Lincoln Logs are not Turing complete and are therefore not listed.
Ultimately I prefer a mill, lathe, drill press, and some aluminum stock.
Fully stocked machine shop > Lego Technic > Erector > Capsela > Tinkertoys > Lincoln Logs. (if I wanted to deal with erector, i'd be just at well off machining things from scratch. However, I find Lego Technics are quite good for prototyping mechanisms.)
This base has been pretty extravagantly decked out by previous occupants, and being outside Wamego, I suspect that this is the same same silo that was being used as a large scale LSD synthesis lab a few years back. Which brings up the question, how did it make its way onto EBay?
Here's an article originally from the San Francisco Chronicle about the LSD missile silo situation. IIRC, there was also a big article about it in Rolling Stone a while ago, but I don't have the issue around to check.
Not really. The field-effect transistors on a TFT screen have gates which behave like capacitors. You pump charge into the gate of the transistor to set the pixel on or off.
All this does is charge the capacitor faster by using a bigger current for a shorter time period.The same amount of current is used, so it has the same power cunsumption.
Add placement is just one step closer to advertorial. Once schools become dependent on this revenue, advertisers will be able to dictate their policies on the threat of withdrawing it.
Yeah, it's not as if colleges aren't primarily funded by private interests already.
Historically (pre- System 7.1) MacOS was free (as in beer.) You yould go to any Apple reseller with a stack of floppies and copy the installation disks, while the salespeople showed off their latest gewgaws. So this really isn't a new thing for Apple.
If the legal channel for anonymous trade (cash) is removed, people will invent their own cash.
i.e. you go to the seedy quickie-mart and buy a bunch of slim jims, and you exchange slim-jims for drugs with your drug dealer. The dealer then sells the slim-jims back to the quickie-mart at a discount. (the quickie-mart takes something ilke 5 or 10% off the transaction.)
This has been documented happening; it usually involves some unassuming and overpriced trinket that might be kept behind the counter.
optimized for a general-purpose instruction set and geared towards SISD integer instructions, with each processor running its own instruction stream with its own control flow.
So it seems like it can do everything a DSP can vis a vis hardware-level parallelism, plus some things that are hard for SIMD-style DSPs. Which is faster, 25 SISD processors sharing an address space, or one SIMD processor which can operate on 25-ary vectors?
Multiple SISD cores seem to win, I think, though they may be harder to program for.
Ask a DSP processor to play chess, and it'll
crawl.
The main bottleneck in chess program is a game tree search. Tree searches are inherently parallelizable, and there are, in fact, very good algorithms for doing them on SIMD processors.
Light dissipates on an exponential scale, though. It's far better to have many smaller light sources distributed over the area to be illuminated than to have a single bright source in the center.
Wrong. Light dissipates according to the inverse-square law. But the reason an incandescent 100W bulb is brighter than two 50W bulbs has nothing to do with this. It's because the filament is thicker in the higher-wattage bulb, and therefore can be run hotter, producing more visible light and less infrared.
Plug in 5 100W light bulbs in one room, and a 500W halogen bulb in another. See which room is more brightly illuminated.
Actually, you'd almost certainly be better off just building dedicated hardware optimized for JPEG/MPEG compression, like you already see in the hardware decoder cards for DVD. These either implement common computation-intensive parts of the CODEC algorithms in hardware, or use DSPs to implement them in firmware using hardware that's geared towards signal processing.
Running on a general-purpose device, even a parallel one, won't get you these benefits.
Uhm, a DSP is a general-purpose parallelized device.
It's not like their adders and multipliers are any faster then those in modern processors. The only real difference between a DSP and a CPU is that DSPs have typically embraced parallelism in hardware (VLIW, multiple cores on a chip, pipelining) to a greater extent than contemporary CPUs, at the necessary expense of backwards compatibility with earlier models.
25x looks to me like it could be a GREAT chip to do common DSP tasks like filtering or block discrete cosine transforms on.
This is not necessarily a problem. Look at lightbulbs. Many small bulbs is better than one large one - until a certain number fail there is no need to replace any.
On the other hand, one large bulb is better than many small ones - One 100W bulb is typically brighter than two 50W bulbs.
There are a number of these kinds of games. Other people have mentioned Crobots, Jrobots, and a dozen others I've never heard of. One of my favorites was RoboWar for the Mac, because it used a very small stack-based language, designed in such a way that the processor speed of the robot was limited. Each robot could execute only a limited number of operations per time step, which meant that efficient implementation of your algorithm was the biggest factor in how well your robot did. The author of the game also held annual tournaments that aspiring RoboWarriors could submit their entries to, and see how they fared against the state of the art. That meant that the robots, even with very limited computational capacity, had a very rapid evolution toward very sophisticated algorithms. Early robots just roved around and fired whenever they saw something in their sights. As time went on, the entries seen in the tournaments were able to camp in corners, dodge incoming fire, "lead" their targets, and employ inter-robot communication for team battles.
