The problem with research like this is it places so much emphasis on "culture" and "society" and how these will "emerge" from collections of individual units that it is easy to forget about how complex the individual units need to be.
Human culture is certainly amazing and could not have been created without many, many people. But it also can't be created by many, many ants. Sure, with ants you can get a lot of interesting behaviors, but you'll never get anything approaching human culture. I rather doubt the individuals in this simulation will be as complex as ants. No matter how much they wave the magic wand of "emergence" they can't get around the hard problem of creating something that is actually intelligent.
The article seems fond of giving out meaningless information. It says the plants will displace 6000 tons of carbon dioxide. Is that 6000 per day, per year, or per the liftime of the plants? It also says that the cost will be $10.2 for 2.25 megawatts. Again we have to ask over what time frame that $10.2 million is being charged.
It's probably a little too hard for Reuters to get a lot of science competent journalists, but they should at least have editors to check this sort of thing.
I took a sophomore level intro to systems programming course and for one lab we had to optimize various segments of code. Problem was, the compiler knew most of the tricks the lab was trying to teach us. The compiler was already unrolling loops and using intermediate variables to avoid calculating the same value over and over again.
The only place the compiler wasn't ideal is in optimizing code for a certain associatvity and size of cache. In other words, it's not especially worthwhile to heavily optimize code unless you know the computer architecture you're writing for very well. If you're writing multi-platform code, just forget it. Spend the time considering your choice of algorithm.
Sorry but the CELL potential for 25GFlops single precision not double.
Nope , it's 256 GFlops single precision. 25 GFlops is for double precision. Granted, this is only for highly parallizable code, but what else does someone use a 1000+ node supercomputer for?
The scary thing is, that the CELL with its potential for 25 GFlops of double precision floating point, could rival this system with just 1600 8 SPE units.
Granted, the CELL isn't exactly off the shelf, and I'm willing to bet 4,564 970FXs will be cheaper than 1600 CELLs for quite some time, so the project still has merit.
Current plans seem to have HD-DVDs embedded with a traditional DVD layer to work on older players. We could still rip that DVD layer.
It's not like bandwidth is fast enough that there is huge demand for slinging around high definition 4 GB movies. Most discs are ripped and compressed to around 700 MB. It's going to be years before there's any demand to rip the new format.
As far as I know, only asymmetric (public key) cryptography would be completely destroyed. The gains a quantum computer would provide for breaking symmetric cryptography are substantial, but could be defeated by increasing the key length.
I'd be interested to hear what the lifespans of these mice are. I've heard a hypothesis that a lot of the aging process is the result of things our bodies do to avoid cancer. It's promising that they mentioned the mice do not suffer from auto-immune disorders, but I'd like to know more.
They used the names of actually professors who have relevant research areas in the article. Besides the blatently stolen newscientist diagram and the 3 minute photo shopped rat picture, it was generally a good hoax. And it will only become more believable as time goes on.
There is currently a system available to anonymize web transactions . The legal implications of this are worth considering, with the current spat of court cases holding service providers responsible for the actions of their users.
I've just been re-reading Dune and didn't quite know what they meant by "oil lens binoculars." Now I do. I know Herbert wasn't the first person to think of them, but it's interesting to see another science fiction gadget appear in the real world.
Basically it comes down to organic and inorganic chemistry. Iron sulphide, to the best of my limited knowledge of chemistry, doesn't contain carbon. Organic cells, with membranes made of phospholipids and optional cell walls of cellulose, are carbon rich.
I'm guessing they are not using java because distributed computing is very much about speed. A few distributed computing clients have hand written (or hand optimized) assembly code running the bulk of the computation. Java would be a serios step backwords.
...from my limited knowledge, "asynchronous" is really just "synchronous" on a much smaller scale. You just have smaller synchronous components that don't have to coordinate synchronously on the global scale. I mean, your adders and stuff are still going to be the same, they will just have their own clock (or no clock I suppose). So my naive assumption is that you have lots of little synchronous components glued logically together with a synchronous coordination bus/fabric. At *some* point it is always synchronous.
Adders don't have clocks, as I've had to point out to a few students. The inputs to the adders change with the clock, so it is easy to get confused. Asynchronous design is not multi-level synchronous design. It usually involves handshaking, that is one module asks "Are you done yet?" and the other module replies "yep" or "hold on". The purpose of a clock in a synchronous design is to be a taskmaster. The clock says to each module "You will be done at this time!" where "this time" is some integer multiple of the clock. Contrary to what you said, I would say that at some point all synchronous design is asynchronous. Gates don't have clocks.
