Yes, I thought it was common knowledge also. But I've noticed that there seems to be very little decrease in the use of GIF files in web sites
Well, for your information, certain programs (Front page extensions to be precise) rely on you using either gif or bmp for the backdrops on their automatically generated navigation icons and theme elements. Well, frontpage 2000 did, cant speak for 2002 extensions.
This makes alot of sense relative to JPG, but isn't as good as PNG, which seems to code the icons in about half the space.
You can still use any file format for the main body of your site, its just a failing (one of many) in the server extensions to generate icons on the fly.
although it is true that a cdrom needs time to position the laser lens over a sector that is not very much of the time...
Its about 100 - 200 ms I believe. The faster drives sit around the 100 ms mark I think. The laser head has to move over the right track (which takes most of the time) and then the disk has to spin under the laser until the start of the data is reached.
Thats still a substantial amount of time compared to RAM.
There is no fragmentation of cdroms as they are used more and more
I never suggested that there was (except with packet CD where the directory structure is a little spread out IIRC).
However, while the CD file structure should be optomised to have files stored sequentially in the order that they are most likely to be used, they are still potentially slow for random access reading if you are reading alot of small files out of order.
These sort of issues (plus spin up/down times) are quite noticable in some games in particular - Diablo II expansion pack Act 5 Throne of destruction (where you first meet Baal) comes to mind. The last lot of monsters he throws at you take a while to get loaded up from the disk, and you can be dead before you see what hit you. I'm sure that there are lots of other examples of this sort of thing that a RAM (or even HD cached) drive would prevent.
Who would want a 100x drive? I think I've sustained permenant hearing loss from the whine of my 32x drive.
The biggest problem with these sort of drives is seek time. A modern drive can read the whole CD in under 2 minutes, but it will take a good fraction of a second to jump from one part of a drive to another. This doesn't improve alot no matter how fast you spin the CD.
A far better solution would be to build a CD with a 640 MB Cache, and have it just read the whole thing into RAM.
Given the price of RAM over the next few years, this sort of technology should available soon.
Alternatively, it could be written into the OS itself. The only problem with this could be with some copy protection systems perhaps.
(and just watch me get moderated "-2, Dissenting Opinion" for saying it too)
Well, you got that bit wrong at least. You are sitting at +5, Insightful.
Probably doesn't reflect on the quality of the rest of your post I guess.
Michael
The difference between M$ and OS
on
Revolution OS
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I think when Microsoft executives see photos of typical open source luminaries, they might feel an urge to give them a hug and a bowl of soup, rather than worry about them taking market share from Microsoft (forgetting that Bill Gates created the same impression at age 24, negotiating the deal to license DOS to IBM). But Stallman and Raymond and Perens are not like that; they have spent decades writing software and thinking about writing software, and the intellectual heft of their arguments reflect that.
I have often wondered why Bill Gates is responsible for such bad (and occasionally good) software.
He's not a fool, certainly, and I keep wondering why he has allowed so much rubbish to creep into the windows source code. (Particularly at a kernel level where it can do so much damage.)
Has he forgotten about the basis of good code? Did he never know how in the first place? Or is there something intrinsic in the business model of microsoft that makes it become different from the open source models?
Although how can a drug dealer give an excuse to a "moral" question when his morals value using drugs?
That depends really to my mind on whether he values using drugs, or just selling them to others. If its only the latter, then his moral position is similar to many tobacco companies.
You are stealing money from Microsoft. The data you provide for product activation has value, however small.
Its very small, as I lied to them anyway the first time I went through this (with front page 2000). How valuable is a false entry in their database? (In fact, the only information they say they require is your country - I'd put that value as pretty small even if they get the correct information).
I suppose someone is going to tell me that its illegal to lie to microsoft now.
They are stealing copyrighted media. This is illegal. They should go to somewhere like China where there is no copyright law, and see how they like that knowledge economy.
Well, you can send someone a music file using instant messaging, e-Mail and news groups, just for starters.
