shameless_1

Scaling to a 128 bit system is pretty hard on the layout level. On current designs, something like 95% of the surface is metal interconnects. Where there's metal you're limited in freedom to place transistors. So with 128-bit systems you're looking at 128-bit registers, address buses and data buses. Those take up a lot of real estate on the die and you can only go so far in narrowing them by using layers. 128-bit is a really really wide highway on a CPU.

That doesn't mean that 128-bit systems can't be built. What it does mean is that upgrading a current 64-bit CPU to a 128-bit CPU involves sacrifices. Current-gen 64-bit systems contain a lot of optimizations in silico (branch predictors, cache predictors, ...) and control structures and that's where the problem lies: each optimization (literally) taps into that wide highway and creates dead zones on the die that contain nothing more than metal. And everywhere you tap you create zones where layering can only be applied with reduced freedom.

The Peter Principle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle

Not meant to counter your argument, but at least one compiler out there (GCC) is - in my experience - very good at finding optimizations for x86 but fails most of the time for ARM unless you provide very clear and very strict hints in your code. NEON optimization is one of them. It wouldn't be the first time that GCC completely ignores intrinsics in my loops or (I kid you not) introduces 16-bit Thumb code in my 32 bit code. Very frustrating to constantly have to second-guess your compiler.

1st Ave Machine used to have that feature, their site was (and is) rather heavy.

They changed the website look and feel, had to look up the release date of the video for which I first saw this UI pattern (Sixes last by Alias): 2005

Edit: site now: http://1stavemachine.com/

For those interested in more info on this, this type of capacitors is a supercapacitor (the name is used only once in the article in a caption).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercapacitor

>> Do you, or anyone, have a link to somewhere not simply explaining the technical side of pointers, but their usage in idealistic and primarily real world examples?

I often use them for parsing json on the fly in an embedded environment with limited ram. Suppose you have a runtime with 4K RAM of which 2K is available, but in comes a string that requires much more space. You can't store the string in RAM, validate it and then use the variables. What I do is parse on the fly and store the variables along with function pointers that need to process them. Once the string has ended and you're sure it's valid and checksummed you process the variables with their function pointers. This technique stretches the length of the message you're able to process, especially for stuff like 32-bit floats that have a larger string than binary representation.

"Life" is like "species": different schools/universities/professors hold different definitions.

Example in this context: a (bio) virus. It has no metabolism, without a host cell it's completely static. The academic world is kinda split when you ask someone in the field whether a virus is a living organism or not. According to one school of thought it's as much alive as a rock.

> ... and may still be here but undetectable to our current technologies.

I recently saw a nature doc where they were raising Panda cubs. Because the species isn't doing that well and breeding in captivity is problematic they try to keep them unfamiliar with humans [0]. Keeping them undomesticated, so to speak. The caretakers wear Panda costumes every time they have to interact with the cubs. They do the same when raising endangered birds: hand puppets reduces imprinting with humans [1].

In that respect, I think it's overkill for alien tech to rely on advanced tech to make themselves undetectable. Look up at the sky. See those Boeing and Airbus planes? That's how easy it is. Disguise your spacecraft as a reflective metal tube that leaves a trail of water vapor and you're done.

Disclaimer: I don't actually believe they're among us.

[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fXBRKWmICU

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=XNk...

As an engineering project this is truly a resourceful and rather elegant solution to tune a Kahlman filter for positioning. But on the level of privacy ... big consequences. The BSSID allows tracking when someone moves to a different place. And since that's tied to GPS with multiple captures over time you get a pretty accurate location for the WiFi device.

> Google has harvested the location, name and signal strength of many millions of wireless networks across the world

Don't forget that that dataset of wireless locations is updated continuously through crowdsourcing.

I honestly hope they raise the cash. Some of the comments point out that they might not have thought the whole thing through ("basically it appear to me that you would want us to buy hack a day, and offer it to the current redactors, which means they would win a $500.000 company.").