Speed. The average hard drive is spinning at 7200 RPM nowadays. At this speed, there is an average latency of 4.6ms just to spin the track under the head. You can't do much about this except spin the disk faster. At 10000 and 15000 (thanks Seagate), you still have 3ms and 2ms, respectively. This is on top of any time needed to move the head itself. With most access times less than 8ms in the low end and less than 5ms in the high end, this ceiling isn't too far off. Sure you can spin the disk faster, but this gets expensive (money, energy, and heat).
I have invented a way to massively reduce access times while reducing redundancy and increasing portability: Make the hard-drive double as the system's power supply by turning it into a flywheel. If you spin that sucker at 100,000 RPM, it'll run for weeks on a single charge and cut the average latency down to 0.3 ms. Think of the potential for flywheel-powered laptops. It's just a matter of time before someone figures out how to capture the energy from all the random jostling all laptops undergo to generate all the power it'll ever need.
If anyone actually ever does this, I wanna royalty!
After watching DVDs on my computer for most of a year, I nabbed an Apex AD-600A at the Circuit City in Dearborn, MI about a month ago (I live in Windsor, Ontario). It runs hot and it's obviously a cheap little econobox, but it runs every DVD I've thrown at it, in addition to PAL VCDs on my NTSC television -- including an Episode of a certain movie series which is not scheduled for DVD release for five more years.:-) It played the MP3s I tried, but I think it can only read Mode2 discs; at least one disc caused it to lock up, which I suspect was Mode1. I should also note that the player has locked up a couple of times during regular DVD playback, including one occasion when I was using the Zoom feature. In other words, use at your own risk. What with region hacks, the known Macrovision cheat for Cinemaster 1.028 and so forth, the Apex doesn't give you anything you can't get on the Internet. But for the price it's a honey of a machine, and it freed my from the necessity of watching movies at my computer.
I also hope they make "The Voice" a little bit more convincing.
As I understand from recently re-reading the _Dune_ series, the power of "Voice" portrayed in the books is supposed to be a matter of extremely subtle control of emphasis, timbre and intonation, idiosyncratic to each individual, which ignites instant and unthinking obedience in that individual. How exactly are you going to portray a thing like that in a movie without some kind of trickery, like they used in the Smithee version of _Dune_? Some things just won't translate from paper to celluloid without a little tweaking.
Not being Paul Verhoeven it's difficult to say exactly what he was trying to get across, but I've always taken it as pretty much political satire, having a go at right-wing militarists.
If you have a DVD player, you should pick up or rent the DVD, which includes a full-length audio commentary from Verhoeven and screenwriter Ed Neumeier (sp?). You can find out a lot about what they were thinking when they made the film. What I took away from the commentary was that, although some people might not like what Verhoeven et al. did with Heinlein's source material, they didn't just trash it or make fun of it. They tried to present the society more or less on its own terms (at least on the surface), with the attitude: "This is the best that authoritarian militarism has to offer. Everyone seems healthy and well fed, the sexes are basically equal, anyone with the talent can rise to any height regardless of sex, creed or race, etc. In exchange for these benefits, you must submit to our absolute authority, and we will extend you the franchise only after you have proven that you accept society in its current form."
I for one rather like the movie, probably because I didn't take either it or the book that seriously. (I stopped taking Heinlein seriously around the time I read "The Number of the Beast --".) It's true that the filmmakers undercut the portrayal of the society at every point, but so what? As one of Heinlein's own characters might have observed, if he didn't want someone else grubbing around with his work, Heinlein (or his estate) shouldn't have sold the film rights without a guarantee that his opinions would be slavishly respected.
A lot of people seem to think that it's not possible to oppose corporatism without opposing its products -- technology, affluence, mobility, etc. It's not true: this way of thinking is just part of the false left/right dichotomy that dominates so much of politics. I for one am extremely grateful to live in the time and place I do, with all its benefits. But that doesn't mean we have to accept the bad with the good. An unjust system is unjust, whether it benefits large numbers of people or not. And the system that we live under is, in many ways, extremely unjust -- in its distribution of wealth and privilege, in the way it denies people control over their own lives and a voice in public affairs, in the hundred different ways it is rigged and jerrymandered for the benefit of a few at the expense of many.
