2) The open source license clearly gives you the ability to keep working on the code after you give it to them (anyone can). but I guess this would restrict entrant author from offering it commercially and open source (say how MySQL does). AGAIN, no different than I see if you work for a company as an employee and the company has copyright and your job ends.
That is my point, actually: if I don't win the prize, can I not rebrand it for another company?
Copyright - use "(C) 2008 Ubiquiti Networks, Inc. All rights reserved." as non-intrusive text
Does this mean entrants do not own the copyright to the web design portion of the contest?
(Btw, in case you thought this was just about adding a web-based front-end to an existing product, think again: this is about designing intuitive user interfaces for complex networking options. Not a trivial task.)
A basic search will turn up a lot of licenses, how can you be so lazy that you can't type something into Google but are able to submit a Slashdot story?
Why read Slashdot at all? Just Google the news, like I do. Just type "What is <current-date> like?" into Google and let'er rip.
Google provides search results, not dialog.
Slashdot used to provide editing, too, but for a while now that's been more of a nuisance than a feature.
People who prefer fantasy worlds to real life seem to be getting less traction lately. Our species might still have a chance.
The esteem with which societies regard different memes fluctuates over time. It may be a little nearsighted to assume that recent memetic trends are very relevant to the fate of our species.
You already use this technology. In fact I remember encountering this for the first time when writing an AppleScript program in sixth grade to help a room full of students add up Giant Eagle receipts. I was very embarrassed to have no explanation for someone suddenly getting $54.2300000001 on the screen (looking back, our computer teacher probably should have been able to offer us an explanation.)
That's not probabilistic computing, that's an artifact of computing in base-2 with limited precision and displaying the output in decimal. It's entirely deterministic and reproducible.
You're right. I didn't mean it literally. I was responding to someone else who was talking about lossy CPU operations.
For working with money use integer cents/pence/whatever and have rules for who gets the remainder. If you do use floating point binary representations, at least round the output for display.
I think a better idea is to use a math primitives that support efficient arbitrary precision. Although your way is certainly the norm, but as others have pointed out, the fact that "cents" are the lowest divisible unit of money in meatspace need not hold over in the digital world if you don't want it to.
And what percent of people running around with MP3 devices HAVE a 'nice pair of cans' instead of cheap earbuds, and I have to say that I've NEVER seen a 'pocket sized amp'. If you do this, you're going to have to face it: You're an audiophile and relatively out of mainstream. You know, the people happy with the earbuds that came with their iPod and 64k MP3 streams?
In either case we're taking advantage of the notion that NOT ALL of the data is important; indeed much of it is relatively irrelevant to our perception.
No, not irrelevant. Remember that thing about patting your head and rubbing your tummy? That used to be a relevant example of a practical neurological limitation of the motor cortex (IIRC.) Pianists used to be one of the only groups of people who could do this easily. Today everybody types and uses a mouse and/or plays video games, and that's not challenging to anybody anymore.
Conversely there have now been studies (which I have been unable to find via Google for some time and I've been severely regretting lately) that show a waning capability of people to tell when and how an image has been stretched. This is due to the prolific presence of widescreen video displays that stretch pictures inappropriately and are robbing people en masse of that particular neurological faculty.
I do not want to see something similar happen to our musical perception.
You already use this technology. In fact I remember encountering this for the first time when writing an AppleScript program in sixth grade to help a room full of students add up Giant Eagle receipts. I was very embarrassed to have no explanation for someone suddenly getting $54.2300000001 on the screen (looking back, our computer teacher probably should have been able to offer us an explanation.)
If you are listening to music on a portable media device, it's safe to say that you aren't going to be able to hear the difference between the lossy format and the lossless format.
It's like drinking from a well. Connoisseurs may claim to be able to taste the difference between it and tap water, but that's just the extra tang from all the bull shit.
If you float in the well, does that make you a witch?
Please don't confuse "lossy" media compression with whatever Krishna Palem's technology is going to do. First of all, you can definitely hear the differences if you own a nice pair of cans and a pocket-sized amplifier.