Learning throgh RoboWar to produce advanced behaviour out of a slow and limited language was a great help when I later went on to dabble in embedded systems--the skill set required is very similar.
Also, the world would have to move tens of billions of miles for appreciable climate change. The earth already moves over a billion towards and away from the sun in its yearly irregular orbit. In fact, the northern hemisphere's winter takes place when the earth is one billion miles closer.
That's impressive considering the average radius of Earch's orbit is 96 MILLion miles.
Remember a seismic wave travels at a finite velocity, and waves can be made to constructively interfere.
If you timed everyone's jump well enough you could make it so that the small vibrations from each individual jump would propagate out of China and all arrive at an outside target at the same time, without any destructive effect inside China.
Think of it this way: if you had 1000 people drop drops of water into a swimming pool at the same time, and all the drops were on the edge of a circle, you could create a large disturbance in the center of the circle that would be bigger than the disturbance at the drops themselves.
Now pulling this off would require a fairly advanced model of wave propagation through the earth, as the wave velocity varies through different layers of the crust. You'd probably only be able to concentrate a fraction of the available energy that way. Actually you're guaranteed low efficiency by the laws of thermodynamics. But in principle, concentrating seismic waves is certainly doable. in fact I'm sure there has been some military research into concentrating the seismic waves from precisely timed explosions.
That's kid stuff. With a simple modification you can make your desktop environment (not to mention your desk) into a fully sensual audiovisual experience in less than 30 minutes. Even Notepad now has 32 Billion colors of syntax autohilighting.
It's like MacOS X for the brain. No really, it's the same technology Steve Jobs depends on.
Man, and you thought your terminal had a "visual bell." Yowzah.
I saw a documentary on TLC a while ago about AI and such, and they mentioned a group of scientists who had done something similar to this. They were pretty vague about the whole thing but these people had basically taken a small clump of nerve cells (I want to say they were human brain cells, but I'm not sure...) and put them on this chip that would monitor their outputs and provide inputs. They had connected the whole thing to this computer which simulated a very simple 2D (pseudo-3d, kinda like Wolfenstein) environment, and trained the cells to move around in the virtual "world", avoiding walls and obstacles.
Camera+radar speeding ticket generators have been around for decades, but never found wide-scale deployment in the USA.
Another reason is that in most states, the driver is responsible for paying a ticket, not the owner of the vehicle. Taking a picture of the licence plate only gets you the name of the owner, who can just say they she wasn't driving the car when the picture was taken.
s/in vitro/in vivo/ above. (That is, electrodes in living animals.) There has been some work on trying to study networks in vitro as well (i.e., in an artificial cell culture grown on an electrode array,) but it's quite difficult--good electrodes are hard to make small enough, and even on the best electrode arrays you have to rely on luck to provide you with cells that wind up close enough to the electrodes to provide a good signal, and you wtill have very little idea about how the cells are connected. Another problem is the neurons will tend to move around a bit, so it's hard to track changes over time in such a culture. These problems could also be helped by this technique, by controlling the growth of interconnections and keeping the cells happy in one place.
I think the best immediate application for this kind of technology is not in constructign useful biological circuits, but in doing basic research on the properties of the nerve cells themselves. Traditionally, most of our knowledge about how nerve cells operate has come from studies of single cells in isolation, and in vitro recording. Neither of these techniques give very much information about the mechanisms which govern interaction between neurons, especially in the ways that their growth and behavior is influenced by neighboring cells. A technique which allows us to control the growth of a nerve culture would be a great tool for studying those interactions, becaue you would be able to more tightly control the interactions present (as opposed to blindly jamming electrodes into brains and trying to infer circuits and connections from correlations in firing patterns, which is more or less the standard technique.)
Koch in Biophysics of Computation showed that given what we know about neurons, they can theoretically implement equivalents of addition, multiplication, feedback, and many other computations, all within a single cell! The range of possibilities is enourmous, and requires a controlled environment to study the different tyeps of interactions. This could be a very important tool for research.
You're right, I goofed on the size. Having only audio input is a good point too, you'd think they would have a data MD drive by now. In fact, I seem to remember they did at one point, but there was very little demand for it because everyone had "cheap," "reliable" Zip Drives. (excuse me while I laugh hysterically) But i'd think it'd be trivial to put a USB connection into a portable MD recorder--how about it, Sony?
As far as the bitrate goes, 74min in 140MB does in fact work out to 256kbps.
These CDs are 3 inches wide, hold around 180 megabytes, cost $2 each for non-rewritable blanks, and the player will be very sensitive to skipping from external forces like any CD player.
