Is anybody else reminded of http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096754/ Abyss? In the movie they added more oxygen to a water supply inside the helmet and you had to actaully breath the water inside your suit!
Whatever they used in the Abyss, it was most likely not water, as the sequence with the mouse breathing was not CGI. And water in your lungs is bad!
But, there do exist some breathing fluids, that among other things are being used on prematurely born babies, before their lungs are fully developed. AFAIK, using them for diving is still science fiction. You can read more about it here
I do not claim to agree with the politics involved and the rationalization of the war...[snip]
From your previous post, I quote: "Actually Sept 11 happened because of the hatred of the US and its ideology by people on the other side of the world.".
Are you sure about that? Why? What have those that did it said about it? Do we even know who did it? Does the explanation sound plausible? Because people hate US and it's ideologies, they blow up buildings with planes?
The truth is, we still don't know what the people involved in 9/11 wanted. We think we know who some of them were. But even after two wars, we still don't understand their motives, or even if the attack worked as planned, or a lot of other things. The explanation you gave is totally unsatisfactory on a lot of accounts, and frankly, it doesn't make sense at all. It was however popular with some right-wing US media for a period.
You also said: "Everything that happens in washington lately has been a result of an act of terrorism which led to this war."
I'm not trying to be a conspiracy theorist, but frankly, do you really believe that nothing of that would have happened if it wasn't for 9/11? Bush saw 9/11 as an opportunity to do what he wanted to do anyway (go to war in Iraq) a little bit faster. I can agree that Afghanistan might have been avoided, but Iraq was pretty much a target anyway. Or have you been living in a vacuum?
[snip]...but even in Norway you have to admit that things that happen on the otherside of the world affect you at least to some extent.
Not really.
Having an oil-based economy should at least in theory make us feel changes in oil-price pretty well. Sorry, it doesn't work that way. For me, as a private person, it has no measurable effect. Maybe the total stock-exchange index can feel a few percent, but the local variations in stock-price are much larger. And if the gas-price gets some percent bigger or smaller, it's still nothing compared to whether I take a night out and drink some beer.
Having close economic and military ties with the US, one should guess we would feel "the war on terror" too. We don't. The last time we had a hijacker in Norway, it was on a domestic flight, where the airport security was so lax, that they allowed a mentally disturbed asylum seeker to bring an axe on-board! The hijacker was then overpowered by a major from a small city (and no, he did not look like that californian governor).
The truth is, the world is a chaotic place. Things happen everywhere, all the time. What gets selected as "news" by the press is pretty arbitrary, and it really doesn't make sense to pay to much attention to it, except as entertainment. It certainly doesn't affect you any more than the zillions of things happening that never qualifies as "news".
What matters to you is what happens locally that affects you, and those things you tend to find out about anyway. In short, unless you feel the effect yourself, it isn't really there! Local variations are more important.
That doesn't mean that some global trends aren't important. They can be important for people planning things for many people (such as people dealing with state budget or national security). They are, however, of absolutely no importance to me. And even to people that would benefit from knowing about important trends, knowing that some muslim killed some jews in Gaza, is totally worthless.
On the other hand, knowing that from time to time, there are conflicts in the middle east, with crazy people on both sides; is useful knowledge for some people (although, apart from being able to keep up a conversation with other people, I've never really needed to know it myself).
To keep things in perspective, you should worry more about local crime than the war on terror. But much more worrysome is the risk of damaging yourself in the kitchen with either hot stuff or sharp knives:-)
In your case, I would recommend not watching the news. It might be too hard for you to understand, and it seems to confuse you. I'm not sure about the US (which you seem to be from), but here in Norway, we have a weekly newspaper for mentally retarded people called "Klar Tale" (Clear Speech), which I keep recommending to people as confused as you are. It might be easier to understand for you, and should be enough to give you a somewhat broader picture than FOX News.
There's too many times my boss has come across the hall to say "I just mailed you" something I need to work on, and it is better for me to be able to say "read my reply" than "what mail?"
And of course, even better to say: "I'll look at it after I've checked my email tomorrow". But then again, our jobs might be a little different?
But on WEEKENDS, what email? Were I truly addicted, there would be withdrawal symptoms. Nope.
