The "brakes" and "accelerator" in my car (a white 2004 Prius), are in fact, drive-by-wire. A computer meltdown could make things interesting. My car is nicknamed "Snowcrash" in anticipation of this possibility. Now, Toyota claims that the brakes have a kind of mechanical hydraulic reversion with a computer failure, and I trust that they have thought of, and prepared for, at least 99% of the failure modes.
Even in conventional internal-combustion-only cars, the transmissions are becoming significantly more complex and electronics-driven.
Massachussets is involved in a case with Microsoft over the future of digital documents. MA has made it a requirement that all records be stored in a completely open digital format, and have recommended that the OpenDoc standard qualifies (along with Adobe's PDF) and that Microsoft's new MSXML doesn't.
Microsoft is imposing some restrictions on the MSXML format -- and it would appear that they might be able to change those restrictions at some future time.
If they are willing to cut off an entire country, then potentially it may be impossible legally to read and modify that country's documents. Massachussets has to be aware that if it could happen to Korea, it could potentially happen to MA if they are too uppity.
We'll see if Massachussets officials can withstand the full-court press of Microsoft's hard-bought political muscle, but if anything should give those officials some backbone, it's this kind of nonsense.
I recall a few years ago reading about some engineers at MIT that had developed a sonic projection system that worked in a novel way. They exploited nonlinearities in the way that ultrasonic waves propogated through the air, so that by putting out just the right pattern of ultrasonic pulses the system would generate extremely colliminated audio-range frequencies at some distance from the "speaker", as in this system.
The advantage of this is that you can get very directed sound from a small speaker. Usually to get narrow beamspread waves you need a source that is at least many times the wavelength. Middle A has a wavelength of about two feet, requiring a unweildy (to say the least) speaker to get aimable sound.
Anyway, it appears from the limited information that I've seen that LRAD is the same system, weaponized. Does anybody know if this is in fact the case?
davidwr recommends: Get or renew your passport now and it should be RFID-free for the next 10 years.
That's what I did. But you really can't expect your average slashdotter to get out of their chairs and actually go down to the passport office to do this? They'd much rather sit on their butts and whine.
While this is a great display, that addresses many of the problems of flourescent LCD displays, there's a more exciting one that I've recently read about that unfortunately I can't find the link to at this time.
All color LCDs up to this point use a matrix of black-and-white LCD shutters behind an array of color filters. This means that for any spot on the screen, two-thirds of the light is always blocked (a red pixel will always block all of the green and blue light). It also means that a 1280x1024 display really needs to have 3x1280 or 3840 pixels across. (This is not completely a bad thing for computer displays -- current text display drivers take advantage of this to give higher resolution)
This new LCD panel uses no filters, but instead flickers the backlight R/G/B very quickly. The LCD shutters turn on and off in sync with the backlight color, so if a part of the image is red, the LCD pixel shutters are only clear when the red backlight is on.
This allows a much lower-power display, as you are only using 1/3 of the light.
Conceivably one could use more than three colors of LED, too, to get wider gamut -- although that's not part of the product that I recall seeing.
Anyway, I'm still holding the torch for SED displays mentioned above, but these LCD advances are looking very strong indeed, and could surpass SED brightness, flatness, color purity, and low-power characteristics before SEDs can be mass-produced.
It was an interesting article, with tons of good data (and, to their credit, they include the raw data without comment in the appendix (ok, it would have been a lot nicer if they included it in a spreadsheet-friendly format, but...))
Unfortunately, you can't do anything with a bare processor. You need a system to plug it in to, and that system costs money.
If you assume that the disk/video/case/fans/power-supply/motherboard/OS package would cost $600 or so, then that would have the effect of adding $600 to the cost of each processor for a system that can do actual work. For example, in the 3Ds Max 7 Rendering Test, their calculated best performer was the Intel Pentium 4 630 or Intel Pentium D 820 -- relatively cheap processors.
But, adding the $600 to the cost makes the best performer the Athlon 64 X2 3800 (the cheapest of the Athlon dual proc chips.) The other X2 chips round comprise four of the next five places as well.
