1.A computer simulation of a mind is not a real mind. At least, we have no reason to believe it is.
On the contrary, I believe that it's difficult to argue that it's _not_. If we presume that you can capture all relevant mental state information, then there's no reason why the substrate would matter.
The only scenarios in which the emulated mind would not be adequately equivalent to the original mind would be if you assume that relevant information content goes down to a detail level finer than we can capture, or that there's some intangible "soul" associated with the original mind in its original substrate that cannot be copied.
Occam's razor suggests that neither is the case (though only the experiment itself will tell:)).
If you have nanotech, you should be able to rebuild the body to any degree you like, atom by atom.
Why? Information about the original state of the system would be permanently lost in the crystallization process.
I am assuming that all relevant information about a mind's contents is stored in the strength of synapses, and in the density of various neurochemicals distributed on the same or larger distance scale. The majority of this information should be reconstructable even with ice crystals turning neurons into swiss cheese.
If you believe that the mind state is stored by microtubules or in quantum states in special proteins or what-have-you, then I agree, the mind won't be reconstructable. However, I have yet to see convincing evidence that invalidates the simpler case.
And at the temperatures required many fluids crystalize. whoops.
If you're going much below freezing in the first place, you've already found a way to stop fluid crystallization from doing damage.
In the case of the frogs that started this thread, they contain antifreeze agents that inhibit crystal growth and so result in a much finer-grained polycrystalline mass when the freezing is finished. No irreparable damage.
Any (revivable) frozen human will have similar safeguards in place.
Methanol may be easier to produce but it is toxic. But you can drink ethanol (and some people do).
Gasoline's toxic too:).
Methanol and ethanol smell different. Confusing them isn't a problem. Any methanol sold at the pump will probably be spiked with both an additional odour agent and some kind of illness-inducing agent like any other denatured alcohol.
In summary, I don't see how toxicity is a concern.
Remember, any ethanol sold at the gas pump will be denatured also.
The reason I still haven't is that they're about as good for electronics and magnetically sensitive media as a lightning strike. The intermittent arc gives off *vast* amounts of RF crud, which will induce currents in just about anything electronic and degauss anything magnetic nearby.
Your computer case will not save you if your machine has drive bays. All connected wires (modem, network, power) will also act perfectly well as antennas penetrating the case's shielding.
Credit cards and bank cards generally aren't shielded at all:).
Set up those Faraday cages before building anything like this.
"In summary, the quicksort-vs-heapsort argument is a red herring."
No, it isn't. It is an example of something that cannot be implemented properly in FORTRAN.
Yes, it is, because it is something that does not need to be implemented, because heapsort works perfectly well for practical purposes.
Pick another -- let's talk about space-efficent random list insertion or deletion, or implementation of a balanced tree, or any of a number of other areas where data structures are critical to algorithm performance. FORTRAN is not made for these things. Unfortunately, not every scientific problem is so cleanly decomposed into the tight little loopy segments that FORTRAN is good at computing.
However, the majority of scientific computations _are_, as is demonstrated by the fact that FORTRAN remains so popular in the scientific community.
By all means use C or some other language if that suits your problem best. But arguing that FORTRAN is bad because it doesn't work for a number of problems that aren't in its major workload is silly. It would be like, oh, saying that Perl is evil because it can't do matrix transformations as fast as C. In order for this to stick, I'd have to explain why people would be doing matrix transformations in Perl in the first place.
Now you're talking about taking carbon that's trapped in rocks and releasing it into the atmosphere (when the ethanol is burned)? What a bad plan, if you believe the global warming crowd at all.
As per my original post, you can extract it from the atmosphere by effusion or other methods easily enough. Limestone is just likely to be cheaper. Switching to alcohol-based vehicles is a Good Thing either way, as it burns more cleanly than gasoline, can be used in fuel cells (encouraging the switchover to fuel cell technology), and sets up the alcohol synthesis infrastructure, which you'd need with either source of CO2.
Limestone would be used until there was a good reason not to use it (like global warming becoming a big enough political concern). The infrastructure is desirable regardless.