I bet a survey in 1970 would show that well over 60% of people would have said that they started the day by reading the newspaper. Were they addicted to newspapers?
In my opinion, yes. While TV news might have taken over somewhat, most people are still addicted to news. Because for the vast majority of us, it's something that's totally irrelevant for our lives. It might be a nice hobby to know what's going on in Iraq, but it has little or no consequences for our daily lives. The same can be said about sports (or the weather report).
What a bullshit non-story. Sheesh.
Huh, you don't think 5 times a day is excessive. Personally, I check my e-mail at most once a day. It is, after all called e-mail. It's not like I empty my snail-mail several times daily either. Usually it's at most once a week, since it's mostly bills or trash anyway. If people want to reach me now, they can reach me through an invention patented by Graham Bell.
From the story submission: Netscape was there at the beginning of the internet boom. In 1996, the company controlled 90 percent of the browser market, but now its usershare is in the single digits.
Wow, you mean there are less than 10 users of Netscape Navigator?
Why it needs to to execute ~10e10 instructions just to pull up a blank word processor window I have no idea.
Apparently it is to "resolve symbols" located in shared libraries. I think someone will have to come up with something clever to fix this, as I don't see applications getting smaller in the future. Maybe we need yet another incompatible C++ ABI.
The traditional units evolved because they served a definite purpose, and they are the handiest thing for the specific job for which they were intended. A ``one size fits all'' unit doesn't fit most things very well.
Well, that's why the SI units aren't "one size fits all". That's why there are SI prefixes. We have not only meter, but also centimeter, kilometer, etc...
In most situations where traditional units are still used, they do not make more sense. An obvious example is the use of feet for measuring height in aviation (hektometers would make a lot more sense). And in those situations where traditional units actually are more convenient (if such situations exist), it would be much better to invent a similar unit, with a simple conversion factor into the SI system (such as half-meters, half-liters, or whatever...).
Take a look at my bookmarks on metrification for some interesting articles on this.
I did. And there were several interesting things to note. First, people are fairly good at rationalizing the status quo: "Because this is the way it's always been done, it must be the best way". Secondly, people are selfish: "Because I don't see any problems with measuring in hogshead/bell, I don't see why anyone else should be confused". Third, people will invent excuses to legitimate their irrational behaviour: "Even in sweden they use inches for measuring bolts" (as if they had any choice, the bolt has to actually fit the machine). Lastly, people always resist change (which happened to be the only valid argument I found)
Judging from the comments here, it seems like nearly everyone think it is wrong to stop people from illegally distributing copyrighted works.
Get a grip. Either you pay for the software/movie/music you want, or you satisfy yourself with free legal alternatives. But if you pirate it, and actively help others pirate it, and then get caught, at least take it as a man!
Copyright exists for a reason, and in most cases it works pretty well. The latest Star Wars prequel cost a lot of money to make. It would not have been made, unless George Lucas expected to get even more money in return. If you are against all copyright, you should not enjoy Star Wars at all!
The real joke is when you then change the keyboard mapping to Davorak and double your speed again.
Hmm, interesting. What is this Davorak you speak of. Never heard of that language.
QWERTY was designed to be a--s s--l--o--w a--s possible to keep you from jamming the damn keys.
Nope, QWERTY was designed to keep you from getting the rods connected to each key jamming into each other. Of course that isn't a big concern today, as that kind of typewriters is pretty much outdated today. However, if you really wanted to design a keyboard today, that would be as slow as possible, I'm sure I could come up with quite a lot of "improvements" to qwerty.
And if you really wanted to design a keyboard for maximum typing speed, I'm sure there are better layouts than Dvorak too, as most of the hype for Dvorak is just that: hype. I'm not saying that Dvorak isn't "better", (which it probably is, to some degree). But it clearly will not make you type at double speed, unless you are a complete moron who never learnt to type properly in the first place.
Re:If you believe that we are biological machines.
on
Download Your Brain
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I think you are assuming that if we know how neurons really work we could make a self aware computer.
No. The computer wouldn't be self-aware. The program it is running would be. That program we don't need to build. It is uploaded from someones brain. What we need is good enough knowledge about how neurons work to build a simulator good enough to replace the physical brain.
I believe that logic is non sequitur.
Only because of the way you state the argument.
