While it's true that the Atlas 5 uses Russian motors, the Boeing Delta 4 uses American-designed and -manufactured RS-68 motors. The RS-68 is a brand-new, simple, relatively easy-to-manufacture engine with reasonable performance. My neighbor across the street had to come out of retirement to help build it, as there just aren't young people today with the skills and experience necessary to build state-of-the-art rocket engines.
While the times sound extreme, I believe that by "open Word" he meant opening it on his apparently quite large document.
It wouldn't shock me if the numbers in TFA are correct, but as other people mention, these times are only a small part of the story. In my experience (and I am a devout, card-carrying MS disliker) Open Office works fine for 98% of what you need, but a significant fraction of time time it doesn't read and format a document I get from somebody else "correctly" (that is, how it was formatted in Word on their PCs or Macs.) As this is fairly critical for a lot of the documents I exchange with my MS-using clients, I feel that just measuring relative times perhaps isn't that important if the results are incorrect.
I have found abiword works better sometimes when OOo doesn't, but I also have a Mac on my desk for those times when I really want to see docs in Word.
OK, it's kind of wacky, but here's the scheme. The screen is just a flat piece of Scotchlite. This is a remarkable material that reflects almost all light directly back to where it came from. Obviously, this is just part of the scheme.
The other part is the wacky goggles. These have projectors mounted above them with tiny LCD or OLED screens that project down through half-silvered 45 degree mirrors in front of each eye.
So, the light from the projector is as if it's coming straight out of your pupil, and so reflects back right at each pupil. This way, each eye gets only its own image.
To make this work well, you'd have to get some kind of head tracker as well, to move the image as you move your head.
The nice thing about this is that you could have multiple people viewing the same screen, and so sharing the experience.
The devestating problem with the perspecta display is that there cannot be hidden surfaces, not a problem for this (or any other) goggle based system.
The bandwidth problem of the perspecta display comes from needing to display an image from all points of view -- even though 99% of those points of view don't actually have anybody viewing them. Goggle based systems don't have that problem.
But! If you wanted to have a shared goggle-free environment and had a large amount of money, you could do that too! You'd want to have a very large half-silvered mirror with many projectors above it -- enough so that from any point in the field of view you could have a projector more or less lined up with each viewer.
Anyway -- back to reality.
Thad
New CRT-speed technologies coming soon
on
Are CRTs History?
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· Score: 1
Traditional big-tube CRT's truly are nearing the end of their lives. That's OK, though. There are a couple of new display technologies that will have the speed of CRT's, so that field-sequential stereo should be possible.
These are SED and OLED displays. Both of these displays are getting closer, after being available Real Soon Now for years.
Toshiba and Canon have built a small factory in Japan for building SED TV's, and they claim to be shipping them this year. Yesterday, they announced a new plant for building these in quantity. SED's actually are CRT's, and share their brightness, wide field-of-view, and color purity -- but they differ from CRT's in that they have a seperate semiconductor electron gun at every pixel.
Samsung just announced a 40-inch OLED a couple of days ago. There are still problems to be worked out -- especially with the lifetime of the blue OLED material -- but there is tremendous activity in the field.
Both of these technologies can switch pixels on and off in at most a couple of milliseconds, so field sequential stereo should be possible.
I've made movies of the images posted on the MER website over the last few days of Opportunity's front left and right rear wheels. It's clear that they're making considerable, consistent (if slow) progress. In particular, in the last couple of days the front wheel has begun to slog its way through the dirt, where it had just been digging in for the first three days.
and my wife's, twice. She has had hers in for the "recalibration of the computer." We'll see if hers acts any differently now than it did before.
It seems to me that the problem occurs when the computer tries to restart the engine, and it doesn't catch immediately. It does seem that the car will continue to run as an electric car, and it does seem to come its senses within a few seconds.
My blindingly white Prius is nicknamed "Snowcrash" for exactly this reason -- if the computer goes down, it's just a car shaped hunk of metal.
Thanks for the article. I, sadly, agree completely with your analysis of both the atmospheric and political climates.
I found the temperature profiles measured in Alaskan permafrost described in the first part of Elizabeth Kolbert's devastating series in the New Yorker to be extremely clear and decisive. So much of what is attributed to as "climate change" is easily dismissed as anecdotal (at least by those who wish to deny change.) But the permafrost is a spectacular low-pass filter, and provides incontrovertable evidence that the arctic is warming, and warming quite quickly.
