OK, finally we are moving away from x86 and toward RISC. We are only 20 years behind schedule, but hey, better late than never.
MS Windows NT 4 supported RISC 15 years ago in 1996(*), Dec Alpha, IBM/Motorola PowerPC and MIPS. All on the standard Win NT 4 retail CD. Consumer oriented PowerPC machines were available. I recall Byte magazine comparing dual PowerPC and dual x86 systems. Alpha machines were available for the more serious users. Despite better computational performance on the RISC based machines x86 won due to price and software availability. ARM could fail as well. ARM may have better battery performance but is it so much better that it will outweigh the software availability issue?
Also as other have pointed out the x86 has a RISC core. x86 instructions are converted to RISC instruction on-the-fly, scheduled and executed. The "problem" is that we do not have direct access to this core and must go through the x86 facade.
(*) OK you can argue 1993, day 1 for Win NT, since MIPS was supported. However I don't think there was any real push towards a consumer MIPS machine. The motivation was more internal, making sure Win NT was portable to other architectures.
... it would be nice if the iTunes store acted as a backup for all my purchased music, but the idea makes sense when you consider the former paradigm. If you bought a CD in the past and lost, broke or damaged it, you went and bought a new CD... This simply extended that concept to non-physical music purchases...
The problem with your argument is that this old paradigm applied to both CDs with application software and CDs with music. The new paradigm of online purchase with unlimited download is being applied by Apple to applications, the logical next step is to apply this to music as well.
I think the electrical engineers and computer programmers have a lot of experience with technology failing, and have seen first hand how a tiny, seemingly insignificant detail, or slight deviation from expected, have caused things to fail horribly time and time again. So, it's only natural that they're much more wary for new tech, especially when it can directly affect their own life.
Yes, but I think its more general than that. As a person develops more experience in a given domain they give more consideration to what can go wrong, and/or have a better understanding of the value added (as opposed to what the sales/marketing people are saying).
This could be a real boon for the billboard industry! The car plans the route to expose you to the client's advertising product most relevant to your selected destination.
You are on to something but I see a different implementation. No need to change the route, since you are not driving the system can project targeted ads onto the windshield. Billboards are obsolete. Advertising is how we will finally get heads-up-displays into our cars. [/satire]
They start with a small number of basic "rules" and acquire the majority of their learning from experience.
In general it seems like an expert systems AI project. You have a domain that has an incomplete definition, many variables and many inputs. You hand code some basic rules as a starting point. You rig up sensors so that a computer can observe the environment and the human and it generates new rules based on its observations(*). And/Or you let the computer loose in a simulated environment and it learns through trial and error.
(*) In the movie Starman the alien learns to drive via observation. Red means stop, green means go, and yellow means go faster. Selection of the expert to observe is a critical step.
Its from Google, of course it harvests data to better deliver targeted advertising. The real question is will it deliver targeted ads while driving. A pleasant voice telling you of the sponsored sites you are driving near.
While I can acknowledge cool engineering when I see it, we discovered millennia ago that the wheel is better when designing mobile tools. Why do robotics researchers keep going back to animal shapes? This might be faster than a human, but that doesn't mean much. I guarantee it isn't faster, more efficient, or more practical than an AI-controlled motorcycle or trike.
There is a major flaw in your logic. You are not considering that the tools we make are constrained by our technical proficiency. Wheels are our best option because they are of a sufficiently low technology that we can make them. As for practical they are not, hence the need for use to build roads or lay tracks all over the planet. Roads and tracks being another sufficiently low technology. For true practicality you have to look at what nature developed to navigate natural terrain.
I think you are beginning to realize that what you formerly considered an attitude of those growing old was in fact an attitude of those growing up. As we grow up our attitudes that are somewhat based on textbooks and storybooks are modified by real world experiences. Now this is often domain specific, its not an overall understanding.
For example a hobby of mine is SCUBA diving. In the "old days" divers used mechanical analog gauges indicating depth and tank pressure, and a watch and a plastic card with tables indicating a time limit for a given depth. When dive computers were introduced to replace the preceding the diving magazines were filled with articles, everyone was really interested and curious and in theory thought this was really cool. However on the dive boats the doctors, lawyers and business types had the computers while the electrical engineers and computer programmers were still using analog gauges, a watch and a plastic card. Was the later group technophobic, I think not. To borrow from your post I think I would describe the the later group as questioning the speed of change and the benefits, a more grown up perspective. The former group, whether having blind faith in technology or wanting the new shiny thing as a status symbol was acting more childish. I admit the preceding characterizations are overly general but from the on-the-boat conversations we had back in these days I think there is some fairness to these depictions.
