while it is true that "beaming" broadband into Iran is absurd. as others have said, whomever asked the press secretary that question is ignorant of how broadband works and deserves to be laughed at soundly by their peers.:p
that said, your characterization of Iran is way off. Iran is considerably more civilized then what you think it is. Electricity, cell phones, computers, and internet access are all relatively common place in Iran.
The place that you are describing is called Afghanistan.
The user's perception of the performance differences between older CPUs running Win95 and newer CPUs running modern OS's has nothing to do with the processors that AMD and Intel are selling. It is the software. it is partly the operating system. it's partly the fact that people run a lot more junk in the background then they used to.
it is also sometimes the OEM's fault unfortunately.
amusing antectode: a friend of mine was recently having serious performance problems with his new laptop. I spent half a day trying to figure out why and discovered that the OEM had installed a "power saving" application on the machine that was performing registry reads 20-100 times per second. The only thing the application had in the registry was its configuration settings. Needless to say, the OEM, who shall go unnamed clearly has an utterly incompetent software engineering team. The application was suppossed to detect when to throttle down the CPU frequency and thereby save battery life, but the application was drawing more power all by itself then anything else in the system and was causing performance on this otherwise excellent piece of hardware be horrible.
In that case, I uninstalled all OEM supplied software from the system and it became quite snappy.
Actually, acceleration is not an issue at all. If a warp bubble was ever made to work, the acceleration for the people on the ship would be zero.
Acceleration is a change in velocity. In a warp bubble, if you could make one, there is no change in velocity because the ship does not move. The space behind the ship is stretched and the space in front of the ship is contracted. The ship itself doesn't move.
Re:Let's not put the cart before the horse
on
Introducing the Warpship
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I agree that it is way to soon to be talking about engineering designs for a warp drive as anything more than speculative curiosities. But that said, if such a drive works, it isn't time that will be warped. It is space.
The basic theory behind how that could be done was worked out in a physic's paper published in the 1990s. It requires a large source of negative energy to sustain the warp "bubble" though, and its not clear how or even if that is possible. I presume this is why "dark energy" is being brought into the picture with the proposals linked by this slashdot article. Since the understanding is that if dark energy really does exist, it has a large negative magnitude.
The other problem with that initial paper that I'm aware of (there may be others) is that the paper showed that a moving bubble in space time that gets between two locations at a speed that exceeds the speed of light can exist as a valid solution to the equations of general relativity in a universe in which negative energy exists. The paper didn't demonstrate though that such a bubble could be constructed from a region of space that didn't already have one. For such a bubble to be usable as a means of transportation, even in theory, you need to demonstrate not only that "warp bubbles" can exist, you need to also demonstrate that they can be constructed at the source, and then deconstructed at the destination.
Maybe follow-up papers have discussed those details and shown that construction/deconstruction are also theoretically possible? I haven't followed up on it. But even if they do, we still require large amounts of negative energy to do this and negative energy, if it really exists at all, is not well understood.
I'm also not clear on what kind of radiation such a bubble would give off, but it's possible it would be intense enough to fry anything inside...
It is exciting to see astrophysics beginning to point at the idea notion that negative energy might actually be real though. It means that things such as warp ships are not complete fantasy. They are way, way off though, if possible at all. We likely won't know for sure for quite a long time.:)
I was with you until you turned to ranting about schools becoming more about prepping for standardized tests.
A programming assignment in which a student is assigned to create a piece of software that solves an assigned task is not a standardized test. There's no basis for a comparison.
More generally, its also not reasonable to assume reusing old testing materials on the part of a teacher is new. Your average person tends to be rather lazy about how they do their job and will frequently take the path that involves less effort if they believe the end result still sufficiently (what ever they define to be sufficient in their own minds) gets the job done. A study of history suggests this has always been true. There's no reason to think teachers are any different. Recycling of old testing materials has likely been going on amongst the less inspired of the teaching profession for as long as teachers have existed.
True. Those Intel chips do not have integrated memory controllers.
All the chips from both companies potentially get a boost from DDR3 memory over DDR2 memory. But, as the article demonstrates on the other pages, for the benchmarks they are looking at, the sensitivity going from DDR2->DDR3 is small.