Her description of the many positive feedback systems in the same article are, I'm sure, old hat to all atmospheric scientists -- but it was good to see them all in one place. If there's one link that you follow in Slashdot this year, let it be this one. The article is a tour-de-force. Authoritative, on-the-scene reporting, done with passion and grace.
I hope that things change, that people in general wake up to the impending climate catastrophe. I agree that the question now can only be how best to adapt to the oncoming changes, if possible -- because change is coming.
Let me offer my sincere hope that your training and observations, and those of your fellow scientists, will soon be appreciated and put to good use. I agree, these will be interesting times. I'm so devestatingly depressed about the world my children are going to grow up in.
Many people have posted almost the right answer for why two cameras are needed, one pointing slightly forward, one slightly back, for stereo. That's right, as far as it goes.
But what people are missing is that these are not cameras like you are used to. The pictures they take are not (say) 4k x 4k, they are 4k by 1 pixel. That one-pixel-high image is painted across the surface by the motion of the satellite, generating a very long strip image. Typically, the cameras run continuously.
So, that's why you can't just "snap a photo, move the camera, snap another one". These are not snapshots, they are long strip images taken a scanline at a time. Two fixed cameras are the right answer.
People have been talking about perpendicular recording for 20 years, and if I recall correctly the big problem with all previous attempts was ensuring alignment between the heads. Previous attempts used a head on either side of the medium, and keeping those within micron tolerances would be well-nigh impossible.
Hitachi has a very small head writing the data, then the magnetic field lines diffuse through the medium, coming back out the same side in a much larger area that won't flip the bits at that point. Clever.
The same team that built this Wasp built a smaller (!) micro air vehicle a couple of years earlier. This paper describes the design and implementation of the project at a good level of detail -- enough to show the complexity and tradeoffs in design, but not so much to bury the reader in equations and minutia.
What fascinates me about MAVs is that you can do absolute cutting-edge research on a shoestring budget. Many prototypes can be designed, analyzed, built, tested, and thrown away.
It seems, from all I've read about this millipede technology, that the real bugaboo is re-writing bits. I'm wondering just how important that really is. While I would preserve the ability to destroy data (easily implemented by writing pits at every location) I think that 99% of the uses of this massive storage could be done without re-writing.
Let me think of a couple of scenarios for these chips:
1) Music storage and playback, as in an Ipod.
This is a perfect example of something that you never need erase. You very rarely want to replace the previous version of a song with a newer one -- mostly you just want to add to your collection. In the very odd case that I never want to hear a song ever again, I could destroy it.
2) My own business -- visual effects.
We scan and create a few terabytes a year of images. Perhaps surprisingly, we throw almost none of them away during production, keeping old versions of images as reference. Disks are cheap enough that there's no need to erase frames during a project, and these millipede devices promise to be rugged and permanent enough to act as their own long-term backup. We'd just disconnect the drives and store them on a shelf forever.
Clearly, we'd want to change the way that filesystems work -- maybe the directory structure would be kept in flash memory where just the data bytes are on the millipede surface until it's time to inter the disk in the archive.
I think that IBM, and others, should really consider the possibility of non-rewritable millipedes, especially because abandoning that capacity would appear to make everything else much much simpler and cheaper. They might make it into production sooner too.
Multiprocessing, both discrete and multicore, will accelerate all compute-bound applications in the future. Right now we haven't reached a critical mass yet -- where programmers feel it's worth the effort to multi-thread all of their applications -- but we will get there soon. It's not an easy change, and there are a whole world of problems that programmers haven't had experience with yet, but either these programmers will learn or they will not be competetive any longer.
Face it, the days of increasing clock speeds is over. It's done. Finished. Kaput. The low hanging fruit has all been eaten.
On the other hand, the multiprocessing benefits are huge and practically untapped. There is every reason to expect that in ten years we have 64 or 256 processors on a chip. People who hope to be working in ten years better learn how to write for these systems.
Compare the P4 to the Cell. The P4 goes to unbelievable lengths (even literally, in pipeline lengths!) to run at a high clock speed. Its contribution to global warming is substantial. It's expensive. And, it's an absolute dead end. Intel has already abandoned it.
