If Apple had another revolution up their sleeve, I would guess...
a button 'compile', then a button 'install', then a button 'done'!
Command Line Interface is an issue independent and unrelated to the people who have ever or never compiled things before. The OS that makes difficult things easy, and the impossible, possible.
Jef is almost talking about doing away with icons, close boxes, and button bars. Try to imagine what the UI to a word processor is without the preconceived notions of toolbars, icons, OS widgets, etc. The thought that the OS itself gets in the way of the app!
When you use your word processor, you use the keyboard to type; there's most of the input. So why not use that? That almost means a return to the command line, if you haven't noticed.
So you want to write a letter:
At a cli, just type:
write a letter to TWX the Linux Zealot
The OS should launch the preferred editor, with the appropriate format for a letter.
If one is still using a mouse, just click on where to start typing. Is it the header?
TWX the Linux Zealot
10220 Davenport Dr
Cupertino, Ca 95145
That's finished. Where next? The body?
Dear TWX,
It is with deepest regret that I inform you...
Then you finish your letter. Now what? email it? Print it? save it? What UI would you use if you didn't have icons to save you? No floppy disk, no printer, no letter icon?
How about the CLI again?
save letter to TWX the Linux Zealot at c:\documents\Louis\private
Letter interface closes!
Or, type:
save
And a window shows up with all unsaved documents. Click on the one that you want (pictures? the first line? Time and date? command that started it?) and it saves it. Do you care where? No, not really, as long as there is enough space, it's easy for you to find it, and the OS can find it again.
Printing. Easy. type:
print
Or
print last saved document
Or print last document
Or print letter to TWX
You get the idea. Icons and widgets, while useful at the time, are not the end all and be all of UI!
When you're writing a document in your favorite OS, be it OS X, Win2k, or Linux, it should be the interface of writing the document, and not the interface of the OS, that you should be dealing with. The constraint, put before by he and his crew upon the first iteration of the Mac OS, was of consistent UI so that all apps looked alike and felt alike. It was supposed to lessen the learning curve.
What he is saying isn't wrong. If the OS is an interface you have to learn first, before you can use your app or do your work, it is a waste of time, it is unnecessary. Hardware should be powerful enough today that the OS intrusion should be minimal. When you're using something like Netscape, a web browser, it should be a world of URLs, links, images, files, and content. You shouldn't have to worry about fonts, except perhaps as a preference, or printer setup, except when you want to choose specific printers, or about security settings, except when you want warnings or such. Compare that with Linux, and compare that with Windows. Printers and fonts and stuff just works behind the scenes. Netscape does it's part, and gets what it needs from the OS, without having to fiddle with configuring printers for Netscape, configuring fonts or font servers for Netscape, etc.
Or something similar with CD burning, under OS X and under Windows. If the drive is connected, all you have to do is drag files to it to burn stuff to it! No interface windows, no volume information, no format or filename or filesystem fiddling. Just treat is as another device to write to!
Treat ripping music, making mp3s, and burning them as one set of functions. That's iTunes. OS doesn't get in the way. In fact, if OS really didn't get in the way, the CD should automatically connect with CDDB, so that when you popped up explorer or Finder, the CD has all the names, titles, album info, etc. Drag one of these items into an MP3 folder, or just drag the whole CD into the MP3 folder, and mp3 files, or even a whole mp3 album, gets created. The UI, in this case drag and drop, don't get in the way, and are the seamless transparent means by which one could operate. The OS merges functionality with the Apps involved, but it's the app you're using that gets the focus.
His much maligned word processing example; start typing, and the OS should figure out you're writing an email, or a letter, or drafting a document. Does the system do it for you now? No, you need to find the right icon or the right folder, first. Why should this be? Why should the system be smart enough to figure out what we need? If you want to start browsing, just typing http://slashdot.org into a commandline-like interface should be enough to bring up Netscape. If you want to send an email, typing louisjr@nospam.com should bring up the right email program. Want to play music? How about 'play sad_songs' Or pop a CD into the drive. Want to copy it? 'copy CD to c:\scratch\music'
Of course, my own guesses and implementation of Jef's idea may be broken too. But I think there's merit.
Since it uses similar techniques to LCD manufacturing, expect similar sizes and pixel densities. Supposedly 20% cheaper because one doesn't need a backlight any more.
However, that still means $1000 for a similar OEL disply. Or would that OED?