Whereas a MiniDisc is 2.5" wide, holds 256 MB, costs $2 each for a rewritable blank disk, the player is much less sesceptible to skipping, and uses ATRAC2, which at 256Kbps is generally regarded to be superior to mp3 at the same bit rate,
So why bother with this mutant mp3-cd player? It won't even play my CDs.
Erm. Google doesn't normally search through newsgroups. It may search through mailing list archives, if the archives are on the web. But Google Groups does not index mailing lists.
The January 2001 issue, to be exact. The article's not available online ($5 to download a PDF?? WTF??) but it's right there on page 74. A fascinating read, very detailed, with lots of great pictures.
Well, as long as we're talking about the origins of first person 3d games, there was a hit game for the Mac around 1988 or so, called The Colony
Sure, its graphics were primitive. And the low frame rate forced it to focus on puzzle-solving and plot rather than combat and reflexes. But that wasn't necessarily a bad thing; its plot was (and is) still better than almost anything else I've ever seen.
It remembered its roots, too; the plot borrowed heavily from Aliens and from 2001, and sure enough, there's a replica of Bave Bowman's suite, with a monolith inside, and many of the puzzles involve moving things around with a forklift that looked (and sounded) like the one Ripley used in Aliens. And the game contained a mini-clone of Battlezone (of course, the granddaddy of them all.)
Sadly, I think it'd be classified as abandonware now; I don't think Mindscape still exists. Does anyone have this game lying around? Particularly the color version, released soon after the Mac II came out? (Yep, it's that old...) I'd love to fire up a Mac emulator and play this again, with a decent framerate this time.
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Lincoln Logs are not Turing complete and are therefore not listed.
Ultimately I prefer a mill, lathe, drill press, and some aluminum stock.
Fully stocked machine shop > Lego Technic > Erector > Capsela > Tinkertoys > Lincoln Logs. (if I wanted to deal with erector, i'd be just at well off machining things from scratch. However, I find Lego Technics are quite good for prototyping mechanisms.)
Here's an article originally from the San Francisco Chronicle about the LSD missile silo situation. IIRC, there was also a big article about it in Rolling Stone a while ago, but I don't have the issue around to check.
All this does is charge the capacitor faster by using a bigger current for a shorter time period.The same amount of current is used, so it has the same power cunsumption.
Add placement is just one step closer to advertorial. Once schools become dependent on this revenue, advertisers will be able to dictate their policies on the threat of withdrawing it.
Yeah, it's not as if colleges aren't primarily funded by private interests already.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Historically (pre- System 7.1) MacOS was free (as in beer.) You yould go to any Apple reseller with a stack of floppies and copy the installation disks, while the salespeople showed off their latest gewgaws. So this really isn't a new thing for Apple.
bonobo's are actually a species of monkey with hyper-sexual behavior.
Ape.
Your comment violated the postersubj compression filter. Comment aborted.
(more crap to get mast the l***ness filter)
(yet more crap)
(this is my fourth try now)
god DAMN you people!
grrr...
(Use the Preview Button! Check those URLs! Don't forget the http://!)
i.e. you go to the seedy quickie-mart and buy a bunch of slim jims, and you exchange slim-jims for drugs with your drug dealer. The dealer then sells the slim-jims back to the quickie-mart at a discount. (the quickie-mart takes something ilke 5 or 10% off the transaction.)
This has been documented happening; it usually involves some unassuming and overpriced trinket that might be kept behind the counter.
You mean like Texas Instrument's TMS320C80 DSP?
optimized for a general-purpose instruction set and geared towards SISD integer instructions, with each processor running its own instruction stream with its own control flow.
So it seems like it can do everything a DSP can vis a vis hardware-level parallelism, plus some things that are hard for SIMD-style DSPs. Which is faster, 25 SISD processors sharing an address space, or one SIMD processor which can operate on 25-ary vectors? Multiple SISD cores seem to win, I think, though they may be harder to program for.
Ask a DSP processor to play chess, and it'll crawl.
The main bottleneck in chess program is a game tree search. Tree searches are inherently parallelizable, and there are, in fact, very good algorithms for doing them on SIMD processors.
Wrong. Light dissipates according to the inverse-square law. But the reason an incandescent 100W bulb is brighter than two 50W bulbs has nothing to do with this. It's because the filament is thicker in the higher-wattage bulb, and therefore can be run hotter, producing more visible light and less infrared.
Plug in 5 100W light bulbs in one room, and a 500W halogen bulb in another. See which room is more brightly illuminated.
And yes, this is quite OT.
Running on a general-purpose device, even a parallel one, won't get you these benefits.
Uhm, a DSP is a general-purpose parallelized device.
It's not like their adders and multipliers are any faster then those in modern processors. The only real difference between a DSP and a CPU is that DSPs have typically embraced parallelism in hardware (VLIW, multiple cores on a chip, pipelining) to a greater extent than contemporary CPUs, at the necessary expense of backwards compatibility with earlier models.
