Posts by RegReaderrr

Embrace your outsourced future

Have anyone heard of balanced trade?

It's amazing how people run like hens to the corners of the henhouse. Nope, the fox ain't gonna look there... Even if it skips you, your offspring has no chance.

A race to the bottom is a race to the bottom, it's simple math. One either protects his house or loses it, it's simple common sense. Leaving the house open and hiding under the bed is childish at best.

The protections are called Balanced Trade and Glass-Steagall. Learn about it and grow some feathers... at least.

China takes HPC heavyweight title

Finally

It is about time to move past the obsolete x86 architecture. Nvidia is making ARM based CPUs too, soon we'll be able to use better processors not only in our phones, but also in desktops and high performance gear. Good for Nvidia! Booo for the lobbyist driven purchases of the US research labs. Who would have thought that the mighty West would become more tainted and bureaucratic than communist China... the Western branch of the Chinese retail industry...

CUDA daddy muses on future GPUs

CUDA is Nice

As a person who wrestles with both CUDA and OpenCL I prefer CUDA by far. One can do a lot more in CUDA. OCL is basically meant for shaders, it's not the real deal. CUDA tools are excellent. No one comes close to that on the GPU side.

Give credit where credit is due, Nvidia is the ONLY company which is innovating in the area of processors. x86 is an ancient kludge, RISC has been around for a while. Only NVidia's Fermi is something new and it's quite fast and useful. In many fields it's the only game in town. The oil industry is a good example.

IBM opens up vast market for GPU computing

Go IBM

Fermi blades provide a lot of value for the customers. They can help replace the expensive, interconnected stacks of PeeCees with a few cores and a few GPUs. IBM sells reliable gear, good for them.

China's Nebulae supercomputer - zero to second in 3 months

GPU is the Way

GPU nodes scale way better faster and cheaper than the puny x86 obsolescence.

Toshiba Australia boss waves tablet around

AlwaysInnovating

The iPad seems like a crude rip-off of a tablet made by alwaysinnovating. It went on sale a year ago, full 8 months before Apple's iPad. see it at alawaysinnovating dot com, a nice detachable keyboard is also available. Cheaper too.

Project Mojo – the server rack that packs petaflops

High Performance CGPU

If SGI keeps messing around, they will have to file for bankruptcy again, this time final... Dawning Inc in China started to make supercomputers which are not only cheaper and faster but burn half the electricity of anything SGI can offer. El Reg, please note: speaking about a single precision supercomputer is like speaking about lilliputian giant, this is a contradiction in terms.

So the above mentioned Dawning Inc is beating SGI right now by offering NVidia Fermi GPUs attached to nice x86 blades. Fermi is 3 to 10 times faster in double precision than ATI's GPU, indeed ATI's GPU architecture is unsuitable for general purpose computing to begin with. The funny part is that Dawning also offers standard Infiniband interconnect, apparently SGI got a clue from them.

So while SGI is trying to figure out how to politically please their x86 masters, it may disappear altogether... as so many others. In the meantime, cheap, small and economical supercomputers are already available in China and Japan.

Nvidia recovering in fiscal Q1

Good for NVidia

In double floating point performance NVidia's Fermi is 3 times faster than the best ATI product. Fermi is both a GPU and a general purpose processor and it is used to accelerate everything from game physics to drug research. This is a huge selling point and NVIDIA GPUs are showing up in pairs and triplets in workstations. ATI offers an architecure which is suitable only for graphics. Fermi beats that by 10% at least, and offers also physics and high performance computing, something that ATI can do only 5 to 10 times slower.

NVidia has another winner in their hands, and the x86 makers are running scared from the quality and performance of Fermi. It's hard to feel for them, x86 is an old and mediocre architecture which has only been kept alive up by the IBM legacy. The phones and tablets have shown that x86 can be beaten easily by much smaller companies. It's very pleasing to see growing market recognition for superior products like Fermi and ARM. It's much needed competition for x86 and it benefits consumers greatly.

Google's Android code deleted from Linux kernel

Buy Nokia

The Linux kernel developers explained at length the problems created by Google. Basically Google insisted on adding some proprietary hooks to the kernel, setting the stage for other such hooks by other companies. This is neither sound design, nor bug free, and it presents another security risk. The developers also explained how Nokia cooperated with the kernel team and resolved the exact same issue in a satisfactory and clean manner. As a result, Nokia still uses the standard kernel while those who use Android have forked themselves. There you have it - Nokia doesn't have BS slogans but they do play well. Goodbye Nexus, hello Nokia.

An evil fork?

Seems like the fruity guy was right, something does stink about this story. Goodbye Nexus. Nokia, here I come...

