Common misconception. Too big can be very cumbersome and frustrating. When you get down to it, it's all about effectiveness and sleekness, you see. I think women spot one they find attractive, try it for a bit, and if their experience is pleasant, they'll stick with it. I think women (and quite a few men) like simplicity, that they want something that can adapt to them, not the other way around, and I think Steve Jobs has that figured out pretty well.
Despite what you think you might have learned from all those edutainment movies. Observing real-world behavior will teach you alot more about human nature...
It's not a question of cheating. Those algorithms are simply approximate. They can't be guaranteed to get the optimal solution, but only to get a solution that is within some factor as good as the optimal... Or sometimes give no guarantees at all (e.g.: genetic algorithms). Those are often the solutions used in practice for NP-complete problems, because they're fast and will often get you very very close to the optimal solution. So close that you don't really care it isn't guaranteed optimal. Methods such as genetic algorithms or simulated annealing work by sampling the space of possible solutions and performing random mutations on the better solutions that are found in an attempt to get even better solutions.
I agree. Education takes so long. I'm currently working on a Ph.D. I'll probably be done around 28. I wish I had more time, so I could take things a little slower, enjoy my life more, and also spend even more time learnings about other topics. The perspective of growing old doesn't bring me any comfort. It's just something we all have had to resign ourselves to, thus far... But I honestly would love to have the opportunity to have 4-5 different careers in my life, to try alot of different possibilities, without having to feel any kind of rush.
Clearly, from the other comments, alot of people see it as wrong and unnatural for people to live indefinitely, because it's never been achieved. It would be a radical change. I honestly think, though, that if we could find a way to keep people young indefinitely, to keep both our bodies and our brains from aging, it might be a good thing. It might indeed imply that we would have to enforce population control, to avoid a population explosion, but is that so bad? It means less children to take care of, which means those children might be better taken care of. It also probably means more educated people, more experts in all fields, lower crime rates, etc. Not to mention... If people are young forever, it means no more old folks to care care of. Society suddenly has a bigger supply of able workers available.
If you're worried about changing the "natural order of things", then I say, we've already done that, as a species. We have the power to use our intelligence to improve our living conditions. Should we really refrain from doing so? Do you really think it's best for us to simply breed more and more children forever? If we have the power to prevent aging and greatly reduce fatality rates, should we really just do nothing, just so we can keep breeding more children? Should we just let people suffer and die because it's "natural"?
There is a programming model for FPGAs. They have their own programming languages which are widely used in the industry (Verilog/VHDL). This model isn't so different from the way OpenCL is used with GPUs. This kind of design will work well for some applications, where custom hardware accelerators can be precompiled and loaded on demand. There will already be demand for this. Some companies that can't afford to make ASICS will certainly like the idea of integrating their own decryption/routing/video accelerator into a chip for cheap, and be able to patch the hardware.
I would personally love to have a CPU that's coupled with an FPGA because it would allow things like implementing your own raytracing accelerator. You can even implement a whole custom CPU into an FPGA... To give you an idea of the flexibility, you can design your own custom memory controller, your own cache. Custom-design your own CPU with a hardware-accelerated garbage collector... The possibilities are boner inducing....
I don't know how much of a difference it will make for customers in the very near future, but for researchers, this will be an invaluable tool, and it might lead to insight on how to make good-ole regular processors (without FPGAs) better (hardware design research).
Current GPUs are only really useful for some tasks. Namely, code that doesn't do alot of branching (e.g.: matrix multiplication). The rest can't really gain that much performance. Not to mention, you have to manually upload and download data to the GPU, it's a total mess to program.
With an FPGA, you can generate on-the-fly a customized hardware accelerator for your problem domain. This could be a processor with specialized instruction for your problem domain, a vector processor, or even a hardware raytracing accelerator.. Whatever you need, so long as the FPGA has enough resources to encode it... And, it can potentially have access to the same memory bus as the CPU.
This won't beat a GPU at raw floating-point power, but it's just much much much more flexible in what it can do.
The benefit is that raytracing is a more natural way to do 3D rendering (by simulating light). It basically gives you a unified model of rendering. For programmers, this means almost every effect can be done very simply, and in a more physically realistic manner. Shiny surfaces, shadows, mirrors, are actually trivial to do with raytracing, but with current hardware (which performs rasterization), those effects are all hard to do, usually involving multiple rendering passes and dirty hacks. The end result is also less realistic. One problem that is *very hard* to tackle (I find) using rasterization, is real-time lighting, and again, it's very easy to do with raytracing.
Current efforts at real-time raytracing are limited because there isn't that much research into the topic, compared to the billions of R&D that went into rasterizing 3D accelerators. Lots of shiny surfaces is also a combination of poor artistic choices and trying too hard to demo the technical capabilities available. What I've seen involved either doing all the work on the CPU, or designing custom FPGAs to do hardware acceleration with a fraction of the computational power that a modern GPU has.
