Re:Probably only faster for simple operations
on
FPGA Supercomputers
·
· Score: 1
Where did you get that it learns from its own successes and failures? Some of the links seem to be slashdotted, but that's not in the NASA press release. Nor was it in the press releases I vaguely remember from when HAL was starting.
Re:Probably only faster for simple operations
on
FPGA Supercomputers
·
· Score: 1
Actually, gaming is one area where this might make a difference -- if there are enough gamers out there willing to spend over $10,000... Where FPGA computing shines is when you need to do a lot of repetitive computing, and much of it can be done in parallel. That is, this machine could do Quake with movie quality graphics as fast as human comprehension allows. Of course, maybe a P4 1.5GHz can do the same, and it costs less and is much, much easier to program...
"why aren't we all ditching our amd's/pentiums and buying one of these little babies?"
A) It's only faster on certain problems where the computations can be performed massively in parallel. And most CPU's already spend 99% of their time waiting for data to arrive from memory or the hard drive, or for the operator to click the mouse.
B) It's a s-o-b to program. You aren't writing software, you are designing a custom hardware circuit to solve the problem, which is then implemented by programming logic gates and connections in the chips. In other words, on a computing job where you could write a program in C in a week and it would run in 1 minute on a PC, on FPGA's it might take a year to design and run in a millisecond. So if reducing the run time is worth paying six figures for software development, go for it... Maybe the HAL people have found a way to ease the programming, but it's still going to be quite a lot harder than normal programming.
Just guessing this box might hold 100 FPGA's at $25 each. Plus it has to have a normal computer in there to hand the programs and data out to the FPGA's. So it costs more than a PC, but maybe not as much as a top-end workstation (depending on how big a profit margin they are taking). It's great for a rocket navigational system, but the only down to earth applications I can think of for a machine this big are professional video processing, weather prediction, and some really heavy engineering simulations.
On a smaller scale, cell phones and future modems are likely to include some FPGA-like circuits, probably as a small part of a custom chip rather than as a separate FPGA. When a new protocol comes out requiring revised circuit design, you do the changes in the FPGA program and distribute it to be downloaded.
No government could stop this; FPGA's are sold worldwide and used extensively for prototyping and occasionally for production. Maybe they'll try to restrict the HAL programming language.
75% right. "Field Programmable" means it is programmable in the field, rather than mask programmed at the factory. Some FPGA's are based on EEPROM (Electrically Eraseable) or Flash ROM technology, but obviously for this job you want the ones that are based on RAM. That means they have to read their program every time they power up -- that's a disadvantage when you are just using the FPGA as a permanent replacement for a bunch of hardwired logic chips, but perfect when you want to change the program every time you use it.
merely saying you are going to harm or kill somebody constitutes a crime. No. If it is expressed as a direct threat in such a way as to be taken seriously, then it is a crime -- "give me your money or I'll shoot". More to the point here, when a mob boss says "Joey is a rat fink. Go kill him." that is definitely a crime, and makes the boss as responsible for the murder as the man who pulls the trigger.
Ah yes, European citizens don't kill each other -- but in the last 100 years, their governments killed tens of millions. (I'll restrict this discussion to western Europe, since the Balkans is just too easy...) The British are still carrying on a colonial war in Northern Ireland. The French only gave up on colonial wars when they got their rears whipped everywhere from Vietnam to Algeria. The Germans and Italians had a worse colonial record than the Brits and French, until their colonies were taken away...
I think I prefer the American tradition of small-scale non-governmental violence.
There's a big difference between being morally wrong and being illegal. A "Christian conservative" who cheers when someone is killed really needs to go back and read the New Testament again... But it's not illegal unless they are actually telling people to go out and murder.
Admittedly there is a rather fuzzy line between talking about how bad someone is and encouraging his murder, and maybe if I looked at the web site I'd think they crossed it. I got rather lost in the legalese, but it appears that in fact the jury did decide that this line had been crossed. This makes the Appeals Court decision somewhat unusual. In general they won't overrule the jury or trial court on a finding of fact except for clear bias or an egregious error utterly unsupported by the evidence. But here the jury was overruled on a finding of fact.
