I really like MDA for game creation because it allows me to focus on game mechanics (great for simulation/conquest games) rather than coding. With all the tweaking of game mechanics and in-game entities, code changes can be very tedious. Having auto-generated database and XML mappings doesn't hurt either!
It should be plainly obvious that any exponentially increasing phenomenon can't be a "law". If this so-called law were to continue unabated for a couple of centuries, the number of transistors in a chip would exceed the number of atoms on planet earth. Clearly, a limit is going to be reached well before that happens.
If you are simply talking about Moore's Law in terms of processing power, there are other places to gain improvements rather than just compactness of chips. There is also parallel processing technology, which is still steadily improving.
There are many important algorithmic problems that are inherently serial. Some things are mathematically impossible to parallelize. Also limitations caused by enforcing cache coherency, communications interconnects, and resource access synchronization/serialization create bottlenecks in parallel systems. The astrophysics simulation code that I paralellized is almost entirely math operations on large arrays (PDE solving), however there are diminishing returns past 48 processors due to communications latency. Better programming techniques can push the limit of this, however it is difficult to design software that mitigates the effects of this kind of latency without many man-hours spent to handle it.
Then, far off over the horizon, there's the possibility of quantum computing, which would make for a rediculously huge surge in processing power all at once.
I mentioned this in my post, however there is a bit of a catch.
Quantum computing, practically speaking, is only useful for certain problems - problems that are "embarassingly parallel." QC does not help with fundamentally serial problems, and is likely to be impractical beyond a critical number of qubits, due to quantum incoherency, even quantum error correction can only stretch so far. Great for cryptography/number theoretic operations, and probably many optimization problems (scheduling perhaps?) but certainly not for standard computation. Problems (like database queries) that require large amounts of data to be stored in a quantum coherent fashion are unlikely to be practical.
"That's fundamentally how Moore's Law works: as soon as the current paradigm starts to get maxed out, we simply shift to another paradigm."
Ahh, but that's just it - there is a cost to the switch in terms of both time and money. What I am saying is that yes, we can continue to change paradigms whenever we hit a limit, however these transitions will be very expensive and will cause "delays" during which little improvment on shipping computer technology will be seen.
I believe Moore's Law (or, rather, the modified version about processor speed rather than transitor count) will transition to a new regime soon - that of "average" exponential improvement in the form of a punctuated near-equilibrium.
I believe that the chip industry will have to shift paradigms as the limit of a technology approaches and during these shifts there will be a period of relative nonimprovement as new techniques are refined, implemented, and large scale facilities are built.
There's so many promising technologies on the horizon (photonic computing, three dimensional "chips," quantum computation) etc, but the transition to each will be very bumpy, not at all smooth like the last 40 years of refining two-dimensional semiconductors.
As times change, what we know as Moore's law will change with it. It's likely that the "average" improvement will continue to follow the law more or less (considering that it is driven more heavily by economics than technology). Computers will continue to get faster, cheaper, and able to do things we wouldn't have thought we needed to do before.
I think what this man is doing is simply wonderful... we really need to spend more resources solving the problems of third world nations (if nothing else it would help our country's public image). U.S. citizens spent around $30 billion last year on toys for their kids, if even 10% of that was directed towards this kind of R&D, many of these "simple solutions" could be found and put into action.
I wonder sometimes, with things like the iPod and the iMac's new FrontRow if Apple isn't slowly heading towards "information appliances" as its primary method of support, rather than simply a PC competitor with a nice interface.
Maybe in a few years it won't matter if OS X runs on commodity boxes, as Apple won't really be competing with them as their main business. Apple/TiVo anyone?
There are lots of relativistic particles in cosmic rays, particle accelerators, etc, that approach c. Do two colliding particles at the Tevatron repulse each other? Or do the anti-gravities cancel out? You'd think that somebody would have noticed something like this.
I had this precise thought, however if you notice the proposal says that the accelleration will be very large in the case that the mass to be accellerated is much less than the mass that is "already moving fast" (in whatever frame you're dealing with). Just like gravitational slingshot. So while gravitational slingshots are a known phenomenon that have been used for decades, I don't think that gravitational pull between small collections of particles in an accellerator has ever been detected, and it is not clear that this repulsion effect is that great enough that it could have been detected already.
