It's VERY random... between 8 and 15 seconds... one of these days, I'll get a website up about it... but its running on an old PII, Slackware 5.4 (a good release that supports all the hardware I need and none that I don't, that I'm very familiar with kernel hacking in)... The LILO to music time is about 3 seconds (due mostly to compiling the kernel with only the modules I need and tuning the startup scripts), but it takes 8 to 15 seconds to get there...
Okay, for everyone alternatively complaining that this is overkill on the desktop, or that they would prefer all the checks, etc. in place... this is NOT built for desktop systems.
Read the post; this is for an embedded system requiring seven nines. Though it can (and most likely will) be adapted for desktops, any desktop running this will be a high-reliability server, with all the checks (except memory, which this chip does after a fashion) built into the hardware...
This was most likely a low-power version of the PIII... this company specializes in low-power and embedded systems, and it is common in that market to purposely underclock a CPU (or make a custom-run specially built to be underclocked) in order to save on power and heat.
You can find the BIOS they used here. It has to be custom-tuned, but this kit includes the code itself, so you can build the BIOS yourself. They basically disabled most of the checks and auto-configure options; no disk seeks (reasonable enough in a highly reliable system), only check the first word of every 1K memory block, no auto-configure of IDE, etc.
I've been waiting for something like this for a while! My car MP3 player takes too long to boot up... can't wait to get my hands on this. No mention of cost, but I've sent an e-mail to their contact link and will reply to this message with price if/when they get back to me.
Congrats to Linus and all of us who have ever debugged a kernel module until 2:00 in the morning!
Okay mods, go ahead and mod me down. Don't care. Had to join in the celebration!!!
Re:Nice idea, too bad it looks awful.
on
The New Zelda
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· Score: 1
(Not that I don't like South Park)
My problem is that I don't like South Park for the eigth installment (including GB games) in a series that I *still* buy on release day and play beginning to end.
On the anime front, looks like they're doing cell shading which, unfortunately, is not high-quality. With that kind of technology, I don't think you can do anime-style rendering.
Nintendo, if you're reading this, please look into a better technology! I love the way you went with this, but the rendering has to be a little better. Don't kill my favorite franchise of all time just cause the technology sucks!
The article says: "it stands to reason it will still have the patented Z-trigger lock-on battle system".
SOFTWARE PATENTS ARE evil!
Software patents are evil, but this isn't a software patent... its a patent on a unique and novel user interface mechanism which Nintendo paid a lot of money (in the form of user interface studies) to develop, and it easily copied by other companies. Now, if they patented the particular method of implementing this user interface, THAT would be evil...
In response to all three replies (who all said basically the same thing):
And believeing a law is wrong or should be changed is a rather good reason to break it. When you realize that you'll never change a law by working in the system, the only way to change it is to break it. Maybe you'll have to break even more laws in the process of changing that one bad law.
Let me change my original statement:
but believing that a law should be different is never a good reason to break it unless that law clearly and unequivocally impinges on basic human liberties
Yeah, there's some ambiguity about what basic human liberties are, but most people can say without hesitation whether a particular rule or law clearly interfere with them. And patent law does not clearly interfere with liberty, unless you believe that information wants to be free... but then, that's the informations' freedom and not human freedom.
Besides which, if it wanted to be free, why did someone pay so much money to develop it? Which brings me to an interesting point that bears on the original discussion... what if the enforceability of a patent is directly related to the amount of money spent to develop the patent? Not quite sure how exactly to make that work, but the basic idea is simple: patents exist to protect a company's or individual's investment in intellectual property, therefore the amount of protection is directly proportional to the amount of the investment.
Hmm... have to come up with a system that rewards ingenuity as well. Having a miraculous idea at two in the morning that noone else will think of independantly for a hundred years ought to be protected as well... any suggestions? Sound like a good idea, at least in theory? Or am I just smoking crack tonight?:)
I've used several AMD motherboards in the last couple years (all of them were upgrades, not fried boards)... haven't seen any problems under Linux. Under Windows, the usual flakiness...
From everyone I've talked to, with AMD procs, its all about the cooling. This is the secret to combatting flakiness. That, and ECC RAM. You don't have to be a big-time overclocker with Peltier junction coolers or (god-forbid!) water coolers... just get a decent sized heatsink with some good airflow over it, and a nice big fan.