The Cell has eight much-simpler processors along with its Power core. It can, and will, compute 10 times as fast as a P4, if programmed correctly. The game programmers are going to be pulling their hair out for the next couple of years, but they are going to be the high-demand programmers of the next decade as they are the first over the wall of significant multiprocessing.
1) It turns out that almost all of the road damage is due to large trucks. SUVs and Priuses both do about the same amount of damage -- none. They both take up about the same amount of space on the road, too, so they really are using about the same amount of the road resource.
2) This is just the camel's nose under the tent. The real value is congestion-limiting taxation -- much as is done in London and Singapore, but a lot more flexibly. Note well that GPS knows both your position and time. So, given the initial investment of putting GPS in all the cars (say $1-2B for California) then it would be very easy to charge people, say, $2 for going south through the Sepulveda Pass between 8:00 and 9:30 on weekdays. Which one might well argue is less of a burden than just forcing everybody to crawl across the hill at 5mph for free.
Anyway -- I think this is a terrible idea. There are so many extremely good reasons to have high-milage cars that they need to be encouraged, not discouraged. Pollution is expensive in any number of ways, depleting oil supplies is expensive in even more ways.
Brazil is changing all 300,000 of its federal government computers from Windows to open source software like Linux. Brazil's interest in different forms of software could be the beginning of a long term shift in the software market. That has Microsoft's founder Bill Gates wanting to talk to Brazil's president, Luiz Ignacio Lula de Silva. Alex Goldmark reports.
Choosing which software to buy may not seem like a scintillating topic. But, in Brazil, excitement is high about switching to Open Source software like Linux, the free operating system which users are free to copy, modify, and distribute as they wish. Brazil isn't just dropping Windows, but all proprietary software. They want access to the code of the software they buy, and to the information that it provides access to. This could spell trouble for Microsoft's business model, according to Georg Greve, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe, which promotes and coordinates open source software projects.
"Brazil certainly poses one of the largest threats to Microsoft there is right now." Greve took time away from a software reception to talk about the importance of Brazil's decision. "If people take that as an example as they are doing all over the world, people look to Brazil for this. Then, the whole monopoly could actually be in danger. So, for Microsoft, it is a pretty seminal thing to stop this now." Up to now, only 10 percent of the government computers are Windows-free, but proponents of Brazil's plan realize, that if Brazil follows through, and becomes the trendsetter it wants to be this could be the beginning of a critical shift in the software world for developing countries. At the World Social Forum hosted here in Brazil this week, John Perry Barlow, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a cyberspace civil liberties group, commented on Bill Gates's moves at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
"Where Bill Gates, who may be the most powerful man in the world, sought an audience with Lula. Why did he do that? Because he is afraid of Brazil. Why is he afraid of Brazil? Because the government has taken the initiative to move this country to open source code."
Across town, at a government sponsored event to promote open source software, Brazil's intentions were clear. [translated] "For Brazil, we don't have any interest in supporting proprietary solutions because we are decided on supporting companies that believe in open source models. Sergio Amadeu is the head of the Brazil Open Source Technology Institute. Next to President Lula, he is the final word on Brazil's software choices. [translated] "We are not against any specific companies. But, there are companies like Microsoft that want to fit the world into their business model. We defend open source because it is better for innovation, better for competition, better for security, and better for stability."
Microsoft representatives in Brazil were not available for an interview. In an e-mail, they said Gates and Lula met in Davos two years ago, and the two have many things to talk about, including bringing technology into impoverished communities, and promoting Brazilian industry. Open Source was not mentioned. Sergio Amadeu, however, was eager to talk about Brazil's open source ambitions. He has been in contact with Venezuela, Korea, India, and several African nations promoting his cause. And that is just what Microsoft is worried about.
For NPR, I'm Alex Goldmark, Porto Allegre, Brazil
-- transcribed by Thad Beier without permission thad@hammerhead.com if you wish to complain
As far as "news for nerds" goes, I think that this article is perfectly appropriate. If you were to think about ways that money could help cure the world's ills, you naturally would gravitate to ways of using modern technology to help keep people from dying from easily preventable causes.
I commend the Gates Foundation for their work here. Vaccinating millions of people is about the best bang-for-the-buck you can get. It is a great program. Even more than this, I applaud the Foundation's work in fighting malaria -- a horrible disease that is just not on people's radar in the US. These are excellent examples of applying technology to help as many people as possible.