There's a big difference between being morally wrong and being illegal. A "Christian conservative" who cheers when someone is killed really needs to go back and read the New Testament again... But it's not illegal unless they are actually telling people to go out and murder. Admittedly there is a rather fuzzy line between talking about how bad someone is and encouraging his murder, and quite likely if I looked at the web site I'd think they crossed it. Apparently the jury did.
If they can't replace it with a CD that works, then they'd better refund your money. There might be a bit of argument about the definition of "works" -- but if it won't play in a good car CD-player, it doesn't work. But the main thing is that if 100 people each come into a store and scream at the manager for 5 minutes, his whole day is gone, and the unsold stock is going back...
Yes, it does make it unplayable on a computer -- by deliberately writing errors that the current generation of computer CD drives don't know how to ignore. So all you need is for the software running the drive to be more fault tolerant -- and if you've ever got a game disk scratched, you know there are major lawful uses for this little enhancement...
And how do you prove it's in the public domain? I'll bet the RIAA's answer is "Send it to us and let us see if it matches anything copyrighted. Sorry, due to the large volume of requests and the millions of bad songs we own, your submission will be checked in 2011..."
And with the wolf guarding the flock... That is, the RIAA no doubt wants to appoint whoever gets to approve the music -- and of course it is going to take a long time to evaluate unknown music, so if you aren't signed with them, they get to sit on your work for a few (weeks, months, years?) before it gets distributed. The RIAA is already very close to being a combination in restraint of trade -- now they are trying to use the courts to suppress the little bit of competition remaining.
if a product has a primary, lawful use, then the entire product was lawful, even if it has unlawful uses. I think that's in the DCMA too. I know Napster argued that point and lost on the facts, not the law. That is, AFAIK, the judge decided that when most of the users were downloading copyrighted stuff, the primary use must be piracy, not downloading non-copyrighted material. If the piracy had been incidental to lawful use, Napster would have won -- and note that the RIAA got a rather limited victory, that Napster does what it can to filter out files named by the record companies, without changing their architecture. For a fault tolerant CD drive in a computer, the intended primary use and most common use would obviously be reading CD-ROM's. Playing copy-protected audio CD's would be a secondary use, and copying them probably less common than playing them...
Of course, I would not suggest advertising that it will beat the copy protection...
Sorry, their whole web site seems to be written in.ASP. I thought that is a Micro$oft language, so why won't a M$ browser support it even on a Mac? I don't suppose it would do much good to give you their help page, that's also in ASP. You could send snail mail complaining about it to
MSNBC on the Internet
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052
Isn't there a better browser for the Mac? (I don't know diddly-squat about Macs, so don't ask me.)
Or maybe it's some setting in IE5. You might ask for help here
The DCMA applies if the primary purpose of the software is to break the security. (At least until the Supreme Court throws it out for making fair use impossible.) But the primary purpose of CD Paranoia is to read damaged disks. If it just happens to also read disks with copy protection which looks like damage...
1) Write to your state Attorney General, consumer fraud protection. Computers are commonly used to listen to CD's, so selling CD's that are known to not play on them might be considered fraud, at least unless they are very clearly marked.
2) Take the record store to small claims court. Get 99 friends to do the same. Watch them ship the damned things back and refuse to stock any more...
RTFA (read the fine article. In brief, they introduce errors in the table of contents and the data sectors that a typical audio CD player will just skip over, but most CD-ROM driver software will hang up on. So you can't use your computer to listen to or to copy the CD. The music industry seems to believe that no one is smart enough to hack the CD-ROM drivers and change the fault handling. I give it 3 days. Of course, distributing any such hack for the purpose of defeating the security is a violation of the CDMA.
On the other hand, I really would appreciate a premium CD driver that would recover as much data as possible from scratched CD-ROM's. And if that just happens to make it read copy protected CD's...
"Almost every answer has some reference to a way he's voted on a bill, a committee he's chaired, a piece of legislation he's working on, etc. In other words, constant reminder's of the work he's doing in Washington." He's trying to show that this is what he really does, not just a message tailored to a particular audience. I've seen too damn many politicians that would claim to be for freedom in a geek forum (if they can find someone to explain the questions to them), but next week are telling an assemblage of Christian Conservatives that they are all for censorship...
