"A telecommunications company could put transponders on an airplane and fly it over a city," Bushman said. "The aircraft could be used for everything from relaying cell phone calls to cable television or Internet connections."
I really wish they would stop talking such nosense, every time there's a storm or strong winds and microbusrts these thing would get destroyed. It's bad enough my Cable Modems goes down all the time imagine every time it get's windy you loose your internet....
The Apple Power PC openboot firmware( The equivalent to a BIOS in that world ) is derived from the Sun OS boot prom. This searches for Java drivers and other thing to run during boot time.
I'm sure this is far more open, understandable and practical compaired to anything Microsoft is proposing.
Also with DRM built in I'm sure it's not going to be open since there only security they can offer is obfuscation.
If all relays acted like open relays but just too failed relay attempt and deleted them. This would make the search for open relays more difficult for the spammers.
Thier data isn't normalize. What is the ratio of Linux to Windows servers in the study? What was the ratio of breaches VS. Attempts?
by attempting to Normalizing the numbers we can see the following. 67% + 23.2% = 90.2 % total listed. 12892 + 4626 = 17518 combined successful attacks. = 90.2% so 100% of attacks would be 19421 breaches total.
So linux out of 13012 attacks 12892 breaches Windows 4505 attack with 4626 Breaches
Giving linux 99.07% breach rate VS.
Microsoft at 102.67% Breach rate , Per successful attack.
If they computed there numbers correcly I should have seen 100% since there are percent and actual numbers of successful attempts.
Then again maybe there are 2% that breach MS security without a successful attack?
Anyhow its stuff like this that keeps me using FreeBSD.
When both parties look the same and both are standing for things I don't want or care about and ignoring the issues I and concerned with, such as free speech, encryption, privacy, Corperate corruption, jobs and the economy. I mean who cares about tax cuts when everyone I know is umemployed.
Worse yet it's almost impossible to get something equilvalent to a resume for these candidates. How should I choose an elected official with less information then I can get on a potential employiee.
With this choice why vote, I might as well flip a coin. Since I have no information to base a decision on. How can I tell who is the lesser evil?
There are many free packages that will allow you to capture video on one PC and broadcast (multicast) video across a LAN. Many can allow you to receive it using just a plain web browser. I had a product several years ago that allowed full screen, full motion video to be send globally with analog TV input and TV-out. www.livecamserver.com (no longer selling systems, but code is available) Another company GlobalStreams had a product called OnQ that could also do that. Both Logitech and Intel have USB web cams that can take composite video input and come with Internet streaming software.
A TV-out video card can allow for an NTSC composite video output and some even have S-Video out. This allows your regular computer display to be available as composite video which can then be connected to the TV or some other analog broadcast solution.
If needed Radio Shack sells an RF modulator to convert composite video and audio (Phono Plugs) to RF channel 3 and 4.
If you just want to send analog video across an office wirelessly there are several companies that sell 2.4 Gigahertz Wireless video transmitters and receivers. Radio Shack, X10. http://www.rf-video.com/ etc. sells these, a quick search on google for "2.4 GHz video transmitter" will give a long list of companies selling these.
Most of these, I have found to be compatible with each other and support up to 4 channels. Most come in 2 flavors, the ones with build in cameras and the ones with video inputs.. You don't want the camera transmitter unless your willing to cut off the camera and attach your own video input connector. Using the $79 solution from X10 with the camera removed works great if you willing to tinker. The other directly accepts composite video and audio, this is easily connected to a VCR, DVD player, TV-Out video card or a camcorder.
Both can use the same receivers on the TV side and have outputs composite video as well as RF channel 3 and 4.
Alex Lightman recently spoke with him after the Shuttle accident and write and article on his thoughts, a clip from there reads:
I called Gregory Benford, professor of physics and science fiction writers. He said, "The space shuttle is a vehicle designed by lawyers in 1970. From now on, we will probably turn back to using rockets, and landing people in capsules in the ocean, to get payloads into space."
Xerox TextBridge Pro
on
Accurate OCR?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I once had to recover a lost book manuscript from old printouts. The hard drive had crashed. After severer iterations I found a good combination and proper settings.
