A researcher sends a photon 20ms back in time, cracks the British inventor's grandfather's passport to learn where he lives, kills him with a carbon nanotube sword, farts in your general direction (Nee!), films the whole thing on VHS tape, sells it to ClearChannel, and declares "3. PROFIT!"
Props to Cornell for their impressive work! (and yeah, that chair is just amazing to watch. If only IKEA would license that technology... but I digress.)
I'd like to point out a similar bit of work from about 12 years ago. Different approach, but similar goals: Cynthia Breazeal (Ferrell) (hope I'm spelling that right) did some incredibly impressive work as a Grad student @ MIT in the 90s. The most germain is her paper titled Failure Recognition and Fault Tolerance of an Autonomous Robot
This is a MUST READ paper for anyone interested in building robots which operating in real-time in the unpredictable real world. (Real World. Noun. The place where $#it happens, stuff breaks, sensors get noisy input, etc. and the robot has to "cope" anyway.)
In this paper she describes a methodology for developing a six-legged, insect-like robot, Hannibal [pictures and links], which can adapt to both minor and gross subsystem failures and continue, as much as practical, to fulfill its mission. IMO, the best part is the section talking about adaptive gaits where the robot can change seamlessly from high-speed to high-stability walking patterns, as required, and should one (or more) of the legs becomes inoperable, the robot learns to make due without it prior programming thanks to the subsumption architecture Rod Brooks invented and she and other notable members of the Mobile Robot Labs perfected.
Her work these days is mostly centered around human-computer/robot interactions exploring emotive systems and feedback to bridge the gap.
Given a retailer's propensity to package together extra services, and the average user's lack of knowledge regarding their phone's capabilities, this new service seems ripe for abuse.
Lack of knowledge about a phone? Get real. This is the under-25 crowd we're talking about. Do you think the 40+ year-old moms & dads are going to be the ones lining up for these products? And to a GenY'er, a phone is almost an extention of themselves. Ringtones, downloads, games, IM's, push-to-talk, voicemail, etc. are all an essential part of staying online.
That being said, I do think that there is potential for abuse. Stalkers, for instance. Or college profs following up on students too "sick" to attend class. (but plenty well enough to catch a movie or go to the beach, instead!) Also, how long before this information is subpoenaed by attorneys. (For instance, in auto collision cases -- if client was at a bar for three hours prior to a fiery crash, that doesn't look good.)
However, it could be a cool feature -- see who's nearby for a quick lunch meet-up. Finding your family/friends at an amusement park/mall/beach/etc.
Like nearly all technologies, it's benign. It's up to the user to make it good or bad.
Even more, they get to claim a moral high ground, knowing it won't cost *them* anything. It's a highbrow way of saying "Hell yeah, I'm for helping the poor! You go first, won't you, buddy? I'm a little light this week."
BTW, ever notice that the countries that are the poorest are frequently also the least free? (in terms of personal and economic freedom)
And before someone pipes up saying "The United Nations should administer the programme" please have a read about the spectacular success of the UN Oil-For-Food Programme, first.
"We will love to put that kind of agreement in place with anyone [everyone] who distributes Linux software, Red Hat, whoever [everyone] else," Steve Ballmer told India's Economic Times.
Linux, being free (speech, beer) can't be bought and buried, so the traditional corporate stragegy of buying and dismantling a competitor won't work. And you just *know* that it drives them crazy in Redmond! They're sitting on mountain of cash and it won't help them a bit. It's the worst possible outcome -- they must compete!
They're slow, and scarce and don't work 24-7. *If* the software has progressed to the point that it's "good enough" (that's a big IF) then a massive farm of machines could simultaneously monitor all communications (tv, email, phone, IM, etc.), summarize, and filter out anything interesting, looking for trends. Think Really Big Brother.
awesomeness, to be sure, if you consider the ultimate outcome. Remember, this is DARPA, so they're looking at potential military applications. I read it as: "translate (military) communications in real-time,... then destroy one or both parties."
Yes, it is crazy. Pacman, Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, galaxian, Tempest, Defender, and PC favorites like MULE, Tetris, etc. all ran on machines with less than 1/10 of 1% the processing capability of this card.
