Look at what your saying here. Before we invaded Iraq they were produceing at "maximum production". So your saying that we invaded Iraq for the oil. The oil which they were already pumping out as fast as they could. The War did nothing but interupt the flow of oil out of Iraq. It was only in the last few months that they got back up to pre-war production levels. If we wanted the Oil we would have just let them sell the oil outside of the sactions that were placed on them by the UN... oh wait we did, it was called the UN oil for Food program(forget for the time being were alot of the money from this program ended up).
What do you think happens now that we are in Iraq, do you think the US gov gets money for each barrel of oil that leaves Iraq? In 20 years the biggest consumer of Oil will not be the US, it will be China. One Billion Chinese what to have car's and tv's, it will happen. And by that time most of the oil wells on earth will be on the downward slope of thier prodution curves ( in fact that should happen sometime before 2015). The cost of oil will go up alot when we can't produce oil fast enough. And don't think that anyone who has easy to pump oil won't be pumping when prices hit $100 a barrel. Many wells will be restarted when prices climb to those levels and higher.
The funny thing about the Idea that we went to Iraq for oil is that once the price of oil gets high enough the worlds biggest supply of econimaicly extractable oil will not be in the middle east, It will be in North America. Between the oil sands in Canada and the Oil shale in the US we have more than 6 times the oil in the whole of the middle east. Most of the oil on earth is in North America. Sure oil prices have to be over $100 a barrel to make money getting at it but the prices will get there. Heck prices are already over $45 so we will see $100 once supply starts to get tight.
Bottom line, the united states didn't need to invade Iraq to get their oil, they will gladly pump it out for us. We invaded Iraq to remove a threat to the whole reigon. In the end any additional oil that gets pumpped only pushes off the day that oil prices get high. We aren't going to run out of oil anytime soon. Even when a oil well starts it's downward slope on it's production curve half of the oil is still in the ground. The only thing that Saudi, Iraq and other middle eastern states can provide us with is cheap oil for now. This is something they will do no matter who is in power or what we do, they want to make money just as much as we do.
Now if you read this message this far you might be wondering why then did we invade Iraq, the answer isn't just "for oil" because if we wanted just the oil we wouldn't have to do anything. If oil was realy the ONLY reason to care about that regoin having people like Saddam in power would be helpful, he stablized a unstable country for the time he was in power. Sure he used horrible tatics to do it but if it's all about oil, the oil flowwed under Saddam just fine. It is the other reasons that we care the countries in the middle east that caused us to invade Iraq. If they didn't have our attenttion we wouldn't care what happened there. Funny how nobody in the world gave one rats ass about what happened in Rwanda. Not one country in the world cared when millions of people were killed there.
p.s. it's 5 am here so I just typed this in withour look it over so if I misspelled stuff or it's hard to follow, sorry.
I haven't seen anyone mention this yet.
on
Star Wars on DVD
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· Score: 5, Informative
But there is a longtime petition site to get the original movies put on Dvd. http://www.originaltrilogy.com/ Check it out...
You can say that if you wish. But in the 40's EVERONE thought that bombing cities was a good way to "break the will of the enemy" and thus end wars. But as WWII showed if anything bombing cities only strengthens the will to fight. Also as Germany proved it is possible to increase total produdction even during city bombing campains. The thing that I also always like to point out when people talk about the Atom bomb's in Japan is the fact that the fire bombing raid of Tokyo a few weeks before hand killed more people than BOTH of the Atom bombs put together.
It is clear that the Japanese were ready to give up before the bombs. I don't buy that dropping the bombs saved our troops from landing in Japan. But I don't see it as being that much worse that the fire bombing of Tokyo... I know that some people might say that I am wrong because of the effects of radation years later... but Dead is dead and the fire bombing killed more people even after the fact. Japan would have given up before we invaded without us using the Bombs. But who knows how many more people would have been killed before they gave up. I don't know and I don't think anyone can say for sure...
If you want to talk about something that was totaly wrong that we did during WWII just look at the bombing raid on Dresden(sp?). That was just to show-off to the Russians what power the we had before the end of the war. All of those people died just becuase they got in the middle of the pissing match between the USA+BG vs the SU...