Still, in the long run, raytracing is *the way* to get the most realistic graphics possible. Raytracing is what's used by the the most realistic software rendering packages available today. Not saying you'll have graphics like these in real-time super soon, but it's worth looking forward to:
It does seem likely that if a big part of your brain was reconstructed, you could have a different personality from before (with different degrees of change depending on the location and amount of damage). However, if I had to pick between that and being essentially disabled for life, I'd pick the personality change.
Having different personality traits could mean some of the people you know won't fully recognize you. It could likely mean losing some friends and/or a love partner, but then, so could having a significant memory or coordination problem (or any other major impairment, really). People can be very prejudiced and impatient.
>> My fiancee takes the stance that it's easier for men since we don't have to go through as much effort. Jewelry, shoes, bras, lingerie, worrying about safety and a host of other variables make it "easier" for men to date and catch a partner. When we started dating, I threw a bag in my truck and drove six hours to her house on a whim on her invite, if it hadn't worked out I'd have bailed to my buddy's house. Not that simple for a woman in her view.
I kind of feel like disagreeing with your fiancée there.
I'm a male-to-female transsexual... So I got to experience grooming myself both as a man and a woman. I can get dressed up in nice clothes, makeup, etc. in about an hour, less if I'm in a rush, and that's largely because I'm still not that good at makeup and it takes me a long time. So, I put in one hour of work, and I make heads turn, get whistled at, get hit on by tons of men at nightclubs. Arguably if I was better at makeup, I could do this in 30 mins. Putting on a bra, I can tell you, isn't very difficult. Jewelry? takes seconds to put on. Same thing for high heels. I don't find them very comfortable, but just t go out for an evening dancing, it's not a problem. I take a cab to and from the club, also mostly resolves the safety issue (and I don't usually go alone). Lingerie? I try to wear pretty underthings, but I think most men won't pick a girl based on whether or not she wears exotic lingerie in bed.
Now, grooming yourself as a man takes *some* time too. You also have to pick clothes you think are fashionable. You might also want to do something with your hair. Some men also wear jewelry. Not to mention, being considered a sexy woman is largely a matter of restricting the amount of food you eat. Being considered a sexy man (enough to distinguish yourself from the others) can require hours and hours working out at the gym. And then... Men often have to pay for women whenever doing an activity that requires paying, and do pretty demanding things for them. You just told us you drove *SIX HOURS* on a whim to date this girl? That means you were spending something around 33% of your awake time that day just for the privilege to see her, not to mention the gas. Do you think it took her more than an hour to make herself pretty?
In terms of dating, I think men clearly have to put in more effort. They are expected to do most of the courting, to pay for the girl, to come get her at home, to call her back, to compliment her, to think of interesting activities, etc. In terms of trying to just have casual sex with people, I think the asymmetry is even worse. Like I said, I'm a transsexual, so I have to be extra careful. When I go to nightclubs, I never leave with someone I didn't go to the club with. But, if I were a more anatomically standard girl, and I wanted to get laid with men, I could conceivably leave with a different guy each time, almost 100% success rate. I don't even think I'd have to spend more than an hour looking for someone. Guys? If they want to find a girl to get laid with at a nightclub, they have to come back over and over. I don't know what their success rate is, but it's probably no better than 25% of the time.
I very much agree. I think it's extremely common for women to be into 'bad boys'. Guys who seem confident because they don't seem to care very much about things. These same guys will end up irritating because when you're in a relationship with them, they'll treat you with the same level of caring they give to everything else: not much. I think another sad thing is that the guys who meet the 'bad boy' stereotype can be domineering and controlling. I suppose it makes alot of women tingle to see a man who seems to control the people who surround him (so powerful!), but do they really want that guy to try to control them too?
When I hear a woman say that "all men are the same, they're all jerks", it makes me sad. Quite possibly, all the men you dated were jerks, but then, you wouldn't have that problem if you stopped only picking jerks. If you gave a chance to one of the many many decent, honest, respectful men out there (and they exist), you might be pleasantly surprised.
Perhaps it's in part because the guys who simply don't care are the ones who ask girls out the most and we nerds don't do it nearly as much... But, in the end, it's the women who pick the people they're dating. They're the ones who say yes or no. If you're a girl and you want a decent man for a relationship, my advice would be to be more selective in the ways that matter. Men who aren't respectful and trustworthy will quickly show their true colors, if you observe carefully enough.
I don't get why intel would buy a software company in the first place, much less one that makes not-so-great antivirus software. Seems to me they should have put that huge wad of cash into R&D.
Okay so, his argument makes very little sense. The way he comes up with a number of lines of code is terrible handwaving. He also doesn't seem to understand that the genome isn't a direct encoding of the brain, but rather a very complex and convoluted encoding of how to build a whole human being, keep it alive, and grow it to adulthood. It probably isn't the case that we will reverse engineer the human brain from its genome, and if it is, it certainly won't happen in 10 years.