Are you suggesting that we should diable these web services too? Or that (in your opinion) there is sufficiently high illegal activity on P2P software to justify blocking it alone? Even though it has perfectly legitimite uses as well (like distributing linux iso files).
For that matter, alot of stuff that you say is illegal may not be.
Examples: 1. Music which is distributed free of copyright 2. Music which you already own the copyright to but just want a MP3 backup of (will become more important as copy protected music gets pushed more). 3. My own example - I used morpheus to get a win XP iso, even though I bought a legit one (remember, you buy the licencse, not the software) because I hate product activation that much. Have I broken the law? A moot point. As I haven't cost M$ a cent in revenue, I doubt that they will take me to court on that one, in case I win.
And frankly, my position is not illegal until its tested in court, becaue its not for you to judge.
I doubt that P2P software will ever stop. Any more than video recorders will go away. If ports start getting blocked, the software will shift ports. Probably to port 80, which is how streaming media work through firewalls.
I honestly don't know, but I was under the impression that files are still left behind because the OS supposedly needs them.
I'm not an expert on this one, but I am sure that there is alot of stuff left in. I don't think thats much of an issue, because its not really what microsoft is arguing. They seem to be saying that you have to have the programs - when all you want is the core OS functionality (perhaps).
Its ironic that while they argue that the operating system cant have these bits chopped out of them, they actually use an incredibly simple hack to hide the messenger "module" from the add/remove list, and which can be easily circumvented. The whole windows OS has become so convoluted that it would actually be dangerous to really bury the code - any update to messenger would probably bring down other parts of the OS if it wasn't a module.
Michael
Re:Why there will never be a time machine
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 2
If you were to travel forward back to B, you'd actually end up at B'
But how do we know that we aren't at B' already? Seriously, how can you say that you cant get there from here, you end up somewhere else. Couldn't we be in that somewhere else? All the posts seem to assume that you couldn't time travel because you cant get there from here, you just get somewhere similar. But what if the universe we live in has people just appear in it (with the right technology, presumably) from another time. Doesn't this defeat the whole argument above that we wont see time travel because people will just disappear off to somewhere else? Like it couldn't happen to us? What is so special about our current frame of reference?
Michael
Michael
Re:Why there will never be a time machine
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 2
A time traveller in Alpha steps into the circle of light or whatever and dissapears. No one from timeline Alpha will ever see him or her again. Of course in timeline Beta someone just appeared out of nowhere and they have plenty of reason to believe time travel is possible
Alot of people have posted on this sort of theme. I just don't get it - to continue the above thread, what is to stop someone from Beta time travelling back to Alpha? Or is the implication that Beta (and Gamma, Delta, etc...) are all different from Alpha? If this is what time travel would be about, it presupposes that we are living in the one and only parallel universe that can't be jumped back into. Doesn't quite ring true to me.
Michael
Re:People have too much time on their hands
on
GameBoy Web Server
·
· Score: 2
In other words, anybody with an EPROM burner could 'rip' a C64 cartridge
Getting off topic here, and replying to an AC post as well, but the aim was to copy the ROM to tape or disk and then run from RAM, so you didn't need any extra hardware.
Michael
Re:People have too much time on their hands
on
GameBoy Web Server
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Quite true that this is useless to you/the world, but to him, the person that did this, he has learned a great deal. I mean, what have you done? what "valuable" asset have you produced?
Yes, I'd agree. Probably the most useful things I did was to write a ROM ripper for the C-64 to read game cartridges, and a graphic printer driver for the MPS 802 printer (No mean feat - it only had one 8x8 graphic character per line - boy did that print head fly with all those carriage returns).
Point is, neither of those things were terribly useful. So what. They were fun. I don't look back at my youth with regret because I could have done something else with my time.
To be truthful, I'm rather envious of Adrian for having the skills to do this sort of thing.
You want to know when "enough is enough"? When the rest of the world's military powers appear to be using muskets as compared to our gear of that future day.
Yeah, right. If you take the entire axis of evil, and throw in a few other countries around the region, its outpowered by the US about 3 to 1.