Here are the unstated assumptions:
What we call our consciousness is akin to "software" running on a "computer" known as a "brain".
Advances in medicine/biotechnology will make it possible to capture the "state" of a given neuron in a brain
And here are the stated assumptions
Computer technology continues to improve at near Moore's law
Advances in medicine/biotechnology will give us a sufficient understanding of brain neurons to run a simulation of them.
Together these assumptions lead to downloading as a definite possibility. On the other hand, if you insist on a completely logical argument, you shouldn't try to predict the future.
Re:If you believe that we are biological machines.
on
Download Your Brain
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· Score: 1
Computers are great tools for what they do. They manipulate a series of 1s and 0s, store and retrieve the 1s and 0s on various media etc.
Yes, and that's why they are so excellent for performing simulations of other machines (even if we don't understand, which is usually the case, or we wouldn't have bothered with the simulation).
The one thing that a computer has never done and I don't think ever will is to understand the significant of the stream of 1s and 0s that it is manipulating. That would require true consciousness and TRUE consciousness is part of our minds.
Exactly. So instead of building a smart computer program, we build a simple computer program: a brain/nerve tissue simulator/interpreter. This requires very little understanding of how consciousness actually works. It does however require a very good computer, and a lot of medical research to understand how neurons really work.
There are things we don't understand yet (otherwise we could make autopilots from simulating the brains of flies), but it is not unheard of, to take a guess and say that those problems will be solved too, in 50 years.
No mater how good we get at simulating consciousness I don't believe that we will ever be able to take machine consciousness beyond the simulation into reality.
But when we are running a simulation of the brain in the software, it's much easier to experiment on it.
First of all, the "speed" of the brain could be hundreds or thousands times faster than a "normal" brain, all you need is a faster computer. This would (a) allow you to think faster, and (b) allow you to do "genetic" or "hormonic" experiments in software at a much higher rate, which could evolve "super-thinkers" pretty fast.
Secondly, you could have several of these "faster clones" communicate with themselves all at enormous speed, building entire research communities of "fast thinkers".
Lastly, in the real world, there are not too many really bright thinkers. In the virtual world, if you needed 15 copies of Stephen Hawking, you could have them at an instant.
And of course, all of these faster better thinkers can also think up better computer hardware to run the simulations of themselves even faster on.
Basically, this means that if we can make good enough hardware, and we can figure out how neurons work good enough to simulate them, it's only a matter of time before you have something radically smarter than you. Actually, it's only a matter of time before you have something radically smarter than all of the worlds scientists together. And that is the singularity...
It is plausible that these bright thinkers would eventually be smart enough to find out how consciousness works. But even if they don't, it doesn't really matter, because something pretty darn significant would have happened either way.
Well what if you found out that every 7 years or so, you had a completely different body than what you had previously? Gasp! You're a different person! Change your name!
This could have been funny, if it actually was true that every cell in your body was replaced every 7th year.
But that is a complete fallacy, and I have no idea why this fallacy became so popular. Some cells, such as nerve tissue, are never replaced. Some cells, such as those in your skin or in your colon, can be replaced several times daily.
For a database server it's not the system uptime that counts - it's the database uptime. If it goes down, I could as well have rebooted the whole server - the phone will ring just the same.
Except that rebooting a computer takes around 2 minutes (maybe more if it's a heavy server. Restarting the DBMS (which is already cached in RAM, remember) should take less than a second. If you get phone calls then, just pretend you went to the loo for a minute and wait for it to calm down:-)
But I don't understand why this is supposed to help. If Gnome/KDE gets screenDPI from the X-server, why would they ever be different? It shouldn't matter whether X reads it from EDID from the monitor, or get the value from a configuration file, or whatever. They should always be either both wrong or both correct. There should never be any inconsistency.
So which one is broken, in this case? Gnome? KDE? Or both?
umm. 32bit emulation should be done by the kernel and not by a chroot, compile yourself a kernel that supports 32bit emulation, the default kernel doesnt support it, yes it's annoying.
Umm, 32 bit emulation is already done by the CPU. That's how most people use their Athlon 64's today. The linux kernel by default supports both 32 and 64 bit binaries, when compiled for amd64 architecture. That isn't the problem here.
