Anyone written something like this to drive a Palm device sitting in a cradle ? I have a pretty handspring Prism at the end of a USB link that would be ideal if there was software...
I really do hope that people read the entire paper before posting their thoughts about it. I hate Microsoft with a passion -- my first thought upon hearing about the WTC attack was, "Those poor people! I sure hope Bill Gates was in there."
Bluetooth doesn't need line of sight. The main failing with irDA is that it needs line of sight to be maintained between communicating devices. Bluetooth can talk to devices within your snazzy Dockers 'mobile pants' while happily irradiating your groin.
'burnt' is fairly inaccurate. Xilinx Virtex
FPGAs store the configuration data in SRAM.
You can very quickly and easily reprogram these
parts, in the time taken to essentially do a
'memcopy' And voila, you have new hardware
available. Any small bugs in your design can
be changed in a matter of hours (re-run synthesis/
layout and load it back into the memory)
More interestingly, newer FPGAs can be modified
on the fly, keeping parts active and loading up
new circuitry, making for all sorts of funky
options.
The fraud committed against Egg had nothing to do with clever hacking. It was a fairly dumb, run of the mill fraud attempt that could have happened irl as well. More details in
The Register
The problem with the site being too advanced is that it provided 3D rotatable images of the products they were trying to sell.
99% (or some other large percentage) of on-line buyers in Europe do not have broadband access.
Using the boo.com site over a modem is(was) very painful due to the high bandwidth requirements.
Of course, the main reason Boo failed was that its based on a stupid idea. How big is the market for geeks buying sports gear....
More seriously, I've bought a lot of different products on line, but I wouldn't buy clothes/ shoes or anything else that I would want to try on/ try out before buying. It was just a dumb business idea from the start.
But goggle does have clever search engine technology. It is _not_ obvious. It was not thought of for several years by a whole lot of companies trying to index the web.
Hence, IMHO, it does deserve a patent.
Its not a dumb one like 'one-click' it is a clever idea that deserves to be protected.
You can get it at Bookshop.co.uk Amazon in the uk probably also carry it (amazon.co.uk)
Unusual to see the tables turned for a change. I had to buy Cryptonomicon from the States because it wasn't going to published in the UK for 9 months after the US date. And I thought it was only films that this happened to...
I had a very similar situation a couple of months ago. I found the free altavista access worked really well for my needs. It does stick up banner ads, but they are easily enough ignored.
Its free access, and they had local numbers for pretty much everywhere I needed them. Get it here
I think an author who does the same sort of thing (I.e., weave people into a story around tech, rather than write stories about tech) is Iain M. Banks. His sci-fi is consistently excellent, which unfortunatly cannot be said about all of his main stream fiction.
It really worries me that this gets a score of interesting, when it bears no relation to the reality of the story.
The post on slashdot says 3 windows a day, the article says 3, 30 minute windows per day. That means they require to process the data in roughly 7 and a half hours, even without assuming time to formulate a useful signal.
18 hours a day processing time means they miss 2 potential windows. If an infrastructure was in place that would allow distributed clients to be quickly assembled and spread this could be potentially useful. I doubt that this can be done in this case. This does not preclude it being useful in the future.
There is already effort by ex distributed.net people to put such an infrastructure in place.
Does anyone else find it hypocritical to be pretending to take some 'moral high ground' by posturing about refusing to use Amazon.com, while Jon Katz still sells his books through Amazon ?
So in public he pretends to be making a stance against this 'evil corporation' while still profiting from its sales of his books.
If there was anything other than rhetoric coming from Katz he might actually get some more respect around here.
So I guess there is the challenge. Boycott Amazon if you want, but actually do it, don't just pretend to be doing it. Forbid them from selling your book and lining your pockets, if you have any integrity.
Anyone can easily confirm this by a quick search at Amazon...
Actually, I'd recommend that if you are actually seriously interested you'd take a look at ELSI which is the ethics body attached to the HGP and funded by the US government. Gordon
I'd heartily recommend anything by Michael Marshall Smith.
Stephenson is quite funny, but Smith is really insightful and also very cutting at the same time.
"Only Forward" and "One of Us" are excellent "Spares" is currently being made into a film.
Not sure if they are very available in the US though. Amazon.com looked like it was having trouble getting them out in the US anyway. Amazon.co.uk has plenty.
I'd recommend 'Luminous' by Greg Egan if anyone wants some new, _hard_ sci-fi too. Again, probably hard to find in the US.
The linked article misses the big point that many of these legacy processor designs could easily be fitted into some of the newer reprogrammable FPGA parts on the market. This will certainly be the case in the next few years when parts in excess of 50 million gates become available, running at half gig system speeds.