What if this takes less power than an LCD? Then you really have no design choice if you want to create a powerful PDA that still happens to be miserly.
You may never see this on your desktop, replacing your CRT. But your next Palm, or Gameboy Advance, or handheld computing unit, may be built around the OEL for other properties; size, weight, power, etc.
Right now they are separate activities; browse a book in a store, or a library, or a friend's bookshel. Listen to music over the radio, on a friend's CD, or on the music channel. See a movie on TV, etc.
If someone could combine the browse, the search, the information, and the purchase of items all on one site, they might have something powerful ^^
I'd disagree on your interpretation, but agree on your sentiment.
Dot-com slump/failure *was* due to an over-focus on technology, and lack of focus on market. If there is a technical development, it becomes a market when someone sells it correctly. Otherwise, it will flounder. If a dot-com had no market, it wasn't because the market didn't exist, it was because they failed to create, master, and maximize their market. They had excellent technical products without problems they could solve.
So to address some of your points: Buy groceries online?
How about combining a recipe site, with grocery shopping, with delivery services, as well as streaming video 'lessons'? How about adding 'cooking' services to deliver the finished meal to your home? How would you tailor it to make money? I don't know, but it seems natural to combine the many recipe sites with the grocery sites with the delivery sites.
Who wants to buy groceries online? How about people who don't know how to pick a canteloupe? Or know when to buy bananas? Or can't tell which wine is any good? Or can't decide between red potatoes or yellow potatoes? Or don't know the subtleties of the different cuts of steaks? There's people who don't cook, that's obvious, because of all the fast food restaurants and dine in places all over SiValley. My reasoning could be flawed, since I'm pulling from the experience of myself, my college friends, and all their friends. We cook for fun, but we don't know what we're doing ^^
<em>Online purchasing is ideal for commodity items where you know what you're getting the moment you order it. Books, CDs, software... </em>
The genius who can overcome this mindset and problem will make lots of money ^^. A limitation that can be overcome is called an opportunity.
Reread what you said. Books, CDs, software. How can you buy *new* books, CDs, and software, online, if you've never tried the book, heard the music, or used the software? There are *outside* distribution channels that sell these products, and the internet is just used to organize the buyers and sellers. So content sites that allow one to use software for free, unlock functionality for a nominal fee, and unlimited download and use for a higher fee, is an *opportunity*. Or with books. Browse for free. Read unlimited amounts online for a small service charge (maintenance fee?), get hardcopies for a small price. Same with CDs. Or DVDs. Etc.
There's a market. Someone who wants to get all the niceties of radio broadcast, or tv broadcast, or libraries, combine it with the catalog, search, review, and query capabilities of the internet, tie it with the relative distribution efficiency of the internet, as well as the large potential market audience, and finally tieing into the consumer need to 'own', can make lots of money. Right now they are all independent. I can look up reviews and information online. I can hear, read, or watch in real life. I can order and purchase online, in a separate transaction. I cannot yet get all three services from one site, or a group of sites. Amazon is *building* itself that way, but it's not there yet.
If the author of this article, referencing Leadbeater, is correct in his interpretation... I'm glad the geeks won!
I so do not want to live in a world as described by Leadbeater... The net is perfectly fine the way it is, and in a very bottoms up, needs driven way, is evolving, albeitly in a non-hurried and eventful way, into whatever it is best suited and best needed for.
We *already* have television and radio networks for the dissemination of media and 'content'. The net itself is a self publishing, self pruning system where people can spout, and fade away to noise if no one wants to listen. I like it that way.
If I knew what I was working on, e-speak, would make the world *more* like Leadbeater's vision, I would quit.
It also sounds like Leadbeater is trying to 'rewrite' history to reflect his biases. I hope he fails!
I was actually thinking that if you have some simple asynch logic to generate a clock signal, you could probably pretty trivially do the clock scaling.
However, I don't know how linear the ramp would be, nor do I know if the XScale has a linear ramp. Does XScale have a small set of pre-defined clock rates, or is it literally some continuous well defined function determinate upon the input voltage?
Just a question, if you really do have internal access to the X-scale stuff. This MHz based on voltage sounds suspiciously like asynchronous processing, in which changing the input voltage changes the rate at which signals pull up or down.
Is it some clock like signal that is asynchronous? Or are portions of the control pipeline asynchronous? Or is this just terribly nifty synchronous logic?
As an AC reply to your post has pointed out, technological improvements help too.
