Carbon dating is not the only dating technique. There are actually perhaps 30-35 different common dating techniques with useful time range from a matter of decades to billions of years, tens of billions of years infact.
Another common one is radiometric dating which gives you a range of 700 million to 50 billion years (!). In a way Carbon 14 dating is radiometric dating, it's just using one particular isotope. In reality there a many different isotopes that may be used to suit the range you need.
Since the stone tool is not organic matter, carbon 14 would not be useful. Carbon dating gets too inaccurate after 50,000 years.
"What features are there that are "must have" apart from the "ooh shiny" aspect"
Never underestimate the power of the "ooh shiny" marketing. The Force can have a strong influence on the weak-minded.
It's probably people who don't have shiny things that don't understand why people like to buy shiny things.
Just in time, as if they really clamped down on file sharing people really would have stopped sharing en mass. mafRIAA cartel leaders would have watched their profits falling and found it harder to push and promote new music. The industry would retract... the recession would get blamed.
Because piracy is the only thing supporting the industries profits amidst a global economic downturn.
The blogger doesn't really back up his prediction with any reasoning or facts. He needs to because, the same things were said of Windows XP, that it wouldn't lure people away from 98/ME, that the requirements were too high etc. I would have thought a Microsoft insider would be well aware of history.
He also parrots other blogs by claiming the new taskbar is mac-like. It isn't, he's clearly not spent any time with Dock.
Supposedly mac users claim glossy monitors have a sharper image? Perhaps if you've only seen half-arse anti-glare. Most LCD monitors, particularly desktop monitors have very good anti-glare coatings these days, and don't really harm clarity at all. I really don't understand why laptop makers can't get this right, particularly Apple.
If I conclude there is 1 in 1000 chance of us dying when the spaghetti monsters noodley appendages blot out the sun and subsequently all life on earth, and people who research pasta deities have a given probability of being wrong, by what amount does this alter the probability?
It doesn't, not by any reasonable and practical definition anyway. You just have a chance of some bunk numbers.
I'm excited by the possibility that we may see, out of holywood, an actual Proverbial Good Sci-Fi Film -- as was the original Blade Runner and films like 2001: A Space Oddessy.
It may happen.
What has changed really?
on
Less Is Moore
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I agree that the shift will is towards smaller cheaper more energy efficiency and ubiquitous computers. However it doesn't necessarily follow that computers won't get faster and software to make use of it. Moore's inacurately named Law is still holding true at the bleeding edge, driven by gaming, content creation and research. What we are getting is a growing gap between the lowest end and the highest end. The high end will become a smaller slice of revenue for sure.
For chip manufacturers little will change, performance per watt and cost/die/wafer require the same thing: ever smaller transistors that use less power per iteration. It's the same thing. So in reality Moore's Observation is still iterating unchecked, it's just the end packaging that will be different.
Instead of dozens of billion-transistor multicore behemoths from a wafer, they will get hundreds of tiny cut-down processors with a lower transitor count.
Now, it's been shown the latter which is a more profitable approach.
Re:The bells and whistles nobody uses...
on
Less Is Moore
·
· Score: 1
So I'm starting to suspect that fretting about bloatware is more of a mental health problem than a software problem.
Amen.
Microsoft got told off
on
Less Is Moore
·
· Score: 1
There is a possibility (however unlikely) that Microsoft has made a very clever and astute move going for a streamlined version of their current technology rather than a new iteration with whatever arbitrary new features weighing it down. It's clever because it's timed for release in a global recession and a switch in focus to developing markets - the 'next billion' users.
But it's unlikely, and I would hesitate to say microsoft has actually preempted anything, I'd say their responding to what they've been told by hardware vendors who have put their foot down and said, "this is what we will be selling, if you don't come up with something we're going to take matters into our own hands with linux".