Some of the more radical critics of corporatism have drawn a comparison with slavery. Before the Civil War, many in the southern U.S. defended their "peculiar institution" on the basis that slaves were actually treated better than free workers -- they were fed, clothed, housed and generally looked after like the valuable assets they were, whereas working people took what work they could find, were underpaid, overworked, exploited, and liable to be fired and left destitute at any time if they uttered a word of protest. This argument is still true enough for a lot of people today, and it was even truer at the time, but it didn't stop people from combating what they saw as a true evil. Freedom is better than bondage, whether to a master or to a corporation.
Since the fall of Soviet Communism, there's been a lot of crowing in the west about the victory of democracy over tyranny. This is true enough, but it's far from the whole story. Communism gained as many adherents as it did (and still has quite a few, China being a frequently-neglected example) for one major reason: because it promised to increase political freedom by reducing economic inequality. Under the likes of Lenin and Stalin, of course, ordinary people ended up with neither freedom nor equality, but the dream remains. ISTM that Seattle is a sign that economics may be returning to its rightful place at the focus of the debate about freedom, which for too long has been equated with free markets and nothing else. Many people who call themselves libertarians are really fighting for their own liberty to exploit others, and the people who are being exploited are getting tired of it. People should have a say in the decisions that affect their lives, whether those decisions are made in parliament or in the boardroom.
What if this theory gave a theoretical basis to something that could not be predicted from existing theory, rather than observation? The author suggests that maybe this model will permit the cosmological constant to be derived theoretically. IANATP (I Am Not A Theoretical Physicist), so I can't speak to just how easy/likely/possible this would be, but if this does turn out to be the case it would be a point in favour of the theory.
BTW, it seems strange to me to use the word "predict" in relation to a theory that abolishes the concept of time. When a scientist speaks of "prediction", she usually doesn't mean a statement about an event that will take place in the future, but rather a statement about an event whose outcome is unknown from the point of view of the predictor. This applies to all future events, but it also applies, at least imaginatively, to any past event whose actual outcome was not taken for granted when the theoretical "prediction" was made. Maybe a word like "idiodiction" would capture the idea better.
ISTM that confusion like this arises because people confuse real space with phase space. The alpha particle in the bubble chamber leaves a linear track in real space (i.e. the space that we perceive), even though it's "really" an expanding spherical wave in phase space. What the guy is talking about in this article is basically viewing the entire universe not as an entity that unfolds linearly in time, but holistically, as an enormous polydimensional phase space. What we perceive as time and history results because different parts of the phase space have higher probabilities than others, and our brains construct our perceptions by stringing together, for lack of a better word, "samples" of congruent areas of this space.
The part that I find really interesting is the Alpha point, where by definition all particles occupy the same point. This corresponds eerily well with the Big Bang. The idea that the "history" of the universe is just the distance, in phase space, between us and the Alpha point, is an elegant one. I like this theory.
Um, did you miss the POINT of Jurassic Park? Given the choice...I'd rather have a zillion-polygon, curved-surface, bump-mapped, dynamically lit dinosaur in my virtual reality goggles than a REAL dinosaur standing on what was once my body but is not a bit of squishy pulp between its toes.
You're exactly right, and I understood the point you make perfectly well. But the point I was trying to make is, memes are relatively easy to control as long as they're penned up inside a virtual environment. It's when they get into the real world that they're a hazard. A programming error that causes my game of Drakan to crash isn't so bad. An error that makes my local phone switch crash is bad. An error that crashes my local phone switch, which further causes a cascading failure in thousands of other phone switches across the continent, to the point where AT&T has to reboot its entire network, is really bad -- because there are real-world consequences, even though the memes remains safely penned up in the silicon.