I have one of those also, but I have had a 15Krpm Seagate cheetah for over a year now. The cheetah smokes the WD drive, but that is to be expected. The WD is about on par with a 10Krpm scsi drive from last year( performance and price ). Still with Sata they have removed most of the difference between Scsi and Ide( to be fair Sata is more like scsi than it is like Ide, but I won't complain:). Oh and to keep this at least a little bit on topic the platters in my cheetah are only 2.5 inches. They made them smaller so they could improve seek times and reduce the power draw when running at 15Krpm.
We aren't going to see a major shift in the US until Arin starts pushing Ipv6. The real problem is that currently getting Ipv6 costs money and doesn't get you very far. Look at it this way... currently a Ptla/32 costs $2500 a year. But people that have been sitting on Ipv4 blocks for years don't pay anything. I know of two Isp's that would like to offer Ipv6 the their customers but because they don't have their own Ipv4 netblocks they don't want to pay $2500 a year just so few of their customers have Ipv6. So instead of getting Ipv6 and moving away from Ipv4 they are forced to stay with Ipv4.
I think that the situation is currently backwards to the way it should be. Arin ( and other Ipv4 providers ) should be charging next to nothing for Ipv6 netbocks ($100 or so) and slowly start charging more for Ipv4 blocks each year. So for the first year charge $100 for each Ipv4 block (on top of any other fees). The second year they would charge 500 and the year after that 1000 and then 3000 and so on... Until we start charging more for Ipv4 address's than Ipv6 we will not see any major move to Ipv6. The more people that can get switched over to Ipv6 the sooner the better.
This is going to keep happening until Arin starts pushing Ipv6. The real problem is that currently getting Ipv6 costs money and doesn't get you very far. Look at it this way... currently a Ptla/32 costs $2500 a year. But people that have been sitting on Ipv4 blocks for years don't pay anything. I know of two Isp's that would like to offer Ipv6 the their customers but because they don't have their own Ipv4 netblocks they don't want to pay $2500 a year just so few of their customers have Ipv6. So instead of getting Ipv6 and moving away from Ipv4 they are forced to stay with Ipv4. I think that the situation is currently backwards to the way it should be. Arin ( and other Ipv4 providers ) should be charging next to nothing for Ipv6 netbocks ($100 or so) and slowly start charging for Ipv4 blocks each year. So for the first year charge $100 for each Ipv4 block (on top of any other fees). The second year the would charge 500 and the year after that 1000 and then 3000 and so on... Until we start charging more for Ipv4 address's than Ipv6 we will have people trying to hijack current Ipv4 netblocks... The more people that can get switched over to Ipv6 the sooner the better. If everyone was using Ipv6 this will no longer be a problem...
It is clear that you have never done much with real routers. IOS (Cisco routers) is not user friendly. I don't know of one real router that has a point and click interface. Some routers have limited web interfaces but you almost always have to get to the real interface to use the advanced features.
Ok, I don't normaly answer something that looks like a troll, but I'll bite. Ok what is he "effectively putting off"? Keep in mind I would like to see a lessing of dependence on oil, but I just don't see it happening anytime soon. Let look at the problems that most of the sited "solutions" currently have.
Wind. Sure if put enough wind mills to blanket an area the size of south dakota we should be able to product more energy than we currently use. Have you even been to a windmill array? They are loud and ugly and where are we going to get the resources to build the tens millions of large windmills? Sure we could make them now but if we did we would use most if not all of the worlds steel for the next 10 years... More steel = more mining. In the end wind could provide enough power but it would cost much more than what we currently have.
Solar. Of all of the current "solutions" I feel that solar has the best shot at competing with current systems. Solar thermal systems, not solar cells. Solar thermal systems could be small and provide a modist amount of power to local areas. It might not be enough to totaly replace the current power systems at peek times but it would help to eliminate most consumption. The marjor problem with all solar systems is location. You need to be someplace sunny. So forget about putting plants down in the southwest and sending that power to New York, you would lose much of it during the tranmision.
Fuel Cells. Fule cells are allways pointed out as the best "solution". "The only exaust is water" is most often the responce. The big problem with Hydrogen fuel cell( yes I know that other types extist but they don't fit in well as long term solution) is platinum. We just don't have enough platinum to make fuel cells for new cars much less every other device that needs portaible power. If we used all the platinum in the world we would have enough for about 200Million cars. So most of the US could have fuel cell cars, but the rest of the world would be up a creek.