Wrong, exactly backwards -- but the proposal wasn't explained well. It was to put several Senate or Congressional seats on the ballot at once. Let's say there were five seats up for election; you get to vote for five out of all the candidates, and the five with the highest totals win. That means that any group that has 20% of the vote and can agree on one candidate will definitely get their candidate elected -- while under the present system, I think there are groups as big as that being generally ignored by both parties.
One problem with this sort of plan is a tendency to get an unacceptably long slate. E.g, the simplest "at large" plan for the Senate would mean a nationwide contest for 16 or 17 Senate seats every two years, and a slate of about 50 candidates. If you can look at a slate like that and pick out the best 16, IMHO you spend way too much time watching the news. But there are compromise plans, like maybe grouping several states together, or elect 50 Senators by state and 50 by occupational groups...
As for the House, my suggestion is to abolish it and replace it with what I call "direct voting with proxies." That is, you can vote directly on bills through the internet, but most people don't have the time and will instead appoint someone to vote for them. I think the best actual mechanism would be for your selected "proxy" to e-mail a filled-in ballot to you for each vote, then you can set software to verify the source, add your voter ID and send it in. (All e-mails are encrypted and secure with no gov't backdoors, of course. And to keep your voting secret, you can ask for ballots from several proxies -- no one but you knows which are getting thrown out.) The proxies become _real_ representatives, not just the guy that got votes from 51% of the half of the people that bothered to come to the polls. Instead of gov't salaries, they can beg for money from their constituents -- note that a Congressman's salary amounts to just a few cents from each voter in his district.
The trouble is, these statistics compare two self-selected groups -- people who care enough to seek out news on the internet vs. people who don't. It doesn't prove much about what some guy that is content with the few minutes of real news coverage a day on pme 1/2 hour TV "news" show would do if you took away the TV and replaced it with an internet terminal.
The real problem is that the mass media usually "balance" views by presenting two views out of many, and usually two veiws that are quite close together. They'll debate what a gov't agency should do, not whether it should exist at all...
Slashdot Mirror
Just don't connect it to the pod doors. 8-)
Where did you get that it learns from its own successes and failures? Some of the links seem to be slashdotted, but that's not in the NASA press release. Nor was it in the press releases I vaguely remember from when HAL was starting.
Actually, gaming is one area where this might make a difference -- if there are enough gamers out there willing to spend over $10,000... Where FPGA computing shines is when you need to do a lot of repetitive computing, and much of it can be done in parallel. That is, this machine could do Quake with movie quality graphics as fast as human comprehension allows. Of course, maybe a P4 1.5GHz can do the same, and it costs less and is much, much easier to program...
"why aren't we all ditching our amd's/pentiums and buying one of these little babies?"
A) It's only faster on certain problems where the computations can be performed massively in parallel. And most CPU's already spend 99% of their time waiting for data to arrive from memory or the hard drive, or for the operator to click the mouse.
B) It's a s-o-b to program. You aren't writing software, you are designing a custom hardware circuit to solve the problem, which is then implemented by programming logic gates and connections in the chips. In other words, on a computing job where you could write a program in C in a week and it would run in 1 minute on a PC, on FPGA's it might take a year to design and run in a millisecond. So if reducing the run time is worth paying six figures for software development, go for it... Maybe the HAL people have found a way to ease the programming, but it's still going to be quite a lot harder than normal programming.
Just guessing this box might hold 100 FPGA's at $25 each. Plus it has to have a normal computer in there to hand the programs and data out to the FPGA's. So it costs more than a PC, but maybe not as much as a top-end workstation (depending on how big a profit margin they are taking). It's great for a rocket navigational system, but the only down to earth applications I can think of for a machine this big are professional video processing, weather prediction, and some really heavy engineering simulations.
On a smaller scale, cell phones and future modems are likely to include some FPGA-like circuits, probably as a small part of a custom chip rather than as a separate FPGA. When a new protocol comes out requiring revised circuit design, you do the changes in the FPGA program and distribute it to be downloaded.
No government could stop this; FPGA's are sold worldwide and used extensively for prototyping and occasionally for production. Maybe they'll try to restrict the HAL programming language.