I think that adding a minimal system cost makes for a far more useful comparison -- and it does show the value of the new dual-proc systems. Not too surprisingly, the Athlon 64 FX chips still the worst price-performance solution -- they're just too expensive for what you get.
At Siggraph this year, there were two similar systems on display. They are unbelievably cool.
1) Point Gray's Ladybug2 has five cameras mounted in a box about the size of, say, a stack of three decks of cards.
2) Immersive Media's system has 11 (!) cameras in a sphere about 2 inches on a side.
Both systems do real-time stitching of the multiple images into a panorama.
We're looking into them for the obvious motion-picture visual effects applications. The resolution (both spatial and dynamic) is not ideal for motion-picture work, but the ability to have an extremely small, lightweight, panoramic capture is a tradeoff that is worthy of pursuit. In the past (say, on The Fast and The Furious) we used six ARRI 435 cameras mounted to the side of a motorcycle, to the tune of several thousand dollars a day rental, hundreds of pounds of weight, and fairly compromised images in other ways (bad lens flare, extremely bouncy images.)
I was fairly astonished to see in the recent issue of Aviation Week that Russia is now building GPS-guided bombs. Presumably this is just using the civilian signal, which could be disabled or degraded in a conflict theater -- but still, it was an fairly amazing development. I suppose that it's conceivable that AvWeek got the facts wrong, and that it was a GLONASS-guided bomb, but they're usually pretty good about that sort of thing.
Your parents probably said the same thing about the first 32 bit machines.
Seriously, though, it makes little difference today. It will not be very many years, though, before everybody has >4GB memory on their machines. 64-bit machines today are a bit of future-proofing.
I am pained to admit, though, that so far the market for 64-bit laptops has been tepid at best. OK, it's not even above freezing. Still, if you look more than a couple of years off (and you can be sure that Apple is) then 64-bit machines will be a requirement.
I agree that the Pentium M is a nice chip, but so is AMD's Turion -- and the Turion is a 64 bit chip.
In any case, the deep beauty of the decision to go with the Intel architecture is that Steve Jobs will be able to play Intel off of AMD *at any time* in the future. There's actual competition to be exploited, and you can bet that it will be exploited.
I am very encouraged to see a focus on efficiency and multi-core processors. It's going to be a wonderful revolution in programming and design.
You say > it's not standard for other apps on any OS
I believe that Adobe Acrobat Reader pretty much does that. There are no tabs in acroread, but if you run acroread on a bunch of files, clicking the big X in the corner closes the current one and pops you to the next one. It's confusing the first couple of times, but it's pretty cool after that.
delta_avi_delta says: Sometimes they're monomaniacal obsession with elegance causes them to make decisions that seem idiotic from our technical viewpoint (you can't get to the battery on an iPod because they wanted it to look "perfect" with no nasty access doors...) but the public doesn't care.
Actually, the point is that the public does care -- it's those subtle design principles that people respond to. Syd Mead did some work back in the eighties with electronics designed like jewelry; but I don't think that his designs were ever actually built.
A door that's not there can never break off, can never be opened by rambunctious 8-year-olds (and they'll open anything that is openable, and many things that aren't), can never be lost, jammed, or broken.
It's quite exciting to see. One is used to seeing that kind of fanatical devotion to quality in the space program, but one sees it in fewer and fewer places these days.
I had originally wanted to make a Lego dinosaur, but the people in charge at SGI had thought that perhaps that was a message that they didn't want to put out there.
Anyway, if you're wondering, the idea of the globe is that you can make the whole world out of little tiny pieces -- which seems like OpenGL to me. OpenGL is a great library, beautifully orthogonal, simple, and consistent, just the right thing for building 3D applications.
And, btw, I think that the Google logo looks a whole lot like the OpenGL on the table in the book cover, but...hey, whatever.
And what's potentially going to be *really* interesting is that earth is going to slow down fairly dramatically over the next few hundred years, according to US scientists. Note the article a few days ago in Slashdot about the US government lobbying to get rid of the leap second, and just have a leap hour every 500 or 600 years. If you do the (very simple) math, you can see that these scientists anticipate the earth rotation rate slowing down by five or six seconds a year over that time.