The scanner I used is a $99 scanner that is several years old, Canon CanoScan FB620P. I am very impressed with it. For OCR I used Xerox TextBridge Pro, the interface it awkward, but the OCR part it works. The biggest problem was the way the windows twain drivers were setup such that I had to go through several windows and mouse clicks to scan, and finish scanning.
I can do over 30 pages per Hour, I get about 99.8% on clean copy, the trick was to use a gray scale scan or text mode, Also I scan at 300 DPI , I find it's important to give the OCR as much info as possible to work from.
You still want to run this past a human proofreader, but overall I am very impressed with the setup and it's results.
Interleaved memory dates back to the 286 Cpu's and earlier. This sounds like they have just re-implemented it yet again with the newer speeds and are marketing it as something totaly new.
Definiation from a site on the net: Interleaved memory, which divides memory into two or four portions that process data alternately; that is, the CPU sends information to one section while another goes through a refresh cycle; a typical installation will have odd addresses on one side and even on the other (you can have word or block interleave). If memory accesses are sequential, the precharge of one will overlap the access time of the other.
With my former Companies IBS and DVBS we were doing video over TCP, UDP (Unicast and Multicast) TCP is certainly the easiest to implement. but at only a few percent packet loss (under 5%) is comes to a grinding halt. I have never seen TCP get to full speed between to T3 at 45Mbps and even with much tweaking of the TCP windows and other timing parameters in some cases we still couldn't get over 56K over a lossy 45Mbps to 45MBps link.
With UDP 5% loss is 5% loss, MPEG and most other video formats will not be happy, with video tearing up and stalling all the time.
It's possible to implement the TCP's transmission protocol over UDP, just the packet headers will not be correct. At my former company we developed 2 mechanisms to re-implement a TCP like connection using UDP packets. One called SPAK, which is an aggressive retransmission protocol, unlike TCP that backs down intentionally with congestion (loss) this pushes harder! On a 64K link with 90% loss measured with Ping we were able to send 60Kbps! This was for a live event from Sri Lanka to the USA on March 14 1997 with Arthur C. Clarke, and it work, even to my surprise. I had to use a 2400 Bps modem to connect to the remote server because telnet couldn't establish a connection over the 64K line into that country.
The other method we called ECIP for Error Correction Internet Protocol. It used erasure Codes, (unheard of at that time) the best papers on this are by Luigi Rizzo. http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/fec.html These also worked well it took about 4 years of work to find an optimal coding and transmission scheme that ultimately borrowed some of the S-PAK ideas to include a retransmission but kept the latency to under 1 packet round trip time! This is important when doing video conferencing.
Both of these protocols were able to consonantly move up to 40MBps between to lossy T3's from the USA to Korea. This was tested over a 3-year period.
I still own the rights to these and if anyone is interested is commerial or opensourcing these you can contact me through livecam.com
It?s hard to talk about this article without cursing!
They have confused speed of electrons with (RF) radio signals; they don?t know a thing about impedance or resistance.
1.) A vacuum is the fastest medium for signals to pass through does that mean using their logic we should be using vacuum tubes!
2.) Silicon was chosen because it is a semiconductor and we can make transistors with it.
3.) You would never be able to do very small integrated circuits on chicken feathers because it?s not homogeneous, meaning consistently the same material across a small area, it?s full of inconsistencies. Silicon is grown in crystals that form an almost perfect lattice down to the atomic scale. Any imperfections in the crystal make it unusable.
4.) Chicken feathers are dirty.
5.) Chicken feathers don?t conduct electricity they are in insulator!
6.) Who ever would publish this article in the press doesn?t deserve to be working near anything with a keyboard or even a telephone.
------------ This next article was only available in the google cache.
http://216.239.33.100/search?q=cache:X_T7CtgytAk C: www.theveteransobserver.com/techwatch.htm+Gaak++Ma gna+science+centre+&hl=en&ie=UTF8 Hard Wired for Survival
Predatory machines that suck vital energy from their prey? Sounds like a videogame from hell. Guess again: it's the latest research in evolutionary robots.