I only talked about it in terms of integrated memory controllers because you brought up the idea that Intel parts have always been "memory starved". That statement is what I was contesting. Intel parts have only been memory starved on some workloads, relative to AMD, when AMD had an integrated memory controller, and Intel didn't. The blanket statement that this has always been the case is not true.
As to your point that you want to see data justifying the claims that DDR2 vs DDR3 in their study isn't all that relevant, the article provides that data. One may question the workloads they chose, but the data justifying the claim within the scope of the workloads that they did choose is there.
The only significant difference between Intel and AMD processors on the memory BW front is that AMD moved to the integrated memory controller two generations before Intel did. If your experience is that Intel processors have always been memory starved, then your experience is limited to the time between when AMD integrated the controller and when Intel integrated the memory controller.
On the question of memory BW it is that simple. The company that integrated the memory controller first was ahead on deliverable memory BW for a while. With i7 now both companies have integrated memory controllers, and that memory BW benefit which AMD had over Intel is now gone.
I'm a bit puzzled by the notion that this might mean CPU developers would put a new focus on power efficiency. The focus from CPU manufacturers in the netbook space already is on power efficiency. That is the whole point of Intel'a Atom processor line, for example.
I didn't aim to prove the point you stated, and I personally think Greenspan is naive. Of course Greespans mistakes don't have anything to do with antitrust issues, so it doesn't make any sense for you to bring that up.
I simply said what the EU report actually states. They state there in the ruling that they believe Intel paid OEMs to not buy from AMD, and they also state there in the ruling that there is no evidence of this in Intel's contracts with those OEMs and that the believe that none of Intel's contracts with those OEMs are illegal. Read it for yourself. That is what it says. It's only a couple pages and is on the EU court's website.
Have you read the text of the actual ruling on the EU court's website? The court says that all of Intel's contracts with their OEM's are legal. There is no evidence of the abuses they allege in any of the contracts that Intel has with channel suppliers, and the EU court says so in their own ruling.
They state that they believe these things to be occurring through back channels but admit that the contracts show no evidence of it.
I'm still wondering what the EU wants Intel to change. If the contracts are all legal and above the board as the EU says, what exactly are they asking Intel to do?
You really think that the board members of a company like Intel are stupid enough to put people in charge who would intentionally take actions that would cause the company to get broken up by the government?? That is a rather naive point of view. Not to mention, if Intel invites regulatory scrutiny in excess of what they are already getting, their stock price will go down, not up. So that strategy would not be a way to get lucrative options or bonuses. That strategy, on the part of the people running the company would be a recipe for decreasing the value of their stock options, and getting themselves fired by the company's board of directors.
you are also overstating the facts. the word you repeatedly emphasis (bribe) occurs nowhere in the ruling. the ruling states that the contracts themselves were all legal. the EU is reading between the lines of the contracts to infer the illegal activity that they claim Intel engaged in.
i'm still puzzled by what the EU wants other than to levy a fine. they say Intel has engaged in no illegal contracts. what exactly do they want Intel to change?
unfortunately that isn't sufficient. If you are so big that the governments are in fear of you becoming a monopoly they are going to start going after you no matter what you do.
It's not really clear that Intel really told customers not to buy they competitors products or if the court is mincing words and arguing that Intel's dominant position puts them in a position where "encouraging customers to buy your products" is the same thing as "encouraging the customer not to buy the competitors products".
Volume discounting means "buy more and we give you a discount". What they were doing was "don't buy from others and we give you a discount.. you don't even have to buy more from us".
What is not clear is whether that is actually what they did. It has certainly been inferred that they said "we give you the volume discount if you don't buy from AMD", but what is not clear is if they actually said that to their buyers or not.
Afterall, a buyer has a fixed number of CPUs that they are going to buy. period. it is determined by the number that they think they can sell to customers. If Intel says "we'll give you a discount if you buy more from us", because it is a zero sum game, that MEANS that the buyer will buy less from AMD whether Intel asked them to or not.
What is not clear is if the lawyers for the other side are arguing that the fact that Intel selling more chips means AMD sells less means that offering volume discounts to increase sales is equivalent to telling the buyer not to buy from the competitor. It sounds like this is the game the game the EU and AMD's lawyers are playing.
