The result would be a monopoly by AMD, which would be FAR worse than an Intel monopoly.
I'd like some of what you are smoking. Why on Earth would an AMD monopoly (not that that is feasible in many years) be worse than an Intel monopoly? Intel have already showed us that they will not flinch from asking $2000 or more for their fastest chip, or slow down Moore's law to a dribble. It is only competition from AMD that has forced Intel to speed up the scaling and lower their prices (somewhat).
AMD, on the other hand, delivers faster CPUs at half the price, unlocked so you can OC them if you want. The only problem is the power comsumption, but that is being taken care of in the next revision. Now, it is possible that AMD would be just as evil as Intel if they got a monopoly, but we haven't seen that yet.
I don't want Intel to die, but I'd like them to go down to, say, 35% marketshare, with another 35% for AMD, and the rest shared between Transmeta and VIA (who hopefully will release a decent chip at some time).
AMD does not "innovate", they "tweak" and "re-design" existing technologies for the most part,
They have to. AMD has less than 10% of the financial resources of Intel. They can't afford some things Intel can. And AMD does innovate (damn, I hate that word - contaminated by M$), what about Hypertransport (used to be LDT)?
usually for shockingly low prices
Since so many people are so computer-illiterate and brand-loyal to the point of blindness, they have to. But the times are a-changing.
(which ends up cutting into R&D funds, which is VERY bad in the long run)
If you want to support AMD's R&D you can buy two CPUs then; use one and put the other one in a drawer. Then AMD will get as much $ from you as Intel would for a worse performing CPU, you have a backup CPU and warm fuzzy feeling from helping AMD's R&D.
But in a few years, developers and designers will have had enough with the current x86
Didn't they say exactly that some 10 years ago, when the first RISC chips came?;-)
Really, if you know anything about CPUs, you must know that there has been a convergence. RISC chips are becoming more CISC-like, and CISC chips more RISC-like.
IA-64 still runs 32-bit code, just slower.
Yes, but not little slower. Didn't an 800 MHz Itanium perform roughly on par with a 50 MHz 486 on i386 code?
Personally I think that IA-64 will be stillborn. It is far slower and more inefficient than the RISC chips it is supposed to replace and runs legacy 32 bit x86 apps so pathetically slow that a 233 MHz G3 iMac could probably outclass it in emulation mode...
The idea that all IP is just "numbers" and can't be owned is a fallacy.
Not at all.
Anything in the universe can be hashed to a numerical representation.
Unfortunately not. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle forbids it, even in principle.
My car has a number, and I most certainly can own it.
Right. Tell me what number corresponds to your car... if you can. In contrast, it is easy (in principle) to say the number that is Windows 2K, the Matrix DVD or the latest Britney Spears CD.
To suggest otherwise is to advocate a communist system.
Oh dear. An ignoramus seeing Communist plots everywhere. Tell you what, something not lassiez-faire Capitalism and brutal IP philosophy is not necessarily Communism.
No, O2 has no prominent absorbtion band in the IR wavelengths that is going to be used. However, O3 (Ozon) is an extremely reactive chemical, and its presence implies that there is O2 (that can be dissociated by UV radiation and recombine to O3).
It is already too late. AAMOF a lot of the new telescope tech was developed in the "black" by military scientists.
Case in point: Adaptive optics. You know, you can use a telescope the other way too: placing a light-source, such as a high-power laser, at the focus and using tho optics to collimate a sharply focused beam to destroy aircraft, missiles or satellites with. But the turbulent atmosphere messes up your beam and disperses the energy. Thus adaptive optics, where a small laser constantly measures the distortion and a "rubber" mirror exactly compensates for it in real-time.
Besides this, a nulling interferometer gives you an image with two spots for each planet. One is in the real position, and the other one in the mirror-reversed by the star position. AFAIK there is no way right now to find out which one is the correct one.
So, the Keck interferometer will probably not be able to see terrestrial planets around other stars (altho it will be able to see Jovian ones, including ones far from their star, which should complement radial-velocity searches nicely). The proposed Terrestrial Planet Finder, consisting of four 3.5 m mirrors in space separated by a baseline of up to 1000 m, working in IR (3-30 um) would not only be able to detect Earth-sized planets, but take their spectra and detect absorption bands from H2O, O3 and CO2, that is, detect the presence of life.
As far as astronomers know, black holes have a bimodal mass distribution, that is, they basically come in two sizes. There are stellar black holes, and supermassive black holes.