My guess is that this is due to global warming, and the earth (particularly the oceans) getting farther from the spin axis -- both by just expansion due to increased temperature and from land-locked ice melting into the ocean (especially from Greenland.)
So, whatever effects that are caused by the differential change in rotation, will be exacerbated at least another 20% or so.
Oh, and the earth's inner core (the part that the FA describes as rotating faster) is solid, not liquid. The solid inner core is lubricated by several hundred miles of liquid outer core from the rest of the planet.
I'm incredibly disappointed with the lack of respect for science and intellectual achievement that seems to pervade the United States today. Everywhere I look I see this -- in energy, economics, medicine, education -- everywhere.
But, I had one glorious day last year. The Jet Propulsion Labs at CalTech had an open house in May, and I attended this year with my little boy. It was a unique experience. You don't just stumble upon JPL, it's way off in the corner of the LA basin, but people came from everywhere around to the open house.
At each of a fifty or so different stations, there were JPL scientists describing their current work to an incredibly diverse but intensely interested audience. The scientists and engineers are, of course, very enthusiastic about their projects -- but the tremendous enthusiasm of my fellow attendees was surprising and heartening. Young and old, of every imaginable race and combination thereof, in families and individually -- everyone was just enthralled. It was kind of interesting to watch the engineers trying to describe the interferometer that JPL hopes to send up to measure the positions and velocities of stars more accurately to this group -- but they struggled to explain it, and people struggled to understand it.
As I said above, it was glorious. I recommend it to anybody in the LA area. There is hope.
I work in the movie business, and I am a fan of copyright protection -- it's a good thing. It lets movies happen.
But, I really worry about this new system, at least for the next ten years, as it will encourage the worst kind of piracy.
You see, here's the problem. People are not just going to drop $4,000 to replace their old big-screen HDTVs. Your best customers are not going to be able to see this new content. All boasting to the contrary above, I believe strongly that there will be no quick hack (as with DeCSS) that will unlock the content -- and unlike with DVD's the HD-DVD and BluRay systems are designed to have upgradeable encryption as time goes on. (Once DVDs were cracked, there was no way to fix it -- that won't be true of HD-DVD and BluRay). So, there will be NO WAY to view HD-DVD or BluRay at their native high-resolution without buying the new display.
Well, unless you download the movies off the 'net.
You see, the "protection" systems that are being designed will stop 99.99% of people from copying BluRay DVD's, but 0.01% is still way more than enough to put movies on the 'net.
It seems like this system will be worst possible alternative, encouraging people very strongly to pirate in the way that is most pernicious. Allowing people to play their own HD-DVD's in somewhat un"protected" ways is a much better long-term compromise, at least until HDCP TV's are the norm.
There's a SCO case hanger-on named Jeff V. Merkey (who tried to buy a commercial license to the Linux kernel for $50,000, a long story) that is trying to use subpeona laws to find the names of people posting to the Yahoo SCOX board. He's a nutball, but he's trying.
Anyway, there was a hearing in court today to hear his attempted expedited subpoena request, and it was found to be deficient in many ways. Interesting story. You can read a brief eyewitness report of the hearing Here on the Yahoo! board.
Grebman will tell you over and over that his car is a proof-of-concept, not even a prototype. His batteries are rediculously poor in all figures of merit compared to what would be optimal. He's not trying to build a practical car, what he's trying to do is develop interest in plug-in hybrids with large-scale car manufacturers.
Using modern lithium-polymer batteries and supercapacitors, you should be able to get very good performance for the first 100 miles, without using much more weight, space, and cost than the Prius' current NiMH battery back.
It's a proof of concept. As far as I'm concerned, he's proved that it is a good idea.
My business partner has a couple of pure-electric RAV4s. He has a special hookup with the LA DWP to charge his cars during non-peak hours, for around 5 cents per kWh. Anybody driving an electric car every day would do the same thing.