Intel would gain nothing by explicitely telling its buyers not to buy from AMD. Convincing the buyer to buy more from Intel automatically means AMD sells less anyway. That is the very nature of competition in a market where two companies are competing for a percentage of a fixed amount of sales.
I know one thing. Whether Intel plays unfairly with their competitor is an open question.
But the idea that the want to destroy their competitor doesn't make sense. If Intel ever succeeded in destroying their competitor, both the EU and the US government would immediately label Intel a true monopoly and would proceed to break the company up into separate companies.
Intel has to know this.
The worst thing that could possible happen to Intel would be for their competition in the microprocessor space to be destroyed.
you are totally correct that Kirk's ascendancy to becoming the captain is absurd. Though this doesn't bother me mostly because, just about every star trek episode ever written has been absurd in how it handles the command structure. they sometimes play lip service to the idea that the commander shouldn't be standing on the front lines of some dangerous exploration with a pistol in his hand...
but in just about every star trek episode he almost always is.
clearly their command structure isn't meant to be realistic at all. star trek has always been more interested in inserting their main character into the lime light regardless of the sense behind it.
no to mention... one thing unique about star trek is that the series' play with alternate time lines quite frequently. it isn't unique to play with alternate time lines, but it is unique to play with them as carelessly as some star trek episodes do.
they always succeed in correcting the time line back "to canon" whenever time lines get screwed up in past star trek episodes and movies. but it is certainly staying within the spirit of the idea that alternate time lines can and do exist when this movie goes and diverges from the "canon" time line and ends without ever returning back to it.
I do agree that the fact that the mining ship's platform was impenetrable to any planetary defenses, yet easily destroyable by a few shots from spock's ship to be absurd. but then again...star trek has always been notorious for setting up a problem for the hero's to solve that in reality should have easily been solvable by other means. So I shrugged it off.:)
I agree that the whole delta vega thing made no sense. 1) delta vega has to be a moon of vulcan for it to see the black hole that closely 2) yet the name "delta vega" is not a name you would expect for a moon of vulcan, so the writers seemed to think that it wasn't a moon of vulcan. 3) it's possible for a moon of vulcan to not fall into the black hole IF the black hole has the same mass as the original planet, BUT, the rest of the sequences around the black hole clearly imply that the black hole had considerably more mass than the original object. for example, spock's ship an the mining vessel wouldn't have gotten trapped in the original black hole if it has the same mass as the supernova. and the enterprise would have had zero difficulty escaping from the black hole at the end if that last black hole really had the same mass as the mining vessel. But then again, star trek has always leaned toward the side of "fantasy" whenever "scientific realism" didn't suit the plot. so this also is typical of star trek.
As for the narada taking on damage when the kelvin collided with it: maybe it did. the movie didn't cover it, but the ship did just drift around in space and do nothing for 25 years...
come now... as a navy man you are concerned about promoting an inexperienced recruit to captain too quickly, but you aren't bothered by the fact that in pretty much every single star trek episode ever made, the captain of the damn ship is almost always the first one to leave the ship to lead the team that goes to determine if the new anomally they just discovered is safe?;)
That last point has bothered me for as long as star trek has been around. In a world where the captain is the first one to beam straight into every dangerous situation, it seems the only logical conclusion is that captains must not be valued very highly. Seems almost natural at that point that you might give some random bloke the job even though he has little experience.:p
what can happen is that a bad teacher can hide behind bureaucratic obstacles once that teacher has seniority, or, even worse, such a teacher can (and sometimes will) threaten to sue the school district if the district tries to fire him/her.
most school districts do not have the financial resources or expertise to fight such a battle. so they chose not to.
in the lifetime of a human, yes, the probability of such a major asteroid impact is very small and hard to take seriously.
in the lifetime of the planet, or of the human species (unless you think we are going to drive ourselves extinct), the probability that a major asteroid impact will eventually occur is very high. It is inevitable that it will occur eventually. The only logic by which human beings shouldn't be concerned about this is if you assume we're too stupid (as a species) to survive that long anyway.