Stellar black holes are formed through total gravitational collapse of very massive stars; stars with more than, say, 30 solar masses. This event is known as a hypernova and produces a gamma-ray burst (GRB), which can easily be seen from billions of light-years away (other GRBs may be produced by mergers of neutron-star pairs, or a neutron star and a black hole). Stellar black holes commonly have masses between roughly 3 and 20 solar masses at formation, but can of course grow by swallowing gas. A well-known example of a stellar BH is Cygnus X-1.
Supermassive black holes (SMBH) reside in the centers of many galaxies (in all larger galaxies, it is thought) and have masses between, say 100 000 and 10 billion solar masses. The one in the center of the Milky Way is rather smallish for a SMBH with "only" 2.6 million solar masses, and is fairly inactive right now. Active SMBHs are observed as the central "engines" in Seyfert galaxies, Radio galaxies, Quasars and Blazars. The differences between these are primarily due to the angle from which it is observed, and how much gas and dust is around. The larger the SMBH mass, the larger the luminosity it can sustain.
The ratio between the mass of the central SMBH and the mass of the bulge component of stars in the galaxy has turned out to be astonishingly constant, about 0.5 percent IIRC. This indicates a connection between the formation of the SMBH and the formation of the bulge stars, which happened when the galaxy formed.
No one really knows for sure how SMBHs form. They are too large and the Universe is too young for them to have been early stellar BHs that simply have grown by swallowing gas. Some think that dense clusters of tens of thousands of stellar BHs and/or neutron stars in the galaxy cores collapsed together and merged in one big crunch. If so, this would be the most energetic events in the Universe, excepting the Big Bang itself. Others think that the SMBHs were formed directly in the Big Bang, and that the galaxies formed around them - that the SMBHs were "gravitational seeds" for galaxies, sort of.
Actually they seem to have found a few examples of mid-size BHs now, with masses between 100 and 10 000 solar masses, in the cores of globular star clusters. They could conceivably have formed in the same way as SMBHs, only in a smaller scale. And then there might exist tiny BHs formed in the Big Bang, now decaying thru emittance of quantum Hawking radiation, but AFAIK no one has found their very special gamma ray burst signature yet (observed GRBs do not fit).
As to Dark Matter, most scientists agree on that it cannot be dominated by inactive BHs, because then we would have much more gravitational lensing than we observe.
Imaginating having to do that in Japan made a lot of people thankful that Uranium and Plutonium tended to do their thing with a lot of gusto.
There was no need for Hiroshima. There was no need for invading Japan at all. Japans war machine was totally broken; they had almost no warships or aircraft left and their factories were being pulverized by the minute. The US could have simply stopped there and made peace - after all, Japan had already lost all conquered land. They were no threat anymore. But of course the US wanted vengeance.
I dont see fire-bombing or nuking civilian cities with almost no military significance as any less warcrime or any less horrific than gassing people in camps. But, as we all know, history is written by the victors.
Indeed. And Stalin (who we were talking about) killed 60 million, thru summary executions, planned famine and gulag, and is thought to have been "our savior from Hitler", almost a "nice guy". (Shudder).
Those plantation owners in the South in the 1860s, they had every right to be upset about scofflaw abolitionists helping their property to escape. Thats not whining; they had every right to protect their investment and their future profits. Now, people bitching about supposed bad conditions for the slaves, thats whining.
(For the intellectually challenged, the above was irony.)
Id like to take the opportunity to recommend to everyone this other book: Hackers: Heroes of the computer revolution, by Stephen Levy.
I know it is not a new book, but having been out of print, it is now available again in paperback. Im reading it right now, and it is really GREAT!
/Dervak
Re:Why are we always on the defensive?
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CPRM Smokescreen
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· Score: 1
You are Jack Valenti
Hardly. He would never set himself up as a target, not even to provoke violence that would let him act out the hurt innocence. After all, despite all precautions, someone _might_ succeed.
Actually, the price will go down, if not as fast as it would have with more competition.
This early in the product cycle Nvidia cant produce many GF3s, because the yields are probably very low. So they set a high price to reduce demand. With time, as their yields go up they will reduce the price, and there will probably be a GF3MX in 4-6 months or so.
Why should Nvidia reduce the price if they dont have any competition? Simply because selling say, 1 million chips @ $300 makes them less money than 5 million chips @ $150, production costs being equal. Yield increasing by a factor 5 not being unrealistic at all, and 1 or 5 million being the demand at the different price points.