The problem is that you also need a 64-bit userspace. E.g. ld-linux.so and shared libraries in both 64-bit versions and 32-bit versions. There are various approaches for doing this:
Some vendors, like Suse have followed the lead of e.g. Solaris, which simply added/lib64 and/usr/lib64 when going 64-bit.
But this is less than ideal. For Solaris, it made sense, since only applications needing a larger address space would benefit from 64-bit support. Thus the majority of userland could remain 32-bit.
On x86 however, there are pretty big performance benefits in going to 64-bit, because it doubles the number of registers (general purpose register, fpu register, mmx registers, and sse registers). So the default should be 64-bit, and we should add/lib32 and/usr/lib32 instead. As far as I know, no linux distribution does just that...
And the reason for that is that we want to support even more general things. How about a/lib-ppc and/usr/lib-ppc for running powerpc binaries through qemu? Or more realistically; the other way around? (Some powerpc users probably want to run wine).
So the people behind Debian and Ubuntu have thought about this problem, and want to do it right! And that takes a bit of planning, because it's supposed to be the last time we do such a thing, no matter what kind of weird multiarch-processors or user-space emulators the future will bring.
So in the meantime, Debian and Ubuntu users will have to add a separate directory hierarchy with a complete 32-bit user-space, and run their apps in this environment (chrooted). While this is less than ideal, it's also the most foolproof solution (remember to re-mount/home,/tmp,/proc,/dev, and/sys inside the chrooted environment, and copy/etc/passwd,/etc/shadow, and/etc/group into it too).
Thus, the present "solution" is an annoyance, but the annoyance can easily be limited by a bit of scripting. And it has the advantage of being completely general. There's e.g. nothing stopping you from adding a Fedora chroot to an Ubuntu distribution.
A PC by any other name would smell just as sweet. If you put everything you want from a PC into a console, it's going to cost as much as a new PC and would essentially be a non-upgradable, non-customizable PC in a pretty box. What's so great about that?
The pretty box sounds nice!
But seriously, where did you get the idea that PCs were upgradeable anymore? We're living in times where CPU sockets change every year (even several times each year), PCI and AGP gets replaced by PCI Express, IDE gets replaced by SATA, USB already having replaced the standard serial port, and I can't even use the RAM from my old computer in the new one!
Someone has done this before. It's called a data acquisition system. The basic design for one is even sketched out in one of Grady Booch's books (before he became one of the three amigos).
The design of a data acquisition systems will of course differ, depending on how much data it records per sensor, how many sensors there are, how often to record the data, and if the data is to be available for online or offline processing.
In most of the "hard" cases, you will use a pipelined architecture, where data is received on one or more realtime boxes, and buffered for an appropriate (short) period. A second stage occurs when data is collected from these buffers, and buffered/reordered/processed to make writing the desired format to a file or DBMS easier. The last stage, is, of course, to write it. You might use zero or more computers at each stage, with a fast dedicated network in-between. You might even decide to split up some of the stages even further. Depending on how much you care about your data, you may also add redundancy. And make sure it's fault-tolerant, it's generally better to loose some data, as long as it's tagged as missing, than to loose it all. To check this in real-time you can also add data-monitoring anywhere it makes sense for your system.
In the simper cases, you simply remove things not needed, such as a soundcard instead of dedicated realtime-boxes, redundancy, monitoring, dedicated network, etc...
Some commercial off-the-shelf systems will surely do this. But the more advanced systems, you still build yourself, either from scratch, or by reusing code you find in other similar projects (I'm sure there are some scientific code available from people interested in medical science, biology, astrophysics, geophysics, meteorology, etc...).
Most of the "heavy" systems will not run on Windows, or even Intel, due to limitations of that platform for fast I/O. This has obviously changed a lot recently, so it's no longer the stupid choice it was, but don't expect too many projects of this kind to have noticed, as they probably have existed much longer.
There do exist motherboards without features. But why go for it? It's not like it's going to be cheaper (since demand and availability rules the marketplace much more than cheap added features, and hey, maybe some of those features come in handy someday too...).And it's not going to be faster/better (since you can add your slot-in cards to the integrated mobo too). And it's unlikely to be more compatible with e.g. linux, which supports most motherboards onboard features anyway (and definitely if they are "mainstream").