i didn't put words in your mouth. the point is that no machine which uses an atom is going to have a high end gpu in it. hence saying that the success of the atom is proof that cpu speed increases are over while pretending it doesn't imply anything negative for gpu speed increases is silly. the success of atom based cpu's shows that there is now a market in which both cpu speed AND gpu speed are irrelevant.
netbooks which have small processors like the atom or some arm based processor in them, mean lower margins for intel and other cpu manufacturers. but almost all of these machines that have atom or arm based processors in them also have a cheap integrated Intel graphics solution. that is equally bad for the gpu market. obviously in the segment where atom is relevant, gpu speed is even less relevant than cpu speed is if they are using integrated intel graphics solutions (which basically suck even worse than the atom does so far as performance is concerned).
as for the claim that gains in gpu speed are not anywhere near done, while saying that CPU speed gains are over. that doesn't really hold water either. claiming that gpu speed increases won't be over until we have photorealistic rendering in real time ignores the way microprocessor design works. gpu speed increases will stop for the same reason that cpu speed increases stopped: because you eventually reach the point where the next speed increases draws so much power and generates so much heat that there is absolutely no benefit to increasing the speed anymore. cpu speeds didn't stop increasing because software couldn't benefit from the speed increases anymore. it stopped because increasing speed further was so expensive that it made no sense to do it anymore. That said, cpus still are increasing speed with each generation, but the increases are coming much more slowly and are occurring as a result of micro-architecture improvements, which are much harder to pull off then just shrinking the process size, and doubling the power (which is how cpu speed was increased generation over generation in the 90s).
high end gpu's have already crossed that threshold as well, in my opinion. which is why I suspect nvidia is interested in expanding beyond the graphics market. think about it: the power supply requirements of a high end desktop that has the best possible graphics solution installed are getting pretty nuts. the power supply in a high end gaming/video-rendering desktop (if you want the machine to be able to run without blue-screening every few hours) costs more than the CPU itself. gpus are hitting a plateau as well at this point because of this power issue.
gpus are going to have to improve performance the hard way from hear on out, in my opninion, just like cpus have been forced to do.
So. You think there is a market for products that have low end ATOM CPU's and high end graphics?? That is absurd. It is true that many people can get by with just an Atom processor, but those same people are most definitely NOT going to be buying an nVidia GPU to go with that processor either.
Intel isn't nearly as afraid of nVidia making CPUs as you seem to think. No microprocessor manufacturer (not even AMD) is even capable of meeting the demands of the high volume segments of the PC market the way that Intel is capable of doing.
For example, if Intel were to disappear from the face of the earth, do you know what would happen? There would be no company physically capable of producing enough CPUs to meet demand, prices would sky rocket because supply would be so much less than demand and it would probably take a decade before the likes of nVidia or AMD were able to build up the manufacturing capacity to meet the demand that Intel is currently supplying.
For better or worse, Intel is the dominant player because nobody can match their manufacturing capacity. I'm sure they worry about the possibility that nVidia might cut into their CPU sales...but the notion that they would be scared witless that a company that doesn't even own a FAB is going to rival them in the high volume microprocessor market segments is naive.
I personally suspect that what Intel wants to get out of this is some clear understanding that non-AMD customers who might start using AMD's spun-off FABs (which is certainly going to start happening at some point) do not get to benefit from the cross licensing agreement that Intel has with AMD.
I'm not a lawyer, and haven't seen the licensing agreements either, but I suspect that what Intel is trying to avoid is having AMD's old fabs thinking they are a party in the licence agreements and thereby becoming a back door for other companies to get in on the agreement.
on what basis do you think people wanting to spend less in the current economy hurts Intel more than AMD? Intel's chips do tend to be more expensive because people are still willing, for the most part, to pay more for them. Intel charges higher prices on their CPUs because they can. Not because they need to.
But you need to keep in mind: Intel is still a process generation a head of AMD and AMD's recent spinoff of their foundry is not going to help AMD in that regard. And in the end, the cost of manufacturing a CPU decreases with each advance in process generation.
If the amount of $ customers are willing to spend on their CPU's drops as the economy grinds down, both companies will take a hit on their profit margins, but Intel can afford to lower prices further than AMD can afford to do, so long as AMD continues to be a lagging behind Intel by a process generation.