However... Neuroscientists have already began reverse engineering the brain with the tools they have, which largely involves probing around animal brains with electrodes and seeing the response of various neurons to precisely calibrated stimuli. We seem to have a pretty good understanding of what happens in the first layers of the visual cortex, and the transformations that are applied on the visual input seem fairly straightforward to understand. It seems that we could encode what these first layers perform in terms of convolutional transformations in less than a page of programming code.... We might actually be able to simulate a significant part of the human visual cortex (hundreds of millions of neurons) in real-time using simple DSP chips.
In my opinion, it perhaps isn't so unlikely that other parts of our brains have a very regular structure, as these first layers of the visual cortex do, and so simulating what the human brain does in terms of computation might not take all that much code or as much CPU power as people imagine it would. It's possibly already achievable using the computational power of a medium-sized computer cluster any university can afford, or by designing specialized hardware.
Unfortunately, it seems that neuroscientists are very limited by the tools they have. Studying the early visual cortex using electrodes seems viable, because we can conceive of the simple convolutional transformations that occur easily, and map receptive fields using these simple tools. However, when it comes to analyzing the behavior of the neocortex, it seems quite difficult to quantify thoughts and reasoning using electrodes. It seems that, in a way, neuroscientists could do a much better job if they were able to map the connectivity of the brain first, and study its behavior using simulations. But so far, they have been deducing the connectivity by studying the behavior of different cells... So it becomes somewhat of a chicken and egg problem.
>> Hell? The thought of being able to watch my favorite movies over and over "for the fist time" sounds pretty good to me.
Yeah... If you are still capable of even understanding what's going on in the said movies. Alzheimers heavily damages short term memory, as far as I know.
Here in Canada, it seems like euthanasia will be legalized soon. This could enable people to choose ahead of time to be terminated if things get very bad. Right now, people who suffer the torture of debilitating illnesses don't even have that legal option. They have to suffer it through to the end and bring their family along, whether they want that or not.
I haven't had to go through this myself, but other people have told me they have seen their great grandparents go through it... To the point where these people became senile, then unable to walk, unable to talk, blind, and eventually starved to death. I think we should allow people to decide whether or not they want to finish their life that way.
Another big improvement may be optical chip interconnects. This could make the connection from the processor to the RAM and other devices much faster, while also saving space on motherboards and RAM chips to put... More RAM. Not to mention possible power savings, and the fact that it should be rather easy to have more RAM channels with this technology... Imagine your processor having an individual, parallel connection to each RAM chip.
It's true that eventually, we will reach a plateau, and in a sense, I think it's fair to say that computers are already evolving less rapidly than they used to, at least in terms of performance... but we're not quite at the limit yet. We might still get to see 50TB SSDs that can do gigabits per seconds, desktops with 512GBs of RAM, processors with 128/256/512 cores, etc. We will get to see personal computers with levels of performance that seem "ridiculously unnecessary" by today's standards.
And once this technology really does reach a plateau, if we really do find ourselves "stuck" at some performance level, it will force people to... You know, optimize things. Come up with clever ways of doing more with what you have. It could also lead to *gasp* more standardization, as the evolution of computing technology slows down.
>> because her mind is my own we'll only be thinking of sex!
But what if your female clone is into women only? I mean... Would you have sex with a male version of yourself? Think of the implications!
>> I know this might be flamebait, but. Java SUCKS for gaming. [...]
Would you care to explain why you feel that way? As someone who's programmed in both C++ and Java, I think the main reason would be the lack of native OpenGL support in Java, but that's not necessarily a fault of the language itself. Java is actually a pretty convenient language to work with. If vendors provided proper 3D/sound APIs, it seems it would be perfectly fine to program games with.
It might automate code generation but it doesn't automate debugging or QA testing which in my experience take significantly more effort then running the build system....
They most likely use some kind of "compatibility layer" on which they develop the games. Something to handle the rendering, audio, input, networking, etc. (all interactions with the outside) in a cross-platform manner. It's also likely that most of the bugs in the compatibility layer are already fixed, because most of them will be pretty obvious (it's not very complex code, after all). The rest of the bugs, such as bugs in the game logic, will most likely have the same result on any platform.
Supporting Macs requires a big initial effort in building this compatibility layer and properly testing it, but once that's done, you can just have your coders use it transparently. As for your beta testers, just have some of them use macs, some of them use PCs, to be on the safe side, but they most likely all would experience the same bugs, because most of the code is the same on either platform. The more games you crank out using your cross-platform API, the better tested it is, the less likely it becomes for people to find flaws in the said API.
A few years ago, a friend an I coded a rendering API that could use either Direct3D or OpenGL as its target. It took us some effort to find clever tricks to keep the performance good. We had to find ways to have the GPU transform between coordinate systems as needed. For our modest 3D engine, it wasn't an impossible effort though. We did discover some cases where both targets didn't perform exactly the same down the road, but those bugs were easily fixed.
