Also, games could benefit from 64-bit processing. Imagine being able to process larger amounts of data to do 3-D graphics that will be of much higher quality than currently possible--games will start to look something akin to participating in a photorealistic movie.
You are assuming that a 64-bit processor can actually process all the data in its larger address space in the time it takes a 32-bit processor to process data in its smaller address space. That would mean a 64-bit processor would have to be thousands of times faster than a 32, but really you'll be lucky if it's twice as fast.
Yes, you can process larger amounts of data in one go, but not that much faster than breaking it into 4G chunks and doing the processing sequentially on a 32-bit.
Did anybody really need 32 bit CPU's when intel went from 286 -> 386? Maybe not, maybe so. But that is what happened, and now everyone uses 32 bit, and needs AT LEAST that. It's only evolution that we move to 64bit cpu's, more general purpose registers, and shed the excess bloat that AMD is doing.
The addition of hardware MMU (preemptive multitasking and protected memory) and on-chip FPU meant that a 386 added considerable value over a 286. The one advantage of 64-bit processors like Opteron is that it can address >4G of memory. It's more like the jump from P2 to P3 in terms of actual impact on the market.
Sure, you might not find a use for it yourself, and if you haven't, you should keep buying 32 bit cpu's. But for me, and many more gamers and game developoers/modders (who are the ones that have pushing the desktop performance barrier higher and higher over the years) are going to use them, and NEED them. I plan on running the latest video games on my 64bit athlons when they arrive.
You're focussed on performance, but performance isn't an inherent property of 64-bit-ness - memory is. Sure, more memory is good, and 256M or 512M on the desktop is common now, but no game developer can afford to require >4G of memory.
If you consider cheap SPARCs, PPC,s and so on to be cheap, high performance, and usefull on the desktop, you have another thing coming. For one, there are no, and never will be, drivers for commodity hardware for these platforms. Secondly the chips that offer reasonable performance aren't "cheap" as you call it. They are very very expensive, and their platform is also very very expensive (relative to x86-64, and x86-32). And there is only a small handfull of software packages(that the mainstream doesn't use, gamers can't use, etc..) that run on them compared to what AMD is offering.
Not really, you can buy a Sun Blade for roughly the same price as a PC. Gamers tend to see themselves as the most important part of the market, but the most important market is actually the corporate desktop. People who, every now and again, buy PCs by the thousand or the ten thousand.
hough this is not the only edge x86 has (ie, look at its high competition market, which drives performance up way faster than the platforms you mentioned previously) you have hit this nail right on the head. One of the biggest advantages x86 has is its compatibility with commodity components.
If Intel and AMD are smart, they'll do it like Apple - essentially throw away their old hardware and rely on emulation for compatibility. It is inevitable that AMD will have had to make compromises to ensure backwards compatibility, and those will hurt it in the long run.
Affordable x86 64-bit servers for the masses, this is going to revitalize AMD and really put it on the map as a serious challenger to Intel.
But there already are affordable 64-bit servers for the masses, cheap SPARCs, PPCs and so on. What does anyone need a 64-bit computer for? If you need to address large amounts of memory, or require compatibility with apps that are written to do so. The speed advantages of 64-bit per se simply aren't that great. People who need 64-bit can already get it, the apps are already written, etc. The one and only edge that x86 has is backwards compatibility and the use of very cheap commodity components.
hope Chipzilla wakes up and sees that its incredibly expensive and backwards-incompatible Itanic 2 chips are the result of engineers developing for themselves instead of developing for the needs of their customers.
But Engineers are the only people in the near future who need 64-bit processors on their desktops.
Of course, Intel has proven time and time again that you can use large-sounding numbers to sell things to people who should know better, so perhaps it will work out quite well for AMD.
A school teaching the 'fundamentals' using newer technology, like php,.NET, firewire, usb, irda, would hopefully give you a better chance of getting a decent job than one still using older technology.
A degree prepares you for a career, not a job. A career is a marathon, and job is a sprint. It's not about "how to do X with Y", it's about, "how to do $X with $Y" - do you see the difference? The first is like hardcoding everything into your program, the second is like abstracting all your constants into a header file and using variables everywhere else.