Memes that exist in the real world in the form of DNA, on the other hand, are potentially the most dangerous of all. Why? The answer is obvious: because you can't reboot the little suckers. Once they're out, they're out, doing their thing whether you like it or not. It's not just big scary dinosaurs, or even little scary anthrax germs. It's all the stuff that's supposed to help make our lives better that scares me.
As long as the memes are penned up in the silicon, then even if they get out of control, to the point where the power is out, the phones are down and there's rioting in the streets, survival is still within reach. You can always go live on a mountain somewhere and forage for a living. But when the memes are made of the same stuff we are, watch out. If the viral catastrophe doesn't get you, the creeping post-humanism will.
People think the Internet is going to change the world, that just because you have a computer and a phone line you can rule the world... hah. The Internet is nothing compared to biotech. Think of the Jurassic Park example. Computers may let you create the convincing illusion of dinosaurs, but one day biotech is going to create real dinosaurs, or at least beasts that look like them.
I for one look forward to a longer, healthier life as a result of things like this. Unless they kill us all first.
As far as I can tell, most people's objection to studies like this, which try to answer the question of what makes geeks tick, amounts to complaining that they will just end up being used by the shameless power mongers who operate society. Personally, I don't have any problem at all with these kinds of lines of inquiry -- as long as they don't just stop at geeks. If it turns out that geekiness is a form of autism, or has some characteristics in common with autism, that's fine. It doesn't mean that we can't still draw a line between function and dysfunction, between people who can get along and be productive, and people who may need help to live.
But we shouldn't stop there. There's no reason not to apply this kind of reasoning to all the different kinds of people in this society -- like, what makes the shameless power mongers so shameless and power-hungry? Just as geeks have their preoccupations, so other people have theirs, like devoting their lives to status and dominance games, or to gaining advantages for themselves at other people's expense. That doesn't mean they're dysfunctional megalomaniacs, any more than all geeks are catatonic idiot-savants.
I say it's better to understand than not to understand. The trick is not to let the knowledge be used against you.
>I'm not confinced that technology did this as >much as our society of personality worship.
Personality worship isn't specific to our society or to any society. It's only human to focus on the personalities in any story. The problem comes in when the media focus on the personalities to the exclusion of hard news, or, worse, when the personalities are the story -- the Baba Wawa effect. This happens because the news organizations' public responsibility is undermined by their corporate responsibility to make a profit. The resulting competition for eyeballs and attention spans forces them to pander to the public's worst instincts whether they want to or not.
Some people on this thread having blamed the public for being gullible, for lapping up whatever the media throw at them. Instead of blaming the media for pandering to people's worst instincts, they blame people for having worst instincts to begin with. I wish these complainers wouldn't be so quick to condemn people for being people instead of saints.
Who says that this story is about manipulation? This isn't the Gulf War; no one's trying to whip up support for an invasion. What they're trying to whip up is ratings. I would dearly love it if someone, anyone in the media would try a simple experiment: simply give stories like this the coverage they deserve. A public increasingly disgusted with media excesses would probably flock to watch/listen/read.
True to form, Katz, the technological determinist, pins the blame for the media feeding frenzy on technology and not on institutions. Considering that the media industry is ever and increasingly driven by cutthroat competition for every little vanishing sliver of the audience's attention, it's hardly surprising that this sad but basically marginal story turned into a week-long weepfest. The death of a Diana or a JFK Junior offers the corporate media an irresistible opportunity to be at once sanctimonious and shameless, their favourite combination. This is especially true of the U.S. media, but it's an increasingly global phenomenon thanks to barons like Rupert Murdoch.
The desperation at every level to find some angle, any angle at all, leads to ludicrous extremes. In a week when China and Taiwan are inching ever closer to war, Time magazine devotes 36 pages to a full-colour obituary. On Entertainment Tonight, the cast of The Practice wax eloquent on the meaning of it all. And, silliest of all, a local news program's "high tech" analysis of the plane crash the other night turns out to be pointing a video camera at a computer screen running Microsoft Flight Simulator!