It feels like it's all been done, because for the most part, that's true. Adding 37% more shiny crap to the same old game doesn't make it better, it just means it has more shiny crap and you are going to spend a fortune on new hardware just to play the same old game concept.
I wish the industry would let go of this obsession for photorealism (at the expense of gameplay dynamics) for a bit and realize that fun isn't something that can be tacked on to a game by adding more processing power. Some of the great games were great because of the focus on challenging gameplay, not visuals. And even on visually splendid games (HL2 comes to mind), the dynamics of the game and the story are foremost... graphics are secondary.
First the "Wii" and now the "WOOO?" What the hell is going on over there? Is there some sort of embargo on Japanese phonems these days? Like they ran out of all the other constantants and have to use up their surplus of "W" sounds before they can order more. Did they fire off all the marketing weasels and hire an offshore preschool class as replacements? I don't get it. (shakes head in disbelief)
Yeah, I've heard the same stuff from my family... "what do I care if somebody watches what I type" "I don't care if somebody reads my boring email or looks at pictures of my grandkids" etc. Drove me nuts!! I patiently explained "well, your system could be zombied and you'd be spreading spam, be a hopping-off point for hackers, a drop-box for software, etc." but it just never registered.
I finally figured that I could either 1) go hardcore admin and completely lock down their PC to the point of only bare functionality (basic web browsing w/no active X, no HTML email, forced virusscans @ startup, etc.) and do lots of admin to keep it up to date (and in the process become the "bad guy") or 2) buy them Macs and quit worrying. I took the easy way out w/some old tangerine iMacs, a couple new Minis, and a family pack of Tiger.
Yeah, I know this doesn't really answer your question, but it's related. If you can't solve the problem, avoid the situation.
>>They heard their customers and acted on their customers wishes.
No, they acted in their financial best interest, as they should. Someone at MSFT ran an accounting model showing a convincing model of financial loss due to this policy, and the number-pushers won.
But remember. What Microsoft gives (under considerable pressure from bad press) they can also quietly take away (later, when it's "safe" to do so or if they change their mind, etc.).
This is the reason I don't buy software that requires me to ask permission to use what I've paid for.
That was my point. You could hardly expect the tyrannical Chinese government to refer to their acts as a "massacre" -- instead they will whitewash it by calling it "The Events of [insert date here]".
When free access to history and information exists, then wordsmithing loses its authority and power.
Orwell said those who control the present control the past. And those who control the past, control the future. It was this very sort of circumstance he had in mind.
The fact that you do not fear a backlash from questioning the head of government in a public place is evidence enough. Much of the population of this world would either be killed for such an act, or at the least imprisoned for a bit. Go read up about the various hobbies of Uday and Qusay Hussein if you want to learn about retribution and tyranny. Suffer though Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, or the Diary of Anne Frank if you want a glimpse into real oppression. Meanwhile, you are free. Live your life and enjoy it, but please knock it off with the overly dramatic whining. It's juvenile and tiresome.
Online security, access for non-English users and spam? Yeah, right.
Other topics to be discussed include spying on the US, countering United Nations efforts, hacking for military secrets, laundering money, limiting access to information (such as news, especially from the West), and whitewashing history ("June 4th Incident, 1989? Never heard of it!".)
>>This policy won't affect 95% of their customers so it's probably a win for them financially.
Especially those who say "to hell with all this nonsense" and switch themselves, their parents, and their siblings to Macs as I did. 5 PCs have gone dark, 5 new Macs online in their place, and my "family tech support" time has gone from approx 10 hours a month (and some six-hour marathons rebuilding virus-laden machines) to ZERO in the past year. A "win-win" scenario.
>>Even simple programs use up way more memory than needed.
Agreed. It's obscene to write a simple "Hello, world" and look at the memory usage. I used to fret about a few dozen bytes... now I allocate megs and don't even thing about it. Such is progress. Some people (such as Steve Gibson at GRC.com) are still coding Windows apps in assembly. I know people here aren't too impressed with Gibson (for all his showboating) but I've gotta say it's damned impressive seeing a real honest full-featured Windows app that's smaller than the Slashdot.gif picture in the upper left corner of this page. That's just cool.
Also, look at the Demo world. There are some absolutely stunning apps being written that use procedural rendering to accomplish stunning skeletal character animation with inverse kinematics, with soundtracks and advanced effects, in just a few hundred K bytes. Amazing stuff.
