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Comment: Re:Pointless (Score 1) 117

by icebike (#39119835) Attached to: Unconstitutional Video Game Law Costs California $2 Million

Two Million is chump change for any Government Agency in California. They have that much slop in just about every department.

Nobody will notice this except the lawyers who got bitch-slapped by the Supreme Court. They may be more cautious next time the governor or the legislature decides to pass something like this, if for no other reason than protecting their good reputation.

Wait, they are lawyers, what the hell was I thinking. Where's my meds.

Comment: Re:Using this technique (Score 4, Informative) 269

by icebike (#39101805) Attached to: Test-Tube Burgers Coming Soon

I don't know why but this concept gives me the creeps because we don't really understand all there is to know about genetics.

And this is different in what why when compared to meat from Cattle or Pigs, or Lettuce, or tomatoes? We really don't know all there is to know about ANYTHING, and we never will. Yet I bet you eat these things with impunity.

Interestingly enough, Tomatoes are one of the first bio-engineered foods. Originally no bigger than a berry, it had already been engineered by indigenous farmers in South America to be about the size of a large grape when the Spanish arrived. Only after it was spread to Europe was it widely cultivated, crossbred, and selected until it reached its current size. Every once in a while someone decides to make tea out of tomato leaves. Bad Idea. And we don't know All there is to Know about tomatoes yet, but we eat them by the ton.

This "We don't know all there is to know" is just another version of the rallying cry There are some things science can't explain! which is thrown out by the "back to the earth" crowd any time anything challenging is presented.

I haven't decided if this an example of the Fallacy of False Dilemma, or the Fallacy of the Appeal to Ignorance, but its pretty annoying in any case.

Comment: Not in my buns! (Score 3, Interesting) 269

by icebike (#39101417) Attached to: Test-Tube Burgers Coming Soon

On a continent that goes apeshit over Genetically Modified and other Bioengineered Crops, it seems unlikely this will gain any traction in the commercial market place, at least not in the EU. On the other hand, the EU may take the stance that since this work was pioneered in the EU, it can't possibly be bad.

Now on Mars, or long space voyages this might have some appeal, especially Mars, where there is a possibility of finding water, thereby eliminating one of the heaviest component of any food product. Although unless making and transporting the necessary equipment and media takes up less room and less weight than a freezer full of hamburger this seems unlikely there as well. Chances are the growth media can be shipped dry as well, and reconstituted with distilled water from any source.

Even if the cost per pound could be brought in line with animal sources, it seems unlikely to be a rational method of food production here on earth, simply because significant portions of the meat supply would be put at risk by a simple power failure, or contaminant in the growth media.

The rest of this story will no doubt be filled with hand wringing posts over the amount of CO2 that cattle produce (something never attributed to Wildebeest herds), and how this will save the earth. The whole concept creates an intellectual conundrum for the Peta crowd. They would love to get animals off the farm, and this method presents a way forward, but having to embrace those huge corporations, and bio-engineering is probably more than they could stomach.

Comment: Re:Actually Solar is not the quest here folks... (Score 4, Informative) 74

by icebike (#39096743) Attached to: Intel Gets Serious With Solar-powered CPU Tech

Essentially a throttle, but more likely a demand based system, such that non-busy processors can run at the lowest possible speed and voltage, and when work stacks up, it ramps up.

Great for the smart phone in your pocket which has nothing to do for hours at a time other than check the email and listen for calls.
Since its screen is off, you really don't care how fast it does those things as long as they are just barely fast enough.

There is a great deal of "stare time" that happens when people look at computers, and the processors are spinning away all the time while you are reading this. They could just as well drop to an extremely low power state, and wait for a mouse move, finger tap, or something else.

This much we've been doing all along, for the last 20 years. But power consumption still remained high, because even simple tasks like checking the clock to see if its time to increment that digital time read out took processing power, and historically any use of the processor kept it awake at something like full power for that task.

Now, those tasks can be performed at extremely low power, without ramping up the speed. Only when the processor can't meet the demand would the system increase the voltage and speed up the chip.

Comment: Actually Solar is not the quest here folks... (Score 5, Interesting) 74

by icebike (#39096303) Attached to: Intel Gets Serious With Solar-powered CPU Tech

Yes Intel did demo a solar cell powering a Pentium, but that was merely to make a point about the inefficiencies of near-threshold voltage (NTV) CPUs. They have no particular focus on Solar powered processors.

Near-threshold voltage (NTV) CPUs are the focus of Intel's research here.
NTV transistors can switch at voltages just the threshold for the device's powered state, and CPUs made of these can idle along at extremely low voltage doing real work (slower) or they can ramp up the power and work much faster.

The Register has a much better explanation of this technology than the linked article.

The idea is to have devices run at low voltages and power consumption rates that would be akin to a sleep mode in today's chips. And NTV techniques are not just limited to processors used in hand-held devices like smartphones and tablets, but to everything all the way up to exascale supercomputers, says Rattner. The important thing is that NTV techniques allow a chip's performance and power to scale as voltage scales up and down, and to do so across a wide dynamic range.

Also a good summary here:

Marketing spin aside, the "near-threshold voltage" chip is quite an achievement. Intel first revealed in March 2010 that it had a prototype chip running at such low voltages, but Claremont's creators took that technology and baked it into a full IA architecture processor. Based on a Pentium core, Claremont can not only be throttled down to "within a couple of hundred millivolts of the threshold voltage of the transistors," said Intel engineer Sriram Vangal, who demoed the chip during Rattner's turn, but – equally important – it also has a high dynamic range that allows it to be cranked up to deliver ten times the low-power performance by increasing the voltage.

Once again, the Register does a better job of reporting than Techworld.

Comment: Is this really a problem? (Score 4, Interesting) 363

Other than Facebook itself, and Google, has anyone actually been asked to join a Social Network by their employer?

(No, Gmail does not count).

I've heard of people being asked to follow twitter, but that's hardly a social network, and its far from bidirectional.

The magic of our first love is our ignorance that it can ever end. -- Benjamin Disraeli

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