I agree, but I think an even more important factor is the interface. Sure, your cellphone is could have enough computing power to run most of the applications you use on a regular basis, but... How fast can you type on it? How comfortable is it to do that for extended periods of time? What about all the students doing assignments, all the people writing reports and making spreadsheets? How comfortable do you feel working with such a tiny screen? The fact that cellphones have to be small to be portable limits their usability in important ways.
Alot of these limits could be fixed, say, by having a small docking port (perhaps even wireless docking) with external I/O devices, monitors, or TVs. But then, if you're going to have a device to hook your cellphone to at home so you can use it as a desktop, how much more expensive would it be to add a CPU, some RAM and a hard drive to that thing, in order to make it... A full-fledged desktop computer.
I agree and I honestly don't understand. People who develop 3D for the web probably won't want to use all the latest and fanciest features DirectX exposes. Furthermore, they could have developed their own 3D API layer that uses DirectX internally, but can still map to OpenGL/etc. on another platform. Why limit yourself to the latest Windows when you simply don't have to?
Not to be mean, but these people most likely haven't thought out their strategy very far, and their plugin probably won't succeed.
>> 3D graphics is bandwidth intensive, especially for textures.
Well, fortunately, bandwidth is increasing, slowly, over time. It's apparently pretty easy to get a 100Mbps connection in Japan now. Even downloading 100MBs of textures at that speed wouldn't be so bad. In the meantime, textures can be compressed for download. Quake 3 used jpeg files for its textures. That can easily give you a compression ratio of 10:1.
>> 3D accelerated postage stamps just won't be that compelling.
Look at the browser games people are playing. My girlfriend keeps getting addicted to them. None of them are really that sophisticated, looks wise. If someone can just manage to get some 3D RPG game online, even if it looks like a 10 year old game, people WILL play it, *alot*.
>> Procedural textures are vastly smaller but are rather labour intensive to create. While this is a nice concept it won't be replacing downloaded 3D content anytime soon.
It's my opinion that procedural content is "The Future (TM)". If you give people enough motivation to use it, they just might. Web-based games might be a good reason to develop the technology further, because it makes even more sense in that context.
>> I have enough trouble convincing people to wait for a 2MB Java applet that's downloaded once and cached with WebStart.
In an earlier post, someone was talking about a web-based (WebGL) port of Quake. They said the game fetched the textures after the level was loaded, while the user was playing. You can imagine something like that, if properly implemented, mitigating the problem. Textures only need to be loaded when you are about to see them, and they only need to be loaded in full quality when you can see them up close.
>> I agree that WebGL will eventually make 3D more accessible in browsers (once it's supported in mainstream browsers). I doubt, however, if any commercial developers will use it, because it's based on scripting, so offers a way for everyone to view the source code, something that commercial publishers tend to dislike.
There are obfuscators available. It's not perfect, but it's a start. If the technology is available, people will want to use it. If some big companies don't, smaller companies will. It will certainly be interesting to see what kind of browser games people implement based on WebGL. I might even be interested in playing around with it myself.
>> I also imagine that its scripting nature will mean that WebGL games won't have access to advanced gaming technology such as physics, and so relegate it to more casual games.
They will cater to the lowest common denominator in terms of hardware. Right now, most people don't have systems that can do GPGPU. Perhaps later on it will become available... Still, you can do quite a bit in terms of physics on a simple CPU. None of the latest games *require* special physics acceleration, if I'm not mistaken. Now, of course, we're talking about web games coded in JavaScript, but still, JavaScript VMs are getting better.
What's your point, exactly? It's obviously impossible to formally prove that your software will never fail under any given condition, unless your software is trivial, but... There is a huge difference between well-designed/well-written code and code written by people who simply don't care and will only go so far as to make sure their software works under a typical use case.
Case in point: how many bugs in web applications were caused by code that didn't escape strings going into an SQL request? How many buffer overflows were caused by people not ensuring that the input would properly fit in a buffer? Now, how easy is it to simply write a function that both reads the user input and ensures that those conditions are met, before doing anything else with the said input? Not hard at all.
A very small effort can go a long way. As a developer, I try to ask myself "how could I make the software fail, as a user?" and "how could I prevent such failures, as a programmer?"
Having done such simulations as well, I can tell you it's possible to integrate Hebbian learning in there. There has also been research work combining evolving the neural network's structure and using backpropagation to adjust weights. Finally, in my own experiments, I showed that agents with recurrent neural networks can learn without either of those things. It's essentially possible to build the neural network equivalent of a flip-flop. The agent can then turn these neural switches on and off during its lifetime, exhibiting some degree of adaptation to the environment.
Slashdot Mirror
>> Observing real-world behavior will teach you alot more about human nature...
You have me confused with my younger sister, LUH 3417.
I thought women liked them bigger?