IE, all the theory for Relativity and relativistic effects have been around since Maxwell and Newton, with Newton providing the classical approximations and Maxwell providing the framework for information at the speed of light in 1862, but it wasn't until 1905 that relativity was born from Einstein. Why the 50 year wait?
So the argument 'do you seriously suppose that in over 100 years of eeg no-one would have detected them before?' isn't valid. The lack or proof of mirror cells is not at all tied to how long it took to detect them ^^
Excuse my pathetic attempt to use Einstein and Maxwell in my argument. Just using the example that having all the information available, and actually creating something from it, is not necessarily so simple.
If you target a game into the context of winners and losers, then you may be right;
But if you have 5 people playing and only one winner at any one time, is that zero sum?
1 winner - 4 losers = -3?
Like Q3Arena, for example, in which there can be teams of 5 on 5 playing capture the flag for 9 rounds. Sure, at the end of ten rounds there can only be one winner, but for each individual playing, the game is much more than zero sum, winning and losing.
It's the team play, the cooperation, the strategy, the resource and player allocation, the team to team interaction. It's couched in the traditional competitive zero sum winner takes all game, but the actual game itself is so much more than just being the winner of 9 rounds.
If you want to take games in a slightly different context, they make the learning of certain lessons fun and enjoyable. If a game isn't fun, it isn't a game.
Here are games that are fun that teach us things:
Monopoly/Chess/Checkers/Risk==strategy
Twister==How to interact with people of the other sex
The game doesn't have to be presented as an object lesson for it to be an effective one, right?
So kids don't have to think about zero sum, or game theory, or that life is depressing or unfair and unhappy.
As an adult, it's very valid to try to shape the kids perceptions by trying to present them games that happen to teach them lessons. The kids don't have to know this, of course!
I think any constructive long term game is non-zero sum; people have already mentioned the Sim games. There's also Civilization, the ThemeX games, and a bunch of other management/resource type games.
While they are definitely competitive, they aren't zero sum.
Then there are actually games like QuakeArena in which players ally themselves into teams. While teams may be zero sum, within a team itself the game is non-zero sum, with cooperation, strategy, and interaction dictating the effectiveness or lack thereof of a team.
I wouldn't predict 'direct neural tapping' to be as mindblowing as you suggest.
If we all have our brains wired up to computers, they can perhaps become extensions of ourselves, the way a watch, a shoe, a sword can become an extension of a person.
But that does not mean we can become extensions of each other. People with quick and adaptable brains, in the neuro-plasticity sense, and not the smart and gifted sense, might be able to quickly learn how to communicate with each other, any more than two people from the same school speaking the same language are extensions of each other.
One would *still* have to interpret each person, the same way we interpret our vision, our sounds, our smells, our reality. We gain one more sensory organ, perhaps, but that's about it. We'd probably have to invent a synchronization language to allow ourselves to taste our SO's ice cream, but it still wouldn't mean *we* would be tasting it. It would probably still route it through our own taste centers, just that our two different taste centers may start to synchronize more.
A car currently only allows for two/three degrees of freedom, what with the accelerator/brake and steering.
The proper analogy is if we use the muscles to actually control/dictate the ABS system, the 4 wheel independent suspension (anticipating speedbumps and potholes with active control), and 4 wheel drive.
I think it's one of the goals of Apple, as per their digital lifestyle.
Walk up to an Apple Cube+SE with Bluetooth and wireless firewire and, miraculously...
It detects your PDA and starts synching
It detects your MP3 player and starts up background processes to configure and transfer music
It detects your cell phone/pager unit and starts updating information
Then when you sit down to the OS, and start on a document, that application gains central focus. They tried this in OS X with the one application mode, but that sorta lost out to general opinion.
Their view that the Finder is just an application into browsing and viewing the PC and network, and not the PC or network itself, is one step I think. It's a very strong bias into the shaping of what the user thinks the PC or network is, but it can be swapped out into an email program, so that the network appears to be email lists, users, websites, emails, notes, attachments, and local storage. Or switch it into a web browser, and the device starts to look like web pages, music, movies, external sites, local storage, and information.
It's an entirely new interface, and is not limited by the older constraints of older interfaces.
Meaning that, unlike a cheap Power Glove, you are not limited to the degrees of freedom that your fingers and hand have. If you want to tap the muscular controls of your entire body, you can. If you want to tap into the muscles of just your arm, you can. If you just want the hand, you can. So it is already a superset of the powerglove. It would also mean that you aren't limited to on/off switches, but also the more analog like nature of muscle response over time and signal strength.
