Azat Posted April 7, 2003 Report Share Posted April 7, 2003 "Today a company or agency with a $10 million hardware budget can buy processing power equivalent to 2,000 workstations, two petabytes of hard drive space (two million gigabytes, or 50,000 standard 40-gigabyte hard drives like those found on today's PCs), and a two-gigabit Internet connection (more than 2,000 times the capacity of a typical home broadband connection). If current trends continue, simple arithmetic predicts that in 20 years the same purchasing power will buy the processing capability of 10 million of today's workstations, 200 exabytes (200 million gigabytes) of storage capacity, and 200 exabits (200 million megabits) of bandwidth. Another way of saying this is that by 2023 large organizations will be able to devote the equivalent of a contemporary PC to monitoring every single one of the 330 million people who will then be living in the United States." "Surveillance Nation"MIT Technology ReviewApril, 2003 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Azat Posted June 29, 2003 Author Report Share Posted June 29, 2003 From The Past: "Introduced in 1978, the original 16-bit 8086 chip contained only 29,000 transistors and ran at 5 MHz... In comparison, early 2003's Pentium 4 processors contain 55 million transistors and run more than 600 times faster -- at 3.06GHz. To The Present: Based on combined desktop, laptop and server shipments, Mercury Research calculates that Intel shipped its One-Billionth Processor in April [2003], roughly 25 years after the debut of the first 8086 microprocessor on June 8, 1978... And On To Tomorrow: Mercury Research calculates that the next billion X86 CPUs could ship far faster than the first billion processors, in only four [vs. 25] years -- by as early as 2007!" Paraphrases from a June 9 Intel Press Release Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Azat Posted June 29, 2003 Author Report Share Posted June 29, 2003 Don't Lick That Envelop! Finally, don't lick that flap if you have something to hide -- a particularly hard lesson learned by a 35-year old man who was just arrested for a murder committed 21 years ago (http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/05/21/old.murder.ap/index.html). It seems that DNA technologies of twenty, and even ten years ago, were too crude to lift a "DNA fingerprint" from the victim's body. But this was finally accomplished last year. The question then, was how to legally get a DNA sample from the suspect to test for a match? The authorities sent him a letter containing a form he had to fill out, along with a self-addressed (and assumedly stamped) return envelop. All he had to do was sign the form, lick the flap, and drop it in a mailbox. (I wonder if this was a "You've Won!" sweepstakes kind of form...?) This freely-given DNA sample was then analyzed, matched to the "fingerprint" on the body, and he was arrested. Talk about "getting licked!" This story is somewhat humorous (although assumedly not for the man arrested), but it does remind us that "privacy" as we've known it is being constantly eroded by the technological advances that are otherwise so valuable. We've seen TV cop shows where the DNA from a glass of water given to someone being interrogated, or a thrown-out piece of chewing gum, can be a "smoking gun" -- and now we've seen a real-life version. In a different kind of privacy issue, another man was just sentenced to 30 years in jail based on the evidence stored in his car's "black box" -- it documented for the police that he was actually moving at 100 MPH just prior to hitting a car containing two teenagers (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ibsys/20030613/lo_wplg/1658180). And if you don't think that YOU have such a "black box," consider that they're already built into 25 million cars in the US as part of the engine and data monitoring system! (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030605/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/vehicle_black_boxes_2) Just something to keep in mind as you walk around with your cell phone turned on, drive past recording traffic surveillance cameras on roadways, take the "fast lane" through toll plazas, or walk past shops' surveillance cameras on a sidewalk. For both good and for ill (and there ARE both "goods" and "ills"), our lives are increasingly an open book; let's be sure that we only allow our technologies to shape our societies in ways that we are, quite literally, willing to live with. Copyright © 2001-2003, Jeffrey R. Harrow. All rights reserved.Email: Jeff@TheHarrowGroup.com Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
McCarthyiologist Posted June 29, 2003 Report Share Posted June 29, 2003 "Introduced in 1978, the original 16-bit 8086 chip contained only 29,000 transistors and ran at 5 MHz... In comparison, early 2003's Pentium 4 processors contain 55 million transistors and run more than 600 times faster -- at 3.06GHz. Are you sure of that ? I mean, 600 times seems to be too smal considering that beside the clock frequencies more information per cycle could be processed. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sip Posted June 30, 2003 Report Share Posted June 30, 2003 Are you sure of that ? I mean, 600 times seems to be too smal considering that beside the clock frequencies more information per cycle could be processed.Very true. It's not just clock speed but P4 is first of all superscaler, has a 20 stage pipeline, has a very sophisticated branch prediction unit and crazy caches, supports out-of-order instruction execution, and even has built-in support for hyper-threading (executing two different program threads completely in parallel). On top of that, now a lot of things are done off the CPU (like audio/graphics processing) and that releaves a lot of burden from the main CPU. Of course P4 has multiple arithmetic units and two of the interger units actually run at TWICE the clock rate!!! So for a 3Ghz P4, you have 2 integer units that are running at 6Ghz As far as I know, the 8086 is just a single-issue processor (one instruction at a time) and needs an 8087 floating point coprocessor to do floating point!!! Not to mention the fact that it's 16 bits. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MosJan Posted June 30, 2003 Report Share Posted June 30, 2003 8086 what can i use this unit for ???i still have one it has 8mb ram and a 40mb hdrive Movses Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
McCarthyiologist Posted June 30, 2003 Report Share Posted June 30, 2003 8086 what can i use this unit for ???i still have one it has 8mb ram and a 40mb hdrive Movses If ot was an old MAC, you could have made of it an aqu. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MosJan Posted June 30, 2003 Report Share Posted June 30, 2003 I hed some 12 old MAC's at my shop at one time I could not even donate the stupid thinks to goodwill it Was only good for target practice it makes a big bang wan you shut at one MAC no way duUde Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Azat Posted June 30, 2003 Author Report Share Posted June 30, 2003 Are you sure of that ? I mean, 600 times seems to be too smal considering that beside the clock frequencies more information per cycle could be processed.Domino, it is a direct quote from Intel and all it says is the clock speed is 600 times faster. it does not say that the CPU is X times faster or anything like that Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
McCarthyiologist Posted June 30, 2003 Report Share Posted June 30, 2003 Domino, it is a direct quote from Intel and all it says is the clock speed is 600 times faster. it does not say that the CPU is X times faster or anything like thatOK, understood, I just have read "faster" so I supposed they were talking about the speed compared to the 8086. Ah and, I am McCarthyologue, or Professor McFadi, not Domino. Now, who will beat MosJan with a Classic Mac for me? Vava ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Azat Posted October 27, 2003 Author Report Share Posted October 27, 2003 "Am I living in the last generation to die of cancer, or the first generation to be saved by nanotechnology?" Nobel Prize winner Richard Smalley Director of the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology, Rice University, Houston.(From the Oct. 10 Forbes/Wolfe nanotech Weekly Insider) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Azat Posted October 27, 2003 Author Report Share Posted October 27, 2003 My my my - how far have we come This is a complete 12 channel GPS receiver from Motorola - their "GPS Mini-Module!" Yes it is 1.6CM long http://www.synergy-gps.com/FSoncore2.jpg Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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