By William Underhill Gaak is one mean stage villain. Indifferent to the screams of the audience, he hoists his prey off the ground, plunges a fang into its heart and sucks out its vital energy. Without so much as a pause for remorse, he whirs off in search of fresh victims. Don't blame Gaak for this anti-social behavior. He can't help himself: he's hard-wired for survival. Gaak and other robots of his ilk are showing off their predatory instincts at the ''Living Robots'' show at the Magna Science Adventure Centre in Rotherham, England. ''Be afraid,'' says the ringmaster. ''Be very afraid.''
The half-hour performances are intended not merely to stir the curiosity of the school kids who dominate the 500-seat auditorium, but also to advance the emerging field of evolutionary robotics. Noel Sharkey, a computer-science professor at Sheffield University, is using the contest as a Darwinian breeding ground, where the weak robots perish and the strong survive to perpetuate their kind. The idea is to build dumb robots with the capability to ''evolve,'' leave them alone and see how smart they become. Says Sharkey: ''What we are after are really simple explanations for complex behavior.''
The experiment starts out simply enough. Each of the 11 robots in Sharkey's menagerie has the same goal: to obtain energy. Six of them are prey robots, who ''graze'' beneath a tree of white light, replenishing their batteries through solar panels. Five of them are predators who, like Gaak, can derive energy only by draining it from the ''preybots.'' Each species recognizes the other by the amount of heat they give off, as detected through infrared sensors. The biorobots hunt and flee free of all human control, guided only by their simple ''brains''--so-called neural networks that mimic the function of brain cells. To simulate evolution, Sharkey every so often picks out the most successful robots and transfers part of their brains to a new generation, who start the hunt all over again. Darwin would approve. Locked in a continuous battle to survive, preybots evolve new methods of escape, while the ''predatorbots'' devise new ways to entrap.
Sharkey, 53, has become a kind of latter-day Frankenstein. A school dropout at 15, he did stints as a dance-band musician and psychiatric nurse before earning a psychology degree at Exeter University and doing research at Harvard and Stanford. He is perhaps best known as a judge on the cult BBC TV show ''Robot Wars,'' where contestants--from school kids to engineering graduates--enter their own fighting `bots. His research has a slightly more practical bent. Unmanned missions to faraway planets might, for example, need different species of autonomous robots bred to support each other in different roles. Sharkey's robots may also shed some light on behavior. What if preybots, say, begin banding together and acting as a herd for their own protection? This kind of adaptation might give scientists some insight into how human and animal proclivities arose. ''By building artificial models we can get some evidence of how learning and evolution inter-react,'' says Dylan Evans of Bath University.
Biorobots are also a step toward creating intelligent robot helpers endowed with something like commonsense--a goal that has eluded artificial intelligence rsearchers for decades. ''Natural creatures are much more complex than anything that we have managed to produce so far,'' says Inman Harvey, a researcher in robotics at Sussex University, ''but they aren't designed on the drawing board. So perhaps we can pick up a few basic ideas from Darwinian evolution.'' Hopefully scientists will be able to catch on faster than nature, which took 4 billion years to hit upon the human brain.
There is nothing-worst then revisionist history. I can't stand seeing site that post something and a bit later it vanished forever or have it altered removing the very think I was interested in.
There are several GPL'ed Open Source software packages that I have copies of, that have vanished with all references to them and are no longer available on the net. Also a number of great sites that came and gone for either lack of cash or time. I think if someone open sources something it should stay that way.
Also if it's open on the net for public viewing, then it should be fair game. Especially if the original author is credited and it is in the original context, like the Wayback Machine is. I know there are always special cases where something was put up that the webmaster was not entitled to like a copyrighted book or something, but for most stuff this is invaluable and a great service to humanity.
Also think of all those users who's we site was lost without backup. Now they can get that data back.
The Wayback Machine is one of the few web services I'd be willing to pay for.
I wouldn't have said anything about the new offer, if you a planning to leave then make real plans, and discuss this with your employer as final and make what ever concessions to lessen the blow for them, IE. Staying on a bit longer to train someone else, offer a part time or availability after hrs as a consultant. With the understanding your outta there.
If you have an offer keep it to your self! Approach your employer (privately) asking for a raise don't mention another job. Be honest (but restrict the conversation to things applicable to the current position with them) and say you feel you are worth more, like $X, you'd really like to stay but the current low pay is a problem. (Not as an ultimatum or threat) They shouldn't hold that against you. Either they are willing to go more or you take the other offer.
