Neural nets, optimization sorting, whatever it is... what I would really be inclined to do with a vastly huge amount of spare computing power.. would be to try to run the most interesting evolutionary systems that might exhibit some emergent behavior that I had never initially expected/hoped for.
If you're bloody silly enough to be running i-tunes, than by definition there's no trust relationship! At that point, you're willingly installing DRM software that is specifically designed to limit your rights and abilities to use data you PAID FOR.
Bah. Such a silly notion.
The very act of installing i-tunes, shows that you are already a victim who is untrusted by the groups you choose to exchange data with. Any other sort of oppression or inappropriate EULA or ugliness is any suprise? Please!
Yikes. I happily waited for a 9MB jpeg to download, expecting some sort of astronomical beauty, perhaps a new desktop background.... It finally finishes, I fire up the gimp, wait while it loads... and it's utter -crap-! Just an enormously hi-res image of the inane illustrative figures. Don't waste your time or bandwidth.
Looked into it a while ago. It seemed to have already fallen behind the main branch, and it didn't support mencoder at all, anyway [which is all I care about]
That's not the problem. I don't have a problem with running out of CPU when merely -playing- something, it's when I want to do some heavy processing on something a V4L capture from live television [using my computer as a PVR]. Now THAT does take a lot of CPU [ffmpeg or XVID encoding], leaving not that much for the processing. Still, it might work. Use mplayer to play the stream [with effects] and pipe it to mencoder to encode it, which can run as a seperate task. I'll see if I can get it to work. Come to think of it, Thanks for the tip.
Of course, I don't mean to complain, for goodness sakes. A'rpi has done an amazing job. I recently introduced a friend of mine to linux, and he was awe-struck by the huge functionality and flexibility of mplayer. I will always be greatfull for the development that has gone into this wonderful program that I use every day.
Mplayer only just recently got inverse-telecine, which is a Good Thing for those of us who like to archive a lot of shows.... I used to have to use virtaldub under wine if I wanted to get IT done right [for truly treasured movies... the rest I just deinterlaced and accepted the quality loss].
The only remaining quibble I have with mplayer, actually most specifically with mencoder, is the lack of any threaded/forked/etc rendering pipeline. I am somewhat in the minority in having a SMP system, but there are a good deal of us out there. It causes me such pain to not have quite enough cpu to do certain realtime effects while encoding, to fall behind, while I see CPU0 pegged to 100%, and CPU1 just sitting there idle.
There was a big occasion for disagreement a while back, when someone tried to get some threading into mplayer, even had working patches. A'rpi refused. He had somewhat of a point; the context switching overhead actually wastes cycles on a single processor. [As well as flushing the cache at inoportune times]. Threading on a uniprocessor system would only really help with I/O latencies, but mplayer has great cacheing, and manages well, even with just a single context.
I'm torn between being hopefull that maybe there will be more openess to future improvements such as SMP support, but I'm also sad to see such a wonderfull developer throw in the towel. MPlayer probably wouldn't have happened without him.
But I wish they would have non-talkback binaries available for linux. Sure, I can build it myself and configure that off...but last time I ran a complete mozzila build, it took hours [I still have a slow old 400Mhz [and, let's face it, moz is -huge-], and used almost a gig of diskspace. Yah, should have disabled debugging symbols, I know... ; )
Yeesh. Normally I wouldn't bother posting this, but I've read 4 comments about how the propriatary bastard is offering the videos only in windows media format! Good lord. Read a little further. It's in good ol' MPG1 too.
They clearly only are posting in windows media because it uses so much less bandwidth. Actually windows media uses MPG4 as it's underlying implementation, which you can play in linux anyway if you really care to. Yeesh!
Although in principal I'm all for reducing spam, refusing paying customers the ability to send mail that is returnable to the account they choose would be very annoying. Most people don't like to use their ISP provided email addr because if people come to know them by that addr, [store it in their address book, rolodex, etc], then the customer is more locked into not switching ISP's because they would then lose that address.
They are their own servers and all, they can provide whatever level and type of, cough, service, they want to. If I was using verizon I would consider strongly switching ISP's right away.
Also, there is the question of whether or not it is really necessary to use them as a mail gateway. One can always run one's own invocation of sendmail, and it would happily squirt off mail with any return address you wanted. That is, unless they have transparently proxied port 25, and put this additional restriction on it. Course, that wouldn't be so transparent a proxy anymore, would it.
I'll have to wait until I know more, but I really don't like any additional restrictions on use. Besides, spam really isn't much of a problem to me anyway. Just use seperate addresses for different classes of mail. Keep the spam coming to one or two, and have others for private and personal contacts.
