However, it's also interesting, according to the article, that these mice have a lot more mitochondria, and they live longer. That would tend to support the mitochondrial theory of aging, which says, basically, that cells get old because their mitochondria wear out.
Why do I get the feeling both companies expect to be able to screw each other over, somehow in the future, with this agreement? In a way, you are right, but both companies are just betting on themselves, really.
Sun is betting on Solaris. With Solaris on IBM servers (just x86 servers), they get get more people to run software on Solaris. They are betting that customers will like it so much that the next time they go to buy a server, they'll want one with Solaris on it, too. And the natural place to buy hardware that runs Solaris is... Sun.
IBM is betting on their hardware, traditionally their strong suit. They are hoping that by offering Solaris on IBM hardware they will attract Sun customers. And that those customers will like the hardware so much that they will move their software from Sun hardware to IBM hardware.
Who is right? Only time will tell, but here's a hint: for most serious applications the cost of the software far exceeds the cost of the hardware.
Either way, this certainly pressures HP in the server department.
Why? Even if IBM gets a few more points of the server market (taking it from Sun) HP's market share shouldn't be affected. Well, marketing is funny: the big get bigger simply because they are big. Ask MS how many sales they make because Windoze is the market leader. So it does put pressure on HP. Of course, HP can sell Solaris too...
And I'm sure there are a certain segment of the computer market who didn't buy IBM because of the OS, or didn't buy Sun because of the hardware, or both. Now HP has to work much harder to get and keep those customers.
"He went that way ->" "Are you looking at ME?" "Bite me" "Nothing to see here, move along" "I have a telescope and I'm looking right back atcha" "No WMDs here either" "I'm hairy and nude - you still wanna look?" "Area 52"
In my experience "slow" is a very subjective measure of a web site. It really depends on how quickly the content is displayed, not how quickly the entire page is loaded and rendered.
Lets say you visit, oh, dilbert.com (just to pick on a geeky site) to get your daily dose of dilbert. If the first thing that is rendered on your screen is the actual comic, you don't really care that it takes another 10-20 seconds to display the buttons, menus, sidebars, topbars, bottombars, animations, ads and ads for ads. It can do that while you chuckle over the comic.
On the other hand, if you have to sit there and drum your fingers while all the other crap loads first before you get to look at todays dilbert, then you are going to be muttering "why is this site so freaking slow?" And if wwww.weselladstoadserversbythebillions.com got it's DNS server taken out by a freak lightning strike, you could be sitting there a while.
Would it be possible to have a plug-in or extension, so that I could right click on the actual content of a site and say "next time I visit here, load this bit first?" Yes, I could just block everything else on the site, but then they'll change it a week later, and some of the non-content stuff might actually be useful on occasion. I don't want to have to be in an arms race with a million web-monkeys on a thousand different sites just to browse my RDA of surfing.
The point about multi-core chips is that it is (now) much cheaper to add cores to a chip than to add speed/cache/bandwidth to the chip. Which is why a 4 core chip is not 4X the price of a 1 core chip.
If someone had in mind to build a multi-core OLPC, you'd probably see an 8 core system for $250. Same clock speed, slightly more power consumption, maybe more memory bandwidth.
In fact, this would probably be a better way of making the OLPC more powerful, instead of just revving up the cpu speed. Maybe next year there will be a dual core $100 laptop.
Speaking of gamers, wouldn't if be fun to have an 8 core CPU where some of those cores are actually GPUs? Hm....
I've been reading up on and following this experiment for a while now. Personally, I don't think it will "work" in the sense that back-time signaling will be demonstrated. However, the experiment is still well worth doing, because we learn as much from how it "fails" as from success. Plus, it's just so interesting.