So coding for efficiency is happening, but it's rare -- a case of someone showing off. Or is it?
This brings up an interesting point: due to changes in architecture and hardware, coding for efficiency (usually performance) is already resulting in smaller code size. Let me explain.
In the early days of microcomputers (C64, Apple ][, TRS80), where system resources were extremely limited and cpu power was slight (e.g. 6502/8088, 8bit, 1mhz, 32k RAM, 40k floppies, no HDD or only tape for storage) and programmers had no choice but to code for efficient 1) performance within the boundaries of storage limitations.
Then around the days of the M68000 Macintosh and the 386, with its extended memory addressing, coding for performance meant pre-computing tables and looking up values as needed. Memory was cheaper than CPU.
This trend reversed in the early 90s when storage became cheap and bus speed increased, but couldn't keep pace with CPU speed advances. Suddenly, it was "cheaper" to compute values at the time they were needed b/c bus speeds imposed a huge penalty on looking up values. Breaking the on-chip ram cache could make-or-break a tight graphics rendering loop, so that was priority. (remember, at this point, software rendering was still common).
Introduce the extremely high-power GPU video cards we have today and the situation changes again. Offloading huge computational loads onto a deidcated graphics engine, the system CPU is somewhat of a traffic cop, ensuring subsystems have a steady flow of sound, textures, geometry, and network packets, oh... and occasionally performing game logic.
So it appears we've come full circle.
The bad news is now you guys have to listen to dinosaurs like me who cut their teeth coding in 6502 assembly ramble on about "well, sonny, back in MY day..."
I think constantly about how Mexicans are treated back in the US, and I honestly have to say I can't imagine that there is anywhere in the world that welcomes immigrants as well as the Dutch welcome high-tech people with valuable skills.
I'll inform the masses of high-tech, skilled Mexicans pouring across our border. What? Oh, that's right. There really aren't any. Instead, we have millions of uneducated, poorly skilled welfare candidates. But thanks for that nice bit of America-bashing.
The Dutch are obviously having immigration issues with Muslims not being integrated into the population.
Are they high-skilled, or are they like the unskilled, poorly integrated Mexicans in America? See a parallel?
Slashdot Mirror
I have a mallet and a snorkel, you inconsiderate clod.
>>The F-117 pilot never knew anything was wrong because the flight computer had been compensating for the missing piece of equipment.
What a showoff. The conventional approach for "missing equipment" is driving an SUV.
Hate to disappoint you, but this bunch could claim Prior Art.
A researcher sends a photon 20ms back in time, cracks the British inventor's grandfather's passport to learn where he lives, kills him with a carbon nanotube sword, farts in your general direction (Nee!), films the whole thing on VHS tape, sells it to ClearChannel, and declares "3. PROFIT!"
Props to Cornell for their impressive work! (and yeah, that chair is just amazing to watch. If only IKEA would license that technology... but I digress.)
I'd like to point out a similar bit of work from about 12 years ago. Different approach, but similar goals: Cynthia Breazeal (Ferrell) (hope I'm spelling that right) did some incredibly impressive work as a Grad student @ MIT in the 90s. The most germain is her paper titled Failure Recognition and Fault Tolerance of an Autonomous Robot
This is a MUST READ paper for anyone interested in building robots which operating in real-time in the unpredictable real world. (Real World. Noun. The place where $#it happens, stuff breaks, sensors get noisy input, etc. and the robot has to "cope" anyway.)
In this paper she describes a methodology for developing a six-legged, insect-like robot, Hannibal [pictures and links], which can adapt to both minor and gross subsystem failures and continue, as much as practical, to fulfill its mission. IMO, the best part is the section talking about adaptive gaits where the robot can change seamlessly from high-speed to high-stability walking patterns, as required, and should one (or more) of the legs becomes inoperable, the robot learns to make due without it prior programming thanks to the subsumption architecture Rod Brooks invented and she and other notable members of the Mobile Robot Labs perfected.
Her work these days is mostly centered around human-computer/robot interactions exploring emotive systems and feedback to bridge the gap.
Yeah, I'm a fanboy.