In fact, the only place where it seems to make any difference at all, is in theoretical reliability (number of components divided by mean time of failure). But hey, we all know which components on a motherboard is going to fail. It's those components who must handle a lot of power (i.e. connections between CPU and powersupply). Adding AC97 onboard sound isn't going to make your motherboard fail more often.
Unit testing is for finding bugs early on (preferably design errors, but also coding errors).
If the code is already written and works, then it's not likely to be worth the effort to add random unit tests all over the place. What you need then is either (a) stress testing, to discover hidden bugs, or (b) regression tests, to make sure the software keeps working, even after programmers have "improved" upon it.
Maybe it'll be a lisp that supports lightweight processes, unicode, and has a compatible windows port that costs less than $10,000 per seat.
Oh hey, hello MzScheme.
Of which the only limitations of note, are that it is slow. As slow as e.g. Perl or Python. Still very nice, though...
Lisp is hardly one to talk about NIH. Their philosophy is "everything was invented in Lisp first, so actually implementing and releasing whatever you're talking about is left for plebians who don't understand the elegance of lisp"
Ouch! That gotta hurt!
But you do have a good point. FFI hasn't exactly been what lispers have given most thought too. And if you are to take advantage of other people's useful work, it's not like you are going to find some other way (besides rewriting it in lisp, or communicating with other programs over sockets).
Slashdot Mirror
Are you a jedi knight? I guess not. That's why you don't have a lightsaber!
Whatever they used in the Abyss, it was most likely not water, as the sequence with the mouse breathing was not CGI. And water in your lungs is bad!
But, there do exist some breathing fluids, that among other things are being used on prematurely born babies, before their lungs are fully developed. AFAIK, using them for diving is still science fiction. You can read more about it here
From your previous post, I quote: "Actually Sept 11 happened because of the hatred of the US and its ideology by people on the other side of the world.".
Are you sure about that? Why? What have those that did it said about it? Do we even know who did it? Does the explanation sound plausible? Because people hate US and it's ideologies, they blow up buildings with planes?
The truth is, we still don't know what the people involved in 9/11 wanted. We think we know who some of them were. But even after two wars, we still don't understand their motives, or even if the attack worked as planned, or a lot of other things. The explanation you gave is totally unsatisfactory on a lot of accounts, and frankly, it doesn't make sense at all. It was however popular with some right-wing US media for a period.
You also said: "Everything that happens in washington lately has been a result of an act of terrorism which led to this war."
I'm not trying to be a conspiracy theorist, but frankly, do you really believe that nothing of that would have happened if it wasn't for 9/11? Bush saw 9/11 as an opportunity to do what he wanted to do anyway (go to war in Iraq) a little bit faster. I can agree that Afghanistan might have been avoided, but Iraq was pretty much a target anyway. Or have you been living in a vacuum?
[snip]...but even in Norway you have to admit that things that happen on the otherside of the world affect you at least to some extent.
Not really.
Having an oil-based economy should at least in theory make us feel changes in oil-price pretty well. Sorry, it doesn't work that way. For me, as a private person, it has no measurable effect. Maybe the total stock-exchange index can feel a few percent, but the local variations in stock-price are much larger. And if the gas-price gets some percent bigger or smaller, it's still nothing compared to whether I take a night out and drink some beer.
Having close economic and military ties with the US, one should guess we would feel "the war on terror" too. We don't. The last time we had a hijacker in Norway, it was on a domestic flight, where the airport security was so lax, that they allowed a mentally disturbed asylum seeker to bring an axe on-board! The hijacker was then overpowered by a major from a small city (and no, he did not look like that californian governor).
The truth is, the world is a chaotic place. Things happen everywhere, all the time. What gets selected as "news" by the press is pretty arbitrary, and it really doesn't make sense to pay to much attention to it, except as entertainment. It certainly doesn't affect you any more than the zillions of things happening that never qualifies as "news".
What matters to you is what happens locally that affects you, and those things you tend to find out about anyway. In short, unless you feel the effect yourself, it isn't really there! Local variations are more important.
That doesn't mean that some global trends aren't important. They can be important for people planning things for many people (such as people dealing with state budget or national security). They are, however, of absolutely no importance to me. And even to people that would benefit from knowing about important trends, knowing that some muslim killed some jews in Gaza, is totally worthless.