At college I learnt how to program in FORTRAN, DCL, and a language you probably haven't even heard of for programming CNC machines. There were no variables in this language, if you wanted to store a value, you had to move one of the tool heads to that position, then to recall that value, you had to use the command that told you where the head was! Fortunately there were 6 heads, and you usually only needed 3 to make what you were making...
But what mattered were the principles, nowadays I use Solaris 9, Oracle 9i, Java 1.4, all the latest technologies, no problems, and I'll have no problems on versions 10, 11, etc. Whereas all the NT4 MCSEs had to start again Windows 2000, and they'll have to start all over again with.NET.
Not only are there many castles and the such still around that were made out of stone, but there's many stone houses as well.
That's a simplistic view - there are sandstone buildings crumbling all over London. If you're building out of basalt or granite it might last, but those are expensive to work with.
Incidentally, in Britain we think of marble as being an expensive material, but there are parts of Italy where they use marble for every floor because it's cheaper than carpet!
Most of the houses around me now have been here at least a hundred years. They just built them and they stayed up. Victorians were good at that.
But the only Victorian houses you see are the ones that did last. You aren't seeing all the Victorian houses that didn't. Remember that (nearly) all of London was "Victorian" at one time, and now they're rare enough that we have a special word for them.
If you google around, you will find that although the pyramids were a massive 'public-works' project, the workforce were farmers who had nothing to do during the flood season.
Nothing to do apart from spend time with their families, learn to play musical instruments, sports, travel, work on their own homes, or any one of a million other things. What do you do on your vacation?
The Pyramids, the Great Wall and even the Taj Mahal are monuments to slavery and should be torn down.
There is some very damning evidence that this piece of shit wanted to detonate a radiological device on our soil.
First let me say that if he's a terrorist or a traitor, he deserves to hang, and I'll tie the knot myself. Problem is, hang him and he's a martyr, imprison him and other terrorists will hijack planes to free him, exile him and he's free to wreak havoc.
But if there's all this evidence, why not try him, even in a military court in closed session? That's a serious question. Remember: if innocent people are arrested, that means the real terrorists are still at large.
Why not? They've tried it with Windows nt, which didn't work, so maybe there's more trust in open systems since then.
Unless OpenBSD has the magic ability to "do what the programmer meant, not what he wrote" when encountering a divide by zero, the Navy's application would have crashed in exactly the same way on OpenBSD too.
If you want to criticize NT, fine, go ahead, but you don't have to make stuff up.
Which, of course, is contrary to the concept of a generalized computing device, which many people believe a PC should be
You mean many geeks think a workstation should be. The mass consumer market only wants a device to play games, surf the web, and read and write email on, with maybe a little light word processing and spreadsheets.
Think of this analogy. It would be possible to construct a general "temperature controlled chamber" device, that could heat and chill things. But instead in a kitchen, we have a freezer, a fridge, an oven, and a microwave - all specialized devices. And if you want to do a "high end" heating task, like say firing pottery, you need to buy yet another specialized device, a kiln. That way of doing things works pretty well, and it's the way PCs are heading.
the man from Microsoft suggests that longhorn will give users the ability to play games directly from the cd, without installation. Which is great in theory, but what does that mean? Either your loading the whole game into RAM, *shudder* or it will include a program to automatically install when you run the game, and uninstall the program when you finish. At least that's what I think, if somebody can think up other possibilities, I'm all ears.
Yes, because the old Playstation has enough RAM to cache a complete CD. And an internal HD that Sony just didn't tell you about.
Oh, wait, it doesn't have either of those, how can it play games straight from the CD?
In the same light I think several hundred million people's piles of trash being perpetually burned would have the Global Warming people throwing fits. We make it faster than the atmosphere can reasonably take it in. That's a heck of a lot of CO2
If you have lots of small CO2 sources, then you have a problem, but if you only have a few large ones, you can collect the CO2 and pump it to the bottom of the ocean, where pressure will keep it in liquid form.
There are only so many atoms on the planet (don't pick the metiorite type nits). In the long run, reducing, reusing and recycling are the only weapons that can work in this game.
Well before resources have run out on Earth we will have the capabilities for asteroid mining, Mars mining etc. And hopefully in a few decades we'll be on fusion power and not have to burn fossil fuels at all.