So, using your numbers (except for your high electricity price) the electric car gets four times the miles/dollar as the gas car. Of course, the electric RAV4 only gets 100 of those miles per charge. Based on a month's driving and his electricity bill, we calculated that the electric RAV4 cost about 1 cent/mile in electricity.
Of course, the car was very expensive, and the batteries will probably need to be replaced after (say) 80,000 miles at a cost of (say) $10,000, so that drives the cost/mile up considerably -- but battery technology is getting better, pretty fast.
But right now, at least, the cost of energy for getting vehicles down the road is significantly cheaper using electricity vs gasoline. It's probably an historical oddity that won't last -- as many forms of energy are fungible.
that the scientists expect that the rate of Earth's rotation will slow fairly dramatically in the next few hundred years, likely due to global warming.
Do the math. If they expect to need a leap hour in 600 years, that means that they expect six extra seconds a year -- not just one every couple of years. This is a huge increase.
I presume that the reason for this is that the mass of the earth will be moving somewhat further away from the axis, due to the ocean levels rising somewhat. An increase in the time for 365 rotations of 6 seconds a year is about equivalent to a 5 meter rise in ocean levels (more or less).
I find it interesting that when the threat of global warming is convenient, the US gov't has no problem taking it into account, as we see in this case. Of course, at other times, it's just a myth.
in the compiler case, I don't think it is something they can legitimately complain about. Intel and AMD processors are actually different, and it appears that Intel has done some extremely aggressive optimization for their own processors. In particular, the pipeline length for the Intel processors are much longer, so instructions need to be scheduled differently to be optimal.
That Intel hasn't done the same aggressive optimization for AMD processors can't be too surprising.
Intel has hired some of the best compiler writers in the world (they had to, for the Itanium project) and have created a great compiler. Nothing is stopping AMD from doing the same thing.
On the other hand, the "retroactive rebates" and innumerable other marketing techniques described in the article seem to be absolutely beyond the pale of antitrust laws. It is rampant abuse of the worst order. The pressures that they apply on various manufacturers and distributors are completely shameless, and are well documented. If the laws of this country are enforced (a big if!) then AMD has them dead to rights.
Well, there are any number of reasons, but I think that the biggest "problem" that they had was that the rest of the world moved at a faster pace than SGI was able to. SGI was used to four year or more product cycles, and Microsoft/Intel and the rest of the PC juggernaut moved twice that fast. That kind of failure builds exponentially over time.
My first day at SGI in 1991 included the presentation to the company of what would become the Origin 3000 "brick", that would allow you to expand processors, memory, I/O by connecting boxes with thick cables. Unfortunately, I don't think that technology shipped until 1998 or so -- and you know that the engineers were working on it before 1991. Now, this was (and remains!) an amazing piece of technology (not in the Bruce Karsh sense) but anything that takes seven or eight years to produce is the wrong thing by the time it is finished. It has to be. Still, in the late 80's and early 90's, one could be forgiven for not noticing that the pace of change had increased.
I was elated in '92 when SGI introduced the Indigo. Almost immediately, though, I was horrified to learn that it had "special" designed-to-be-incompatible memory modules. It was almost (but not quite) cheaper to buy memory by buying whole Indigoes and throwing the box away.
I've always thought that it's not surprising when companies fail to adapt to change -- it's truly more surprising when they do.
Anyway, we have our shrine to SGI still at Hammerhead -- a bookshelf full of O2's that we can't bring ourselves to part with.
Of the pictures they have to choose from, I have to go for the pic of Iapetus. It's by far the most shocking of the pictures -- the girdling ridge around Iapetus' equator is just too weird to believe.
But, my favorite Cassini picture is this one, of the rings edge on. Here you can see a perfectly straight line, almost a quarter of a million miles long. Where else in the universe can you see such a thing?
Slashdot Mirror
The "brakes" and "accelerator" in my car (a white 2004 Prius), are in fact, drive-by-wire. A computer meltdown could make things interesting. My car is nicknamed "Snowcrash" in anticipation of this possibility. Now, Toyota claims that the brakes have a kind of mechanical hydraulic reversion with a computer failure, and I trust that they have thought of, and prepared for, at least 99% of the failure modes.