Pretty useless stat, unless you expect humans to increase life expectancy to 300,000 years TIMES two (the return portion of the trip)
One doesn't need to return to explore the galaxy. Reports could be issued by pulse laser, or similar device. It is likely that cryonics can eventually solve the biological issues with surviving the long trip. Of course it might just be easier to send well-preserved zygotes which could then be gestated inside an artificial womb. OF course you'd have to have robots or somesuch raise the children, which would have interesting social implications, to say the least.
The real useful stat would be how many stars are within 3-4 light years and even then, you still have all the problems a trip to Mars using conventional technology has, the main ones being how to get enough food, water out there to support the astronauts for the duration of such a long trip.
According to this list of nearest stars, there are 61 stars known to be within 5 parsecs (~15.2 ly). This would make a one way trip at.5c quite reasonable within a single human lifetime.
Having enough food/water is not a very difficult problem - a small nuclear reactor could provide enough energy to recycle watter/biomass into nourishment. The actual problem at these speeds is shielding astronauts from radiation, and avoiding collisions.
Ah ha. I see. May I be the first to volunteer you for the most incredible ride of your life? Or the shortest. We're not really sure. Game?
Provided this theory turns out to be mathematically sound, then yes, please do sign me up. There is nothing I can conceive of that I can accomplish on this world that compares with the chance to see the stars - even if it means no return trip.
Felber's research shows that any mass moving faster than 57.7 percent of the speed of light will gravitationally repel other masses lying within a narrow 'antigravity beam' in front of it.
because, of course, no physical phenomenon can operate only for masses travelling above a fixed speed like that because such a phenomenon would violate Lorentz invariance.
Actually I read this to mean that the repulsion effect requires that the relative velocity is greater than.577c. Blockquoth the abstract for "Weak antigravity fields in General Relativity": (emphasis mine)
Within the weak-field approximation of general relativity, new exact solutions are derived for the
gravitational field of a mass moving with arbitrary velocity and acceleration. Owing to an inertial-
pushing effect, a mass having a constant velocity greater than 1/23 times the speed of light gravita-
tionally repels other masses at rest within a narrow cone.
I believe this supports my interpretation. Deeper examination is required to check for Lorentz invariance at a deeper level, however.
Near light speed travel is a prett cool achievement, but it's completeley useless, here's why: We can't go faster than light (the speed of light is the maximum speed of "things in the universe" light just happens to travel that fast, simply because it can't go any faster). But even at light speed th closest galaxies are still years away, so we really can't 'go anywhere'
There are approximately 100 billion stars in our galaxy... all of these stars less than 300000 light-years away. I'd say that's pretty useful.
You have to know the exact cause of gravity to negate it. Last time I checked they dont know what exactly adds to the weight of a single atom so I dont see how they can create antigravity.
What complete and utter nonsense. While I doubt I will see working antigravity in my lifetime (or if it is even possible at all), the idea that you must "know the exact cause" of something to manipulate it effectively is rubbish. Electromagnetic fields were not well explained until many decades after they had been successfully used in engineering applications (telegraph, lightbulb, radio). Even then it was much later that the much more accurate theory of Quantum Electrodynamics (widely considered to be the single most accurately tested theory in all of physics)...
Also you have to have good knowledge of the path involved. Imagine passing a asteroid 10m across at the speed of light. If your system cannot accomodate for the effects then most likely you'll be a smear inside the ship if the ship survives.
Ah ha, now there's a much more reasonable objection. The answer to this is simple - statistics. It's quite possible that near-lightspeed travel will be a tremendous gamble, one which will only be won by the use of massive redundancy. Instead of sending a single ship, we send hundreds or thousands, until one makes it. It's not like we're exactly running out of people any time soon.
Best bet is to hope that there's a nth demension you can pop into that allows you to travel the same spatime line without worrying about the mass of objects in the path.
