It's nice to see some people getting together to create their own enterprise and thereby have the right to set their own direction, but if such people gain wealth and then each starts a number of enterprises and not lacks time in the day to work everywhere, well, socialism turns into capitalism. Production produces. Although some of the results of production can be given to people who have had no experience, such as young adults, many of them prefer leadership rather than starting fresh. In reality most leaders are greedy, but their greed makes them desire the success of the enterprise.
Computers are useful to socialist ideals in sharing information. Capitalists find that socialist desires drag down profits, although I would think that there should really be a third side: anyone with some blank disk space, say a 100 Gb, is allowed to configure that space arbitrarily perhaps with a random sequence or perhaps with a creative algorithm. And if the reordered bits and bytes happen to coincide in part with what someone else created, that's just luck. In the near enough future, creative programs will dazzle us enough to make us overlook many human achievements.
Information is universal. It is not owned. Those who focus their minds on particular types of information are sure to experience some of them. A creative engine may be guided by such a principle to derive information of interest. That's what makes information achievable and universal. How would someone then say I own this and you can't have it?
Well, for one, they are probably not after people who have antipolitical views, but have much larger fish to fry, like terrorists |) Still, it makes you wonder how you are judged because you can't really tell what the Internet is doing against your reputation, especially if some website is rigged to send data to the wrong places.
On the one hand, given today's connectedness, one might be tempted to build snoop technology just to see if it's safe to go downtown--and does the ruling ok this? On the other hand, it may be best to surf behind an anonymous server and systematically eliminate all physical ties to society...
The middle ground is to obfuscate. Not sure how to do that and surf with any fun. Is obfuscation and disguise the new terrorist strategy? Are they wolves in sheep's clothing? Can you believe that some people go through the trouble to become doctors before building car bombs? The government has its hands full, though I fail to see how snooping on the Internet is going to catch the big ones. Some of these characters have some brains and are unlikely to tip their hand, and the most shocking thing is that they killed no one innocent in the UK with those cars.
for Moore's Law to hold a true course for some time to come. Extrapolate, will you, to the day a machine can be used to remove problem points from your body. The results range from a cure for cancer to much longer lifespans.
I suppose we should also pray that is not a day people will feel free to neglect themselves.
I wonder how agriculture might change if a machine can really push a crop through (or in other fields, get whatever job done), like the next generation of iPhone.
While high energy devices and explosives are used in everyday life, and anyone wanting badly enough can build a bomb from gasoline or a number of common items, there is some danger in proliferating knowledge of destructive explosions to people not old enough to drive.
So what's to fear? - Big storms, flooding, tropical diseases, drought, famine from global warming? - Fake products? Toxins and harmful elements of legal products? - Terrorists? Punks? Nutcases? - Bird flu? - Identity thieves? Criminals? - Big Brother and loss of civil liberties? - Techno screwups that might label you a very bad x, y, or z? A malfunctioning automobile/airplane? - Technological or political upheaval? - Overpopulation?
The list is getting longer, caused by the power that bad things have for accumulating and travelling close to you. But you, insulated and told of so many wonderful advancements, are most likely told little about making a real difference. The writing is on the wall, so to speak, when one opens a Slashdot page and sees the occasional heads-up.
Now, one might wonder would it make any sense to have an environmental studies summer camp. I doubt it. Kids are passionate about fun factor. Blowing up things are fun. Mature people think "environment" but have to do the pollution thing called a job, and have no time to do more than sort the recycling.
So the solution is build technology to address the problems. People need something like a network of gizmos that can detect hazards and sound a general alarm. Are locusts invading? Is someone carrying a dense metal object nearby? What's in the toothpaste? Did the cook pee in the soup? Has your computer smuggled out your private data? Are you developing a deadly disease? Has a deadly bacteria spread all over your salad?
Is it time for government intervention? There are so many people with similar problems that it would be cost effective to do something broad and sweeping rather than regional approaches. Or do we wait until events demonstrate that a reaction is unavoidable?
Would it be worthwhile to start on an open-source technology that detects hazards, let alone fix the problems? The world has grown complex enough that a person can't really defend himself without some technological assistance. Generations ago, life expectancy was low due to the large numbers of misunderstood or missed hazards. Now it's the same paradigm all over again. The solution used to be educate until the ability to cope is absorbed into common sense. This technique may soon be limited in effectiveness.