Even in conventional internal-combustion-only cars, the transmissions are becoming significantly more complex and electronics-driven.
Thad Beier
Massachussets is involved in a case with Microsoft over the future of digital documents. MA has made it a requirement that all records be stored in a completely open digital format, and have recommended that the OpenDoc standard qualifies (along with Adobe's PDF) and that Microsoft's new MSXML doesn't.
Microsoft is imposing some restrictions on the MSXML format -- and it would appear that they might be able to change those restrictions at some future time.
If they are willing to cut off an entire country, then potentially it may be impossible legally to read and modify that country's documents. Massachussets has to be aware that if it could happen to Korea, it could potentially happen to MA if they are too uppity.
We'll see if Massachussets officials can withstand the full-court press of Microsoft's hard-bought political muscle, but if anything should give those officials some backbone, it's this kind of nonsense.
Thad Beier
I recall a few years ago reading about some engineers at MIT that had developed a sonic projection system that worked in a novel way. They exploited nonlinearities in the way that ultrasonic waves propogated through the air, so that by putting out just the right pattern of ultrasonic pulses the system would generate extremely colliminated audio-range frequencies at some distance from the "speaker", as in this system.
The advantage of this is that you can get very directed sound from a small speaker. Usually to get narrow beamspread waves you need a source that is at least many times the wavelength. Middle A has a wavelength of about two feet, requiring a unweildy (to say the least) speaker to get aimable sound.
Anyway, it appears from the limited information that I've seen that LRAD is the same system, weaponized. Does anybody know if this is in fact the case?
Thad Beier
davidwr recommends: Get or renew your passport now and it should be RFID-free for the next 10 years.
That's what I did. But you really can't expect your average slashdotter to get out of their chairs and actually go down to the passport office to do this? They'd much rather sit on their butts and whine.
Thad
Here's the link
http://www.physorg.com/news7308.html
Thad
While this is a great display, that addresses many of the problems of flourescent LCD displays, there's a more exciting one that I've recently read about that unfortunately I can't find the link to at this time.
All color LCDs up to this point use a matrix of black-and-white LCD shutters behind an array of color filters. This means that for any spot on the screen, two-thirds of the light is always blocked (a red pixel will always block all of the green and blue light). It also means that a 1280x1024 display really needs to have 3x1280 or 3840 pixels across. (This is not completely a bad thing for computer displays -- current text display drivers take advantage of this to give higher resolution)
This new LCD panel uses no filters, but instead flickers the backlight R/G/B very quickly. The LCD shutters turn on and off in sync with the backlight color, so if a part of the image is red, the LCD pixel shutters are only clear when the red backlight is on.
This allows a much lower-power display, as you are only using 1/3 of the light.
Conceivably one could use more than three colors of LED, too, to get wider gamut -- although that's not part of the product that I recall seeing.
Anyway, I'm still holding the torch for SED displays mentioned above, but these LCD advances are looking very strong indeed, and could surpass SED brightness, flatness, color purity, and low-power characteristics before SEDs can be mass-produced.
Thad Beier
It was an interesting article, with tons of good data (and, to their credit, they include the raw data without comment in the appendix (ok, it would have been a lot nicer if they included it in a spreadsheet-friendly format, but ...))
Unfortunately, you can't do anything with a bare processor. You need a system to plug it in to, and that system costs money.
If you assume that the disk/video/case/fans/power-supply/motherboard/OS package would cost $600 or so, then that would have the effect of adding $600 to the cost of each processor for a system that can do actual work. For example, in the 3Ds Max 7 Rendering Test, their calculated best performer was the Intel Pentium 4 630 or Intel Pentium D 820 -- relatively cheap processors.
But, adding the $600 to the cost makes the best performer the Athlon 64 X2 3800 (the cheapest of the Athlon dual proc chips.) The other X2 chips round comprise four of the next five places as well.
I think that adding a minimal system cost makes for a far more useful comparison -- and it does show the value of the new dual-proc systems. Not too surprisingly, the Athlon 64 FX chips still the worst price-performance solution -- they're just too expensive for what you get.