Now, if they start fighting global warming, I'm going to have to find a way to contribute to the Foundation -- but it won't be by buying Windows:)
The advance that never seems to happen is parallel read drives. If you have a 200 GB drive, it probably has five or so platters with data on them, and so has five heads -- but it only uses one head at a time. If you could read all five heads together, you would get 5x the data rate. You'd get the performance of a five-disk RAID0 in one disk.
Why aren't companies doing this? There must be a good reason.
Thad
Re:larger drops in solar output seem questionable
on
BBC on Global Dimming
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· Score: 1
Mod the parent up, and my grandparent down -- I breezed through the article some months ago, and didn't parse the greenhouse statement correctly. Try as I might, I can't find any definitive statements that greenhouse farmers are noting any effect from solar dimming.
Thad Beier
Re:larger drops in solar output seem questionable
on
BBC on Global Dimming
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· Score: 2, Informative
Apparently this has been seen in Holland among people who use greenhouses to grow vegetables, that for some reason the greenhouses weren't staying as warm as they used to. This effect is one of the strongest confirmations of dimming.
Thad Beier
It's exactly the same as SMP, except for two things:
1) Far less 'glue' circuitry is required on the motherboard. This allows cheaper multi-processor systems.
2) Potentially, communication between the processors could be faster.
Mostly, though, the advantage will be social -- if a large fraction of systems have multiple processors, as they will soon, then more and more applications will be written to take advantage of them.
I got kicked out of school after two years, basically because I didn't really belong there yet. I went to work for five years, and finally decided that it was time to go back to school. I had a good job at a great place, but I kept running into barriers -- things that I should have learned in school but hadn't.
I went crawling back on my hands and knees to my previous school, and they were surprisingly (well, to me, anyway) receptive to the idea of me coming back. (The "We sincerely hope that you could continue your education elsewhere." closing sentence in our previous correspondence didn't seem to leave that open as an option, but time heals all wounds, apparently.)
It was great. I had a ravenous appetite for learning. As I was paying for it myself the second time around, I wanted to get everything out of the experience that I could. I worked furiously, did extra homework, upbraided the profs when they skipped a day (much to the shock and bewilderment of my classmates) and got straight A's for the one-and-a-half years it took to finally graduate. (Bringing my GPA up to a less-than stellar 2.7. *sigh*)
It is hard to go back. It is so easy to keep working, to keep going on once you've started going on. There are a thousand things keeping you at work, and only this vague sense that continuing your education is the right thing to do. With that kind of conflict, it is very difficult to go back to school for even a couple of years.
But to me, those two years were among the most productive of my life. YMMV.
I don't know Nash's theory, but what appears to be happening is that the different huge Asian conglomerates are each persuing different technologies. This is a relatively new thing in the TV market, and exposes a new layer of competition. Up until a few years ago, companies were mostly competing at the margins of features and price, and we had big, beautiful, feature-rich CRTs at remarkably low prices (and low margins for the manufacturers.)
Now, though, we see Sharp (for example) betting the ranch of LCDs, Toshiba and Canon going for broke on SEDs, Samsung and LG with these OLEDs, and other flogging plasma panels for all they're worth. Rather than competing on marginal features, they are all desperately competing in basic science and process engineering. It's amazing to watch, and I can imagine that the pressure on the development teams is intense -- because it's likely that all but one of these technologies will be abandoned when the winner is apparent.
I'm betting on SEDs, because they provide high quality, reasonable manufacturability, long life, and build on the best of current CRT technologies. OLEDs will rule if, in the end, it is possible to get the science to work -- I'm just not convinced yet that it is.
AC says: I hope you're sitting down: any company is allowed to license WMA/WMV for any platform. Microsoft hates Linux, but they won't sacrifice Windows Media world domination just to spite Linux.
Thank you, AC -- that's interesting. I hadn't thought it was possible, but the link you include clearly MS will allow and perhaps even encourage this kind of thing. My internal model of the nuances of Microsoft's plan for world domination will have to be modified considerably:)
Slashdot Mirror
While it's true that the Atlas 5 uses Russian motors, the Boeing Delta 4 uses American-designed and -manufactured RS-68 motors. The RS-68 is a brand-new, simple, relatively easy-to-manufacture engine with reasonable performance. My neighbor across the street had to come out of retirement to help build it, as there just aren't young people today with the skills and experience necessary to build state-of-the-art rocket engines.