Agreed. The real reason cell phones are banned on airplanes is because a user on an airplane would create too much load for the cellular network. The networks are not designed for people moving at hundreds of miles an hour. At that speed, the rate of handoffs between base stations is ridiculous. During a handoff, a user has to use two channels and the handoff itself requires switching center resources.
The only reason I could see cell phones being allowed is the use of CDMA technology. The short version is that with CDMA, all base stations are using the same frequencies. A handoff in this case is simpler because two adjacent base stations can broadcast on the same code without interfering with other users. The mobile can choose the stronger one.
Currently, nothing is cheap on the moon. If it costs absolutely nothing on earth, it's still going to cost $500 a pound just to get it into orbit. I seem to recall some science fiction novel using natural argon deposits on the moon for personal propulsion. I don't think we actually know if there are such deposits, but it would make a lot more sense to use a gas on the moon than to waste imported, $500 a pound CO2.
That's basically true, but unrelated. The mitochondria are similar to bacteria, not viruses. And by very early, we're talking about our single celled anaerobic ancestors.
The mortality rate of AIDS even without treatment is not 100%. It's really close, but there are cases of people who have had HIV for a long, long time and not shown symptoms. There are other cases of prostitutes who have not caught HIV even though they really should have, implying that some people are immune to HIV and others are immune to AIDS.
AIDS won't wipe out humans, certainly. It's just not THAT deadly. It's still a tragic disease that deserves a lot of funding to find a cure, but it's not an extinction event.
Certainly, 1024-bit symmetric encryption (your typical secret password encryption) is going to be unbreakable for centuries based on current predictions.
If I remember correctly, there is a section in Applied Cryptography where Schneier calculates that the sun going nova would not provide enough energy to flip through every combination of 256 bits, never mind actually testing them to see if they decrypt the message. So yes, 1024 bit symmetric encryption will be secure from brute force attack for quite some time, at least until we start building black hole powered computers and feed entire galaxies into them.
Of course, some people are so stupid that it's really not necesary to use a script on them. One of my professors told a story of a student who copied someone else's C++ code and changed all of the instances of this to that. Obviously, the new code didn't work too well.
IMHO, this has been the best Slashdot interview to date. What does this mean? Give us more interviews with Nobel Prize winners! Ok, I realize this isn't the easiest request to fulfill, but it does deserve some consideration.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with research like this is it places so much emphasis on "culture" and "society" and how these will "emerge" from collections of individual units that it is easy to forget about how complex the individual units need to be.
Human culture is certainly amazing and could not have been created without many, many people. But it also can't be created by many, many ants. Sure, with ants you can get a lot of interesting behaviors, but you'll never get anything approaching human culture. I rather doubt the individuals in this simulation will be as complex as ants. No matter how much they wave the magic wand of "emergence" they can't get around the hard problem of creating something that is actually intelligent.
The article seems fond of giving out meaningless information. It says the plants will displace 6000 tons of carbon dioxide. Is that 6000 per day, per year, or per the liftime of the plants? It also says that the cost will be $10.2 for 2.25 megawatts. Again we have to ask over what time frame that $10.2 million is being charged.
It's probably a little too hard for Reuters to get a lot of science competent journalists, but they should at least have editors to check this sort of thing.
I took a sophomore level intro to systems programming course and for one lab we had to optimize various segments of code. Problem was, the compiler knew most of the tricks the lab was trying to teach us. The compiler was already unrolling loops and using intermediate variables to avoid calculating the same value over and over again.
The only place the compiler wasn't ideal is in optimizing code for a certain associatvity and size of cache. In other words, it's not especially worthwhile to heavily optimize code unless you know the computer architecture you're writing for very well. If you're writing multi-platform code, just forget it. Spend the time considering your choice of algorithm.
The scary thing is, that the CELL with its potential for 25 GFlops of double precision floating point, could rival this system with just 1600 8 SPE units.
Granted, the CELL isn't exactly off the shelf, and I'm willing to bet 4,564 970FXs will be cheaper than 1600 CELLs for quite some time, so the project still has merit.
Current plans seem to have HD-DVDs embedded with a traditional DVD layer to work on older players. We could still rip that DVD layer.
It's not like bandwidth is fast enough that there is huge demand for slinging around high definition 4 GB movies. Most discs are ripped and compressed to around 700 MB. It's going to be years before there's any demand to rip the new format.