My first AMD MB (about 1.5 years ago) had a huge problem the first couple days until I added a bigger fan and heatsink... been running continuously (other than a move in late May) since and haven't seen a problem...
First off, let me say that I sympathise with all the AIDS sufferers out there, and say that I can definitely empathise with their friends and family members, having been one myself.
Yet, despite my rather biased perspective on this issue, I do not believe that blatantly breaking the law is the answer in this case. I do believe that international patent law should be different, but believing that a law should be different is never a good reason to break it.
I understand that drug companies are out to make money, and that if they have knowledge or a device that cost them money to get, then they have a right to try to sell it at a profit, and keep it proprietary to boot. Open Source only works when its willing on all sides.
But, frankly, a lot of what they practice is not profit. It's extortion. We need some way to regulate their prices to a fair price. Let's see, quick ideas:
In a capitalist economy, this is done through competition. Can't compete with proprietary technology... no way to get a competitor fairly.
Okay, supply/demand laws... These basically boil down to: "The price of something is optimally set by the consumer at the price the consumer is willing to pay. This price goes up as demand increases, and goes down as supply increases." Hmmm... no control over supply. Demand, unfortunately, will be set nearly world-wide by the U.S. Health Insurance industry. Who, of course, will want to pay as little as possible, but will want to make it necessary to have health insurance to get treated. That's their motive, and I feel it won't do any good to any sufferers who don't have health insurance.
U.S. (or other big country) legislature could help here... either by limiting the cost of treatment (which I do NOT support), or by creating a welfare system that sets a cap at the maximum cost of treatment. This second option I do support, and am even willing to spend my tax-dollars to do. It is, as far as I can see, the only legal and (more importantly) morally right way to reduce the cost of these treatments while preserving the patent-holder's right to profit.
Did I miss anything, anyone? Any other ideas on how this should work? What about the ability to share patented information to synthesize a cure? Anyone with any ideas on how to address that?
I agree much more with free software now that I have heard his reasoning... if the world is going to be run on and by software, then the world needs the ability to own that software.
Where do you draw the line on how much of technology belongs to the society that depends on it? What if Ford tried to enforce an old patent on the internal combustion engine? Would anyone protest?
Well, other than the two obvious (beer and money) ways to compensate a developer, there's another not so obvious way that I personally would *LOVE* to be compensated...
See, here's the thing... I make out okay in the money and beer department, but I don't always have the money to pay for cool geek toys. Find a cool geek toy that's roughly in the price range you're thinking, preferably one that you can verify or guess that they don't have. If its linux compatible and/or can help them continue developing, then that's even better!
Some quick ideas in the under $100 range:
Drawing Tablet (most devs have always wanted one to play around with but not enough reason to actually pay for it)
Some decent speakers
Mice, keyboards, etc. with Geek potential (check out Intel's new wireless solutions for ideas)
Palm m100
Gift certificate to Best Buy / Circuit City / Half.com, etc.
That's it I could come up with... any other ideas?
Well, I would write Maxis if I were you... they're planning on releasing it in the next couple months. TheSims Online! Yes, sounds idiotic... but the very first thing I thought of when I saw their demo and started reading reviews of how the in-game economy is supposed to work, I instantly thought of Snowcrash
Any other/.ers notice this? Any chance of 3D-ifying it? From there it'll only be a matter of time before technology catches up (things like realistic facial expressions, VoN, and full gesture recognition)
How do you view FSF's goal, that stated on their website as The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as in freedom) software ---particularly the GNU operating system(used widely today in its GNU/Linux variant)--- and free (as in freedom) documentation.
In particular, how do you interpret what the word free means in respect to software and programmer's rights?
First, I'll second what I've heard so many times throughout this and other forums. Code is speech. Just as much as a cooking recipe or instructions on how to build a bomb
Alright that said, here's the second point:
The ability to decrypt an admittedly lame encryption algorithm does not mean that you will decrypt it, or even that the decryption is necessarily illegal. The ability to pick a lock is not considered illegal in this country, only using that ability to commit a crime. What is Dmitrii's fundamental crime? Providing the knowledge necessary to pick a lock. A very tiny brass lock. Not even like a Masterlock or anything. Okay, maybe I'm stretching the analogy a little, but I think everyone can get my point.