The only way you can meet anyone in the air with weapons even vaguely threatening to the US is if the US sells them to that person in the first place. Please bear in mind that this is just how most of these places got their weapons in the first place. Iran, Iraq and Afganistan have had, over the last 15 years a great deal of military support from the US.
The point is, the US doesn't really need better weapons, and certainly not on the scale it produces them. It does need to stop giving them away and selling them to governments and rebel groups in third world countries because of a (usually very short term) intervention.
Think it through - since the fall of the soviet union the supply of military equipment to the third world has come predominantly from the US. (Who else do you think has the technology to make it)?
Ok, enough preaching - my take home message: If you want the US to have overwhelming military strength, thats easy - stop selling and giving your weapons away.
It seems like he went through some of the most boring, flattest parts of the US on his trip. Even through Colorado and Utah, everything was flat. What's up with that?
Probably too hard to change the film every 36 miles while driving around the edge of a canyon.:-)
Truth is, its going to happen for most people with or without having a chip inserted. Biometric identification (such as iris identification) will enable people to be tracked wherever they go, at least outside of their own homes. Your mobile phone lets you be tracked pretty much anywhere, as does your always connected PDA. Computer recognition of your car plates allows instant tracking of your travels, and its been around for years now. Some smart cards such as credit cards can be activated from a distance (so you don't have to swipe them at a checkout). The list goes on.
The most difficult issue here is the recognition that we need a bill of rights to protect our privacy. This information will be collected on all of us, whether or not we like it, and even if you don't get a chip implanted in you.
We need to accept that this information is being collected now. We need legislative protection, ideally at the constitutional level, so that even if a company has this information, they are limited in what they can do with it. This has been needed probably since the first day a telephone book was published, but it is certainly needed now.
that usually, many of the most brilliant people aren't that interested in school
Certainly, some intelligent people don't get formally trained. Alot more do.
There is much less correlation between brilliance in the academic success and commercial success - alot of bright people have relatively ordinary jobs. It depends on what they want out of life.
So I don't think that this would deter all the prospective applicants for such a scheme, even though I would value my freedom more than that. Then again, I didn't really have any financial problems through Uni.
If it gives people an opportunity that they might not otherwise get, 2 years of work isn't a bad deal.
WMA is of a reasonable quality and does as it says on the tin
Yes, but doesn't microsoft have a fair bit of control over the WMA architecture - the usual problem of not being able to view it on any other player because of the control?
Anyway, if everyone starts using it it becomes the standard. Sort of like internet explorer. Do we really want to go that way with WMA compression?
I'm not missing your point. I understand the difference between having massively parallel system and something that is not deterministic
In fact, you could NEVER solve a 1024 variable instance of 3-SAT by naively testing all possibilities using a DNA computer because there aren't enough particles in the universe to represent even a tiny fraction of the solutions!
Thats a strong statement. It assumes that all solutions have to be present at once, not sequentially over time, or indeed that a DNA computer has to have all the solutions prefabricated in the first place. It is possible that DNA computers could assemble the answers from base pairs, for example.
My point is that if your algorithm is exponential time, I can ALWAYS beat your machine. As I understand it, quantum computing currently has extreme scalability problems going beyond a few (? 11 AFAIK) qbits, as its hard to make a molecule big enough to hold all the quantum states.
So you make that comparison based on my worst case scenario (that every answer has to be prefabricated), your best case scenario (that you can read the quantum state of a large molecule), and the assumption that you can simply increase the complexity of a problem until a non deterministic approach is faster.
Personally, I was just commenting that DNA compting is very, very fast in principle. Perhaps we ought to rething 128 bit key lengths even on the basis of this. By the way, if quantum computing becomes practical, just how long will the key length need to get:):):)
The only operations (under normal circumstances) an organism does with DNA is copy. Mutations (reversals, transpositions, etc.) occur because of chemical errors. That is the only operation it does really
Actually, we do alot more than that. How do you think that our immune system works? Every immune globulin is coded in DNA. Do you think we have DNA to produce an immune globulin to every possible molecule? Nope. We rearrange our DNA to produce matching (ie., stereochemical gloves that fit a specifically shaped and charged molecule) immune globulin. There may be similar stuff for our sense of smell.