What ever they say, your response is, "I'll have to think it over" Don't act fast or rash. Take your time, let them sweat a little.
A second offer on the table is like an insurance policy. I means if your present position fails you have a backup plan.
Remember, when negotiating the first person to speak first looses.
I would be so wonderful to see something as stagnant as the music giants hire hackers to counter the p2p networks. If it were really true, think of the implications....
Nothing like a good fight/challenge, Finaly maybe these P2P will start to index MD5 checksums in a Central or distributed DB and toss out bogus or corrupt MP3's. Ranking and PGP keys for the anonymous rippers?
What is the next move in the game beyond that?
To be honest the P2P network stuff I have seen so far is quite primitive, it's amasising it works as well as it does. All this is good for evolution of P2P software.
There are some older versions of software that lack some features but were used for a long time, work just fine and have never had a single reported security problem.
I assume software used for years without a reported bug or hole (or a patched version) is a very reliable way to say secure.
NCSA/1.4.1 has never had a reported hole ever found. Neither had the patched FreeBSD 2.0.5
I ran leonardodicatpio.com on the combination for 5 years. Even during the Titanic Movie release. Tons of young hackers tried to break it then never succeeded. Only problem I had was they would over fill the log files when they would throw 100 Mbps of web hits at it to try to crash it. Even that I managed fix with a small tweak in the source.
Has anyone looked at H.26L and JVT licenses?
on
More on MPEG4
·
· Score: 1
Much of MPEG-4 video ISO 14496-2 came from the ITU H.263 V1.
Now there is H.263 V3 and H.26L which I understand worked much better.
There is also the New JVT (Joint Video Team) that is combining MPEG and H.26L newest advances.
Does anyone know what the license issues on these are? Has anyone looked into these?
Intel / AMD are trying to make things smaller and smaller? Not from what I have seen.
Both are benefiting from the work done by the material science and optics people "the FAB" that have been increasing the resolution of the etching process. From 5uM 15 Years go to 0.8 uM 6 years ago down to 0.13 and talking about 0.1 less then 100 nm, FYI the wavelength of red is ~680nm and Blue ~200nm.
But as far as there designs go they went from 8 Bit to 16, 32 and now 64 Bit. And from a 100K transistors to 47 Million transistor in the P4, and IBM's Power4 CPU is topping the scale at a whopping 174 Million Transistors.
The reality is though the improvement performance in MHz is more from the improved chemistry and resolution then the increase in transistors. The performance per transistor has been rapidly decreasing! While the power consumption is going up.
When I did the math, an original 4004 from Intel, 2,250 Transistors, 108 KHz in 10 microns FAB. It hit's 0.06 MIPS, that about 1 instruction per 2 clock cycles.
A new 0.13 uM (FAB) part can run at almost 4 Gigahertz, So let's hypothetically say we built 47 Million transistors worth of 4004's or 8008's (3500 transistor) and divide by half because of bus overhead and what not. We would have some 6,000 CPU's in that same space, each operating at 4 GHz that's 6 Trillion Instructions per second, even if I'm off by a factor of 10 that's still rocking. But that's a big chip and a terrible instruction set.
Now lets say there in another CPU with almost the same number of transistors as the 8008, certainly less then the 8080's 6000 Transistor and it's is running at 500Mhz at 0.8 uM. That's the F21 and less transistors = Less power and lower delays and fewer timing issues.
Now move that to the new 0.18 um and is at 2.4 GHz, now fit as many as possible into the smallest size chip MOSIS will produce and you have 25 of them!
Are we still following this? Now Chucks core runs 1 Instruction per Clock tick, and programs tend to use much less code then corresponding Intel machine code.
These CPU cores are on a single silicon die so there is no required (electrical) signaling method. Just address select lines. It's a direct register-to-register transfer at least in the original discussions that I had with Chuck about this.
There are a number of different mechanisms that have been discussed to signal the software, I'm not sure what Chuck has experimented with so far.
There is a group at MIT with a similar architecture only much less efficient.
http://www.cag.lcs.mit.edu/raw/
Slashdot Mirror
"A telecommunications company could put transponders on an airplane and fly it over a city," Bushman said. "The aircraft could be used for everything from relaying cell phone calls to cable television or Internet connections."