Speaking of which, here's the third point. If a new method of picking locks was discovered, making all existing Masterlocks easily pickable, what would Masterlock do? Would they try to imprison the originator of this method? Or would they be more likely to try to make a better lock and sell it to people?
Well, that's my $0.02. If you ask me, people shouldn't be able to be imprisoned because they step on any other individual's (corporate or private) pride...
Nonvolatile memory (passive) is even worse, because NV memory is almost always capacitive... you're basically charging and discharging microscopic batteries, which is inherently slow.
Thats total nonesense. In fact the memory that most resembles your "battery" scheme is dynamic memory aka. DRAM or SDRAM if you like. It consists out of one transistor and one capacitor per cell.
Flash/Eprom memory work using fowler-nordheim tunneling to store tiny charges in isolated gate oxides. Writing is even slower than with a capacitor. There are other nonvolatile memory techniques which work in a totally different way. (FRAM: storing data by moving atoms, MRAM: magnetic memory, phase change memory etc..)
Storing tiny charges in isolated gate oxides... hmm, sounds a lot like a capacitor to me. Also, notice the words always and basically in the original text. I recognize that this is not a 100% accurate description, but close enough for the purposes of this discussion.
The second reason memory is slow is size. The smallest simple memory circuit you can make with silicon takes two transistors (a basic flip-flop circuit)...
This is static memory, yes. The smallest version requires at least FOUR transistors because you have to adress the cell by some means. But as mentioned abovce - the smallest memory cell requires just a single transistor.
As mentioned above, the smallest simple memory circuit; I know that there are better ways to do this, but wanted to keep the discussion simple and focused on theoretical limitations of silicon, which in this case is die size. Addressing was also covered later in this same paragraph, if you had bothered to read it.
and switching speed, which increases geometrically with transistor count, due to radio interference considerations (aka crosstalk).
No, switching speed is mainly dependand on line and gate capacity. (see low k dielectrica). Crosstalk is a totally different issue...
At the speeds we're talking about (the limits of silicon), crosstalk becomes an incredibly important design issue, and will fundamentally limit your design and architecture, thereby decreasing your maximum speed. While I generally agree that other factors also affect speed, we're talking about theoretical limits and how to overcome them.
as well as the fact that most nanotech is mechanical
Fictional stories are not a reliable source for scientific information.
Nanotech is, by its definition, mechanical in nature. I have yet to see a working design for any nanotech device that isn't at least partially, if not totally, mechanical in nature. By working design for any nanotech device, I'm referring to a theoretical architecture for a molecular-level computing device which performs calculations or does work at a molecular level, which has been shown through computer simulations to function.
Well, for one, memory technology is usually behind other silicon computing technologies, basically because of the added complexity.
There are two reasons why memory is slow. First off, with the fastest ways to do memory, they're all active. You not only have to store data, you have to keep it stored. So, to effect a change, you have to overcome the circuitry thats holding state, or you have to turn it off, neither of which is a zero time process. Nonvolatile memory (passive) is even worse, because NV memory is almost always capacitive... you're basically charging and discharging microscopic batteries, which is inherently slow. Nanotechnology does not inherently get rid of either of these problems, but because its so small, the timescales involved are shortened as well... you don't have as much potential energy to overcome.
The second reason memory is slow is size. The smallest simple memory circuit you can make with silicon takes two transistors (a basic flip-flop circuit)... that's for one bit... once you put more bits together, you also have to do address decoding, which increases your transistor count exponentially. Even with a smart row/column scheme for addressing, the minimum number of transistors required is (N^0.5), where N is the number of bits of memory on a chip. For ECC ram, it's (N^0.5 * log N^0.5). The distances that the electricity has to travel limit your maximum speed via two mechanisms, the fundamental restriction that information cannot travel faster than the speed of light, and switching speed, which increases geometrically with transistor count, due to radio interference considerations (aka crosstalk). Nanotech addresses this by making the distance that signals have to travel much shorter, as well as the fact that most nanotech is mechanical, not electrical in nature. At the scales where nanotech is applicable, the speed of light isn't as fundamental a barrier, but crosstalk becomes increasingly important due to the inverse square law, so having a non-electric means of conveying information is incredibly important.
So, short answer: nanotech will incredibly increase the speed of one of the slowest components of a solid-state turing machine, which will allow the field to advance while legacy devices are still in use.