Also, I am not at all convinced Nvidia will have no competition. The Radeon2 seems impressive, and we should not count out the G800 or the Kyro2.
All in all, Im pretty convinced a GF3 will be at ~$350-400 in six months, with a GF3MX introducing at ~$200-250.
In 25 years, the goverment have given all citizens a nano-assember, that can make bread.
Not very likely. Because M$-AOL-TimeWarner-GM-Exxon-Sony-Matsushita will own the "IP" and patents for all kinds of bread and milk. Noone will be allowed to use their nanoassembler (if they are allowed to have one) for that, at least not without paying a fee every time you use it (which, coincidentally will be about three times the price of bread and milk today). Ah - the joys of monopoly!!!
At least this is likely to happen if we do not rise up and destroy our corporate lords while we still can, while they still do not control everything.
And BTW, any alien geologists examining the rock strata of the Earth in, say, 100 million years will find a very pronounced and extremely fast mass extinction right at the current time. Lots of animal and plant species disappearing in a very short time, especially big ones and predators, but many smaller species too.
The rocks will contain a significant portion of carbon, that is, soot, and many heavy metals (probably buckyballs too). It is likely the aliens will put it down to an impact from space, but the big crater is strangely missing...
Right you are. And as a matter of fact, all discontinuities between geologic eras/periods/epochs are mass extinctions of varying magnitude. After all, thats what the different strata were named for originally; their fossil content. A sharp discontinuity and you use another name, e.g. Triassic-Jurassic-Cretaceous...
The primary division is between eras: Precambrian, Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic, with as you might expect big extinctions between.
The Pracambrian-Paleozoic (or Proterozoic-Cambrian if you wish) the biggest, the Paleozoic-Mesozoic (Permian-Triassic) not quite as big but still incredible, and the most famous one, the Mesozoic-Cenozoic (Cretaceous-Tertiary) that killed the dinosaurs, the smallest of those three.
In between there were smaller mass extinctions between geological periods; e.g Jurassic-Cretaceous or even smaller between epochs, like for instance Miocene-Pliocene. All mass extinctions were not necessarily caused by comet/asteroid impacts, directly or indirectly. Large igneous provinces (flood basalt) are another option, as are large climate fluctuations caused by continental drift.
Once this can be done at the molecular or atomic level, then you can make gold, heroin, a ferrari, or any other desirable item out of your garbage, mud, sewage.
Heroin, yes. A Ferrari, yes. Gold, no. If you want something made of gold, then you will have to put gold into your nanotech replicator.
To transmogrify other elements into gold, a lot more energy is required than can be done with even a hypothetical nanotech assembly replicator. To change atomic nuclei is an entirely other ballpark than just placing atoms next to each other.
At the very least youll need a particle accelerator-plugin to your replicator, in order to achieve the vast energies needed to overcome the electromagnetic repulsion between atomic nuclei.;-) There is a significant radiation hazard too, both diretly from leaked accelerated heavy particles, and from radioactive decay of unstable isotopes created as a secondary product.
/Dervak
Re:What if the government is run by another Hitler
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The Unblinking Eye
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· Score: 1
And what country would that be, you Anonymous Cowardly Idiot?
And BTW, Words at the start of sentences use capitals. Loser.
/Dervak
Re:What if the government is run by another Hitler
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The Unblinking Eye
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· Score: 1
Considering the fact that most policemen use violence and gunfire, whether against criminals or innocent citizens, and considering that historically police have been responisble for the most loathsome atrocities (Gestapo anyone?), Im not willing to give them any trust.
Considering that the military works tirelessly to protect the richest 1% from anything that could threaten the status quo, not flinching from killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, and is made up of men and women who would kill you if you tried to exercise your liberty (Civil War anyone?), Im not willing to trust them.
Considering that hundreds of thousands of ordinary non-violent people, sentenced for victimless crimes (like smoking pot or having consentual sex with someone 17 years old) are behind bars, at the same time as anyone who can afford a top lawyer gets off the hook no matter if it is murder, and the fact that Congress is bought by Big Business, Im inclined to distrust the legislature and the judges.