I really wish they would stop talking such nosense, every time there's a storm or strong winds and microbusrts these thing would get destroyed. It's bad enough my Cable Modems goes down all the time imagine every time it get's windy you loose your internet....
The Apple Power PC openboot firmware( The equivalent to a BIOS in that world ) is derived from the Sun OS boot prom. This searches for Java drivers and other thing to run during boot time.
I'm sure this is far more open, understandable and practical compaired to anything Microsoft is proposing.
Also with DRM built in I'm sure it's not going to be open since there only security they can offer is obfuscation.
If all relays acted like open relays but just too failed relay attempt and deleted them. This would make the search for open relays more difficult for the spammers.
Thier data isn't normalize.
What is the ratio of Linux to Windows servers in the study? What was the ratio of breaches VS. Attempts?
by attempting to Normalizing the numbers we can see the following.
67% + 23.2% = 90.2 % total listed.
12892 + 4626 = 17518 combined successful attacks. = 90.2% so
100% of attacks would be 19421 breaches total.
So linux out of 13012 attacks 12892 breaches
Windows 4505 attack with 4626 Breaches
Giving linux 99.07% breach rate VS.
Microsoft at 102.67% Breach rate , Per successful attack.
If they computed there numbers correcly I should have seen 100% since there are percent and actual numbers of successful attempts.
Then again maybe there are 2% that breach MS security without a successful attack?
Anyhow its stuff like this that keeps me using FreeBSD.
Wouldn't it be better to make all SMTP Servers give the illusion that they are an open relay and just drop bogus relayed messages into /dev/null
I mean right now it's easy to detect open relays, we need to make determining if a reley is open or not more difficult.
When both parties look the same and both are standing for things I don't want or care about and ignoring the issues I and concerned with, such as free speech, encryption, privacy, Corperate corruption, jobs and the economy. I mean who cares about tax cuts when everyone I know is umemployed.
Worse yet it's almost impossible to get something equilvalent to a resume for these candidates. How should I choose an elected official with less information then I can get on a potential employiee.
With this choice why vote, I might as well flip a coin. Since I have no information to base a decision on.
How can I tell who is the lesser evil?
John
There are many free packages that will allow you to capture video on one PC and broadcast (multicast) video across a LAN. Many can allow you to receive it using just a plain web browser. I had a product several years ago that allowed full screen, full motion video to be send globally with analog TV input and TV-out. www.livecamserver.com (no longer selling systems, but code is available)
Another company GlobalStreams had a product called OnQ that could also do that.
Both Logitech and Intel have USB web cams that can take composite video input and come with Internet streaming software.
A TV-out video card can allow for an NTSC composite video output and some even have S-Video out. This allows your regular computer display to be available as composite video which can then be connected to the TV or some other analog broadcast solution.
If needed Radio Shack sells an RF modulator to convert composite video and audio (Phono Plugs) to RF channel 3 and 4.
If you just want to send analog video across an office wirelessly there are several companies that sell 2.4 Gigahertz Wireless video transmitters and receivers. Radio Shack, X10. http://www.rf-video.com/ etc. sells these, a quick search on google for
"2.4 GHz video transmitter" will give a long list of companies selling these.
Most of these, I have found to be compatible with each other and support up to 4 channels.
Most come in 2 flavors, the ones with build in cameras and the ones with video inputs.. You don't want the camera transmitter unless your willing to cut off the camera and attach your own video input connector. Using the $79 solution from X10 with the camera removed works great if you willing to tinker.
The other directly accepts composite video and audio, this is easily connected to a VCR, DVD player, TV-Out video card or a camcorder.
Both can use the same receivers on the TV side and have outputs composite video as well as RF channel 3 and 4.
I hope this helps.
Read that article at:
http://www.alexlightman.com/ - 16 Minutes from Earth
I once had to recover a lost book manuscript from old printouts. The hard drive had crashed. After severer iterations I found a good combination and proper settings.
The scanner I used is a $99 scanner that is several years old, Canon CanoScan FB620P.
I am very impressed with it. For OCR I used Xerox TextBridge Pro, the interface it awkward, but the OCR part it works. The biggest problem was the way the windows twain drivers were setup such that I had to go through several windows and mouse clicks to scan, and finish scanning.
