Heck, let's "Take It To The Next Level" (TM) and include a GPS receiver; an auto-dialer; city/highway db. When the "alarm" goes off, have the vehicle auto-dial 911; a synthesized voice announces (among other things) the GPS coordinates, along with cross streets (city) or mile-post number (highway). If the driver attempts to thwart the system, the vehicle will administer electric shocks (with increasing intensity).
Parts of this is a good idea. Instead of taking control away from the driver, which may cause heaps of problems (eg. a glitch, someone trying to drive someone to the hospital to save a life - unfortunately after having a beer), alert the police. Give them the coords, vehicle type/color and registration. Having the emergency blinkers go on would also be a measure. Yes, a glitch could cause your neighbours to think you're a drunk bastard, but I find this an acceptable risk compared to coming to a halt on a speedway or refusing to start in an emergency.
The thought of detecting alcohol isn't a bad safety feature in itself. It's the measures taken if it is detected that is just plain wrong.
This is NOT about someone paying for their service to be extra fast. This is about forcible bundling by monopolies. This is about a company like AT&T deciding that they want to offer a movie download service and everyone else's is going to take 1000x as long as theirs to download.
That kind of service isn't unknown, although not as extreme. A DSL-provider here in Norway provides movies from it's store way quicker than from anywhere else. The reason? IT IS ALREADY WITHIN THEIR NETWORK! It basically costs them nothing to transfer it to you. Now, favouring their own services by slowing down other available options.. Wouldn't that be a misuse of monopoly?
Look. It doesn't take much to read a speech off of a piece of paper. That does not make him a brilliant speaker. He might be skilled in the art of reading speeches. YAY!
He also does it to throw folks like you and I off, thinking that nobody so idiotic could possibly be a threat, so we dismiss him, giving him freedom to, say, authorize the openning of our mail without search warrants. If he was just an ordinary citizen - not the president of the USA, I would probably not find him a big threat. Someone that has that much power should know better. Dismiss him? No freaking way. He's scary.
Amd never dropped the gigahertz race. They simply continued on a less extreme curve than Intel. As we can see from Intel's latest generation of CPUs (which have even lower clock rate than AMD CPUs) the actual absolute numbers are artificial. The key point is that AMD's processors have continued to increase in clock rate on a regular basis. IBM spent years sitting on their G5 without ever reaching the covetted "3 Ghz" which Apple claims they promised.
Let me rephrase. AMD never dropped the GHz race. They did continue to up the frequency, but spent more effort getting more done per clock. AMD's CPUs outperformed Intel's at the same frequency. The point was that GHz isn't a performance measure in itself. The combination of GHz, good instruction set and the processors efficiency (ie, getting more done per tick) are all great factors. The fact that PPC never reached 3GHz is really sad. PPC and AMD's XP-series of were about the same efficiency, but the PPC never kept up in the speed race, unfortunately.
(I've been using x86 since I got a 16MHz 286. The last few years I've started using a bunch of ARM devices and a couple of PPC devices. Of x86, ARM and PPC, I like the latter the best)
bluefoxlucid asks: "With Apple having now switched to x86 CPUs,
I've been wondering for a while why we use the x86 architecture
at all...."
Because its a better CPU.
Oh really?
"... The Power architecture was known for its better performance
per clock;..."
Utter nonsense. This is a complete lie. Benchmarks do not bear this out. And this is besides the fact, that this qualifier reveals the PowerPC's primary weakness -- it has a far lower clock rate.
I call bull. Having a "far lower clock rate" isn't necessarily a weakness. Look at what AMD did when they dropped the gigahertz race and started giving the chips an arbitrary performance number. They didn't focus on clockspeed, but on getting more done per tick. There are a lot of problems with high frequency computing, including (but not exclusive to) heat, being more vulnerable to interference, and being more expensive.
It is the correct and logical choice. If RISC were really the greatest thing since sliced bread, then PowerPC should be running circles around x86. But the truth is that it can't even keep up.
Oh come on. Do you think the only thing that governs market success (and therefore also further R&D) is the quality of the product (Think Britney Spears)? x86 isn't a good arch. powerpc is. If IBM had chosen PPC instead of x86, do you really think x86 would have gotten all its extentions, the high clock rate it has, and the same popularity? PowerPC doesn't have *close* to the same marketshare as x86, and development isn't as fast. Intel & AMD have huge amounts of cash to spend on R&D. Of course the finished product will outperform the PPC. But that doesn't mean that x86 is a *better* product.
