I looked at the videos, but mostly what I saw was a robot semi-randomly driving around. Did they do some kind of experiment to prove they had done something more than set loose a stochastic system with wheels?
I tried to follow up on some of the references, but after the second not-so-reputable journal with some kind of barrier to entry, I gave up. If I had done experiments in this vein, I would be yelling as loudly as possible about what tests I did to ensure this actually proves something. You know, so people wouldn't think I was just a crack-pot looking for attention.
Doesn't help either that this is the same douche-bag that stuck a chip in his arm and claimed he was a "cyborg". In addition to not feeding trolls, can we avoid feeding media whores in future too?
Actually, the link I clicked through looked like a relatively ordinary (and not terribly big) grant program. Looks like the news here is maybe just that they are targeting individual junior faculty (rather than the gigantic industry-academia mega-consortium partnership programs that they usually fund)?
If I had to guess, I'd say this is a physics grad student who is looking to use this hard drive for something other than data storage. Where I work (in academia) we repurpose hardware all the time for purposes other than it's intended one, in order to do science, since commercial stuff is often engineered way beyond our capability to build it from scratch. That is, provided we can overcome details of its implementation that arise from its original (true) purpose.
This may be one of those cases where the thing is engineered beyond hope of hacking, but I'm kind of disappointed at the "you're-an-idiot-because-hard-drives-aren't-meant-to-do-that" attitude in these posts. Is this really indicative of the level of imagination and curiosity on Slashdot?
Yeah, we should totally stop putting cow shit on crops. We should also stop putting water on them. Water is what goes in toilets! We should use Brawndo, the Thirst Mutilator instead!
The bias is in the title and the spin.
By this logic one should be able to claim "No health benefits to eating veggies not soaked in arsenic". Veggies soaked in arsenic have all of the same vitamins and nutritional content and veggies not soaked in arsenic. Therefore they are just as healthy!
All those anti-arsenic-soaked-vegetable conspiracy nuts can just shut up now.
It's not available yet, but Xandros Presto ( http://www.prestomypc.com/ ) is designed to do just this (boot quickly into a simple setup).
The fast-boot parts are similar to those in the EeePC version of Xandros which does indeed get up and going really fast (whatever else you might think of Xandros)
I'm skeptical about a lot of the suggestions for generic lightweight linux distributions, since even though these run on underpowered machines, few of them actually put any thought into optimizing boot time.
It's kind of weird the article compares Einstein - a theoretician - with large experimental / engineering enterprises such as Sputnik or CERN. Theoretical and experimental physics are two very different beasts (that don't always even get along), and to my knowledge, there aren't any grand collaborations in theoretical physics (still done on a small / individual scale).
The differences between Cell and GPU aren't as clear cut and simple as you make them out to be. Both derive their power from having lots of parallel processing units and memory architecture that helps you keep those elements busy (which is the real trick in parallel computing). Both are a bit tricky to program. Cell has mechanisms for chaining data flow from one SPE to another (which is good for decoding applications), but I don't see a fundamental limitation of using CUDA/GPUs for decoding. An existence proof of this can be found at this site. It's not H.264, but it shows that HD decoding can be made to fit into a GPU.
As many others have already noted, this is just a web app, and the parallels drawn to app banning are misguided on a number of fronts). What's surprising is that IBM got completely shut-out on the enterprise side of things. At the 3G release keynote, "enterprise" basically was taken to mean "Exchange," and IBM was left twiddling their thumbs.
There's an IBM exec's blog that I found amusing to read (http://edbrill.com). If you thumb through the back archives and read between the lines, you can see the s*t-storm of "Why aren't you guys on iPhone" that he had to deal with, followed by a series of petulant "we didn't want to be on the iPhone in the first place" and "look how un-secure the iPhone is" posts.
Slashdot Mirror
I looked at the videos, but mostly what I saw was a robot semi-randomly driving around. Did they do some kind of experiment to prove they had done something more than set loose a stochastic system with wheels? I tried to follow up on some of the references, but after the second not-so-reputable journal with some kind of barrier to entry, I gave up. If I had done experiments in this vein, I would be yelling as loudly as possible about what tests I did to ensure this actually proves something. You know, so people wouldn't think I was just a crack-pot looking for attention. Doesn't help either that this is the same douche-bag that stuck a chip in his arm and claimed he was a "cyborg". In addition to not feeding trolls, can we avoid feeding media whores in future too?
Actually, the link I clicked through looked like a relatively ordinary (and not terribly big) grant program. Looks like the news here is maybe just that they are targeting individual junior faculty (rather than the gigantic industry-academia mega-consortium partnership programs that they usually fund)?
If I had to guess, I'd say this is a physics grad student who is looking to use this hard drive for something other than data storage. Where I work (in academia) we repurpose hardware all the time for purposes other than it's intended one, in order to do science, since commercial stuff is often engineered way beyond our capability to build it from scratch. That is, provided we can overcome details of its implementation that arise from its original (true) purpose. This may be one of those cases where the thing is engineered beyond hope of hacking, but I'm kind of disappointed at the "you're-an-idiot-because-hard-drives-aren't-meant-to-do-that" attitude in these posts. Is this really indicative of the level of imagination and curiosity on Slashdot?
Yeah, we should totally stop putting cow shit on crops. We should also stop putting water on them. Water is what goes in toilets! We should use Brawndo, the Thirst Mutilator instead!
The bias is in the title and the spin. By this logic one should be able to claim "No health benefits to eating veggies not soaked in arsenic". Veggies soaked in arsenic have all of the same vitamins and nutritional content and veggies not soaked in arsenic. Therefore they are just as healthy! All those anti-arsenic-soaked-vegetable conspiracy nuts can just shut up now.
It's not available yet, but Xandros Presto ( http://www.prestomypc.com/ ) is designed to do just this (boot quickly into a simple setup). The fast-boot parts are similar to those in the EeePC version of Xandros which does indeed get up and going really fast (whatever else you might think of Xandros) I'm skeptical about a lot of the suggestions for generic lightweight linux distributions, since even though these run on underpowered machines, few of them actually put any thought into optimizing boot time.
It's kind of weird the article compares Einstein - a theoretician - with large experimental / engineering enterprises such as Sputnik or CERN. Theoretical and experimental physics are two very different beasts (that don't always even get along), and to my knowledge, there aren't any grand collaborations in theoretical physics (still done on a small / individual scale).
The differences between Cell and GPU aren't as clear cut and simple as you make them out to be. Both derive their power from having lots of parallel processing units and memory architecture that helps you keep those elements busy (which is the real trick in parallel computing). Both are a bit tricky to program. Cell has mechanisms for chaining data flow from one SPE to another (which is good for decoding applications), but I don't see a fundamental limitation of using CUDA/GPUs for decoding. An existence proof of this can be found at this site. It's not H.264, but it shows that HD decoding can be made to fit into a GPU.
As many others have already noted, this is just a web app, and the parallels drawn to app banning are misguided on a number of fronts). What's surprising is that IBM got completely shut-out on the enterprise side of things. At the 3G release keynote, "enterprise" basically was taken to mean "Exchange," and IBM was left twiddling their thumbs. There's an IBM exec's blog that I found amusing to read (http://edbrill.com). If you thumb through the back archives and read between the lines, you can see the s*t-storm of "Why aren't you guys on iPhone" that he had to deal with, followed by a series of petulant "we didn't want to be on the iPhone in the first place" and "look how un-secure the iPhone is" posts.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dddAi8FF3F4