Nuclear. I am not sure if you would file this under the heading as a "solution". So I will keep this one short. The only real problem today with nuclear power is the waste issue, it could be reduced if we reprocessed spent fuel but it would still be a problem. It has taken 60 years to produce a safe nuclear reactor but the newest pebble bed reactors are safe. The biggest problem currently is the people who freakout when they hear the words "nuclear power". Nuclear power would work well with fuel cells if we can get enough platinum.
Like I said, all of the above are valid solutions but I don't see any of them flying in the real world. If missed something I would be happy to hear it, but of it was a great solution we would already be using it.
No that is not true. If the cable starts out small and you transfer mass to the end of the cable durring constuction you don't need an asteriod or a space station. Here is the report that details the plan for building this first space elevator. The cable that they are planning is very small compaired to what has been talked about in scifi. They have a whole section talking about costs of the project, at least read a little about what they plan to do before you claim that it will cost too much.
Don't knock the Saturn V, it was the cheapest launch system(per pound) that Nasa has ever had. It's all nice and good to talk about how the shuttle has reusable parts and how that saves so much money, but it is not in anyway true. At the begining of the Shuttle program Nasa did everything that they could do make sure that the Saturn V's would never be built again, they destroyed all of the blueprints and attempted to destroy all of the equipment used to make them. The shuttle costs around $360Millon per launch. I have seen projections of cost if we could build the Saturn V today, they would cost around $170-210Million(per launch). At first that doesn't sound like much of a savings, but the Saturn V could lift 120ton's into Leo compair that to the shuttles 30ton's(55,000 pounds now that I look it up).
If we had the Saturn V we could build the money pit that is the IIS in a quarter(conservatively) of the launches that it will take with the shuttle. Sure we would have to fly someone up to put it together, but we could put up a construction crew up for an extended misson once or twice and be done with it. Don't missunderstand me I fully support space exploration but Nasa has let me down.
I saw the history channel show about this and I thought it was one of the coolest things I had seen in a long time. But now it's for sale... check it out... underground fortress
Ahh someone has seen the power4 spec benchmarks, I am not going to disagree that the power4 is a badass processor but you need to understand how that benchmark was performed. First, you can't buy the configuration that was tested (and you would be stupid if you did) let me explain, power4 chips come in MCM's. Each MCM has four cpu dies, each cpu die has two processor cores. So each MCM has eight cpu's in it, if you are having problems envisioning the MCM think back to the pentium pro it was one module but it had two silicon chips in inside. So each power4 chip has two cpu's it also has 1.5meg(I think this is the right size) of integrated L2 cache. And each MCM has 128meg of high speed L3 cache. So now that you understand how the power4 is normaly sold let me explain how the spec benchmark was performed. They took a standard MCM and disabled three of the Power4 chips and then they disabled one of the two processor cores on the remaining chip. So, they had a single processor power4 with 1.5meg of L2 cache and 128meg of L3 cache. No wonder it has the fastest spec benchmark! Many other processors would recive much higher ratings with half the cache that the power4 had in this test... but as I started out saying at the top of this post the Power4 is a badass cpu. I just don't feel that the spec benckmark was 100% fair( seeing how you can't even get the config that was tested ). And even if you could get it you would be paying for 8 cpu's and getting one...
We will not see even 15,000rpm ide drives for years. It is not a question of technology it's a business decision. The manufactures need to have performance differation between the professional drives and commodity drives. This will keep the ide stuff at least one step behind scsi. We should start seeing 10k ide drives soon, now that most manufactures have 15k scsi drives. Also I have no idea were you are getting the 20,000rpm numbers from, I havn't heard of anyone even testing 20,000rpm drives. If anyone comes out with a 20k drive it will be Seagate. They always annouce their dirves a year before they are on the market, at least that is what they have done in the past. And they usually are about a year ahead of everyone else when it comes to advancing rpm speeds. So if Seagate annouced 20,000rpm drives today (and it's thats not going to happen any time soon) I wouldn't expect to more than just Seagate shipping 20K drive for another two years... That being said, Serial ATA is a good thing, just the thin cables make upgrading worth it.