Actually, I believe it should be like this: "tIs'b casu eitttele dnai nsib teet.r"
On a bit more serious note though. Network traffic is BE, which is why eg. Intels NPE (Network Processing Engines, an ARM CPU found in various embedded devices) runs BE. Quite a few of these also support running in LE, but this usually incurs a performance hit. On the Linksys NSLU2, which has an Intel IXP420 running at 266Mhz (Early models 133Mhz), the difference between transfer rates using LE and BE is ~30% due to byteswapping everything.
In our network-oriented world, perhaps BE would be better performance-wise. But you'd be amazed to see how many things break when changing endianness.
With Just-in-Time compilation, legacy x86 programs could be painlessly run on ARM/PPC by translating them dynamically at run time, similar to how CIL and Java work.
Do you really believe that? If so, how does one get to this fantasy land you live in? This may be true sometime in the future, but that day is not today.
Especially since an FPU is more or less an oddity on ARM CPUs. Which means running Debian on ARM is dog slow, since ARM Debian insists on using hardfloat, which triggers an interrupt so it can be handled by the kernel. GAH!
because when NT 3.1 shipped, it wanted 16 MB of RAM on the x86, and 32MB of RAM on the other systems, but going above 8 MB required specialized RAM because the RAM Chips (you plugged chips into sockets then, not chips on cards with standardized interfaces) were mass produced for 1 MB, 4 MB, and 8 MB, but going to 16 MB required using VERY expensive (relative to normal RAM) chips. So upgrading from 4 to 8 was normally doable (usually, they used the same chips, and you filled half the slots for 4MB, I think, it's been a long time since I had a 486 computer), but going to 16MB would often cost $2000 for the new RAM, when computers sold for $2000.
Just a detail there. Are you saying that expanding the ram on my 386 or 486 required something else than ram "sticks"? I remember upgrading my 386 to 16MB ram with kingston sticks (Well, not 16mb, since I used four slots of 4mb. Kingston "4mb" sticks had only nearly 4mb accessible to me, the rest I presume was for errorchecking or dealing with bad ram). These were the kind of ram sticks that came before EDO, might it've been fast page ram?
so long as he's not in the public eye, he's an amazing speaker. Uh, when he's talking to himself?
I don't bite on the "stupidity-pr"-thing. Noone with a little experience and IQ would "play dumb" to be a president. Really. The whole fucking world looks at Bush as a stubborn, war-mongering moron.
2.5" HDs are actually not very power-hungry. Typical power-draw figures are 5W during spinup, and about 2W while in use (dropping to 0.5W or so during spindown). Actually, they aren't that powerhungry. Most of the 2.5" HDs are capable of being powered by the USB-port, which gives them a grand total of 0.5A at 5V, ie 2.5W. The highest peaks are usually on spinning up, with power usage when in use a bit lower than that.
I do have a couple of 0.7A@5V drives too, but that still doesn't add up to 5W. So I'd say your powersaving-estimate would be a bit high;-)
Actually, the number of writes on flash memory tends to be in the millions these days. Combine this with wear levelling and Windows should run just fine on it.
Where can I get one of these? Windows doesn't run fine on anything else I have!
Not really. Many of my friends who got a C64 were programming in basic within a couple of weeks. Granted, the learning curve of c64 basic wasn't too steep. But for a determined child, learning to program in C (given a pointer to documentation), won't take long.
As a sidenote, having a licence that specifies "this version or any other later revision of this licence" is kinda braindead. That makes it possible to do all kinds of neat tricks to the licence, and you can't really do anything about it (Except change the licence for the next release).
Let me see.... So, they're changing the licence from now on. But I can still download a GPLv2-and-later licenced one that just isn't the latest version.
So, are they planning on adding features that will be incompatible with GPLv3?
"3) Stove top -- Pots/pans/ect would have their own unique heating elements & the entire stove top would be usable"
Those are called "Induction tops", and are readily available (Atleast here in Norway). You buy special pots/pans/etc for your special stove. Induction heats the pots/pans/etc, and *only* those. Advantages are amongst others rapid heating, rapid cooling of the stove, no restrictions on placement on the stove.
