Microsoft and the executives within have been buying or buying stake in cable companies left and right. ASDL hasn't taken off nearly fast enough so it looks like cable modems are winning the consumer bandwidth war, at least in the short term. I'm out in a small community in Wisconsin and I've got a cable modem, if I held my breath waiting for the phone companies to do ASDL here I'd be dessicating before it happened.
As a result of this cable companies will be even bigger money than they are now. This is the next frontier Microsoft wants to assimilate.
There's considerable picture loss, but nowhere near as much as going from 35 mm to digital. Probably the best photo site on the net, Philip Greenspun's photo.net says that there's about 56% as much information in an APS film as in a 35 mm. He also says that for printing snapshot type photos or maybe even 8x10 you're doing ok. If you're satisfied with the results then you made an excellent purchase (this goes for anything, including digital cameras or computers or operating systems or...)
I still use traditional film. I've got an Nikon N90s and on my last trip shot 9 rolls of film. I've looked at digital cameras with each new generation and there still isn't enough resolution compared to even a 35 mm negative. They're fine if you're going to post something on the web or make a small print, but they're not so fine once you want to print something larger.
For price/performance digital cameras probably do win, my trip cost me >$200 for prints and another >$100 to get everything on PhotoCD. In two more similarily photogenic trips I'll have put out a cost equal to my camera body. I couldn't however have blown up a half dozen of my favourite images and put them on my office walls and have them still look sharp with a consumer digital camera.
I've never developed my own film, I'd like to learn how though.
Well, its a microkernel so that 100kB comparision to NT isn't really accurate. What the microkernel represents is the smallest amount of code that allows it to schedule processes, manipulate memory and load in other modules. As soon as a user does something silly like try to use it the microkernel will have to load in code that handles ethernet, graphics, input/output devices etc.
A more accurate comparision would be from a fresh boot what is the graph of memory consumption of each OS while running this script in SuperWizzyWorks 2000?
The percentage of indexed web sites is small, but the amount of data that represents is pretty staggering. Unlike an encyclopedia or other reference book which can cross reference between the a concept in the index and a number of appearances of the concept in the body of the text a web search engine has a much harder job (as do people trying to use the search engine). For an encyclopedia some person does the job of indexing things with an understanding of context, so for instance 'green' in the index would be referenced to entries on 'colours', 'the spectrum' but not 'grass'. The web search engine blindly returns every instance of the word 'green' with no regard to context. So if the person was actually wondering how to make 'green' with his box of crayolas (since his sister ate every shade of green in his box of 64) he'd either have to wade through each site till he found what he was after or choose a better search term.
Machines aren't very good at being intelligent in this manner, so suppose a new search engine was created. You type in a search term and it comes back with a list of matching pages. You again wade through the list but now you also can award a number of relavence points to the ones that matched closest. This would work well for a while, but would break down in the long run, as the web continues to expand new pages will be unranked, so they would not appear in the ranked lists of potential hits (at least for popular search terms) and so won't be ranked.
What might work better would be a search by reduction. Type in some overgeneralized search term and the text on the page is distilled down to a brief outline. There are already packages which can create fairly decent summaries of documents. You click on a button that indicates "I like this, find me more like it" which means that there's something you like about the summary so it generates a number of new more specific search terms from the summary and comes up with a new list.
The clone situation isn't quite as simple as the clone vendors whined about. All of the clone vendors were making use of Apple motherboard designs and ROMs for a ridiculously cheap fee, on the order of 50 bucks or so a pop. Essentially Apple was paying the clone makers to tighten a noose around its neck. The main clone makers (PowerComputing and Daystar) were supposed to increase the market share in areas where Apple knew it was weak: Entry level computing (PowerComputing) and multiprocessor systems (Daystar). Instead all the vendors went after the same slice of the pie as Apple was after, so as a result while there was more competition the market share didn't actually increase.
Since Apple makes its money from hardware this was a win for the clone vendors at the expense of a loss for Apple. It was also a short term win for the consumers for at least in the short term they'd get faster and cheaper computers, in the long term I doubt very much Apple would be around.
Around this time Steve Jobs entered the scene and looked at the licensing situation and realized Apple was doing itself in. Negotiations were done with the main companies and at least one of the companies leaked the negotiations to the press. Graduated licensing: compete in new markets and its cheap, cut out Apple's legs and its going to be prohibitively expensive for you. PowerComputing didn't feel it could compete in this manner and refused to sign. Eventually all negotiations were cut off.
PowerComputing probably underestimated the value of the low end market. Had they signed the new agreement when it was offered they could have introduced their version of the iMac and a few years earlier (and it would probably have had a floppy) and made a lot of money. The most unfair thing Apple did was terminate the license agreements early for at least one vendor.