I agree that hard drives are the fastest they have ever been, but at the same time when compaired to the relitive increase in Cpu speed they are the slowest they have ever been. We may have ide drives that can push 30-50MB a sec but we also have 1.6-2.2Ghz Cpu's. Also, if you think that Fibre Channel is going to replace scsi you are wrong. They are designed to do two different things, scsi is great at filling a Pc with high end drives and Fibre Channel is all about San's. If you try to put together a San using just scsi you will be in a for a nightmare. I would say that it is almost impossible when just using scsi, but I guess it could be done but it would just be a major hack. And I would like to know where you can get fibre channel that works inside a Pc. I know you can get those copper, most use cat5, Fibre Channel adapters, and they work well, but they are not spec and I wouldn't setup a server with them, but I would use them at home. They are just different standards for different applications.
I totally agree with you about USB hubs on monitors. Not only do many machines now have front USB connectors but by this time next year most of the shipping chipsets will support 3 or 4 USB buses and that gives you 6 or 8 USB connectors. I think that this will remove the need for a USB hub in most cases.
It is not true that you need an application that supports smp to see any advantage from smp. If you alot of heavy multitasking then you can see a hugh improvement if you have a Smp system. But for the aveage person smp is just a waste of money.
God, I hope not. 802.11b is slow, at only 11mbps it can take quite a while to copy anything larger than a 100meg. Backing up a few gigs would be a nightmare... 802.11a is 54mbps and that is not too bad. But I will stick with GigE so I can push +20Meg/sec to my sever...
I just have to say that I have been installing Slackware for the last six years. Over all of that time the install program hasn't changed once... many people like simple setup programs...
It's easy for Ds3, you will have to wait a month or so for Oc3's. Just look at ImageStream. I do have to say that I work for ImageStream... but, I think we make very good midrange routers. You can also get all of the cards that we use in the routers and put them in your own Linux servers. Everything from a one port t-1 card to a two port ds3 with intgrated Csu-dsu's on the card. We will have the Atm Oc3 cards in a few weeks. And they do look very sweet. We aready have the hardware, we are just finishing up the software... I am pretty sure that the cost on the Atm Oc3 cards is going to be around ( don't quote me for sure, but this should be close ) $2100. I know that sounds like alot, but compair that to a cisco solution. If you want more info, just call 1-800-813-5123 and talk to Doug or Eric. p.s. I would write a longer message but it is 3:30am and I need sleep BAD...
I would just like to point out a few things myself...
Point A) A senior VP at Intel Corporation, Albert Yu, indicated that Willamette would only be 30% faster than the Coppermine. The Willamete will not be that much faster than the Pentium III at the same clock speed. The most important thing to remember about the Willamette is Intel has decided the way to increase performance is to raise the clock speed and sacrifice IPC ( instructions per clock ) efficiency. So you can't compare this transient from the P III to the Willamette to the transitions of the 486 to Pentium. The Pentium had a much better IPC than the 486, the Willamette will most likely have a lower IPC than the P III. But the Willamette is designed to scale to very high clock speeds. You only have to look at the Willamette's pipeline to see this design philosophy. The pipeline has 20 stages; this will make it easy for Intel to raise the clock speed. For more info on how a pipeline length affects CPU performance check out this web page. http://www.aceshardware.c om/Spades/read.php?article_id=50. I would also like to point out that the double clocked ALU is only one stage of the 20 stage pipeline. You do have a good point about the Sse2 instructions, if Intel can get a lot of developers to use them it will make it much harder for AMD to claim they have the fastest FPU. But AMD shouldn't be afraid, they have just rolled out a new architecture that has a lot of room for growth. And I can't see Intel getting that far a head of AMD. I would expect that title of the fastest x86 CPU will change hands many times in the next year, but Intel is not about the totally destroy AMD.
Point B) I am not going to say I disagree with you it's just that I think 3d rendering is not a good example, the average computer user will never do 3d rendering outside of a game. I think that speech recognition is a much better example... something that many people would use if it worked better...
Point C) The Ppro was expensive because they had bad yields. This is the same reason that Rdram is much more expensive today when compared to Sdram.