We will always need a method of converting nanotech information into other forms of information, but you will see that the conversion gets closer and closer to the human being, which can only process information at a certain speed regardless.
A co-worker of mine has a button on his toolbar to disable image loading in IE. He's already contacted X10 and told them he was going to develop a button to disable popups... but he's just been waiting to hear from some interested parties...
This button will probably disable Javascript, and act similar to a checkbox control (on/off behaviour at a button press)... if interested please e-mail him at bblatchl@inmar-inc.com and tell him you'd be interested in such a thing...
I already asked him, and he's fully cool with the 2000+ expected responses to this post, so be sure to e-mail him (he's standing beside me chuckling right now...). Especially if you know how to disable JUST pop-up code, rather than all JavaScript.
I'm going to preface this by saying that Mr. Card and I have met on several occasions, having friends in common and whatnot (and these friends knowing that I'm such a huge sci-fi reader). I'm a Zen Buddhist... he and I have had some amazing discussions about religion over beers at a local bar before.
The point? That I believe that this is really his view on religion; that it is an allegorical history more than anything else; an integral part of society. And I think he would agree with the statement that all religion has some truth in it.
All that said, he is a devout mormon! I have a lot of respect for someone who can reconcile a fundamentalist religion with these kinds of beliefs; not that I think they're contradictory, just that it takes an amazing amount of will and conviction to continue to hold beliefs like this in that kind of an environment.
Does anyone remember this book? It's one where this type of technology is highly used... as a result, polite custom is to wear a featureless plastic mask while outside.
If I was a citizen of Tampa, I have a feeling that I would do this as a form of civil disobedience. If I ever have occasion to be in Tampa, you can be sure that I will!
I would imagine that the tires will be rubber or foam filled. The advantage of rubber or foam filled is that you can have a self-healing super-composite (usually accomplished by embedding foam or epoxy capsules within the material)... Tracks would be ideal, but the weight doesn't justify the added maneuverability, especially since those benefits aren't realized as well in particularly rocky terrain. Treads deal great with bumpy terrain and with low-traction terrain, but when the bumpiness is more granular treads may actually decrease effectiveness...
Here's the bottom line: this isn't us vs. them at all. Companies ALL do good things and bad things, because corporations don't care about good or bad, public domain or copyrights, cathedrals or bizzars. They care about the bottom line, and are trying to find the best way to get there. They want to minimize risk and maximize profit, and for each company the way to do this is different.
In this case, Google is just trying to protect themselves from a potentially huge liability. The manner in which they chose to reduce this risk is a little excessive, but legally it was the easiest, safest way to do this.
One great point of logic against all of the above: what if God (in whatever form) created it to appear that it had always been here?
Counter point: if an omniscient being created something in such a way as to lead you astray, what can you possibly do to prove otherwise? Therefore, what does it matter?
A BEAM imaging array wouldn't be all that hard to build small... one controller that sends out directional info and beams back down to earth on amateur band (yes, it is possible), plus a couple hundred imagers (think photocell in a tube)... I could get it all down to less than a pound, counting solar cells. Especially considering that I wouldn't even need capacitors for energy storage. Use tethers between the microsats (easier for communication anyways), and use orbital velocity to store/retrieve energy... the tethers can be made to push against earth's magnetic field, or to take energy out of it. Problem would be every time I get it over Cindy Crawford's bedroom, I'd take so much juice sending pics down that it'd graze the atmosphere...
Slashdot Mirror
It's VERY random... between 8 and 15 seconds... one of these days, I'll get a website up about it... but its running on an old PII, Slackware 5.4 (a good release that supports all the hardware I need and none that I don't, that I'm very familiar with kernel hacking in)... The LILO to music time is about 3 seconds (due mostly to compiling the kernel with only the modules I need and tuning the startup scripts), but it takes 8 to 15 seconds to get there...
Okay, for everyone alternatively complaining that this is overkill on the desktop, or that they would prefer all the checks, etc. in place... this is NOT built for desktop systems.
Read the post; this is for an embedded system requiring seven nines. Though it can (and most likely will) be adapted for desktops, any desktop running this will be a high-reliability server, with all the checks (except memory, which this chip does after a fashion) built into the hardware...