Thad Beier
While the times sound extreme, I believe that by "open Word" he meant opening it on his apparently quite large document.
It wouldn't shock me if the numbers in TFA are correct, but as other people mention, these times are only a small part of the story. In my experience (and I am a devout, card-carrying MS disliker) Open Office works fine for 98% of what you need, but a significant fraction of time time it doesn't read and format a document I get from somebody else "correctly" (that is, how it was formatted in Word on their PCs or Macs.) As this is fairly critical for a lot of the documents I exchange with my MS-using clients, I feel that just measuring relative times perhaps isn't that important if the results are incorrect.
I have found abiword works better sometimes when OOo doesn't, but I also have a Mac on my desk for those times when I really want to see docs in Word.
Thad Beier
OK, it's kind of wacky, but here's the scheme. The screen is just a flat piece of Scotchlite. This is a remarkable material that reflects almost all light directly back to where it came from. Obviously, this is just part of the scheme.
The other part is the wacky goggles. These have projectors mounted above them with tiny LCD or OLED screens that project down through half-silvered 45 degree mirrors in front of each eye.
So, the light from the projector is as if it's coming straight out of your pupil, and so reflects back right at each pupil. This way, each eye gets only its own image.
To make this work well, you'd have to get some kind of head tracker as well, to move the image as you move your head.
The nice thing about this is that you could have multiple people viewing the same screen, and so sharing the experience.
The devestating problem with the perspecta display is that there cannot be hidden surfaces, not a problem for this (or any other) goggle based system.
The bandwidth problem of the perspecta display comes from needing to display an image from all points of view -- even though 99% of those points of view don't actually have anybody viewing them. Goggle based systems don't have that problem.
But! If you wanted to have a shared goggle-free environment and had a large amount of money, you could do that too! You'd want to have a very large half-silvered mirror with many projectors above it -- enough so that from any point in the field of view you could have a projector more or less lined up with each viewer.
Anyway -- back to reality.
Thad
Traditional big-tube CRT's truly are nearing the end of their lives. That's OK, though. There are a couple of new display technologies that will have the speed of CRT's, so that field-sequential stereo should be possible.
These are SED and OLED displays. Both of these displays are getting closer, after being available Real Soon Now for years.
Toshiba and Canon have built a small factory in Japan for building SED TV's, and they claim to be shipping them this year. Yesterday, they announced a new plant for building these in quantity. SED's actually are CRT's, and share their brightness, wide field-of-view, and color purity -- but they differ from CRT's in that they have a seperate semiconductor electron gun at every pixel.
Samsung just announced a 40-inch OLED a couple of days ago. There are still problems to be worked out -- especially with the lifetime of the blue OLED material -- but there is tremendous activity in the field.
Both of these technologies can switch pixels on and off in at most a couple of milliseconds, so field sequential stereo should be possible.
Thad Beier
I desperately love my Prius.
I'd buy another one, if I didn't already have two!
thad
I've got the movies up on my ADSL line at
front hazcam
rear hazcam
Higher bandwidth mirrors would be most appreciated
Thad Beier
and my wife's, twice. She has had hers in for the "recalibration of the computer." We'll see if hers acts any differently now than it did before.
It seems to me that the problem occurs when the computer tries to restart the engine, and it doesn't catch immediately. It does seem that the car will continue to run as an electric car, and it does seem to come its senses within a few seconds.
My blindingly white Prius is nicknamed "Snowcrash" for exactly this reason -- if the computer goes down, it's just a car shaped hunk of metal.
Thad Beier
When I click on "view source", it's obfuscated in the typical javascript way, but the header refers to
http%3a%2f%2fuk.my.msn.com
But, of course, that's just the hex for
http://uk.my.msn.com/
To me, it looks legit, so far. Somebody has a sense of humor.
Thad
I found the temperature profiles measured in Alaskan permafrost described in the first part of Elizabeth Kolbert's devastating series in the New Yorker to be extremely clear and decisive. So much of what is attributed to as "climate change" is easily dismissed as anecdotal (at least by those who wish to deny change.) But the permafrost is a spectacular low-pass filter, and provides incontrovertable evidence that the arctic is warming, and warming quite quickly.