Most people regardless of sex go into the field for money rather than any interest in the subject. Of my undergraduate electrical engineering class there were only about 5 of us out of 50 who went into actual engineering. The rest went into management or other areas. This was good in a way, most of the graduates were pretty dim bulbs. 100% of the females did go into management, but since there was only one I'd say the sample size was a bit small to make a sound judgement:)
Whether they hate the RIAA or not really isn't an issue. As one poster pointed out portable MP3 players won't really take off till Joe Average has access to bandwidth. I'd amend that with they won't take off till Joe Average has convenient access to music. One way to get this music is by downloading it as a lot of us do now. Another way would be if you could go to a music store and upload it from their server. This is where Joe Average normally gets his music. Getting downloadable digital media into record stores across the country would be a big win for RIO. This won't happen unless record companies feel secure in releasing mainstream music through this means. Anti-piracy measures would be one means to help this.
The Sony Walkman succeeded because it was a portable device that enabled the user to listen to music of their choosing, and their was a wide range of music readily available. Of course a lot of this music wasn't bought and payed for, this annoys the RIAA. Now they've got a jihad against anything that is capable of recording or deploying user recorded music. It's dumb and pointless, but its there, witness the backlash against CD recorders etc.
If RIO is smart they'll make sure it can still play ordinary MP3. If not they'll be in the running for the shortest time from IPO to Chapter 11 protection. Let the RIAA bandwagon deploy music in their protected format, which Joe Average will eat up, but make sure that the device is happy playing regular MP3.
Also make sure that any competing company can build compatible players for a reasonable fee, otherwise you'll have a format fight which will kill the technology.
That's true, I didn't think of trademark issues. Until its actually in users hands there is no way to know what if anything it violates however. If it turns out that they've modified the Linux kernel and won't release the differences, nail them with the GPL. If it turns out that they're not using Linux at all, then worry about trademark issues, most likely by having them substitute Linux with GNU (if what they mean is that they're using GNU command line tools). If it turns out somehow they are a legitimate hybrid of BeOS and Linux then celebrate that somebody has enough faith in the OS to use it in a rather unique way.
You don't know the full story, so your statement that there is no way that it can't be interpreted as some sort of infringement is not true. It can't be interpreted at all at this point in time. There is nowhere near enough technical information available for us to make an informed decision.
Everybody is jumping on the conspiracy theory band wagon. Remember that marketing releases are generated by, well, marketing people. So for instance a statement from engineering such as: The iToaster runs the BeOS operating system and a core system of GPL'd utilities familiar to anybody who has used the Linux operating sytem. The marketing interpretation of the same statement: The iToaster runs a BeOS/Linux hybrid. It makes marketing people warm and fuzzy inside, its fully buzzword complient. It uses the word hybrid and thats a cool word.
Give the iToaster people the benefit of the doubt. If it turns out that they are violating GPL then voice your righteous indignation, but do it politely. Remember that the Open Source community is trying to gain acceptance. If you're a member of the mob mentality you're just another anchor around the neck of Open Source.
It's a cheap machine, 300 bucks, I'll buy one. If I find any code derived from Open Source code I'll make it known. I'm sure others will do the same.
Karsten Kutza maintains Neural Networks at Your Fingertips.
I got all of these off of Google. Try entering 'neural network' as a search term and seeing what hits you get.
I may have some old notes, papers and source code on them in that area of maximized entropy I call my apartment. If I can find anything I'll post them and GPL everything.
If I ever quit my present job and work on microprocessor circuits I'll do my best to kill names like Pentium or Celeron or Athlon and stuff. They all sound either very similar or just aren't very beefy sounding. They sound like they're picked by focus groups. I hate focus groups.
Instead I'll pick names that are more in your face, much like 60's and 70's sports cars. These chips are powerful and they suck up as much power as old sports cars suck up gas. They deserve names with guts. Names like the Vindicator, maybe with performance specs right in the title, the way sports cars used to proudly display their number of cylinders and engine displacement. The Vindicator 128 1 gig.
Forget dancing femme-boys in gold lame bunny suits, open up a early 70's Popular Mechanics sometime. Thats how advertising should be. Scantily clad girls draped across the vehicle. Chips are small, there won't be any draping across them. Maybe a gorgeous blonde in a string bikini. The camera pans in to her feet and slowly makes its way up her body. Caressing every last inch of her perfect legs and thighs. Just above the bikini line is the chip. Slowly the camera zooms and focuses in on the chip and its name. The Vindicator 128 1 gig. Fade out. No text, no boring announcers. Maybe the wa-wa guitar track from a porno flick. The viewer knows if he buys one of these babies he's getting some!
Ah well, maybe not. The management didn't think adding tesla coils, jacobs ladders and a full height lava lamp to our big servers was a good idea. Even after I explained the concept of retro-computing.
Bob Metcalfe sounds like one of those National Enquirer prophets: "I correctly predicted that internet stocks would collapse! That proves my track record, now I predict the demise of Linux". Substitute the collapse of internet stocks with the assasination of John Lennon and the demise of Linux with the second coming of Elvis and its virtually identical with supermarket tabloid predictions and backed up by just a valid an analysis.