The frenzy will die out, as they all do, but the problem will remain. If we really want to improve the situation, we need to start by fixing responsibility where it belongs: not on all the shiny hardware, but on the people who make the decisions, and maybe on the corporate media's whole way of doing business. It's only going to get worse from here.
Slashdot Mirror
That could be a selling point: stability. "So stable, you can't even tip 'em over!"
I have invented a way to massively reduce access times while reducing redundancy and increasing portability: Make the hard-drive double as the system's power supply by turning it into a flywheel. If you spin that sucker at 100,000 RPM, it'll run for weeks on a single charge and cut the average latency down to 0.3 ms. Think of the potential for flywheel-powered laptops. It's just a matter of time before someone figures out how to capture the energy from all the random jostling all laptops undergo to generate all the power it'll ever need.
If anyone actually ever does this, I wanna royalty!
After watching DVDs on my computer for most of a year, I nabbed an Apex AD-600A at the Circuit City in Dearborn, MI about a month ago (I live in Windsor, Ontario). It runs hot and it's obviously a cheap little econobox, but it runs every DVD I've thrown at it, in addition to PAL VCDs on my NTSC television -- including an Episode of a certain movie series which is not scheduled for DVD release for five more years. :-) It played the MP3s I tried, but I think it can only read Mode2 discs; at least one disc caused it to lock up, which I suspect was Mode1. I should also note that the player has locked up a couple of times during regular DVD playback, including one occasion when I was using the Zoom feature. In other words, use at your own risk. What with region hacks, the known Macrovision cheat for Cinemaster 1.028 and so forth, the Apex doesn't give you anything you can't get on the Internet. But for the price it's a honey of a machine, and it freed my from the necessity of watching movies at my computer.
As I understand from recently re-reading the _Dune_ series, the power of "Voice" portrayed in the books is supposed to be a matter of extremely subtle control of emphasis, timbre and intonation, idiosyncratic to each individual, which ignites instant and unthinking obedience in that individual. How exactly are you going to portray a thing like that in a movie without some kind of trickery, like they used in the Smithee version of _Dune_? Some things just won't translate from paper to celluloid without a little tweaking.
Not being Paul Verhoeven it's difficult to say exactly what he was trying to get across, but I've always taken it as pretty much political satire, having a go at right-wing militarists.
If you have a DVD player, you should pick up or rent the DVD, which includes a full-length audio commentary from Verhoeven and screenwriter Ed Neumeier (sp?). You can find out a lot about what they were thinking when they made the film. What I took away from the commentary was that, although some people might not like what Verhoeven et al. did with Heinlein's source material, they didn't just trash it or make fun of it. They tried to present the society more or less on its own terms (at least on the surface), with the attitude: "This is the best that authoritarian militarism has to offer. Everyone seems healthy and well fed, the sexes are basically equal, anyone with the talent can rise to any height regardless of sex, creed or race, etc. In exchange for these benefits, you must submit to our absolute authority, and we will extend you the franchise only after you have proven that you accept society in its current form."
I for one rather like the movie, probably because I didn't take either it or the book that seriously. (I stopped taking Heinlein seriously around the time I read "The Number of the Beast --".) It's true that the filmmakers undercut the portrayal of the society at every point, but so what? As one of Heinlein's own characters might have observed, if he didn't want someone else grubbing around with his work, Heinlein (or his estate) shouldn't have sold the film rights without a guarantee that his opinions would be slavishly respected.
That reminds me, now that the millennium is here, I can finally order new cheques. (All the old ones had 19__ pre-printed on them...)