Cryonics fans generally assume that the Miracle of Nanotechnology will solve this, just like everything else... Now, while I can buy nanotech fixing up whatever caused death in the first place, and I can sort of buy its rebooting a brain that's been offline for centuries, I find it a little difficult to accept that they'll be able to reconstitute a mess of meat shredded at the molecular level.
If you have nanotech, you should be able to rebuild the body to any degree you like, atom by atom.
I personally think that we aren't likely to reconstitute the frozen bodies. A solution requiring less miraculous technology would be to slice up the brain and map out the synapse connection patterns and strengths to load into a computer-emulated brain. This would require very hefty amounts of computing power, but if we were reviving people at all, we'd be at a point where we had the resources necessary.
I'm not hopeful for the frozen, though. Firstly, between the time you die and the time you're frozen, I strongly suspect that the brain will likely have degraded to the point where most of the critical information in it has been lost. Secondly, I'm doubtful of any cryonics company keeeping its frozen members stored under the required conditions for the century or two they'll be waiting for revival.
Yes, the major problem that's usually discussed is how to replace the water in our bodies with another fluid and back without making the vital organs stop working. I believe some experiments have been conducted - hopefully only in theory.
I remember reading about experiments of this kind performed on dogs back in the early 90s. They had some successes, but 1) they didn't go down to freezing at the time of the article I'd read, and 2) there were complications in most of the test subjects (things like epilepsy on revival). They replaced some or all of the dogs' blood with a solution more resistant to freezing, if I recall correctly.
But for a frog, this is just a few months. How are you going to keep cells alive for decades without "feeding" them?
By cooling them down to liquid nitrogen temperatures after they've been frozen. Metabolism, like most other chemical processes, is *very* strongly dependent on temperature. Reaction rate tends to be tied to it exponentially, so in a very cold environment, the cell will effectively be in stasis.
Re:Feh. Only ONE bit per atom...
on
Atomic Scale Memory
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· Score: 3, Informative
Only half joking: Researchers at U.Michigan hope to store up to 10 bits per atom, by using Rydberg states.
I seem to recall that a group used similar techniques to store much more than that (they wanted to encode a small image's bits).
The problem, of course, is that readout tends to be destructive, and you'll have a lot of fun trying to compete on a density basis with the solid-substrate schemes:).
And frankly, it is a language isssue. FORTRAN doesn't have recursion. You can't properly implement quicksort in a non-recursive language. And quicksort outperforms heapsort in most cases.
If Quicksort is the most relevant example you can think of, then I'm afraid you're not making a very strong case.
Both are O(n log n) in the best case, and I'll be extremely surprised if there's more than about a factor of two difference in running time for comparable best-case inputs. And yes, I've done the analysis.
Quicksort, however, has a nasty habit of not guaranteeing anything better than O(n^2), which can be triggered by a variety of pathological cases (admittedly less likely for large sets being sorted). What you wind up with in practice, working through the analysis assuming randomly-distributed lists, is O(log n) average-case behavior with a nastier coefficient, degrading performance to a level closer to than of heapsort.
You can use clever methods for selecting the pivot to reduce this problem, but this bites you back with the extra operations you have to perform. You don't gain a whole lot for the average case (though you make the pathological case far less likely).
In summary, the quicksort-vs-heapsort argument is a red herring.
Yes, there are problems for which recursive formulations are very elegant, but the majority of scientific problems that require brute force seem to be implemented adequately in Fortran-77. Do you have examples of important, computation-intensive problems for which the recursive formulation is far better than an iterative formulation?
Corn is one source. Direct synthesis is another.
on
Ethanol Not A Total Loss
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Another option is to write off biologicals altogether and produce ethanol (or methanol, which is easier and still a good fuel) directly from CO2 and hydrogen.
You need a power plant to supply the electricity to produce the hydrogen, so this is an energy storage scheme as opposed to an energy collection scheme, but I strongly suspect that the end-to-end system efficiency will still be greater than with corn fermentation.
This has the advantage of letting you build the infrastructure for alternate fuel production (hydrogen or methanol, which can be processed by fuel cells and stored at far higher density than hydrogen) without having to replace every car on the road (an internal combustion engine can burn methanol).