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Look at what your saying here. Before we invaded Iraq they were produceing at "maximum production". So your saying that we invaded Iraq for the oil. The oil which they were already pumping out as fast as they could. The War did nothing but interupt the flow of oil out of Iraq. It was only in the last few months that they got back up to pre-war production levels. If we wanted the Oil we would have just let them sell the oil outside of the sactions that were placed on them by the UN... oh wait we did, it was called the UN oil for Food program(forget for the time being were alot of the money from this program ended up).
What do you think happens now that we are in Iraq, do you think the US gov gets money for each barrel of oil that leaves Iraq? In 20 years the biggest consumer of Oil will not be the US, it will be China. One Billion Chinese what to have car's and tv's, it will happen. And by that time most of the oil wells on earth will be on the downward slope of thier prodution curves ( in fact that should happen sometime before 2015). The cost of oil will go up alot when we can't produce oil fast enough. And don't think that anyone who has easy to pump oil won't be pumping when prices hit $100 a barrel. Many wells will be restarted when prices climb to those levels and higher.
The funny thing about the Idea that we went to Iraq for oil is that once the price of oil gets high enough the worlds biggest supply of econimaicly extractable oil will not be in the middle east, It will be in North America. Between the oil sands in Canada and the Oil shale in the US we have more than 6 times the oil in the whole of the middle east. Most of the oil on earth is in North America. Sure oil prices have to be over $100 a barrel to make money getting at it but the prices will get there. Heck prices are already over $45 so we will see $100 once supply starts to get tight.
Bottom line, the united states didn't need to invade Iraq to get their oil, they will gladly pump it out for us. We invaded Iraq to remove a threat to the whole reigon. In the end any additional oil that gets pumpped only pushes off the day that oil prices get high. We aren't going to run out of oil anytime soon. Even when a oil well starts it's downward slope on it's production curve half of the oil is still in the ground. The only thing that Saudi, Iraq and other middle eastern states can provide us with is cheap oil for now. This is something they will do no matter who is in power or what we do, they want to make money just as much as we do.
Now if you read this message this far you might be wondering why then did we invade Iraq, the answer isn't just "for oil" because if we wanted just the oil we wouldn't have to do anything. If oil was realy the ONLY reason to care about that regoin having people like Saddam in power would be helpful, he stablized a unstable country for the time he was in power. Sure he used horrible tatics to do it but if it's all about oil, the oil flowwed under Saddam just fine. It is the other reasons that we care the countries in the middle east that caused us to invade Iraq. If they didn't have our attenttion we wouldn't care what happened there. Funny how nobody in the world gave one rats ass about what happened in Rwanda. Not one country in the world cared when millions of people were killed there.
p.s. it's 5 am here so I just typed this in withour look it over so if I misspelled stuff or it's hard to follow, sorry.
But there is a longtime petition site to get the original movies put on Dvd. http://www.originaltrilogy.com/ Check it out...
Shouldn't this story be titled "How to crash your home built KiteCam" or at least "how to use slashdot to crash your webserver in 3 easy steps".
You can say that if you wish. But in the 40's EVERONE thought that bombing cities was a good way to "break the will of the enemy" and thus end wars. But as WWII showed if anything bombing cities only strengthens the will to fight. Also as Germany proved it is possible to increase total produdction even during city bombing campains. The thing that I also always like to point out when people talk about the Atom bomb's in Japan is the fact that the fire bombing raid of Tokyo a few weeks before hand killed more people than BOTH of the Atom bombs put together.
It is clear that the Japanese were ready to give up before the bombs. I don't buy that dropping the bombs saved our troops from landing in Japan. But I don't see it as being that much worse that the fire bombing of Tokyo... I know that some people might say that I am wrong because of the effects of radation years later... but Dead is dead and the fire bombing killed more people even after the fact. Japan would have given up before we invaded without us using the Bombs. But who knows how many more people would have been killed before they gave up. I don't know and I don't think anyone can say for sure...
If you want to talk about something that was totaly wrong that we did during WWII just look at the bombing raid on Dresden(sp?). That was just to show-off to the Russians what power the we had before the end of the war. All of those people died just becuase they got in the middle of the pissing match between the USA+BG vs the SU...