The proposed experiment is based on another experiment by B. Dopfer that has already been done and the results published. The original experiment shone a UV laser into a special crystal that split each incoming photon into two entangled photon going in different directions (you need a laser to get the right frequency of light into the crystal.) One photon (B) went through a double-slit and then to a, well, camera. You expect to see one of two patterns on the detector: if the photon is acting like a particle, then there's a 'hump'. If it's acting like a wave, there will be a diffraction pattern. Now the other photon (A), goes through a lens and onto another detector. With the lens in the right position, you can observe A and tell which slit photon B went through. Move the lens and you can't tell anymore. What's interesting is that the pattern detected for B depends on where the lens is at detector A. This is exactly the 'spooky action at a distance' that Einstein pointed out.
Now, the original experiment filtered out all the noise by using a 'coincidence detector'. This also, in effect, re-synchronized the two signals via classical communications, eliminating any exciting possibilities like FTL communication. Unfortunately, the Dopfer paper doesn't say what happens without the coincidence detector.
Cramer is proposing two modifications to the Dopfer experiment.
First is to remove the coincidence detector. This will degrade the pattern that shows up at detector B, but (according to the QM math), not enough to make it go away. That means that a change in the setup at detector A will 'instantly' effect the pattern seen at detector B. Simply by looking at what pattern is seen at B, you can tell what the physical setup is at A. Even if this is as far as the experiment goes, it will be extraordinary. Theoretically (yes, I know) A and B can be as far apart as you want, far enough to demonstrate that FTL communication is taking place.
The second modification that Cramer is proposing is even more radical. If you look closely at the original experiment, you can see something really unusual: the distance that photon B travels to it's detector is SHORTER than the distance photon A travels to it's detector. So what? So it looks like a change in how A is measured effects the measurement of B, even if B is measured before changing A. This is quite a bit like the 'delayed choice' experiment, except with much more measurable results. Now the difference in path lengths between A and B in the original Dopfer experiment was on the order of centimeters, too short to measure directly. Cramer wants to route the A photons through a fiber optic cable, introducing enough delay between the A and B detectors that it can be measured. This is where the 'retrocausality' (I hate that term) comes in.
I doubt (and I'm pretty sure Cramer is skeptical too) that back-time signaling can be demonstrated. But you can work the experiment just via the math, using standard QM equations, to see what the predicted outcome is. And there's nothing in the math (so far) that prevents the experiment from working. QM predicts that it will work. If the experiment doesn't work, then we learn more about Quantum Mechanics. If it only partially works, then we get FTL communication. If it goes all the way, we've invented time travel (for information, anyway).
I see from all the comments that nobody actually read the article.
The 'cure' doesn't eliminate any and all fear. It doesn't address situational fear at all. What it 'cures' is LEARNED fear responses. It's specific application to, for example, soldiers would be for PTSD.
And even if there was a way to get read of all fear reactions, you'd still have a BRAIN and the ability to choose not to do things that you reason are too risky.
The level of stupidity here stuns me. What were they going to do if one of those kids parents had shown up during the "attack" with a shotgun? And where did they find sadistic morons to threaten the lives of the kids without real weapons? What were they going to do if a Cop or an FBI agent happened to be nearby? Or what if a random stranger had seen the "attack" and called the SWAT team, DHS, HRT and the media? Those morons could have gotten themselves killed, not to mention what could have happend to the kids.
Actually, the point here is a little more complicated. The point (IMHO) is that if you get used to treating mechanisms badly, which act like they are alive (by reacting to your abuse), then it's a lot easier for you to do the same to actual living things.
I wouldn't kick a robotic dog, because I don't want to get into the habit of kicking dogs - real or artificial. Does anyone remember the part of "Bicentennial Man" where the dad insists that his kids treat the android as if it were person? I'd make my kids do that too, because if they feel free to abuse an android, they might feel free to abuse people as well.
Isn't it much more likely that I really do have free will, rather than postulate a vast, complicated conspiracy by God/evolution/nature/my brain to fool me into thinking I have it?
And, if there isn't free will, there's no use in claiming not to have free will, because you were obviously pre-determined to think you have free will. Hah! Beat that one.
What's the alternative to free will, anyway? Think about it. If you assume there is no free will, then all sorts of really nasty things could follow as a logical consequence. Given the choice I'd rather assume free will - it makes living much better.