If the technology gets off the ground, expect to see encoders (or even entirely new codec formats) designed to take into account the nuances of specific probablistic computing machines. Personally I will be a little shocked if the notion that a probablistic general-purpose computational device can outperform any hardware specifically designed for decoding multimedia. So that's where you'll probably see the technology going: hardware media decoders (and maybe encoders, too, for real time applications like portable gaming.) Some computational scientific research takes advantage of probablistic analyses, too, so maybe we'll see a niche for these machines in the supercomputer market. Perhaps there is even a home for this technology in Hollywood CGI (raytracing is expensive, and there are already people using probabilistic algorithms to do it faster.)
But honestly, can anyone think of a potential application for the average PC of this technology that isn't media codecs? No, because there isn't one. When is the last time a new computer even batted an eyelash at the CPU power it takes to decode audio and/or video? I've been rolling with a 1GHz processor for years and I still can't make out the bumps in my CPU usage meter caused by my media player. If you can: you're using the wrong codec / decoder / media-player.
With regards to music, they're not talking about skips and pops, they're talking about extremely slight modulations in pitch or, in the case of video, a very slight difference in color.
With respect, you have no idea what they're talking about. I can promise you that if I ran an MP3 decoder on a PC emulator that introduced noise into the lower bits of every computation, before it horribly crashed the noise it put out could not be uniformly characterized by any "slight modulation" or "slight difference." You're probably asking yourself why this matters because surely that is not how anyone proposes to use this technology. Hopefully you're now realizing what this implies: if you'd want to take advantage of this technology, you would have to write your code to specifically tell the processor which operations and registers can deal with a little bit of garbage. Great. I can't wait to code for that.</sarcasm>
If I could get 30x the battery life out of my laptop by accepting imperfections in the video it displays and in the audio it plays (and I know it wouldn't, but this is a hypothetical), then I'd gladly go for it.
..when they give you a phone number in Malaysia or Whateverstan, you can pretty much assume as well that this isn't the friend you're looking for.
Yeah one time I almost bought a car from someone on Craigslist, but I could tell by his voice that he was black, so I knew what was up.</racism>
What problem is this supposed to solve? The thread you posted in was discussing hackers stealing WoW logins and looting their gold, then selling it. How is asking someone for their phone number going to fix it?
In the same way that airbrushing and Photoshopping Hollywood's most beautiful people can be damaging to our perception when we are bombarded with it as often as we are, perfectly produced music does the same. Fledgling actors, actresses, and musicians have a great deal of self-esteem issues to contend with if they are to keep at it long enough to lift off the ground. Maybe there is even something to be said in defense of live music: should my favorite local bands now be expected to bring their own auto-tuning hardware along with their amplifiers? If they bring auto-tuners, what amount of digital assistance is too much? As taxing as it can be to compare yourself every day to successful members of your field who are using all this movie magic, imagine what it must feel like to give in and begin depending on computers look pretty sound in tune?
There didn't seem to be any other way to contact you than a comment (feel free to mod OT,) but if you feel that maybe you've put a good deal of thought into the subject we were discussing, I've got some interesting ideas about game design and cheats that I'd like to bounce off of you. My contact info is at codebad.com if you're interested in chatting.
Am I the only one who is pretty disgusted at the trend of games where the primary skill function is just how much time your character spends doing stuff?
Go play a FPS and you'll find autoaim bots, wallhacks, and other assorted cheating tools. Corner a cheater and they'll complain about how they have a "real life" and can't spend all their time playing the game to get the skills to compete with other players. This is simply more of the same.
You seem to have mistaken my complaint to be one about cheaters. It isn't.
There are thousands of folks who want instant gratification. Twitch monkeys who can't stand not being at the top of whatever hill they see but don't want to invest the time it takes to get there (nevermind that being at the top of the hill doesn't HAVE to be the point of a lot of these games). So they go for the short-cut.
I think that's precisely what I find so wrong with games that reward sacrificed time rather than enhancing aptitudes. Because those "twitch monkeys" aren't at the top of any hill, are they? The gratification they get doesn't come from being the best, so what is it? Do they just like putting virtual bullets into virtual heads controlled by other players?