Common misconception. Too big can be very cumbersome and frustrating. When you get down to it, it's all about effectiveness and sleekness, you see. I think women spot one they find attractive, try it for a bit, and if their experience is pleasant, they'll stick with it. I think women (and quite a few men) like simplicity, that they want something that can adapt to them, not the other way around, and I think Steve Jobs has that figured out pretty well.
Despite what you think you might have learned from all those edutainment movies. Observing real-world behavior will teach you alot more about human nature...
It's not a question of cheating. Those algorithms are simply approximate. They can't be guaranteed to get the optimal solution, but only to get a solution that is within some factor as good as the optimal... Or sometimes give no guarantees at all (e.g.: genetic algorithms). Those are often the solutions used in practice for NP-complete problems, because they're fast and will often get you very very close to the optimal solution. So close that you don't really care it isn't guaranteed optimal. Methods such as genetic algorithms or simulated annealing work by sampling the space of possible solutions and performing random mutations on the better solutions that are found in an attempt to get even better solutions.
I agree. Education takes so long. I'm currently working on a Ph.D. I'll probably be done around 28. I wish I had more time, so I could take things a little slower, enjoy my life more, and also spend even more time learnings about other topics. The perspective of growing old doesn't bring me any comfort. It's just something we all have had to resign ourselves to, thus far... But I honestly would love to have the opportunity to have 4-5 different careers in my life, to try alot of different possibilities, without having to feel any kind of rush.
Clearly, from the other comments, alot of people see it as wrong and unnatural for people to live indefinitely, because it's never been achieved. It would be a radical change. I honestly think, though, that if we could find a way to keep people young indefinitely, to keep both our bodies and our brains from aging, it might be a good thing. It might indeed imply that we would have to enforce population control, to avoid a population explosion, but is that so bad? It means less children to take care of, which means those children might be better taken care of. It also probably means more educated people, more experts in all fields, lower crime rates, etc. Not to mention... If people are young forever, it means no more old folks to care care of. Society suddenly has a bigger supply of able workers available.
If you're worried about changing the "natural order of things", then I say, we've already done that, as a species. We have the power to use our intelligence to improve our living conditions. Should we really refrain from doing so? Do you really think it's best for us to simply breed more and more children forever? If we have the power to prevent aging and greatly reduce fatality rates, should we really just do nothing, just so we can keep breeding more children? Should we just let people suffer and die because it's "natural"?
There is a programming model for FPGAs. They have their own programming languages which are widely used in the industry (Verilog/VHDL). This model isn't so different from the way OpenCL is used with GPUs. This kind of design will work well for some applications, where custom hardware accelerators can be precompiled and loaded on demand. There will already be demand for this. Some companies that can't afford to make ASICS will certainly like the idea of integrating their own decryption/routing/video accelerator into a chip for cheap, and be able to patch the hardware.
I would personally love to have a CPU that's coupled with an FPGA because it would allow things like implementing your own raytracing accelerator. You can even implement a whole custom CPU into an FPGA... To give you an idea of the flexibility, you can design your own custom memory controller, your own cache. Custom-design your own CPU with a hardware-accelerated garbage collector... The possibilities are boner inducing....
I don't know how much of a difference it will make for customers in the very near future, but for researchers, this will be an invaluable tool, and it might lead to insight on how to make good-ole regular processors (without FPGAs) better (hardware design research).
Current GPUs are only really useful for some tasks. Namely, code that doesn't do alot of branching (e.g.: matrix multiplication). The rest can't really gain that much performance. Not to mention, you have to manually upload and download data to the GPU, it's a total mess to program.
With an FPGA, you can generate on-the-fly a customized hardware accelerator for your problem domain. This could be a processor with specialized instruction for your problem domain, a vector processor, or even a hardware raytracing accelerator.. Whatever you need, so long as the FPGA has enough resources to encode it... And, it can potentially have access to the same memory bus as the CPU.
This won't beat a GPU at raw floating-point power, but it's just much much much more flexible in what it can do.
The benefit is that raytracing is a more natural way to do 3D rendering (by simulating light). It basically gives you a unified model of rendering. For programmers, this means almost every effect can be done very simply, and in a more physically realistic manner. Shiny surfaces, shadows, mirrors, are actually trivial to do with raytracing, but with current hardware (which performs rasterization), those effects are all hard to do, usually involving multiple rendering passes and dirty hacks. The end result is also less realistic. One problem that is *very hard* to tackle (I find) using rasterization, is real-time lighting, and again, it's very easy to do with raytracing.
Current efforts at real-time raytracing are limited because there isn't that much research into the topic, compared to the billions of R&D that went into rasterizing 3D accelerators. Lots of shiny surfaces is also a combination of poor artistic choices and trying too hard to demo the technical capabilities available. What I've seen involved either doing all the work on the CPU, or designing custom FPGAs to do hardware acceleration with a fraction of the computational power that a modern GPU has.