Cost for the methanol (or ethanol) is potentially very cheap, even with high energy costs. The efficiency of the methanol synthesis step is what will limit price (and of atmospheric CO2 extraction if you get tired of shipping in limestone).
Erm, i dunno when u mean they did this, but in the collection i have always read, The Magicians Nephew has always been the first book (and this is going back 15 years). So unless it wasnt done recently, ill say the order i read them in made perfect sense, as the nephew turns out to be the old man who owns the wardrobe.
The order you refer to (and the original poster complains about) is the chronological order of events in the story. The order of (I think) publication is the older ordering (the one in my collection, and apparently in the original poster's). That order is:
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe Prince Caspian The Voyage of the Dawn Treader The Silver Chair A Horse and His Boy The Magician's Nephew The Last Battle
Chronological order would put TMN at the beginning, and HHB before Prince Caspian.
imho, it's time we started really looking at interactive and reactive programming. Yes, AI research is a step in the right direction, also realtime english parsing stuff, but we need systems that can at least pretend to comprehend and react to realtime and infinitely variable human input.
And after that we'll work on turning lead into gold.
Beyond very simple and well-defined contexts, natural speech parsing seems to require a solution to the Strong AI problem. Ditto a computer that responds intelligently to you outside a simple and well-defined context.
I'll happily settle for better game AI, as that's about all we'll be getting for the next 30-50 years or so.
The project is really cool, and the plots are fascinating. However, the plots that are produced are misleading. The role of science and the media is a growing concern, and it [slashdot.org] was on slashdot earlier today.
Would you be happier if they put a little sticker on the picture saying "object size is not to scale"?
They're constrained by the fact that we actually have to be able to _see_ objects on the plot, and be able to pick out the more important objects (like planets) from the hordes of smaller objects sprinkled about the plot.
Actually, my linux (RedHat 7.3) installation will freeze occasionally. I find that it freezes when RealPlayer + many other things are running at once. (I think RealPlayer doesn't play nice with resources, but I'm just guessing.)
Has anybody else seen this behavior before, and if so, what was the cause? My computer is so stable otherwise.
There are doubtless many, many things that could cause this to happen. But the one that's been doing it for me has been heat.
Nice, hot weather, nice, hot processor, nice, hot video card, not-so-nice noises from the CPU fan that's on it's last legs and is varying speed erratically. And now I get freezes playing graphics-intensive games under W2K or playing MP3s under Linux.
This idea of "disposable" everything is really attrocious. We have finite resources on this planet, a delicate ecosystem, and yet we go around making as many things as possible disposable, consumable, bulk-buyable. These phones are just another step down the road to complet unsustainability; no technology could sustain this nonsense.
Our "delicate" ecosystem is likely to outlive us by tens of millions of years, so don't weep for its sake.
Nor are we likely to run out of resources. Firstly, if we're willing to process low-grade ores, we have mind-boggling amounts of any desired material available.
Secondly, raw materials will stop being a problem when our garbage becomes a higher-grade ore than what we'd otherwise be mining. Expect recycling to make big money in the next century or two as cities become closed systems resource-wise.
The real issue of conservation is not whether we'll run out of materials or make the planet uninhabitable - it's whether the planet will be _comfortable_ to live on, and whether all of our favourite fuzzy critters at the top of the biological pyramid will still be here for us to look at. This is perfectly do-able; it's just a question of whether we, as a race, consider it worth a little added inconvenience and expense. The jury's still out on this one.
In summary, you are addressing the wrong question with your alarmist rant about ecology.
I'll leave it to someone else to tear apart your political rant.
Honestly, I doubt x86 decoding seriously bloats the die that much - jeez, on a 0.13u process, how big would the original 8086 core be? Take a look at the die for a Hammer processor - x86 decoding doesn't take that much space.
The real problem is that it adds extra stages to the pipeline, which does things like make branch mispredict penalties worse.
Oh, and if you're editing a 1600x1200 movie on a PC, you're limited by your disk transfer rate. No way are you storing *any* significant chunk of that in a PC's RAM.
ever heard of PCI-X and aggregated (i.e. many in parallel) Ultra320 arrays?... Of course you need a Quad CPU system to do all of this in real time (or a very powerful dual system).