OK, it's neat tech and I'm all for pushing the envelope. But what devices would you want to share via USB that you can't already share over an IP network? Mouse - two computers, one mouse? madness. Same for keyboards. storage devices? well, can't you already share drives/partitions via NFS or that windows stuff? Printers? been done. several ways. Network ports? It's called a router - most computers can do it.
I just don't see the application. Am I missing something?
If we want to continue to have faster and faster CPUs, then multiple cores is the way to go. You can only squeeze so many MHz out of a chip (as Intel found out at about 4Ghz). Cache and I/O bandwidth will only get you so far. However, since most operating systems are multi-tasking, having multiple cores is a win. And yes, you as a home PC user with your screen saver on may not see full use of all those cores, but believe it, there WILL be applications that can take advantage of them. Programs expand to fill the CPU cycles available. Besides, SETI@home would certainly benefit;).
Uh, the scout salute has the three fingers next to each other, pressed together. The web day salute has the fingers separated, to make a sort of 'W' sign. FYI.
... is going to be the new benchmark. Sun is already heading in that direction with their low-power AMD offerings, and even more so with the new Niagara systems. When the other vendors get their acts together, expect them to follow suit.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, Couldn't resist.
This isn't an 4/1 joke, is it?
Once you leave Earth for a while, particularly if you travel far, you realize that it doesn't suck quite as much as you thought.
A similar phenomenon occurs when traveling outside of the U.S.
"Someone" I believe is Isaac Asimov.
And the truth is it's not "that's odd" but usually "What the....?"
You can move the blocks on the computer and have the real blocks assemble themselves to match.
Besides, legos are expensive enough without stuffing them full of electronics.
In a Laura Croft movie?
Maybe that's why this is news for nerds.
Not so fast, you super-athlete wanna-bes.
According to wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphenolpyruvate_carboxykinase
over expression of this gene also causes type II diabetes. Not a great trade off.
However, it's also interesting, according to the article, that these mice have a lot more mitochondria, and they live longer. That would tend to support the mitochondrial theory of aging, which says, basically, that cells get old because their mitochondria wear out.
Until they can make di-lithium crystals.
Sun is betting on Solaris. With Solaris on IBM servers (just x86 servers), they get get more people to run software on Solaris. They are betting that customers will like it so much that the next time they go to buy a server, they'll want one with Solaris on it, too. And the natural place to buy hardware that runs Solaris is... Sun.
IBM is betting on their hardware, traditionally their strong suit. They are hoping that by offering Solaris on IBM hardware they will attract Sun customers. And that those customers will like the hardware so much that they will move their software from Sun hardware to IBM hardware.
Who is right? Only time will tell, but here's a hint: for most serious applications the cost of the software far exceeds the cost of the hardware. Either way, this certainly pressures HP in the server department.
Why? Even if IBM gets a few more points of the server market (taking it from Sun) HP's market share shouldn't be affected. Well, marketing is funny: the big get bigger simply because they are big. Ask MS how many sales they make because Windoze is the market leader. So it does put pressure on HP. Of course, HP can sell Solaris too...
And I'm sure there are a certain segment of the computer market who didn't buy IBM because of the OS, or didn't buy Sun because of the hardware, or both. Now HP has to work much harder to get and keep those customers.
Everyone should paint messages on their roof.
"He went that way ->"
"Are you looking at ME?"
"Bite me"
"Nothing to see here, move along"
"I have a telescope and I'm looking right back atcha"
"No WMDs here either"
"I'm hairy and nude - you still wanna look?"
"Area 52"
See? Mess with their heads.
Germs that make gasoline.
So soon I'll be able to contract a flesh-eating, anti-biotic resistant, EXPLOSIVE infection.
Just great. While you're at it how about a pill that turns body fat into C4?
--
I for one, welcome our explosive bacterial overlords.
In my experience "slow" is a very subjective measure of a web site. It really depends on how quickly the content is displayed, not how quickly the entire page is loaded and rendered.