I've always held that asking what came before the Big Bang is like asking what is North of the North Pole? It's a grammatically correct question but we can't expect it to mean anything.
While we don't have a working theory of quantum gravitation, we do have some strong hints that time and and space themselves were forged in the Big Bang. If you look at a Universe a Planck Length is size, the error in the time of any event observed would be longer than the time the Universe has existed for, to this point, and any error is position would be large than the current Universe at that size.
In short, time and space are useless measurements of a Universe this small.
In a very real sense, the Universe has always existed but has a finite age. I think once I came to understand what this really meant, it's very a beautiful truth about the world. I am sceptical of any theory that talks about a "before" the Big Bang - I think it misses one of the most important truths there is to know!
Of all the convoluted wishy washy
Time and space are conceived as well as possible with our ability to observe and invent theories. We may be too limited to cause verifying phenomena for better theories, but that is not to say the Big Bang is necessarily the North Pole of time or smallness invalidates measurement and dimension.
The most sensible approach is to not omit the possibility extending the universe beyond the events of the Big Bang. That is, take time as we understand it and consider the Big Bang as a point in time and space with the possibility of having a past and having exterior entities. Who know? Perhaps dark matter was not all sourced from the Big Bang. There are too many possibilities.
I.e., if Libby was to serve normally, he probably would have gotten as much time as Paris Hilton...does it make sense to send anyone to jail with so much overcrowding that they are let out after a token stay? The system can't do anything solid to prevent crime. The upshot of it all is you could easily be a victim if the system is too weak to deter, and you want to think of either protecting yourself or presenting people with better options so they don't even consider bothering you in a bad way.
It's harder for an individual to make a difference nowadays because one meets more strangers than ever before, as one has more ability to get about achieving numerous little goals, and it's all too easy to overlook a sneak. The government with all its power has too many problems to look after the little guy, who has to reproduce a microcosm of the security that used to be run by government. It doesn't look like it will get any easier in the next 5-10 years.
More RAM? Heh. If the claims of 100x read write is true, swap = RAM. After all, with light, all you have to do is shine at multiple points to eliminate seek. Heck!
Be nice to have an accurate prediction. It would bolster mankind's confidence in mind over matter.
Chaos theory suggests that increasing precision by a decimal point would lead to totally different results, yet the computer isn't considering anything close to accurate.
So throwing chaos into chaos - well, the prediction is chaos.
What may be nice is the investment in computing technology will spin off lots of nice gadgets for us. Just to let the simulate people know, the fact that people are aware they are being simulated and thus should be thinking of randomizing rather than patterning their activities ought to boost hardware requirements by several orders of magnitude.
Perhaps simulation is really moot. People have well known objectives, such as chasing the American dream. Individuals are hard to predict, and it is individuals that cause mayhem when least expected.
All sacred geometry or even cockblockery aside, do you remember the 5, 6, 7 & 8's?
Now, someone help me with trees. I, for one, am unclear how a tree is applicable to ports. If I have an Ethernet router with 5678 ports--perhaps this is even better than 3456 ports-- I don't want some ports to talk immediately to the root node of a 12-ary tree while other ports have to send data meandering through twigs, branches, and trunks. If a 12-ary tree is good, a 3456-ary tree is better. Better yet may be every one of the ports having a single path to each of the 3455 other ports.
Well, saving money wouldn't be the big statistic to look for because Microsoft would surely offer an educational discount. There are costs in training teachers.
The long term implications may be considered. Students may either find themselves unfamiliar with a Microsoft world in the workplace or they may drive a large changeover to free software when they go to work.
Another statistic of interest - will free software evolve fast enough? Will large groups of students, given the large supply of students, corroborate to implement programs that satisfy new objectives?
At any rate, Microsoft is offering many free software too so the whole world seems to be tilting to a lower cost for starting a computer setup. The cost of any advanced objective still lies in the expertise to achieve and maintain. So we should watch the viewpoint of students as to their desire and insight in applying computers in more aspects of life.