Still, in the long run, raytracing is *the way* to get the most realistic graphics possible. Raytracing is what's used by the the most realistic software rendering packages available today. Not saying you'll have graphics like these in real-time super soon, but it's worth looking forward to:
Rendered using VRay
Mental Ray
Mental Ray
VRay
It does seem likely that if a big part of your brain was reconstructed, you could have a different personality from before (with different degrees of change depending on the location and amount of damage). However, if I had to pick between that and being essentially disabled for life, I'd pick the personality change.
Having different personality traits could mean some of the people you know won't fully recognize you. It could likely mean losing some friends and/or a love partner, but then, so could having a significant memory or coordination problem (or any other major impairment, really). People can be very prejudiced and impatient.
>> My fiancee takes the stance that it's easier for men since we don't have to go through as much effort. Jewelry, shoes, bras, lingerie, worrying about safety and a host of other variables make it "easier" for men to date and catch a partner. When we started dating, I threw a bag in my truck and drove six hours to her house on a whim on her invite, if it hadn't worked out I'd have bailed to my buddy's house. Not that simple for a woman in her view.
I kind of feel like disagreeing with your fiancée there.
I'm a male-to-female transsexual... So I got to experience grooming myself both as a man and a woman. I can get dressed up in nice clothes, makeup, etc. in about an hour, less if I'm in a rush, and that's largely because I'm still not that good at makeup and it takes me a long time. So, I put in one hour of work, and I make heads turn, get whistled at, get hit on by tons of men at nightclubs. Arguably if I was better at makeup, I could do this in 30 mins. Putting on a bra, I can tell you, isn't very difficult. Jewelry? takes seconds to put on. Same thing for high heels. I don't find them very comfortable, but just t go out for an evening dancing, it's not a problem. I take a cab to and from the club, also mostly resolves the safety issue (and I don't usually go alone). Lingerie? I try to wear pretty underthings, but I think most men won't pick a girl based on whether or not she wears exotic lingerie in bed.
Now, grooming yourself as a man takes *some* time too. You also have to pick clothes you think are fashionable. You might also want to do something with your hair. Some men also wear jewelry. Not to mention, being considered a sexy woman is largely a matter of restricting the amount of food you eat. Being considered a sexy man (enough to distinguish yourself from the others) can require hours and hours working out at the gym. And then... Men often have to pay for women whenever doing an activity that requires paying, and do pretty demanding things for them. You just told us you drove *SIX HOURS* on a whim to date this girl? That means you were spending something around 33% of your awake time that day just for the privilege to see her, not to mention the gas. Do you think it took her more than an hour to make herself pretty?
In terms of dating, I think men clearly have to put in more effort. They are expected to do most of the courting, to pay for the girl, to come get her at home, to call her back, to compliment her, to think of interesting activities, etc. In terms of trying to just have casual sex with people, I think the asymmetry is even worse. Like I said, I'm a transsexual, so I have to be extra careful. When I go to nightclubs, I never leave with someone I didn't go to the club with. But, if I were a more anatomically standard girl, and I wanted to get laid with men, I could conceivably leave with a different guy each time, almost 100% success rate. I don't even think I'd have to spend more than an hour looking for someone. Guys? If they want to find a girl to get laid with at a nightclub, they have to come back over and over. I don't know what their success rate is, but it's probably no better than 25% of the time.
Call me a sexually frustrated nerd, but...
I very much agree. I think it's extremely common for women to be into 'bad boys'. Guys who seem confident because they don't seem to care very much about things. These same guys will end up irritating because when you're in a relationship with them, they'll treat you with the same level of caring they give to everything else: not much. I think another sad thing is that the guys who meet the 'bad boy' stereotype can be domineering and controlling. I suppose it makes alot of women tingle to see a man who seems to control the people who surround him (so powerful!), but do they really want that guy to try to control them too?
When I hear a woman say that "all men are the same, they're all jerks", it makes me sad. Quite possibly, all the men you dated were jerks, but then, you wouldn't have that problem if you stopped only picking jerks. If you gave a chance to one of the many many decent, honest, respectful men out there (and they exist), you might be pleasantly surprised.
Perhaps it's in part because the guys who simply don't care are the ones who ask girls out the most and we nerds don't do it nearly as much... But, in the end, it's the women who pick the people they're dating. They're the ones who say yes or no. If you're a girl and you want a decent man for a relationship, my advice would be to be more selective in the ways that matter. Men who aren't respectful and trustworthy will quickly show their true colors, if you observe carefully enough.
Distributing free content is free, but, unless I'm mistaken, that doesn't mean it's free to ship products that implement the codec.
I don't get why intel would buy a software company in the first place, much less one that makes not-so-great antivirus software. Seems to me they should have put that huge wad of cash into R&D.
Okay so, his argument makes very little sense. The way he comes up with a number of lines of code is terrible handwaving. He also doesn't seem to understand that the genome isn't a direct encoding of the brain, but rather a very complex and convoluted encoding of how to build a whole human being, keep it alive, and grow it to adulthood. It probably isn't the case that we will reverse engineer the human brain from its genome, and if it is, it certainly won't happen in 10 years.