Going to Mars would probably suck. For example, I think living in Anarctica sounds a lot better. I predict the population of Mars will never exceed that of Antarctica.
You know, the Spanish empire ignored North America because it thought it was just a useless, barren wasteland. I can imagine them saying something similar. The Moon is a like Antarctica, Mars is more like northern Canada - difficult, but liveable.
I am just saying that for people who would live in a simulator, any quirks in the universe wouldn't look like mistakes. They would just look like that's how the universe is supposed to work.
You are of course correct, but only if you were born in that world. Don't forget that the copy of you would have your memories of this world. It would remember feeling hunger, for example, or uncomfortably cold, and you cannot map those directly into digital experiences. For example, should "power low" be hunger, thirst, sleepiness, a headache or what? And if it didn't have those memories, then would it be you?
The system being emulated doesn't have any special powers to distinguish, so it will never know it is emulated.
How could it not know? Would you reconstruct a perfect replica of the real world for it, like The Matrix? That makes no sense - creatures that live inside a machine would have access to the machine's capabilities - perfect memory, for example, or the ability to think at variable rates depending on the hardware. In fact, this is what really attracts geeks, even more so than the immortality. And any intelligence will eventually spot the flaws in the simulation, unless the creator of the simulation was a lot smarter than the combined intelligence of all the human minds.
As a student, I am a teacher's bane - talented but distracted. What am I so busy doing? Getting a head start on the industry that I want to work in. You can do this any number of ways:
I used to think like you - to be like you, even - but since then I have come to regret it. Slightly, anyway. For example, when I decided I wanted to go to grad school it was harder to get in, because they couldn't just tick a box after looking at my transcript. I had to persuade them that my grades weren't representative of my ability, which meant getting good non-academic references, getting appointments in a busy professor's schedule for extra interviews, etc. But I did get in and I did very well. After that I've still been asked about the Bachelor's grades at interview, but I usually just reply that I have a good Master's, what does that matter? But remember that you have to get past HR and their forms before you can get an interview with an engineer, and if their form says "grade cutoff point is X", that's what they'll do. There might not even be a checkbox for Master's on their form at all!
In retrospect, when you are in college getting a good grade is your full time job. You might not think it now, but if you don't do as well as you could, it'll come back to haunt you.
Not all companies are Microsoft, Oracle, and AOL. Walmart needs computer programmers. So does McDonalds and Holiday Inn.
It would be a mistake to assume that because Walmart doesn't have the "prestige" of Oracle or a bank that their programmers are any less talented. Walmart runs one of the world's most sophisticated supply chains. That travelling salesman problem you looked at in CS 101? A tiny improvement in the algorithm is worth millions of dollars - literally. McDonalds couldn't operate without their data warehouse to spot trends and highlight operational inefficiencies. And the hospitality industry uses some very advanced computation, for example yield management.
If the people Computer Science degree have trouble finding real jobs today, I wonder what it would be with people with MIS degree.
Depends on the job. If I'm hiring someone whose job it will be to code up forms and reports in VB and Crystal, then I'll take the MIS major over the CS major. If I'm hiring someone whose job it will be to work on an OS, I'd take the CS major over the MIS major. Even after the implosion, the IT job market is still very varied.
I am very interested in seeing how the brain would adapt to this. Would the brain always remember things or, in the case of trauma, learn to halt impulses before they reach the implanted area so that they are "forgotten"?
Consider a relational database, like Sybase. It maintains two types of data: the database itself, which analogous to what you know, and the transaction log, which is the experiences that taught you what you know. Example: you know not to touch a hot iron, because you had the experience of burning your finger.
What you are suggesting is dumping the transaction log periodically. So you would know not to touch the iron, but the memory of getting burnt would not be there. The question is, would you trust your own memory in that case? Or would you get burnt again to work out where the memory came from?
is how long before someone overclocks one of these things? How many tops (thought operations per second) could you get? How would you cool something like that?
Alastair Reynolds has people with this capability in his books, they do it by replacing the "bus" in their brains with superconductors. The catch is that without external cooling they can only accelerate their thinking for short bursts before they overheat and have to rest. But it's enough to give them a tactical advantage in battle, and back at home with their equipment, it makes them the leading scientific researchers in human civilization.