What use can the complex neural net have? Why not do an analogy?
We have fly by wire systems in which a computer device controls an aircraft and multiple control surfaces in ways and at rates that humans cannot, because there is too much information too process.
Not lets switch the direction of logic; you have a human controller, with much more sensitive and flexible control points than a Power Glove or joystick can sense. The neural net would allow one to almost directly map the human musculature to the airplane control surface, allowing both more control and higher reliability, without reducing flexibility or increasing complexity. It's not perfect, of course, but it's conceivable that all one needs to do is don a light slave suit and control a plane in the same way one would control rollerblades or skis; muscle control!
I don't think what this guy is proposing works against Apple's design goals.
As per the OS as an interface between applications and the computer, that is *always* necessary even if it's nothing more than an abstraction layer that allows applications and devices to communicate with a uniform series of APIs. In which case OS X is bundles, Quartz, Cocoa, XML configuration files, Quicktime, a filesystem, the Finder, and a few other things.
Aqua, as a GUI, is an interface between which a human user can interact with the network, the applications, documents, data, and other tools. It is, as the name implies, just a Graphical User Interface into which all the other components plug in. Apple is espousing the digital lifestyle, in which you work with PDAs, mp3 players, camcorders, cameras, VCRs, TVs, radios, what have you, as these little tools Jeff may be talking about, but using OS X, Aqua, and all the other little things as a glue to network them all together.
Nothing is conflicting or contradictory, except perhaps in the analysis that OS X gets in the way, or enhances one's 'digital lifestyle'. Steve thinks it's a multiplier. I have to agree, in that having iMovie, which sits on top of the OS X, using the Aqua interface, allows us to do non linear editing and connects our camcorders, our imaginations, our CD-RW and DVD-R devices together in ways that cannot happen without an OS and without a UI, especially a GUI.
The same can be said with MP3s, mp3 players, CDs, and iTunes. Or Final Cut Pro, DVD-R, camcorders, digital cameras, CDs, MP3s, and DVD players. Aqua is the interface between all the software, the software is enabled with Quicktime, Quartz, and firewire, and all of the above sits on OS X.
It's like arguing language is an impediment to understanding; it is, because it's constructs and semantics can create misunderstanding, when one needs to also see that without language, there doesn't exist a medium from which communication exists (yet).
When devices all talk to each other wirelessly with XML packets and have AI to the point of 'grokking' each other, then OSes and such will not be needed. Until then, OSes and GUIs will allow such devices to interface with each other and with us.
I don't think 64bit transitioning is as tough as you make it; 64bit PowerPC would be much simpler to architect for, especially if they have 32bit compatibility and transparency, so that for a generation or two things run at par or slightly faster until the software is updated and optimized towards 64bit processing.
They have their respective SoftWindows and VirtualPC software, as well as their own copies of games released on their platform, that isn't currently released under Linux. Is the emulation software on those platforms stopping the porting and production of games for that market?
So it isn't the emulation issue that seems to stop the games (though admittedly the performance of x86 on PowerPC isn't very hot either)
How about a nod towards the PowerPC for balancing power and performance?
AMD for now has a huge performance lead, at the sacrifice of power. Intel has a huge marketing and manufacturing lead, with slightly less power and slightly less performance.
Transmeta wipes the floor with power, at the sacrifice of performance.
How bout something in between?
PowerPC, with good power, and good performance?
Why do you think faster processors are the only way to beat Intel?
You know what I'm desperately hoping for?
Computers that are Fast Enough. Are Macs? I dunno, I guess they might be.
Not only are they *fast enough*, but they are engineered. Quiet. Cool. Easy to upgrade and fix. Useable. Reliable.
I'm drawing qualities from cars; at first they were simple, crude, and very expensive. Elite, even. Eventually they became extensions and expressions of our personality. They became specialized, tailored, fashionable, and above all, reliable. They don't regularly crash and stall, now.
I want computers the same. Notebooks, desktops, TiVos, communications devices, consoles, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
What?
It's bad to click install and then finish/done?
If Apple had another revolution up their sleeve, I would guess...
a button 'compile', then a button 'install', then a button 'done'!
Command Line Interface is an issue independent and unrelated to the people who have ever or never compiled things before. The OS that makes difficult things easy, and the impossible, possible.
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That's some of the problem, right there.