Thad Beier
At Siggraph this year, there were two similar systems on display. They are unbelievably cool.
1) Point Gray's Ladybug2 has five cameras mounted in a box about the size of, say, a stack of three decks of cards.
2) Immersive Media's system has 11 (!) cameras in a sphere about 2 inches on a side.
Both systems do real-time stitching of the multiple images into a panorama.
We're looking into them for the obvious motion-picture visual effects applications. The resolution (both spatial and dynamic) is not ideal for motion-picture work, but the ability to have an extremely small, lightweight, panoramic capture is a tradeoff that is worthy of pursuit. In the past (say, on The Fast and The Furious) we used six ARRI 435 cameras mounted to the side of a motorcycle, to the tune of several thousand dollars a day rental, hundreds of pounds of weight, and fairly compromised images in other ways (bad lens flare, extremely bouncy images.)
Thad Beier
Hammerhead Productions
I was fairly astonished to see in the recent issue of Aviation Week that Russia is now building GPS-guided bombs. Presumably this is just using the civilian signal, which could be disabled or degraded in a conflict theater -- but still, it was an fairly amazing development. I suppose that it's conceivable that AvWeek got the facts wrong, and that it was a GLONASS-guided bomb, but they're usually pretty good about that sort of thing.
Thad Beier
Your parents probably said the same thing about the first 32 bit machines.
Seriously, though, it makes little difference today. It will not be very many years, though, before everybody has >4GB memory on their machines. 64-bit machines today are a bit of future-proofing.
I am pained to admit, though, that so far the market for 64-bit laptops has been tepid at best. OK, it's not even above freezing. Still, if you look more than a couple of years off (and you can be sure that Apple is) then 64-bit machines will be a requirement.
Thad Beier
I agree that the Pentium M is a nice chip, but so is AMD's Turion -- and the Turion is a 64 bit chip.
In any case, the deep beauty of the decision to go with the Intel architecture is that Steve Jobs will be able to play Intel off of AMD *at any time* in the future. There's actual competition to be exploited, and you can bet that it will be exploited.
I am very encouraged to see a focus on efficiency and multi-core processors. It's going to be a wonderful revolution in programming and design.
Thad Beier
Re: big X in corner closing a tab
You say > it's not standard for other apps on any OS
I believe that Adobe Acrobat Reader pretty much does that. There are no tabs in acroread, but if you run acroread on a bunch of files, clicking the big X in the corner closes the current one and pops you to the next one. It's confusing the first couple of times, but it's pretty cool after that.
Thad
delta_avi_delta says: Sometimes they're monomaniacal obsession with elegance causes them to make decisions that seem idiotic from our technical viewpoint (you can't get to the battery on an iPod because they wanted it to look "perfect" with no nasty access doors...) but the public doesn't care.
Actually, the point is that the public does care -- it's those subtle design principles that people respond to. Syd Mead did some work back in the eighties with electronics designed like jewelry; but I don't think that his designs were ever actually built.
A door that's not there can never break off, can never be opened by rambunctious 8-year-olds (and they'll open anything that is openable, and many things that aren't), can never be lost, jammed, or broken.
It's quite exciting to see. One is used to seeing that kind of fanatical devotion to quality in the space program, but one sees it in fewer and fewer places these days.
Thad Beier
I had originally wanted to make a Lego dinosaur, but the people in charge at SGI had thought that perhaps that was a message that they didn't want to put out there.
Anyway, if you're wondering, the idea of the globe is that you can make the whole world out of little tiny pieces -- which seems like OpenGL to me. OpenGL is a great library, beautifully orthogonal, simple, and consistent, just the right thing for building 3D applications.
And, btw, I think that the Google logo looks a whole lot like the OpenGL on the table in the book cover, but...hey, whatever.
Thad Beier
And what's potentially going to be *really* interesting is that earth is going to slow down fairly dramatically over the next few hundred years, according to US scientists. Note the article a few days ago in Slashdot about the US government lobbying to get rid of the leap second, and just have a leap hour every 500 or 600 years. If you do the (very simple) math, you can see that these scientists anticipate the earth rotation rate slowing down by five or six seconds a year over that time.