Considering the fact that anyone who seeks to be President has no more chance than a snowflake in Hell unless he is "approved" by AOL-TimeWarner-Sony-M$-GM-Exxon-CocaCola-Disney, for a salary that is less than some CEOs in the private sector, but still many, many times higher than the median, but is compensated by the incredible rush of Power, all the while not really taking any responsibility, Im inclined to distrust whoever holds that office.
Actions speak. Throughout history, organized government/military/corporations have beaten up/raped/tortured/maimed/murdered orders of magnitude more people than all serial killers/terrorists/lunatics in the world. I know whom I fear most. (Hint: It is not the lone crazies or terrorist commandos.)
You dont seem to understand. Crunch was a phreaker, not a cracker. That means that he hacked the phone system, not computers. So why should he be barred from working with computers? It is a different field.
So you dont want to work with him? Fine, it is your right. But do not place onerous restraints on people who do not deserve them.
And BTW, WRT what you said, what happens to a bad politician? Answer: He gets to be president, even if more than 50% of the people voting opposed him.
It is people like you who are forcing "crackers" to continue with their illegal activities. They have got to earn a living to pay their rent and put food on their table, and the back side of security is what they know best.
Now think for a while, where would you like to have a "cracker": in a computer security job, under constant scrutiny and surveillance, or out in the wild, working for, say, organized crime instead?
If we don't give the drug company financial incentives to produce new drugs through patent protection, they will slow their rate of researching new drugs. Is that in society's best interest?
Actually, Yes.
Ask yourself, what is the prime motivator of a pharmaceutical company, of any company for that matter? Money.
How does a pharmaceutical company get a steady, dependable stream of money? By producing drugs that heal people? No way, then those people would be healthy and would not buy any more meds.
What then? By producing drugs that alleviate the symptoms but which do not cure the disease, making the patients dependent on those drugs for the rest of their life. Thats the way to make big wads of $$$ for the shareholders and nice fat bonuses for the fat cats.
Not very different from the business of the makers of illicit drugs, when you think of it...
To keep people healthy, we should do like they did in ancient China instead. The physician only gets paid as long as the patient is healthy. Or something like that...
I have to point out that many of these tragedies were not created by the governments of the people harmed, but by other sovereign powers.
So? Is it ok to perpetrate atrocities, as long as it is towards the citizens of some other nation? And, it is only a small step between doing something to another people and doing it to your own. CIA performed covert tests of the effectiveness of psychochemical agents in the New York subway!
The citizens of Hiroshima could indeed not have prevented the Bomb by distrusting the US govt more, but if the Japanese had distrusted their own govt more then their country might not have gone to war in the first place.
"War crime" is really a redundant term. War is the crime.
Ill take 1000 uncaught serial killers and child molesters over one corrupt, powermad government any day. And governments are always corrupt and powermad. Dont believe anything else. History teaches a grim lesson.
Assyrians
Roman Cruxifictions
Huns
Genghis Khan and his Mongols
Tamerlane
Conquest of the Americas
Inquisition
30-year war
Slave trade
Trenches of WWI
Stalins purges
Holocaust
Dresden
Hiroshima
Gulag
Great Leap in Red China
Pol Pot
Rwanda
None of the above was caused by lone maniacs, but by governments, some even "democratic".
If 6000 years of living beneath the heel of chieftains, kings, priests, emperors, lords, presidents, ministers and CEOs havent taught us to always distrust authorities, any authority, then noting ever will.
If you choose security over freedom, you will in the end have neither.
I think it is futile trying to get a single number to describe the performance of different CPUs, especially as a product of various numbers. Other people have pointed out that what is important is what you use the CPU for. That determines what performance number is important to you.
Think about it like a car. What car has the highest performance? Then ask yourself what kind of performance you mean?
Top speed? Acceleration? Torque? MPG? Range before refueling? Tire grip? Driving characteristics? Ground clearance? Payload capacity? Coolness factor? Envy factor? It all depends on what you want to use your car for (and on your wallet).
It is the same with processors. If you are on a budget and only word-process and browse the web, get the cheapest Celery you can find, if you have a little more dough and want to be able to game some too, get a Duron and a GF2MX card. If you use 3DSMax or pack DivX;-), get a 1 GHz or faster Tbird. If you only play Q3 get a 1.5 GHz P4 and a GF2Ultra, for those important 200 FPS in 640x480...;-)
/Dervak
Re:There has to be a practical reason...
on
Going Up?