Lack of knowledge about a phone? Get real. This is the under-25 crowd we're talking about. Do you think the 40+ year-old moms & dads are going to be the ones lining up for these products? And to a GenY'er, a phone is almost an extention of themselves. Ringtones, downloads, games, IM's, push-to-talk, voicemail, etc. are all an essential part of staying online.
That being said, I do think that there is potential for abuse. Stalkers, for instance. Or college profs following up on students too "sick" to attend class. (but plenty well enough to catch a movie or go to the beach, instead!) Also, how long before this information is subpoenaed by attorneys. (For instance, in auto collision cases -- if client was at a bar for three hours prior to a fiery crash, that doesn't look good.)
However, it could be a cool feature -- see who's nearby for a quick lunch meet-up. Finding your family/friends at an amusement park/mall/beach/etc.
Like nearly all technologies, it's benign. It's up to the user to make it good or bad.
Even more, they get to claim a moral high ground, knowing it won't cost *them* anything. It's a highbrow way of saying "Hell yeah, I'm for helping the poor! You go first, won't you, buddy? I'm a little light this week."
BTW, ever notice that the countries that are the poorest are frequently also the least free? (in terms of personal and economic freedom)
And before someone pipes up saying "The United Nations should administer the programme" please have a read about the spectacular success of the UN Oil-For-Food Programme, first.
>>What's wrong with using humans?
They're slow, and scarce and don't work 24-7. *If* the software has progressed to the point that it's "good enough" (that's a big IF) then a massive farm of machines could simultaneously monitor all communications (tv, email, phone, IM, etc.), summarize, and filter out anything interesting, looking for trends. Think Really Big Brother.
awesomeness, to be sure, if you consider the ultimate outcome. Remember, this is DARPA, so they're looking at potential military applications. I read it as: "translate (military) communications in real-time, ... then destroy one or both parties."
Correct on all accounts!!
/. in days, but I'm fresh outta mod points!!
This is by far the most insightful comment I've read on
Yes, it is crazy. Pacman, Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, galaxian, Tempest, Defender, and PC favorites like MULE, Tetris, etc. all ran on machines with less than 1/10 of 1% the processing capability of this card.
It feels like it's all been done, because for the most part, that's true. Adding 37% more shiny crap to the same old game doesn't make it better, it just means it has more shiny crap and you are going to spend a fortune on new hardware just to play the same old game concept.
I wish the industry would let go of this obsession for photorealism (at the expense of gameplay dynamics) for a bit and realize that fun isn't something that can be tacked on to a game by adding more processing power. Some of the great games were great because of the focus on challenging gameplay, not visuals. And even on visually splendid games (HL2 comes to mind), the dynamics of the game and the story are foremost... graphics are secondary.
>Nintendo Wii controller and Hitachi WOOO Blu-ray
First the "Wii" and now the "WOOO?" What the hell is going on over there? Is there some sort of embargo on Japanese phonems these days? Like they ran out of all the other constantants and have to use up their surplus of "W" sounds before they can order more. Did they fire off all the marketing weasels and hire an offshore preschool class as replacements? I don't get it. (shakes head in disbelief)
Yeah, I've heard the same stuff from my family... "what do I care if somebody watches what I type" "I don't care if somebody reads my boring email or looks at pictures of my grandkids" etc. Drove me nuts!! I patiently explained "well, your system could be zombied and you'd be spreading spam, be a hopping-off point for hackers, a drop-box for software, etc." but it just never registered.
I finally figured that I could either 1) go hardcore admin and completely lock down their PC to the point of only bare functionality (basic web browsing w/no active X, no HTML email, forced virusscans @ startup, etc.) and do lots of admin to keep it up to date (and in the process become the "bad guy") or 2) buy them Macs and quit worrying. I took the easy way out w/some old tangerine iMacs, a couple new Minis, and a family pack of Tiger.
Yeah, I know this doesn't really answer your question, but it's related. If you can't solve the problem, avoid the situation.
360. Slam. F'ng. Dunk!
It's a rare thing, unfortunately, to see a counterpoint so well executed as yours but you nailed every point. Well done, sir.
>>They heard their customers and acted on their customers wishes.
No, they acted in their financial best interest, as they should. Someone at MSFT ran an accounting model showing a convincing model of financial loss due to this policy, and the number-pushers won.