I have a strange suspicion this DARPA robot isn't going to have Asimov's laws integrated into it...
Terminator, Transformers,... these are the wrong movies. Try Red Planet and the AMEE robot. Given the following snippet I bet you can guess what happens next. Hint: Asimov would not approve.
"The landing craft is damaged entering the Martian atmosphere, veers off course, and crash-lands far from their landing zone near the habitat. In the process, they lose track of "AMEE", a military combat robot re-purposed to serve as their "Mars surface navigator"..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Planet_(film)
But you could imagine something like a CSI series set in the future.
Well there was a Star Trek episode like that. Someone found a body. Someone else walked into the room with a tricorder and announced whose DNA was present. No fancy glass walled lab was necessary.
If a qualified person with access to SCO source code looked for copies of that code in Linux and did not find anything, that is fairly conclusive. They say you can't prove a negative. But in fact there's a huge difference between proving there are no aliens in outer space (hard) vs. proving there's no elephant in this room (easy). The LInux codebase is openly available and rather small, relative to the power of tools available to search it.
All we have is one consultant's statement that he found nothing. That does not tell us if SCO had other consultants working independently who came to a different conclusion. That is why this one data point is insufficient to conclude that SCO knew there was no copying. The fact that someone identified errno.h (correctly or incorrectly) seems to indicate that there was at least one other person also doing the research. Again, I am only arguing against the meme that SCO knew they had no possible infringement. Whether or not such a claim of infringement was accurate is a different question.
Good times. I came home from the local computer swap meet with two CDs. FreeBSD and Yggdrasil plug and play Linux. As a UC grad I naturally started to install FreeBSD but it crashed. So I tried Yggdrasil. It installed, was pretty straight forward, no surprising questions for a person who had installed MS Windows a few times. It restarted, graphics (ATI) worked, sound (SoundBlaster) worked, networking (3Com) worked - all were automatically configured. I started using it and had a great time. I wished I had it when I was still in school. It would have been so much better than calling into the VAX from home to work on UNIX based projects.
Later I tried other distros and was introduced to the non-joy of having to enter timing parameters for my video monitor, and similar nonsense, during setup. Linux had seemed to have taken a few steps backwards.
I don't miss the "challenge" one bit. If you're up for a challenge there are plenty of barebones and expert-friendly distros out there to cut your teeth over. However, things have progressed enough that if you're not prepared to use up what little free time you have tinkering around with shit to get it to work, we now have a lot more friendly options for people who want to actually USE their computers to do something useful.
Actually Yggdrasil plug and play linux (early to mid 90s) just worked, no tinkering. Graphics, sound, etc just came up working like Windows on my 486 DX2-66. I didn't understand all the bitching and moaning until I tried other distributions. Sadly it was many years before other distros achieved a comparable installation and setup experience.
Also, it is NOT a national ID. It is issued by my state...other states and the federal govt, for the most part..do not have the information from my DL immediately upon query.
"The computerized system uses the Global Justice XML Data Model (Global JXDM), an information-exchange standard designed specifically for criminal justice agencies that has been widely, but not universally, adopted."
And most important...where the fuck is it in the constitution for the Federal Govt. to issues national id??
Original iPad is 1 GHz A4 processor, new iPad is 1 GHz A5 processor. I wouldn't worry about that, it's not like the original is that slow or that many apps strain it.
Isn't the new iPad also dual core? Games can make use of that.
What a bunch of words. You can't file a lawsuit resting on accusations substantiated only by your own inability to falsify them!
IMHO, logical fallicies are usually useless as applied to real world arguments. Would you like to hear all about why I think "no true Scotsman" is being inappropriately applied more often than not? Oh, bummer, I thought sure you would.
Here are some more words you may like: "Ignoratio elenchi (also known as irrelevant conclusion[1] or irrelevant thesis) is the informal fallacy of presenting an argument that may in itself be valid, but does not address the issue in question.";-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignoratio_elenchi
Note that in this discussion the issue would be:
(1) One consultant says he did not find anything.
(2) One poster wondered if this proved that SCO knew there was nothing.
(3) I argued "no", that (1) was insufficient information regarding what SCO knew.
I prefer engineering notation (indices of 3,6,9):
50e-09 m
BTW why does it matter if they wrote 50 nanometers?
