. It's now been 2+ minutes since I submitted my comment and I can't post this correction yet. Hey Slashdot, how about implementing an 'edit post' button! Welcome to the 2000's!
Exactly. I fail to understand how someone can be smart enough to think of the shortcomings of super fast charging without being fast enough to think of the obvious solution of batteries in between the power station and the car charger. Suggests either extreme laziness or some kind of agenda.
When I was at CMU from 1990 - 1994 the CS department had a couple of rooms full of old discarded and no longer used mainframe and mainframe support equipment. We wandered through there once or twice just to see what old computers looked like. I probably saw your IBM 360 surrounded by dozens of big refrigerator sized reel to reel tape machines (there were alot of those) and didn't even know what I was looking at.
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Price. Also, price of motherboards and other infrastructure.
Next question.
The reason I say this is that the performance of Intel instruction set architectures has already reached a point of diminishing returns, and the rate of progress has slowed considerably. Intel's own parts are no longer doubling in performance every two years; they're improving marginally every two years instead (I'll throw up a completely made up number that is only very roughly accurate for the purposes of this post - let's say 20%).
The amount of money necessary to drive substantial improvements in desktop processor technology no longer meets the amount of money available in the market to pay for such improvements:
- The desktop processor market share is shrinking
- For the vast majority of use cases, CPUs from several years ago were already "good enough"
- We are nearing the end of the "easy" node shrinks, and possibly nearing the end of the "possible" node shrinks
All of these combined means that there just isn't enough money in the market to drive significant performance increases anymore.
The amount of money that AMD has to spend to get closer and closer to parity with Intel is less than the amount of money that Intel has to spend to stay ahead of Intel; thus, AMD will eventually catch up.
The release of Beema and Mullins are evidence of this.
How long will it take AMD to catch up? My guess is 2 - 3 years more years.
At that point, Intel will no longer be able to easily have any competitive advantage over AMD because it would cost them far too much to move significantly ahead of AMD. Intel will be forced to gut its margins to stay competitive.
That's my prediction.
Once you know a beginner's algorithm for solving the cube, it's amazingly easy to do. I was a kid in the 80's and all my life I thought it required serious brains to be able to solve it. Now I know that the guys who figured out how to solve it had brains, but for the rest of use, there are extremely easy algorithms that can be used to do it. In a way, it's taken the mystery out of the puzzle for me.
I taught my son how to solve it when he was 5 (last year). Solving the cube is in fact so easy that a kid can do it.
Haven't these guys ever heard this saying? I have never seen a more comprehensive and obvious example of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
I've read a couple of your posts. You have an odd way of thinking about these things.
For example, you seem to be suggesting that specific conditions like geography and climate were necessary for humanity to develop space flight technology. It's as if you conclude that if things didn't happen exactly as they did, we wouldn't have achieved what we have. As if what we've achieved is the pinnacle of possible achievement in the timespan involved.
But I have no idea why you would assume that as a precondition of your argument. What if the dark ages hadn't happened? We'd probably have had space travel in the 1700s. What if different accidents of geography 50,000 years ago had caused human technology to develop even faster than it did? Maybe we've actually been held back by these accidents, and would be significantly more advanced than we are had they not happened.
Who can say? Pretty much no one. Which is why the basis of your argument is so absurd.
But when the cop says they smelled marijuana, and conduct a search, and there is no marijuana present, would a suspect's complaint to the police department that illegal searches are being conducted on the pretense of fabricated evidence have any standing?
It is my assumption that they would, which is why I don't see the problem; the cops have to be honest about what they believe they smell or else they can be held accountable. They can't fake these things too often or else the pattern becomes clear.
However, if there is in fact no way in which faking such evidence can come back to bite the cop, then I agree there is a problem, since they can just make stuff up without consequence.
I personally don't know which is true, having very little direct experience with law enforcement.
Am I the only person in the USA with kids under 10 who has not bought an iPad (or any pad?). I know they're great pacifiers but I tend to avoid pacifiers. No cell phone that can play games either. When I take my family to dinner, we talk, joke, and draw with crayons and pencils. When we're at home, the kids play inside or outside. They don't sit and stare at iPads or cell phones in either context.
I'm trying really hard not to be judgemental because I know that everyone has their own way of doing things and there is no single right way. And certainly a moderate amount of pad/phone use is fine, similarly to how just about everything in moderation is fine.
But when I go to restaurants and I see 90% of the kids just sitting there watching or playing on a pad and not interacting with anyone, I just can't help but feel like there is something wrong. And when my kids go over other kids houses and I see how much of those other kids lives revolves around playing games or watching things on handheld devices like pads and phones, I conclude that for some kids, being pacified with these devices is a regular part of the daily routine.