Quite the "PC" there. *smirk*
I repeat - nothing that you're going to do real-time video editing on at that resolution will *have* an AGP bus (or cost less that about ten times what a home PC costs).
All you're doing is supporting my case.
Not fast enough?
on
AGP4X vs. AGP8X
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· Score: 4, Informative
Well, when AGP 1x was out, people didn't find it very useful because it wasn't fast enough
AGP2x was okay to offload the PCI bus and do some basic stuff, but not fast enough for high-speed games and transfering large chunks of information.
Not fast enough to be useful? What reviews were you reading?
Back when AGP 1x and 2x were rolled out, they were found to be marginally useful because the graphics card was the bottleneck. This is true even today. Fill rate is still almost invariably the bottleneck for performance, and CPU power for geometry and physics is usually second.
The original intent of AGP was to transfer textures across the bus, with the card's texture memory just a cache of this data. But this is a _bad_ thing to do - bandwidth and especially latency of a card's on-board memory is likely to be much better than AGP transfer bandwidth and latency, so nobody in their right mind writes games that require streaming textures from system memory. This isn't going to change - the memory in your PC is optimized for being big. The memory in your graphics card is optimized for being fast. Even with a zero-latency, infinite-bandwidth AGP port, local memory is better.
All AGP is used for now is to transfer geometry data, and it's plenty fast for that (cards are still generally fill-rate limited). With on-board transformation and lighting, and further folding-in of the graphics pipeline on the way, the amount of data that needs to be transferred per frame is going to get _smaller_, not larger.
Very high AGP transfer rates are a marketing bullet-point, and not much else.
Oh, and if you're editing a 1600x1200 movie on a PC, you're limited by your disk transfer rate. No way are you storing *any* significant chunk of that in a PC's RAM.
Honda have spent millions on research and development of their humanoid robot [honda.com] and nasa start from scratch again with what looks like an inferior product?
Honda's robot is designed to be used on Earth. Weight isn't nearly as big a consideration for it. Neither is the need to be rad-hard, the need to tolerate micrometeorites, etc.
NASA's robot was designed from the start to be used in space. It also was designed from the start to be tool-using - its hands are a lot more dextrous than those of Asimo, and the rest of the robot's design reflects this philosophy.
i presume Honda's goals are similar to Nasa's in regards to putting robots in hostile enviroments
Not according to Honda's Asimo page. Their robot was designed to be used in human dwellings, which meshes nicely with the "robotic servants" theme that shows up in a lot of Japanese pop culture. Completely different design criteria vs. NASA's applications (NASA wants something that can build/maintain fiddly bits of the space station without requiring a human to suit up and go outside the station).
In summary, using Honda's design would not be a practical solution for NASA.
One wonders if the builders of this robot are Star Wars fans. The robot's head bears a striking resemblance to Jango Fett's helmet...
Re:Good Concept but too much equipment
on
Virtual Sword Fighting
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· Score: 3, Interesting
It seems like VR stuff has advanced very slowly in the past few years - except the graphics part of it. We are now getting to the point with the new cards from ATi and Nvidia that movies can be rendered real time so the visual experience is great, but physically its still cumbersome. Why isn't the equipment wireless, using bluetooth or something similar for everything to communicate. Its not going to feel very realistic to me if I have a strand of wires attached to me.
Graphics have always been the easiest part of building a VR rig; it's the user interface that's the hard part.
Radio links would indeed work for the control devices, but shoving full-motion video through the link with acceptable resolution and low latency would be trickier (recent wireless kits can likely do it, with difficulty). Also bear in mind that many of these rigs use EM-based position sensors. Nearby radio transmissions could quite possibly screw this up if it's being used.
Biggest killer of current VR technology for me (besides the price)? The display. I like having a decent field of view with decent resolution. Current head-mounted displays aren't there yet (and a CAVE-type solution is a bit bulky/costly).
Historically, fast and accurate head-motion tracking has been a problem as well (even a slight lag causes simulator sickness). This may have improved in recent years (haven't kept up with the field).