I think the GP is largely complaining that they left off the 'e' in front of the exponent. Perhaps '-8' was written in superscript and somehow that formatting was lost. "5 x" is atypical but "10-8m" is wrong.
You are correct that engineering notation would have made more sense, reminding readers what a nanometer is.
Read this part to understand why it is still relevent (there are, after all, still cases pending):
So, my head is spinning, because what I'm thinking is: does this demonstrate that SCO knew there was no basis for their copyright infringement claims...
It does not.
"Argument from ignorance, also known as argumentum ad ignorantiam or appeal to ignorance, is an informal logical fallacy. It asserts that a proposition is necessarily true because it has not been proven false (or vice versa). This represents a type of false dichotomy in that it excludes a third option, which is: there is insufficient investigation and therefore insufficient information to "prove" the proposition to be either true or false. Nor does it allow the admission that the choices may in fact not be two (true or false), but may be as many as four; with (3) being unknown between true or false; and (4) being unknowable (among the first three). And finally, any action taken, based upon such a pseudo "proof" is fallaciously valid, that is, it is being asserted to be valid based upon a fallacy.[1] In debates, appeals to ignorance are sometimes used to shift the burden of proof." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
... which might be considered tampering and leaves room for the other side's lawyers to ask "and then you took a soldering iron to a delicate IC?"...
Because the odds of the randomly generated bits creating an email to Bernie Madoff discussing the ponzi scheme falls within a range considered to be reasonable doubt? You would need a fairly ignorant and gullible jury to buy that... oh wait... OK that may work for a celebrity defendant but I wouldn't count on that saving the average guy.
I think I've read somewhere that evidence has also be reproducible by the defense. If you destroy the device in the process of recovering data, that might be hard to do; or not... I'm just guessing really.
I think some tests inherently destroy evidence. For such cases it may be that the defense has the right to observe the testing to ensure that it was done properly.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, finally we are moving away from x86 and toward RISC. We are only 20 years behind schedule, but hey, better late than never.
MS Windows NT 4 supported RISC 15 years ago in 1996(*), Dec Alpha, IBM/Motorola PowerPC and MIPS. All on the standard Win NT 4 retail CD. Consumer oriented PowerPC machines were available. I recall Byte magazine comparing dual PowerPC and dual x86 systems. Alpha machines were available for the more serious users. Despite better computational performance on the RISC based machines x86 won due to price and software availability. ARM could fail as well. ARM may have better battery performance but is it so much better that it will outweigh the software availability issue?
Also as other have pointed out the x86 has a RISC core. x86 instructions are converted to RISC instruction on-the-fly, scheduled and executed. The "problem" is that we do not have direct access to this core and must go through the x86 facade.
(*) OK you can argue 1993, day 1 for Win NT, since MIPS was supported. However I don't think there was any real push towards a consumer MIPS machine. The motivation was more internal, making sure Win NT was portable to other architectures.
The problem with your argument is that this old paradigm applied to both CDs with application software and CDs with music. The new paradigm of online purchase with unlimited download is being applied by Apple to applications, the logical next step is to apply this to music as well.
I think the electrical engineers and computer programmers have a lot of experience with technology failing, and have seen first hand how a tiny, seemingly insignificant detail, or slight deviation from expected, have caused things to fail horribly time and time again. So, it's only natural that they're much more wary for new tech, especially when it can directly affect their own life.
Yes, but I think its more general than that. As a person develops more experience in a given domain they give more consideration to what can go wrong, and/or have a better understanding of the value added (as opposed to what the sales/marketing people are saying).
This could be a real boon for the billboard industry! The car plans the route to expose you to the client's advertising product most relevant to your selected destination.
You are on to something but I see a different implementation. No need to change the route, since you are not driving the system can project targeted ads onto the windshield. Billboards are obsolete. Advertising is how we will finally get heads-up-displays into our cars. [/satire]
So how do humans do it?
They start with a small number of basic "rules" and acquire the majority of their learning from experience.
In general it seems like an expert systems AI project. You have a domain that has an incomplete definition, many variables and many inputs. You hand code some basic rules as a starting point. You rig up sensors so that a computer can observe the environment and the human and it generates new rules based on its observations(*). And/Or you let the computer loose in a simulated environment and it learns through trial and error.
(*) In the movie Starman the alien learns to drive via observation. Red means stop, green means go, and yellow means go faster. Selection of the expert to observe is a critical step.
Does it track you everywhere you go?
Its from Google, of course it harvests data to better deliver targeted advertising. The real question is will it deliver targeted ads while driving. A pleasant voice telling you of the sponsored sites you are driving near.