Free software can always use more able programmers.
As the reconfiguring and manual repairing become less and less frequent it becomes easier to automate hot fixes by just installing lots of el-cheapo redundancies. Only after a long list of breakdowns have occurred will it be necessary for a crew to manually overhaul the system.
It's the model that the Hubble telescope works on. The gyroscopes will fail but there are enough to keep the device working between servicing.
Right now there is a hue and cry about so much skilled work requiring people, especially in the trades, but in a few years, more and more automation will just take over basic menial labor and then evolve into skilled work. First there's Stanley driving itself. Next illegal immigration is clamped down. Many governments in South America are taking over oilfields. It's all related to setting economic boundaries, such as division of labor. The clues are there. What were we supposed to think, that the actions are independent? What they're not telling us is the continual encroachment of machines into the labor pool.
How hard is it to swing a hammer or slice a grapefruit? The megapixels of cameras are getting higher per dollar while multiple cores in low-power CPUs permit the construction of autonomous domestic robots.
Outsourcing of task T indicates the regard of task T having less value. If all goes well, task T will become solvable by following a large set of rules. After all, remote staff pretty well have to do their job by rules. If they can't find anyone needing to do anything outside the rules, the rules will have evolved to the point that they can be implemented into the interface between the remote staff and the local server. Goodbye, staff.
This being said, the countries that provide outsourcing are growing economically and technologically. It is all too predictable that the people there will be providing automation equipment, as even basic programming tasks become automated and numerous people are left with nothing better to do than solve more difficult tasks, like AI.
Also 1000 TFlops is still much much less than 10^23, which means the universe is very complex compared to computing power.
Now, it is possible to set up the networking between processors to compute a specific calculation quickly. There is an architecture called systolic arrays that basically treats unrolls a loop into a long pipeline. If you arrange processors into a grid and you chain certain processors together depending on the job they each have to do, you can run the loop many different times, each time with a different set of initial parameters. Generally you assume that the loop always has the same number of iterations (so you assign different sized grids to each of the different lengths of loops).
For example, a chess playing program can be assumed to search a similar sized tree for each move. Therefore, pipeline each possible move into the systolic array and the answers come out the end all in a bunch. The idea is that a general purpose grid of processors would take time figuring out where to send each intermediate result but a special purpose grid already has these decisions hardwired. Of course, chess is a fanciful example because there would be so many processors barking up the wrong proverbial tree that they would be wasted. Feedback loops could be used to reload search trees with useful searches once useless search directions are identified.
Multimedia processing where a large array of data needs to be processed is very appropriate for systolic arrays.
First of all, knocking sequences on a door may be a bit insecure as I'll justify below. It's unusual though and could be a novelty. Now, programs could be protected from casual or accidental execution if mouse clicks are customized.
changes every time
The alphabet is so small though. Short and long beats and short, long, and zero rests. That's 4 characters. If it can be assumed that no one will use consecutive rests, there is still limited number of passwords.
Remembering different passwords is painful, especially if they change often. Therefore, they will be have to be short and sweet. All a break-in artist has to do is get a unit of his own and get familiar with the most common knocks. They should get recycled eventually and the probability of finding the right knock in 3 tries could be quite good.
It is nice to have software that spots human error, and if a certain human error is common, software is designed specificly to prevent that problem. However, there are rare problems that cannot be seen until software is smart to the n-th degree. The probability of an n-th degree error is so small that the cost of the error is weighed against the cost of protecting against it. Even if special protections are built for a predictable error, there will still be rare bugs in other parts that can cause just as much harm. Computers are used to enable handling more items or more detail. This makes it harder for people to double check for problems.
Caveat emptor - the analogy is, if you have a lot to lose, don't just trust a computer or a bureaucracy. You have to put in your own checks and balances
However, after x years copyrights and patents will expire anyways. I can just picture the Far-Side-styled cartoon that has pirates arriving, with a bagful of raw materials in tow, dressed colorfully and flying the jolly roger, at a site replete with intellectual property only to perform a copying process rather than a depriving process. Software copying essentially involves altering your own matter rather than taking someone else's. But today's pirates sneak around with spyware, phone cameras, USB keys, handheld scanners, etc. Very technical and not prone to lose any bodyparts with sudden attacks.