My guess is that this is due to global warming, and the earth (particularly the oceans) getting farther from the spin axis -- both by just expansion due to increased temperature and from land-locked ice melting into the ocean (especially from Greenland.)
So, whatever effects that are caused by the differential change in rotation, will be exacerbated at least another 20% or so.
Oh, and the earth's inner core (the part that the FA describes as rotating faster) is solid, not liquid. The solid inner core is lubricated by several hundred miles of liquid outer core from the rest of the planet.
Thad Beier
I'm incredibly disappointed with the lack of respect for science and intellectual achievement that seems to pervade the United States today. Everywhere I look I see this -- in energy, economics, medicine, education -- everywhere.
But, I had one glorious day last year. The Jet Propulsion Labs at CalTech had an open house in May, and I attended this year with my little boy. It was a unique experience. You don't just stumble upon JPL, it's way off in the corner of the LA basin, but people came from everywhere around to the open house.
At each of a fifty or so different stations, there were JPL scientists describing their current work to an incredibly diverse but intensely interested audience. The scientists and engineers are, of course, very enthusiastic about their projects -- but the tremendous enthusiasm of my fellow attendees was surprising and heartening. Young and old, of every imaginable race and combination thereof, in families and individually -- everyone was just enthralled. It was kind of interesting to watch the engineers trying to describe the interferometer that JPL hopes to send up to measure the positions and velocities of stars more accurately to this group -- but they struggled to explain it, and people struggled to understand it.
As I said above, it was glorious. I recommend it to anybody in the LA area. There is hope.
Thad Beier
I work in the movie business, and I am a fan of copyright protection -- it's a good thing. It lets movies happen.
But, I really worry about this new system, at least for the next ten years, as it will encourage the worst kind of piracy.
You see, here's the problem. People are not just going to drop $4,000 to replace their old big-screen HDTVs. Your best customers are not going to be able to see this new content. All boasting to the contrary above, I believe strongly that there will be no quick hack (as with DeCSS) that will unlock the content -- and unlike with DVD's the HD-DVD and BluRay systems are designed to have upgradeable encryption as time goes on. (Once DVDs were cracked, there was no way to fix it -- that won't be true of HD-DVD and BluRay). So, there will be NO WAY to view HD-DVD or BluRay at their native high-resolution without buying the new display.
Well, unless you download the movies off the 'net.
You see, the "protection" systems that are being designed will stop 99.99% of people from copying BluRay DVD's, but 0.01% is still way more than enough to put movies on the 'net.
It seems like this system will be worst possible alternative, encouraging people very strongly to pirate in the way that is most pernicious. Allowing people to play their own HD-DVD's in somewhat un"protected" ways is a much better long-term compromise, at least until HDCP TV's are the norm.
Thad Beier.
There's a SCO case hanger-on named Jeff V. Merkey (who tried to buy a commercial license to the Linux kernel for $50,000, a long story) that is trying to use subpeona laws to find the names of people posting to the Yahoo SCOX board. He's a nutball, but he's trying.
Anyway, there was a hearing in court today to hear his attempted expedited subpoena request, and it was found to be deficient in many ways. Interesting story. You can read a brief eyewitness report of the hearing Here on the Yahoo! board.
Thad Beier
Grebman will tell you over and over that his car is a proof-of-concept, not even a prototype. His batteries are rediculously poor in all figures of merit compared to what would be optimal. He's not trying to build a practical car, what he's trying to do is develop interest in plug-in hybrids with large-scale car manufacturers.
Using modern lithium-polymer batteries and supercapacitors, you should be able to get very good performance for the first 100 miles, without using much more weight, space, and cost than the Prius' current NiMH battery back.
It's a proof of concept. As far as I'm concerned, he's proved that it is a good idea.
Thad Beier
My business partner has a couple of pure-electric RAV4s. He has a special hookup with the LA DWP to charge his cars during non-peak hours, for around 5 cents per kWh. Anybody driving an electric car every day would do the same thing.