Jef is almost talking about doing away with icons, close boxes, and button bars. Try to imagine what the UI to a word processor is without the preconceived notions of toolbars, icons, OS widgets, etc. The thought that the OS itself gets in the way of the app!
When you use your word processor, you use the keyboard to type; there's most of the input. So why not use that? That almost means a return to the command line, if you haven't noticed.
So you want to write a letter:
At a cli, just type:
write a letter to TWX the Linux Zealot
The OS should launch the preferred editor, with the appropriate format for a letter.
If one is still using a mouse, just click on where to start typing. Is it the header?
TWX the Linux Zealot
10220 Davenport Dr
Cupertino, Ca 95145
That's finished. Where next? The body?
Dear TWX,
It is with deepest regret that I inform you...
Then you finish your letter. Now what? email it? Print it? save it? What UI would you use if you didn't have icons to save you? No floppy disk, no printer, no letter icon?
How about the CLI again?
save letter to TWX the Linux Zealot at c:\documents\Louis\private
Letter interface closes!
Or, type:
save
And a window shows up with all unsaved documents. Click on the one that you want (pictures? the first line? Time and date? command that started it?) and it saves it. Do you care where? No, not really, as long as there is enough space, it's easy for you to find it, and the OS can find it again.
Printing. Easy. type:
print
Or
print last saved document
Or print last document
Or print letter to TWX
You get the idea. Icons and widgets, while useful at the time, are not the end all and be all of UI!
Geek dating!
Jef is right.
When you're writing a document in your favorite OS, be it OS X, Win2k, or Linux, it should be the interface of writing the document, and not the interface of the OS, that you should be dealing with. The constraint, put before by he and his crew upon the first iteration of the Mac OS, was of consistent UI so that all apps looked alike and felt alike. It was supposed to lessen the learning curve.
What he is saying isn't wrong. If the OS is an interface you have to learn first, before you can use your app or do your work, it is a waste of time, it is unnecessary. Hardware should be powerful enough today that the OS intrusion should be minimal. When you're using something like Netscape, a web browser, it should be a world of URLs, links, images, files, and content. You shouldn't have to worry about fonts, except perhaps as a preference, or printer setup, except when you want to choose specific printers, or about security settings, except when you want warnings or such. Compare that with Linux, and compare that with Windows. Printers and fonts and stuff just works behind the scenes. Netscape does it's part, and gets what it needs from the OS, without having to fiddle with configuring printers for Netscape, configuring fonts or font servers for Netscape, etc.
Or something similar with CD burning, under OS X and under Windows. If the drive is connected, all you have to do is drag files to it to burn stuff to it! No interface windows, no volume information, no format or filename or filesystem fiddling. Just treat is as another device to write to!
Treat ripping music, making mp3s, and burning them as one set of functions. That's iTunes. OS doesn't get in the way. In fact, if OS really didn't get in the way, the CD should automatically connect with CDDB, so that when you popped up explorer or Finder, the CD has all the names, titles, album info, etc. Drag one of these items into an MP3 folder, or just drag the whole CD into the MP3 folder, and mp3 files, or even a whole mp3 album, gets created. The UI, in this case drag and drop, don't get in the way, and are the seamless transparent means by which one could operate. The OS merges functionality with the Apps involved, but it's the app you're using that gets the focus.
His much maligned word processing example; start typing, and the OS should figure out you're writing an email, or a letter, or drafting a document. Does the system do it for you now? No, you need to find the right icon or the right folder, first. Why should this be? Why should the system be smart enough to figure out what we need? If you want to start browsing, just typing http://slashdot.org into a commandline-like interface should be enough to bring up Netscape. If you want to send an email, typing louisjr@nospam.com should bring up the right email program. Want to play music? How about 'play sad_songs' Or pop a CD into the drive. Want to copy it? 'copy CD to c:\scratch\music'
Of course, my own guesses and implementation of Jef's idea may be broken too. But I think there's merit.
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Poor you, you'd have been enlightened if you had followed that link!
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It's only beta!
Since it uses similar techniques to LCD manufacturing, expect similar sizes and pixel densities. Supposedly 20% cheaper because one doesn't need a backlight any more.
However, that still means $1000 for a similar OEL disply. Or would that OED?
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Here
Mentions '20% cheaper' and uses less power than LCD...
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Probably because you wouldn't have a choice.
What if this takes less power than an LCD? Then you really have no design choice if you want to create a powerful PDA that still happens to be miserly.