As far as I know, only asymmetric (public key) cryptography would be completely destroyed. The gains a quantum computer would provide for breaking symmetric cryptography are substantial, but could be defeated by increasing the key length.
I'd be interested to hear what the lifespans of these mice are. I've heard a hypothesis that a lot of the aging process is the result of things our bodies do to avoid cancer. It's promising that they mentioned the mice do not suffer from auto-immune disorders, but I'd like to know more.
Ya, I had a pet rat that died of cancer. But it was four years old at that point and the typical rat lifespan is two years.
It's been done at Carnegie Mellon as well.
They used the names of actually professors who have relevant research areas in the article. Besides the blatently stolen newscientist diagram and the 3 minute photo shopped rat picture, it was generally a good hoax. And it will only become more believable as time goes on.
There is currently a system available to anonymize web transactions . The legal implications of this are worth considering, with the current spat of court cases holding service providers responsible for the actions of their users.
I've just been re-reading Dune and didn't quite know what they meant by "oil lens binoculars." Now I do. I know Herbert wasn't the first person to think of them, but it's interesting to see another science fiction gadget appear in the real world.
Basically it comes down to organic and inorganic chemistry. Iron sulphide, to the best of my limited knowledge of chemistry, doesn't contain carbon. Organic cells, with membranes made of phospholipids and optional cell walls of cellulose, are carbon rich.
I'm guessing they are not using java because distributed computing is very much about speed. A few distributed computing clients have hand written (or hand optimized) assembly code running the bulk of the computation. Java would be a serios step backwords.
Adders don't have clocks, as I've had to point out to a few students. The inputs to the adders change with the clock, so it is easy to get confused. Asynchronous design is not multi-level synchronous design. It usually involves handshaking, that is one module asks "Are you done yet?" and the other module replies "yep" or "hold on". The purpose of a clock in a synchronous design is to be a taskmaster. The clock says to each module "You will be done at this time!" where "this time" is some integer multiple of the clock.
Contrary to what you said, I would say that at some point all synchronous design is asynchronous. Gates don't have clocks.
Agreed. The real reason cell phones are banned on airplanes is because a user on an airplane would create too much load for the cellular network. The networks are not designed for people moving at hundreds of miles an hour. At that speed, the rate of handoffs between base stations is ridiculous. During a handoff, a user has to use two channels and the handoff itself requires switching center resources.
The only reason I could see cell phones being allowed is the use of CDMA technology. The short version is that with CDMA, all base stations are using the same frequencies. A handoff in this case is simpler because two adjacent base stations can broadcast on the same code without interfering with other users. The mobile can choose the stronger one.
Currently, nothing is cheap on the moon. If it costs absolutely nothing on earth, it's still going to cost $500 a pound just to get it into orbit. I seem to recall some science fiction novel using natural argon deposits on the moon for personal propulsion. I don't think we actually know if there are such deposits, but it would make a lot more sense to use a gas on the moon than to waste imported, $500 a pound CO2.
That's basically true, but unrelated. The mitochondria are similar to bacteria, not viruses.
And by very early, we're talking about our single celled anaerobic ancestors.
The mortality rate of AIDS even without treatment is not 100%. It's really close, but there are cases of people who have had HIV for a long, long time and not shown symptoms. There are other cases of prostitutes who have not caught HIV even though they really should have, implying that some people are immune to HIV and others are immune to AIDS.
AIDS won't wipe out humans, certainly. It's just not THAT deadly. It's still a tragic disease that deserves a lot of funding to find a cure, but it's not an extinction event.
Does anyone have a link to the original image data? I respect the work of the image processing scientists, and I'd like to try my hand at it as well.
Sure, they are saving money on wages, but think how much their paper and toner costs are going to go up with all the resumes being printed.
Certainly, 1024-bit symmetric encryption (your typical secret password encryption) is going to be unbreakable for centuries based on current predictions.
If I remember correctly, there is a section in Applied Cryptography where Schneier calculates that the sun going nova would not provide enough energy to flip through every combination of 256 bits, never mind actually testing them to see if they decrypt the message. So yes, 1024 bit symmetric encryption will be secure from brute force attack for quite some time, at least until we start building black hole powered computers and feed entire galaxies into them.
Of course, some people are so stupid that it's really not necesary to use a script on them. One of my professors told a story of a student who copied someone else's C++ code and changed all of the instances of this to that. Obviously, the new code didn't work too well.
IMHO, this has been the best Slashdot interview to date. What does this mean? Give us more interviews with Nobel Prize winners!
Ok, I realize this isn't the easiest request to fulfill, but it does deserve some consideration.