Lets say you visit, oh, dilbert.com (just to pick on a geeky site) to get your daily dose of dilbert. If the first thing that is rendered on your screen is the actual comic, you don't really care that it takes another 10-20 seconds to display the buttons, menus, sidebars, topbars, bottombars, animations, ads and ads for ads. It can do that while you chuckle over the comic.
On the other hand, if you have to sit there and drum your fingers while all the other crap loads first before you get to look at todays dilbert, then you are going to be muttering "why is this site so freaking slow?" And if wwww.weselladstoadserversbythebillions.com got it's DNS server taken out by a freak lightning strike, you could be sitting there a while.
Would it be possible to have a plug-in or extension, so that I could right click on the actual content of a site and say "next time I visit here, load this bit first?" Yes, I could just block everything else on the site, but then they'll change it a week later, and some of the non-content stuff might actually be useful on occasion. I don't want to have to be in an arms race with a million web-monkeys on a thousand different sites just to browse my RDA of surfing.
The point about multi-core chips is that it is (now) much cheaper to add cores to a chip than to add
speed/cache/bandwidth to the chip. Which is why a 4 core chip is not 4X the price of a 1 core chip.
If someone had in mind to build a multi-core OLPC, you'd probably see an 8 core system for $250.
Same clock speed, slightly more power consumption, maybe more memory bandwidth.
In fact, this would probably be a better way of making the OLPC more powerful, instead of just revving
up the cpu speed. Maybe next year there will be a dual core $100 laptop.
Speaking of gamers, wouldn't if be fun to have an 8 core CPU where some of those cores are actually
GPUs? Hm....
I've been reading up on and following this experiment for a while now. Personally, I don't think it will "work" in the sense that back-time signaling will be demonstrated. However, the experiment is still well worth doing, because we learn as much from how it "fails" as from success. Plus, it's just so interesting.
The proposed experiment is based on another experiment by B. Dopfer that has already been done and the results published. The original experiment shone a UV laser into a special crystal that split each incoming photon into two entangled photon going in different directions (you need a laser to get the right frequency of light into the crystal.) One photon (B) went through a double-slit and then to a, well, camera. You expect to see one of two patterns on the detector: if the photon is acting like a particle, then there's a 'hump'. If it's acting like a wave, there will be a diffraction pattern.
Now the other photon (A), goes through a lens and onto another detector. With the lens in the right position, you can observe A and tell which slit photon B went through. Move the lens and you can't tell anymore. What's interesting is that the pattern detected for B depends on where the lens is at detector A. This is exactly the 'spooky action at a distance' that Einstein pointed out.
Now, the original experiment filtered out all the noise by using a 'coincidence detector'. This also, in effect, re-synchronized the two signals via classical communications, eliminating any exciting possibilities like FTL communication. Unfortunately, the Dopfer paper doesn't say what happens without the coincidence detector.
Cramer is proposing two modifications to the Dopfer experiment.
First is to remove the coincidence detector. This will degrade the pattern that shows up at detector B, but (according to the QM math), not enough to make it go away. That means that a change in the setup at detector A will 'instantly' effect the pattern seen at detector B. Simply by looking at what pattern is seen at B, you can tell what the physical setup is at A.
Even if this is as far as the experiment goes, it will be extraordinary. Theoretically (yes, I know) A and B can be as far apart as you want, far enough to demonstrate that FTL communication is taking place.
The second modification that Cramer is proposing is even more radical. If you look closely at the original experiment, you can see something really unusual: the distance that photon B travels to it's detector is SHORTER than the distance photon A travels to it's detector. So what? So it looks like a change in how A is measured effects the measurement of B, even if B is measured before changing A. This is quite a bit like the 'delayed choice' experiment, except with much more measurable results.
Now the difference in path lengths between A and B in the original Dopfer experiment was on the order of centimeters, too short to measure directly. Cramer wants to route the A photons through a fiber optic cable, introducing enough delay between the A and B detectors that it can be measured. This is where the 'retrocausality' (I hate that term) comes in.