That would be nice, but IIRC, there are no current theories that are either accepted or considered promising within the physics community that provide a mechanism for interdimensional transport using non-exotic mass/energy.
I dont see the two coming around anytime soon. It would be best to focus efforts on speedy travel between earth, mars, and the asteroid belt. Longer missions to the outer planets are fine but mars is our best bet for establishing a second colony of humans in case earth gets smeared by a large asteroid.
In 1900 people didn't see landing on the moon as coming any time soon, nevertheless it was written about and eventually studied. Our innate need to push the envelope in science and technology leads to many breakthroughs, intentional or not. More importantly it helps to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers. When I interned at JPL, my supervisor said that that was the primary goal of NASA, and I believe it is a valid one.
Disclaimer: I am not a physicist, but I do have a B.S. in Physics.
Personally I'm a bit skeptical about his claims, however energy appears to be conserved. This method uses gravitationally-mediated kinetic energy exchange - this is the same principle that allows gravitational slingshot to work.
As long as something has been liscenced under GPL, the owner cannot assert additional restrictions, or revoke the liscense - therefore how is the owner relevant to the stockholders, if no such change can take place?
Linux couldn't be relicensed under GPLv3 without the permission of every person who has code in it. Linux contains contributions from thousands of programmers.
9. The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions
of the General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will
be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to
address new problems or concerns.
Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the Program
specifies a version number of this License which applies to it and "any
later version", you have the option of following the terms and conditions
either of that version or of any later version published by the Free
Software Foundation. If the Program does not specify a version number of
this License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software
Foundation.
So looks like anyone can use it under GPL V3 if they like, and fork off of that. At that point, it seems it becomes V3, but IANAL... anyone who is?
I don't know the exact number of coders in Microsoft, but it must be above 300,000.
Check out Microsoft on Wikipedia. They have approximately 60000 employees, and while it doesn't say the number of contractors, I would be shocked to find it is four times that amount. Also, remember that a large amount of these employees are *NOT* coders but managers, marketing and sales (that's a biggy), accounting, secretarial/administrative, researchers, and HR.
Mozilla team is pulling an IE (implementing their own extensions... read the blog... "w3c doesn't have to make all the rules"... if Microsoft said that/. would be up in arms)
The difference here is that the ping tag does not affect loading or rendering of the page. It can be safely ignored, and does not create any compatibility problems for the user.
Also, you must remember that Microsoft shoves its browser down people's throats, in the form of OS integration and prebundling, whereas this piece of software is not only optional, but open source, and a simple extension will disable this functionality, if one doesn't want to alter the source themselves.
Does anyone know where I can buy a microswitch USB keyboard? Everything I find seems to be membrane (which I hate). Personally I like microswitch better than buckling spring (though Type Ms are still quite fun). In line with the topic, it'd probably be nice if it didn't have the numeric pad as well (though for gaming, that's pretty great!)
Thus, the Federal Government has no legal powers that are not explicitly set forth in the Constitution.
Check out the Necessary and Proper clause. This is used to justify almost all of the expansion of the federal government from its original, limited role.
Not saying I agree in this circumstance, but really... where does it say in the constitution that the federal government can have education and energy policies? Or spy on their own people?
MySpace users have wallets? I thought most of them were 12 year old kids...
Strictly interpreted, it's likely that most myspace users do not have much actual money (though many spoiled kids, and even not so spoiled kids who happen to be misers often do).
There are other types of economic capital than cash - time, effort, information - all of which are being invested in myspace by its users. Websites like myspace, wikipedia, and slashdot depend on the investment by users of these valuable quantities, and whether 12 or twentysomething, it is this infusion of resources, rather than money, which primarily drives the site.
So in this case "vote with your wallet" could be extended to mean "vote with your economic contribution" - if you don't like how a website works, go create content somewhere else.
Many human actions are only damaging if done en mass. It is a crime to incite individuals to violence, or to disrupt the peace. While this is surely not a violent crime, instructing individuals to perform a DDoS is an attack, whether performed in cyberspace (via browser refresh or other methods) or in real life (say, inciting a flash mob to take all the paper numbers in a waiting line, and leave).