You may never see this on your desktop, replacing your CRT. But your next Palm, or Gameboy Advance, or handheld computing unit, may be built around the OEL for other properties; size, weight, power, etc.
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My point was that you can't try books online.
Right now they are separate activities; browse a book in a store, or a library, or a friend's bookshel. Listen to music over the radio, on a friend's CD, or on the music channel. See a movie on TV, etc.
If someone could combine the browse, the search, the information, and the purchase of items all on one site, they might have something powerful ^^
Geek dating!
I'd disagree on your interpretation, but agree on your sentiment.
Dot-com slump/failure *was* due to an over-focus on technology, and lack of focus on market. If there is a technical development, it becomes a market when someone sells it correctly. Otherwise, it will flounder. If a dot-com had no market, it wasn't because the market didn't exist, it was because they failed to create, master, and maximize their market. They had excellent technical products without problems they could solve.
So to address some of your points: Buy groceries online?
How about combining a recipe site, with grocery shopping, with delivery services, as well as streaming video 'lessons'? How about adding 'cooking' services to deliver the finished meal to your home? How would you tailor it to make money? I don't know, but it seems natural to combine the many recipe sites with the grocery sites with the delivery sites.
Who wants to buy groceries online? How about people who don't know how to pick a canteloupe? Or know when to buy bananas? Or can't tell which wine is any good? Or can't decide between red potatoes or yellow potatoes? Or don't know the subtleties of the different cuts of steaks? There's people who don't cook, that's obvious, because of all the fast food restaurants and dine in places all over SiValley. My reasoning could be flawed, since I'm pulling from the experience of myself, my college friends, and all their friends. We cook for fun, but we don't know what we're doing ^^
<em>Online purchasing is ideal for commodity items where you know what you're getting the moment you order it. Books, CDs, software... </em>
The genius who can overcome this mindset and problem will make lots of money ^^. A limitation that can be overcome is called an opportunity.
Reread what you said. Books, CDs, software. How can you buy *new* books, CDs, and software, online, if you've never tried the book, heard the music, or used the software? There are *outside* distribution channels that sell these products, and the internet is just used to organize the buyers and sellers. So content sites that allow one to use software for free, unlock functionality for a nominal fee, and unlimited download and use for a higher fee, is an *opportunity*. Or with books. Browse for free. Read unlimited amounts online for a small service charge (maintenance fee?), get hardcopies for a small price. Same with CDs. Or DVDs. Etc.
There's a market. Someone who wants to get all the niceties of radio broadcast, or tv broadcast, or libraries, combine it with the catalog, search, review, and query capabilities of the internet, tie it with the relative distribution efficiency of the internet, as well as the large potential market audience, and finally tieing into the consumer need to 'own', can make lots of money. Right now they are all independent. I can look up reviews and information online. I can hear, read, or watch in real life. I can order and purchase online, in a separate transaction. I cannot yet get all three services from one site, or a group of sites. Amazon is *building* itself that way, but it's not there yet.
Do you see what I mean?
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If the author of this article, referencing Leadbeater, is correct in his interpretation... I'm glad the geeks won!
I so do not want to live in a world as described by Leadbeater... The net is perfectly fine the way it is, and in a very bottoms up, needs driven way, is evolving, albeitly in a non-hurried and eventful way, into whatever it is best suited and best needed for.
We *already* have television and radio networks for the dissemination of media and 'content'. The net itself is a self publishing, self pruning system where people can spout, and fade away to noise if no one wants to listen. I like it that way.
If I knew what I was working on, e-speak, would make the world *more* like Leadbeater's vision, I would quit.
It also sounds like Leadbeater is trying to 'rewrite' history to reflect his biases. I hope he fails!
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Dynamically change the clock multiplier?
I was actually thinking that if you have some simple asynch logic to generate a clock signal, you could probably pretty trivially do the clock scaling.
However, I don't know how linear the ramp would be, nor do I know if the XScale has a linear ramp. Does XScale have a small set of pre-defined clock rates, or is it literally some continuous well defined function determinate upon the input voltage?
Oh well, neat trick, regardless.
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Just a question, if you really do have internal access to the X-scale stuff. This MHz based on voltage sounds suspiciously like asynchronous processing, in which changing the input voltage changes the rate at which signals pull up or down.
Is it some clock like signal that is asynchronous? Or are portions of the control pipeline asynchronous? Or is this just terribly nifty synchronous logic?