Her description of the many positive feedback systems in the same article are, I'm sure, old hat to all atmospheric scientists -- but it was good to see them all in one place. If there's one link that you follow in Slashdot this year, let it be this one. The article is a tour-de-force. Authoritative, on-the-scene reporting, done with passion and grace.
I hope that things change, that people in general wake up to the impending climate catastrophe. I agree that the question now can only be how best to adapt to the oncoming changes, if possible -- because change is coming.
Let me offer my sincere hope that your training and observations, and those of your fellow scientists, will soon be appreciated and put to good use. I agree, these will be interesting times. I'm so devestatingly depressed about the world my children are going to grow up in.
Thad Beier
Many people have posted almost the right answer for why two cameras are needed, one pointing slightly forward, one slightly back, for stereo. That's right, as far as it goes.
But what people are missing is that these are not cameras like you are used to. The pictures they take are not (say) 4k x 4k, they are 4k by 1 pixel. That one-pixel-high image is painted across the surface by the motion of the satellite, generating a very long strip image. Typically, the cameras run continuously.
So, that's why you can't just "snap a photo, move the camera, snap another one". These are not snapshots, they are long strip images taken a scanline at a time. Two fixed cameras are the right answer.
Thad Beier
People have been talking about perpendicular recording for 20 years, and if I recall correctly the big problem with all previous attempts was ensuring alignment between the heads. Previous attempts used a head on either side of the medium, and keeping those within micron tolerances would be well-nigh impossible.
Hitachi has a very small head writing the data, then the magnetic field lines diffuse through the medium, coming back out the same side in a much larger area that won't flip the bits at that point. Clever.
Thad Beier
The same team that built this Wasp built a smaller (!) micro air vehicle a couple of years earlier. This paper describes the design and implementation of the project at a good level of detail -- enough to show the complexity and tradeoffs in design, but not so much to bury the reader in equations and minutia.
What fascinates me about MAVs is that you can do absolute cutting-edge research on a shoestring budget. Many prototypes can be designed, analyzed, built, tested, and thrown away.
Thad Beier
It seems, from all I've read about this millipede technology, that the real bugaboo is re-writing bits. I'm wondering just how important that really is. While I would preserve the ability to destroy data (easily implemented by writing pits at every location) I think that 99% of the uses of this massive storage could be done without re-writing.
Let me think of a couple of scenarios for these chips:
1) Music storage and playback, as in an Ipod.
This is a perfect example of something that you never need erase. You very rarely want to replace the previous version of a song with a newer one -- mostly you just want to add to your collection. In the very odd case that I never want to hear a song ever again, I could destroy it.
2) My own business -- visual effects.
We scan and create a few terabytes a year of images. Perhaps surprisingly, we throw almost none of them away during production, keeping old versions of images as reference. Disks are cheap enough that there's no need to erase frames during a project, and these millipede devices promise to be rugged and permanent enough to act as their own long-term backup. We'd just disconnect the drives and store them on a shelf forever.
Clearly, we'd want to change the way that filesystems work -- maybe the directory structure would be kept in flash memory where just the data bytes are on the millipede surface until it's time to inter the disk in the archive.
I think that IBM, and others, should really consider the possibility of non-rewritable millipedes, especially because abandoning that capacity would appear to make everything else much much simpler and cheaper. They might make it into production sooner too.
Thad Beier
Multiprocessing, both discrete and multicore, will accelerate all compute-bound applications in the future. Right now we haven't reached a critical mass yet -- where programmers feel it's worth the effort to multi-thread all of their applications -- but we will get there soon. It's not an easy change, and there are a whole world of problems that programmers haven't had experience with yet, but either these programmers will learn or they will not be competetive any longer.
Face it, the days of increasing clock speeds is over. It's done. Finished. Kaput. The low hanging fruit has all been eaten.
On the other hand, the multiprocessing benefits are huge and practically untapped. There is every reason to expect that in ten years we have 64 or 256 processors on a chip. People who hope to be working in ten years better learn how to write for these systems.
Compare the P4 to the Cell. The P4 goes to unbelievable lengths (even literally, in pipeline lengths!) to run at a high clock speed. Its contribution to global warming is substantial. It's expensive. And, it's an absolute dead end. Intel has already abandoned it.