IMO this isn't healthy, and parallels games that reward time sacrifice: what exactly do these players enjoy doing? It isn't getting better at something, or being the best, because they aren't getting better or becoming the best, their characters are. I think if you set aside the morals and/or social contracts that affect how people feel about cheating, the role of cheat software to a cheater is identical to the role of the items/spells/powers your characters can accumulate: advancing your in-game advantage without advancing your own aptitudes.
It seems to me that games like World of Warcraft and Pokemon have stumbled onto something that Final Fantasy was only beginning to uncover in the 1990s. People crave foraging for items, hunting, exhausting supplies of hiding places for things to collect and hunt, and upgrading their tools. Seems to me like this taps into some very deep-seated primal instincts that are very useful if you do not live in the first world (although I'd bet plenty of the monkeys on wall street eye their investment portfolios with a similar fascination that MMORPG players consider their characters.)
Yeah, treadmills and grinds aren't for everyone. But that doesn't mean you get to ditch the rules because they're inconvenient for you. Play the game... or don't play at all.
As it seems ambiguous, I'll make it clear: I was advocating the latter option: Don't play at all. Games that make wasting your time part of the experience are ridiculous. Real life contains enough of that.
They may not have any one particular translation for words either. Remember, a lot of these small languages have relatively few people who are not well connected with each other, which is necessary to expedite the definition of new words for new technologies.
Forget computers, these people may never have used a paper address book before..
I think that's the entire point of this project. Everyone takes for granted that there is usually a correct canonical term for a certain type of thing, but it's obvious that there aren't, and sometimes there aren't even terms for things. Some words that have been canonized are even completely incorrect like "Kleenex" (tissue) or (coincidentally) "Rolodex"
Natural language translation is an incredibly subtle task. What's the difference between translating between one language and another, and translating between one dialect and another? Can there be a statement which simply cannot be translated for a particular language? Culture? Individual? People disagree about whether female authority figures should be addressed as "sir" or "m'am." Think about that.
It may be tempting to criticize this because of the obvious potential for catastrophic failures, or because these languages/regions simply don't have terms for certain ideas we (Nokia, apparently) want to give (or market) to them. Consider that perhaps many expressions you use today began life differently and changed; perhaps some phrase started out more sarcastic, or officious, but is more or less casual and direct when you say it. Maybe a humorously inappropriate translation that gets picked by the most people (ie. crowdsourcing) is simply the most memorable and will do the job of making sense to the user best.
I'm not saying this is the end-all killer localization app, but I think it's more than a little silly to assume these obvious pitfalls are fatal ones, or even that they aren't beneficial diversions off the beaten path; after all, when is the last time you saw Corporate America make use of the most poignant slang terminology in any way that wasn't transparent and condescending? What would all the names of skateboard tricks be called if they had all been invented by the marketing staff of a skateboard manufacturer?
For better or worse, the public should participate in the advancement of their language.
"Provided that the thermal memory is well insulated", that basically means putting it on a different piece of silicon/on something else entirely, which kind of defeats the object as I see it.
To interface a phononic computational device with a traditional electronic device without leaking heat, you could use something like an optoisolator, though obviously it might not be preferable to use an electric photo element.
While I haven't looked at this in great detail, it strikes me that achieving anything near useful density is going to very difficult due to entropy, and the simple fact that putting very small volumes at slightly different temperatures right next to each others quickly leads to a relatively uniform temperature distribution.
From the article:
It exploits the fact that some materials can only exchange heat when they are at similar temperatures.
This sounds somewhat improbable/unfeasible to me...
You're probably right, it probably is infeasible. But then again, a lot of good things do start out that way.
Didn't read TFA but it could be a hysteresis [wikipedia.org] kind of thing which is thought of as a boundary region rather than a single threshold.
If you have a noisy, fluctuating signal then it makes sense to output a 1 when the upper threshold is crossed, and to output a 0 when the lower threshold is crossed.
You mean 0 when the threshold is crossed one way, and 1 when crossed the opposite way?
Am I the only one who is pretty disgusted at the trend of games where the primary skill function is just how much time your character spends doing stuff? It might as well just be an online store where you buy virtual skills and pay with your blood over firewire. Sacrifice your lives to something worthy, chumps! Develop some actual talents while you're at it!
So the REAL IRONY would be Apple spending millions to make multitouch usable in a mobile device, and then letting its competitors once again rip it off and claim ownership again.