I think it would be you. Think of it this way: if the emulation is good enough so that no observer can distinguish between the original and the emulation, then that person has been transferred.
That's a Turing test, and it won't work. Consider the following thought experiment. You have no idea who Mel Gibson is. You also have two oil paintings, one of the real William Wallace and one of Gibson's character in the movie Braveheart. Could you tell which one is which? If not, does it logically follow that Mel Gibson is actually the reincarnation of William Wallace? I would say not.
That there is a simulation of "you" running will not change the fact that once the original you dies, you're gone. Even if the simulation believes that it is you, it doesn't change the fact that the original you knows it isn't, and is going to experience dying. And even if you and the simulation coexist for a time, in 10 years, 50 years, 100 years you will be completely different people, because your experiences will be so different. How much of what you do in your life is influenced by the knowledge that time is finite? I don't mean grand philosophical questions, I mean "do you own a watch? an alarm clock? did you think that you had to graduate by a certain time, or complete activities by a certain age?" All of that simply won't apply to a simulation.
If you want immortality through technology, it's going to have to be done "in place" and it has to replace your mortal hardware while it's still running.
People I know that are still undergrads are mostly people from my college fraternity (i.e. they were freshman my senior year or first year out when I visited friends there).
Note to self: throw all resumes from fraternity members in the trash, as they've already made their own arrangements.
Its no better in the Physical sciences I can assure you. Bioinformatics is a BIG growth area, if you can code in PERL you will obtain god like status in bioinformatics
Yes, and perl programmers used to get a lot of respect back when CGI was the hottest technology on the web, like in '95 or '96 or so. Now perl's in everyone's skillset, and most of 'em don't use it for web work anymore, rather they prefer JSP, PHP, whatever.
Staking your career on one niche language or technology is a dangerous game. Instead you should learn about bioinformatics, then you can program in perl, or whatever language comes next. Remember, the people paying you don't really care about code per se, they care ahout getting their problems solved.
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Also, games could benefit from 64-bit processing. Imagine being able to process larger amounts of data to do 3-D graphics that will be of much higher quality than currently possible--games will start to look something akin to participating in a photorealistic movie.
You are assuming that a 64-bit processor can actually process all the data in its larger address space in the time it takes a 32-bit processor to process data in its smaller address space. That would mean a 64-bit processor would have to be thousands of times faster than a 32, but really you'll be lucky if it's twice as fast.
Yes, you can process larger amounts of data in one go, but not that much faster than breaking it into 4G chunks and doing the processing sequentially on a 32-bit.
Did anybody really need 32 bit CPU's when intel went from 286 -> 386? Maybe not, maybe so. But that is what happened, and now everyone uses 32 bit, and needs AT LEAST that. It's only evolution that we move to 64bit cpu's, more general purpose registers, and shed the excess bloat that AMD is doing.
The addition of hardware MMU (preemptive multitasking and protected memory) and on-chip FPU meant that a 386 added considerable value over a 286. The one advantage of 64-bit processors like Opteron is that it can address >4G of memory. It's more like the jump from P2 to P3 in terms of actual impact on the market.
Sure, you might not find a use for it yourself, and if you haven't, you should keep buying 32 bit cpu's. But for me, and many more gamers and game developoers/modders (who are the ones that have pushing the desktop performance barrier higher and higher over the years) are going to use them, and NEED them. I plan on running the latest video games on my 64bit athlons when they arrive.
You're focussed on performance, but performance isn't an inherent property of 64-bit-ness - memory is. Sure, more memory is good, and 256M or 512M on the desktop is common now, but no game developer can afford to require >4G of memory.
If you consider cheap SPARCs, PPC,s and so on to be cheap, high performance, and usefull on the desktop, you have another thing coming. For one, there are no, and never will be, drivers for commodity hardware for these platforms. Secondly the chips that offer reasonable performance aren't "cheap" as you call it. They are very very expensive, and their platform is also very very expensive (relative to x86-64, and x86-32). And there is only a small handfull of software packages(that the mainstream doesn't use, gamers can't use, etc..) that run on them compared to what AMD is offering.