On the other hand, knowing that from time to time, there are conflicts in the middle east, with crazy people on both sides; is useful knowledge for some people (although, apart from being able to keep up a conversation with other people, I've never really needed to know it myself).
To keep things in perspective, you should worry more about local crime than the war on terror. But much more worrysome is the risk of damaging yourself in the kitchen with either hot stuff or sharp knives :-)
In your case, I would recommend not watching the news. It might be too hard for you to understand, and it seems to confuse you. I'm not sure about the US (which you seem to be from), but here in Norway, we have a weekly newspaper for mentally retarded people called "Klar Tale" (Clear Speech), which I keep recommending to people as confused as you are. It might be easier to understand for you, and should be enough to give you a somewhat broader picture than FOX News.
And of course, even better to say: "I'll look at it after I've checked my email tomorrow". But then again, our jobs might be a little different?
But on WEEKENDS, what email? Were I truly addicted, there would be withdrawal symptoms. Nope.
Good thing!
In my opinion, yes. While TV news might have taken over somewhat, most people are still addicted to news. Because for the vast majority of us, it's something that's totally irrelevant for our lives. It might be a nice hobby to know what's going on in Iraq, but it has little or no consequences for our daily lives. The same can be said about sports (or the weather report).
What a bullshit non-story. Sheesh.
Huh, you don't think 5 times a day is excessive. Personally, I check my e-mail at most once a day. It is, after all called e-mail. It's not like I empty my snail-mail several times daily either. Usually it's at most once a week, since it's mostly bills or trash anyway. If people want to reach me now, they can reach me through an invention patented by Graham Bell.
Try another vendor...
Wow, you mean there are less than 10 users of Netscape Navigator?
Apparently it is to "resolve symbols" located in shared libraries. I think someone will have to come up with something clever to fix this, as I don't see applications getting smaller in the future. Maybe we need yet another incompatible C++ ABI.
Well, that's why the SI units aren't "one size fits all". That's why there are SI prefixes. We have not only meter, but also centimeter, kilometer, etc...
In most situations where traditional units are still used, they do not make more sense. An obvious example is the use of feet for measuring height in aviation (hektometers would make a lot more sense). And in those situations where traditional units actually are more convenient (if such situations exist), it would be much better to invent a similar unit, with a simple conversion factor into the SI system (such as half-meters, half-liters, or whatever...).
Take a look at my bookmarks on metrification for some interesting articles on this.
I did. And there were several interesting things to note. First, people are fairly good at rationalizing the status quo: "Because this is the way it's always been done, it must be the best way". Secondly, people are selfish: "Because I don't see any problems with measuring in hogshead/bell, I don't see why anyone else should be confused". Third, people will invent excuses to legitimate their irrational behaviour: "Even in sweden they use inches for measuring bolts" (as if they had any choice, the bolt has to actually fit the machine). Lastly, people always resist change (which happened to be the only valid argument I found)
Get a grip. Either you pay for the software/movie/music you want, or you satisfy yourself with free legal alternatives. But if you pirate it, and actively help others pirate it, and then get caught, at least take it as a man!
Copyright exists for a reason, and in most cases it works pretty well. The latest Star Wars prequel cost a lot of money to make. It would not have been made, unless George Lucas expected to get even more money in return. If you are against all copyright, you should not enjoy Star Wars at all!
Hmm, interesting. What is this Davorak you speak of. Never heard of that language.
QWERTY was designed to be a--s s--l--o--w a--s possible to keep you from jamming the damn keys.
Nope, QWERTY was designed to keep you from getting the rods connected to each key jamming into each other. Of course that isn't a big concern today, as that kind of typewriters is pretty much outdated today. However, if you really wanted to design a keyboard today, that would be as slow as possible, I'm sure I could come up with quite a lot of "improvements" to qwerty.
And if you really wanted to design a keyboard for maximum typing speed, I'm sure there are better layouts than Dvorak too, as most of the hype for Dvorak is just that: hype. I'm not saying that Dvorak isn't "better", (which it probably is, to some degree). But it clearly will not make you type at double speed, unless you are a complete moron who never learnt to type properly in the first place.