Slashdot Mirror
while it is true that "beaming" broadband into Iran is absurd. as others have said, whomever asked the press secretary that question is ignorant of how broadband works and deserves to be laughed at soundly by their peers. :p
that said, your characterization of Iran is way off. Iran is considerably more civilized then what you think it is. Electricity, cell phones, computers, and internet access are all relatively common place in Iran.
The place that you are describing is called Afghanistan.
The user's perception of the performance differences between older CPUs running Win95 and newer CPUs running modern OS's has nothing to do with the processors that AMD and Intel are selling. It is the software. it is partly the operating system. it's partly the fact that people run a lot more junk in the background then they used to.
it is also sometimes the OEM's fault unfortunately.
amusing antectode: a friend of mine was recently having serious performance problems with his new laptop. I spent half a day trying to figure out why and discovered that the OEM had installed a "power saving" application on the machine that was performing registry reads 20-100 times per second. The only thing the application had in the registry was its configuration settings. Needless to say, the OEM, who shall go unnamed clearly has an utterly incompetent software engineering team. The application was suppossed to detect when to throttle down the CPU frequency and thereby save battery life, but the application was drawing more power all by itself then anything else in the system and was causing performance on this otherwise excellent piece of hardware be horrible.
In that case, I uninstalled all OEM supplied software from the system and it became quite snappy.
Actually, acceleration is not an issue at all. If a warp bubble was ever made to work, the acceleration for the people on the ship would be zero.
Acceleration is a change in velocity. In a warp bubble, if you could make one, there is no change in velocity because the ship does not move. The space behind the ship is stretched and the space in front of the ship is contracted. The ship itself doesn't move.
I agree that it is way to soon to be talking about engineering designs for a warp drive as anything more than speculative curiosities. But that said, if such a drive works, it isn't time that will be warped. It is space.
The basic theory behind how that could be done was worked out in a physic's paper published in the 1990s. It requires a large source of negative energy to sustain the warp "bubble" though, and its not clear how or even if that is possible. I presume this is why "dark energy" is being brought into the picture with the proposals linked by this slashdot article. Since the understanding is that if dark energy really does exist, it has a large negative magnitude.
The other problem with that initial paper that I'm aware of (there may be others) is that the paper showed that a moving bubble in space time that gets between two locations at a speed that exceeds the speed of light can exist as a valid solution to the equations of general relativity in a universe in which negative energy exists. The paper didn't demonstrate though that such a bubble could be constructed from a region of space that didn't already have one. For such a bubble to be usable as a means of transportation, even in theory, you need to demonstrate not only that "warp bubbles" can exist, you need to also demonstrate that they can be constructed at the source, and then deconstructed at the destination.
Maybe follow-up papers have discussed those details and shown that construction/deconstruction are also theoretically possible? I haven't followed up on it. But even if they do, we still require large amounts of negative energy to do this and negative energy, if it really exists at all, is not well understood.
I'm also not clear on what kind of radiation such a bubble would give off, but it's possible it would be intense enough to fry anything inside...
It is exciting to see astrophysics beginning to point at the idea notion that negative energy might actually be real though. It means that things such as warp ships are not complete fantasy. They are way, way off though, if possible at all. We likely won't know for sure for quite a long time. :)
I was with you until you turned to ranting about schools becoming more about prepping for standardized tests.
A programming assignment in which a student is assigned to create a piece of software that solves an assigned task is not a standardized test. There's no basis for a comparison.
More generally, its also not reasonable to assume reusing old testing materials on the part of a teacher is new. Your average person tends to be rather lazy about how they do their job and will frequently take the path that involves less effort if they believe the end result still sufficiently (what ever they define to be sufficient in their own minds) gets the job done. A study of history suggests this has always been true. There's no reason to think teachers are any different. Recycling of old testing materials has likely been going on amongst the less inspired of the teaching profession for as long as teachers have existed.
True. Those Intel chips do not have integrated memory controllers.
All the chips from both companies potentially get a boost from DDR3 memory over DDR2 memory. But, as the article demonstrates on the other pages, for the benchmarks they are looking at, the sensitivity going from DDR2->DDR3 is small.