While I'm not certain felony charges are warranted in this instance, inciting detrimental group behavior is far from a new thing, and should be punished.
Slashdot Mirror
I really like MDA for game creation because it allows me to focus on game mechanics (great for simulation/conquest games) rather than coding. With all the tweaking of game mechanics and in-game entities, code changes can be very tedious. Having auto-generated database and XML mappings doesn't hurt either!
It should be plainly obvious that any exponentially increasing phenomenon can't be a "law". If this so-called law were to continue unabated for a couple of centuries, the number of transistors in a chip would exceed the number of atoms on planet earth. Clearly, a limit is going to be reached well before that happens.
Unless you use something smaller than atoms...
If you are simply talking about Moore's Law in terms of processing power, there are other places to gain improvements rather than just compactness of chips. There is also parallel processing technology, which is still steadily improving.
There are many important algorithmic problems that are inherently serial. Some things are mathematically impossible to parallelize. Also limitations caused by enforcing cache coherency, communications interconnects, and resource access synchronization/serialization create bottlenecks in parallel systems. The astrophysics simulation code that I paralellized is almost entirely math operations on large arrays (PDE solving), however there are diminishing returns past 48 processors due to communications latency. Better programming techniques can push the limit of this, however it is difficult to design software that mitigates the effects of this kind of latency without many man-hours spent to handle it.
Then, far off over the horizon, there's the possibility of quantum computing, which would make for a rediculously huge surge in processing power all at once.
I mentioned this in my post, however there is a bit of a catch. Quantum computing, practically speaking, is only useful for certain problems - problems that are "embarassingly parallel." QC does not help with fundamentally serial problems, and is likely to be impractical beyond a critical number of qubits, due to quantum incoherency, even quantum error correction can only stretch so far. Great for cryptography/number theoretic operations, and probably many optimization problems (scheduling perhaps?) but certainly not for standard computation. Problems (like database queries) that require large amounts of data to be stored in a quantum coherent fashion are unlikely to be practical.
"That's fundamentally how Moore's Law works: as soon as the current paradigm starts to get maxed out, we simply shift to another paradigm."
Ahh, but that's just it - there is a cost to the switch in terms of both time and money. What I am saying is that yes, we can continue to change paradigms whenever we hit a limit, however these transitions will be very expensive and will cause "delays" during which little improvment on shipping computer technology will be seen.
I believe Moore's Law (or, rather, the modified version about processor speed rather than transitor count) will transition to a new regime soon - that of "average" exponential improvement in the form of a punctuated near-equilibrium.
I believe that the chip industry will have to shift paradigms as the limit of a technology approaches and during these shifts there will be a period of relative nonimprovement as new techniques are refined, implemented, and large scale facilities are built.
There's so many promising technologies on the horizon (photonic computing, three dimensional "chips," quantum computation) etc, but the transition to each will be very bumpy, not at all smooth like the last 40 years of refining two-dimensional semiconductors.
As times change, what we know as Moore's law will change with it. It's likely that the "average" improvement will continue to follow the law more or less (considering that it is driven more heavily by economics than technology). Computers will continue to get faster, cheaper, and able to do things we wouldn't have thought we needed to do before.
I think what this man is doing is simply wonderful... we really need to spend more resources solving the problems of third world nations (if nothing else it would help our country's public image). U.S. citizens spent around $30 billion last year on toys for their kids, if even 10% of that was directed towards this kind of R&D, many of these "simple solutions" could be found and put into action.
I wonder sometimes, with things like the iPod and the iMac's new FrontRow if Apple isn't slowly heading towards "information appliances" as its primary method of support, rather than simply a PC competitor with a nice interface.
Maybe in a few years it won't matter if OS X runs on commodity boxes, as Apple won't really be competing with them as their main business. Apple/TiVo anyone?
There are lots of relativistic particles in cosmic rays, particle accelerators, etc, that approach c. Do two colliding particles at the Tevatron repulse each other? Or do the anti-gravities cancel out? You'd think that somebody would have noticed something like this.