VR rigs are really cool toys, but nobody's figured out how to build a really _good_ one yet that I know of.
Slashdot Mirror
I see two problems with that approach.
:)).
1.A computer simulation of a mind is not a real mind. At least, we have no reason to believe it is.
On the contrary, I believe that it's difficult to argue that it's _not_. If we presume that you can capture all relevant mental state information, then there's no reason why the substrate would matter.
The only scenarios in which the emulated mind would not be adequately equivalent to the original mind would be if you assume that relevant information content goes down to a detail level finer than we can capture, or that there's some intangible "soul" associated with the original mind in its original substrate that cannot be copied.
Occam's razor suggests that neither is the case (though only the experiment itself will tell
If you have nanotech, you should be able to rebuild the body to any degree you like, atom by atom.
Why? Information about the original state of the system would be permanently lost in the crystallization process.
I am assuming that all relevant information about a mind's contents is stored in the strength of synapses, and in the density of various neurochemicals distributed on the same or larger distance scale. The majority of this information should be reconstructable even with ice crystals turning neurons into swiss cheese.
If you believe that the mind state is stored by microtubules or in quantum states in special proteins or what-have-you, then I agree, the mind won't be reconstructable. However, I have yet to see convincing evidence that invalidates the simpler case.
And at the temperatures required many fluids crystalize. whoops.
If you're going much below freezing in the first place, you've already found a way to stop fluid crystallization from doing damage.
In the case of the frogs that started this thread, they contain antifreeze agents that inhibit crystal growth and so result in a much finer-grained polycrystalline mass when the freezing is finished. No irreparable damage.
Any (revivable) frozen human will have similar safeguards in place.
Methanol may be easier to produce but it is toxic. But you can drink ethanol (and some people do).
:).
Gasoline's toxic too
Methanol and ethanol smell different. Confusing them isn't a problem. Any methanol sold at the pump will probably be spiked with both an additional odour agent and some kind of illness-inducing agent like any other denatured alcohol.
In summary, I don't see how toxicity is a concern.
Remember, any ethanol sold at the gas pump will be denatured also.
I've wanted to build a Tesla coil for years.
:).
The reason I still haven't is that they're about as good for electronics and magnetically sensitive media as a lightning strike. The intermittent arc gives off *vast* amounts of RF crud, which will induce currents in just about anything electronic and degauss anything magnetic nearby.
Your computer case will not save you if your machine has drive bays. All connected wires (modem, network, power) will also act perfectly well as antennas penetrating the case's shielding.
Credit cards and bank cards generally aren't shielded at all
Set up those Faraday cages before building anything like this.
"In summary, the quicksort-vs-heapsort argument is a red herring."
No, it isn't. It is an example of something that cannot be implemented properly in FORTRAN.
Yes, it is, because it is something that does not need to be implemented, because heapsort works perfectly well for practical purposes.
Pick another -- let's talk about space-efficent random list insertion or deletion, or implementation of a balanced tree, or any of a number of other areas where data structures are critical to algorithm performance. FORTRAN is not made for these things. Unfortunately, not every scientific problem is so cleanly decomposed into the tight little loopy segments that FORTRAN is good at computing.
However, the majority of scientific computations _are_, as is demonstrated by the fact that FORTRAN remains so popular in the scientific community.
By all means use C or some other language if that suits your problem best. But arguing that FORTRAN is bad because it doesn't work for a number of problems that aren't in its major workload is silly. It would be like, oh, saying that Perl is evil because it can't do matrix transformations as fast as C. In order for this to stick, I'd have to explain why people would be doing matrix transformations in Perl in the first place.
Now you're talking about taking carbon that's trapped in rocks and releasing it into the atmosphere (when the ethanol is burned)? What a bad plan, if you believe the global warming crowd at all.
As per my original post, you can extract it from the atmosphere by effusion or other methods easily enough. Limestone is just likely to be cheaper. Switching to alcohol-based vehicles is a Good Thing either way, as it burns more cleanly than gasoline, can be used in fuel cells (encouraging the switchover to fuel cell technology), and sets up the alcohol synthesis infrastructure, which you'd need with either source of CO2.