Obama to boost US nuclear power industry

Never Say Never

@Mike Richards - "So yes, reprocessing kind of makes sense in getting the most out of the fuel, but it won't make for cheaper energy and it will make for a lot of high-level actinide waste which will have to be processed and stored. Good luck with finding a permanent solution for that."

Luckily, the so called nuclear waste is not waste - it's pure fuel. It can burn producing 10 times the power already produced and what remains is one tenth of its original radioactive materials. Luckily, the remaining real waste is 100 times shorter-lived. So there you have your "permanent solution" - burn the waste in fast breeder reactors and store the waste for ~ 100 years in average. Thorium OR fast reactors can satisfy all world energy needs for no less than 10000 years from only the easily available fuel. More advanced technologies (available today) can supply fuel until the sun explodes... with sizable reserves left over. One of those reactors has been running for 30 years, so it's not a new tech nor a particularly complex one. There is a Toshiba design for a sealed "battery" type fast reactor which works for 30 years without refueling. For even more info, please research on Integral Fast Reactor (canceled by Lewinsky's boyfriend), thorium reactors (youtube LFTR), Galena reactor, BN-600, etc There are plenty of permanent solutions but the advanced reactor designs are all blocked by the arbitrary licensing process. This is the only problem.

Loan guarantees are not "subsidy"!

A loan guarantee will only pay money if the project fails and cannot repay its debt. The government will have to pay only in case of default, and that can happen only because of the government. The truth is that the GOVERNMENT is the ONLY force which can ruin a nuclear plant project. Many half built plants have been canceled because of government interference and "shifting goal posts" regulation. It goes as trivia that the government uses regulation as a club to beat the "less special" in the special interest pecking order. Nuclear power has been to the receiving end of this club far too many times and no one would start a plant without a loan guarantee - it provides at least some insurance against the government's game of picking winners and losers. Then the previous 18 billion in loan guarantees did NOT get awarded... so Obama's words are likely smoke and mirrors this time around too.

As an example, compare $5 trillion in fresh ~0% loans for the financial industry with the shaky "guarantees" for $34 billion 5% loans for nuclear power. More than 50% of nuclear cost is due to high interest and regulation cost, including long build times. Consider also the direct and indirect subsidies for "clean ebergy" which is from 3 to 5 times more expensive than nuclear. These subsidies aren't even loans they are gifts at the altar of Gaia, never to be seen again. For the last 10 years the amount of money gone with the wind approaches 100 billion... your money.

Steve Jobs dubs Google's 'don't be evil' motto 'bulls**t'

Competeing is evil?

Oh, don't you dare compete with the fruit fly, she is going to get offended and call you "evil"...

China picks MIPS for super-duper super

x86 on MIPS

x86 on MIPS is good news. x86 on anything is good news and I expect ARM and others to develop emulators also. 30% reduction in speed is quite acceptable since, MIPS can offer twice the processing power per Wat. x86 is used only for office apps, where speed isn't critical. Sounds like a good move for the Chinese.

FBI nicks 22 in classic bribery sting

Small Fish

Chasing small fish for a few African millions while Wall Street is rewarded for stealing trillions... All done for the "good" of the taxpayers... at their expense, of course.

Google to mobile industry: ‘F*ck you very much!’

Go a Step Further

We know what the goal of a public corporation is, but that's not the point. You don't seem to know that it's more important what the corporations are allowed to do. For example, it is in the interest of window and glass manufacturers to break your windows, it is in the interest of doctors to have you sick (in the US at least), etc. Such behavior used to be kept in check by competition, and other law. No more. Nowadays monopolies are sold. maintained and bailed out no matter what damage they do. Since our governments have already sold out to malicious interests, it's essential to maintain some public awareness as a defense against damaging practices. In other words, since we failed at the ballot box, we better try to vote properly with our wallets. In this regard the article has value, it's not perfect, but it's a step forward from the bunch of parrots elsewhere.

Two wrongs don't make a right

Unethical behavior should not be excused. Legalities aside, Google was assuring everyone that they had interest only in adverts, NOT hardware.

Nexus' T-Mobile deal is not cheaper or better than the rest, so the end users gain nothing. Besides, phone manufacturers like Motorola, experience the largest problems. They have already spent a lot on advertising their phones AND Android, which Google picks up for free by being the original thing. To add insult to injury, Nexus runs a new version of Android not supplied to the other partners. Google is not in the game for the end users. Actually by being bigger and more resourceful they can push the users around easier.

I have to say the obvious here, bad business practices are prevailing throughout the western world. They are the result of sloppy legislation, deliberately drafted with humongous loopholes. It is ludicrous to think that any private company will "do no evil" and keep themselves from exploiting the loopholes.

Corruption in government and private enterprise is the reason for these problems. They can't be fixed by anything other than responsible and active population... and that's nowhere to be found.