Even assuming the data is captured and preserved in a reasonably indelible format, will it be really readible? There's alot of concern regarding physical formats, but little consideration to the greater problem the software and systems to read and process it. Preserve the data, but what about the software and systems to use it? Fortunately software emulation and visualization is probably the key here since one architecture can emulate another in a straightforward fashion. I presently virtualise old DOS apps from within a windows/linux machine. In the future I could virtualise any extra layer deep my old machines on whatever current platform and virtualisation software. So I'm not too concerned
I'm not surprised at the tone of complacency, something to consider is that the internet, as a cloud of data, has been around such a short time, we haven't really seen much old content start to disappear into oblivion, let alone start to worry about preserving it. Indeed popularity keeps things alive, links go dead when people don't care anymore. But there must already be a mind boggling large ammount lot of unique content that has vanished from the cloud, not to mention usenet & forums which may be sitting on backup tapes somewhere.
What we really need, is a international organization immune to (flawed) copyright and patent law that archives preserves data, documentation and most importantly software source code for future generations.
"We didn't achieve mass customization of cars until Ford thought up the assembly line. We need the equivalent of the assembly line in the (operating system) world:"
Err, no we don't, at least not Dell/Apple's definition of 'customization' where you have two or three choices of hardrive upgrade options, each increment of cost would buy your the retail part outright.
Worse, ford and his mass production gave us any colour so long as it's black.
This is rather the opposite and a Good Thing.
The better analogy would have been the custom car scene from the 1950s onwards, where you can pay for a customized build, rather than do all the work yourself. This might get frowns from those who like object to paying someone do it.
I'm highly surprised and intrigued the chip even worked at -242C (31K!) for a long time it was speculated in overclocking circles that weird things would happen to current silicon much below the temperature of liquid nitrogen. It does seem liquid helium has been tried a few times but this is the lowest reported temperature I have ever seen on a overclocked CPU. It might not mean much for people who don't care about overclocking but I think this is a significant achievement.
I'm also intrigued by the possibility this chip could have gone faster, it may have become bound by motherboard reference clock and multipliers at this speed. It's not uncommon for the motherboards ability to deliver current to become the limiting factor.
8ghz is reportedly the outright world record
http://www.nordichardware.com/news,5505.html
Although I think this was reset to 8.2ghz not long after.
Devices (voice transformers) that pitch shift your voice to music in real time have been around for years. Using one is an uncanny experience... the result of voice processing is you sound like a pop star.
One laptop per student is the single best approach. There is little point in 'computer rooms' since about 1994. Considering how laptops are coming down in price. When you look at bulk deals of basic laptops the cost per child is now acceptable. But even if it is the most expensive solution it is absolutely worth every penny.
These kids will be shoved out into the workforce at some point, and even today, let alone ten years from now almost all jobs involve using a computer for at least a significant portion of their role. The way they learn and work should somewhat resemble how they will learn and work for the rest of their life.
But...erm... I do agree with the statement made above. Paying teachers something close to fairly would be a first priority. If there isn't the money for that, then there are other problems with education in todays western world.
Rolled up circuitry will allow for very dense electronics, which may turn out to be more practical than 3d-chips and other such advances. I've often wondered about finding a way to fold semi-conductors up like origami. If we are ever to have a nanotech revolution with smart machines tiny enough to float around our blood stream and other such applications for nanomachines, it's going to be necessary to package alot of processing power in to a small volume.
Consider that it is somewhat easier to print your circuitry in two dimensions, then to fold it up very small.
This is also helpful for making of smart materials, for example it'd be no use having a smart skin for a aircraft if fatigue and deformation destroys the circuitry within it.
Slashdot Mirror
Carbon dating is not the only dating technique. There are actually perhaps 30-35 different common dating techniques with useful time range from a matter of decades to billions of years, tens of billions of years infact.
Another common one is radiometric dating which gives you a range of 700 million to 50 billion years (!). In a way Carbon 14 dating is radiometric dating, it's just using one particular isotope. In reality there a many different isotopes that may be used to suit the range you need.