However... Neuroscientists have already began reverse engineering the brain with the tools they have, which largely involves probing around animal brains with electrodes and seeing the response of various neurons to precisely calibrated stimuli. We seem to have a pretty good understanding of what happens in the first layers of the visual cortex, and the transformations that are applied on the visual input seem fairly straightforward to understand. It seems that we could encode what these first layers perform in terms of convolutional transformations in less than a page of programming code.... We might actually be able to simulate a significant part of the human visual cortex (hundreds of millions of neurons) in real-time using simple DSP chips.
In my opinion, it perhaps isn't so unlikely that other parts of our brains have a very regular structure, as these first layers of the visual cortex do, and so simulating what the human brain does in terms of computation might not take all that much code or as much CPU power as people imagine it would. It's possibly already achievable using the computational power of a medium-sized computer cluster any university can afford, or by designing specialized hardware.
Unfortunately, it seems that neuroscientists are very limited by the tools they have. Studying the early visual cortex using electrodes seems viable, because we can conceive of the simple convolutional transformations that occur easily, and map receptive fields using these simple tools. However, when it comes to analyzing the behavior of the neocortex, it seems quite difficult to quantify thoughts and reasoning using electrodes. It seems that, in a way, neuroscientists could do a much better job if they were able to map the connectivity of the brain first, and study its behavior using simulations. But so far, they have been deducing the connectivity by studying the behavior of different cells... So it becomes somewhat of a chicken and egg problem.
>> Hell? The thought of being able to watch my favorite movies over and over "for the fist time" sounds pretty good to me.
Yeah... If you are still capable of even understanding what's going on in the said movies. Alzheimers heavily damages short term memory, as far as I know.
Here in Canada, it seems like euthanasia will be legalized soon. This could enable people to choose ahead of time to be terminated if things get very bad. Right now, people who suffer the torture of debilitating illnesses don't even have that legal option. They have to suffer it through to the end and bring their family along, whether they want that or not.
I haven't had to go through this myself, but other people have told me they have seen their great grandparents go through it... To the point where these people became senile, then unable to walk, unable to talk, blind, and eventually starved to death. I think we should allow people to decide whether or not they want to finish their life that way.
Another big improvement may be optical chip interconnects. This could make the connection from the processor to the RAM and other devices much faster, while also saving space on motherboards and RAM chips to put... More RAM. Not to mention possible power savings, and the fact that it should be rather easy to have more RAM channels with this technology... Imagine your processor having an individual, parallel connection to each RAM chip.
It's true that eventually, we will reach a plateau, and in a sense, I think it's fair to say that computers are already evolving less rapidly than they used to, at least in terms of performance... but we're not quite at the limit yet. We might still get to see 50TB SSDs that can do gigabits per seconds, desktops with 512GBs of RAM, processors with 128/256/512 cores, etc. We will get to see personal computers with levels of performance that seem "ridiculously unnecessary" by today's standards.
And once this technology really does reach a plateau, if we really do find ourselves "stuck" at some performance level, it will force people to... You know, optimize things. Come up with clever ways of doing more with what you have. It could also lead to *gasp* more standardization, as the evolution of computing technology slows down.
>> Depends on what is meant by "bad". If by bad you mean get castrated, then I'd say that it would be better to not have gotten head.
But if you do somehow get castrated in some freak accident, this new discovery will allow you go grow a little head down there as a replacement!
>> because her mind is my own we'll only be thinking of sex! But what if your female clone is into women only? I mean... Would you have sex with a male version of yourself? Think of the implications!
>> I know this might be flamebait, but. Java SUCKS for gaming. [...]
Would you care to explain why you feel that way? As someone who's programmed in both C++ and Java, I think the main reason would be the lack of native OpenGL support in Java, but that's not necessarily a fault of the language itself. Java is actually a pretty convenient language to work with. If vendors provided proper 3D/sound APIs, it seems it would be perfectly fine to program games with.
It might automate code generation but it doesn't automate debugging or QA testing which in my experience take significantly more effort then running the build system....
They most likely use some kind of "compatibility layer" on which they develop the games. Something to handle the rendering, audio, input, networking, etc. (all interactions with the outside) in a cross-platform manner. It's also likely that most of the bugs in the compatibility layer are already fixed, because most of them will be pretty obvious (it's not very complex code, after all). The rest of the bugs, such as bugs in the game logic, will most likely have the same result on any platform.
Supporting Macs requires a big initial effort in building this compatibility layer and properly testing it, but once that's done, you can just have your coders use it transparently. As for your beta testers, just have some of them use macs, some of them use PCs, to be on the safe side, but they most likely all would experience the same bugs, because most of the code is the same on either platform. The more games you crank out using your cross-platform API, the better tested it is, the less likely it becomes for people to find flaws in the said API.