But remember. What Microsoft gives (under considerable pressure from bad press) they can also quietly take away (later, when it's "safe" to do so or if they change their mind, etc.).
This is the reason I don't buy software that requires me to ask permission to use what I've paid for.
That was my point. You could hardly expect the tyrannical Chinese government to refer to their acts as a "massacre" -- instead they will whitewash it by calling it "The Events of [insert date here]".
When free access to history and information exists, then wordsmithing loses its authority and power.
Orwell said those who control the present control the past. And those who control the past, control the future. It was this very sort of circumstance he had in mind.
The fact that you do not fear a backlash from questioning the head of government in a public place is evidence enough. Much of the population of this world would either be killed for such an act, or at the least imprisoned for a bit. Go read up about the various hobbies of Uday and Qusay Hussein if you want to learn about retribution and tyranny. Suffer though Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, or the Diary of Anne Frank if you want a glimpse into real oppression.
Meanwhile, you are free. Live your life and enjoy it, but please knock it off with the overly dramatic whining. It's juvenile and tiresome.
Online security, access for non-English users and spam? Yeah, right. Other topics to be discussed include spying on the US, countering United Nations efforts, hacking for military secrets, laundering money, limiting access to information (such as news, especially from the West), and whitewashing history ("June 4th Incident, 1989? Never heard of it!".)
>>This policy won't affect 95% of their customers so it's probably a win for them financially.
Especially those who say "to hell with all this nonsense" and switch themselves, their parents, and their siblings to Macs as I did. 5 PCs have gone dark, 5 new Macs online in their place, and my "family tech support" time has gone from approx 10 hours a month (and some six-hour marathons rebuilding virus-laden machines) to ZERO in the past year. A "win-win" scenario.
>>Even simple programs use up way more memory than needed.
Agreed. It's obscene to write a simple "Hello, world" and look at the memory usage. I used to fret about a few dozen bytes... now I allocate megs and don't even thing about it. Such is progress. Some people (such as Steve Gibson at GRC.com) are still coding Windows apps in assembly. I know people here aren't too impressed with Gibson (for all his showboating) but I've gotta say it's damned impressive seeing a real honest full-featured Windows app that's smaller than the Slashdot.gif picture in the upper left corner of this page. That's just cool.
Also, look at the Demo world. There are some absolutely stunning apps being written that use procedural rendering to accomplish stunning skeletal character animation with inverse kinematics, with soundtracks and advanced effects, in just a few hundred K bytes. Amazing stuff.
So coding for efficiency is happening, but it's rare -- a case of someone showing off. Or is it?
This brings up an interesting point: due to changes in architecture and hardware, coding for efficiency (usually performance) is already resulting in smaller code size. Let me explain.
In the early days of microcomputers (C64, Apple ][, TRS80), where system resources were extremely limited and cpu power was slight (e.g. 6502/8088, 8bit, 1mhz, 32k RAM, 40k floppies, no HDD or only tape for storage) and programmers had no choice but to code for efficient 1) performance within the boundaries of storage limitations.
Then around the days of the M68000 Macintosh and the 386, with its extended memory addressing, coding for performance meant pre-computing tables and looking up values as needed. Memory was cheaper than CPU.
This trend reversed in the early 90s when storage became cheap and bus speed increased, but couldn't keep pace with CPU speed advances. Suddenly, it was "cheaper" to compute values at the time they were needed b/c bus speeds imposed a huge penalty on looking up values. Breaking the on-chip ram cache could make-or-break a tight graphics rendering loop, so that was priority. (remember, at this point, software rendering was still common).
Introduce the extremely high-power GPU video cards we have today and the situation changes again. Offloading huge computational loads onto a deidcated graphics engine, the system CPU is somewhat of a traffic cop, ensuring subsystems have a steady flow of sound, textures, geometry, and network packets, oh... and occasionally performing game logic.
So it appears we've come full circle.
The bad news is now you guys have to listen to dinosaurs like me who cut their teeth coding in 6502 assembly ramble on about "well, sonny, back in MY day..."
Here's a limited solution.
Find a midi file, import it into garageband, change view to score/notation, print.
Are they high-skilled, or are they like the unskilled, poorly integrated Mexicans in America? See a parallel?