No, it's not adaptive technology. It's pre-programmed.
75% right. "Field Programmable" means it is programmable in the field, rather than mask programmed at the factory. Some FPGA's are based on EEPROM (Electrically Eraseable) or Flash ROM technology, but obviously for this job you want the ones that are based on RAM. That means they have to read their program every time they power up -- that's a disadvantage when you are just using the FPGA as a permanent replacement for a bunch of hardwired logic chips, but perfect when you want to change the program every time you use it.
It sounds good to me -- but I am not a lawyer, let alone a federal judge appointed by corporate stooges...
merely saying you are going to harm or kill somebody constitutes a crime. No. If it is expressed as a direct threat in such a way as to be taken seriously, then it is a crime -- "give me your money or I'll shoot". More to the point here, when a mob boss says "Joey is a rat fink. Go kill him." that is definitely a crime, and makes the boss as responsible for the murder as the man who pulls the trigger.
Ah yes, European citizens don't kill each other -- but in the last 100 years, their governments killed tens of millions. (I'll restrict this discussion to western Europe, since the Balkans is just too easy...) The British are still carrying on a colonial war in Northern Ireland. The French only gave up on colonial wars when they got their rears whipped everywhere from Vietnam to Algeria. The Germans and Italians had a worse colonial record than the Brits and French, until their colonies were taken away...
I think I prefer the American tradition of small-scale non-governmental violence.
There's a big difference between being morally wrong and being illegal. A "Christian conservative" who cheers when someone is killed really needs to go back and read the New Testament again... But it's not illegal unless they are actually telling people to go out and murder.
Admittedly there is a rather fuzzy line between talking about how bad someone is and encouraging his murder, and maybe if I looked at the web site I'd think they crossed it. I got rather lost in the legalese, but it appears that in fact the jury did decide that this line had been crossed. This makes the Appeals Court decision somewhat unusual. In general they won't overrule the jury or trial court on a finding of fact except for clear bias or an egregious error utterly unsupported by the evidence. But here the jury was overruled on a finding of fact.
There's a big difference between being morally wrong and being illegal. A "Christian conservative" who cheers when someone is killed really needs to go back and read the New Testament again... But it's not illegal unless they are actually telling people to go out and murder. Admittedly there is a rather fuzzy line between talking about how bad someone is and encouraging his murder, and quite likely if I looked at the web site I'd think they crossed it. Apparently the jury did.
If they can't replace it with a CD that works, then they'd better refund your money. There might be a bit of argument about the definition of "works" -- but if it won't play in a good car CD-player, it doesn't work. But the main thing is that if 100 people each come into a store and scream at the manager for 5 minutes, his whole day is gone, and the unsold stock is going back...
No, it's "All your musics are belong to us"
Yes, it does make it unplayable on a computer -- by deliberately writing errors that the current generation of computer CD drives don't know how to ignore. So all you need is for the software running the drive to be more fault tolerant -- and if you've ever got a game disk scratched, you know there are major lawful uses for this little enhancement...
And how do you prove it's in the public domain? I'll bet the RIAA's answer is "Send it to us and let us see if it matches anything copyrighted. Sorry, due to the large volume of requests and the millions of bad songs we own, your submission will be checked in 2011..."
And with the wolf guarding the flock... That is, the RIAA no doubt wants to appoint whoever gets to approve the music -- and of course it is going to take a long time to evaluate unknown music, so if you aren't signed with them, they get to sit on your work for a few (weeks, months, years?) before it gets distributed. The RIAA is already very close to being a combination in restraint of trade -- now they are trying to use the courts to suppress the little bit of competition remaining.
if a product has a primary, lawful use, then the entire product was lawful, even if it has unlawful uses. I think that's in the DCMA too. I know Napster argued that point and lost on the facts, not the law. That is, AFAIK, the judge decided that when most of the users were downloading copyrighted stuff, the primary use must be piracy, not downloading non-copyrighted material. If the piracy had been incidental to lawful use, Napster would have won -- and note that the RIAA got a rather limited victory, that Napster does what it can to filter out files named by the record companies, without changing their architecture. For a fault tolerant CD drive in a computer, the intended primary use and most common use would obviously be reading CD-ROM's. Playing copy-protected audio CD's would be a secondary use, and copying them probably less common than playing them...