I only talked about it in terms of integrated memory controllers because you brought up the idea that Intel parts have always been "memory starved". That statement is what I was contesting. Intel parts have only been memory starved on some workloads, relative to AMD, when AMD had an integrated memory controller, and Intel didn't. The blanket statement that this has always been the case is not true.
As to your point that you want to see data justifying the claims that DDR2 vs DDR3 in their study isn't all that relevant, the article provides that data. One may question the workloads they chose, but the data justifying the claim within the scope of the workloads that they did choose is there.
The only significant difference between Intel and AMD processors on the memory BW front is that AMD moved to the integrated memory controller two generations before Intel did. If your experience is that Intel processors have always been memory starved, then your experience is limited to the time between when AMD integrated the controller and when Intel integrated the memory controller.
On the question of memory BW it is that simple. The company that integrated the memory controller first was ahead on deliverable memory BW for a while. With i7 now both companies have integrated memory controllers, and that memory BW benefit which AMD had over Intel is now gone.
I'm a bit puzzled by the notion that this might mean CPU developers would put a new focus on power efficiency. The focus from CPU manufacturers in the netbook space already is on power efficiency. That is the whole point of Intel'a Atom processor line, for example.
I didn't aim to prove the point you stated, and I personally think Greenspan is naive. Of course Greespans mistakes don't have anything to do with antitrust issues, so it doesn't make any sense for you to bring that up.
I simply said what the EU report actually states. They state there in the ruling that they believe Intel paid OEMs to not buy from AMD, and they also state there in the ruling that there is no evidence of this in Intel's contracts with those OEMs and that the believe that none of Intel's contracts with those OEMs are illegal. Read it for yourself. That is what it says. It's only a couple pages and is on the EU court's website.
Have you read the text of the actual ruling on the EU court's website? The court says that all of Intel's contracts with their OEM's are legal. There is no evidence of the abuses they allege in any of the contracts that Intel has with channel suppliers, and the EU court says so in their own ruling.
They state that they believe these things to be occurring through back channels but admit that the contracts show no evidence of it.
I'm still wondering what the EU wants Intel to change. If the contracts are all legal and above the board as the EU says, what exactly are they asking Intel to do?
You really think that the board members of a company like Intel are stupid enough to put people in charge who would intentionally take actions that would cause the company to get broken up by the government?? That is a rather naive point of view. Not to mention, if Intel invites regulatory scrutiny in excess of what they are already getting, their stock price will go down, not up. So that strategy would not be a way to get lucrative options or bonuses. That strategy, on the part of the people running the company would be a recipe for decreasing the value of their stock options, and getting themselves fired by the company's board of directors.
you are also overstating the facts. the word you repeatedly emphasis (bribe) occurs nowhere in the ruling. the ruling states that the contracts themselves were all legal. the EU is reading between the lines of the contracts to infer the illegal activity that they claim Intel engaged in.
i'm still puzzled by what the EU wants other than to levy a fine. they say Intel has engaged in no illegal contracts. what exactly do they want Intel to change?
unfortunately that isn't sufficient. If you are so big that the governments are in fear of you becoming a monopoly they are going to start going after you no matter what you do.
It's not really clear that Intel really told customers not to buy they competitors products or if the court is mincing words and arguing that Intel's dominant position puts them in a position where "encouraging customers to buy your products" is the same thing as "encouraging the customer not to buy the competitors products".
Volume discounting means "buy more and we give you a discount". What they were doing was "don't buy from others and we give you a discount.. you don't even have to buy more from us".
What is not clear is whether that is actually what they did. It has certainly been inferred that they said "we give you the volume discount if you don't buy from AMD", but what is not clear is if they actually said that to their buyers or not.
Afterall, a buyer has a fixed number of CPUs that they are going to buy. period. it is determined by the number that they think they can sell to customers. If Intel says "we'll give you a discount if you buy more from us", because it is a zero sum game, that MEANS that the buyer will buy less from AMD whether Intel asked them to or not.
What is not clear is if the lawyers for the other side are arguing that the fact that Intel selling more chips means AMD sells less means that offering volume discounts to increase sales is equivalent to telling the buyer not to buy from the competitor. It sounds like this is the game the game the EU and AMD's lawyers are playing.