Limestone would be used until there was a good reason not to use it (like global warming becoming a big enough political concern). The infrastructure is desirable regardless.
Cryonics fans generally assume that the Miracle of Nanotechnology will solve this, just like everything else... Now, while I can buy nanotech fixing up whatever caused death in the first place, and I can sort of buy its rebooting a brain that's been offline for centuries, I find it a little difficult to accept that they'll be able to reconstitute a mess of meat shredded at the molecular level.
If you have nanotech, you should be able to rebuild the body to any degree you like, atom by atom.
I personally think that we aren't likely to reconstitute the frozen bodies. A solution requiring less miraculous technology would be to slice up the brain and map out the synapse connection patterns and strengths to load into a computer-emulated brain. This would require very hefty amounts of computing power, but if we were reviving people at all, we'd be at a point where we had the resources necessary.
I'm not hopeful for the frozen, though. Firstly, between the time you die and the time you're frozen, I strongly suspect that the brain will likely have degraded to the point where most of the critical information in it has been lost. Secondly, I'm doubtful of any cryonics company keeeping its frozen members stored under the required conditions for the century or two they'll be waiting for revival.
Yes, the major problem that's usually discussed is how to replace the water in our bodies with another fluid and back without making the vital organs stop working. I believe some experiments have been conducted - hopefully only in theory.
I remember reading about experiments of this kind performed on dogs back in the early 90s. They had some successes, but 1) they didn't go down to freezing at the time of the article I'd read, and 2) there were complications in most of the test subjects (things like epilepsy on revival). They replaced some or all of the dogs' blood with a solution more resistant to freezing, if I recall correctly.
But for a frog, this is just a few months. How are you going to keep cells alive for decades without "feeding" them?
By cooling them down to liquid nitrogen temperatures after they've been frozen. Metabolism, like most other chemical processes, is *very* strongly dependent on temperature. Reaction rate tends to be tied to it exponentially, so in a very cold environment, the cell will effectively be in stasis.
Only half joking: Researchers at U.Michigan hope to store up to 10 bits per atom, by using Rydberg states.
:).
I seem to recall that a group used similar techniques to store much more than that (they wanted to encode a small image's bits).
The problem, of course, is that readout tends to be destructive, and you'll have a lot of fun trying to compete on a density basis with the solid-substrate schemes
And frankly, it is a language isssue. FORTRAN doesn't have recursion. You can't properly implement quicksort in a non-recursive language. And quicksort outperforms heapsort in most cases.
If Quicksort is the most relevant example you can think of, then I'm afraid you're not making a very strong case.
Both are O(n log n) in the best case, and I'll be extremely surprised if there's more than about a factor of two difference in running time for comparable best-case inputs. And yes, I've done the analysis.
Quicksort, however, has a nasty habit of not guaranteeing anything better than O(n^2), which can be triggered by a variety of pathological cases (admittedly less likely for large sets being sorted). What you wind up with in practice, working through the analysis assuming randomly-distributed lists, is O(log n) average-case behavior with a nastier coefficient, degrading performance to a level closer to than of heapsort.
You can use clever methods for selecting the pivot to reduce this problem, but this bites you back with the extra operations you have to perform. You don't gain a whole lot for the average case (though you make the pathological case far less likely).
In summary, the quicksort-vs-heapsort argument is a red herring.
Yes, there are problems for which recursive formulations are very elegant, but the majority of scientific problems that require brute force seem to be implemented adequately in Fortran-77. Do you have examples of important, computation-intensive problems for which the recursive formulation is far better than an iterative formulation?
Another option is to write off biologicals altogether and produce ethanol (or methanol, which is easier and still a good fuel) directly from CO2 and hydrogen.
You need a power plant to supply the electricity to produce the hydrogen, so this is an energy storage scheme as opposed to an energy collection scheme, but I strongly suspect that the end-to-end system efficiency will still be greater than with corn fermentation.
This has the advantage of letting you build the infrastructure for alternate fuel production (hydrogen or methanol, which can be processed by fuel cells and stored at far higher density than hydrogen) without having to replace every car on the road (an internal combustion engine can burn methanol).