There is a lot of truth to the usefullness of having a singular person architect a large ammount of code. Software development isn't like many other forms of work; you ususally can't get more output from hiring more software engineers, even good ones. People can talk as much as they like about having good use-case diagrams and using well documented abstract procedure call interfaces, but in software development there are always additional inefficiencies in bringing other people up to the task.
Even coding on one's own, there is so much to keep track of that all nighter jolt cola inspired images are not mere flights of fancy, but often a real part of the real coders lifestyle. Handling that kind of hierarchical thinking and concern over so many issues often dosen't readily subdivide into multiple people.
How does this relate to primmadonnas? I don't know. I'm rambling. I've been up coding all night!;)
Seriously, just use xdm. Same effect, but without doing something so foolish as forcing someone into a GUI. Makes debugging startup problems a lot harder. I can just see it now.
UNlike in microsoft OS's, where the only real flexibility as far as multiple kernel versions goes is a kernels binary images for seperate architectures [two], and for SMP vs. Uniprocessor [they charge a lot more for the former]. In linux, because the source is available, it's all always optional.
It's not bloat when you can choose yourself whether or not to compile it / patch it into the kernel. Even if some of these things migrated into the mainstream linus kernel, they sure as heck will be configuration options for them to be rolled in or not.
And I personally think that software suspend is a really good idea, moreso then winME which [I think] now has it. The hugely greater stability of linux allows you to have the nearly-instant on convinience of resuming, because memleaks and the like don't gradually destablize the system the longer it runs. I always loved the perk of working on a laptop wherein I could have a bunch of applications open, be in the middle of a gdn session, and hibernate to disk and power off, only to come back to precisely the point I was before when the power is back on. Software suspend alone is going to make me check this out.
---
Only a few possible paths in this version, eh?
on
Military Grade Gaming
·
· Score: 1
of course, the quote:
"``Depending on the path you took, a particular tape is played,'' he
said. Because there are only a few possible paths in this version of
the simulation, he said, it is possible to record the evaluations in
advance... As the simulation becomes more sophisticated, there will be
more choices for the lieutenant, and software will put the story
together on the fly."
sort of makes me wonder a bit at the real sophistication of the
thing. Quite possibly more a matter of hype then any really significant
technology. Quite possibly nothing more then several [nontheless at least somewhat intelligent] gaming idiots with a
fat chunk of government grant sqaundering U.S. tax dollars...
If nothing else, goes to show another example where "intelligent agent"
software research seems to be getting money thrown at it.
ps: Then again, $45 mil isn't really even pocket change to the military.
Data has a way of disapearing sometimes, and I want to maintain its accessibility to me. A good contemporary example is the amazing video compression software FIASCO, which has recently been yanked from distribution due to some unexplained patent concerns.
...I kept a mirror of it, and of so much else. I also store my favorite television programs, because VHS tape degrades so very quickly. No piracy, though.
The experiments with changing one so-called macro gene and causing eyes to appear all over the legs of fruit flies should make this pretty obvious. The genome is nano-molecular software, people! The ribosomes and other parts of the cell are the assembly machinery that follow it's instructions, but DNA is clearly turing complete. Think of all the cute little enzymes moving back and forth on RNA snippits, sometimes even changing and reordering the DNA.
The genome is clearly software, and I imagine that their is a lot of code reuse. This only makes sense! If every part of the body was redundantly coded by simmilar genes, then a favorable mutation in one area would have no impact on the others; they might even end up incompatible! Think about it, if a creature evolved [or picked up via a passing bateriological plasmid or virus splice some favorable trait or genetic function from another species or even phyla [it happens]] a usefull new 'constructor' class for types of muscle tissue, would you expect it to only change the formation of muscle tissue in their left arm?
The notion is ludicrous. Living things clearly are possess quite a hierarchy of coding. That any significant biologist could really have thought that every different substructure and detail of every part of the body was specifically detailed in the genome, they should have been laughed at.
I suspect instead that gould is just being a pretentious semi-intellectual as usual. [Don't get me wrong, I love that he has so virtously stood up for evolution vs. creationism... but we should all expect a lot more then merely that in a real scientist, and his tendancy towards relativism and belittling the glory of mankinds mind have bothered me for a while;) ]
I don't want to move towards a world of the ubiquitous `network appliance'. I know; to many I am a naysayer for this. There are some compelling arguements r.e. the ability to pass off a certain functionality that is too processor intensive on one's own portable unit to a commodified local computation grid, [for say, realtime speech recognition and translation].