Its alot more complex than that. Just like true neural computing has to do more than just weigh up a series of electrical inputs to a nerve - there are local and systemic hormonal messengers.
Its easy to make a mistake by interpreting a technology only in terms of your current understanding of technology. See my.sig with regard to this.
These DNA computers, while being massively parallel, as you say, are still deterministic.
Yes. To put it in perspective, though, the average DNA base pair has a molecular weight of 610. So one mole of the substance (ie. 610 g) contains 6.022 x 10 e+23 base pairs.
So, assuming that it takes you 10 days to set up a computation - approximately 10 e+6 seconds, you have 6 * 10 e+17 computational units per second. This assumes the computation time is trivial (which it is, compared to the set up time of 10 days do make all the DNA).
Lets say that again. 600 000 000 000 000 000 computations per second. In a large beaker containing a few litres of solute.
Of course, each unit only holds a quaternery bit of information (ie., one of four states for the four kinds of nucleotide).
At the moment we have computers that can run in the GHz range, ie., 2 * 10 e+9 computations per second.
A DNA computer will be able to operate at at least 8 orders of magnitude faster than any current conventional computer, and potentially at 10 e+12 times faster with increased amounts of DNA and faster setup times.
It may be deterministic, but it will take us another 25+ years to get to this point on the intel roadmap - which of course should derail before then. In other words, this technology is faster than anything that can be or is likely to be done on silicon.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I thought it was common knowledge also. But I've noticed that there seems to be very little decrease in the use of GIF files in web sites
Well, for your information, certain programs (Front page extensions to be precise) rely on you using either gif or bmp for the backdrops on their automatically generated navigation icons and theme elements. Well, frontpage 2000 did, cant speak for 2002 extensions.
This makes alot of sense relative to JPG, but isn't as good as PNG, which seems to code the icons in about half the space.
You can still use any file format for the main body of your site, its just a failing (one of many) in the server extensions to generate icons on the fly.
My 2c worth,
Michael
although it is true that a cdrom needs time to position the laser lens over a sector that is not very much of the time...
Its about 100 - 200 ms I believe. The faster drives sit around the 100 ms mark I think. The laser head has to move over the right track (which takes most of the time) and then the disk has to spin under the laser until the start of the data is reached.
Thats still a substantial amount of time compared to RAM.
There is no fragmentation of cdroms as they are used more and more
I never suggested that there was (except with packet CD where the directory structure is a little spread out IIRC).
However, while the CD file structure should be optomised to have files stored sequentially in the order that they are most likely to be used, they are still potentially slow for random access reading if you are reading alot of small files out of order.
These sort of issues (plus spin up/down times) are quite noticable in some games in particular - Diablo II expansion pack Act 5 Throne of destruction (where you first meet Baal) comes to mind. The last lot of monsters he throws at you take a while to get loaded up from the disk, and you can be dead before you see what hit you. I'm sure that there are lots of other examples of this sort of thing that a RAM (or even HD cached) drive would prevent.
Michael
Who would want a 100x drive? I think I've sustained permenant hearing loss from the whine of my 32x drive.
The biggest problem with these sort of drives is seek time. A modern drive can read the whole CD in under 2 minutes, but it will take a good fraction of a second to jump from one part of a drive to another. This doesn't improve alot no matter how fast you spin the CD.
A far better solution would be to build a CD with a 640 MB Cache, and have it just read the whole thing into RAM.
Given the price of RAM over the next few years, this sort of technology should available soon.
Alternatively, it could be written into the OS itself. The only problem with this could be with some copy protection systems perhaps.
Michael
(and just watch me get moderated "-2, Dissenting Opinion" for saying it too)
Well, you got that bit wrong at least. You are sitting at +5, Insightful.
Probably doesn't reflect on the quality of the rest of your post I guess.