I have one of those also, but I have had a 15Krpm Seagate cheetah for over a year now. The cheetah smokes the WD drive, but that is to be expected. The WD is about on par with a 10Krpm scsi drive from last year( performance and price ). Still with Sata they have removed most of the difference between Scsi and Ide( to be fair Sata is more like scsi than it is like Ide, but I won't complain :). Oh and to keep this at least a little bit on topic the platters in my cheetah are only 2.5 inches. They made them smaller so they could improve seek times and reduce the power draw when running at 15Krpm.
We aren't going to see a major shift in the US until Arin starts pushing Ipv6. The real problem is that currently getting Ipv6 costs money and doesn't get you very far. Look at it this way... currently a Ptla /32 costs $2500 a year. But people that have been sitting on Ipv4 blocks for years don't pay anything. I know of two Isp's that would like to offer Ipv6 the their customers but because they don't have their own Ipv4 netblocks they don't want to pay $2500 a year just so few of their customers have Ipv6. So instead of getting Ipv6 and moving away from Ipv4 they are forced to stay with Ipv4.
I think that the situation is currently backwards to the way it should be. Arin ( and other Ipv4 providers ) should be charging next to nothing for Ipv6 netbocks ($100 or so) and slowly start charging more for Ipv4 blocks each year. So for the first year charge $100 for each Ipv4 block (on top of any other fees). The second year they would charge 500 and the year after that 1000 and then 3000 and so on... Until we start charging more for Ipv4 address's than Ipv6 we will not see any major move to Ipv6. The more people that can get switched over to Ipv6 the sooner the better.
This is going to keep happening until Arin starts pushing Ipv6. The real problem is that currently getting Ipv6 costs money and doesn't get you very far. Look at it this way... currently a Ptla /32 costs $2500 a year. But people that have been sitting on Ipv4 blocks for years don't pay anything. I know of two Isp's that would like to offer Ipv6 the their customers but because they don't have their own Ipv4 netblocks they don't want to pay $2500 a year just so few of their customers have Ipv6. So instead of getting Ipv6 and moving away from Ipv4 they are forced to stay with Ipv4. I think that the situation is currently backwards to the way it should be. Arin ( and other Ipv4 providers ) should be charging next to nothing for Ipv6 netbocks ($100 or so) and slowly start charging for Ipv4 blocks each year. So for the first year charge $100 for each Ipv4 block (on top of any other fees). The second year the would charge 500 and the year after that 1000 and then 3000 and so on... Until we start charging more for Ipv4 address's than Ipv6 we will have people trying to hijack current Ipv4 netblocks... The more people that can get switched over to Ipv6 the sooner the better. If everyone was using Ipv6 this will no longer be a problem...
It is clear that you have never done much with real routers. IOS (Cisco routers) is not user friendly. I don't know of one real router that has a point and click interface. Some routers have limited web interfaces but you almost always have to get to the real interface to use the advanced features.
Ok, I don't normaly answer something that looks like a troll, but I'll bite. Ok what is he "effectively putting off"? Keep in mind I would like to see a lessing of dependence on oil, but I just don't see it happening anytime soon. Let look at the problems that most of the sited "solutions" currently have.
Wind. Sure if put enough wind mills to blanket an area the size of south dakota we should be able to product more energy than we currently use. Have you even been to a windmill array? They are loud and ugly and where are we going to get the resources to build the tens millions of large windmills? Sure we could make them now but if we did we would use most if not all of the worlds steel for the next 10 years... More steel = more mining. In the end wind could provide enough power but it would cost much more than what we currently have.
Solar. Of all of the current "solutions" I feel that solar has the best shot at competing with current systems. Solar thermal systems, not solar cells. Solar thermal systems could be small and provide a modist amount of power to local areas. It might not be enough to totaly replace the current power systems at peek times but it would help to eliminate most consumption. The marjor problem with all solar systems is location. You need to be someplace sunny. So forget about putting plants down in the southwest and sending that power to New York, you would lose much of it during the tranmision.
Fuel Cells. Fule cells are allways pointed out as the best "solution". "The only exaust is water" is most often the responce. The big problem with Hydrogen fuel cell( yes I know that other types extist but they don't fit in well as long term solution) is platinum. We just don't have enough platinum to make fuel cells for new cars much less every other device that needs portaible power. If we used all the platinum in the world we would have enough for about 200Million cars. So most of the US could have fuel cell cars, but the rest of the world would be up a creek.