Is it good enough that 1% of the population can say 'I am fairly confident that this doesn't have any holes. Why should Joe Public have to rely on someone like me saying 'trust me, it's secure?'
Well, it's a hell of a lot better than 20-30 guys at some company that may or not share the same political opinions. Voting machines, when implemented properly should be the most reliable way to count the votes.
Fashion is short-lived. The point with fashion is spending boatloads of cash on short-lived stuff, so that you can claim to be "with it". The more cash you can spend on items that will obviously be "out" after a short time, the better. The shorter lifetime and higher cost make it attractive, so one can flaunt it to show off one's "supremacy" over the less-fortunate.
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Parts of this is a good idea. Instead of taking control away from the driver, which may cause heaps of problems (eg. a glitch, someone trying to drive someone to the hospital to save a life - unfortunately after having a beer), alert the police. Give them the coords, vehicle type/color and registration. Having the emergency blinkers go on would also be a measure.
Yes, a glitch could cause your neighbours to think you're a drunk bastard, but I find this an acceptable risk compared to coming to a halt on a speedway or refusing to start in an emergency.
The thought of detecting alcohol isn't a bad safety feature in itself. It's the measures taken if it is detected that is just plain wrong.
That kind of service isn't unknown, although not as extreme. A DSL-provider here in Norway provides movies from it's store way quicker than from anywhere else. The reason? IT IS ALREADY WITHIN THEIR NETWORK! It basically costs them nothing to transfer it to you.
Now, favouring their own services by slowing down other available options.. Wouldn't that be a misuse of monopoly?
Look. It doesn't take much to read a speech off of a piece of paper. That does not make him a brilliant speaker. He might be skilled in the art of reading speeches. YAY!
He also does it to throw folks like you and I off, thinking that nobody so idiotic could possibly be a threat, so we dismiss him, giving him freedom to, say, authorize the openning of our mail without search warrants.
If he was just an ordinary citizen - not the president of the USA, I would probably not find him a big threat. Someone that has that much power should know better.
Dismiss him? No freaking way. He's scary.
Let me rephrase. AMD never dropped the GHz race. They did continue to up the frequency, but spent more effort getting more done per clock. AMD's CPUs outperformed Intel's at the same frequency. The point was that GHz isn't a performance measure in itself. The combination of GHz, good instruction set and the processors efficiency (ie, getting more done per tick) are all great factors.
The fact that PPC never reached 3GHz is really sad. PPC and AMD's XP-series of were about the same efficiency, but the PPC never kept up in the speed race, unfortunately.
(I've been using x86 since I got a 16MHz 286. The last few years I've started using a bunch of ARM devices and a couple of PPC devices. Of x86, ARM and PPC, I like the latter the best)
Oh really?
I call bull. Having a "far lower clock rate" isn't necessarily a weakness. Look at what AMD did when they dropped the gigahertz race and started giving the chips an arbitrary performance number. They didn't focus on clockspeed, but on getting more done per tick. There are a lot of problems with high frequency computing, including (but not exclusive to) heat, being more vulnerable to interference, and being more expensive.
Oh come on. Do you think the only thing that governs market success (and therefore also further R&D) is the quality of the product (Think Britney Spears)? x86 isn't a good arch. powerpc is.
If IBM had chosen PPC instead of x86, do you really think x86 would have gotten all its extentions, the high clock rate it has, and the same popularity?
PowerPC doesn't have *close* to the same marketshare as x86, and development isn't as fast. Intel & AMD have huge amounts of cash to spend on R&D. Of course the finished product will outperform the PPC. But that doesn't mean that x86 is a *better* product.
tIs' ebacsue ilttel neidna si ebttre.
Actually, I believe it should be like this:
"tIs'b casu eitttele dnai nsib teet.r"
On a bit more serious note though. Network traffic is BE, which is why eg. Intels NPE (Network Processing Engines, an ARM CPU found in various embedded devices) runs BE. Quite a few of these also support running in LE, but this usually incurs a performance hit. On the Linksys NSLU2, which has an Intel IXP420 running at 266Mhz (Early models 133Mhz), the difference between transfer rates using LE and BE is ~30% due to byteswapping everything.
In our network-oriented world, perhaps BE would be better performance-wise. But you'd be amazed to see how many things break when changing endianness.