I doubt (and I'm pretty sure Cramer is skeptical too) that back-time signaling can be demonstrated. But you can work the experiment just via the math, using standard QM equations, to see what the predicted outcome is. And there's nothing in the math (so far) that prevents the experiment from working. QM predicts that it will work. If the experiment doesn't work, then we learn more about Quantum Mechanics. If it only partially works, then we get FTL communication. If it goes all the way, we've invented time travel (for information, anyway).
THAT'S why the experiment is so fascinating.
I see from all the comments that nobody actually read the article.
The 'cure' doesn't eliminate any and all fear. It doesn't address situational fear at all.
What it 'cures' is LEARNED fear responses. It's specific application to, for example, soldiers would be
for PTSD.
And even if there was a way to get read of all fear reactions, you'd still have a BRAIN and the ability
to choose not to do things that you reason are too risky.
Seriously, read the article. It's interesting.
Sheesh.
The level of stupidity here stuns me.
What were they going to do if one of those kids parents
had shown up during the "attack" with a shotgun? And where
did they find sadistic morons to threaten the lives of the
kids without real weapons? What were they going to do if
a Cop or an FBI agent happened to be nearby? Or what if
a random stranger had seen the "attack" and called the
SWAT team, DHS, HRT and the media? Those morons could
have gotten themselves killed, not to mention what could
have happend to the kids.
IDIOTS
Here is the web page for TRIPS, straight from UT austin:
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~trips/
Enjoy.
It's the monoliths playing games with us.
Actually, the point here is a little more complicated. The point (IMHO) is that if you get used to treating mechanisms badly, which act like they are alive (by reacting to your abuse), then it's a lot easier for you to do the same to actual living things.
I wouldn't kick a robotic dog, because I don't want to get into the habit of kicking dogs - real or artificial. Does anyone remember the part of "Bicentennial Man" where the dad insists that his kids treat the android as if it were person? I'd make my kids do that too, because if they feel free to abuse an android, they might feel free to abuse people as well.
... I choose to believe that I have free will.
Isn't it much more likely that I really do have free will, rather than postulate a
vast, complicated conspiracy by God/evolution/nature/my brain to fool me into thinking
I have it?
And, if there isn't free will, there's no use in claiming not to have free will, because
you were obviously pre-determined to think you have free will. Hah! Beat that one.
What's the alternative to free will, anyway? Think about it. If you assume there is
no free will, then all sorts of really nasty things could follow as a logical
consequence. Given the choice I'd rather assume free will - it makes living
much better.
OK, it's neat tech and I'm all for pushing the envelope.
But what devices would you want to share via USB that you can't
already share over an IP network?
Mouse - two computers, one mouse? madness. Same for keyboards.
storage devices? well, can't you already share drives/partitions via
NFS or that windows stuff? Printers? been done. several ways.
Network ports? It's called a router - most computers can do it.
I just don't see the application. Am I missing something?
> but 80 core chips seem absurd.
;).
If we want to continue to have faster and faster CPUs, then multiple cores is the way to
go. You can only squeeze so many MHz out of a chip (as Intel found out at about 4Ghz).
Cache and I/O bandwidth will only get you so far. However, since most operating systems
are multi-tasking, having multiple cores is a win. And yes, you as a home PC user with your screen saver on may not see full use of all those cores, but believe it, there WILL be applications that can take advantage of them. Programs expand to fill the CPU cycles available. Besides, SETI@home would certainly benefit
Wouldn't be a lot cheaper just to get a bumper sticker that says
"NO INSURANCE" ?
...the pilots get to say "Call me Snake" before each mission.
[ Escape from New York reference, for the Kurt Russel impaired.]
Uh, the scout salute has the three fingers next to each other, pressed together. The web day salute has the fingers separated, to make a sort of 'W' sign. FYI.
... is going to be the new benchmark. Sun is already heading in that direction with their low-power AMD offerings, and even more so with the new
Niagara systems. When the other vendors get their acts together, expect them to follow suit.