A few years ago, a friend an I coded a rendering API that could use either Direct3D or OpenGL as its target. It took us some effort to find clever tricks to keep the performance good. We had to find ways to have the GPU transform between coordinate systems as needed. For our modest 3D engine, it wasn't an impossible effort though. We did discover some cases where both targets didn't perform exactly the same down the road, but those bugs were easily fixed.
I agree, but I think an even more important factor is the interface. Sure, your cellphone is could have enough computing power to run most of the applications you use on a regular basis, but... How fast can you type on it? How comfortable is it to do that for extended periods of time? What about all the students doing assignments, all the people writing reports and making spreadsheets? How comfortable do you feel working with such a tiny screen? The fact that cellphones have to be small to be portable limits their usability in important ways.
Alot of these limits could be fixed, say, by having a small docking port (perhaps even wireless docking) with external I/O devices, monitors, or TVs. But then, if you're going to have a device to hook your cellphone to at home so you can use it as a desktop, how much more expensive would it be to add a CPU, some RAM and a hard drive to that thing, in order to make it... A full-fledged desktop computer.
I agree and I honestly don't understand. People who develop 3D for the web probably won't want to use all the latest and fanciest features DirectX exposes. Furthermore, they could have developed their own 3D API layer that uses DirectX internally, but can still map to OpenGL/etc. on another platform. Why limit yourself to the latest Windows when you simply don't have to?
Not to be mean, but these people most likely haven't thought out their strategy very far, and their plugin probably won't succeed.
>> 3D graphics is bandwidth intensive, especially for textures.
Well, fortunately, bandwidth is increasing, slowly, over time. It's apparently pretty easy to get a 100Mbps connection in Japan now. Even downloading 100MBs of textures at that speed wouldn't be so bad. In the meantime, textures can be compressed for download. Quake 3 used jpeg files for its textures. That can easily give you a compression ratio of 10:1.
>> 3D accelerated postage stamps just won't be that compelling.
Look at the browser games people are playing. My girlfriend keeps getting addicted to them. None of them are really that sophisticated, looks wise. If someone can just manage to get some 3D RPG game online, even if it looks like a 10 year old game, people WILL play it, *alot*.
>> Procedural textures are vastly smaller but are rather labour intensive to create. While this is a nice concept it won't be replacing downloaded 3D content anytime soon.
It's my opinion that procedural content is "The Future (TM)". If you give people enough motivation to use it, they just might. Web-based games might be a good reason to develop the technology further, because it makes even more sense in that context.
>> I have enough trouble convincing people to wait for a 2MB Java applet that's downloaded once and cached with WebStart.
In an earlier post, someone was talking about a web-based (WebGL) port of Quake. They said the game fetched the textures after the level was loaded, while the user was playing. You can imagine something like that, if properly implemented, mitigating the problem. Textures only need to be loaded when you are about to see them, and they only need to be loaded in full quality when you can see them up close.
>> I agree that WebGL will eventually make 3D more accessible in browsers (once it's supported in mainstream browsers). I doubt, however, if any commercial developers will use it, because it's based on scripting, so offers a way for everyone to view the source code, something that commercial publishers tend to dislike.
There are obfuscators available. It's not perfect, but it's a start. If the technology is available, people will want to use it. If some big companies don't, smaller companies will. It will certainly be interesting to see what kind of browser games people implement based on WebGL. I might even be interested in playing around with it myself.
>> I also imagine that its scripting nature will mean that WebGL games won't have access to advanced gaming technology such as physics, and so relegate it to more casual games.
They will cater to the lowest common denominator in terms of hardware. Right now, most people don't have systems that can do GPGPU. Perhaps later on it will become available... Still, you can do quite a bit in terms of physics on a simple CPU. None of the latest games *require* special physics acceleration, if I'm not mistaken. Now, of course, we're talking about web games coded in JavaScript, but still, JavaScript VMs are getting better.
What's your point, exactly? It's obviously impossible to formally prove that your software will never fail under any given condition, unless your software is trivial, but... There is a huge difference between well-designed/well-written code and code written by people who simply don't care and will only go so far as to make sure their software works under a typical use case.
Case in point: how many bugs in web applications were caused by code that didn't escape strings going into an SQL request? How many buffer overflows were caused by people not ensuring that the input would properly fit in a buffer? Now, how easy is it to simply write a function that both reads the user input and ensures that those conditions are met, before doing anything else with the said input? Not hard at all.
A very small effort can go a long way. As a developer, I try to ask myself "how could I make the software fail, as a user?" and "how could I prevent such failures, as a programmer?"
Having done such simulations as well, I can tell you it's possible to integrate Hebbian learning in there. There has also been research work combining evolving the neural network's structure and using backpropagation to adjust weights. Finally, in my own experiments, I showed that agents with recurrent neural networks can learn without either of those things. It's essentially possible to build the neural network equivalent of a flip-flop. The agent can then turn these neural switches on and off during its lifetime, exhibiting some degree of adaptation to the environment.