With Just-in-Time compilation, legacy x86 programs could be painlessly run on ARM/PPC by translating them dynamically at run time, similar to how CIL and Java work.
Do you really believe that? If so, how does one get to this fantasy land you live in? This may be true sometime in the future, but that day is not today.
Especially since an FPU is more or less an oddity on ARM CPUs. Which means running Debian on ARM is dog slow, since ARM Debian insists on using hardfloat, which triggers an interrupt so it can be handled by the kernel. GAH!
Just a detail there. Are you saying that expanding the ram on my 386 or 486 required something else than ram "sticks"? I remember upgrading my 386 to 16MB ram with kingston sticks (Well, not 16mb, since I used four slots of 4mb. Kingston "4mb" sticks had only nearly 4mb accessible to me, the rest I presume was for errorchecking or dealing with bad ram). These were the kind of ram sticks that came before EDO, might it've been fast page ram?
Uh, when he's talking to himself?
I don't bite on the "stupidity-pr"-thing. Noone with a little experience and IQ would "play dumb" to be a president. Really. The whole fucking world looks at Bush as a stubborn, war-mongering moron.
The article asked you a question. It's polite to give an answer. Quit whining or STFU.
2.5" HDs are actually not very power-hungry. Typical power-draw figures are 5W during spinup, and about 2W while in use (dropping to 0.5W or so during spindown).
;-)
Actually, they aren't that powerhungry. Most of the 2.5" HDs are capable of being powered by the USB-port, which gives them a grand total of 0.5A at 5V, ie 2.5W. The highest peaks are usually on spinning up, with power usage when in use a bit lower than that.
I do have a couple of 0.7A@5V drives too, but that still doesn't add up to 5W. So I'd say your powersaving-estimate would be a bit high
Where can I get one of these? Windows doesn't run fine on anything else I have!
Think volume, not storage size.
They aren't
If the RIAA want their pound of flesh, would they not be better off going after the Russian licensing agency?
Yes. But since the RIAA is in the US of A, suing a "innocent" company in another country (with different laws) for ridiculous amounts just might work.
Not really. Many of my friends who got a C64 were programming in basic within a couple of weeks. Granted, the learning curve of c64 basic wasn't too steep. But for a determined child, learning to program in C (given a pointer to documentation), won't take long.
As a sidenote, having a licence that specifies "this version or any other later revision of this licence" is kinda braindead. That makes it possible to do all kinds of neat tricks to the licence, and you can't really do anything about it (Except change the licence for the next release).
Let me see.... So, they're changing the licence from now on. But I can still download a GPLv2-and-later licenced one that just isn't the latest version.
So, are they planning on adding features that will be incompatible with GPLv3?
AFAIK, all bittorrent clients have a "UserAgent"-kind of field. If that happens to be BitTyrant, ban the user.
Ok, they're apparently caleld "Induction cookers", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induction_cooker
"3) Stove top -- Pots/pans/ect would have their own unique heating elements & the entire stove top would be usable"
Those are called "Induction tops", and are readily available (Atleast here in Norway). You buy special pots/pans/etc for your special stove. Induction heats the pots/pans/etc, and *only* those. Advantages are amongst others rapid heating, rapid cooling of the stove, no restrictions on placement on the stove.
Is it good enough that 1% of the population can say 'I am fairly confident that this doesn't have any holes.
Why should Joe Public have to rely on someone like me saying 'trust me, it's secure?'
Well, it's a hell of a lot better than 20-30 guys at some company that may or not share the same political opinions. Voting machines, when implemented properly should be the most reliable way to count the votes.
Funny thing that. If I were google, I'd do that too. Yet, googling for "finance" brings up Yahoo Finance as the first link, *then* google finance ;-)
Fashion is short-lived. The point with fashion is spending boatloads of cash on short-lived stuff, so that you can claim to be "with it". The more cash you can spend on items that will obviously be "out" after a short time, the better. The shorter lifetime and higher cost make it attractive, so one can flaunt it to show off one's "supremacy" over the less-fortunate.
So the ISS is going to hide inside itself? OP said ISS *and* astronauts. He was wondering where the ISS was going to "hide".
Alternatively shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits
(Although neither George Carlin nor I understand why "tits" is there)