His first premise: The Open Source Movement's ideology is utopian balderdash. Alright, maybe Richard Stallman is a bit over the top with some of his talk, but he's not the entire Open Source movement. There are other advocates, such as Bruce Perens, who have done work in getting existing companies such as Netscape or Apple to at least test the Open Source waters. Then he goes on to take a Linux Torvalds' quote out of context as proof that the Open Source community is a band of raving pinko commies. Oh, scratch that, it was just hyperbole. However, if Open Source succeeds a quarter billion people will die or some other such drivel. Oh, and the only means of writing a document under Linux is with EMACS doncha know! I guess Applix, Word Perfect etc. are just communist propoganda and don't really exist.
The second premise: Linux is 30 year old technology and as such is senile. It's an interesting sentiment, but not correct. Linux is built up from concepts that are 30 some years old but only because technology often builds up on the past. Pre-emptive multitasking and protected memory are just good ideas, no reason to throw them out. In the mean time the kernel guru's have added in multi threading, multi processor support as well as support for late nineties hardware. On top of that there are a number of decent GUI overlays that can make normal day to day stuff just as easy as it is under NT (as well as some of the more complext administrative tasks as well). NT is no different in that regards, its really built up from thirty year old technology and doesn't really offer any new features. Linux performs well now. If Microsoft gets its act together maybe NT will work well tomorrow. Maybe. If given the choice between shipping something that doesn't works but people will buy or shipping something that works as advertised a little bit late guess which one will win?
In a way this is the biggest evidence that Linux (as well as other operating systems) is relevant. If Microsoft was truly indominatible they could delay their operating system release until it actually worked and not worry about releasing expensive (to the consumer) bug fix patches as Windows 98 or Windows 99 etc.
Is Linux going to kill Windows? No, I don't think so. I do think that things will be a lot closer to how they were in the eighties though. Windows will have the majority, but more like a 60 or 70% majority overall. A bit more on the desktop and a bit less in the server space. Linux and other operating systems will have that 30 to 40% market share segment. It won't dominate but will ensure that applications are ported to capture that segment of the market.
Old gurus never die, their opinions just (in some cases) become obsolete or bought and paid for.
Enforced morals via censorship is bad, but there is also a time and a place for everything. Most libraries don't carry visual pornographic materials (one of the local libraries where I grew up used to carry Playboy, not sure if they still do) and thats their right. It shouldn't be the governments job or responsibility to provide, enforce or mandate filtering however.
Some people are going to have a problem with libraries censoring or discouraging pornography as well. Get over it, go buy a magazine or rent a video. Most forms of media or libraries are censored in one form or another. Slashdot is censored in the form of having editors. The editors only post articles which from their point of view fit in with the editorial guidelines they've set forth: News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters. I might feel that to me "The Internet Archive of Invasively Nude Female Geeks" fits in with the mandate, but its up to Rob and Hemos and others whether it gets posted.
Likewise I can walk down the hallway to our company library and look at the magazines: IEEE Circuits and Systems yes, Hustler no. Do I feel offended that I can't get pornography here? Nope, I'm free to do that on my own time. I would be offended if the company decided to filter out certain websites. I wouldn't be offended if I were repremanded for visiting them on company time though.
Two genetically identical persons growing up different wouldn't be proof of the presense or lack of a soul or a higher power or purpose. There are many environmental factors that are at least as important as genetics, such as how you were brought up, how you've been treated, your economic well being etc.
Even if every gene in a person and its clone were identical the personalities would be quite different if for instance clones weren't given equal protection by the law: You're just a clone, you can't vote, can't own property and oh yeah, if I ever need a liver, kidney, heart or eyes you're just a convenient sack for holding replacement parts.
Somebody post the link. I ordinarily just submit spam to spamcop and hope that takes care of it, it'd be kind of cool if they got too much of a good thing, maybe for a few days running.
Re:Top X Things You Can Do With Your DIVX Disks
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DIVX is dead
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CD's or DIVX disks look cool after a couple seconds of microwaving. The charge buildup rips nice patterns through the aluminum. No, this didn't (apparently) harm my microwave.
The concept may well be to do performance monitoring at the instruction level under x86 emulation. This isn't what their performance claims are based on though, not by a long shot. I don't even see where they made that particular claim in the article. All I saw was a claim that they could emulate an X86 machine much as the DEC Alpha can, but oh, as Mr. T would say, we'll do it helluva fast!
Right now because of all the erroneous information they've released my guess is they're high tech snake oil salesmen. I doubt very much that they coined the term Reconfigurable Computing. It's been in fairly common usage for a while. There claim that it outperforms the IBM Pacific Blue with the caveat 'Oh, we ran a different performance measure so direct comparisions are different' is a huge understatement. IBM tested their machine doing real work, real code, albeit on their site rather than the customer site. Star Bridge tested theirs running a useless code perfectly chosen to make their machine look best.
The question isn't whether this machine will work, the question is if it even exists.
or performance claims in this case. Notice that for the performance they compare the IBM Pacific Blue running real code to their machine doing a 4 bit adder. The reason for this provides insight into the technology they're using.
Their computer is based around FPGAs (Field Programable Gate Arrays), in particular they are using the XILINX family of FPGA. These are devices that are composed of thousands of small logic blocks wired together through a switching network. The functionality of these small logic devices is user definable by setting bits in an SRAM. The connectivity between pins and the logic blocks and other logic blocks is also user definable by setting bits in static RAM.