A lot of people seem to think that it's not possible to oppose corporatism without opposing its products -- technology, affluence, mobility, etc. It's not true: this way of thinking is just part of the false left/right dichotomy that dominates so much of politics. I for one am extremely grateful to live in the time and place I do, with all its benefits. But that doesn't mean we have to accept the bad with the good. An unjust system is unjust, whether it benefits large numbers of people or not. And the system that we live under is, in many ways, extremely unjust -- in its distribution of wealth and privilege, in the way it denies people control over their own lives and a voice in public affairs, in the hundred different ways it is rigged and jerrymandered for the benefit of a few at the expense of many.
Some of the more radical critics of corporatism have drawn a comparison with slavery. Before the Civil War, many in the southern U.S. defended their "peculiar institution" on the basis that slaves were actually treated better than free workers -- they were fed, clothed, housed and generally looked after like the valuable assets they were, whereas working people took what work they could find, were underpaid, overworked, exploited, and liable to be fired and left destitute at any time if they uttered a word of protest. This argument is still true enough for a lot of people today, and it was even truer at the time, but it didn't stop people from combating what they saw as a true evil. Freedom is better than bondage, whether to a master or to a corporation.
Since the fall of Soviet Communism, there's been a lot of crowing in the west about the victory of democracy over tyranny. This is true enough, but it's far from the whole story. Communism gained as many adherents as it did (and still has quite a few, China being a frequently-neglected example) for one major reason: because it promised to increase political freedom by reducing economic inequality. Under the likes of Lenin and Stalin, of course, ordinary people ended up with neither freedom nor equality, but the dream remains. ISTM that Seattle is a sign that economics may be returning to its rightful place at the focus of the debate about freedom, which for too long has been equated with free markets and nothing else. Many people who call themselves libertarians are really fighting for their own liberty to exploit others, and the people who are being exploited are getting tired of it. People should have a say in the decisions that affect their lives, whether those decisions are made in parliament or in the boardroom.
What if this theory gave a theoretical basis to something that could not be predicted from existing theory, rather than observation? The author suggests that maybe this model will permit the cosmological constant to be derived theoretically. IANATP (I Am Not A Theoretical Physicist), so I can't speak to just how easy/likely/possible this would be, but if this does turn out to be the case it would be a point in favour of the theory.
BTW, it seems strange to me to use the word "predict" in relation to a theory that abolishes the concept of time. When a scientist speaks of "prediction", she usually doesn't mean a statement about an event that will take place in the future, but rather a statement about an event whose outcome is unknown from the point of view of the predictor. This applies to all future events, but it also applies, at least imaginatively, to any past event whose actual outcome was not taken for granted when the theoretical "prediction" was made. Maybe a word like "idiodiction" would capture the idea better.
ISTM that confusion like this arises because people confuse real space with phase space. The alpha particle in the bubble chamber leaves a linear track in real space (i.e. the space that we perceive), even though it's "really" an expanding spherical wave in phase space. What the guy is talking about in this article is basically viewing the entire universe not as an entity that unfolds linearly in time, but holistically, as an enormous polydimensional phase space. What we perceive as time and history results because different parts of the phase space have higher probabilities than others, and our brains construct our perceptions by stringing together, for lack of a better word, "samples" of congruent areas of this space.
The part that I find really interesting is the Alpha point, where by definition all particles occupy the same point. This corresponds eerily well with the Big Bang. The idea that the "history" of the universe is just the distance, in phase space, between us and the Alpha point, is an elegant one. I like this theory.
Um, did you miss the POINT of Jurassic Park? Given the choice...I'd rather have a zillion-polygon, curved-surface, bump-mapped, dynamically lit dinosaur in my virtual reality goggles than a REAL dinosaur standing on what was once my body but is not a bit of squishy pulp between its toes.
You're exactly right, and I understood the point you make perfectly well. But the point I was trying to make is, memes are relatively easy to control as long as they're penned up inside a virtual environment. It's when they get into the real world that they're a hazard. A programming error that causes my game of Drakan to crash isn't so bad. An error that makes my local phone switch crash is bad. An error that crashes my local phone switch, which further causes a cascading failure in thousands of other phone switches across the continent, to the point where AT&T has to reboot its entire network, is really bad -- because there are real-world consequences, even though the memes remains safely penned up in the silicon.