Michael
I think when Microsoft executives see photos of typical open source luminaries, they might feel an urge to give them a hug and a bowl of soup, rather than worry about them taking market share from Microsoft (forgetting that Bill Gates created the same impression at age 24, negotiating the deal to license DOS to IBM). But Stallman and Raymond and Perens are not like that; they have spent decades writing software and thinking about writing software, and the intellectual heft of their arguments reflect that.
I have often wondered why Bill Gates is responsible for such bad (and occasionally good) software.
He's not a fool, certainly, and I keep wondering why he has allowed so much rubbish to creep into the windows source code. (Particularly at a kernel level where it can do so much damage.)
Has he forgotten about the basis of good code? Did he never know how in the first place? Or is there something intrinsic in the business model of microsoft that makes it become different from the open source models?
Just wondering,
Michael
Although how can a drug dealer give an excuse to a "moral" question when his morals value using drugs?
That depends really to my mind on whether he values using drugs, or just selling them to others. If its only the latter, then his moral position is similar to many tobacco companies.
Michael
You are stealing money from Microsoft. The data you provide for product activation has value, however small.
Its very small, as I lied to them anyway the first time I went through this (with front page 2000). How valuable is a false entry in their database? (In fact, the only information they say they require is your country - I'd put that value as pretty small even if they get the correct information).
I suppose someone is going to tell me that its illegal to lie to microsoft now.
Michael
They are stealing copyrighted media. This is illegal. They should go to somewhere like China where there is no copyright law, and see how they like that knowledge economy.
Well, you can send someone a music file using instant messaging, e-Mail and news groups, just for starters.
Are you suggesting that we should diable these web services too? Or that (in your opinion) there is sufficiently high illegal activity on P2P software to justify blocking it alone? Even though it has perfectly legitimite uses as well (like distributing linux iso files).
For that matter, alot of stuff that you say is illegal may not be.
Examples:
1. Music which is distributed free of copyright
2. Music which you already own the copyright to but just want a MP3 backup of (will become more important as copy protected music gets pushed more).
3. My own example -
I used morpheus to get a win XP iso, even though I bought a legit one (remember, you buy the licencse, not the software) because I hate product activation that much. Have I broken the law? A moot point. As I haven't cost M$ a cent in revenue, I doubt that they will take me to court on that one, in case I win.
And frankly, my position is not illegal until its tested in court, becaue its not for you to judge.
I doubt that P2P software will ever stop. Any more than video recorders will go away. If ports start getting blocked, the software will shift ports. Probably to port 80, which is how streaming media work through firewalls.
My 2c
Michael
And what excuse is given in response to the moral questions? We have to make a profit. Disgusting.
Nah, its a great excuse. Ask any drug dealer.
Michael
I honestly don't know, but I was under the impression that files are still left behind because the OS supposedly needs them.
I'm not an expert on this one, but I am sure that there is alot of stuff left in. I don't think thats much of an issue, because its not really what microsoft is arguing. They seem to be saying that you have to have the programs - when all you want is the core OS functionality (perhaps).
Michael
If it's not used, I don't install it. Except I can't do that with IE and Messenger.
You can remove messenger from windows xp by typing the following line into the run option on the start menu:
RunDll32 advpack.dll,LaunchINFSection %windir%\INF\msmsgs.inf,BLC.Remove
Its ironic that while they argue that the operating system cant have these bits chopped out of them, they actually use an incredibly simple hack to hide the messenger "module" from the add/remove list, and which can be easily circumvented. The whole windows OS has become so convoluted that it would actually be dangerous to really bury the code - any update to messenger would probably bring down other parts of the OS if it wasn't a module.
Michael
If you were to travel forward back to B, you'd actually end up at B'
But how do we know that we aren't at B' already? Seriously, how can you say that you cant get there from here, you end up somewhere else. Couldn't we be in that somewhere else? All the posts seem to assume that you couldn't time travel because you cant get there from here, you just get somewhere similar. But what if the universe we live in has people just appear in it (with the right technology, presumably) from another time. Doesn't this defeat the whole argument above that we wont see time travel because people will just disappear off to somewhere else? Like it couldn't happen to us? What is so special about our current frame of reference?