Of course, I would not suggest advertising that it will beat the copy protection...
Sorry, their whole web site seems to be written in .ASP. I thought that is a Micro$oft language, so why won't a M$ browser support it even on a Mac? I don't suppose it would do much good to give you their help page, that's also in ASP. You could send snail mail complaining about it to
MSNBC on the Internet One Microsoft Way Redmond, WA 98052
Isn't there a better browser for the Mac? (I don't know diddly-squat about Macs, so don't ask me.) Or maybe it's some setting in IE5. You might ask for help here
The DCMA applies if the primary purpose of the software is to break the security. (At least until the Supreme Court throws it out for making fair use impossible.) But the primary purpose of CD Paranoia is to read damaged disks. If it just happens to also read disks with copy protection which looks like damage...
1) Write to your state Attorney General, consumer fraud protection. Computers are commonly used to listen to CD's, so selling CD's that are known to not play on them might be considered fraud, at least unless they are very clearly marked.
2) Take the record store to small claims court. Get 99 friends to do the same. Watch them ship the damned things back and refuse to stock any more...
RTFA (read the fine article. In brief, they introduce errors in the table of contents and the data sectors that a typical audio CD player will just skip over, but most CD-ROM driver software will hang up on. So you can't use your computer to listen to or to copy the CD. The music industry seems to believe that no one is smart enough to hack the CD-ROM drivers and change the fault handling. I give it 3 days. Of course, distributing any such hack for the purpose of defeating the security is a violation of the CDMA.
On the other hand, I really would appreciate a premium CD driver that would recover as much data as possible from scratched CD-ROM's. And if that just happens to make it read copy protected CD's...
"Almost every answer has some reference to a way he's voted on a bill, a committee he's chaired, a piece of legislation he's working on, etc. In other words, constant reminder's of the work he's doing in Washington." He's trying to show that this is what he really does, not just a message tailored to a particular audience. I've seen too damn many politicians that would claim to be for freedom in a geek forum (if they can find someone to explain the questions to them), but next week are telling an assemblage of Christian Conservatives that they are all for censorship...
Wrong, exactly backwards -- but the proposal wasn't explained well. It was to put several Senate or Congressional seats on the ballot at once. Let's say there were five seats up for election; you get to vote for five out of all the candidates, and the five with the highest totals win. That means that any group that has 20% of the vote and can agree on one candidate will definitely get their candidate elected -- while under the present system, I think there are groups as big as that being generally ignored by both parties.
One problem with this sort of plan is a tendency to get an unacceptably long slate. E.g, the simplest "at large" plan for the Senate would mean a nationwide contest for 16 or 17 Senate seats every two years, and a slate of about 50 candidates. If you can look at a slate like that and pick out the best 16, IMHO you spend way too much time watching the news. But there are compromise plans, like maybe grouping several states together, or elect 50 Senators by state and 50 by occupational groups...
As for the House, my suggestion is to abolish it and replace it with what I call "direct voting with proxies." That is, you can vote directly on bills through the internet, but most people don't have the time and will instead appoint someone to vote for them. I think the best actual mechanism would be for your selected "proxy" to e-mail a filled-in ballot to you for each vote, then you can set software to verify the source, add your voter ID and send it in. (All e-mails are encrypted and secure with no gov't backdoors, of course. And to keep your voting secret, you can ask for ballots from several proxies -- no one but you knows which are getting thrown out.) The proxies become _real_ representatives, not just the guy that got votes from 51% of the half of the people that bothered to come to the polls. Instead of gov't salaries, they can beg for money from their constituents -- note that a Congressman's salary amounts to just a few cents from each voter in his district.
The trouble is, these statistics compare two self-selected groups -- people who care enough to seek out news on the internet vs. people who don't. It doesn't prove much about what some guy that is content with the few minutes of real news coverage a day on pme 1/2 hour TV "news" show would do if you took away the TV and replaced it with an internet terminal.
The real problem is that the mass media usually "balance" views by presenting two views out of many, and usually two veiws that are quite close together. They'll debate what a gov't agency should do, not whether it should exist at all...