Yeah, but isn't the real point that this isn't a valid patent?- that the USPTO doesn't really make that judgment very well?- that the patent has been awarded and when it shouldn't have been?
XUL applications are, in my experience, a lot slower than PyGTK apps running on CPython. Spidermonkey has come a long way, but XUL GUIs are *still* quite a lot slower than PyGTK GUIs. I've been excited about Seed for quite a while, but I hope they'll consider using Spidermonkey. If not, I just might have to create my own GTK+ bindings for it...
But javascript is an awfully convoluted language. Why does it become easy when you put a language like that into the equation?
To put it bluntly: "Because a lot of people already know it."... The problem with attracting developers is that so many of them these days have went on to develop web applications with awful scripting languages like Javascript...
You know what I don't think this is accurate at all. Javascript is actually a very elegant language, what is convoluted is the "web" platform.
As for "extreme speed", C++ will almost always be at least slightly slower than C, if nothing else because of data being copied whenever there's an inheritance or overloading
Neither inheritance nor overloading adds more data copying. What are you talking about? C++ function overloading is accomplished by transforming function identifiers to incorporate their argument signatures, thus making two functions with apparently the same name but different arguments actually have unique names. There is no runtime difference at all. Inheritance doesn't involve extra copying either. Are you just making this stuff up? Another poster totally debunked your cache issue, too.
It may be tempting to personify companies, but they aren't persons, they're people (snicker.) Somebody at HP knew. Some people didn't. Only a proper investigation will bring us closer to knowing. But don't imagine it's as simple as HP being 100% guilty or 100% innocent.
Whether (and how) to penalize HP is a much more interesting question since such penalties are for -- I hope -- their deterrent effect.
Don 't start with that crap here. No one is questioning Wiki-snide-ia's "right" to restrict "original research".
Obviously there is a demand for a wikipedia-like place to post original research, speculation, and hearsay (with a loud disclaimer, of course). If such a site existed, then the battle over citations will mellow out.
Slashdot Mirror
2) The open source license clearly gives you the ability to keep working on the code after you give it to them (anyone can). but I guess this would restrict entrant author from offering it commercially and open source (say how MySQL does). AGAIN, no different than I see if you work for a company as an employee and the company has copyright and your job ends.
That is my point, actually: if I don't win the prize, can I not rebrand it for another company?
The rules of the contest say this:
Required elements for web interface pages:
Does this mean entrants do not own the copyright to the web design portion of the contest?
(Btw, in case you thought this was just about adding a web-based front-end to an existing product, think again: this is about designing intuitive user interfaces for complex networking options. Not a trivial task.)
A basic search will turn up a lot of licenses, how can you be so lazy that you can't type something into Google but are able to submit a Slashdot story?
Why read Slashdot at all? Just Google the news, like I do. Just type "What is <current-date> like?" into Google and let'er rip.
Google provides search results, not dialog.
Slashdot used to provide editing, too, but for a while now that's been more of a nuisance than a feature.
*ducks*
People who prefer fantasy worlds to real life seem to be getting less traction lately. Our species might still have a chance.
The esteem with which societies regard different memes fluctuates over time. It may be a little nearsighted to assume that recent memetic trends are very relevant to the fate of our species.
Rate Parent Up!!
You already use this technology. In fact I remember encountering this for the first time when writing an AppleScript program in sixth grade to help a room full of students add up Giant Eagle receipts. I was very embarrassed to have no explanation for someone suddenly getting $54.2300000001 on the screen (looking back, our computer teacher probably should have been able to offer us an explanation.)
That's not probabilistic computing, that's an artifact of computing in base-2 with limited precision and displaying the output in decimal. It's entirely deterministic and reproducible.
You're right. I didn't mean it literally. I was responding to someone else who was talking about lossy CPU operations.
For working with money use integer cents/pence/whatever and have rules for who gets the remainder. If you do use floating point binary representations, at least round the output for display.
I think a better idea is to use a math primitives that support efficient arbitrary precision. Although your way is certainly the norm, but as others have pointed out, the fact that "cents" are the lowest divisible unit of money in meatspace need not hold over in the digital world if you don't want it to.