Michael
Michael
A time traveller in Alpha steps into the circle of light or whatever and dissapears. No one from timeline Alpha will ever see him or her again. Of course in timeline Beta someone just appeared out of nowhere and they have plenty of reason to believe time travel is possible
Alot of people have posted on this sort of theme. I just don't get it - to continue the above thread, what is to stop someone from Beta time travelling back to Alpha? Or is the implication that Beta (and Gamma, Delta, etc...) are all different from Alpha? If this is what time travel would be about, it presupposes that we are living in the one and only parallel universe that can't be jumped back into. Doesn't quite ring true to me.
Michael
In other words, anybody with an EPROM burner could 'rip' a C64 cartridge
Getting off topic here, and replying to an AC post as well, but the aim was to copy the ROM to tape or disk and then run from RAM, so you didn't need any extra hardware.
Michael
Quite true that this is useless to you/the world, but to him, the person that did this, he has learned a great deal. I mean, what have you done? what "valuable" asset have you produced?
Yes, I'd agree. Probably the most useful things I did was to write a ROM ripper for the C-64 to read game cartridges, and a graphic printer driver for the MPS 802 printer (No mean feat - it only had one 8x8 graphic character per line - boy did that print head fly with all those carriage returns).
Point is, neither of those things were terribly useful. So what. They were fun. I don't look back at my youth with regret because I could have done something else with my time.
To be truthful, I'm rather envious of Adrian for having the skills to do this sort of thing.
Michael
You want to know when "enough is enough"? When the rest of the world's military powers appear to be using muskets as compared to our gear of that future day.
Yeah, right. If you take the entire axis of evil, and throw in a few other countries around the region, its outpowered by the US about 3 to 1.
The only way you can meet anyone in the air with weapons even vaguely threatening to the US is if the US sells them to that person in the first place. Please bear in mind that this is just how most of these places got their weapons in the first place. Iran, Iraq and Afganistan have had, over the last 15 years a great deal of military support from the US.
The point is, the US doesn't really need better weapons, and certainly not on the scale it produces them. It does need to stop giving them away and selling them to governments and rebel groups in third world countries because of a (usually very short term) intervention.
Think it through - since the fall of the soviet union the supply of military equipment to the third world has come predominantly from the US. (Who else do you think has the technology to make it)?
Ok, enough preaching - my take home message: If you want the US to have overwhelming military strength, thats easy - stop selling and giving your weapons away.
My 2c worth. (There goes my karma!)
Michael
It seems like he went through some of the most boring, flattest parts of the US on his trip. Even through Colorado and Utah, everything was flat. What's up with that?
:-)
Probably too hard to change the film every 36 miles while driving around the edge of a canyon.
Michael
How soon until this is mandatory?
Truth is, its going to happen for most people with or without having a chip inserted. Biometric identification (such as iris identification) will enable people to be tracked wherever they go, at least outside of their own homes. Your mobile phone lets you be tracked pretty much anywhere, as does your always connected PDA. Computer recognition of your car plates allows instant tracking of your travels, and its been around for years now. Some smart cards such as credit cards can be activated from a distance (so you don't have to swipe them at a checkout). The list goes on.
The most difficult issue here is the recognition that we need a bill of rights to protect our privacy. This information will be collected on all of us, whether or not we like it, and even if you don't get a chip implanted in you.
We need to accept that this information is being collected now. We need legislative protection, ideally at the constitutional level, so that even if a company has this information, they are limited in what they can do with it. This has been needed probably since the first day a telephone book was published, but it is certainly needed now.
My 2c worth,
Michael
that usually, many of the most brilliant people aren't that interested in school
Certainly, some intelligent people don't get formally trained. Alot more do.
There is much less correlation between brilliance in the academic success and commercial success - alot of bright people have relatively ordinary jobs. It depends on what they want out of life.
So I don't think that this would deter all the prospective applicants for such a scheme, even though I would value my freedom more than that. Then again, I didn't really have any financial problems through Uni.