Intel would gain nothing by explicitely telling its buyers not to buy from AMD. Convincing the buyer to buy more from Intel automatically means AMD sells less anyway. That is the very nature of competition in a market where two companies are competing for a percentage of a fixed amount of sales.
I know one thing. Whether Intel plays unfairly with their competitor is an open question.
But the idea that the want to destroy their competitor doesn't make sense. If Intel ever succeeded in destroying their competitor, both the EU and the US government would immediately label Intel a true monopoly and would proceed to break the company up into separate companies.
Intel has to know this.
The worst thing that could possible happen to Intel would be for their competition in the microprocessor space to be destroyed.
you are totally correct that Kirk's ascendancy to becoming the captain is absurd. Though this doesn't bother me mostly because, just about every star trek episode ever written has been absurd in how it handles the command structure. they sometimes play lip service to the idea that the commander shouldn't be standing on the front lines of some dangerous exploration with a pistol in his hand...
but in just about every star trek episode he almost always is.
clearly their command structure isn't meant to be realistic at all. star trek has always been more interested in inserting their main character into the lime light regardless of the sense behind it.
no to mention... one thing unique about star trek is that the series' play with alternate time lines quite frequently. it isn't unique to play with alternate time lines, but it is unique to play with them as carelessly as some star trek episodes do.
they always succeed in correcting the time line back "to canon" whenever time lines get screwed up in past star trek episodes and movies. but it is certainly staying within the spirit of the idea that alternate time lines can and do exist when this movie goes and diverges from the "canon" time line and ends without ever returning back to it.
I do agree that the fact that the mining ship's platform was impenetrable to any planetary defenses, yet easily destroyable by a few shots from spock's ship to be absurd. but then again...star trek has always been notorious for setting up a problem for the hero's to solve that in reality should have easily been solvable by other means. So I shrugged it off. :)
I agree that the whole delta vega thing made no sense.
1) delta vega has to be a moon of vulcan for it to see the black hole that closely
2) yet the name "delta vega" is not a name you would expect for a moon of vulcan, so the writers seemed to think that it wasn't a moon of vulcan.
3) it's possible for a moon of vulcan to not fall into the black hole IF the black hole has the same mass as the original planet, BUT, the rest of the sequences around the black hole clearly imply that the black hole had considerably more mass than the original object. for example, spock's ship an the mining vessel wouldn't have gotten trapped in the original black hole if it has the same mass as the supernova. and the enterprise would have had zero difficulty escaping from the black hole at the end if that last black hole really had the same mass as the mining vessel. But then again, star trek has always leaned toward the side of "fantasy" whenever "scientific realism" didn't suit the plot. so this also is typical of star trek.
As for the narada taking on damage when the kelvin collided with it: maybe it did. the movie didn't cover it, but the ship did just drift around in space and do nothing for 25 years...
come now... as a navy man you are concerned about promoting an inexperienced recruit to captain too quickly, but you aren't bothered by the fact that in pretty much every single star trek episode ever made, the captain of the damn ship is almost always the first one to leave the ship to lead the team that goes to determine if the new anomally they just discovered is safe? ;)
That last point has bothered me for as long as star trek has been around. In a world where the captain is the first one to beam straight into every dangerous situation, it seems the only logical conclusion is that captains must not be valued very highly. Seems almost natural at that point that you might give some random bloke the job even though he has little experience. :p
what can happen is that a bad teacher can hide behind bureaucratic obstacles once that teacher has seniority, or, even worse, such a teacher can (and sometimes will) threaten to sue the school district if the district tries to fire him/her.
most school districts do not have the financial resources or expertise to fight such a battle. so they chose not to.
your comparison is not a good one.
in the lifetime of a human, yes, the probability of such a major asteroid impact is very small and hard to take seriously.
in the lifetime of the planet, or of the human species (unless you think we are going to drive ourselves extinct), the probability that a major asteroid impact will eventually occur is very high. It is inevitable that it will occur eventually. The only logic by which human beings shouldn't be concerned about this is if you assume we're too stupid (as a species) to survive that long anyway.