This was most likely a low-power version of the PIII... this company specializes in low-power and embedded systems, and it is common in that market to purposely underclock a CPU (or make a custom-run specially built to be underclocked) in order to save on power and heat.
I've been waiting for something like this for a while! My car MP3 player takes too long to boot up... can't wait to get my hands on this. No mention of cost, but I've sent an e-mail to their contact link and will reply to this message with price if/when they get back to me.
Happy birthday Linux!!!!!!!!!
Congrats to Linus and all of us who have ever debugged a kernel module until 2:00 in the morning!
Okay mods, go ahead and mod me down. Don't care. Had to join in the celebration!!!
My problem is that I don't like South Park for the eigth installment (including GB games) in a series that I *still* buy on release day and play beginning to end.
On the anime front, looks like they're doing cell shading which, unfortunately, is not high-quality. With that kind of technology, I don't think you can do anime-style rendering.
Nintendo, if you're reading this, please look into a better technology! I love the way you went with this, but the rendering has to be a little better. Don't kill my favorite franchise of all time just cause the technology sucks!
SOFTWARE PATENTS ARE evil!
Software patents are evil, but this isn't a software patent... its a patent on a unique and novel user interface mechanism which Nintendo paid a lot of money (in the form of user interface studies) to develop, and it easily copied by other companies. Now, if they patented the particular method of implementing this user interface, THAT would be evil...
And believeing a law is wrong or should be changed is a rather good reason to break it. When you realize that you'll never change a law by working in the system, the only way to change it is to break it. Maybe you'll have to break even more laws in the process of changing that one bad law.
Let me change my original statement:
but believing that a law should be different is never a good reason to break it unless that law clearly and unequivocally impinges on basic human liberties
Yeah, there's some ambiguity about what basic human liberties are, but most people can say without hesitation whether a particular rule or law clearly interfere with them. And patent law does not clearly interfere with liberty, unless you believe that information wants to be free... but then, that's the informations' freedom and not human freedom.
Besides which, if it wanted to be free, why did someone pay so much money to develop it? Which brings me to an interesting point that bears on the original discussion... what if the enforceability of a patent is directly related to the amount of money spent to develop the patent? Not quite sure how exactly to make that work, but the basic idea is simple: patents exist to protect a company's or individual's investment in intellectual property, therefore the amount of protection is directly proportional to the amount of the investment.
Hmm... have to come up with a system that rewards ingenuity as well. Having a miraculous idea at two in the morning that noone else will think of independantly for a hundred years ought to be protected as well... any suggestions? Sound like a good idea, at least in theory? Or am I just smoking crack tonight? :)
From everyone I've talked to, with AMD procs, its all about the cooling. This is the secret to combatting flakiness. That, and ECC RAM. You don't have to be a big-time overclocker with Peltier junction coolers or (god-forbid!) water coolers... just get a decent sized heatsink with some good airflow over it, and a nice big fan.
My first AMD MB (about 1.5 years ago) had a huge problem the first couple days until I added a bigger fan and heatsink... been running continuously (other than a move in late May) since and haven't seen a problem...
Yet, despite my rather biased perspective on this issue, I do not believe that blatantly breaking the law is the answer in this case. I do believe that international patent law should be different, but believing that a law should be different is never a good reason to break it.
I understand that drug companies are out to make money, and that if they have knowledge or a device that cost them money to get, then they have a right to try to sell it at a profit, and keep it proprietary to boot. Open Source only works when its willing on all sides.
But, frankly, a lot of what they practice is not profit. It's extortion. We need some way to regulate their prices to a fair price. Let's see, quick ideas:
In a capitalist economy, this is done through competition. Can't compete with proprietary technology... no way to get a competitor fairly.
Okay, supply/demand laws... These basically boil down to: "The price of something is optimally set by the consumer at the price the consumer is willing to pay. This price goes up as demand increases, and goes down as supply increases." Hmmm... no control over supply. Demand, unfortunately, will be set nearly world-wide by the U.S. Health Insurance industry. Who, of course, will want to pay as little as possible, but will want to make it necessary to have health insurance to get treated. That's their motive, and I feel it won't do any good to any sufferers who don't have health insurance.