The Cell has eight much-simpler processors along with its Power core. It can, and will, compute 10 times as fast as a P4, if programmed correctly. The game programmers are going to be pulling their hair out for the next couple of years, but they are going to be the high-demand programmers of the next decade as they are the first over the wall of significant multiprocessing.
Thad Beier
1) It turns out that almost all of the road damage is due to large trucks. SUVs and Priuses both do about the same amount of damage -- none. They both take up about the same amount of space on the road, too, so they really are using about the same amount of the road resource.
2) This is just the camel's nose under the tent. The real value is congestion-limiting taxation -- much as is done in London and Singapore, but a lot more flexibly. Note well that GPS knows both your position and time. So, given the initial investment of putting GPS in all the cars (say $1-2B for California) then it would be very easy to charge people, say, $2 for going south through the Sepulveda Pass between 8:00 and 9:30 on weekdays. Which one might well argue is less of a burden than just forcing everybody to crawl across the hill at 5mph for free.
Anyway -- I think this is a terrible idea. There are so many extremely good reasons to have high-milage cars that they need to be encouraged, not discouraged. Pollution is expensive in any number of ways, depleting oil supplies is expensive in even more ways.
Thad
disclaimer -- I've got two Prii
We think it will be cheap because
1) There are supposed to be 4 of these chips in a PS3
2) The PS3 has to cost less than $500 for it to be at all competitive
So, even if the rest of the box was free, the chips can't cost more than $125.
Thad
Brazil is changing all 300,000 of its federal government computers from Windows to open source software like Linux. Brazil's interest in different forms of software could be the beginning of a long term shift in the software market. That has Microsoft's founder Bill Gates wanting to talk to Brazil's president, Luiz Ignacio Lula de Silva. Alex Goldmark reports.
Choosing which software to buy may not seem like a scintillating topic. But, in Brazil, excitement is high about switching to Open Source software like Linux, the free operating system which users are free to copy, modify, and distribute as they wish. Brazil isn't just dropping Windows, but all proprietary software. They want access to the code of the software they buy, and to the information that it provides access to. This could spell trouble for Microsoft's business model, according to Georg Greve, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe, which promotes and coordinates open source software projects.
"Brazil certainly poses one of the largest threats to Microsoft there is right now." Greve took time away from a software reception to talk about the importance of Brazil's decision. "If people take that as an example as they are doing all over the world, people look to Brazil for this. Then, the whole monopoly could actually be in danger. So, for Microsoft, it is a pretty seminal thing to stop this now." Up to now, only 10 percent of the government computers are Windows-free, but proponents of Brazil's plan realize, that if Brazil follows through, and becomes the trendsetter it wants to be this could be the beginning of a critical shift in the software world for developing countries. At the World Social Forum hosted here in Brazil this week, John Perry Barlow, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a cyberspace civil liberties group, commented on Bill Gates's moves at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
"Where Bill Gates, who may be the most powerful man in the world, sought an audience with Lula. Why did he do that? Because he is afraid of Brazil. Why is he afraid of Brazil? Because the government has taken the initiative to move this country to open source code."
Across town, at a government sponsored event to promote open source software, Brazil's intentions were clear. [translated] "For Brazil, we don't have any interest in supporting proprietary solutions because we are decided on supporting companies that believe in open source models. Sergio Amadeu is the head of the Brazil Open Source Technology Institute. Next to President Lula, he is the final word on Brazil's software choices. [translated] "We are not against any specific companies. But, there are companies like Microsoft that want to fit the world into their business model. We defend open source because it is better for innovation, better for competition, better for security, and better for stability."
Microsoft representatives in Brazil were not available for an interview. In an e-mail, they said Gates and Lula met in Davos two years ago, and the two have many things to talk about, including bringing technology into impoverished communities, and promoting Brazilian industry. Open Source was not mentioned. Sergio Amadeu, however, was eager to talk about Brazil's open source ambitions. He has been in contact with Venezuela, Korea, India, and several African nations promoting his cause. And that is just what Microsoft is worried about.
For NPR, I'm Alex Goldmark, Porto Allegre, Brazil
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transcribed by Thad Beier without permission
thad@hammerhead.com if you wish to complain
As far as "news for nerds" goes, I think that this article is perfectly appropriate. If you were to think about ways that money could help cure the world's ills, you naturally would gravitate to ways of using modern technology to help keep people from dying from easily preventable causes.