The free hardware source becomes a very interesting proposition indeed, as people can create their own processors at home, on the fly, and change them to suit what they are doing.
What these guys are doing is fairly banal compared to the more interesting research being proposed.
The speed claims that they make are based on large arrays of simple adder circuits, doing no real useful work.
I wouldn't say it was a con, but it is a lot of marketing hype and mis-information from what I can see.
The only really interesting thing about their system is that they took massive amounts of knackered FPGAs and found a way to make a useful system from them. This is imporant if they can use it to hugely increase the usable yield of such devices. It also means the systems can be very cheap.
The FPGAs they use arn't really suitable for Genetic Algorithm type exploration of configurations, as they arn't tolerant to incorrect configurations. Devices like the XC6200 from Xilinx is one of the few that can take erroneous bitstreams without shorting out.
For this device interesting stuff is being done evolving the basic logic structures. However, the research into that depends on parasitics and temperature effects, which are all the things that digital design has been classically trying to supress and remove from the design process. Makes it more a of niche market, especially if you can't just re-use the bitstream you've developed on another chip, as it'll have different characteristics, even across the same process batch.
But reconfigurable computing is a technology who's time has come. It isn't even a matter of when, it is a case of 'how much' will be in the next generation systems. You'll be seeing a lot more systems with embedded FPGAs in the future, providing application specific logic when and where it is needed.
The people that are suggesting that voice recognition input would be very cumbersome are overlooking one obvious point.
Assuming _good_ voice recognition, there is no reason to be spelling out mnemonic forms for commands, or using arcane shortcuts designed to reduce and simplify the amount of typing.
What's wrong with
'parent directory' 'list files' 'go home'
and similar forms of more verbose commands, when using voice recognition. These as spoken commands are much more intiuative and memorable than the convoluted syntax people subject themselves to when using linux or other CLIs
Possibly this doesn't scale so well to more complex, precise commands, but most GNU CLIs for example accept long versions of commands which could be much more easily spoken than spelling the contracted forms.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone written something like this to drive a Palm device sitting in a cradle ? I have a pretty handspring Prism at the end of a USB link that would be ideal if there was software...
I really do hope that people read the entire paper before posting their thoughts about it. I hate Microsoft with a passion -- my first thought upon hearing about the WTC attack was, "Those poor people! I sure hope Bill Gates was in there."
Then you are a poor excuse for a human being
My employer uses sourceforge internally.
We have approx 8000 designers/ software engineers/ admin and so can quite happily share code and jointly develop projects.
Bluetooth doesn't need line of sight. The main failing with irDA is that it needs line of sight to be maintained between communicating devices. Bluetooth can talk to devices within your snazzy Dockers 'mobile pants' while happily irradiating your groin.
Check out www.pizzacast.com for details
'burnt' is fairly inaccurate. Xilinx Virtex
FPGAs store the configuration data in SRAM.
You can very quickly and easily reprogram these
parts, in the time taken to essentially do a
'memcopy' And voila, you have new hardware
available. Any small bugs in your design can
be changed in a matter of hours (re-run synthesis/
layout and load it back into the memory)
More interestingly, newer FPGAs can be modified
on the fly, keeping parts active and loading up
new circuitry, making for all sorts of funky
options.
The fraud committed against Egg had nothing to do with clever hacking. It was a fairly dumb, run of the mill fraud attempt that could have happened irl as well. More details in The Register
The problem with the site being too advanced
is that it provided 3D rotatable images of the
products they were trying to sell.
99% (or some other large percentage) of on-line
buyers in Europe do not have broadband access.
Using the boo.com site over a modem is(was) very painful due to the high bandwidth requirements.
Of course, the main reason Boo failed was that its based on a stupid idea. How big is the market for geeks buying sports gear....
More seriously, I've bought a lot of different products on line, but I wouldn't buy clothes/ shoes or anything else that I would want to try on/ try out before buying. It was just a dumb business idea from the start.
But goggle does have clever search engine
technology. It is _not_ obvious. It was
not thought of for several years by a whole
lot of companies trying to index the web.
Hence, IMHO, it does deserve a patent.
Its not a dumb one like 'one-click' it is a
clever idea that deserves to be protected.
You can get it at Bookshop.co.uk Amazon in the uk probably also carry it (amazon.co.uk)
Unusual to see the tables turned for a change. I had to buy Cryptonomicon from the States because it wasn't going to published in the UK for 9 months after the US date. And I thought it was only films that this happened to...