But I really don't like the idea of moving towards a world in which someone dosen't buy software anymore. What?! Not buying software is good, right?;) No, I mean that in the status quo today, you may have to pay for crappy and propriatary software, but at least you then own it. You can do with it what you want, lately it even seems you may be able to legally reverse engineer it in certain cases.
Do you really want to be typing that private letter on software that is actually running on someone else's hardware?! Yikes! I want software that runs locally, without the need for network services. Otherwise, I would have no real privacy.
Flew in from new york, huh? This stuff is massively contagious during the 3-6 day incubation period. I might want to stay home mostly for the next week or so. If this were to get loose in the united states population...
Perhaps the notion of PDA's being responsible is a blind alley. I would like to see some real statistics, but the notions of significant quantities of 25ish people suddenly experiencing significant memory problems is a very disturbing notion!
Perhaps the mad cow prion disease is secretly rampent in the population, and the vaguest warning signs are only now just beggining to show themselves. Maybe it is a new, as yet undiscovered virus. Maybe it is the ever increasing quantity of electromagnetic bombardment we all recieve as a result of wireless communication technologies.
I have no idea. But if it really is true that a lot of young people are beggining to show significant memory impairment... That is very frightening!
The real question is whether or not the observed neural firing is actually some genetically hardwired process in the brain, part of the underlying archetecture of consciousness... or whether it is instead merely an emergent and learned behavior.
The fact that a experimentally verifiable pattern can be measured does not necessarily demonstrate whether or not the ability is genetically determined. Put electrodes in the cortex of someone doing advanced calculus, and you will likely see a repeatable firing of certain neurons in correlation to certain mathematical notions., even though the symbolic system of math is entirely a cultural construction.
Available at real.com. If you have a V4Lin compatible device, the encoder can do live on-the-fly encoding for delivery to the free realserver. The free server can only stream to 25 clients simultaniously, however. You must pay for more clients.
Alternatively, you could just use the realencoder to save to a file, and as many people as you want could download that via plain old http.
Slashdot Mirror
Neural nets, optimization sorting, whatever it is... what I would really be inclined to do with a vastly huge amount of spare computing power.. would be to try to run the most interesting evolutionary systems that might exhibit some emergent behavior that I had never initially expected/hoped for.
If you're bloody silly enough to be running i-tunes, than by definition there's no trust relationship! At that point, you're willingly installing DRM software that is specifically designed to limit your rights and abilities to use data you PAID FOR.
Bah. Such a silly notion.
The very act of installing i-tunes, shows that you are already a victim who is untrusted by the groups you choose to exchange data with. Any other sort of oppression or inappropriate EULA or ugliness is any suprise? Please!
Yikes. I happily waited for a 9MB jpeg to download, expecting some sort of astronomical beauty, perhaps a new desktop background.... It finally finishes, I fire up the gimp, wait while it loads... and it's utter -crap-! Just an enormously hi-res image of the inane illustrative figures. Don't waste your time or bandwidth.
Looked into it a while ago. It seemed to have already fallen behind the main branch, and it didn't support mencoder at all, anyway [which is all I care about]
That's not the problem. I don't have a problem with running out of CPU when merely -playing- something, it's when I want to do some heavy processing on something a V4L capture from live television [using my computer as a PVR]. Now THAT does take a lot of CPU [ffmpeg or XVID encoding], leaving not that much for the processing. Still, it might work. Use mplayer to play the stream [with effects] and pipe it to mencoder to encode it, which can run as a seperate task. I'll see if I can get it to work. Come to think of it, Thanks for the tip.
Of course, I don't mean to complain, for goodness sakes. A'rpi has done an amazing job. I recently introduced a friend of mine to linux, and he was awe-struck by the huge functionality and flexibility of mplayer. I will always be greatfull for the development that has gone into this wonderful program that I use every day.
Mplayer only just recently got inverse-telecine, which is a Good Thing for those of us who like to archive a lot of shows.... I used to have to use virtaldub under wine if I wanted to get IT done right [for truly treasured movies... the rest I just deinterlaced and accepted the quality loss].
The only remaining quibble I have with mplayer, actually most specifically with mencoder, is the lack of any threaded/forked/etc rendering pipeline. I am somewhat in the minority in having a SMP system, but there are a good deal of us out there. It causes me such pain to not have quite enough cpu to do certain realtime effects while encoding, to fall behind, while I see CPU0 pegged to 100%, and CPU1 just sitting there idle.