Not really, you can buy a Sun Blade for roughly the same price as a PC. Gamers tend to see themselves as the most important part of the market, but the most important market is actually the corporate desktop. People who, every now and again, buy PCs by the thousand or the ten thousand.
hough this is not the only edge x86 has (ie, look at its high competition market, which drives performance up way faster than the platforms you mentioned previously) you have hit this nail right on the head. One of the biggest advantages x86 has is its compatibility with commodity components.
If Intel and AMD are smart, they'll do it like Apple - essentially throw away their old hardware and rely on emulation for compatibility. It is inevitable that AMD will have had to make compromises to ensure backwards compatibility, and those will hurt it in the long run.
Affordable x86 64-bit servers for the masses, this is going to revitalize AMD and really put it on the map as a serious challenger to Intel.
But there already are affordable 64-bit servers for the masses, cheap SPARCs, PPCs and so on. What does anyone need a 64-bit computer for? If you need to address large amounts of memory, or require compatibility with apps that are written to do so. The speed advantages of 64-bit per se simply aren't that great. People who need 64-bit can already get it, the apps are already written, etc. The one and only edge that x86 has is backwards compatibility and the use of very cheap commodity components.
hope Chipzilla wakes up and sees that its incredibly expensive and backwards-incompatible Itanic 2 chips are the result of engineers developing for themselves instead of developing for the needs of their customers.
But Engineers are the only people in the near future who need 64-bit processors on their desktops.
Of course, Intel has proven time and time again that you can use large-sounding numbers to sell things to people who should know better, so perhaps it will work out quite well for AMD.
A school teaching the 'fundamentals' using newer technology, like php, .NET, firewire, usb, irda, would hopefully give you a better chance of getting a decent job than one still using older technology.
.NET.
A degree prepares you for a career, not a job. A career is a marathon, and job is a sprint. It's not about "how to do X with Y", it's about, "how to do $X with $Y" - do you see the difference? The first is like hardcoding everything into your program, the second is like abstracting all your constants into a header file and using variables everywhere else.
At college I learnt how to program in FORTRAN, DCL, and a language you probably haven't even heard of for programming CNC machines. There were no variables in this language, if you wanted to store a value, you had to move one of the tool heads to that position, then to recall that value, you had to use the command that told you where the head was! Fortunately there were 6 heads, and you usually only needed 3 to make what you were making...
But what mattered were the principles, nowadays I use Solaris 9, Oracle 9i, Java 1.4, all the latest technologies, no problems, and I'll have no problems on versions 10, 11, etc. Whereas all the NT4 MCSEs had to start again Windows 2000, and they'll have to start all over again with
Not only are there many castles and the such still around that were made out of stone, but there's many stone houses as well.
That's a simplistic view - there are sandstone buildings crumbling all over London. If you're building out of basalt or granite it might last, but those are expensive to work with.
Incidentally, in Britain we think of marble as being an expensive material, but there are parts of Italy where they use marble for every floor because it's cheaper than carpet!
Most of the houses around me now have been here at least a hundred years. They just built them and they stayed up. Victorians were good at that.
But the only Victorian houses you see are the ones that did last. You aren't seeing all the Victorian houses that didn't. Remember that (nearly) all of London was "Victorian" at one time, and now they're rare enough that we have a special word for them.
If you google around, you will find that although the pyramids were a massive 'public-works' project, the workforce were farmers who had nothing to do during the flood season.
Nothing to do apart from spend time with their families, learn to play musical instruments, sports, travel, work on their own homes, or any one of a million other things. What do you do on your vacation?
The Pyramids, the Great Wall and even the Taj Mahal are monuments to slavery and should be torn down.
There is some very damning evidence that this piece of shit wanted to detonate a radiological device on our soil.
First let me say that if he's a terrorist or a traitor, he deserves to hang, and I'll tie the knot myself. Problem is, hang him and he's a martyr, imprison him and other terrorists will hijack planes to free him, exile him and he's free to wreak havoc.
But if there's all this evidence, why not try him, even in a military court in closed session? That's a serious question. Remember: if innocent people are arrested, that means the real terrorists are still at large.
Why not? They've tried it with Windows nt, which didn't work, so maybe there's more trust in open systems since then.