And what percent of people running around with MP3 devices HAVE a 'nice pair of cans' instead of cheap earbuds, and I have to say that I've NEVER seen a 'pocket sized amp'. If you do this, you're going to have to face it: You're an audiophile and relatively out of mainstream. You know, the people happy with the earbuds that came with their iPod and 64k MP3 streams?
In either case we're taking advantage of the notion that NOT ALL of the data is important; indeed much of it is relatively irrelevant to our perception.
No, not irrelevant. Remember that thing about patting your head and rubbing your tummy? That used to be a relevant example of a practical neurological limitation of the motor cortex (IIRC.) Pianists used to be one of the only groups of people who could do this easily. Today everybody types and uses a mouse and/or plays video games, and that's not challenging to anybody anymore.
Conversely there have now been studies (which I have been unable to find via Google for some time and I've been severely regretting lately) that show a waning capability of people to tell when and how an image has been stretched. This is due to the prolific presence of widescreen video displays that stretch pictures inappropriately and are robbing people en masse of that particular neurological faculty.
I do not want to see something similar happen to our musical perception.
You already use this technology. In fact I remember encountering this for the first time when writing an AppleScript program in sixth grade to help a room full of students add up Giant Eagle receipts. I was very embarrassed to have no explanation for someone suddenly getting $54.2300000001 on the screen (looking back, our computer teacher probably should have been able to offer us an explanation.)
If you are listening to music on a portable media device, it's safe to say that you aren't going to be able to hear the difference between the lossy format and the lossless format.
It's like drinking from a well. Connoisseurs may claim to be able to taste the difference between it and tap water, but that's just the extra tang from all the bull shit.
If you float in the well, does that make you a witch?
Please don't confuse "lossy" media compression with whatever Krishna Palem's technology is going to do. First of all, you can definitely hear the differences if you own a nice pair of cans and a pocket-sized amplifier.
If the technology gets off the ground, expect to see encoders (or even entirely new codec formats) designed to take into account the nuances of specific probablistic computing machines. Personally I will be a little shocked if the notion that a probablistic general-purpose computational device can outperform any hardware specifically designed for decoding multimedia. So that's where you'll probably see the technology going: hardware media decoders (and maybe encoders, too, for real time applications like portable gaming.) Some computational scientific research takes advantage of probablistic analyses, too, so maybe we'll see a niche for these machines in the supercomputer market. Perhaps there is even a home for this technology in Hollywood CGI (raytracing is expensive, and there are already people using probabilistic algorithms to do it faster.)
But honestly, can anyone think of a potential application for the average PC of this technology that isn't media codecs? No, because there isn't one. When is the last time a new computer even batted an eyelash at the CPU power it takes to decode audio and/or video? I've been rolling with a 1GHz processor for years and I still can't make out the bumps in my CPU usage meter caused by my media player. If you can: you're using the wrong codec / decoder / media-player.
With regards to music, they're not talking about skips and pops, they're talking about extremely slight modulations in pitch or, in the case of video, a very slight difference in color.
With respect, you have no idea what they're talking about. I can promise you that if I ran an MP3 decoder on a PC emulator that introduced noise into the lower bits of every computation, before it horribly crashed the noise it put out could not be uniformly characterized by any "slight modulation" or "slight difference." You're probably asking yourself why this matters because surely that is not how anyone proposes to use this technology. Hopefully you're now realizing what this implies: if you'd want to take advantage of this technology, you would have to write your code to specifically tell the processor which operations and registers can deal with a little bit of garbage. Great. I can't wait to code for that.</sarcasm>
If I could get 30x the battery life out of my laptop by accepting imperfections in the video it displays and in the audio it plays (and I know it wouldn't, but this is a hypothetical), then I'd gladly go for it.
You can't. Sorry.
..when they give you a phone number in Malaysia or Whateverstan, you can pretty much assume as well that this isn't the friend you're looking for.
Yeah one time I almost bought a car from someone on Craigslist, but I could tell by his voice that he was black, so I knew what was up.</racism>
What problem is this supposed to solve? The thread you posted in was discussing hackers stealing WoW logins and looting their gold, then selling it. How is asking someone for their phone number going to fix it?