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As an AC reply to your post has pointed out, technological improvements help too.
IE, all the theory for Relativity and relativistic effects have been around since Maxwell and Newton, with Newton providing the classical approximations and Maxwell providing the framework for information at the speed of light in 1862, but it wasn't until 1905 that relativity was born from Einstein. Why the 50 year wait?
So the argument 'do you seriously suppose that in over 100 years of eeg no-one would have detected them before?' isn't valid. The lack or proof of mirror cells is not at all tied to how long it took to detect them ^^
Excuse my pathetic attempt to use Einstein and Maxwell in my argument. Just using the example that having all the information available, and actually creating something from it, is not necessarily so simple.
Geek dating!
If you target a game into the context of winners and losers, then you may be right;
But if you have 5 people playing and only one winner at any one time, is that zero sum?
1 winner - 4 losers = -3?
Like Q3Arena, for example, in which there can be teams of 5 on 5 playing capture the flag for 9 rounds. Sure, at the end of ten rounds there can only be one winner, but for each individual playing, the game is much more than zero sum, winning and losing.
It's the team play, the cooperation, the strategy, the resource and player allocation, the team to team interaction. It's couched in the traditional competitive zero sum winner takes all game, but the actual game itself is so much more than just being the winner of 9 rounds.
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If you want to take games in a slightly different context, they make the learning of certain lessons fun and enjoyable. If a game isn't fun, it isn't a game.
Here are games that are fun that teach us things:
Monopoly/Chess/Checkers/Risk==strategy
Twister==How to interact with people of the other sex
The game doesn't have to be presented as an object lesson for it to be an effective one, right?
So kids don't have to think about zero sum, or game theory, or that life is depressing or unfair and unhappy.
As an adult, it's very valid to try to shape the kids perceptions by trying to present them games that happen to teach them lessons. The kids don't have to know this, of course!
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They also happen to be very popular!
I think any constructive long term game is non-zero sum; people have already mentioned the Sim games. There's also Civilization, the ThemeX games, and a bunch of other management/resource type games.
While they are definitely competitive, they aren't zero sum.
Then there are actually games like QuakeArena in which players ally themselves into teams. While teams may be zero sum, within a team itself the game is non-zero sum, with cooperation, strategy, and interaction dictating the effectiveness or lack thereof of a team.
Louis
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Resistance is futile.
I wouldn't predict 'direct neural tapping' to be as mindblowing as you suggest.
If we all have our brains wired up to computers, they can perhaps become extensions of ourselves, the way a watch, a shoe, a sword can become an extension of a person.
But that does not mean we can become extensions of each other. People with quick and adaptable brains, in the neuro-plasticity sense, and not the smart and gifted sense, might be able to quickly learn how to communicate with each other, any more than two people from the same school speaking the same language are extensions of each other.
One would *still* have to interpret each person, the same way we interpret our vision, our sounds, our smells, our reality. We gain one more sensory organ, perhaps, but that's about it. We'd probably have to invent a synchronization language to allow ourselves to taste our SO's ice cream, but it still wouldn't mean *we* would be tasting it. It would probably still route it through our own taste centers, just that our two different taste centers may start to synchronize more.
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A car currently only allows for two/three degrees of freedom, what with the accelerator/brake and steering.
The proper analogy is if we use the muscles to actually control/dictate the ABS system, the 4 wheel independent suspension (anticipating speedbumps and potholes with active control), and 4 wheel drive.
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I think it's one of the goals of Apple, as per their digital lifestyle.
Walk up to an Apple Cube+SE with Bluetooth and wireless firewire and, miraculously...
It detects your PDA and starts synching
It detects your MP3 player and starts up background processes to configure and transfer music
It detects your cell phone/pager unit and starts updating information
Then when you sit down to the OS, and start on a document, that application gains central focus. They tried this in OS X with the one application mode, but that sorta lost out to general opinion.
Their view that the Finder is just an application into browsing and viewing the PC and network, and not the PC or network itself, is one step I think. It's a very strong bias into the shaping of what the user thinks the PC or network is, but it can be swapped out into an email program, so that the network appears to be email lists, users, websites, emails, notes, attachments, and local storage. Or switch it into a web browser, and the device starts to look like web pages, music, movies, external sites, local storage, and information.
Does that sound right?
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It's an entirely new interface, and is not limited by the older constraints of older interfaces.