Nuclear. I am not sure if you would file this under the heading as a "solution". So I will keep this one short. The only real problem today with nuclear power is the waste issue, it could be reduced if we reprocessed spent fuel but it would still be a problem. It has taken 60 years to produce a safe nuclear reactor but the newest pebble bed reactors are safe. The biggest problem currently is the people who freakout when they hear the words "nuclear power". Nuclear power would work well with fuel cells if we can get enough platinum.
Like I said, all of the above are valid solutions but I don't see any of them flying in the real world. If missed something I would be happy to hear it, but of it was a great solution we would already be using it.
josh
No that is not true. If the cable starts out small and you transfer mass to the end of the cable durring constuction you don't need an asteriod or a space station. Here is the report that details the plan for building this first space elevator. The cable that they are planning is very small compaired to what has been talked about in scifi. They have a whole section talking about costs of the project, at least read a little about what they plan to do before you claim that it will cost too much.
josh
Don't knock the Saturn V, it was the cheapest launch system(per pound) that Nasa has ever had. It's all nice and good to talk about how the shuttle has reusable parts and how that saves so much money, but it is not in anyway true. At the begining of the Shuttle program Nasa did everything that they could do make sure that the Saturn V's would never be built again, they destroyed all of the blueprints and attempted to destroy all of the equipment used to make them. The shuttle costs around $360Millon per launch. I have seen projections of cost if we could build the Saturn V today, they would cost around $170-210Million(per launch). At first that doesn't sound like much of a savings, but the Saturn V could lift 120ton's into Leo compair that to the shuttles 30ton's(55,000 pounds now that I look it up).
If we had the Saturn V we could build the money pit that is the IIS in a quarter(conservatively) of the launches that it will take with the shuttle. Sure we would have to fly someone up to put it together, but we could put up a construction crew up for an extended misson once or twice and be done with it. Don't missunderstand me I fully support space exploration but Nasa has let me down.
I saw the history channel show about this and I thought it was one of the coolest things I had seen in a long time. But now it's for sale... check it out...
underground fortress
Ahh someone has seen the power4 spec benchmarks, I am not going to disagree that the power4 is a badass processor but you need to understand how that benchmark was performed. First, you can't buy the configuration that was tested (and you would be stupid if you did) let me explain, power4 chips come in MCM's. Each MCM has four cpu dies, each cpu die has two processor cores. So each MCM has eight cpu's in it, if you are having problems envisioning the MCM think back to the pentium pro it was one module but it had two silicon chips in inside. So each power4 chip has two cpu's it also has 1.5meg(I think this is the right size) of integrated L2 cache. And each MCM has 128meg of high speed L3 cache. So now that you understand how the power4 is normaly sold let me explain how the spec benchmark was performed. They took a standard MCM and disabled three of the Power4 chips and then they disabled one of the two processor cores on the remaining chip. So, they had a single processor power4 with 1.5meg of L2 cache and 128meg of L3 cache. No wonder it has the fastest spec benchmark! Many other processors would recive much higher ratings with half the cache that the power4 had in this test... but as I started out saying at the top of this post the Power4 is a badass cpu. I just don't feel that the spec benckmark was 100% fair( seeing how you can't even get the config that was tested ). And even if you could get it you would be paying for 8 cpu's and getting one...
Netbsd
We will not see even 15,000rpm ide drives for years. It is not a question of technology it's a business decision. The manufactures need to have performance differation between the professional drives and commodity drives. This will keep the ide stuff at least one step behind scsi. We should start seeing 10k ide drives soon, now that most manufactures have 15k scsi drives. Also I have no idea were you are getting the 20,000rpm numbers from, I havn't heard of anyone even testing 20,000rpm drives. If anyone comes out with a 20k drive it will be Seagate. They always annouce their dirves a year before they are on the market, at least that is what they have done in the past. And they usually are about a year ahead of everyone else when it comes to advancing rpm speeds. So if Seagate annouced 20,000rpm drives today (and it's thats not going to happen any time soon) I wouldn't expect to more than just Seagate shipping 20K drive for another two years... That being said, Serial ATA is a good thing, just the thin cables make upgrading worth it.