U.S. (or other big country) legislature could help here... either by limiting the cost of treatment (which I do NOT support), or by creating a welfare system that sets a cap at the maximum cost of treatment. This second option I do support, and am even willing to spend my tax-dollars to do. It is, as far as I can see, the only legal and (more importantly) morally right way to reduce the cost of these treatments while preserving the patent-holder's right to profit.
Did I miss anything, anyone? Any other ideas on how this should work? What about the ability to share patented information to synthesize a cure? Anyone with any ideas on how to address that?
Where do you draw the line on how much of technology belongs to the society that depends on it? What if Ford tried to enforce an old patent on the internal combustion engine? Would anyone protest?
See, here's the thing... I make out okay in the money and beer department, but I don't always have the money to pay for cool geek toys. Find a cool geek toy that's roughly in the price range you're thinking, preferably one that you can verify or guess that they don't have. If its linux compatible and/or can help them continue developing, then that's even better!
Some quick ideas in the under $100 range:
That's it I could come up with... any other ideas?
Any other /.ers notice this? Any chance of 3D-ifying it? From there it'll only be a matter of time before technology catches up (things like realistic facial expressions, VoN, and full gesture recognition)
Yeah, but I want his particular view on this...
In particular, how do you interpret what the word free means in respect to software and programmer's rights?
First, I'll second what I've heard so many times throughout this and other forums. Code is speech. Just as much as a cooking recipe or instructions on how to build a bomb
Alright that said, here's the second point:
The ability to decrypt an admittedly lame encryption algorithm does not mean that you will decrypt it, or even that the decryption is necessarily illegal. The ability to pick a lock is not considered illegal in this country, only using that ability to commit a crime. What is Dmitrii's fundamental crime? Providing the knowledge necessary to pick a lock. A very tiny brass lock. Not even like a Masterlock or anything. Okay, maybe I'm stretching the analogy a little, but I think everyone can get my point.
Speaking of which, here's the third point. If a new method of picking locks was discovered, making all existing Masterlocks easily pickable, what would Masterlock do? Would they try to imprison the originator of this method? Or would they be more likely to try to make a better lock and sell it to people?
Well, that's my $0.02. If you ask me, people shouldn't be able to be imprisoned because they step on any other individual's (corporate or private) pride...
Thats total nonesense. In fact the memory that most resembles your "battery" scheme is dynamic memory aka. DRAM or SDRAM if you like. It consists out of one transistor and one capacitor per cell.
Flash/Eprom memory work using fowler-nordheim tunneling to store tiny charges in isolated gate oxides. Writing is even slower than with a capacitor. There are other nonvolatile memory techniques which work in a totally different way. (FRAM: storing data by moving atoms, MRAM: magnetic memory, phase change memory etc..)
Storing tiny charges in isolated gate oxides... hmm, sounds a lot like a capacitor to me. Also, notice the words always and basically in the original text. I recognize that this is not a 100% accurate description, but close enough for the purposes of this discussion.
The second reason memory is slow is size. The smallest simple memory circuit you can make with silicon takes two transistors (a basic flip-flop circuit)... This is static memory, yes. The smallest version requires at least FOUR transistors because you have to adress the cell by some means. But as mentioned abovce - the smallest memory cell requires just a single transistor.
As mentioned above, the smallest simple memory circuit; I know that there are better ways to do this, but wanted to keep the discussion simple and focused on theoretical limitations of silicon, which in this case is die size. Addressing was also covered later in this same paragraph, if you had bothered to read it.
and switching speed, which increases geometrically with transistor count, due to radio interference considerations (aka crosstalk).
No, switching speed is mainly dependand on line and gate capacity. (see low k dielectrica). Crosstalk is a totally different issue...
At the speeds we're talking about (the limits of silicon), crosstalk becomes an incredibly important design issue, and will fundamentally limit your design and architecture, thereby decreasing your maximum speed. While I generally agree that other factors also affect speed, we're talking about theoretical limits and how to overcome them.
as well as the fact that most nanotech is mechanical
Fictional stories are not a reliable source for scientific information.
Nanotech is, by its definition, mechanical in nature. I have yet to see a working design for any nanotech device that isn't at least partially, if not totally, mechanical in nature. By working design for any nanotech device, I'm referring to a theoretical architecture for a molecular-level computing device which performs calculations or does work at a molecular level, which has been shown through computer simulations to function.