The link between decreased piracy encouraging economic growth may be actually better piracy encourages economic growth. Technology has enabled third world countries to gain knowledge more easily, and competing companies seek breakthroughs because they know they cannot be complacent. Escalation in competition between hackers and security people also causes greater demand for goods and services. It just makes you wonder though, because some of us regard piracy as wasteful, and with the advent of global warming, even more harmful. Many of us regard malice as evil and want to fight it, but we can be somewhat thankful for the impetus to think and to strive to stay one step ahead, for if we didn't have this force, we would well have a greater probability of sliding into blissful complacency and be blindsided by global climate change and succumbing. Did someone say "a little paranoia goes a long way"?
There have been violations of the "rules of civilized warfare" as long as people have had the misconception that there can be 'civilized' warfare.
Well, aside from "all's fair in love and war", war involves killing and hurting. How can anyone judge combatants when no one charges soldiers with murder?? In most so-called enlightened or free or democratic nations, murder results in the greatest punishment yet murder is not considered a war crime.
It's a bit of a paradox. There is an interesting distinction between countries that are willing to prosecute their own for war crimes and countries that use them for an advantage. Then again, if you're fighting against a nuclear superpower while unable to trust your own government to forgive any reason for failure, you might be tempted to prevail with a greedy algorithm.
What I continually fail to understand is why everyone I know logs in as an Administrator under Windows
In Windows 2000, as far as I know, if I'm not logged in as an administrator but I need to, then I cannot log in as root, as I would in Unix, do something, and log out. Windows XP gives more leeway by allowing "switch-user". Does Windows 2003 do this? Is there any way with Windows 2000 to log in as another user without logging out first?
Ever wonder why the worlds' pyramids are in equatorial regions?
You know, when I had my tires balanced, the weights had to be placed very carefully. We ought to be thankful that monkeys crawled out of the trees and prevented mass extinctions by stabilizing the spin of the earth. Break out the typewriters. We've never believed in monkey genius, but isn't it time we mined the gold in that data?
A pyramid - I actually like the concept because it can be made practical. There's no need to make it solid because that would make a big-time gravitational anomaly. There's no need to even have solid sides. Stability is achieved with a single point at the top, and if something is raised high enough, it's weight is low enough that you can just shove it away into orbit.
In order to counterbalance, it is recommended that the pyramid be built as six pyramids, with a square around the earth within each of the orthogonal planes. Thus, there are two pyramid peaks on the +/- x-axis, two peaks on the +/- y-axis, and two peaks on the +/- z-axis. Loads can be moved along or even within the sides of the squares.
Firstly, no one is going to raise an item to the top floor (all the way up to 62000 mi) by elevator. Space work can be done in less than 1000 mi elevation.
Secondly, the path to the 62000 will not be vertical!!
Now according to TFA the test setup was in place for 6 hours while a payload was just lifted to 1500 feet in an unspecified time. A mile is 5280 feet. There may have been several loads lifted up and down simultaneously (cue Beowulf commentary). It may be surmised that as an item is lifted higher and higher the effect of gravity and atmosphere will be low enough that it can be accelerated heavily to the final altitude.
Before the celebrations begin, recall how a governor on a spinning shaft can be used to slow down the shaft by extending weights farther away from the axis of rotation. This is not to say the space elevator will risk slowing the earth down, but rather any item moved farther and farther from the earth will have a greater and greater kinetic energy in the tangential direction if said item is maintained hovering over the same spot on the ground. If you just lift a feather to an altitude several miles from the ground, inside a vertical vacuum shaft, the feather will have an extremely high speed in a direction parallel to the ground.
If you are raising some load by space elevator but you don't want to spend energy to accelerate it tangentially, you have to allow the load to lag relative to the earth. The space elevator will spiral behind the platform at sea, perhaps going a good number of times around the world. This will result in a very very very long tether.