25x looks to me like it could be a GREAT chip to do common DSP tasks like filtering or block discrete cosine transforms on.
On the other hand, one large bulb is better than many small ones - One 100W bulb is typically brighter than two 50W bulbs.
Learning throgh RoboWar to produce advanced behaviour out of a slow and limited language was a great help when I later went on to dabble in embedded systems--the skill set required is very similar.
That's impressive considering the average radius of Earch's orbit is 96 MILLion miles.
If you timed everyone's jump well enough you could make it so that the small vibrations from each individual jump would propagate out of China and all arrive at an outside target at the same time, without any destructive effect inside China.
Think of it this way: if you had 1000 people drop drops of water into a swimming pool at the same time, and all the drops were on the edge of a circle, you could create a large disturbance in the center of the circle that would be bigger than the disturbance at the drops themselves.
Now pulling this off would require a fairly advanced model of wave propagation through the earth, as the wave velocity varies through different layers of the crust. You'd probably only be able to concentrate a fraction of the available energy that way. Actually you're guaranteed low efficiency by the laws of thermodynamics. But in principle, concentrating seismic waves is certainly doable. in fact I'm sure there has been some military research into concentrating the seismic waves from precisely timed explosions.
It's like MacOS X for the brain. No really, it's the same technology Steve Jobs depends on.
Man, and you thought your terminal had a "visual bell." Yowzah.
You mean Steve Potter's group at Caltech. And they are rat brain cells BTW.
Another reason is that in most states, the driver is responsible for paying a ticket, not the owner of the vehicle. Taking a picture of the licence plate only gets you the name of the owner, who can just say they she wasn't driving the car when the picture was taken.
s/in vitro/in vivo/ above. (That is, electrodes in living animals.) There has been some work on trying to study networks in vitro as well (i.e., in an artificial cell culture grown on an electrode array,) but it's quite difficult--good electrodes are hard to make small enough, and even on the best electrode arrays you have to rely on luck to provide you with cells that wind up close enough to the electrodes to provide a good signal, and you wtill have very little idea about how the cells are connected. Another problem is the neurons will tend to move around a bit, so it's hard to track changes over time in such a culture. These problems could also be helped by this technique, by controlling the growth of interconnections and keeping the cells happy in one place.
I think the best immediate application for this kind of technology is not in constructign useful biological circuits, but in doing basic research on the properties of the nerve cells themselves. Traditionally, most of our knowledge about how nerve cells operate has come from studies of single cells in isolation, and in vitro recording. Neither of these techniques give very much information about the mechanisms which govern interaction between neurons, especially in the ways that their growth and behavior is influenced by neighboring cells. A technique which allows us to control the growth of a nerve culture would be a great tool for studying those interactions, becaue you would be able to more tightly control the interactions present (as opposed to blindly jamming electrodes into brains and trying to infer circuits and connections from correlations in firing patterns, which is more or less the standard technique.)
Koch in Biophysics of Computation showed that given what we know about neurons, they can theoretically implement equivalents of addition, multiplication, feedback, and many other computations, all within a single cell! The range of possibilities is enourmous, and requires a controlled environment to study the different tyeps of interactions. This could be a very important tool for research.
As far as the bitrate goes, 74min in 140MB does in fact work out to 256kbps.
Whereas a MiniDisc is 2.5" wide, holds 256 MB, costs $2 each for a rewritable blank disk, the player is much less sesceptible to skipping, and uses ATRAC2, which at 256Kbps is generally regarded to be superior to mp3 at the same bit rate,
So why bother with this mutant mp3-cd player? It won't even play my CDs.
Erm. Google doesn't normally search through newsgroups. It may search through mailing list archives, if the archives are on the web. But Google Groups does not index mailing lists.
The January 2001 issue, to be exact. The article's not available online ($5 to download a PDF?? WTF??) but it's right there on page 74. A fascinating read, very detailed, with lots of great pictures.
Sure, its graphics were primitive. And the low frame rate forced it to focus on puzzle-solving and plot rather than combat and reflexes. But that wasn't necessarily a bad thing; its plot was (and is) still better than almost anything else I've ever seen.
It remembered its roots, too; the plot borrowed heavily from Aliens and from 2001, and sure enough, there's a replica of Bave Bowman's suite, with a monolith inside, and many of the puzzles involve moving things around with a forklift that looked (and sounded) like the one Ripley used in Aliens. And the game contained a mini-clone of Battlezone (of course, the granddaddy of them all.)
Sadly, I think it'd be classified as abandonware now; I don't think Mindscape still exists. Does anyone have this game lying around? Particularly the color version, released soon after the Mac II came out? (Yep, it's that old...) I'd love to fire up a Mac emulator and play this again, with a decent framerate this time.