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· Score: 2
As I recall the electrical energy costs are around US$1/lb to GEO, and since the propulsion and guidance uses no physical contact with the elevator there is essentially no wear and tear. OTOH, there would be huge construction costs to write off, but it would still probably not cost more than, say US$10/lb assuming a large amount of traffic.
Slashdot Mirror
The result would be a monopoly by AMD, which would be FAR worse than an Intel monopoly.
I'd like some of what you are smoking. Why on Earth would an AMD monopoly (not that that is feasible in many years) be worse than an Intel monopoly? Intel have already showed us that they will not flinch from asking $2000 or more for their fastest chip, or slow down Moore's law to a dribble. It is only competition from AMD that has forced Intel to speed up the scaling and lower their prices (somewhat).
AMD, on the other hand, delivers faster CPUs at half the price, unlocked so you can OC them if you want. The only problem is the power comsumption, but that is being taken care of in the next revision. Now, it is possible that AMD would be just as evil as Intel if they got a monopoly, but we haven't seen that yet.
I don't want Intel to die, but I'd like them to go down to, say, 35% marketshare, with another 35% for AMD, and the rest shared between Transmeta and VIA (who hopefully will release a decent chip at some time).
AMD does not "innovate", they "tweak" and "re-design" existing technologies for the most part,
They have to. AMD has less than 10% of the financial resources of Intel. They can't afford some things Intel can. And AMD does innovate (damn, I hate that word - contaminated by M$), what about Hypertransport (used to be LDT)?
usually for shockingly low prices
Since so many people are so computer-illiterate and brand-loyal to the point of blindness, they have to. But the times are a-changing.
(which ends up cutting into R&D funds, which is VERY bad in the long run)
If you want to support AMD's R&D you can buy two CPUs then; use one and put the other one in a drawer. Then AMD will get as much $ from you as Intel would for a worse performing CPU, you have a backup CPU and warm fuzzy feeling from helping AMD's R&D.
But in a few years, developers and designers will have had enough with the current x86
Didn't they say exactly that some 10 years ago, when the first RISC chips came? ;-)
Really, if you know anything about CPUs, you must know that there has been a convergence. RISC chips are becoming more CISC-like, and CISC chips more RISC-like.
IA-64 still runs 32-bit code, just slower.
Yes, but not little slower. Didn't an 800 MHz Itanium perform roughly on par with a 50 MHz 486 on i386 code?
Personally I think that IA-64 will be stillborn. It is far slower and more inefficient than the RISC chips it is supposed to replace and runs legacy 32 bit x86 apps so pathetically slow that a 233 MHz G3 iMac could probably outclass it in emulation mode...
/Dervak
The idea that all IP is just "numbers" and can't be owned is a fallacy.
Not at all.
Anything in the universe can be hashed to a numerical representation.
Unfortunately not. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle forbids it, even in principle.
My car has a number, and I most certainly can own it.
Right. Tell me what number corresponds to your car... if you can. In contrast, it is easy (in principle) to say the number that is Windows 2K, the Matrix DVD or the latest Britney Spears CD.
To suggest otherwise is to advocate a communist system.
Oh dear. An ignoramus seeing Communist plots everywhere. Tell you what, something not lassiez-faire Capitalism and brutal IP philosophy is not necessarily Communism.
/Dervak
No, O2 has no prominent absorbtion band in the IR wavelengths that is going to be used. However, O3 (Ozon) is an extremely reactive chemical, and its presence implies that there is O2 (that can be dissociated by UV radiation and recombine to O3).
So, if you find O3 there has got to be O2 too.
/Dervak
It is already too late. AAMOF a lot of the new telescope tech was developed in the "black" by military scientists.
Case in point: Adaptive optics. You know, you can use a telescope the other way too: placing a light-source, such as a high-power laser, at the focus and using tho optics to collimate a sharply focused beam to destroy aircraft, missiles or satellites with. But the turbulent atmosphere messes up your beam and disperses the energy. Thus adaptive optics, where a small laser constantly measures the distortion and a "rubber" mirror exactly compensates for it in real-time.
/Dervak
Besides this, a nulling interferometer gives you an image with two spots for each planet. One is in the real position, and the other one in the mirror-reversed by the star position. AFAIK there is no way right now to find out which one is the correct one.
So, the Keck interferometer will probably not be able to see terrestrial planets around other stars (altho it will be able to see Jovian ones, including ones far from their star, which should complement radial-velocity searches nicely). The proposed Terrestrial Planet Finder, consisting of four 3.5 m mirrors in space separated by a baseline of up to 1000 m, working in IR (3-30 um) would not only be able to detect Earth-sized planets, but take their spectra and detect absorption bands from H2O, O3 and CO2, that is, detect the presence of life.