No. The computer wouldn't be self-aware. The program it is running would be. That program we don't need to build. It is uploaded from someones brain. What we need is good enough knowledge about how neurons work to build a simulator good enough to replace the physical brain.
I believe that logic is non sequitur.
Only because of the way you state the argument.
Here are the unstated assumptions:
And here are the stated assumptions
Together these assumptions lead to downloading as a definite possibility. On the other hand, if you insist on a completely logical argument, you shouldn't try to predict the future.
Yes, and that's why they are so excellent for performing simulations of other machines (even if we don't understand, which is usually the case, or we wouldn't have bothered with the simulation).
The one thing that a computer has never done and I don't think ever will is to understand the significant of the stream of 1s and 0s that it is manipulating. That would require true consciousness and TRUE consciousness is part of our minds.
Exactly. So instead of building a smart computer program, we build a simple computer program: a brain/nerve tissue simulator/interpreter. This requires very little understanding of how consciousness actually works. It does however require a very good computer, and a lot of medical research to understand how neurons really work.
There are things we don't understand yet (otherwise we could make autopilots from simulating the brains of flies), but it is not unheard of, to take a guess and say that those problems will be solved too, in 50 years.
No mater how good we get at simulating consciousness I don't believe that we will ever be able to take machine consciousness beyond the simulation into reality.
But when we are running a simulation of the brain in the software, it's much easier to experiment on it.
First of all, the "speed" of the brain could be hundreds or thousands times faster than a "normal" brain, all you need is a faster computer. This would (a) allow you to think faster, and (b) allow you to do "genetic" or "hormonic" experiments in software at a much higher rate, which could evolve "super-thinkers" pretty fast.
Secondly, you could have several of these "faster clones" communicate with themselves all at enormous speed, building entire research communities of "fast thinkers".
Lastly, in the real world, there are not too many really bright thinkers. In the virtual world, if you needed 15 copies of Stephen Hawking, you could have them at an instant.
And of course, all of these faster better thinkers can also think up better computer hardware to run the simulations of themselves even faster on.
Basically, this means that if we can make good enough hardware, and we can figure out how neurons work good enough to simulate them, it's only a matter of time before you have something radically smarter than you. Actually, it's only a matter of time before you have something radically smarter than all of the worlds scientists together. And that is the singularity...
It is plausible that these bright thinkers would eventually be smart enough to find out how consciousness works. But even if they don't, it doesn't really matter, because something pretty darn significant would have happened either way.
This could have been funny, if it actually was true that every cell in your body was replaced every 7th year.
But that is a complete fallacy, and I have no idea why this fallacy became so popular. Some cells, such as nerve tissue, are never replaced. Some cells, such as those in your skin or in your colon, can be replaced several times daily.
Except that rebooting a computer takes around 2 minutes (maybe more if it's a heavy server. Restarting the DBMS (which is already cached in RAM, remember) should take less than a second. If you get phone calls then, just pretend you went to the loo for a minute and wait for it to calm down :-)
But I don't understand why this is supposed to help. If Gnome/KDE gets screenDPI from the X-server, why would they ever be different? It shouldn't matter whether X reads it from EDID from the monitor, or get the value from a configuration file, or whatever. They should always be either both wrong or both correct. There should never be any inconsistency.
So which one is broken, in this case? Gnome? KDE? Or both?
Umm, 32 bit emulation is already done by the CPU. That's how most people use their Athlon 64's today. The linux kernel by default supports both 32 and 64 bit binaries, when compiled for amd64 architecture. That isn't the problem here.
The problem is that you also need a 64-bit userspace. E.g. ld-linux.so and shared libraries in both 64-bit versions and 32-bit versions. There are various approaches for doing this:
Some vendors, like Suse have followed the lead of e.g. Solaris, which simply added /lib64 and /usr/lib64 when going 64-bit.
But this is less than ideal. For Solaris, it made sense, since only applications needing a larger address space would benefit from 64-bit support. Thus the majority of userland could remain 32-bit.
On x86 however, there are pretty big performance benefits in going to 64-bit, because it doubles the number of registers (general purpose register, fpu register, mmx registers, and sse registers). So the default should be 64-bit, and we should add /lib32 and /usr/lib32 instead. As far as I know, no linux distribution does just that...