The geostationary point applies to a centre of mass, does it not? But what happens when a load is being raised? The centre of mass will be lowered, and to prevent the space elevator from collapsing, the counterweight in space may have to be initially raised in altitude, which implies the tether may be much higher than 62000 mi. As loads move up and down, the centre of mass will have to be maintained by moving the counterweight. If the tether spirals in closer and closer loops at higher and higher altitudes, the counterweight will have to move very fast just to keep the centre of mass at 62000 mi. Very fast means high energy requirements, which means massive motors. There will have to be some energy storage because the spiral will be partially in night shadow.
I know someone who is study very hard for the LSAT. He says it shows mental abilities that are presumably required for being a lawyer.
Seems more like the law is just about knowing arbitrary and specific things. If someone does well on the LSAT, it would be a shame to waste that brain on being a lawyer. I suppose that with enough knowledge of the law it would be legal to achieve almost any purpose as long as the method goes through all the loopholes. Anyone committing a felony is a person who didn't hire a lawyer to help with the planning.
If you never had cable, you would never really be aware of those shows. Maybe it's not so bad.
Now the cost of entertainment ought to drop so cable just has to provide more bang for the buck. Personally, it's always been too expensive and distracting, especially with so much info available in the written word. The ante has been raised - let's see whether cable will bring something I can't help buying.
What I really like is the ability to watch something I like any time I want. Having the ability to buy video entertainment online is so much better than missing it on TV.
Does this mean bandwidth is getting bigger and better (as required for video sales)? That would be a bonus - and I'm not adverse to having advertisers pay for improved bandwidth. Let's have video ads running in a window, as long as they are not too disturbing. 24/7 video advertising should help create employment for prospective artists, Internet technologists, as well as provide el cheapo TV and movies over the Internet. So can we finally put to bed the questions of who is paying for entertainment? Where there is throughput there should be a way.
With the advent of dual core and hyperthreading, processing speed has almost doubled but most of the time computers sit idle. In the media and the culture people have little desire to use the spare cycles. People are used to newer and faster 2-3 months later anyways so why shouldn't Intel just milk as much as it can from a successful product line? It buys time and only when AMD becomes a real threat Intel will be able to introduce something for the next generation. If Intel has so much fabrication technology, they have to have something up their sleeve.
The real question is what people are going to do with all the raw power? Does it give computers enough power to recognize voice commands in noisy environments? Do people want to render their own 3D animation? Once people feel they can almost do this stuff they will spend more money on it and the processor manufacturers will be ready to sell. It's dependent on whether the software makers or the hardware makers have taken us to the next level. Right now, we're in the process of making a quantum leap.
it just pisses me off to see them exclusively sell Intel processors
Would you be happier if Dell used AMD as well, boosting competition between rival CPU makers and lowering computer prices? Or does Dell have a deal with Intel to allow them to sell computers for less? So would we be better off if Dell used AMD? Dell has so much advertising it's my benchmark for computer pricing. I know I can get a better deal than a Dell but I wouldn't take a worse deal.
Slashdot Mirror
parasitic owning class
It's nice to see some people getting together to create their own enterprise and thereby have the right to set their own direction, but if such people gain wealth and then each starts a number of enterprises and not lacks time in the day to work everywhere, well, socialism turns into capitalism. Production produces. Although some of the results of production can be given to people who have had no experience, such as young adults, many of them prefer leadership rather than starting fresh. In reality most leaders are greedy, but their greed makes them desire the success of the enterprise.
Computers are useful to socialist ideals in sharing information. Capitalists find that socialist desires drag down profits, although I would think that there should really be a third side: anyone with some blank disk space, say a 100 Gb, is allowed to configure that space arbitrarily perhaps with a random sequence or perhaps with a creative algorithm. And if the reordered bits and bytes happen to coincide in part with what someone else created, that's just luck. In the near enough future, creative programs will dazzle us enough to make us overlook many human achievements.
Information is universal. It is not owned. Those who focus their minds on particular types of information are sure to experience some of them. A creative engine may be guided by such a principle to derive information of interest. That's what makes information achievable and universal. How would someone then say I own this and you can't have it?
easier for them to abuse
Well, for one, they are probably not after people who have antipolitical views, but have much larger fish to fry, like terrorists |) Still, it makes you wonder how you are judged because you can't really tell what the Internet is doing against your reputation, especially if some website is rigged to send data to the wrong places.
