Thanks for the clarification. I had a feeling that there was some potential for two-way communication, but Googling for it produced only people saying that it was a 1-way system, so I figured I was wrong.
Thanks for the information. I think most of my points still stand though, since the bandwidth available to send information back is likely insufficient to really exploit a chip's power in a two-way system.
An adaptor to use AGP cards in PCI slots already exists. It's called AGP express, and is made by ECS. A bridge chip to run AGP in PCIe should also be possible, and I'm sure we'll see one as demand increases.
That's the problem - there are lots of applications, but only as long as what you want is effectively a graphics card. AGP is just too specialised to allow anything massively different without changing the fundamentals of how the interface works.
AGP is a one-way architecture - the motherboard sends data to the graphics card, the graphics card processes it and sends it to the monitor. The limitations of this way of working are why dual graphics card solutions were never practical on AGP once you started increasing the complexity of the data - the bus wasn't capable enough.
That said, it's not impossible to get it working. You just need to get around the one-way bus problem. There are two obvious solutions for this, to my mind: (ignoring the fact that no cards exist to do it for you)
Use it for one way data
You create a card that acts only to process and send away data. At its simplest, this might be an audio card (without line-in, obviously). Getting slightly more creative, the card could take the 'load' of preparing documents and printing them off the CPU, although I can't see this being useful. Using a rather crossfire-like setup, you could send the output of a suitable graphics card into an input on another, and use it as a pre-processor; at its most basic this could be used to divide a signal in half to be processed by two (or more) cards, or getting more complex it could render something simple - perhaps hidden windows, for use in transparency effects, or perhaps acting as a 2D processor and leaving 3D work to the 'bigger' card - tag this as 'rendered' and send the output to its big brother.To be honest though, this seems a little ridiculous.
Creating a feedback path for 2-way data
This, in my opinion, is where it could be useful. The moment you add a way to send data back - at its simplest, I suppose this would be a SATA or IDE cable and suitable software that continuously reads the contents of the 'hard disk' - you have an opportunity for a specialised processor. The hack would be incredible difficult, granted, but the processor on a graphics card would seem to be well suited to encode video. You send your stream to the AGP card, it converts it to mpeg4 (for example) and sends it back via SATA, taking 99% of the load off the processor. (These cards have recently started to appear for PCIe, so the is definitely a market). With some sort of feedback path, the card could do anything a PCI card can do, but substantially faster thanks to AGP's higher bandwidth - the trick is getting a decent feedback loop.
After all that, though, I think the practical answer is no, there is no use for an AGP slot other than graphics; there is no demand for other cards, so they just don't exist.
I'm afraid 200,000 eV is virtually nothing. There are 16 quadrillion eV in one volt, so this is a very tiny potential difference, and is only significant because the energy required to affect a neutron is far, far smaller than that required to affect most things.
Incidentally, if it interests you, an X-Ray LASER was proposed and tested by the Reagan administration, but abandoned after inconclusive results.
They're rare, but they do exist. The Liyama Prolite can support 1600*1200 as long as you use DVI, but you're going to pay around £500 for it. For that kinda of money, why not go 20.1" at least, and get the higher res as standard?
For what it's worth, high resolutions seem to be the norm for laptop displays these days, so it is a bit odd that desktop TFTs aren't keeping up.
The question though isn't the maximum amount the brain can hold, but how much it can hold in a lifetime. Surely the number they quote could be an estimate of the amount the brain takes in in a lifetime, which you could estimate very roughly by recording all of someone's sensory inputs in a day and finding the size of the part they can recall, then extrapolating.
I'm not saying that 125GB is by any stretch of the imagination accurate, but I don't think it's meant to reflect a maximum capacity.
Yes, Government is supposed to exist for the benefit of the population, but that doesn't have to translate into voting for exactly what the people want at a given time. People are fickle. They don't look ahead. They don't always understand things fully. For these reasons we have an indirect democracy rather than just allowing people to vote on every issue they care to show a preference for.
There are also intrinsic problems with absolute majority rule, and this is where music fits in. For us to have much of our music scene, the musicians must make some profit. Ideally, the money would go more directly to them and not to the associations, but still, they do need something. In a true majority-rule situation, almost certainly music piracy would be legal, because more people want to save money on music than want to make money on it. This would be seen as endorsing music piracy as a 'good thing', and it would be much more widespread - if Kazaa/Limewire/Bittorrent/eMule could run TV ads, think how many users they would gain! There's no maybe about it - legalising free music downloads universally would kill organised music. A weaker measure wouldn't, but universal decriminalisation would kill the infrastructure that makes music 'happen'.
Pretty memorable story though. Some of the dupes could almost be new stories, the same thing happens so often, but this is the only moon-explosion dupe I've seen here on/.