I had this precise thought, however if you notice the proposal says that the accelleration will be very large in the case that the mass to be accellerated is much less than the mass that is "already moving fast" (in whatever frame you're dealing with). Just like gravitational slingshot. So while gravitational slingshots are a known phenomenon that have been used for decades, I don't think that gravitational pull between small collections of particles in an accellerator has ever been detected, and it is not clear that this repulsion effect is that great enough that it could have been detected already.
Pretty useless stat, unless you expect humans to increase life expectancy to 300,000 years TIMES two (the return portion of the trip)
.5c quite reasonable within a single human lifetime.
One doesn't need to return to explore the galaxy. Reports could be issued by pulse laser, or similar device. It is likely that cryonics can eventually solve the biological issues with surviving the long trip. Of course it might just be easier to send well-preserved zygotes which could then be gestated inside an artificial womb. OF course you'd have to have robots or somesuch raise the children, which would have interesting social implications, to say the least.
The real useful stat would be how many stars are within 3-4 light years and even then, you still have all the problems a trip to Mars using conventional technology has, the main ones being how to get enough food, water out there to support the astronauts for the duration of such a long trip.
According to this list of nearest stars, there are 61 stars known to be within 5 parsecs (~15.2 ly). This would make a one way trip at
Having enough food/water is not a very difficult problem - a small nuclear reactor could provide enough energy to recycle watter/biomass into nourishment. The actual problem at these speeds is shielding astronauts from radiation, and avoiding collisions.
Ah ha. I see. May I be the first to volunteer you for the most incredible ride of your life? Or the shortest. We're not really sure. Game?
Provided this theory turns out to be mathematically sound, then yes, please do sign me up. There is nothing I can conceive of that I can accomplish on this world that compares with the chance to see the stars - even if it means no return trip.
because, of course, no physical phenomenon can operate only for masses travelling above a fixed speed like that because such a phenomenon would violate Lorentz invariance.
Actually I read this to mean that the repulsion effect requires that the relative velocity is greater than
Near light speed travel is a prett cool achievement, but it's completeley useless, here's why: We can't go faster than light (the speed of light is the maximum speed of "things in the universe" light just happens to travel that fast, simply because it can't go any faster). But even at light speed th closest galaxies are still years away, so we really can't 'go anywhere'
There are approximately 100 billion stars in our galaxy... all of these stars less than 300000 light-years away. I'd say that's pretty useful.
You have to know the exact cause of gravity to negate it. Last time I checked they dont know what exactly adds to the weight of a single atom so I dont see how they can create antigravity.
What complete and utter nonsense. While I doubt I will see working antigravity in my lifetime (or if it is even possible at all), the idea that you must "know the exact cause" of something to manipulate it effectively is rubbish. Electromagnetic fields were not well explained until many decades after they had been successfully used in engineering applications (telegraph, lightbulb, radio). Even then it was much later that the much more accurate theory of Quantum Electrodynamics (widely considered to be the single most accurately tested theory in all of physics)...
Also you have to have good knowledge of the path involved. Imagine passing a asteroid 10m across at the speed of light. If your system cannot accomodate for the effects then most likely you'll be a smear inside the ship if the ship survives.
Ah ha, now there's a much more reasonable objection. The answer to this is simple - statistics. It's quite possible that near-lightspeed travel will be a tremendous gamble, one which will only be won by the use of massive redundancy. Instead of sending a single ship, we send hundreds or thousands, until one makes it. It's not like we're exactly running out of people any time soon.
Best bet is to hope that there's a nth demension you can pop into that allows you to travel the same spatime line without worrying about the mass of objects in the path.
That would be nice, but IIRC, there are no current theories that are either accepted or considered promising within the physics community that provide a mechanism for interdimensional transport using non-exotic mass/energy.
I dont see the two coming around anytime soon. It would be best to focus efforts on speedy travel between earth, mars, and the asteroid belt. Longer missions to the outer planets are fine but mars is our best bet for establishing a second colony of humans in case earth gets smeared by a large asteroid.