So what they're doing is setting each of these programmable blocks to implement a 4 bit adder and wiring them together such that they're all operating at once. It isn't actually doing any useful calculation. There performance claim is based on wiring together a bunch of useless logic and running it all in parallel. Once you start doing useful things the amount of parallelism will reduce. It'll reduce a lot. FPGA's aren't very fast devices, they'll only get a few percentage points (if that) of their performance claim for real applications.
Porting code to this machine would be non-trivial as well. Rather than the normal programming languages computer scientists and programmers are familiar with you're actually controlling the flow of electrical signals. They've probably got synthesis tools that will take some variant of a program language and translate it into the native data needed to program the device. The synthesis tools are most likely very crude and to get real performance you'd probably have to hack bits. Not fun. I say this because of my experience with synthesis tools used for ASIC design. They're fine if you're doing boring design of maybe 50 or 100 MHz. Beyond that you're pushing there technology and it will probably break. These synthesis tools are designed by billion dollar companies. It would take massive amounts of man hours and money to create a well designed synthesis package for something of this magnitude.
If crypto is illegal enforcing it before hand wouldn't be the goal. It'd be more workable enforcing it after the fact. You get picked up on some other offense, data on your hard drive is encrypted and an additional offense is added to the list. If you refuse to decrypt it there are probably present laws that they can already hit you with like interfering with a criminal investigation. It could end up being used a bit like tax laws were in the gangster days: We don't have the evidence to book you for murder, extortion, rape or racketeering but you were dumb and didn't pay your taxes. Off into the clink you go.
OBDisclaimer: I'm not a lawyer and/or cop and to the best of my knowledge I'm not a criminal.
It's not related to fuzzy logic. You're correct in that fuzzy logic uses analog values rather than discrete. Normal boolean logic assumes a statement is true or it is false. Like a simple thermostat, if the temperature falls below some threshold, turn on the heat:
if(Temperature 60) {/* is it cold? */ turn on the heat }
Fuzzy logic assigns a value for the truth of the statement. Rather than just being cold there is a degree of cold, and there can be a degree of hot. So based on the relative strengths of the two assertions you can control the amount of cooling or heating provided in a continuous manner.
A lot of respectable engineers feel that fuzzy logic is bunk, look up some of Bob Pease's articles in Electronic Design for some not so favourable reviews. A lot of others don't.
This Digital Nervous Network is based on work by Mark Tilden as the article mentions. What wasn't really mentioned (aside from it being built from el-cheapo parts) is that there is a large hobbiest community who builds these things.
Essentially they're based on wiring an even number of inverting stages together. Normally this would settle on some ugly analog value that the gates really aren't designed to. By letting motors perturb the gates inputs via RC coupling the outputs of the gates will go into patterns of digital signals. In the proper conditions these signals can be amplified to drive motors in a walking type motion. Further perturbations change the gate of the walk etc.
If only X percent of your users have a given system, only X percent of your system can go down is only true as the other (100-X)% of the system isn't attacked. If some punk with a computer, too little of a life and too much time on their hands knew that a certain government agency or a company relied on the variety of machines in their domain as a part of the security you'd start seeing more multi-system attacks. Especially if the target was a big enough feather in their cap.
Open standard software is a great idea, but it defeats part of the purpose of going to a multi-system approach. Once you've got a common file format it becomes easy to do damage. The guys argument was a bit like the security by obscurity argument. Yeah, you're secure in the short term, but once a determined thug works at it you're still compromised.
The security is better in unix, but its nowhere near insurmountable. Once a user is compromised, even through their own stupidity, its very possible to wreak havoc outside of the scope of that users account. Even disregarding the potential of denial of service attacks a bored script kiddie could implement a number of scripts from rootshell.org.
I'm not knocking Linux or other unix, I use them at home and work, but anybody who thinks migrating the world to a unix quality system would stop these attacks needs to think it through a bit more carefully.
It's easier to grab control of a Windows box because of its lack of security, but bored malcontents would quickly adapt. It's more attractive to attack these because there are a buttload of them out there, but as the status quo changes so will the targets. The recent increase of the MacOS is a case in point as was pointed out by somebody else. MacOS users used to brag about the lack of virii when in reality it was just a result of the lack of market share.
I'm not sure how Art Amolsh expects OS diversity would help things. Essentially right now the other OSes are somewhat safer from viral or worm attacks than other OSes. Not necessarily by design or the capabilities of the operating system, but by having a small market share. The wastes of flesh who code these things target Windows systems because they can then nail greater than 90% of the systems with knowledge of one code base. If other systems were more popular more virii and worms would appear for them as well.
In order to really use diversity to hamper the spread of worms and virii you'd have to go to much wider extremes anyway. Not only would you have to have different operating systems, but users would have to use a variety of different packages for storing information complete with different file formats. Of course that would diminish the benefits of having a shared network: interchange of information would now be much more difficult.