i didn't put words in your mouth. the point is that no machine which uses an atom is going to have a high end gpu in it. hence saying that the success of the atom is proof that cpu speed increases are over while pretending it doesn't imply anything negative for gpu speed increases is silly. the success of atom based cpu's shows that there is now a market in which both cpu speed AND gpu speed are irrelevant.
netbooks which have small processors like the atom or some arm based processor in them, mean lower margins for intel and other cpu manufacturers. but almost all of these machines that have atom or arm based processors in them also have a cheap integrated Intel graphics solution. that is equally bad for the gpu market. obviously in the segment where atom is relevant, gpu speed is even less relevant than cpu speed is if they are using integrated intel graphics solutions (which basically suck even worse than the atom does so far as performance is concerned).
as for the claim that gains in gpu speed are not anywhere near done, while saying that CPU speed gains are over. that doesn't really hold water either. claiming that gpu speed increases won't be over until we have photorealistic rendering in real time ignores the way microprocessor design works. gpu speed increases will stop for the same reason that cpu speed increases stopped: because you eventually reach the point where the next speed increases draws so much power and generates so much heat that there is absolutely no benefit to increasing the speed anymore. cpu speeds didn't stop increasing because software couldn't benefit from the speed increases anymore. it stopped because increasing speed further was so expensive that it made no sense to do it anymore. That said, cpus still are increasing speed with each generation, but the increases are coming much more slowly and are occurring as a result of micro-architecture improvements, which are much harder to pull off then just shrinking the process size, and doubling the power (which is how cpu speed was increased generation over generation in the 90s).
high end gpu's have already crossed that threshold as well, in my opinion. which is why I suspect nvidia is interested in expanding beyond the graphics market. think about it: the power supply requirements of a high end desktop that has the best possible graphics solution installed are getting pretty nuts. the power supply in a high end gaming/video-rendering desktop (if you want the machine to be able to run without blue-screening every few hours) costs more than the CPU itself. gpus are hitting a plateau as well at this point because of this power issue.
gpus are going to have to improve performance the hard way from hear on out, in my opninion, just like cpus have been forced to do.
So. You think there is a market for products that have low end ATOM CPU's and high end graphics?? That is absurd. It is true that many people can get by with just an Atom processor, but those same people are most definitely NOT going to be buying an nVidia GPU to go with that processor either.
Intel isn't nearly as afraid of nVidia making CPUs as you seem to think. No microprocessor manufacturer (not even AMD) is even capable of meeting the demands of the high volume segments of the PC market the way that Intel is capable of doing.
For example, if Intel were to disappear from the face of the earth, do you know what would happen? There would be no company physically capable of producing enough CPUs to meet demand, prices would sky rocket because supply would be so much less than demand and it would probably take a decade before the likes of nVidia or AMD were able to build up the manufacturing capacity to meet the demand that Intel is currently supplying.
For better or worse, Intel is the dominant player because nobody can match their manufacturing capacity. I'm sure they worry about the possibility that nVidia might cut into their CPU sales...but the notion that they would be scared witless that a company that doesn't even own a FAB is going to rival them in the high volume microprocessor market segments is naive.
I personally suspect that what Intel wants to get out of this is some clear understanding that non-AMD customers who might start using AMD's spun-off FABs (which is certainly going to start happening at some point) do not get to benefit from the cross licensing agreement that Intel has with AMD. I'm not a lawyer, and haven't seen the licensing agreements either, but I suspect that what Intel is trying to avoid is having AMD's old fabs thinking they are a party in the licence agreements and thereby becoming a back door for other companies to get in on the agreement.
on what basis do you think people wanting to spend less in the current economy hurts Intel more than AMD? Intel's chips do tend to be more expensive because people are still willing, for the most part, to pay more for them. Intel charges higher prices on their CPUs because they can. Not because they need to.
But you need to keep in mind: Intel is still a process generation a head of AMD and AMD's recent spinoff of their foundry is not going to help AMD in that regard. And in the end, the cost of manufacturing a CPU decreases with each advance in process generation.
If the amount of $ customers are willing to spend on their CPU's drops as the economy grinds down, both companies will take a hit on their profit margins, but Intel can afford to lower prices further than AMD can afford to do, so long as AMD continues to be a lagging behind Intel by a process generation.
That scenario hurts AMD more.