Meaning that, unlike a cheap Power Glove, you are not limited to the degrees of freedom that your fingers and hand have. If you want to tap the muscular controls of your entire body, you can. If you want to tap into the muscles of just your arm, you can. If you just want the hand, you can. So it is already a superset of the powerglove. It would also mean that you aren't limited to on/off switches, but also the more analog like nature of muscle response over time and signal strength.
What use can the complex neural net have? Why not do an analogy?
We have fly by wire systems in which a computer device controls an aircraft and multiple control surfaces in ways and at rates that humans cannot, because there is too much information too process.
Not lets switch the direction of logic; you have a human controller, with much more sensitive and flexible control points than a Power Glove or joystick can sense. The neural net would allow one to almost directly map the human musculature to the airplane control surface, allowing both more control and higher reliability, without reducing flexibility or increasing complexity. It's not perfect, of course, but it's conceivable that all one needs to do is don a light slave suit and control a plane in the same way one would control rollerblades or skis; muscle control!
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I don't think what this guy is proposing works against Apple's design goals.
As per the OS as an interface between applications and the computer, that is *always* necessary even if it's nothing more than an abstraction layer that allows applications and devices to communicate with a uniform series of APIs. In which case OS X is bundles, Quartz, Cocoa, XML configuration files, Quicktime, a filesystem, the Finder, and a few other things.
Aqua, as a GUI, is an interface between which a human user can interact with the network, the applications, documents, data, and other tools. It is, as the name implies, just a Graphical User Interface into which all the other components plug in. Apple is espousing the digital lifestyle, in which you work with PDAs, mp3 players, camcorders, cameras, VCRs, TVs, radios, what have you, as these little tools Jeff may be talking about, but using OS X, Aqua, and all the other little things as a glue to network them all together.
Nothing is conflicting or contradictory, except perhaps in the analysis that OS X gets in the way, or enhances one's 'digital lifestyle'. Steve thinks it's a multiplier. I have to agree, in that having iMovie, which sits on top of the OS X, using the Aqua interface, allows us to do non linear editing and connects our camcorders, our imaginations, our CD-RW and DVD-R devices together in ways that cannot happen without an OS and without a UI, especially a GUI.
The same can be said with MP3s, mp3 players, CDs, and iTunes. Or Final Cut Pro, DVD-R, camcorders, digital cameras, CDs, MP3s, and DVD players. Aqua is the interface between all the software, the software is enabled with Quicktime, Quartz, and firewire, and all of the above sits on OS X.
It's like arguing language is an impediment to understanding; it is, because it's constructs and semantics can create misunderstanding, when one needs to also see that without language, there doesn't exist a medium from which communication exists (yet).
When devices all talk to each other wirelessly with XML packets and have AI to the point of 'grokking' each other, then OSes and such will not be needed. Until then, OSes and GUIs will allow such devices to interface with each other and with us.
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Um... the G5?
I don't think 64bit transitioning is as tough as you make it; 64bit PowerPC would be much simpler to architect for, especially if they have 32bit compatibility and transparency, so that for a generation or two things run at par or slightly faster until the software is updated and optimized towards 64bit processing.
But that's just a Guess
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They have their respective SoftWindows and VirtualPC software, as well as their own copies of games released on their platform, that isn't currently released under Linux. Is the emulation software on those platforms stopping the porting and production of games for that market?
So it isn't the emulation issue that seems to stop the games (though admittedly the performance of x86 on PowerPC isn't very hot either)
Louis
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How about a nod towards the PowerPC for balancing power and performance?
AMD for now has a huge performance lead, at the sacrifice of power. Intel has a huge marketing and manufacturing lead, with slightly less power and slightly less performance.
Transmeta wipes the floor with power, at the sacrifice of performance.
How bout something in between?
PowerPC, with good power, and good performance?
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Why do you think faster processors are the only way to beat Intel?
You know what I'm desperately hoping for?
Computers that are Fast Enough. Are Macs? I dunno, I guess they might be.
Not only are they *fast enough*, but they are engineered. Quiet. Cool. Easy to upgrade and fix. Useable. Reliable.
I'm drawing qualities from cars; at first they were simple, crude, and very expensive. Elite, even. Eventually they became extensions and expressions of our personality. They became specialized, tailored, fashionable, and above all, reliable. They don't regularly crash and stall, now.
I want computers the same. Notebooks, desktops, TiVos, communications devices, consoles, etc.
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