With the tiny HDs on Slashdot earlier, I can imagine this being useful. Perhaps not for downloading large files, but if a 500Kb+ service were provided with flat-rate residential broadband, I would definitely find uses for it:
-Grabbing that file you've left on the home PC so you look organized
-Checking the news
-Streaming music from a home PC rather than storing it separately.
I don't know about you, but I would love a service that opend up my phone as a thin-client for my home PC. If the service gets fast enough you could even stream video camera footage back to your home PC at 10Mb/s, where it gets stored and converted to Divx or similiar and made available for you. With the right set of batch scripts, your PC could react automatically to what you send it and perform the most likely action that you want it to do. When you get back you've got your days work archived in raw format as well as converted to your preferred compression format, categorised and available to you over that same internet connection. Perhaps sending it images generates thumbnails and files the originals, sending an archive extracts it to ~, sending it a program installs it...
Obviously there are security problems to consider - you don't want just anyone to be able to use their phone to control your PC - but if it only responded to your phone, which authenticates you biometrically as well as having a password to operate the PC, the system could be more secure than the standard PC at the moment (although that's not really saying much with the current WMF problems. Not looking forward to cleaning that one up...).
PS: Is it just me or is everything getting modded funny in this article? Or have I just missed a lot of jokes...
Now Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo may have potentially larger markets, but right now Apple is still shipping more G5s than Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo combined, that and each G5 is higher margin than a Cell based CPU.
I suspect that Apple will be shipping more G5s than anyone else for quite a while yet...
If they intend mostly to build at airports and other high-throughput venues, they'll be able to charge an almost extortionate amount and the high demand will take care of the rest.
Normally just seems to mean a mini jack. Sometimes with a cradle for the IPod itself. Obviously in a perfect world "3.5mm Stereo Speaker Connection Cable" is more accurate, but it doesn't quite roll off the tongue, does it?
I don't understand the market for these sort of laptops. At almost 6kg, this is approaching the portability level of my desktop PC, especially since with its battery life of one hour you're still effectively tethered to power supplies anyway. And for this 'privilege' you pay far, far more than you would for an equivalent desktop system. So, where's the market? I can see basically two possibilities: video editors who need a rendering setup that's just about portable, and gamers who want the highest-specced laptop, no matter the price. But since this laptop's gone for the 6800 go - rather than the faster 7800 cards that are being rolled out - and allows no overclocking, the gamer market's going to be pretty limited, at least until it starts shipping with the 7800. And with only 200GB of storage - far less than I use in a day when shooting - the video editing market is limited to those who're willing to carry an additional kilo or two in external drives, or have facilities available; and these people probably just use a desktop anyway.
I also question the accuracy of Hexus' reporting on the weight front. Either they've got one of the two weight figures wrong (7Kg with charger, 8Kg with charger and bag) or that's a very heavy bag.
While I'm ranting about the laptop, is there really any need for the heat to be blown out of the bottom? If it's generating 200W of heat, couldn't it get blown out of the sides, rather than the bottom, which is going to be either on a desk or your lap; the former allows little airflow, the latter being a touch hot.
Anyway, my final point: Does anyone buy these laptops, or are they purely made, like top-of-the-range graphics cards and cars, to be able to boast about having the fastest? Has anyone here ever bought a similiar laptop? Why, if you did?
Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe. Now write it out 100 times.
Only joking. While I agree that it would be nice if it could fail everywhere, what if it doesn't? It only takes one state to enact this law and others will likely follow suit; the risks of this working are too high for my liking... I think I'll wait to celebrate.
How desperate for news must the slashdot editors be to have posted this article? It can't possible interest more than 1% of even Slashdot's IT-concentrated demographic. I freely admit to visiting Slashdot a tad compulsively, but that's in the expectation of a distillation of quality news articles - something that's been slipping for a long time.
Seriously though, just by trawling through the RSS-feed for BBC news, I can see several stories that are far more deserving of Slashdot's attention. (See the technologry section for a good selection). So, my rhetorical question for today is: why is this here?
Will they really though? Even if the stakes got to 50%+ *nix penetration, would the hackers re-learn everything they've built up and attack annew? Virus writers and hackers have 10 years of largely unchanged Windows code to build on with Windows; they can mix and match ready-made vulnerabilities to create code for whatever attack is needed, or to distribute a new worm. Even if *nix environments weren't inherently more secure than Windows - which, thanks to a sensible permissions system, they are - the monopoly position would have to totally reverse in order to create a large-scale shift in attack targets. The fact is, many of these attacks are by untrained 'script kiddies' using programs from the internet. Change the environment and they can't operate at all any more.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the clarification. I had a feeling that there was some potential for two-way communication, but Googling for it produced only people saying that it was a 1-way system, so I figured I was wrong.