So, using your numbers (except for your high electricity price) the electric car gets four times the miles/dollar as the gas car. Of course, the electric RAV4 only gets 100 of those miles per charge. Based on a month's driving and his electricity bill, we calculated that the electric RAV4 cost about 1 cent/mile in electricity.
Of course, the car was very expensive, and the batteries will probably need to be replaced after (say) 80,000 miles at a cost of (say) $10,000, so that drives the cost/mile up considerably -- but battery technology is getting better, pretty fast.
But right now, at least, the cost of energy for getting vehicles down the road is significantly cheaper using electricity vs gasoline. It's probably an historical oddity that won't last -- as many forms of energy are fungible.
Thad Beier
that the scientists expect that the rate of Earth's rotation will slow fairly dramatically in the next few hundred years, likely due to global warming.
Do the math. If they expect to need a leap hour in 600 years, that means that they expect six extra seconds a year -- not just one every couple of years. This is a huge increase.
I presume that the reason for this is that the mass of the earth will be moving somewhat further away from the axis, due to the ocean levels rising somewhat. An increase in the time for 365 rotations of 6 seconds a year is about equivalent to a 5 meter rise in ocean levels (more or less).
I find it interesting that when the threat of global warming is convenient, the US gov't has no problem taking it into account, as we see in this case. Of course, at other times, it's just a myth.
Thad Beier
in the compiler case, I don't think it is something they can legitimately complain about. Intel and AMD processors are actually different, and it appears that Intel has done some extremely aggressive optimization for their own processors. In particular, the pipeline length for the Intel processors are much longer, so instructions need to be scheduled differently to be optimal.
That Intel hasn't done the same aggressive optimization for AMD processors can't be too surprising.
Intel has hired some of the best compiler writers in the world (they had to, for the Itanium project) and have created a great compiler. Nothing is stopping AMD from doing the same thing.
On the other hand, the "retroactive rebates" and innumerable other marketing techniques described in the article seem to be absolutely beyond the pale of antitrust laws. It is rampant abuse of the worst order. The pressures that they apply on various manufacturers and distributors are completely shameless, and are well documented. If the laws of this country are enforced (a big if!) then AMD has them dead to rights.
Thad Beier
Hammerhead Productions
Well, there are any number of reasons, but I think that the biggest "problem" that they had was that the rest of the world moved at a faster pace than SGI was able to. SGI was used to four year or more product cycles, and Microsoft/Intel and the rest of the PC juggernaut moved twice that fast. That kind of failure builds exponentially over time.
My first day at SGI in 1991 included the presentation to the company of what would become the Origin 3000 "brick", that would allow you to expand processors, memory, I/O by connecting boxes with thick cables. Unfortunately, I don't think that technology shipped until 1998 or so -- and you know that the engineers were working on it before 1991. Now, this was (and remains!) an amazing piece of technology (not in the Bruce Karsh sense) but anything that takes seven or eight years to produce is the wrong thing by the time it is finished. It has to be. Still, in the late 80's and early 90's, one could be forgiven for not noticing that the pace of change had increased.
I was elated in '92 when SGI introduced the Indigo. Almost immediately, though, I was horrified to learn that it had "special" designed-to-be-incompatible memory modules. It was almost (but not quite) cheaper to buy memory by buying whole Indigoes and throwing the box away.
I've always thought that it's not surprising when companies fail to adapt to change -- it's truly more surprising when they do.
Anyway, we have our shrine to SGI still at Hammerhead -- a bookshelf full of O2's that we can't bring ourselves to part with.
Thad Beier
Nope - 4.5 tons. About the same as the Tallboys of WW2 that Britain dropped on German submarine pens.
Thad
Of the pictures they have to choose from, I have to go for the pic of Iapetus. It's by far the most shocking of the pictures -- the girdling ridge around Iapetus' equator is just too weird to believe.
But, my favorite Cassini picture is this one, of the rings edge on. Here you can see a perfectly straight line, almost a quarter of a million miles long. Where else in the universe can you see such a thing?
Thad Beier