And the reason for that is that we want to support even more general things. How about a /lib-ppc and /usr/lib-ppc for running powerpc binaries through qemu? Or more realistically; the other way around? (Some powerpc users probably want to run wine).
So the people behind Debian and Ubuntu have thought about this problem, and want to do it right! And that takes a bit of planning, because it's supposed to be the last time we do such a thing, no matter what kind of weird multiarch-processors or user-space emulators the future will bring.
So in the meantime, Debian and Ubuntu users will have to add a separate directory hierarchy with a complete 32-bit user-space, and run their apps in this environment (chrooted). While this is less than ideal, it's also the most foolproof solution (remember to re-mount /home ,/tmp, /proc, /dev, and /sys inside the chrooted environment, and copy /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, and /etc/group into it too).
Thus, the present "solution" is an annoyance, but the annoyance can easily be limited by a bit of scripting. And it has the advantage of being completely general. There's e.g. nothing stopping you from adding a Fedora chroot to an Ubuntu distribution.
Because after you have paid for your graphics card, you can't afford the ultraleet monitor too?
The pretty box sounds nice!
But seriously, where did you get the idea that PCs were upgradeable anymore? We're living in times where CPU sockets change every year (even several times each year), PCI and AGP gets replaced by PCI Express, IDE gets replaced by SATA, USB already having replaced the standard serial port, and I can't even use the RAM from my old computer in the new one!
On the other hand, PCs still are customizable.
The design of a data acquisition systems will of course differ, depending on how much data it records per sensor, how many sensors there are, how often to record the data, and if the data is to be available for online or offline processing.
In most of the "hard" cases, you will use a pipelined architecture, where data is received on one or more realtime boxes, and buffered for an appropriate (short) period. A second stage occurs when data is collected from these buffers, and buffered/reordered/processed to make writing the desired format to a file or DBMS easier. The last stage, is, of course, to write it. You might use zero or more computers at each stage, with a fast dedicated network in-between. You might even decide to split up some of the stages even further. Depending on how much you care about your data, you may also add redundancy. And make sure it's fault-tolerant, it's generally better to loose some data, as long as it's tagged as missing, than to loose it all. To check this in real-time you can also add data-monitoring anywhere it makes sense for your system.
In the simper cases, you simply remove things not needed, such as a soundcard instead of dedicated realtime-boxes, redundancy, monitoring, dedicated network, etc...
Some commercial off-the-shelf systems will surely do this. But the more advanced systems, you still build yourself, either from scratch, or by reusing code you find in other similar projects (I'm sure there are some scientific code available from people interested in medical science, biology, astrophysics, geophysics, meteorology, etc...).
Most of the "heavy" systems will not run on Windows, or even Intel, due to limitations of that platform for fast I/O. This has obviously changed a lot recently, so it's no longer the stupid choice it was, but don't expect too many projects of this kind to have noticed, as they probably have existed much longer.
In fact, the only place where it seems to make any difference at all, is in theoretical reliability (number of components divided by mean time of failure). But hey, we all know which components on a motherboard is going to fail. It's those components who must handle a lot of power (i.e. connections between CPU and powersupply). Adding AC97 onboard sound isn't going to make your motherboard fail more often.
Unit testing is for finding bugs early on (preferably design errors, but also coding errors).
If the code is already written and works, then it's not likely to be worth the effort to add random unit tests all over the place. What you need then is either (a) stress testing, to discover hidden bugs, or (b) regression tests, to make sure the software keeps working, even after programmers have "improved" upon it.
Most people do think like that. But the extreme gamers are then ones who bring the prices down for the rest of us. Please let them continue...
Oh hey, hello MzScheme.
Of which the only limitations of note, are that it is slow. As slow as e.g. Perl or Python. Still very nice, though...
Lisp is hardly one to talk about NIH. Their philosophy is "everything was invented in Lisp first, so actually implementing and releasing whatever you're talking about is left for plebians who don't understand the elegance of lisp"
Ouch! That gotta hurt!
But you do have a good point. FFI hasn't exactly been what lispers have given most thought too. And if you are to take advantage of other people's useful work, it's not like you are going to find some other way (besides rewriting it in lisp, or communicating with other programs over sockets).