Memes that exist in the real world in the form of DNA, on the other hand, are potentially the most dangerous of all. Why? The answer is obvious: because you can't reboot the little suckers. Once they're out, they're out, doing their thing whether you like it or not. It's not just big scary dinosaurs, or even little scary anthrax germs. It's all the stuff that's supposed to help make our lives better that scares me.
As long as the memes are penned up in the silicon, then even if they get out of control, to the point where the power is out, the phones are down and there's rioting in the streets, survival is still within reach. You can always go live on a mountain somewhere and forage for a living. But when the memes are made of the same stuff we are, watch out. If the viral catastrophe doesn't get you, the creeping post-humanism will.
People think the Internet is going to change the world, that just because you have a computer and a phone line you can rule the world... hah. The Internet is nothing compared to biotech. Think of the Jurassic Park example. Computers may let you create the convincing illusion of dinosaurs, but one day biotech is going to create real dinosaurs, or at least beasts that look like them.
I for one look forward to a longer, healthier life as a result of things like this. Unless they kill us all first.
But we shouldn't stop there. There's no reason not to apply this kind of reasoning to all the different kinds of people in this society -- like, what makes the shameless power mongers so shameless and power-hungry? Just as geeks have their preoccupations, so other people have theirs, like devoting their lives to status and dominance games, or to gaining advantages for themselves at other people's expense. That doesn't mean they're dysfunctional megalomaniacs, any more than all geeks are catatonic idiot-savants.
I say it's better to understand than not to understand. The trick is not to let the knowledge be used against you.
>I'm not confinced that technology did this as
>much as our society of personality worship.
Personality worship isn't specific to our society or to any society. It's only human to focus on the personalities in any story. The problem comes in when the media focus on the personalities to the exclusion of hard news, or, worse, when the personalities are the story -- the Baba Wawa effect. This happens because the news organizations' public responsibility is undermined by their corporate responsibility to make a profit. The resulting competition for eyeballs and attention spans forces them to pander to the public's worst instincts whether they want to or not.
Some people on this thread having blamed the public for being gullible, for lapping up whatever the media throw at them. Instead of blaming the media for pandering to people's worst instincts, they blame people for having worst instincts to begin with. I wish these complainers wouldn't be so quick to condemn people for being people instead of saints.
Who says that this story is about manipulation? This isn't the Gulf War; no one's trying to whip up support for an invasion. What they're trying to whip up is ratings. I would dearly love it if someone, anyone in the media would try a simple experiment: simply give stories like this the coverage they deserve. A public increasingly disgusted with media excesses would probably flock to watch/listen/read.
True to form, Katz, the technological determinist, pins the blame for the media feeding frenzy on technology and not on institutions. Considering that the media industry is ever and increasingly driven by cutthroat competition for every little vanishing sliver of the audience's attention, it's hardly surprising that this sad but basically marginal story turned into a week-long weepfest. The death of a Diana or a JFK Junior offers the corporate media an irresistible opportunity to be at once sanctimonious and shameless, their favourite combination. This is especially true of the U.S. media, but it's an increasingly global phenomenon thanks to barons like Rupert Murdoch.
The desperation at every level to find some angle, any angle at all, leads to ludicrous extremes. In a week when China and Taiwan are inching ever closer to war, Time magazine devotes 36 pages to a full-colour obituary. On Entertainment Tonight, the cast of The Practice wax eloquent on the meaning of it all. And, silliest of all, a local news program's "high tech" analysis of the plane crash the other night turns out to be pointing a video camera at a computer screen running Microsoft Flight Simulator!
The frenzy will die out, as they all do, but the problem will remain. If we really want to improve the situation, we need to start by fixing responsibility where it belongs: not on all the shiny hardware, but on the people who make the decisions, and maybe on the corporate media's whole way of doing business. It's only going to get worse from here.