In the same way that airbrushing and Photoshopping Hollywood's most beautiful people can be damaging to our perception when we are bombarded with it as often as we are, perfectly produced music does the same. Fledgling actors, actresses, and musicians have a great deal of self-esteem issues to contend with if they are to keep at it long enough to lift off the ground. Maybe there is even something to be said in defense of live music: should my favorite local bands now be expected to bring their own auto-tuning hardware along with their amplifiers? If they bring auto-tuners, what amount of digital assistance is too much? As taxing as it can be to compare yourself every day to successful members of your field who are using all this movie magic, imagine what it must feel like to give in and begin depending on computers look pretty sound in tune?
There didn't seem to be any other way to contact you than a comment (feel free to mod OT,) but if you feel that maybe you've put a good deal of thought into the subject we were discussing, I've got some interesting ideas about game design and cheats that I'd like to bounce off of you. My contact info is at codebad.com if you're interested in chatting.
Am I the only one who is pretty disgusted at the trend of games where the primary skill function is just how much time your character spends doing stuff?
Go play a FPS and you'll find autoaim bots, wallhacks, and other assorted cheating tools. Corner a cheater and they'll complain about how they have a "real life" and can't spend all their time playing the game to get the skills to compete with other players. This is simply more of the same.
You seem to have mistaken my complaint to be one about cheaters. It isn't.
There are thousands of folks who want instant gratification. Twitch monkeys who can't stand not being at the top of whatever hill they see but don't want to invest the time it takes to get there (nevermind that being at the top of the hill doesn't HAVE to be the point of a lot of these games). So they go for the short-cut.
I think that's precisely what I find so wrong with games that reward sacrificed time rather than enhancing aptitudes. Because those "twitch monkeys" aren't at the top of any hill, are they? The gratification they get doesn't come from being the best, so what is it? Do they just like putting virtual bullets into virtual heads controlled by other players?
IMO this isn't healthy, and parallels games that reward time sacrifice: what exactly do these players enjoy doing? It isn't getting better at something, or being the best, because they aren't getting better or becoming the best, their characters are. I think if you set aside the morals and/or social contracts that affect how people feel about cheating, the role of cheat software to a cheater is identical to the role of the items/spells/powers your characters can accumulate: advancing your in-game advantage without advancing your own aptitudes.
It seems to me that games like World of Warcraft and Pokemon have stumbled onto something that Final Fantasy was only beginning to uncover in the 1990s. People crave foraging for items, hunting, exhausting supplies of hiding places for things to collect and hunt, and upgrading their tools. Seems to me like this taps into some very deep-seated primal instincts that are very useful if you do not live in the first world (although I'd bet plenty of the monkeys on wall street eye their investment portfolios with a similar fascination that MMORPG players consider their characters.)
Yeah, treadmills and grinds aren't for everyone. But that doesn't mean you get to ditch the rules because they're inconvenient for you. Play the game... or don't play at all.
As it seems ambiguous, I'll make it clear: I was advocating the latter option: Don't play at all. Games that make wasting your time part of the experience are ridiculous. Real life contains enough of that.
They may not have any one particular translation for words either. Remember, a lot of these small languages have relatively few people who are not well connected with each other, which is necessary to expedite the definition of new words for new technologies.
Forget computers, these people may never have used a paper address book before..
I think that's the entire point of this project. Everyone takes for granted that there is usually a correct canonical term for a certain type of thing, but it's obvious that there aren't, and sometimes there aren't even terms for things. Some words that have been canonized are even completely incorrect like "Kleenex" (tissue) or (coincidentally) "Rolodex"
Natural language translation is an incredibly subtle task. What's the difference between translating between one language and another, and translating between one dialect and another? Can there be a statement which simply cannot be translated for a particular language? Culture? Individual? People disagree about whether female authority figures should be addressed as "sir" or "m'am." Think about that.
It may be tempting to criticize this because of the obvious potential for catastrophic failures, or because these languages/regions simply don't have terms for certain ideas we (Nokia, apparently) want to give (or market) to them. Consider that perhaps many expressions you use today began life differently and changed; perhaps some phrase started out more sarcastic, or officious, but is more or less casual and direct when you say it. Maybe a humorously inappropriate translation that gets picked by the most people (ie. crowdsourcing) is simply the most memorable and will do the job of making sense to the user best.