In reality until software is developed which can detect and respond to software threats autonomously people will always be susceptible to the whims of worm and virii coders. You can minimize the risk somewhat by using a robust OS or a non-mainstream OS. Once that OS becomes mainstream you've lost the 'protection'.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft and the executives within have been buying or buying stake in cable companies left and right. ASDL hasn't taken off nearly fast enough so it looks like cable modems are winning the consumer bandwidth war, at least in the short term. I'm out in a small community in Wisconsin and I've got a cable modem, if I held my breath waiting for the phone companies to do ASDL here I'd be dessicating before it happened.
As a result of this cable companies will be even bigger money than they are now. This is the next frontier Microsoft wants to assimilate.
There's considerable picture loss, but nowhere near as much as going from 35 mm to digital. Probably the best photo site on the net, Philip Greenspun's photo.net says that there's about 56% as much information in an APS film as in a 35 mm. He also says that for printing snapshot type photos or maybe even 8x10 you're doing ok. If you're satisfied with the results then you made an excellent purchase (this goes for anything, including digital cameras or computers or operating systems or...)
I still use traditional film. I've got an Nikon N90s and on my last trip shot 9 rolls of film. I've looked at digital cameras with each new generation and there still isn't enough resolution compared to even a 35 mm negative. They're fine if you're going to post something on the web or make a small print, but they're not so fine once you want to print something larger.
For price/performance digital cameras probably do win, my trip cost me >$200 for prints and another >$100 to get everything on PhotoCD. In two more similarily photogenic trips I'll have put out a cost equal to my camera body. I couldn't however have blown up a half dozen of my favourite images and put them on my office walls and have them still look sharp with a consumer digital camera.
I've never developed my own film, I'd like to learn how though.
Well, its a microkernel so that 100kB comparision to NT isn't really accurate. What the microkernel represents is the smallest amount of code that allows it to schedule processes, manipulate memory and load in other modules. As soon as a user does something silly like try to use it the microkernel will have to load in code that handles ethernet, graphics, input/output devices etc.
A more accurate comparision would be from a fresh boot what is the graph of memory consumption of each OS while running this script in SuperWizzyWorks 2000?
The percentage of indexed web sites is small, but the amount of data that represents is pretty staggering. Unlike an encyclopedia or other reference book which can cross reference between the a concept in the index and a number of appearances of the concept in the body of the text a web search engine has a much harder job (as do people trying to use the search engine). For an encyclopedia some person does the job of indexing things with an understanding of context, so for instance 'green' in the index would be referenced to entries on 'colours', 'the spectrum' but not 'grass'. The web search engine blindly returns every instance of the word 'green' with no regard to context. So if the person was actually wondering how to make 'green' with his box of crayolas (since his sister ate every shade of green in his box of 64) he'd either have to wade through each site till he found what he was after or choose a better search term.
Machines aren't very good at being intelligent in this manner, so suppose a new search engine was created. You type in a search term and it comes back with a list of matching pages. You again wade through the list but now you also can award a number of relavence points to the ones that matched closest. This would work well for a while, but would break down in the long run, as the web continues to expand new pages will be unranked, so they would not appear in the ranked lists of potential hits (at least for popular search terms) and so won't be ranked.
What might work better would be a search by reduction. Type in some overgeneralized search term and the text on the page is distilled down to a brief outline. There are already packages which can create fairly decent summaries of documents. You click on a button that indicates "I like this, find me more like it" which means that there's something you like about the summary so it generates a number of new more specific search terms from the summary and comes up with a new list.
The clone situation isn't quite as simple as the clone vendors whined about. All of the clone vendors were making use of Apple motherboard designs and ROMs for a ridiculously cheap fee, on the order of 50 bucks or so a pop. Essentially Apple was paying the clone makers to tighten a noose around its neck. The main clone makers (PowerComputing and Daystar) were supposed to increase the market share in areas where Apple knew it was weak: Entry level computing (PowerComputing) and multiprocessor systems (Daystar). Instead all the vendors went after the same slice of the pie as Apple was after, so as a result while there was more competition the market share didn't actually increase.
Since Apple makes its money from hardware this was a win for the clone vendors at the expense of a loss for Apple. It was also a short term win for the consumers for at least in the short term they'd get faster and cheaper computers, in the long term I doubt very much Apple would be around.
Around this time Steve Jobs entered the scene and looked at the licensing situation and realized Apple was doing itself in. Negotiations were done with the main companies and at least one of the companies leaked the negotiations to the press. Graduated licensing: compete in new markets and its cheap, cut out Apple's legs and its going to be prohibitively expensive for you. PowerComputing didn't feel it could compete in this manner and refused to sign. Eventually all negotiations were cut off.
PowerComputing probably underestimated the value of the low end market. Had they signed the new agreement when it was offered they could have introduced their version of the iMac and a few years earlier (and it would probably have had a floppy) and made a lot of money. The most unfair thing Apple did was terminate the license agreements early for at least one vendor.