Unless OpenBSD has the magic ability to "do what the programmer meant, not what he wrote" when encountering a divide by zero, the Navy's application would have crashed in exactly the same way on OpenBSD too.
If you want to criticize NT, fine, go ahead, but you don't have to make stuff up.
My PC is an order of magnitude more powerful than any console.
You have a 7.3Ghz Pentium?
Which, of course, is contrary to the concept of a generalized computing device, which many people believe a PC should be
You mean many geeks think a workstation should be. The mass consumer market only wants a device to play games, surf the web, and read and write email on, with maybe a little light word processing and spreadsheets.
Think of this analogy. It would be possible to construct a general "temperature controlled chamber" device, that could heat and chill things. But instead in a kitchen, we have a freezer, a fridge, an oven, and a microwave - all specialized devices. And if you want to do a "high end" heating task, like say firing pottery, you need to buy yet another specialized device, a kiln. That way of doing things works pretty well, and it's the way PCs are heading.
the man from Microsoft suggests that longhorn will give users the ability to play games directly from the cd, without installation. Which is great in theory, but what does that mean? Either your loading the whole game into RAM, *shudder* or it will include a program to automatically install when you run the game, and uninstall the program when you finish. At least that's what I think, if somebody can think up other possibilities, I'm all ears.
Yes, because the old Playstation has enough RAM to cache a complete CD. And an internal HD that Sony just didn't tell you about.
Oh, wait, it doesn't have either of those, how can it play games straight from the CD?
In the same light I think several hundred million people's piles of trash being perpetually burned would have the Global Warming people throwing fits. We make it faster than the atmosphere can reasonably take it in. That's a heck of a lot of CO2
If you have lots of small CO2 sources, then you have a problem, but if you only have a few large ones, you can collect the CO2 and pump it to the bottom of the ocean, where pressure will keep it in liquid form.
There are only so many atoms on the planet (don't pick the metiorite type nits). In the long run, reducing, reusing and recycling are the only weapons that can work in this game.
Well before resources have run out on Earth we will have the capabilities for asteroid mining, Mars mining etc. And hopefully in a few decades we'll be on fusion power and not have to burn fossil fuels at all.
Going to Mars would probably suck. For example, I think living in Anarctica sounds a lot better. I predict the population of Mars will never exceed that of Antarctica.
You know, the Spanish empire ignored North America because it thought it was just a useless, barren wasteland. I can imagine them saying something similar. The Moon is a like Antarctica, Mars is more like northern Canada - difficult, but liveable.
I would like to take some time to shed some light on the topic for those of you who do not have an Master's degree from Harvard as I do.
:-P
Harvard should teach a course on how to shut up about Harvard
I am just saying that for people who would live in a simulator, any quirks in the universe wouldn't look like mistakes. They would just look like that's how the universe is supposed to work.
You are of course correct, but only if you were born in that world. Don't forget that the copy of you would have your memories of this world. It would remember feeling hunger, for example, or uncomfortably cold, and you cannot map those directly into digital experiences. For example, should "power low" be hunger, thirst, sleepiness, a headache or what? And if it didn't have those memories, then would it be you?
The system being emulated doesn't have any special powers to distinguish, so it will never know it is emulated.
How could it not know? Would you reconstruct a perfect replica of the real world for it, like The Matrix? That makes no sense - creatures that live inside a machine would have access to the machine's capabilities - perfect memory, for example, or the ability to think at variable rates depending on the hardware. In fact, this is what really attracts geeks, even more so than the immortality. And any intelligence will eventually spot the flaws in the simulation, unless the creator of the simulation was a lot smarter than the combined intelligence of all the human minds.
As a student, I am a teacher's bane - talented but distracted. What am I so busy doing? Getting a head start on the industry that I want to work in. You can do this any number of ways:
I used to think like you - to be like you, even - but since then I have come to regret it. Slightly, anyway. For example, when I decided I wanted to go to grad school it was harder to get in, because they couldn't just tick a box after looking at my transcript. I had to persuade them that my grades weren't representative of my ability, which meant getting good non-academic references, getting appointments in a busy professor's schedule for extra interviews, etc. But I did get in and I did very well. After that I've still been asked about the Bachelor's grades at interview, but I usually just reply that I have a good Master's, what does that matter? But remember that you have to get past HR and their forms before you can get an interview with an engineer, and if their form says "grade cutoff point is X", that's what they'll do. There might not even be a checkbox for Master's on their form at all!