Since the stone tool is not organic matter, carbon 14 would not be useful. Carbon dating gets too inaccurate after 50,000 years.
"What features are there that are "must have" apart from the "ooh shiny" aspect" Never underestimate the power of the "ooh shiny" marketing. The Force can have a strong influence on the weak-minded.
It's probably people who don't have shiny things that don't understand why people like to buy shiny things.
Just in time, as if they really clamped down on file sharing people really would have stopped sharing en mass. mafRIAA cartel leaders would have watched their profits falling and found it harder to push and promote new music. The industry would retract ... the recession would get blamed.
Because piracy is the only thing supporting the industries profits amidst a global economic downturn.
The blogger doesn't really back up his prediction with any reasoning or facts. He needs to because, the same things were said of Windows XP, that it wouldn't lure people away from 98/ME, that the requirements were too high etc. I would have thought a Microsoft insider would be well aware of history.
He also parrots other blogs by claiming the new taskbar is mac-like. It isn't, he's clearly not spent any time with Dock.
35 bits per electron?! This kind of resets a few common assumptions about how much data can be stored in matter. Feynman was right.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There's_Plenty_of_Room_at_the_Bottom
Supposedly mac users claim glossy monitors have a sharper image? Perhaps if you've only seen half-arse anti-glare. Most LCD monitors, particularly desktop monitors have very good anti-glare coatings these days, and don't really harm clarity at all. I really don't understand why laptop makers can't get this right, particularly Apple.
If I conclude there is 1 in 1000 chance of us dying when the spaghetti monsters noodley appendages blot out the sun and subsequently all life on earth, and people who research pasta deities have a given probability of being wrong, by what amount does this alter the probability?
It doesn't, not by any reasonable and practical definition anyway. You just have a chance of some bunk numbers.
LOTR was the proverbial Good fantasy film.
I'm excited by the possibility that we may see, out of holywood, an actual Proverbial Good Sci-Fi Film -- as was the original Blade Runner and films like 2001: A Space Oddessy.
It may happen.
I agree that the shift will is towards smaller cheaper more energy efficiency and ubiquitous computers. However it doesn't necessarily follow that computers won't get faster and software to make use of it. Moore's inacurately named Law is still holding true at the bleeding edge, driven by gaming, content creation and research. What we are getting is a growing gap between the lowest end and the highest end. The high end will become a smaller slice of revenue for sure.
For chip manufacturers little will change, performance per watt and cost/die/wafer require the same thing: ever smaller transistors that use less power per iteration. It's the same thing. So in reality Moore's Observation is still iterating unchecked, it's just the end packaging that will be different.
Instead of dozens of billion-transistor multicore behemoths from a wafer, they will get hundreds of tiny cut-down processors with a lower transitor count.
Now, it's been shown the latter which is a more profitable approach.
So I'm starting to suspect that fretting about bloatware is more of a mental health problem than a software problem.
Amen.
There is a possibility (however unlikely) that Microsoft has made a very clever and astute move going for a streamlined version of their current technology rather than a new iteration with whatever arbitrary new features weighing it down. It's clever because it's timed for release in a global recession and a switch in focus to developing markets - the 'next billion' users.
But it's unlikely, and I would hesitate to say microsoft has actually preempted anything, I'd say their responding to what they've been told by hardware vendors who have put their foot down and said, "this is what we will be selling, if you don't come up with something we're going to take matters into our own hands with linux".
In a way this validates some claims by my ex wife in regards to my personal hygiene.
+ A significant portion of our mass is not cells, bone, collagen etc.