I can do over 30 pages per Hour, I get about 99.8% on clean copy, the trick was to use a gray scale scan or text mode, Also I scan at 300 DPI , I find it's important to give the OCR as much info as possible to work from.
You still want to run this past a human proofreader, but overall I am very impressed with the setup and it's results.
Interleaved memory dates back to the 286 Cpu's and earlier. This sounds like they have just re-implemented it yet again with the newer speeds and are marketing it as something totaly new.
Definiation from a site on the net:
Interleaved memory, which divides memory into two or four portions that process data alternately; that is, the CPU sends information to one section while another goes through a refresh cycle; a typical installation will have odd addresses on one side and even on the other (you can have word or block interleave). If memory accesses are sequential, the precharge of one will overlap the access time of the other.
With my former Companies IBS and DVBS we were doing video over TCP, UDP (Unicast and Multicast)
TCP is certainly the easiest to implement. but at only a few percent packet loss (under 5%) is comes to a grinding halt. I have never seen TCP get to full speed between to T3 at 45Mbps and even with much tweaking of the TCP windows and other timing parameters in some cases we still couldn't get over 56K over a lossy 45Mbps to 45MBps link.
With UDP 5% loss is 5% loss, MPEG and most other video formats will not be happy, with video tearing up and stalling all the time.
It's possible to implement the TCP's transmission protocol over UDP, just the packet headers will not be correct.
At my former company we developed 2 mechanisms to re-implement a TCP like connection using UDP packets. One called SPAK, which is an aggressive retransmission protocol, unlike TCP that backs down intentionally with congestion (loss) this pushes harder! On a 64K link with 90% loss measured with Ping we were able to send 60Kbps! This was for a live event from Sri Lanka to the USA on March 14 1997 with Arthur C. Clarke, and it work, even to my surprise. I had to use a 2400 Bps modem to connect to the remote server because telnet couldn't establish a connection over the 64K line into that country.
The other method we called ECIP for Error Correction Internet Protocol. It used erasure Codes, (unheard of at that time) the best papers on this are by Luigi Rizzo. http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/fec.html These also worked well it took about 4 years of work to find an optimal coding and transmission scheme that ultimately borrowed some of the S-PAK ideas to include a retransmission but kept the latency to under 1 packet round trip time! This is important when doing video conferencing.
Both of these protocols were able to consonantly move up to 40MBps between to lossy T3's from the USA to Korea. This was tested over a 3-year period.
I still own the rights to these and if anyone is interested is commerial or opensourcing these you can contact me through livecam.com
Don't they know anything about physics?
It?s hard to talk about this article without cursing!
They have confused speed of electrons with (RF) radio signals; they don?t know a thing about impedance or resistance.
1.) A vacuum is the fastest medium for signals to pass through does that mean using their logic we should be using vacuum tubes!
2.) Silicon was chosen because it is a semiconductor and we can make transistors with it.
3.) You would never be able to do very small integrated circuits on chicken feathers because it?s not homogeneous, meaning consistently the same material across a small area, it?s full of inconsistencies. Silicon is grown in crystals that form an almost perfect lattice down to the atomic scale. Any imperfections in the crystal make it unusable.
4.) Chicken feathers are dirty.
5.) Chicken feathers don?t conduct electricity they are in insulator!
6.) Who ever would publish this article in the press doesn?t deserve to be working near anything with a keyboard or even a telephone.
Living Robots Show
Actualy the whole sites very cool.
Link here
------------
This next article was only available in the google cache.
http://216.239.33.100/search?q=cache:X_T7CtgytA
Hard Wired for Survival
Predatory machines that suck vital energy from their prey? Sounds like a videogame from hell. Guess again: it's the latest research in evolutionary robots.
By William Underhill
Gaak is one mean stage villain. Indifferent to the screams of the audience, he hoists his prey off the ground, plunges a fang into its heart and sucks out its vital energy. Without so much as a pause for remorse, he whirs off in search of fresh victims. Don't blame Gaak for this anti-social behavior. He can't help himself: he's hard-wired for survival. Gaak and other robots of his ilk are showing off their predatory instincts at the ''Living Robots'' show at the Magna Science Adventure Centre in Rotherham, England. ''Be afraid,'' says the ringmaster. ''Be very afraid.''