And so to avoid ever even being able to get into that rut, I haven't bought any such device and do not intend to do so.
Once again, trying hard not to be judgemental, but as everyone who has kids probably knows already, child rearing decisions are some of the hardest things *not* to be judgemental about, as they are so personal and the stakes feel so high.
YMMV.
Get off *my* lawn!
(although truth be told, any account 5000 or so is basically equivalent; when they first made ids available, I'm sure almost everyone did what I did, which was to not bother to sign up for one until you wanted to post a comment with your own name, which means that the time that you actually signed up was not a function of how long you'd been using slashdot, but when you happened to see an article you wanted to post on in that first week or so that ids were available)
You so completely missed his point that it's actually comical.
I've read lots of your comments here, and you keep beating the same drum.
The police are allowed to pull someone over on an anonymous tip. They didn't even have to trail the person for 15 minutes to try to find other evidence of impairment. Just because they did that does not mean that they are no longer allowed to pull them over.
Just in the same way that pulling them over and then asking, "Are you impaired?" and getting a "no" answer does not mean that they are not allowed to ask further questions.
The search was conducted because of the smell of marijuana, which neither you nor I nor anyone else can prove was present, so continuing to question it is just pointless for the purposes of this discussion. However, there is the indisputable fact that marijuana *was* present, 30 freaking pounds of it, so I don't know how anyone could suggest that it was more likely that the cops made up the fact that they smelled it, than that they actually smelled it.
Whenever I read accounts like this, I always, ALWAYS assume that there is much more to the story than the clean and simple explanation given. Obviously there is much more to this story than you are telling, because there are so many incongruous aspects to it (not the least of which is, how could the judge's decision possibly have stood on appeal if your acquaintance was so clearly wronged here?).
The Leaf is a better comparison to your CRV than the Tesla is; the Tesla is in a totally different segment of the market than the CRV.
The CRV has tons more working parts than a Leaf does (gas engines have lots and lots of complex moving parts; the drivetrain of a Leaf is incredibly simple in comparison). I would expect that on average a CRV would require much more maintenance over its lifetime than a Leaf would.
This would, to some degree, mitigate the battery replacement cost of the Leaf. Additionally, depending upon your locale, the Leaf's charging costs may be close to zero; here in Silicon Valley it's very common for workplaces to provide free charging stations for electric cars. I am pretty sure that at least a dozen of my co-workers pay nothing for recharging since they just plug in at work and recharge there every day.
The fuel costs of a CRV would be somewhere north of $1,000 per year, so the equivalent $0 charging cost of a Leaf would more than pay for a battery replacement over the lifetime of the car.
Of course, not everyone will get free charging for their Leaf. But my point is just that the CRV is not guaranteed to be cheaper to run over its lifetime than a Leaf is; and in some situations, the Leaf will definitely come out ahead.
I have ridden in one co-worker's leaf quite a few times for lunch trips and it's really a nice car. But butt ugly :)
Why do they bother with all of the ridiculous security protocols for airline passengers when apparently it's pretty easy to sneak a 16-year-old-kid-sized bomb into the wheel well of an aircraft on the tarmac?
So much neater and easier than trying to sneak weapons through airport security. And the best part is, you don't have to commit suicide to take the plane down.
Seriously, airplane security is clearly full of holes and the sham of passenger security checks is just that, a sham meant to make us 'feel' safe while wasting our time and shoveling tons of dollars to the TSA.
Not uncommon enough that she mentioned it to me as something that she thought was extremely wasteful. Exactly how often it occurred I cannot say, but the impression I was given was that it was something that happened multiple times per week. And she saw it herself, she worked in the hospital. I did say she was a doctor didn't I?
I don't believe that ambulance crews have the authority to refuse service to someone who has called and claimed they need an ambulance. Even if they did, why would they? They get paid for their services when they pick someone up and bring them to the hospital.
Anyway this was in 1998. Things may have changed since then, I don't know.
And you're welcome for my perspective. Talk is free, after all.
I could have used that cookbook. I bought some dried beans and onions and carrots and stuff once and tried to make soup. Of course because I had no idea how to cook I did not realize that you need some kind of stock to start with. I just put all my ingredients in a pot and boiled them together and ended up with a pot of boiled tasteless vegetables in water. It was disgusting.