/Dervak
As far as astronomers know, black holes have a bimodal mass distribution, that is, they basically come in two sizes. There are stellar black holes, and supermassive black holes.
Stellar black holes are formed through total gravitational collapse of very massive stars; stars with more than, say, 30 solar masses. This event is known as a hypernova and produces a gamma-ray burst (GRB), which can easily be seen from billions of light-years away (other GRBs may be produced by mergers of neutron-star pairs, or a neutron star and a black hole). Stellar black holes commonly have masses between roughly 3 and 20 solar masses at formation, but can of course grow by swallowing gas. A well-known example of a stellar BH is Cygnus X-1.
Supermassive black holes (SMBH) reside in the centers of many galaxies (in all larger galaxies, it is thought) and have masses between, say 100 000 and 10 billion solar masses. The one in the center of the Milky Way is rather smallish for a SMBH with "only" 2.6 million solar masses, and is fairly inactive right now. Active SMBHs are observed as the central "engines" in Seyfert galaxies, Radio galaxies, Quasars and Blazars. The differences between these are primarily due to the angle from which it is observed, and how much gas and dust is around. The larger the SMBH mass, the larger the luminosity it can sustain.
The ratio between the mass of the central SMBH and the mass of the bulge component of stars in the galaxy has turned out to be astonishingly constant, about 0.5 percent IIRC. This indicates a connection between the formation of the SMBH and the formation of the bulge stars, which happened when the galaxy formed.
No one really knows for sure how SMBHs form. They are too large and the Universe is too young for them to have been early stellar BHs that simply have grown by swallowing gas. Some think that dense clusters of tens of thousands of stellar BHs and/or neutron stars in the galaxy cores collapsed together and merged in one big crunch. If so, this would be the most energetic events in the Universe, excepting the Big Bang itself. Others think that the SMBHs were formed directly in the Big Bang, and that the galaxies formed around them - that the SMBHs were "gravitational seeds" for galaxies, sort of.
Actually they seem to have found a few examples of mid-size BHs now, with masses between 100 and 10 000 solar masses, in the cores of globular star clusters. They could conceivably have formed in the same way as SMBHs, only in a smaller scale. And then there might exist tiny BHs formed in the Big Bang, now decaying thru emittance of quantum Hawking radiation, but AFAIK no one has found their very special gamma ray burst signature yet (observed GRBs do not fit).
As to Dark Matter, most scientists agree on that it cannot be dominated by inactive BHs, because then we would have much more gravitational lensing than we observe.
/Dervak
Imaginating having to do that in Japan made a lot of people thankful that Uranium and Plutonium tended to do their thing with a lot of gusto.
There was no need for Hiroshima. There was no need for invading Japan at all. Japans war machine was totally broken; they had almost no warships or aircraft left and their factories were being pulverized by the minute. The US could have simply stopped there and made peace - after all, Japan had already lost all conquered land. They were no threat anymore. But of course the US wanted vengeance.
I dont see fire-bombing or nuking civilian cities with almost no military significance as any less warcrime or any less horrific than gassing people in camps. But, as we all know, history is written by the victors.
/Dervak
Indeed. And Stalin (who we were talking about) killed 60 million, thru summary executions, planned famine and gulag, and is thought to have been "our savior from Hitler", almost a "nice guy". (Shudder).
/Dervak
Yeah, right. Illegal!=Immoral
(For the intellectually challenged, the above was irony.)
/Dervak
Id like to take the opportunity to recommend to everyone this other book: Hackers: Heroes of the computer revolution, by Stephen Levy.
I know it is not a new book, but having been out of print, it is now available again in paperback. Im reading it right now, and it is really GREAT!
/Dervak
You are Jack Valenti
Hardly. He would never set himself up as a target, not even to provoke violence that would let him act out the hurt innocence. After all, despite all precautions, someone _might_ succeed.
While Jack is certainly evil, he is not stupid.
Actually, the price will go down, if not as fast as it would have with more competition.
This early in the product cycle Nvidia cant produce many GF3s, because the yields are probably very low. So they set a high price to reduce demand. With time, as their yields go up they will reduce the price, and there will probably be a GF3MX in 4-6 months or so.