Cost for the methanol (or ethanol) is potentially very cheap, even with high energy costs. The efficiency of the methanol synthesis step is what will limit price (and of atmospheric CO2 extraction if you get tired of shipping in limestone).
Erm, i dunno when u mean they did this, but in the collection i have always read, The Magicians Nephew has always been the first book (and this is going back 15 years). So unless it wasnt done recently, ill say the order i read them in made perfect sense, as the nephew turns out to be the old man who owns the wardrobe.
The order you refer to (and the original poster complains about) is the chronological order of events in the story. The order of (I think) publication is the older ordering (the one in my collection, and apparently in the original poster's). That order is:
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
Prince Caspian
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The Silver Chair
A Horse and His Boy
The Magician's Nephew
The Last Battle
Chronological order would put TMN at the beginning, and HHB before Prince Caspian.
imho, it's time we started really looking at interactive and reactive programming. Yes, AI research is a step in the right direction, also realtime english parsing stuff, but we need systems that can at least pretend to comprehend and react to realtime and infinitely variable human input.
And after that we'll work on turning lead into gold.
Beyond very simple and well-defined contexts, natural speech parsing seems to require a solution to the Strong AI problem. Ditto a computer that responds intelligently to you outside a simple and well-defined context.
I'll happily settle for better game AI, as that's about all we'll be getting for the next 30-50 years or so.
The project is really cool, and the plots are fascinating. However, the plots that are produced are misleading. The role of science and the media is a growing concern, and it [slashdot.org] was on slashdot earlier today.
Would you be happier if they put a little sticker on the picture saying "object size is not to scale"?
They're constrained by the fact that we actually have to be able to _see_ objects on the plot, and be able to pick out the more important objects (like planets) from the hordes of smaller objects sprinkled about the plot.
Looks like a decent plot to me.
Ace's Hardware also has a short but very informative article about the NV30.
Actually, my linux (RedHat 7.3) installation will freeze occasionally. I find that it freezes when RealPlayer + many other things are running at once. (I think RealPlayer doesn't play nice with resources, but I'm just guessing.)
Has anybody else seen this behavior before, and if so, what was the cause? My computer is so stable otherwise.
There are doubtless many, many things that could cause this to happen. But the one that's been doing it for me has been heat.
Nice, hot weather, nice, hot processor, nice, hot video card, not-so-nice noises from the CPU fan that's on it's last legs and is varying speed erratically. And now I get freezes playing graphics-intensive games under W2K or playing MP3s under Linux.
Time to replace that CPU fan.
YMMV.
This idea of "disposable" everything is really attrocious. We have finite resources on this planet, a delicate ecosystem, and yet we go around making as many things as possible disposable, consumable, bulk-buyable. These phones are just another step down the road to complet unsustainability; no technology could sustain this nonsense.
Our "delicate" ecosystem is likely to outlive us by tens of millions of years, so don't weep for its sake.
Nor are we likely to run out of resources. Firstly, if we're willing to process low-grade ores, we have mind-boggling amounts of any desired material available.
Secondly, raw materials will stop being a problem when our garbage becomes a higher-grade ore than what we'd otherwise be mining. Expect recycling to make big money in the next century or two as cities become closed systems resource-wise.
The real issue of conservation is not whether we'll run out of materials or make the planet uninhabitable - it's whether the planet will be _comfortable_ to live on, and whether all of our favourite fuzzy critters at the top of the biological pyramid will still be here for us to look at. This is perfectly do-able; it's just a question of whether we, as a race, consider it worth a little added inconvenience and expense. The jury's still out on this one.
In summary, you are addressing the wrong question with your alarmist rant about ecology.
I'll leave it to someone else to tear apart your political rant.
Honestly, I doubt x86 decoding seriously bloats the die that much - jeez, on a 0.13u process, how big would the original 8086 core be? Take a look at the die for a Hammer processor - x86 decoding doesn't take that much space.
The real problem is that it adds extra stages to the pipeline, which does things like make branch mispredict penalties worse.
Oh, and if you're editing a 1600x1200 movie on a PC, you're limited by your disk transfer rate. No way are you storing *any* significant chunk of that in a PC's RAM.