Most people regardless of sex go into the field for money rather than any interest in the subject. Of my undergraduate electrical engineering class there were only about 5 of us out of 50 who went into actual engineering. The rest went into management or other areas. This was good in a way, most of the graduates were pretty dim bulbs. 100% of the females did go into management, but since there was only one I'd say the sample size was a bit small to make a sound judgement :)
Whether they hate the RIAA or not really isn't an issue. As one poster pointed out portable MP3 players won't really take off till Joe Average has access to bandwidth. I'd amend that with they won't take off till Joe Average has convenient access to music. One way to get this music is by downloading it as a lot of us do now. Another way would be if you could go to a music store and upload it from their server. This is where Joe Average normally gets his music. Getting downloadable digital media into record stores across the country would be a big win for RIO. This won't happen unless record companies feel secure in releasing mainstream music through this means. Anti-piracy measures would be one means to help this.
The Sony Walkman succeeded because it was a portable device that enabled the user to listen to music of their choosing, and their was a wide range of music readily available. Of course a lot of this music wasn't bought and payed for, this annoys the RIAA. Now they've got a jihad against anything that is capable of recording or deploying user recorded music. It's dumb and pointless, but its there, witness the backlash against CD recorders etc.
If RIO is smart they'll make sure it can still play ordinary MP3. If not they'll be in the running for the shortest time from IPO to Chapter 11 protection. Let the RIAA bandwagon deploy music in their protected format, which Joe Average will eat up, but make sure that the device is happy playing regular MP3.
Also make sure that any competing company can build compatible players for a reasonable fee, otherwise you'll have a format fight which will kill the technology.
That's true, I didn't think of trademark issues. Until its actually in users hands there is no way to know what if anything it violates however. If it turns out that they've modified the Linux kernel and won't release the differences, nail them with the GPL. If it turns out that they're not using Linux at all, then worry about trademark issues, most likely by having them substitute Linux with GNU (if what they mean is that they're using GNU command line tools). If it turns out somehow they are a legitimate hybrid of BeOS and Linux then celebrate that somebody has enough faith in the OS to use it in a rather unique way.
You don't know the full story, so your statement that there is no way that it can't be interpreted as some sort of infringement is not true. It can't be interpreted at all at this point in time. There is nowhere near enough technical information available for us to make an informed decision.
Everybody is jumping on the conspiracy theory band wagon. Remember that marketing releases are generated by, well, marketing people. So for instance a statement from engineering such as: The iToaster runs the BeOS operating system and a core system of GPL'd utilities familiar to anybody who has used the Linux operating sytem. The marketing interpretation of the same statement: The iToaster runs a BeOS/Linux hybrid. It makes marketing people warm and fuzzy inside, its fully buzzword complient. It uses the word hybrid and thats a cool word.
Give the iToaster people the benefit of the doubt. If it turns out that they are violating GPL then voice your righteous indignation, but do it politely. Remember that the Open Source community is trying to gain acceptance. If you're a member of the mob mentality you're just another anchor around the neck of Open Source.
It's a cheap machine, 300 bucks, I'll buy one. If I find any code derived from Open Source code I'll make it known. I'm sure others will do the same.
I got all of these off of Google. Try entering 'neural network' as a search term and seeing what hits you get.
I may have some old notes, papers and source code on them in that area of maximized entropy I call my apartment. If I can find anything I'll post them and GPL everything.
If I ever quit my present job and work on microprocessor circuits I'll do my best to kill names like Pentium or Celeron or Athlon and stuff. They all sound either very similar or just aren't very beefy sounding. They sound like they're picked by focus groups. I hate focus groups.
Instead I'll pick names that are more in your face, much like 60's and 70's sports cars. These chips are powerful and they suck up as much power as old sports cars suck up gas. They deserve names with guts. Names like the Vindicator, maybe with performance specs right in the title, the way sports cars used to proudly display their number of cylinders and engine displacement. The Vindicator 128 1 gig.
Forget dancing femme-boys in gold lame bunny suits, open up a early 70's Popular Mechanics sometime. Thats how advertising should be. Scantily clad girls draped across the vehicle. Chips are small, there won't be any draping across them. Maybe a gorgeous blonde in a string bikini. The camera pans in to her feet and slowly makes its way up her body. Caressing every last inch of her perfect legs and thighs. Just above the bikini line is the chip. Slowly the camera zooms and focuses in on the chip and its name. The Vindicator 128 1 gig. Fade out. No text, no boring announcers. Maybe the wa-wa guitar track from a porno flick. The viewer knows if he buys one of these babies he's getting some!
Ah well, maybe not. The management didn't think adding tesla coils, jacobs ladders and a full height lava lamp to our big servers was a good idea. Even after I explained the concept of retro-computing.
Bob Metcalfe sounds like one of those National Enquirer prophets: "I correctly predicted that internet stocks would collapse! That proves my track record, now I predict the demise of Linux". Substitute the collapse of internet stocks with the assasination of John Lennon and the demise of Linux with the second coming of Elvis and its virtually identical with supermarket tabloid predictions and backed up by just a valid an analysis.