In retrospect, when you are in college getting a good grade is your full time job. You might not think it now, but if you don't do as well as you could, it'll come back to haunt you.
Not all companies are Microsoft, Oracle, and AOL. Walmart needs computer programmers. So does McDonalds and Holiday Inn.
It would be a mistake to assume that because Walmart doesn't have the "prestige" of Oracle or a bank that their programmers are any less talented. Walmart runs one of the world's most sophisticated supply chains. That travelling salesman problem you looked at in CS 101? A tiny improvement in the algorithm is worth millions of dollars - literally. McDonalds couldn't operate without their data warehouse to spot trends and highlight operational inefficiencies. And the hospitality industry uses some very advanced computation, for example yield management.
If the people Computer Science degree have trouble finding real jobs today, I wonder what it would be with people with MIS degree.
Depends on the job. If I'm hiring someone whose job it will be to code up forms and reports in VB and Crystal, then I'll take the MIS major over the CS major. If I'm hiring someone whose job it will be to work on an OS, I'd take the CS major over the MIS major. Even after the implosion, the IT job market is still very varied.
I am very interested in seeing how the brain would adapt to this. Would the brain always remember things or, in the case of trauma, learn to halt impulses before they reach the implanted area so that they are "forgotten"?
Consider a relational database, like Sybase. It maintains two types of data: the database itself, which analogous to what you know, and the transaction log, which is the experiences that taught you what you know. Example: you know not to touch a hot iron, because you had the experience of burning your finger.
What you are suggesting is dumping the transaction log periodically. So you would know not to touch the iron, but the memory of getting burnt would not be there. The question is, would you trust your own memory in that case? Or would you get burnt again to work out where the memory came from?
is how long before someone overclocks one of these things? How many tops (thought operations per second) could you get? How would you cool something like that?
Alastair Reynolds has people with this capability in his books, they do it by replacing the "bus" in their brains with superconductors. The catch is that without external cooling they can only accelerate their thinking for short bursts before they overheat and have to rest. But it's enough to give them a tactical advantage in battle, and back at home with their equipment, it makes them the leading scientific researchers in human civilization.
I think it would be you. Think of it this way: if the emulation is good enough so that no observer can distinguish between the original and the emulation, then that person has been transferred.
That's a Turing test, and it won't work. Consider the following thought experiment. You have no idea who Mel Gibson is. You also have two oil paintings, one of the real William Wallace and one of Gibson's character in the movie Braveheart. Could you tell which one is which? If not, does it logically follow that Mel Gibson is actually the reincarnation of William Wallace? I would say not.
That there is a simulation of "you" running will not change the fact that once the original you dies, you're gone. Even if the simulation believes that it is you, it doesn't change the fact that the original you knows it isn't, and is going to experience dying. And even if you and the simulation coexist for a time, in 10 years, 50 years, 100 years you will be completely different people, because your experiences will be so different. How much of what you do in your life is influenced by the knowledge that time is finite? I don't mean grand philosophical questions, I mean "do you own a watch? an alarm clock? did you think that you had to graduate by a certain time, or complete activities by a certain age?" All of that simply won't apply to a simulation.
If you want immortality through technology, it's going to have to be done "in place" and it has to replace your mortal hardware while it's still running.
People I know that are still undergrads are mostly people from my college fraternity (i.e. they were freshman my senior year or first year out when I visited friends there).
Note to self: throw all resumes from fraternity members in the trash, as they've already made their own arrangements.
Its no better in the Physical sciences I can assure you. Bioinformatics is a BIG growth area, if you can code in PERL you will obtain god like status in bioinformatics
Yes, and perl programmers used to get a lot of respect back when CGI was the hottest technology on the web, like in '95 or '96 or so. Now perl's in everyone's skillset, and most of 'em don't use it for web work anymore, rather they prefer JSP, PHP, whatever.
Staking your career on one niche language or technology is a dangerous game. Instead you should learn about bioinformatics, then you can program in perl, or whatever language comes next. Remember, the people paying you don't really care about code per se, they care ahout getting their problems solved.