There was a big occasion for disagreement a while back, when someone tried to get some threading into mplayer, even had working patches. A'rpi refused. He had somewhat of a point; the context switching overhead actually wastes cycles on a single processor. [As well as flushing the cache at inoportune times]. Threading on a uniprocessor system would only really help with I/O latencies, but mplayer has great cacheing, and manages well, even with just a single context.
I'm torn between being hopefull that maybe there will be more openess to future improvements such as SMP support, but I'm also sad to see such a wonderfull developer throw in the towel. MPlayer probably wouldn't have happened without him.
Thanx for teh corection! ;)
Seriously, I hadn't noticed. I appreciate it.
---
But I wish they would have non-talkback binaries available for linux. Sure, I can build it myself and configure that off ...but last time I ran a complete mozzila build, it took hours [I still have a slow old 400Mhz [and, let's face it, moz is -huge-], and used almost a gig of diskspace. Yah, should have disabled debugging symbols, I know... ; )
Yeesh. Normally I wouldn't bother posting this, but I've read 4 comments about how the propriatary bastard is offering the videos only in windows media format! Good lord. Read a little further. It's in good ol' MPG1 too.
They clearly only are posting in windows media because it uses so much less bandwidth. Actually windows media uses MPG4 as it's underlying implementation, which you can play in linux anyway if you really care to. Yeesh!
---
Look at the page a little more carefully before you complain.
---
Really? Which region are you using RoadRunner in? I have a friend with RoadRunner, and they don't block any ports of his at all.
---
Although in principal I'm all for reducing spam, refusing paying customers the ability to send mail that is returnable to the account they choose would be very annoying. Most people don't like to use their ISP provided email addr because if people come to know them by that addr, [store it in their address book, rolodex, etc], then the customer is more locked into not switching ISP's because they would then lose that address.
They are their own servers and all, they can provide whatever level and type of, cough, service, they want to. If I was using verizon I would consider strongly switching ISP's right away.
Also, there is the question of whether or not it is really necessary to use them as a mail gateway. One can always run one's own invocation of sendmail, and it would happily squirt off mail with any return address you wanted. That is, unless they have transparently proxied port 25, and put this additional restriction on it. Course, that wouldn't be so transparent a proxy anymore, would it.
I'll have to wait until I know more, but I really don't like any additional restrictions on use. Besides, spam really isn't much of a problem to me anyway. Just use seperate addresses for different classes of mail. Keep the spam coming to one or two, and have others for private and personal contacts.
---
There is a lot of truth to the usefullness of having a singular person architect a large ammount of code. Software development isn't like many other forms of work; you ususally can't get more output from hiring more software engineers, even good ones. People can talk as much as they like about having good use-case diagrams and using well documented abstract procedure call interfaces, but in software development there are always additional inefficiencies in bringing other people up to the task.
;)
Even coding on one's own, there is so much to keep track of that all nighter jolt cola inspired images are not mere flights of fancy, but often a real part of the real coders lifestyle. Handling that kind of hierarchical thinking and concern over so many issues often dosen't readily subdivide into multiple people.
How does this relate to primmadonnas? I don't know. I'm rambling. I've been up coding all night!
---
Seriously, just use xdm. Same effect, but without doing something so foolish as forcing someone into a GUI. Makes debugging startup problems a lot harder. I can just see it now.
---
UNlike in microsoft OS's, where the only real flexibility as far as multiple kernel versions goes is a kernels binary images for seperate architectures [two], and for SMP vs. Uniprocessor [they charge a lot more for the former]. In linux, because the source is available, it's all always optional.
It's not bloat when you can choose yourself whether or not to compile it / patch it into the kernel. Even if some of these things migrated into the mainstream linus kernel, they sure as heck will be configuration options for them to be rolled in or not.
And I personally think that software suspend is a really good idea, moreso then winME which [I think] now has it. The hugely greater stability of linux allows you to have the nearly-instant on convinience of resuming, because memleaks and the like don't gradually destablize the system the longer it runs. I always loved the perk of working on a laptop wherein I could have a bunch of applications open, be in the middle of a gdn session, and hibernate to disk and power off, only to come back to precisely the point I was before when the power is back on. Software suspend alone is going to make me check this out.
---
of course, the quote:
"``Depending on the path you took, a particular tape is played,'' he said. Because there are only a few possible paths in this version of the simulation, he said, it is possible to record the evaluations in advance... As the simulation becomes more sophisticated, there will be more choices for the lieutenant, and software will put the story together on the fly."
sort of makes me wonder a bit at the real sophistication of the thing. Quite possibly more a matter of hype then any really significant technology. Quite possibly nothing more then several [nontheless at least somewhat intelligent] gaming idiots with a fat chunk of government grant sqaundering U.S. tax dollars...