His first premise: The Open Source Movement's ideology is utopian balderdash. Alright, maybe Richard Stallman is a bit over the top with some of his talk, but he's not the entire Open Source movement. There are other advocates, such as Bruce Perens, who have done work in getting existing companies such as Netscape or Apple to at least test the Open Source waters. Then he goes on to take a Linux Torvalds' quote out of context as proof that the Open Source community is a band of raving pinko commies. Oh, scratch that, it was just hyperbole. However, if Open Source succeeds a quarter billion people will die or some other such drivel. Oh, and the only means of writing a document under Linux is with EMACS doncha know! I guess Applix, Word Perfect etc. are just communist propoganda and don't really exist.
The second premise: Linux is 30 year old technology and as such is senile. It's an interesting sentiment, but not correct. Linux is built up from concepts that are 30 some years old but only because technology often builds up on the past. Pre-emptive multitasking and protected memory are just good ideas, no reason to throw them out. In the mean time the kernel guru's have added in multi threading, multi processor support as well as support for late nineties hardware. On top of that there are a number of decent GUI overlays that can make normal day to day stuff just as easy as it is under NT (as well as some of the more complext administrative tasks as well). NT is no different in that regards, its really built up from thirty year old technology and doesn't really offer any new features. Linux performs well now. If Microsoft gets its act together maybe NT will work well tomorrow. Maybe. If given the choice between shipping something that doesn't works but people will buy or shipping something that works as advertised a little bit late guess which one will win?
In a way this is the biggest evidence that Linux (as well as other operating systems) is relevant. If Microsoft was truly indominatible they could delay their operating system release until it actually worked and not worry about releasing expensive (to the consumer) bug fix patches as Windows 98 or Windows 99 etc.
Is Linux going to kill Windows? No, I don't think so. I do think that things will be a lot closer to how they were in the eighties though. Windows will have the majority, but more like a 60 or 70% majority overall. A bit more on the desktop and a bit less in the server space. Linux and other operating systems will have that 30 to 40% market share segment. It won't dominate but will ensure that applications are ported to capture that segment of the market.
Old gurus never die, their opinions just (in some cases) become obsolete or bought and paid for.
Enforced morals via censorship is bad, but there is also a time and a place for everything. Most libraries don't carry visual pornographic materials (one of the local libraries where I grew up used to carry Playboy, not sure if they still do) and thats their right. It shouldn't be the governments job or responsibility to provide, enforce or mandate filtering however.
Some people are going to have a problem with libraries censoring or discouraging pornography as well. Get over it, go buy a magazine or rent a video. Most forms of media or libraries are censored in one form or another. Slashdot is censored in the form of having editors. The editors only post articles which from their point of view fit in with the editorial guidelines they've set forth: News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters. I might feel that to me "The Internet Archive of Invasively Nude Female Geeks" fits in with the mandate, but its up to Rob and Hemos and others whether it gets posted.
Likewise I can walk down the hallway to our company library and look at the magazines: IEEE Circuits and Systems yes, Hustler no. Do I feel offended that I can't get pornography here? Nope, I'm free to do that on my own time. I would be offended if the company decided to filter out certain websites. I wouldn't be offended if I were repremanded for visiting them on company time though.
Two genetically identical persons growing up different wouldn't be proof of the presense or lack of a soul or a higher power or purpose. There are many environmental factors that are at least as important as genetics, such as how you were brought up, how you've been treated, your economic well being etc.
Even if every gene in a person and its clone were identical the personalities would be quite different if for instance clones weren't given equal protection by the law: You're just a clone, you can't vote, can't own property and oh yeah, if I ever need a liver, kidney, heart or eyes you're just a convenient sack for holding replacement parts.
Somebody post the link. I ordinarily just submit spam to spamcop and hope that takes care of it, it'd be kind of cool if they got too much of a good thing, maybe for a few days running.
CD's or DIVX disks look cool after a couple seconds of microwaving. The charge buildup rips nice patterns through the aluminum. No, this didn't (apparently) harm my microwave.
The concept may well be to do performance monitoring at the instruction level under x86 emulation. This isn't what their performance claims are based on though, not by a long shot. I don't even see where they made that particular claim in the article. All I saw was a claim that they could emulate an X86 machine much as the DEC Alpha can, but oh, as Mr. T would say, we'll do it helluva fast!
Right now because of all the erroneous information they've released my guess is they're high tech snake oil salesmen. I doubt very much that they coined the term Reconfigurable Computing. It's been in fairly common usage for a while. There claim that it outperforms the IBM Pacific Blue with the caveat 'Oh, we ran a different performance measure so direct comparisions are different' is a huge understatement. IBM tested their machine doing real work, real code, albeit on their site rather than the customer site. Star Bridge tested theirs running a useless code perfectly chosen to make their machine look best.
The question isn't whether this machine will work, the question is if it even exists.
or performance claims in this case. Notice that for the performance they compare the IBM Pacific Blue running real code to their machine doing a 4 bit adder. The reason for this provides insight into the technology they're using.
Their computer is based around FPGAs (Field Programable Gate Arrays), in particular they are using the XILINX family of FPGA. These are devices that are composed of thousands of small logic blocks wired together through a switching network. The functionality of these small logic devices is user definable by setting bits in an SRAM. The connectivity between pins and the logic blocks and other logic blocks is also user definable by setting bits in static RAM.