:)
I commend the Gates Foundation for their work here. Vaccinating millions of people is about the best bang-for-the-buck you can get. It is a great program. Even more than this, I applaud the Foundation's work in fighting malaria -- a horrible disease that is just not on people's radar in the US. These are excellent examples of applying technology to help as many people as possible.
Now, if they start fighting global warming, I'm going to have to find a way to contribute to the Foundation -- but it won't be by buying Windows
Thad Beier
The advance that never seems to happen is parallel read drives. If you have a 200 GB drive, it probably has five or so platters with data on them, and so has five heads -- but it only uses one head at a time. If you could read all five heads together, you would get 5x the data rate. You'd get the performance of a five-disk RAID0 in one disk.
Why aren't companies doing this? There must be a good reason.
Thad
Mod the parent up, and my grandparent down -- I breezed through the article some months ago, and didn't parse the greenhouse statement correctly. Try as I might, I can't find any definitive statements that greenhouse farmers are noting any effect from solar dimming.
Thad Beier
Apparently this has been seen in Holland among people who use greenhouses to grow vegetables, that for some reason the greenhouses weren't staying as warm as they used to. This effect is one of the strongest confirmations of dimming. Thad Beier
It's exactly the same as SMP, except for two things:
1) Far less 'glue' circuitry is required on the motherboard. This allows cheaper multi-processor systems.
2) Potentially, communication between the processors could be faster.
Mostly, though, the advantage will be social -- if a large fraction of systems have multiple processors, as they will soon, then more and more applications will be written to take advantage of them.
Thad Beier
I got kicked out of school after two years, basically because I didn't really belong there yet. I went to work for five years, and finally decided that it was time to go back to school. I had a good job at a great place, but I kept running into barriers -- things that I should have learned in school but hadn't.
I went crawling back on my hands and knees to my previous school, and they were surprisingly (well, to me, anyway) receptive to the idea of me coming back. (The "We sincerely hope that you could continue your education elsewhere." closing sentence in our previous correspondence didn't seem to leave that open as an option, but time heals all wounds, apparently.)
It was great. I had a ravenous appetite for learning. As I was paying for it myself the second time around, I wanted to get everything out of the experience that I could. I worked furiously, did extra homework, upbraided the profs when they skipped a day (much to the shock and bewilderment of my classmates) and got straight A's for the one-and-a-half years it took to finally graduate. (Bringing my GPA up to a less-than stellar 2.7. *sigh*)
It is hard to go back. It is so easy to keep working, to keep going on once you've started going on. There are a thousand things keeping you at work, and only this vague sense that continuing your education is the right thing to do. With that kind of conflict, it is very difficult to go back to school for even a couple of years.
But to me, those two years were among the most productive of my life. YMMV.
Thad Beier
I don't know Nash's theory, but what appears to be happening is that the different huge Asian conglomerates are each persuing different technologies. This is a relatively new thing in the TV market, and exposes a new layer of competition. Up until a few years ago, companies were mostly competing at the margins of features and price, and we had big, beautiful, feature-rich CRTs at remarkably low prices (and low margins for the manufacturers.)
Now, though, we see Sharp (for example) betting the ranch of LCDs, Toshiba and Canon going for broke on SEDs, Samsung and LG with these OLEDs, and other flogging plasma panels for all they're worth. Rather than competing on marginal features, they are all desperately competing in basic science and process engineering. It's amazing to watch, and I can imagine that the pressure on the development teams is intense -- because it's likely that all but one of these technologies will be abandoned when the winner is apparent.
I'm betting on SEDs, because they provide high quality, reasonable manufacturability, long life, and build on the best of current CRT technologies. OLEDs will rule if, in the end, it is possible to get the science to work -- I'm just not convinced yet that it is.
Thad Beier
AC says: I hope you're sitting down: any company is allowed to license WMA/WMV for any platform. Microsoft hates Linux, but they won't sacrifice Windows Media world domination just to spite Linux.
:)
Thank you, AC -- that's interesting. I hadn't thought it was possible, but the link you include clearly MS will allow and perhaps even encourage this kind of thing. My internal model of the nuances of Microsoft's plan for world domination will have to be modified considerably
Thad Beier