The half-hour performances are intended not merely to stir the curiosity of the school kids who dominate the 500-seat auditorium, but also to advance the emerging field of evolutionary robotics. Noel Sharkey, a computer-science professor at Sheffield University, is using the contest as a Darwinian breeding ground, where the weak robots perish and the strong survive to perpetuate their kind. The idea is to build dumb robots with the capability to ''evolve,'' leave them alone and see how smart they become. Says Sharkey: ''What we are after are really simple explanations for complex behavior.''
The experiment starts out simply enough. Each of the 11 robots in Sharkey's menagerie has the same goal: to obtain energy. Six of them are prey robots, who ''graze'' beneath a tree of white light, replenishing their batteries through solar panels. Five of them are predators who, like Gaak, can derive energy only by draining it from the ''preybots.'' Each species recognizes the other by the amount of heat they give off, as detected through infrared sensors. The biorobots hunt and flee free of all human control, guided only by their simple ''brains''--so-called neural networks that mimic the function of brain cells. To simulate evolution, Sharkey every so often picks out the most successful robots and transfers part of their brains to a new generation, who start the hunt all over again. Darwin would approve. Locked in a continuous battle to survive, preybots evolve new methods of escape, while the ''predatorbots'' devise new ways to entrap.
Sharkey, 53, has become a kind of latter-day Frankenstein. A school dropout at 15, he did stints as a dance-band musician and psychiatric nurse before earning a psychology degree at Exeter University and doing research at Harvard and Stanford. He is perhaps best known as a judge on the cult BBC TV show ''Robot Wars,'' where contestants--from school kids to engineering graduates--enter their own fighting `bots. His research has a slightly more practical bent. Unmanned missions to faraway planets might, for example, need different species of autonomous robots bred to support each other in different roles. Sharkey's robots may also shed some light on behavior. What if preybots, say, begin banding together and acting as a herd for their own protection? This kind of adaptation might give scientists some insight into how human and animal proclivities arose. ''By building artificial models we can get some evidence of how learning and evolution inter-react,'' says Dylan Evans of Bath University.
Biorobots are also a step toward creating intelligent robot helpers endowed with something like commonsense--a goal that has eluded artificial intelligence rsearchers for decades. ''Natural creatures are much more complex than anything that we have managed to produce so far,'' says Inman Harvey, a researcher in robotics at Sussex University, ''but they aren't designed on the drawing board. So perhaps we can pick up a few basic ideas from Darwinian evolution.'' Hopefully scientists will be able to catch on faster than nature, which took 4 billion years to hit upon the human brain.
(c) 2002, Newsweek Inc. All rights reserved.
There is nothing-worst then revisionist history. I can't stand seeing site that post something and a bit later it vanished forever or have it altered removing the very think I was interested in.
There are several GPL'ed Open Source software packages that I have copies of, that have vanished with all references to them and are no longer available on the net. Also a number of great sites that came and gone for either lack of cash or time. I think if someone open sources something it should stay that way.
Also if it's open on the net for public viewing, then it should be fair game. Especially if the original author is credited and it is in the original context, like the Wayback Machine is. I know there are always special cases where something was put up that the webmaster was not entitled to like a copyrighted book or something, but for most stuff this is invaluable and a great service to humanity.
Also think of all those users who's we site was lost without backup. Now they can get that data back.
The Wayback Machine is one of the few web services I'd be willing to pay for.
John
I wouldn't have said anything about the new offer, if you a planning to leave then make real plans, and discuss this with your employer as final and make what ever concessions to lessen the blow for them, IE. Staying on a bit longer to train someone else, offer a part time or availability after hrs as a consultant. With the understanding your outta there.
If you have an offer keep it to your self! Approach your employer (privately) asking for a raise don't mention another job. Be honest (but restrict the conversation to things applicable to the current position with them) and say you feel you are worth more, like $X, you'd really like to stay but the current low pay is a problem. (Not as an ultimatum or threat) They shouldn't hold that against you. Either they are willing to go more or you take the other offer.
What ever they say, your response is, "I'll have to think it over"
Don't act fast or rash. Take your time, let them sweat a little.