josh
I agree that hard drives are the fastest they have ever been, but at the same time when compaired to the relitive increase in Cpu speed they are the slowest they have ever been. We may have ide drives that can push 30-50MB a sec but we also have 1.6-2.2Ghz Cpu's. Also, if you think that Fibre Channel is going to replace scsi you are wrong. They are designed to do two different things, scsi is great at filling a Pc with high end drives and Fibre Channel is all about San's. If you try to put together a San using just scsi you will be in a for a nightmare. I would say that it is almost impossible when just using scsi, but I guess it could be done but it would just be a major hack. And I would like to know where you can get fibre channel that works inside a Pc. I know you can get those copper, most use cat5, Fibre Channel adapters, and they work well, but they are not spec and I wouldn't setup a server with them, but I would use them at home. They are just different standards for different applications.
I totally agree with you about USB hubs on monitors. Not only do many machines now have front USB connectors but by this time next year most of the shipping chipsets will support 3 or 4 USB buses and that gives you 6 or 8 USB connectors. I think that this will remove the need for a USB hub in most cases.
It is not true that you need an application that supports smp to see any advantage from smp. If you alot of heavy multitasking then you can see a hugh improvement if you have a Smp system. But for the aveage person smp is just a waste of money.
josh
God, I hope not. 802.11b is slow, at only 11mbps it can take quite a while to copy anything larger than a 100meg. Backing up a few gigs would be a nightmare... 802.11a is 54mbps and that is not too bad. But I will stick with GigE so I can push +20Meg/sec to my sever...
josh
I just have to say that I have been installing Slackware for the last six years. Over all of that time the install program hasn't changed once... many people like simple setup programs...
It's easy for Ds3, you will have to wait a month or so for Oc3's. Just look at ImageStream. I do have to say that I work for ImageStream... but, I think we make very good midrange routers. You can also get all of the cards that we use in the routers and put them in your own Linux servers. Everything from a one port t-1 card to a two port ds3 with intgrated Csu-dsu's on the card. We will have the Atm Oc3 cards in a few weeks. And they do look very sweet. We aready have the hardware, we are just finishing up the software... I am pretty sure that the cost on the Atm Oc3 cards is going to be around ( don't quote me for sure, but this should be close ) $2100. I know that sounds like alot, but compair that to a cisco solution. If you want more info, just call 1-800-813-5123 and talk to Doug or Eric. p.s. I would write a longer message but it is 3:30am and I need sleep BAD...
I would just like to point out a few things myself...
Point A) A senior VP at Intel Corporation, Albert Yu, indicated that Willamette would only be 30% faster than the Coppermine. The Willamete will not be that much faster than the Pentium III at the same clock speed. The most important thing to remember about the Willamette is Intel has decided the way to increase performance is to raise the clock speed and sacrifice IPC ( instructions per clock ) efficiency. So you can't compare this transient from the P III to the Willamette to the transitions of the 486 to Pentium. The Pentium had a much better IPC than the 486, the Willamette will most likely have a lower IPC than the P III. But the Willamette is designed to scale to very high clock speeds. You only have to look at the Willamette's pipeline to see this design philosophy. The pipeline has 20 stages; this will make it easy for Intel to raise the clock speed. For more info on how a pipeline length affects CPU performance check out this web page. http://www.aceshardware.c om/Spades/read.php?article_id=50. I would also like to point out that the double clocked ALU is only one stage of the 20 stage pipeline. You do have a good point about the Sse2 instructions, if Intel can get a lot of developers to use them it will make it much harder for AMD to claim they have the fastest FPU. But AMD shouldn't be afraid, they have just rolled out a new architecture that has a lot of room for growth. And I can't see Intel getting that far a head of AMD. I would expect that title of the fastest x86 CPU will change hands many times in the next year, but Intel is not about the totally destroy AMD.
Point B) I am not going to say I disagree with you it's just that I think 3d rendering is not a good example, the average computer user will never do 3d rendering outside of a game. I think that speech recognition is a much better example... something that many people would use if it worked better...
Point C) The Ppro was expensive because they had bad yields. This is the same reason that Rdram is much more expensive today when compared to Sdram.
Now I have to go to Comdex!!!!
Now if I could just get simcity 3000 ported to linux.....