In any college town, there are myriad ways to live on the cheap. So "actually poor" college students have as many avenues available to them as I did, which is basically the point. No college student actually starves, and college is a fun time to live cheaply when you are surrounded by other young people living as you are and enjoying a time of life when you can have lots of different kinds of fun that cost basically nothing. And you typically have no dependents to worry about.
Anyway, you're an anonymous coward and you suck.
It would be more accurate to say that when the service is free, as it more or less is for poor people, then the service is used by those people without consideration for the cost of providing that service.
My wife is a doctor, and has worked in the Bronx and also in low income areas of San Jose. In the Bronx it was not uncommon for people to call an ambulance when they had a cold and wanted to see a doctor to get some cough medicine prescribed, because they didn't have to pay for the ambulance and it was a free ride to a free doctor's visit for a condition that doesn't need an ambulance or a doctor.
In San Jose, she sees tons of drunks and drug users who end up returning to the hospital over and over again because it's the easiest way to milk the system for some attention (I suppose drunks don't get much out of it, but drug users can often badger the system into providing some pills; when presented with a persistent patient with unverifiable claims of pain, after a while the doctors have to prescribe something just to get the person out of the way so that patients with real needs can be seen.
Making everyone pay a nominal amount for every visit is not possible because hospitals cannot refuse anyone, even if they can't pay. But forcing people to get insurance, so that they pay ahead of time, seems like the next best thing.
Also virtually nobody in the USA chooses between a $90 doctor's visit and feeding their family. The choice is usually between a $90 doctor's visit and a $90 cable or cell phone bill.
Ah spaghetti and ketchup. Nice combo.
Some of my favorites from my college days were:
- A boiled potato with a slice of American cheese
- A cup of white rice with a handful of peanuts
I was hungry much of the time the last couple of years in college, but mostly that was from stupidity (losing money for dumb reasons) and hubris (refusing to accept any assistance from my parents).
In Pittsburgh (I went to CMU) there used to be a grocery store that would sell expired food ("Groceries Plus More II" was its name). That was a godsend. You'd never know what you'd get each time you went since their stock was determined by whatever expired goods they could procure that week, but whatever you ended up with was usually for pennies on the dollar. Who cares if a can of spaghetti sauce expired two weeks ago, if it is only a quarter, I'll take it.
Nobody actually starves in college or grad school, and going hungry and living on the cheap is one of the charms of that time of life. So enjoy it.
You must feel like a pretty big idiot for buying a gas guzzler cap van then. Why people buy gas inefficient vehicles and then whine about the price of gas is something that I simply cannot fathom.
I watched a little of that Long Way Round show. All I could think was, how lame it is that they did the whole thing with a truck trailing them with supplies and stuff in case they broke down. What a pussy way to ride a motorcycle around the world. Perhaps they should have just put the bikes up on the pickup truck bed and sat on them while being driven around the world. Would have been just about as authentic.
Because most telecommuters are do-nothings, which is why they are just as "effective" at home as they are at work?
I'm only being slightly facetious here. In my experience, home is almost never a place conducive to doing good work, way too many distractions and way too disassociated from the normal work environment and its easy access to communication with co-workers.
I say this having been a telecommuter myself for a time (not by choice, but by circumstance) and finding it demoralizingly difficult to be effective, and seeing the same thing in just about every person I've ever worked with who was a telecommuter.
Sure I've worked with people who still managed to get good work done from home; but in every case, those were the superstars who actually got *more* good work done at work. Working at home took away some of their productivity as it does for everyone else I've known, but they were so good to begin with that it just knocked them down to better-than-average instead of superstar status.
Well that's my opinion anyway.
Lisi's "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" predicts particles. Is this one of those particles that it predicts?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
Er I meant "without being *smart* enought", not "*fast* enough". In this case I guess I was too fast to hit submit. Or maybe just not smart enough to re-read properly before submitting?
By the way Slashdot's post rate limiting is completely dumb. It's now been 2+ minutes since I submitted my comment and I can't post this correction yet. Hey Slashdot, how about implementing an 'edit post' button! Welcome to the 2000's!
Exactly. I fail to understand how someone can be smart enough to think of the shortcomings of super fast charging without being fast enough to think of the obvious solution of batteries in between the power station and the car charger. Suggests either extreme laziness or some kind of agenda.
When I was at CMU from 1990 - 1994 the CS department had a couple of rooms full of old discarded and no longer used mainframe and mainframe support equipment. We wandered through there once or twice just to see what old computers looked like. I probably saw your IBM 360 surrounded by dozens of big refrigerator sized reel to reel tape machines (there were alot of those) and didn't even know what I was looking at.