...
ever heard of PCI-X and aggregated (i.e. many in parallel) Ultra320 arrays?
Of course you need a Quad CPU system to do all of this in real time (or a very powerful dual system).
Quite the "PC" there. *smirk*
I repeat - nothing that you're going to do real-time video editing on at that resolution will *have* an AGP bus (or cost less that about ten times what a home PC costs).
All you're doing is supporting my case.
Well, when AGP 1x was out, people didn't find it very useful because it wasn't fast enough
AGP2x was okay to offload the PCI bus and do some basic stuff, but not fast enough for high-speed games and transfering large chunks of information.
Not fast enough to be useful? What reviews were you reading?
Back when AGP 1x and 2x were rolled out, they were found to be marginally useful because the graphics card was the bottleneck. This is true even today. Fill rate is still almost invariably the bottleneck for performance, and CPU power for geometry and physics is usually second.
The original intent of AGP was to transfer textures across the bus, with the card's texture memory just a cache of this data. But this is a _bad_ thing to do - bandwidth and especially latency of a card's on-board memory is likely to be much better than AGP transfer bandwidth and latency, so nobody in their right mind writes games that require streaming textures from system memory. This isn't going to change - the memory in your PC is optimized for being big. The memory in your graphics card is optimized for being fast. Even with a zero-latency, infinite-bandwidth AGP port, local memory is better.
All AGP is used for now is to transfer geometry data, and it's plenty fast for that (cards are still generally fill-rate limited). With on-board transformation and lighting, and further folding-in of the graphics pipeline on the way, the amount of data that needs to be transferred per frame is going to get _smaller_, not larger.
Very high AGP transfer rates are a marketing bullet-point, and not much else.
Oh, and if you're editing a 1600x1200 movie on a PC, you're limited by your disk transfer rate. No way are you storing *any* significant chunk of that in a PC's RAM.
Honda have spent millions on research and development of their humanoid robot [honda.com] and nasa start from scratch again with what looks like an inferior product?
Honda's robot is designed to be used on Earth. Weight isn't nearly as big a consideration for it. Neither is the need to be rad-hard, the need to tolerate micrometeorites, etc.
NASA's robot was designed from the start to be used in space. It also was designed from the start to be tool-using - its hands are a lot more dextrous than those of Asimo, and the rest of the robot's design reflects this philosophy.
i presume Honda's goals are similar to Nasa's in regards to putting robots in hostile enviroments
Not according to Honda's Asimo page. Their robot was designed to be used in human dwellings, which meshes nicely with the "robotic servants" theme that shows up in a lot of Japanese pop culture. Completely different design criteria vs. NASA's applications (NASA wants something that can build/maintain fiddly bits of the space station without requiring a human to suit up and go outside the station).
In summary, using Honda's design would not be a practical solution for NASA.
One wonders if the builders of this robot are Star Wars fans. The robot's head bears a striking resemblance to Jango Fett's helmet...
It seems like VR stuff has advanced very slowly in the past few years - except the graphics part of it. We are now getting to the point with the new cards from ATi and Nvidia that movies can be rendered real time so the visual experience is great, but physically its still cumbersome. Why isn't the equipment wireless, using bluetooth or something similar for everything to communicate. Its not going to feel very realistic to me if I have a strand of wires attached to me.
Graphics have always been the easiest part of building a VR rig; it's the user interface that's the hard part.
Radio links would indeed work for the control devices, but shoving full-motion video through the link with acceptable resolution and low latency would be trickier (recent wireless kits can likely do it, with difficulty). Also bear in mind that many of these rigs use EM-based position sensors. Nearby radio transmissions could quite possibly screw this up if it's being used.
Biggest killer of current VR technology for me (besides the price)? The display. I like having a decent field of view with decent resolution. Current head-mounted displays aren't there yet (and a CAVE-type solution is a bit bulky/costly).
Historically, fast and accurate head-motion tracking has been a problem as well (even a slight lag causes simulator sickness). This may have improved in recent years (haven't kept up with the field).
VR rigs are really cool toys, but nobody's figured out how to build a really _good_ one yet that I know of.