Thanks for the information. I think most of my points still stand though, since the bandwidth available to send information back is likely insufficient to really exploit a chip's power in a two-way system.
Hmm, that's true. Any idea how much upstream bandwidth is provided? I tried Googling it, but everyone seems to think it's purely downstream. :)
An adaptor to use AGP cards in PCI slots already exists. It's called AGP express, and is made by ECS. A bridge chip to run AGP in PCIe should also be possible, and I'm sure we'll see one as demand increases.
That's the problem - there are lots of applications, but only as long as what you want is effectively a graphics card. AGP is just too specialised to allow anything massively different without changing the fundamentals of how the interface works.
AGP is a one-way architecture - the motherboard sends data to the graphics card, the graphics card processes it and sends it to the monitor. The limitations of this way of working are why dual graphics card solutions were never practical on AGP once you started increasing the complexity of the data - the bus wasn't capable enough.
That said, it's not impossible to get it working. You just need to get around the one-way bus problem. There are two obvious solutions for this, to my mind: (ignoring the fact that no cards exist to do it for you)
Use it for one way data
You create a card that acts only to process and send away data. At its simplest, this might be an audio card (without line-in, obviously). Getting slightly more creative, the card could take the 'load' of preparing documents and printing them off the CPU, although I can't see this being useful. Using a rather crossfire-like setup, you could send the output of a suitable graphics card into an input on another, and use it as a pre-processor; at its most basic this could be used to divide a signal in half to be processed by two (or more) cards, or getting more complex it could render something simple - perhaps hidden windows, for use in transparency effects, or perhaps acting as a 2D processor and leaving 3D work to the 'bigger' card - tag this as 'rendered' and send the output to its big brother.To be honest though, this seems a little ridiculous.
Creating a feedback path for 2-way data
This, in my opinion, is where it could be useful. The moment you add a way to send data back - at its simplest, I suppose this would be a SATA or IDE cable and suitable software that continuously reads the contents of the 'hard disk' - you have an opportunity for a specialised processor. The hack would be incredible difficult, granted, but the processor on a graphics card would seem to be well suited to encode video. You send your stream to the AGP card, it converts it to mpeg4 (for example) and sends it back via SATA, taking 99% of the load off the processor. (These cards have recently started to appear for PCIe, so the is definitely a market). With some sort of feedback path, the card could do anything a PCI card can do, but substantially faster thanks to AGP's higher bandwidth - the trick is getting a decent feedback loop.
After all that, though, I think the practical answer is no, there is no use for an AGP slot other than graphics; there is no demand for other cards, so they just don't exist.
I'm afraid 200,000 eV is virtually nothing. There are 16 quadrillion eV in one volt, so this is a very tiny potential difference, and is only significant because the energy required to affect a neutron is far, far smaller than that required to affect most things.
Incidentally, if it interests you, an X-Ray LASER was proposed and tested by the Reagan administration, but abandoned after inconclusive results.
If the world's civilisation collapses, who's going to remember the codes to get in anyway?
They're rare, but they do exist. The Liyama Prolite can support 1600*1200 as long as you use DVI, but you're going to pay around £500 for it. For that kinda of money, why not go 20.1" at least, and get the higher res as standard?
For what it's worth, high resolutions seem to be the norm for laptop displays these days, so it is a bit odd that desktop TFTs aren't keeping up.
I wish there was a mod option for "-1: Incomprehensible". I've read this five or six times and I have no idea what it means.
I'm English. It's the word we use in England. When you write about them you're free to use whatever term you want, but I like mine.
The question though isn't the maximum amount the brain can hold, but how much it can hold in a lifetime. Surely the number they quote could be an estimate of the amount the brain takes in in a lifetime, which you could estimate very roughly by recording all of someone's sensory inputs in a day and finding the size of the part they can recall, then extrapolating.
I'm not saying that 125GB is by any stretch of the imagination accurate, but I don't think it's meant to reflect a maximum capacity.
Yes, Government is supposed to exist for the benefit of the population, but that doesn't have to translate into voting for exactly what the people want at a given time. People are fickle. They don't look ahead. They don't always understand things fully. For these reasons we have an indirect democracy rather than just allowing people to vote on every issue they care to show a preference for.
There are also intrinsic problems with absolute majority rule, and this is where music fits in. For us to have much of our music scene, the musicians must make some profit. Ideally, the money would go more directly to them and not to the associations, but still, they do need something. In a true majority-rule situation, almost certainly music piracy would be legal, because more people want to save money on music than want to make money on it. This would be seen as endorsing music piracy as a 'good thing', and it would be much more widespread - if Kazaa/Limewire/Bittorrent/eMule could run TV ads, think how many users they would gain! There's no maybe about it - legalising free music downloads universally would kill organised music. A weaker measure wouldn't, but universal decriminalisation would kill the infrastructure that makes music 'happen'.