While I can acknowledge cool engineering when I see it, we discovered millennia ago that the wheel is better when designing mobile tools. Why do robotics researchers keep going back to animal shapes? This might be faster than a human, but that doesn't mean much. I guarantee it isn't faster, more efficient, or more practical than an AI-controlled motorcycle or trike.
There is a major flaw in your logic. You are not considering that the tools we make are constrained by our technical proficiency. Wheels are our best option because they are of a sufficiently low technology that we can make them. As for practical they are not, hence the need for use to build roads or lay tracks all over the planet. Roads and tracks being another sufficiently low technology. For true practicality you have to look at what nature developed to navigate natural terrain.
... MIT cheetah pic here ...
Hollywood's envisioning: http://www.explore-science-fiction-movies.com/amee-red-planet.html
I think you are beginning to realize that what you formerly considered an attitude of those growing old was in fact an attitude of those growing up. As we grow up our attitudes that are somewhat based on textbooks and storybooks are modified by real world experiences. Now this is often domain specific, its not an overall understanding.
For example a hobby of mine is SCUBA diving. In the "old days" divers used mechanical analog gauges indicating depth and tank pressure, and a watch and a plastic card with tables indicating a time limit for a given depth. When dive computers were introduced to replace the preceding the diving magazines were filled with articles, everyone was really interested and curious and in theory thought this was really cool. However on the dive boats the doctors, lawyers and business types had the computers while the electrical engineers and computer programmers were still using analog gauges, a watch and a plastic card. Was the later group technophobic, I think not. To borrow from your post I think I would describe the the later group as questioning the speed of change and the benefits, a more grown up perspective. The former group, whether having blind faith in technology or wanting the new shiny thing as a status symbol was acting more childish. I admit the preceding characterizations are overly general but from the on-the-boat conversations we had back in these days I think there is some fairness to these depictions.
I have a strange suspicion this DARPA robot isn't going to have Asimov's laws integrated into it...
Terminator, Transformers, ... these are the wrong movies. Try Red Planet and the AMEE robot. Given the following snippet I bet you can guess what happens next. Hint: Asimov would not approve.
..."
"The landing craft is damaged entering the Martian atmosphere, veers off course, and crash-lands far from their landing zone near the habitat. In the process, they lose track of "AMEE", a military combat robot re-purposed to serve as their "Mars surface navigator"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Planet_(film)
But you could imagine something like a CSI series set in the future.
Well there was a Star Trek episode like that. Someone found a body. Someone else walked into the room with a tricorder and announced whose DNA was present. No fancy glass walled lab was necessary.
If a qualified person with access to SCO source code looked for copies of that code in Linux and did not find anything, that is fairly conclusive. They say you can't prove a negative. But in fact there's a huge difference between proving there are no aliens in outer space (hard) vs. proving there's no elephant in this room (easy). The LInux codebase is openly available and rather small, relative to the power of tools available to search it.
All we have is one consultant's statement that he found nothing. That does not tell us if SCO had other consultants working independently who came to a different conclusion. That is why this one data point is insufficient to conclude that SCO knew there was no copying. The fact that someone identified errno.h (correctly or incorrectly) seems to indicate that there was at least one other person also doing the research. Again, I am only arguing against the meme that SCO knew they had no possible infringement. Whether or not such a claim of infringement was accurate is a different question.
... Linux in 1997 is old-school, believe it or not ...
Not. '97 was pretty different than '93. '97 wasn't old school, 2nd generation at most with respect to user experience.
Good times. I came home from the local computer swap meet with two CDs. FreeBSD and Yggdrasil plug and play Linux. As a UC grad I naturally started to install FreeBSD but it crashed. So I tried Yggdrasil. It installed, was pretty straight forward, no surprising questions for a person who had installed MS Windows a few times. It restarted, graphics (ATI) worked, sound (SoundBlaster) worked, networking (3Com) worked - all were automatically configured. I started using it and had a great time. I wished I had it when I was still in school. It would have been so much better than calling into the VAX from home to work on UNIX based projects.
Later I tried other distros and was introduced to the non-joy of having to enter timing parameters for my video monitor, and similar nonsense, during setup. Linux had seemed to have taken a few steps backwards.
I don't miss the "challenge" one bit. If you're up for a challenge there are plenty of barebones and expert-friendly distros out there to cut your teeth over. However, things have progressed enough that if you're not prepared to use up what little free time you have tinkering around with shit to get it to work, we now have a lot more friendly options for people who want to actually USE their computers to do something useful.