I'm not saying this is the end-all killer localization app, but I think it's more than a little silly to assume these obvious pitfalls are fatal ones, or even that they aren't beneficial diversions off the beaten path; after all, when is the last time you saw Corporate America make use of the most poignant slang terminology in any way that wasn't transparent and condescending? What would all the names of skateboard tricks be called if they had all been invented by the marketing staff of a skateboard manufacturer?
For better or worse, the public should participate in the advancement of their language.
"Provided that the thermal memory is well insulated", that basically means putting it on a different piece of silicon/on something else entirely, which kind of defeats the object as I see it.
To interface a phononic computational device with a traditional electronic device without leaking heat, you could use something like an optoisolator, though obviously it might not be preferable to use an electric photo element.
While I haven't looked at this in great detail, it strikes me that achieving anything near useful density is going to very difficult due to entropy, and the simple fact that putting very small volumes at slightly different temperatures right next to each others quickly leads to a relatively uniform temperature distribution.
From the article:
It exploits the fact that some materials can only exchange heat when they are at similar temperatures.
This sounds somewhat improbable/unfeasible to me...
You're probably right, it probably is infeasible. But then again, a lot of good things do start out that way.
Didn't read TFA but it could be a hysteresis [wikipedia.org] kind of thing which is thought of as a boundary region rather than a single threshold.
If you have a noisy, fluctuating signal then it makes sense to output a 1 when the upper threshold is crossed, and to output a 0 when the lower threshold is crossed.
You mean 0 when the threshold is crossed one way, and 1 when crossed the opposite way?
Am I the only one who is pretty disgusted at the trend of games where the primary skill function is just how much time your character spends doing stuff? It might as well just be an online store where you buy virtual skills and pay with your blood over firewire. Sacrifice your lives to something worthy, chumps! Develop some actual talents while you're at it!
Yeah, but isn't the real point that this isn't a valid patent?- that the USPTO doesn't really make that judgment very well?- that the patent has been awarded and when it shouldn't have been?
XUL applications are, in my experience, a lot slower than PyGTK apps running on CPython. Spidermonkey has come a long way, but XUL GUIs are *still* quite a lot slower than PyGTK GUIs. I've been excited about Seed for quite a while, but I hope they'll consider using Spidermonkey. If not, I just might have to create my own GTK+ bindings for it...
But javascript is an awfully convoluted language. Why does it become easy when you put a language like that into the equation?
To put it bluntly: "Because a lot of people already know it." ... The problem with attracting developers is that so many of them these days have went on to develop web applications with awful scripting languages like Javascript...
You know what I don't think this is accurate at all. Javascript is actually a very elegant language, what is convoluted is the "web" platform.
As for "extreme speed", C++ will almost always be at least slightly slower than C, if nothing else because of data being copied whenever there's an inheritance or overloading
Neither inheritance nor overloading adds more data copying. What are you talking about? C++ function overloading is accomplished by transforming function identifiers to incorporate their argument signatures, thus making two functions with apparently the same name but different arguments actually have unique names. There is no runtime difference at all. Inheritance doesn't involve extra copying either. Are you just making this stuff up? Another poster totally debunked your cache issue, too.
It may be tempting to personify companies, but they aren't persons, they're people (snicker.) Somebody at HP knew. Some people didn't. Only a proper investigation will bring us closer to knowing. But don't imagine it's as simple as HP being 100% guilty or 100% innocent.
Whether (and how) to penalize HP is a much more interesting question since such penalties are for -- I hope -- their deterrent effect.
Obviously there is a demand for a wikipedia-like place to post original research, speculation, and hearsay (with a loud disclaimer, of course). If such a site existed, then the battle over citations will mellow out.
Everything2
Point of fact: Python has the sexiest sprintf() support available. Observe..
>>> print "I ate %d %s in %.3f seconds" % (99,'hotdogs',62.0895)
I ate 99 hotdogs in 62.090 seconds
Is it possible to consider a scheme where multiple cryptographic authorities must cooperate instead of one?
Ah thanks, I only knew of the economic "theory."