In 1900 people didn't see landing on the moon as coming any time soon, nevertheless it was written about and eventually studied. Our innate need to push the envelope in science and technology leads to many breakthroughs, intentional or not. More importantly it helps to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers. When I interned at JPL, my supervisor said that that was the primary goal of NASA, and I believe it is a valid one.
Disclaimer: I am not a physicist, but I do have a B.S. in Physics.
For more information, see Dr. Felber's recent works on arXiv.org:
Weak 'Antigravity' Fields in General Relativity
Exact Relativistic 'Antigravity' Propulsion
Personally I'm a bit skeptical about his claims, however energy appears to be conserved. This method uses gravitationally-mediated kinetic energy exchange - this is the same principle that allows gravitational slingshot to work.
Professor Baron Cohen is also the cousin of Sascha Baron Cohen, AKA. Ali G.
Actually according to this article, you are correct.
Out of curiousity, why did you fill the form out differently from the last post?.
As long as something has been liscenced under GPL, the owner cannot assert additional restrictions, or revoke the liscense - therefore how is the owner relevant to the stockholders, if no such change can take place?
From the text of GPL V2: So looks like anyone can use it under GPL V3 if they like, and fork off of that. At that point, it seems it becomes V3, but IANAL... anyone who is?
I don't know the exact number of coders in Microsoft, but it must be above 300,000.
Check out Microsoft on Wikipedia. They have approximately 60000 employees, and while it doesn't say the number of contractors, I would be shocked to find it is four times that amount. Also, remember that a large amount of these employees are *NOT* coders but managers, marketing and sales (that's a biggy), accounting, secretarial/administrative, researchers, and HR.
IANAPhysicist, but in my opinion a black hole actually lasts long enough to trap at least one photon (hence the word 'black').
Photons emitted by the singularity as thermal radiation may be trapped. That would be a black hole.
Mozilla team is pulling an IE (implementing their own extensions... read the blog... "w3c doesn't have to make all the rules" ... if Microsoft said that /. would be up in arms)
The difference here is that the ping tag does not affect loading or rendering of the page. It can be safely ignored, and does not create any compatibility problems for the user.
Also, you must remember that Microsoft shoves its browser down people's throats, in the form of OS integration and prebundling, whereas this piece of software is not only optional, but open source, and a simple extension will disable this functionality, if one doesn't want to alter the source themselves.
Does anyone know where I can buy a microswitch USB keyboard? Everything I find seems to be membrane (which I hate). Personally I like microswitch better than buckling spring (though Type Ms are still quite fun). In line with the topic, it'd probably be nice if it didn't have the numeric pad as well (though for gaming, that's pretty great!)
Thus, the Federal Government has no legal powers that are not explicitly set forth in the Constitution.
Check out the Necessary and Proper clause. This is used to justify almost all of the expansion of the federal government from its original, limited role.
Not saying I agree in this circumstance, but really... where does it say in the constitution that the federal government can have education and energy policies? Or spy on their own people?
Actually the new FM tuner, combined with an FM broadcast unit, such as the iTrip, and you get localized podcasting. Hmm... the possibilities...
MySpace users have wallets? I thought most of them were 12 year old kids...
Strictly interpreted, it's likely that most myspace users do not have much actual money (though many spoiled kids, and even not so spoiled kids who happen to be misers often do).
There are other types of economic capital than cash - time, effort, information - all of which are being invested in myspace by its users. Websites like myspace, wikipedia, and slashdot depend on the investment by users of these valuable quantities, and whether 12 or twentysomething, it is this infusion of resources, rather than money, which primarily drives the site.
So in this case "vote with your wallet" could be extended to mean "vote with your economic contribution" - if you don't like how a website works, go create content somewhere else.
Many human actions are only damaging if done en mass. It is a crime to incite individuals to violence, or to disrupt the peace. While this is surely not a violent crime, instructing individuals to perform a DDoS is an attack, whether performed in cyberspace (via browser refresh or other methods) or in real life (say, inciting a flash mob to take all the paper numbers in a waiting line, and leave).
While I'm not certain felony charges are warranted in this instance, inciting detrimental group behavior is far from a new thing, and should be punished.