If nothing else, goes to show another example where "intelligent agent" software research seems to be getting money thrown at it.
ps: Then again, $45 mil isn't really even pocket change to the military.
---
And I'm proud of it.
...I kept a mirror of it, and of so much else. I also store my favorite television programs, because VHS tape degrades so very quickly. No piracy, though.
Data has a way of disapearing sometimes, and I want to maintain its accessibility to me. A good contemporary example is the amazing video compression software FIASCO, which has recently been yanked from distribution due to some unexplained patent concerns.
---
The experiments with changing one so-called macro gene and causing eyes to appear all over the legs of fruit flies should make this pretty obvious. The genome is nano-molecular software, people! The ribosomes and other parts of the cell are the assembly machinery that follow it's instructions, but DNA is clearly turing complete. Think of all the cute little enzymes moving back and forth on RNA snippits, sometimes even changing and reordering the DNA.
;) ]
The genome is clearly software, and I imagine that their is a lot of code reuse. This only makes sense! If every part of the body was redundantly coded by simmilar genes, then a favorable mutation in one area would have no impact on the others; they might even end up incompatible! Think about it, if a creature evolved [or picked up via a passing bateriological plasmid or virus splice some favorable trait or genetic function from another species or even phyla [it happens]] a usefull new 'constructor' class for types of muscle tissue, would you expect it to only change the formation of muscle tissue in their left arm?
The notion is ludicrous. Living things clearly are possess quite a hierarchy of coding. That any significant biologist could really have thought that every different substructure and detail of every part of the body was specifically detailed in the genome, they should have been laughed at.
I suspect instead that gould is just being a pretentious semi-intellectual as usual. [Don't get me wrong, I love that he has so virtously stood up for evolution vs. creationism... but we should all expect a lot more then merely that in a real scientist, and his tendancy towards relativism and belittling the glory of mankinds mind have bothered me for a while
---
I don't want to move towards a world of the ubiquitous `network appliance'. I know; to many I am a naysayer for this. There are some compelling arguements r.e. the ability to pass off a certain functionality that is too processor intensive on one's own portable unit to a commodified local computation grid, [for say, realtime speech recognition and translation].
;) No, I mean that in the status quo today, you may have to pay for crappy and propriatary software, but at least you then own it. You can do with it what you want, lately it even seems you may be able to legally reverse engineer it in certain cases.
But I really don't like the idea of moving towards a world in which someone dosen't buy software anymore. What?! Not buying software is good, right?
Do you really want to be typing that private letter on software that is actually running on someone else's hardware?! Yikes! I want software that runs locally, without the need for network services. Otherwise, I would have no real privacy.
---
Flew in from new york, huh? This stuff is massively contagious during the 3-6 day incubation period. I might want to stay home mostly for the next week or so. If this were to get loose in the united states population...
---
For all you jingoistic Americans fearing an insult to your national hacking pride, rest assured by visiting At http://hacks.mit.edu/
---
Perhaps the notion of PDA's being responsible is a blind alley. I would like to see some real statistics, but the notions of significant quantities of 25ish people suddenly experiencing significant memory problems is a very disturbing notion!
Perhaps the mad cow prion disease is secretly rampent in the population, and the vaguest warning signs are only now just beggining to show themselves. Maybe it is a new, as yet undiscovered virus. Maybe it is the ever increasing quantity of electromagnetic bombardment we all recieve as a result of wireless communication technologies.
I have no idea. But if it really is true that a lot of young people are beggining to show significant memory impairment... That is very frightening!
---
The real question is whether or not the observed neural firing is actually some genetically hardwired process in the brain, part of the underlying archetecture of consciousness... or whether it is instead merely an emergent and learned behavior.
The fact that a experimentally verifiable pattern can be measured does not necessarily demonstrate whether or not the ability is genetically determined. Put electrodes in the cortex of someone doing advanced calculus, and you will likely see a repeatable firing of certain neurons in correlation to certain mathematical notions., even though the symbolic system of math is entirely a cultural construction.
---
Available at real.com. If you have a V4Lin compatible device, the encoder can do live on-the-fly encoding for delivery to the free realserver. The free server can only stream to 25 clients simultaniously, however. You must pay for more clients.
Alternatively, you could just use the realencoder to save to a file, and as many people as you want could download that via plain old http.
---
users calculator generation of responsible confusing for ?
disagree I must!
Postfix awesome usefull work doing for is!
No, I'm not braindead or high. Think about it.
---