There are two reasons why memory is slow. First off, with the fastest ways to do memory, they're all active. You not only have to store data, you have to keep it stored. So, to effect a change, you have to overcome the circuitry thats holding state, or you have to turn it off, neither of which is a zero time process. Nonvolatile memory (passive) is even worse, because NV memory is almost always capacitive... you're basically charging and discharging microscopic batteries, which is inherently slow. Nanotechnology does not inherently get rid of either of these problems, but because its so small, the timescales involved are shortened as well... you don't have as much potential energy to overcome.
The second reason memory is slow is size. The smallest simple memory circuit you can make with silicon takes two transistors (a basic flip-flop circuit)... that's for one bit... once you put more bits together, you also have to do address decoding, which increases your transistor count exponentially. Even with a smart row/column scheme for addressing, the minimum number of transistors required is (N^0.5), where N is the number of bits of memory on a chip. For ECC ram, it's (N^0.5 * log N^0.5). The distances that the electricity has to travel limit your maximum speed via two mechanisms, the fundamental restriction that information cannot travel faster than the speed of light, and switching speed, which increases geometrically with transistor count, due to radio interference considerations (aka crosstalk). Nanotech addresses this by making the distance that signals have to travel much shorter, as well as the fact that most nanotech is mechanical, not electrical in nature. At the scales where nanotech is applicable, the speed of light isn't as fundamental a barrier, but crosstalk becomes increasingly important due to the inverse square law, so having a non-electric means of conveying information is incredibly important.
So, short answer: nanotech will incredibly increase the speed of one of the slowest components of a solid-state turing machine, which will allow the field to advance while legacy devices are still in use.
We will always need a method of converting nanotech information into other forms of information, but you will see that the conversion gets closer and closer to the human being, which can only process information at a certain speed regardless.
A co-worker of mine has a button on his toolbar to disable image loading in IE. He's already contacted X10 and told them he was going to develop a button to disable popups... but he's just been waiting to hear from some interested parties...
This button will probably disable Javascript, and act similar to a checkbox control (on/off behaviour at a button press)... if interested please e-mail him at bblatchl@inmar-inc.com and tell him you'd be interested in such a thing...
I already asked him, and he's fully cool with the 2000+ expected responses to this post, so be sure to e-mail him (he's standing beside me chuckling right now...). Especially if you know how to disable JUST pop-up code, rather than all JavaScript.
The point? That I believe that this is really his view on religion; that it is an allegorical history more than anything else; an integral part of society. And I think he would agree with the statement that all religion has some truth in it.
All that said, he is a devout mormon! I have a lot of respect for someone who can reconcile a fundamentalist religion with these kinds of beliefs; not that I think they're contradictory, just that it takes an amazing amount of will and conviction to continue to hold beliefs like this in that kind of an environment.
If I was a citizen of Tampa, I have a feeling that I would do this as a form of civil disobedience. If I ever have occasion to be in Tampa, you can be sure that I will!
I would imagine that the tires will be rubber or foam filled. The advantage of rubber or foam filled is that you can have a self-healing super-composite (usually accomplished by embedding foam or epoxy capsules within the material)... Tracks would be ideal, but the weight doesn't justify the added maneuverability, especially since those benefits aren't realized as well in particularly rocky terrain. Treads deal great with bumpy terrain and with low-traction terrain, but when the bumpiness is more granular treads may actually decrease effectiveness...
In this case, Google is just trying to protect themselves from a potentially huge liability. The manner in which they chose to reduce this risk is a little excessive, but legally it was the easiest, safest way to do this.
One great point of logic against all of the above: what if God (in whatever form) created it to appear that it had always been here?
Counter point: if an omniscient being created something in such a way as to lead you astray, what can you possibly do to prove otherwise? Therefore, what does it matter?
A BEAM imaging array wouldn't be all that hard to build small... one controller that sends out directional info and beams back down to earth on amateur band (yes, it is possible), plus a couple hundred imagers (think photocell in a tube)... I could get it all down to less than a pound, counting solar cells. Especially considering that I wouldn't even need capacitors for energy storage. Use tethers between the microsats (easier for communication anyways), and use orbital velocity to store/retrieve energy... the tethers can be made to push against earth's magnetic field, or to take energy out of it. Problem would be every time I get it over Cindy Crawford's bedroom, I'd take so much juice sending pics down that it'd graze the atmosphere...