If it gives people an opportunity that they might not otherwise get, 2 years of work isn't a bad deal.
My 2c worth
Michael
I want GPS on my TV remote control, so I can find it.
:)
If your remote had a GPS, it would know where it was.
This might not help as much as you would think
Michael
WMA is of a reasonable quality and does as it says on the tin
Yes, but doesn't microsoft have a fair bit of control over the WMA architecture - the usual problem of not being able to view it on any other player because of the control?
Anyway, if everyone starts using it it becomes the standard. Sort of like internet explorer. Do we really want to go that way with WMA compression?
Michael
You are missing my point.
:) :) :)
I'm not missing your point. I understand the difference between having massively parallel system and something that is not deterministic
In fact, you could NEVER solve a 1024 variable instance of 3-SAT by naively testing all possibilities using a DNA computer because there aren't enough particles in the universe to represent even a tiny fraction of the solutions!
Thats a strong statement. It assumes that all solutions have to be present at once, not sequentially over time, or indeed that a DNA computer has to have all the solutions prefabricated in the first place. It is possible that DNA computers could assemble the answers from base pairs, for example.
My point is that if your algorithm is exponential time, I can ALWAYS beat your machine.
As I understand it, quantum computing currently has extreme scalability problems going beyond a few (? 11 AFAIK) qbits, as its hard to make a molecule big enough to hold all the quantum states.
So you make that comparison based on my worst case scenario (that every answer has to be prefabricated), your best case scenario (that you can read the quantum state of a large molecule), and the assumption that you can simply increase the complexity of a problem until a non deterministic approach is faster.
Personally, I was just commenting that DNA compting is very, very fast in principle. Perhaps we ought to rething 128 bit key lengths even on the basis of this. By the way, if quantum computing becomes practical, just how long will the key length need to get
My 2c worth
Michael
've wondered sometimes if the makers of floppy disks have lowered the quality of the disks over the last 10 years.
Yes, quality has fallen because:
1) Who is going to pay a premium for a good floppy?
2) Data density has increased so each bit has a weaker field and smaller footprint than the old 720 Kb disks - easier to demagnetise or scratch.
Michael
The only operations (under normal circumstances) an organism does with DNA is copy. Mutations (reversals, transpositions, etc.) occur because of chemical errors. That is the only operation it does really
.sig with regard to this.
Actually, we do alot more than that. How do you think that our immune system works? Every immune globulin is coded in DNA. Do you think we have DNA to produce an immune globulin to every possible molecule? Nope. We rearrange our DNA to produce matching (ie., stereochemical gloves that fit a specifically shaped and charged molecule) immune globulin. There may be similar stuff for our sense of smell.
Its alot more complex than that. Just like true neural computing has to do more than just weigh up a series of electrical inputs to a nerve - there are local and systemic hormonal messengers.
Its easy to make a mistake by interpreting a technology only in terms of your current understanding of technology. See my
Michael
These DNA computers, while being massively parallel, as you say, are still deterministic.
Yes. To put it in perspective, though, the average DNA base pair has a molecular weight of 610. So one mole of the substance (ie. 610 g) contains 6.022 x 10 e+23 base pairs.
So, assuming that it takes you 10 days to set up a computation - approximately 10 e+6 seconds, you have 6 * 10 e+17 computational units per second. This assumes the computation time is trivial (which it is, compared to the set up time of 10 days do make all the DNA).
Lets say that again. 600 000 000 000 000 000 computations per second. In a large beaker containing a few litres of solute.
Of course, each unit only holds a quaternery bit of information (ie., one of four states for the four kinds of nucleotide).
At the moment we have computers that can run in the GHz range, ie., 2 * 10 e+9 computations per second.
A DNA computer will be able to operate at at least 8 orders of magnitude faster than any current conventional computer, and potentially at 10 e+12 times faster with increased amounts of DNA and faster setup times.
It may be deterministic, but it will take us another 25+ years to get to this point on the intel roadmap - which of course should derail before then. In other words, this technology is faster than anything that can be or is likely to be done on silicon.
My 2c worth.
Michael