Actually Yggdrasil plug and play linux (early to mid 90s) just worked, no tinkering. Graphics, sound, etc just came up working like Windows on my 486 DX2-66. I didn't understand all the bitching and moaning until I tried other distributions. Sadly it was many years before other distros achieved a comparable installation and setup experience.
Also, it is NOT a national ID. It is issued by my state...other states and the federal govt, for the most part..do not have the information from my DL immediately upon query.
From 2008: "The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) has teamed up with law enforcement agencies in four states in a pilot project to transmit driver’s license photographs across state lines and deliver the photos to an officer’s computer within seconds of a request." http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/topics/law-enforcement/strategies/information-led-policing/photo-sharing.htm
There isn't a national drivers license database.
"The computerized system uses the Global Justice XML Data Model (Global JXDM), an information-exchange standard designed specifically for criminal justice agencies that has been widely, but not universally, adopted."
And most important...where the fuck is it in the constitution for the Federal Govt. to issues national id??
It is where it always is, the commerce clause.
But never a 2x speed bump; going simply by core increase and not architecture improvements it's more likely to be 1.5x faster.
That's why press releases are always carefully crafted, for example "up to 2x faster".
I've got a typical 100 sheet writing pad. With pen, it weighs just over 1.1 lb.
Add a clipboard and you are at 1.6 lbs, heavier than the original iPad.
Original iPad is 1 GHz A4 processor, new iPad is 1 GHz A5 processor. I wouldn't worry about that, it's not like the original is that slow or that many apps strain it.
Isn't the new iPad also dual core? Games can make use of that.
What a bunch of words. You can't file a lawsuit resting on accusations substantiated only by your own inability to falsify them! IMHO, logical fallicies are usually useless as applied to real world arguments. Would you like to hear all about why I think "no true Scotsman" is being inappropriately applied more often than not? Oh, bummer, I thought sure you would.
Here are some more words you may like: "Ignoratio elenchi (also known as irrelevant conclusion[1] or irrelevant thesis) is the informal fallacy of presenting an argument that may in itself be valid, but does not address the issue in question." ;-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignoratio_elenchi
Note that in this discussion the issue would be:
(1) One consultant says he did not find anything.
(2) One poster wondered if this proved that SCO knew there was nothing.
(3) I argued "no", that (1) was insufficient information regarding what SCO knew.
I prefer engineering notation (indices of 3,6,9): 50e-09 m
BTW why does it matter if they wrote 50 nanometers?
I think the GP is largely complaining that they left off the 'e' in front of the exponent. Perhaps '-8' was written in superscript and somehow that formatting was lost. "5 x" is atypical but "10-8m" is wrong.
You are correct that engineering notation would have made more sense, reminding readers what a nanometer is.
You are stealing my material. I'm the one that's been arguing based on structured logical conventions lately.
Can I get a license for your material? :-)
Read this part to understand why it is still relevent (there are, after all, still cases pending):
So, my head is spinning, because what I'm thinking is: does this demonstrate that SCO knew there was no basis for their copyright infringement claims...
It does not.
"Argument from ignorance, also known as argumentum ad ignorantiam or appeal to ignorance, is an informal logical fallacy. It asserts that a proposition is necessarily true because it has not been proven false (or vice versa). This represents a type of false dichotomy in that it excludes a third option, which is: there is insufficient investigation and therefore insufficient information to "prove" the proposition to be either true or false. Nor does it allow the admission that the choices may in fact not be two (true or false), but may be as many as four; with (3) being unknown between true or false; and (4) being unknowable (among the first three). And finally, any action taken, based upon such a pseudo "proof" is fallaciously valid, that is, it is being asserted to be valid based upon a fallacy.[1] In debates, appeals to ignorance are sometimes used to shift the burden of proof."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
... which might be considered tampering and leaves room for the other side's lawyers to ask "and then you took a soldering iron to a delicate IC?" ...
Because the odds of the randomly generated bits creating an email to Bernie Madoff discussing the ponzi scheme falls within a range considered to be reasonable doubt? You would need a fairly ignorant and gullible jury to buy that ... oh wait ... OK that may work for a celebrity defendant but I wouldn't count on that saving the average guy.
I think I've read somewhere that evidence has also be reproducible by the defense. If you destroy the device in the process of recovering data, that might be hard to do; or not ... I'm just guessing really.
I think some tests inherently destroy evidence. For such cases it may be that the defense has the right to observe the testing to ensure that it was done properly.