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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, June 18 2012 @ 02:09 AM EDT |
At one point several minutes into the video (the time isn't visible to me;
sorry) Nathan makes a comment which seems to be telling about the Microsoft
attitude to monopolies law and Google. He basically says that all such
legislation is a competitive tool and people just start using it. This might be
a partly his contempt for the hypocrisy some of his old MS buddies, but the way
I understood it, it seemed more like something that the various MS old boys have
come to understand.
It would be wonderful if someone could show that MS was
deliberately abusing the legal process by making filings they don't believe in
but just hope will damage a competitor. I wonder if Nathan's comment could be
the start of a way into that. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, June 18 2012 @ 02:56 AM EDT |
Having watched it to the end, the Nathan Myhrvold interview is great. One of
his strongest points is the complete disappearance of true industrial research
as opposed to "Advanced Development". "IBM research is a shadow of its self";
Apple doesn't do any. He doesn't mention it, but the destruction of Bell labs
is one of the greatest recent crimes of American industry.
Myhrvold's
argument is that this happens because the CFOs of big companies don't see any
return from the research departments. Patents are the way that this return can
be generated and so support that research.
One possibility for continuing
research is funding from taxation. Another possibility is simply saying that
research belongs to amateurs and charitable foundations, there's no obligation
for the people who benefit from the results to support it. What other
alternatives to patents could we suggest? Preferably ones which would fit into
a free-market / USA / venture capitalist mind set? [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, June 18 2012 @ 07:47 AM EDT |
Link to
VID
This is a
really great Video I enjoyed watching it a lot!
Linus really sticks it to
Nvidia, I guess they had that
coming :-) [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, June 18 2012 @ 11:06 AM EDT |
Link:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-06-18/google-remove-content/5566618
4/1
"countries you might not suspect — Western democracies not typically
associated with censorship,"
Someone isn't paying attention, the UK and USA really like censorship.
Also, looking at Google's stats, MS is issueing more takedown requests than the
next three on top of that list, which included the membership of the RIAA as a
single entry![ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, June 18 2012 @ 05:53 PM EDT |
... Keith Block is ending his 26-year career at Oracle. Block has been Oracle's
executive vice president of North America sales and consulting for the past
decade .
In one instant messaging exchange submitted as evidence in the trial,
Block said Oracle "bought a dog" when it acquired computer maker Sun
Microsystems for $7.3 billion two years. Ago. Block also described Sun as
"dead, dead, dead." Another IM exchange knocked Mark Hurd, Oracle's president
and a close friend of the company's CEO, Larry Ellison. ...
Click here [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Gringo_ on Monday, June 18 2012 @ 08:56 PM EDT |
Announcements such as the Sequoia's LINPACK performance
of 16.325 petaflops
always peak my imagination.
I remember back in 1976 when the Cray I was
installed at
Los Alamos National Laboratory. How many of you remember
that?
Hold up your hand. The Cray I was capable of a blazing
floating point
performance of about 136 MFLOPS and could
peak at 250 MFLOPS. As I recall it
made the cover of
Scientific American.
That was a cool machine,
made of vertical wedges back to
back such that they formed a semicircle. Thus
the backplane
of each unit was a minimal distance to all the other back
planes
- a brilliant design.
It was a 64-bit system. Addressing was 24-bit,
with a
maximum of 1,048,571 64-bit words (1 megaword) of main
memory, where
each word also had 8 parity bits for a total
of 72 bits per word. The machine
and its power supplies
consumed about 115 kW of power. Cooling and storage
likely
more than doubled this figure.
Today's smart phone processors
could blow this machine
away. Imagine if you could travel 36 years back in time
with
your iPhone, and show them how you could run off their
calculations
faster than they could with their brand new
Cray.
We can assume from
this that if Moore's Law keeps up,
your cell phone in the year 2048 will be
more powerful than
IBM's shiny new Sequoia.
It's not actually Moore's
Law, which says chip density
will double every two years, but rather a
variation of that
that says performance will double every 18 months.
I
just took a stab at the math, using the Cray I for the
base and applying that
law to see how well it predicted the
Sequoia. Since 1976 there have been 24 18
month periods.
(2012 - 1976 = 36 years = 432 months, div 18 = 24).
2^24 = 16,777,216 * 136 mflops = 2,281,701,376 mflops
2,281,701,376,000,000 = 2.3 petaflops
2^24 = 16,777,216 * 250 mflops
= 4,194,304,000 mflops
4,194,304,000,000,000 = 4.2 petaflops
So
that variation on Moore's Law starting with the Cray I
in 1976 would predict a
supercomputer capable of between 2.3
and 4.2 petaflops today. According to
that, the Sequoia at
16.325 petaflops is a bit ahead of the curve, but not too
far off.
What if power requirement scaled the same as
performance?
2^24 = 16,777,216 * 230 kw = 3,858,759,680
kw
3,858,759,680,000 watts = 3.8 terawatts vs 8 megawatts
Then the
Sequoia would require nearly 4 terawatts, rather
than the 8 megawatts it runs
on. It is fortunate power
requirement does not scale with performance, or we
would be
hitting a brick wall at this point.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, June 18 2012 @ 09:48 PM EDT |
Microsoft-made hardware to be available starting with release of
Windows 8 and Windows RT
Suggested retail pricing will be announced
closer to availability and is expected to be
competitive ...
Some
information relates to a prerelease product, which may be substantially
modified before it is commercially released.
Surface by Microsoft
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, June 18 2012 @ 10:08 PM EDT |
01: Microsoft’s First Surface Video Is Super Serious, In a
Techno-Funk Kinda Way.
02: Microsoft to build its own
tablet, the Surface.
03: Surface by
Microsoft.
04: The New MacBook Pro: Unfixable, Unhackable,
Untenable.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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