Why should Nvidia reduce the price if they dont have any competition? Simply because selling say, 1 million chips @ $300 makes them less money than 5 million chips @ $150, production costs being equal. Yield increasing by a factor 5 not being unrealistic at all, and 1 or 5 million being the demand at the different price points.
Also, I am not at all convinced Nvidia will have no competition. The Radeon2 seems impressive, and we should not count out the G800 or the Kyro2.
All in all, Im pretty convinced a GF3 will be at ~$350-400 in six months, with a GF3MX introducing at ~$200-250.
/Dervak
In 25 years, the goverment have given all citizens a nano-assember, that can make bread.
Not very likely. Because M$-AOL-TimeWarner-GM-Exxon-Sony-Matsushita will own the "IP" and patents for all kinds of bread and milk. Noone will be allowed to use their nanoassembler (if they are allowed to have one) for that, at least not without paying a fee every time you use it (which, coincidentally will be about three times the price of bread and milk today). Ah - the joys of monopoly!!!
At least this is likely to happen if we do not rise up and destroy our corporate lords while we still can, while they still do not control everything.
/Dervak
And BTW, any alien geologists examining the rock strata of the Earth in, say, 100 million years will find a very pronounced and extremely fast mass extinction right at the current time. Lots of animal and plant species disappearing in a very short time, especially big ones and predators, but many smaller species too.
The rocks will contain a significant portion of carbon, that is, soot, and many heavy metals (probably buckyballs too). It is likely the aliens will put it down to an impact from space, but the big crater is strangely missing...
/Dervak
Right you are. And as a matter of fact, all discontinuities between geologic eras/periods/epochs are mass extinctions of varying magnitude. After all, thats what the different strata were named for originally; their fossil content. A sharp discontinuity and you use another name, e.g. Triassic-Jurassic-Cretaceous...
The primary division is between eras: Precambrian, Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic, with as you might expect big extinctions between. The Pracambrian-Paleozoic (or Proterozoic-Cambrian if you wish) the biggest, the Paleozoic-Mesozoic (Permian-Triassic) not quite as big but still incredible, and the most famous one, the Mesozoic-Cenozoic (Cretaceous-Tertiary) that killed the dinosaurs, the smallest of those three.
In between there were smaller mass extinctions between geological periods; e.g Jurassic-Cretaceous or even smaller between epochs, like for instance Miocene-Pliocene. All mass extinctions were not necessarily caused by comet/asteroid impacts, directly or indirectly. Large igneous provinces (flood basalt) are another option, as are large climate fluctuations caused by continental drift.
/Dervak
Once this can be done at the molecular or atomic level, then you can make gold, heroin, a ferrari, or any other desirable item out of your garbage, mud, sewage.
Heroin, yes. A Ferrari, yes. Gold, no. If you want something made of gold, then you will have to put gold into your nanotech replicator.
To transmogrify other elements into gold, a lot more energy is required than can be done with even a hypothetical nanotech assembly replicator. To change atomic nuclei is an entirely other ballpark than just placing atoms next to each other.
At the very least youll need a particle accelerator-plugin to your replicator, in order to achieve the vast energies needed to overcome the electromagnetic repulsion between atomic nuclei. ;-) There is a significant radiation hazard too, both diretly from leaked accelerated heavy particles, and from radioactive decay of unstable isotopes created as a secondary product.
/Dervak
And what country would that be, you Anonymous Cowardly Idiot?
And BTW, Words at the start of sentences use capitals. Loser.
/Dervak
Considering the fact that most policemen use violence and gunfire, whether against criminals or innocent citizens, and considering that historically police have been responisble for the most loathsome atrocities (Gestapo anyone?), Im not willing to give them any trust.
Considering that the military works tirelessly to protect the richest 1% from anything that could threaten the status quo, not flinching from killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, and is made up of men and women who would kill you if you tried to exercise your liberty (Civil War anyone?), Im not willing to trust them.
Considering that hundreds of thousands of ordinary non-violent people, sentenced for victimless crimes (like smoking pot or having consentual sex with someone 17 years old) are behind bars, at the same time as anyone who can afford a top lawyer gets off the hook no matter if it is murder, and the fact that Congress is bought by Big Business, Im inclined to distrust the legislature and the judges.