So what they're doing is setting each of these programmable blocks to implement a 4 bit adder and wiring them together such that they're all operating at once. It isn't actually doing any useful calculation. There performance claim is based on wiring together a bunch of useless logic and running it all in parallel. Once you start doing useful things the amount of parallelism will reduce. It'll reduce a lot. FPGA's aren't very fast devices, they'll only get a few percentage points (if that) of their performance claim for real applications.
Porting code to this machine would be non-trivial as well. Rather than the normal programming languages computer scientists and programmers are familiar with you're actually controlling the flow of electrical signals. They've probably got synthesis tools that will take some variant of a program language and translate it into the native data needed to program the device. The synthesis tools are most likely very crude and to get real performance you'd probably have to hack bits. Not fun. I say this because of my experience with synthesis tools used for ASIC design. They're fine if you're doing boring design of maybe 50 or 100 MHz. Beyond that you're pushing there technology and it will probably break. These synthesis tools are designed by billion dollar companies. It would take massive amounts of man hours and money to create a well designed synthesis package for something of this magnitude.
If crypto is illegal enforcing it before hand wouldn't be the goal. It'd be more workable enforcing it after the fact. You get picked up on some other offense, data on your hard drive is encrypted and an additional offense is added to the list. If you refuse to decrypt it there are probably present laws that they can already hit you with like interfering with a criminal investigation. It could end up being used a bit like tax laws were in the gangster days: We don't have the evidence to book you for murder, extortion, rape or racketeering but you were dumb and didn't pay your taxes. Off into the clink you go.
OBDisclaimer: I'm not a lawyer and/or cop and to the best of my knowledge I'm not a criminal.
It's not related to fuzzy logic. You're correct in that fuzzy logic uses analog values rather than discrete. Normal boolean logic assumes a statement is true or it is false. Like a simple thermostat, if the temperature falls below some threshold, turn on the heat:
/* is it cold? */
if(Temperature 60) {
turn on the heat
}
Fuzzy logic assigns a value for the truth of the
statement. Rather than just being cold there is a degree of cold, and there can be a degree of hot. So based on the relative strengths of the two assertions you can control the amount of cooling or heating provided in a continuous manner.
A lot of respectable engineers feel that fuzzy logic is bunk, look up some of Bob Pease's articles in Electronic Design for some not so favourable reviews. A lot of others don't.
This Digital Nervous Network is based on work by Mark Tilden as the article mentions. What wasn't really mentioned (aside from it being built from el-cheapo parts) is that there is a large hobbiest community who builds these things.
Essentially they're based on wiring an even number of inverting stages together. Normally this would settle on some ugly analog value that the gates really aren't designed to. By letting motors perturb the gates inputs via RC coupling the outputs of the gates will go into patterns of digital signals. In the proper conditions these signals can be amplified to drive motors in a walking type motion. Further perturbations change the gate of the walk etc.
The community is called BEAM robotics.
If only X percent of your users have a given system, only X percent of your system can go down is only true as the other (100-X)% of the system isn't attacked. If some punk with a computer, too little of a life and too much time on their hands knew that a certain government agency or a company relied on the variety of machines in their domain as a part of the security you'd start seeing more multi-system attacks. Especially if the target was a big enough feather in their cap.
Open standard software is a great idea, but it defeats part of the purpose of going to a multi-system approach. Once you've got a common file format it becomes easy to do damage. The guys argument was a bit like the security by obscurity argument. Yeah, you're secure in the short term, but once a determined thug works at it you're still compromised.
The security is better in unix, but its nowhere near insurmountable. Once a user is compromised, even through their own stupidity, its very possible to wreak havoc outside of the scope of that users account. Even disregarding the potential of denial of service attacks a bored script kiddie could implement a number of scripts from rootshell.org.
I'm not knocking Linux or other unix, I use them at home and work, but anybody who thinks migrating the world to a unix quality system would stop these attacks needs to think it through a bit more carefully.
It's easier to grab control of a Windows box because of its lack of security, but bored malcontents would quickly adapt. It's more attractive to attack these because there are a buttload of them out there, but as the status quo changes so will the targets. The recent increase of the MacOS is a case in point as was pointed out by somebody else. MacOS users used to brag about the lack of virii when in reality it was just a result of the lack of market share.
I'm not sure how Art Amolsh expects OS diversity would help things. Essentially right now the other OSes are somewhat safer from viral or worm attacks than other OSes. Not necessarily by design or the capabilities of the operating system, but by having a small market share. The wastes of flesh who code these things target Windows systems because they can then nail greater than 90% of the systems with knowledge of one code base. If other systems were more popular more virii and worms would appear for them as well.
In order to really use diversity to hamper the spread of worms and virii you'd have to go to much wider extremes anyway. Not only would you have to have different operating systems, but users would have to use a variety of different packages for storing information complete with different file formats. Of course that would diminish the benefits of having a shared network: interchange of information would now be much more difficult.
In reality until software is developed which can detect and respond to software threats autonomously people will always be susceptible to the whims of worm and virii coders. You can minimize the risk somewhat by using a robust OS or a non-mainstream OS. Once that OS becomes mainstream you've lost the 'protection'.