Pretty memorable story though. Some of the dupes could almost be new stories, the same thing happens so often, but this is the only moon-explosion dupe I've seen here on /.
Nope. A fool.
-Grabbing that file you've left on the home PC so you look organized
-Checking the news
-Streaming music from a home PC rather than storing it separately.
I don't know about you, but I would love a service that opend up my phone as a thin-client for my home PC. If the service gets fast enough you could even stream video camera footage back to your home PC at 10Mb/s, where it gets stored and converted to Divx or similiar and made available for you. With the right set of batch scripts, your PC could react automatically to what you send it and perform the most likely action that you want it to do. When you get back you've got your days work archived in raw format as well as converted to your preferred compression format, categorised and available to you over that same internet connection. Perhaps sending it images generates thumbnails and files the originals, sending an archive extracts it to ~, sending it a program installs it...
Obviously there are security problems to consider - you don't want just anyone to be able to use their phone to control your PC - but if it only responded to your phone, which authenticates you biometrically as well as having a password to operate the PC, the system could be more secure than the standard PC at the moment (although that's not really saying much with the current WMF problems. Not looking forward to cleaning that one up...).
PS: Is it just me or is everything getting modded funny in this article? Or have I just missed a lot of jokes...
Doesn't always get it right, but http://norp.com/ is fairly easy to remember. (Friend of mine found it while trying to write porn.com backwards...)
If they intend mostly to build at airports and other high-throughput venues, they'll be able to charge an almost extortionate amount and the high demand will take care of the rest.
Normally just seems to mean a mini jack. Sometimes with a cradle for the IPod itself. Obviously in a perfect world "3.5mm Stereo Speaker Connection Cable" is more accurate, but it doesn't quite roll off the tongue, does it?
There's no official flashplayer for AMD64 Linux. It's little things like that that stop it being truly user-friendly.
Best. Aim. Convo. Ever. (For those that don't know, this is a reference to somethingawful's AIM conversation: http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=287)
I don't understand the market for these sort of laptops. At almost 6kg, this is approaching the portability level of my desktop PC, especially since with its battery life of one hour you're still effectively tethered to power supplies anyway. And for this 'privilege' you pay far, far more than you would for an equivalent desktop system. So, where's the market? I can see basically two possibilities: video editors who need a rendering setup that's just about portable, and gamers who want the highest-specced laptop, no matter the price. But since this laptop's gone for the 6800 go - rather than the faster 7800 cards that are being rolled out - and allows no overclocking, the gamer market's going to be pretty limited, at least until it starts shipping with the 7800. And with only 200GB of storage - far less than I use in a day when shooting - the video editing market is limited to those who're willing to carry an additional kilo or two in external drives, or have facilities available; and these people probably just use a desktop anyway.
I also question the accuracy of Hexus' reporting on the weight front. Either they've got one of the two weight figures wrong (7Kg with charger, 8Kg with charger and bag) or that's a very heavy bag.
While I'm ranting about the laptop, is there really any need for the heat to be blown out of the bottom? If it's generating 200W of heat, couldn't it get blown out of the sides, rather than the bottom, which is going to be either on a desk or your lap; the former allows little airflow, the latter being a touch hot.
Anyway, my final point: Does anyone buy these laptops, or are they purely made, like top-of-the-range graphics cards and cars, to be able to boast about having the fastest? Has anyone here ever bought a similiar laptop? Why, if you did?
Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe. Now write it out 100 times.
Only joking. While I agree that it would be nice if it could fail everywhere, what if it doesn't? It only takes one state to enact this law and others will likely follow suit; the risks of this working are too high for my liking... I think I'll wait to celebrate.
How desperate for news must the slashdot editors be to have posted this article? It can't possible interest more than 1% of even Slashdot's IT-concentrated demographic. I freely admit to visiting Slashdot a tad compulsively, but that's in the expectation of a distillation of quality news articles - something that's been slipping for a long time.
Seriously though, just by trawling through the RSS-feed for BBC news, I can see several stories that are far more deserving of Slashdot's attention. (See the technologry section for a good selection). So, my rhetorical question for today is: why is this here?
Will they really though? Even if the stakes got to 50%+ *nix penetration, would the hackers re-learn everything they've built up and attack annew? Virus writers and hackers have 10 years of largely unchanged Windows code to build on with Windows; they can mix and match ready-made vulnerabilities to create code for whatever attack is needed, or to distribute a new worm. Even if *nix environments weren't inherently more secure than Windows - which, thanks to a sensible permissions system, they are - the monopoly position would have to totally reverse in order to create a large-scale shift in attack targets. The fact is, many of these attacks are by untrained 'script kiddies' using programs from the internet. Change the environment and they can't operate at all any more.