A second offer on the table is like an insurance policy. I means if your present position fails you have a backup plan.
Remember, when negotiating the first person to speak first looses.
JLS
I love it,
I would be so wonderful to see something as stagnant as the music giants hire hackers to counter the p2p networks. If it were really true, think of the implications....
Contermeasure, Counter-countermeasures, Counter-Counter-countermeasures...
Nothing like a good fight/challenge, Finaly maybe these P2P will start to index MD5 checksums in a Central or distributed DB and toss out bogus or corrupt MP3's. Ranking and PGP keys for the anonymous rippers?
What is the next move in the game beyond that?
To be honest the P2P network stuff I have seen so far is quite primitive, it's amasising it works as well as it does. All this is good for evolution of P2P software.
JLS
There are some older versions of software that lack some features but were used for a long time, work just fine and have never had a single reported security problem.
I assume software used for years without a reported bug or hole (or a patched version) is a very reliable way to say secure.
NCSA/1.4.1 has never had a reported hole ever found.
Neither had the patched FreeBSD 2.0.5
I ran leonardodicatpio.com on the combination for 5 years. Even during the Titanic Movie release. Tons of young hackers tried to break it then never succeeded. Only problem I had was they would over fill the log files when they would throw 100 Mbps of web hits at it to try to crash it. Even that I managed fix with a small tweak in the source.
Much of MPEG-4 video ISO 14496-2 came from the ITU H.263 V1.
Now there is H.263 V3 and H.26L which I understand worked much better.
There is also the New JVT (Joint Video Team) that is combining MPEG and H.26L newest advances.
Does anyone know what the license issues on these are? Has anyone looked into these?
John L. Sokol
Intel / AMD are trying to make things smaller and smaller? Not from what I have seen.
i t/ hist_micro/hof/4004B.htm
h tm #1971
Both are benefiting from the work done by the material science and optics people "the FAB" that have been increasing the resolution of the etching process. From 5uM 15 Years go to 0.8 uM 6 years ago down to 0.13 and talking about 0.1 less then 100 nm, FYI the wavelength of red is ~680nm and Blue ~200nm.
But as far as there designs go they went from 8 Bit to 16, 32 and now 64 Bit. And from a 100K transistors to 47 Million transistor in the P4, and IBM's Power4 CPU is topping the scale at a whopping 174 Million Transistors.
The reality is though the improvement performance in MHz is more from the improved chemistry and resolution then the increase in transistors. The performance per transistor has been rapidly decreasing! While the power consumption is going up.
When I did the math, an original 4004 from Intel, 2,250 Transistors, 108 KHz in 10 microns FAB. It hit's 0.06 MIPS, that about 1 instruction per 2 clock cycles.
http://www.intel.com/intel/intelis/museum/exhib
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/quickrefyr.
A new 0.13 uM (FAB) part can run at almost 4 Gigahertz, So let's hypothetically say we built 47 Million transistors worth of 4004's or 8008's (3500 transistor) and divide by half because of bus overhead and what not. We would have some 6,000 CPU's in that same space, each operating at 4 GHz that's 6 Trillion Instructions per second, even if I'm off by a factor of 10 that's still rocking. But that's a big chip and a terrible instruction set.
Now lets say there in another CPU with almost the same number of transistors as the 8008, certainly less then the 8080's 6000 Transistor and it's is running at 500Mhz at 0.8 uM. That's the F21 and less transistors = Less power and lower delays and fewer timing issues.
Now move that to the new 0.18 um and is at 2.4 GHz, now fit as many as possible into the smallest size chip MOSIS will produce and you have 25 of them!
Are we still following this? Now Chucks core runs 1 Instruction per Clock tick, and programs tend to use much less code then corresponding Intel machine code.
Hence 60,000 MIPS, in 500 mW
These CPU cores are on a single silicon die so there is no required (electrical) signaling method. Just address select lines. It's a direct register-to-register transfer at least in the original discussions that I had with Chuck about this.
There are a number of different mechanisms that have been discussed to signal the software, I'm not sure what Chuck has experimented with so far.
There is a group at MIT with a similar architecture only much less efficient.
http://www.cag.lcs.mit.edu/raw/
John L. Sokol