I had a very similar situation a couple of months ago. I found the free altavista access worked
really well for my needs. It does stick up banner ads, but they are easily enough ignored.
Its free access, and they had local numbers for pretty much everywhere I needed them.
Get it here
I think an author who does the same sort
of thing (I.e., weave people into a story
around tech, rather than write stories about tech)
is Iain M. Banks. His sci-fi is consistently
excellent, which unfortunatly cannot be said
about all of his main stream fiction.
It really worries me that this gets a score of interesting, when it bears no relation to the reality of the story.
The post on slashdot says 3 windows a day, the
article says 3, 30 minute windows per day. That means they require to process the data in roughly
7 and a half hours, even without assuming time to formulate a useful signal.
18 hours a day processing time means they miss 2 potential windows. If an infrastructure was in place that would allow distributed clients to be quickly assembled and spread this could be potentially useful. I doubt that this can be done in this case. This does not preclude it being useful in the future.
There is already effort by ex distributed.net people to put such an infrastructure in place.
Check out cosm for such a project.
Does anyone else find it hypocritical to be pretending to take some 'moral high ground' by
posturing about refusing to use Amazon.com, while Jon Katz still sells his books through Amazon ?
So in public he pretends to be making a stance against this 'evil corporation' while still profiting from its sales of his books.
If there was anything other than rhetoric coming from Katz he might actually get some more respect around here.
So I guess there is the challenge. Boycott Amazon if you want, but actually do it, don't just pretend to be doing it. Forbid them from selling your book and lining your pockets, if you have any integrity.
Anyone can easily confirm this by a quick search at Amazon...
Actually, I'd recommend that if you are actually seriously interested you'd take a look at ELSI which is the ethics body attached to the HGP and funded by the US government. Gordon
I'd heartily recommend anything
by Michael Marshall Smith.
Stephenson is quite funny, but
Smith is really insightful and also
very cutting at the same time.
"Only Forward" and "One of Us" are excellent
"Spares" is currently being made into
a film.
Not sure if they are very available
in the US though. Amazon.com looked like
it was having trouble getting them out in
the US anyway. Amazon.co.uk has plenty.
I'd recommend 'Luminous' by Greg Egan
if anyone wants some new, _hard_ sci-fi
too. Again, probably hard to find in the
US.
Gordon
The linked article misses the big point
that many of these legacy processor designs
could easily be fitted into some of the
newer reprogrammable FPGA parts on the
market. This will certainly be the case in the next few years when parts in excess of
50 million gates become available, running at
half gig system speeds.
The free hardware source becomes a very interesting proposition indeed, as people can create their own processors at home, on the fly, and change them to suit what they are doing.
My PhD topic was in reconfigurable computing
What these guys are doing is fairly banal
compared to the more interesting research
being proposed.
The speed claims that they make are based on
large arrays of simple adder circuits, doing
no real useful work.
I wouldn't say it was a con, but it is a lot
of marketing hype and mis-information from what
I can see.
The only really interesting thing about their
system is that they took massive amounts of
knackered FPGAs and found a way to make a useful
system from them. This is imporant if they can
use it to hugely increase the usable yield of such
devices. It also means the systems can be very
cheap.
The FPGAs they use arn't really suitable for
Genetic Algorithm type exploration of configurations, as they arn't tolerant to incorrect configurations. Devices like the XC6200
from Xilinx is one of the few that can take
erroneous bitstreams without shorting out.
For this device interesting stuff is being done
evolving the basic logic structures.
However, the research into that depends on
parasitics and temperature effects, which are all
the things that digital design has been classically trying to supress and remove from the
design process. Makes it more a of niche market,
especially if you can't just re-use the bitstream
you've developed on another chip, as it'll have
different characteristics, even across the same
process batch.
But reconfigurable computing is a technology
who's time has come. It isn't even a matter of
when, it is a case of 'how much' will be in the
next generation systems. You'll be seeing a lot
more systems with embedded FPGAs in the future,
providing application specific logic when and
where it is needed.
The people that are suggesting that
voice recognition input would be very
cumbersome are overlooking one obvious
point.
Assuming _good_ voice recognition, there is
no reason to be spelling out mnemonic forms
for commands, or using arcane shortcuts designed
to reduce and simplify the amount of typing.
What's wrong with
'parent directory'
'list files'
'go home'
and similar forms of more verbose commands,
when using voice recognition. These as
spoken commands are much more intiuative
and memorable than the convoluted syntax
people subject themselves to when using
linux or other CLIs
Possibly this doesn't scale so well to more
complex, precise commands, but most GNU
CLIs for example accept long versions of commands
which could be much more easily spoken than
spelling the contracted forms.