Considering the fact that anyone who seeks to be President has no more chance than a snowflake in Hell unless he is "approved" by AOL-TimeWarner-Sony-M$-GM-Exxon-CocaCola-Disney, for a salary that is less than some CEOs in the private sector, but still many, many times higher than the median, but is compensated by the incredible rush of Power, all the while not really taking any responsibility, Im inclined to distrust whoever holds that office.
Actions speak. Throughout history, organized government/military/corporations have beaten up/raped/tortured/maimed/murdered orders of magnitude more people than all serial killers/terrorists/lunatics in the world. I know whom I fear most. (Hint: It is not the lone crazies or terrorist commandos.)
I rest my case.
/Dervak
You dont seem to understand. Crunch was a phreaker, not a cracker. That means that he hacked the phone system, not computers. So why should he be barred from working with computers? It is a different field.
So you dont want to work with him? Fine, it is your right. But do not place onerous restraints on people who do not deserve them.
And BTW, WRT what you said, what happens to a bad politician? Answer: He gets to be president, even if more than 50% of the people voting opposed him.
/Dervak
You Sir, are an idiot.
It is people like you who are forcing "crackers" to continue with their illegal activities. They have got to earn a living to pay their rent and put food on their table, and the back side of security is what they know best.
Now think for a while, where would you like to have a "cracker": in a computer security job, under constant scrutiny and surveillance, or out in the wild, working for, say, organized crime instead?
And BTW, Draper wasnt a cracker but a phreaker.
/Dervak
If we don't give the drug company financial incentives to produce new drugs through patent protection, they will slow their rate of researching new drugs. Is that in society's best interest?
Actually, Yes.
Ask yourself, what is the prime motivator of a pharmaceutical company, of any company for that matter? Money.
How does a pharmaceutical company get a steady, dependable stream of money? By producing drugs that heal people? No way, then those people would be healthy and would not buy any more meds.
What then? By producing drugs that alleviate the symptoms but which do not cure the disease, making the patients dependent on those drugs for the rest of their life. Thats the way to make big wads of $$$ for the shareholders and nice fat bonuses for the fat cats.
Not very different from the business of the makers of illicit drugs, when you think of it...
To keep people healthy, we should do like they did in ancient China instead. The physician only gets paid as long as the patient is healthy. Or something like that...
/Dervak
I have to point out that many of these tragedies were not created by the governments of the people harmed, but by other sovereign powers.
So? Is it ok to perpetrate atrocities, as long as it is towards the citizens of some other nation? And, it is only a small step between doing something to another people and doing it to your own. CIA performed covert tests of the effectiveness of psychochemical agents in the New York subway!
The citizens of Hiroshima could indeed not have prevented the Bomb by distrusting the US govt more, but if the Japanese had distrusted their own govt more then their country might not have gone to war in the first place.
"War crime" is really a redundant term. War is the crime.
/Dervak
Well said.
Ill take 1000 uncaught serial killers and child molesters over one corrupt, powermad government any day. And governments are always corrupt and powermad. Dont believe anything else. History teaches a grim lesson.
None of the above was caused by lone maniacs, but by governments, some even "democratic".
If 6000 years of living beneath the heel of chieftains, kings, priests, emperors, lords, presidents, ministers and CEOs havent taught us to always distrust authorities, any authority, then noting ever will.
If you choose security over freedom, you will in the end have neither.
/Dervak
I think it is futile trying to get a single number to describe the performance of different CPUs, especially as a product of various numbers. Other people have pointed out that what is important is what you use the CPU for. That determines what performance number is important to you.
Think about it like a car. What car has the highest performance? Then ask yourself what kind of performance you mean?
Top speed? Acceleration? Torque? MPG? Range before refueling? Tire grip? Driving characteristics? Ground clearance? Payload capacity? Coolness factor? Envy factor? It all depends on what you want to use your car for (and on your wallet).
It is the same with processors. If you are on a budget and only word-process and browse the web, get the cheapest Celery you can find, if you have a little more dough and want to be able to game some too, get a Duron and a GF2MX card. If you use 3DSMax or pack DivX;-), get a 1 GHz or faster Tbird. If you only play Q3 get a 1.5 GHz P4 and a GF2Ultra, for those important 200 FPS in 640x480... ;-)
/Dervak
As I recall the electrical energy costs are around US$1/lb to GEO, and since the propulsion and guidance uses no physical contact with the elevator there is essentially no wear and tear. OTOH, there would be huge construction costs to write off, but it would still probably not cost more than, say US$10/lb assuming a large amount of traffic.
/Dervak