Even assuming the data is captured and preserved in a reasonably indelible format, will it be really readible? There's alot of concern regarding physical formats, but little consideration to the greater problem the software and systems to read and process it. Preserve the data, but what about the software and systems to use it? Fortunately software emulation and visualization is probably the key here since one architecture can emulate another in a straightforward fashion. I presently virtualise old DOS apps from within a windows/linux machine. In the future I could virtualise any extra layer deep my old machines on whatever current platform and virtualisation software. So I'm not too concerned
I'm not surprised at the tone of complacency, something to consider is that the internet, as a cloud of data, has been around such a short time, we haven't really seen much old content start to disappear into oblivion, let alone start to worry about preserving it. Indeed popularity keeps things alive, links go dead when people don't care anymore. But there must already be a mind boggling large ammount lot of unique content that has vanished from the cloud, not to mention usenet & forums which may be sitting on backup tapes somewhere.
What we really need, is a international organization immune to (flawed) copyright and patent law that archives preserves data, documentation and most importantly software source code for future generations.
"We didn't achieve mass customization of cars until Ford thought up the assembly line. We need the equivalent of the assembly line in the (operating system) world:"
Err, no we don't, at least not Dell/Apple's definition of 'customization' where you have two or three choices of hardrive upgrade options, each increment of cost would buy your the retail part outright.
Worse, ford and his mass production gave us any colour so long as it's black.
This is rather the opposite and a Good Thing. The better analogy would have been the custom car scene from the 1950s onwards, where you can pay for a customized build, rather than do all the work yourself. This might get frowns from those who like object to paying someone do it.
Hey I resent that. I lost my family that way.
While I'm pleased they have found my spaceship and not recognised what it is, it appears to have slipped out of parking orbit.
I'm highly surprised and intrigued the chip even worked at -242C (31K!) for a long time it was speculated in overclocking circles that weird things would happen to current silicon much below the temperature of liquid nitrogen. It does seem liquid helium has been tried a few times but this is the lowest reported temperature I have ever seen on a overclocked CPU. It might not mean much for people who don't care about overclocking but I think this is a significant achievement.
I'm also intrigued by the possibility this chip could have gone faster, it may have become bound by motherboard reference clock and multipliers at this speed. It's not uncommon for the motherboards ability to deliver current to become the limiting factor.
8ghz is reportedly the outright world record http://www.nordichardware.com/news,5505.html Although I think this was reset to 8.2ghz not long after.
http://www.yoursoundsource.com/roland-boss-vt-1.html - this kind of stuff is already used by pop stars I'm sure.
Devices (voice transformers) that pitch shift your voice to music in real time have been around for years. Using one is an uncanny experience... the result of voice processing is you sound like a pop star.
One laptop per student is the single best approach. There is little point in 'computer rooms' since about 1994. Considering how laptops are coming down in price. When you look at bulk deals of basic laptops the cost per child is now acceptable. But even if it is the most expensive solution it is absolutely worth every penny.
...erm... I do agree with the statement made above. Paying teachers something close to fairly would be a first priority. If there isn't the money for that, then there are other problems with education in todays western world.
These kids will be shoved out into the workforce at some point, and even today, let alone ten years from now almost all jobs involve using a computer for at least a significant portion of their role. The way they learn and work should somewhat resemble how they will learn and work for the rest of their life.
But
Rolled up circuitry will allow for very dense electronics, which may turn out to be more practical than 3d-chips and other such advances. I've often wondered about finding a way to fold semi-conductors up like origami. If we are ever to have a nanotech revolution with smart machines tiny enough to float around our blood stream and other such applications for nanomachines, it's going to be necessary to package alot of processing power in to a small volume.
Consider that it is somewhat easier to print your circuitry in two dimensions, then to fold it up very small.
This is also helpful for making of smart materials, for example it'd be no use having a smart skin for a aircraft if fatigue and deformation destroys the circuitry within it.
"A really good AI would be able to keep on topic and understand what has been discussed previously"
Such an AI posting to slashdot would quickly be revealed.
Replacement friends? Sign me up!
While we're at it, I'd like a robotic doppelganger of myself to attend boring management meetings while I have a pint at the pub.
When a jupiter sized planet moves into a terrestrial orbit it EATS the planet already there.
Om Nom Nom Nom
http://boingboing.net/images/cookienebula.jpg