On the one hand, given today's connectedness, one might be tempted to build snoop technology just to see if it's safe to go downtown--and does the ruling ok this? On the other hand, it may be best to surf behind an anonymous server and systematically eliminate all physical ties to society...
The middle ground is to obfuscate. Not sure how to do that and surf with any fun. Is obfuscation and disguise the new terrorist strategy? Are they wolves in sheep's clothing? Can you believe that some people go through the trouble to become doctors before building car bombs? The government has its hands full, though I fail to see how snooping on the Internet is going to catch the big ones. Some of these characters have some brains and are unlikely to tip their hand, and the most shocking thing is that they killed no one innocent in the UK with those cars.
for Moore's Law to hold a true course for some time to come. Extrapolate, will you, to the day a machine can be used to remove problem points from your body. The results range from a cure for cancer to much longer lifespans.
I suppose we should also pray that is not a day people will feel free to neglect themselves.
I wonder how agriculture might change if a machine can really push a crop through (or in other fields, get whatever job done), like the next generation of iPhone.
FUD? Take good care!
While high energy devices and explosives are used in everyday life, and anyone wanting badly enough can build a bomb from gasoline or a number of common items, there is some danger in proliferating knowledge of destructive explosions to people not old enough to drive.
So what's to fear?
- Big storms, flooding, tropical diseases, drought, famine from global warming?
- Fake products? Toxins and harmful elements of legal products?
- Terrorists? Punks? Nutcases?
- Bird flu?
- Identity thieves? Criminals?
- Big Brother and loss of civil liberties?
- Techno screwups that might label you a very bad x, y, or z? A malfunctioning automobile/airplane?
- Technological or political upheaval?
- Overpopulation?
The list is getting longer, caused by the power that bad things have for accumulating and travelling close to you. But you, insulated and told of so many wonderful advancements, are most likely told little about making a real difference. The writing is on the wall, so to speak, when one opens a Slashdot page and sees the occasional heads-up.
Now, one might wonder would it make any sense to have an environmental studies summer camp. I doubt it. Kids are passionate about fun factor. Blowing up things are fun. Mature people think "environment" but have to do the pollution thing called a job, and have no time to do more than sort the recycling.
So the solution is build technology to address the problems. People need something like a network of gizmos that can detect hazards and sound a general alarm. Are locusts invading? Is someone carrying a dense metal object nearby? What's in the toothpaste? Did the cook pee in the soup? Has your computer smuggled out your private data? Are you developing a deadly disease? Has a deadly bacteria spread all over your salad?
Is it time for government intervention? There are so many people with similar problems that it would be cost effective to do something broad and sweeping rather than regional approaches. Or do we wait until events demonstrate that a reaction is unavoidable?
Would it be worthwhile to start on an open-source technology that detects hazards, let alone fix the problems? The world has grown complex enough that a person can't really defend himself without some technological assistance. Generations ago, life expectancy was low due to the large numbers of misunderstood or missed hazards. Now it's the same paradigm all over again. The solution used to be educate until the ability to cope is absorbed into common sense. This technique may soon be limited in effectiveness.
I've always held that asking what came before the Big Bang is like asking what is North of the North Pole? It's a grammatically correct question but we can't expect it to mean anything.
While we don't have a working theory of quantum gravitation, we do have some strong hints that time and and space themselves were forged in the Big Bang. If you look at a Universe a Planck Length is size, the error in the time of any event observed would be longer than the time the Universe has existed for, to this point, and any error is position would be large than the current Universe at that size.
In short, time and space are useless measurements of a Universe this small.
In a very real sense, the Universe has always existed but has a finite age. I think once I came to understand what this really meant, it's very a beautiful truth about the world. I am sceptical of any theory that talks about a "before" the Big Bang - I think it misses one of the most important truths there is to know!
Of all the convoluted wishy washy
Time and space are conceived as well as possible with our ability to observe and invent theories. We may be too limited to cause verifying phenomena for better theories, but that is not to say the Big Bang is necessarily the North Pole of time or smallness invalidates measurement and dimension.
The most sensible approach is to not omit the possibility extending the universe beyond the events of the Big Bang. That is, take time as we understand it and consider the Big Bang as a point in time and space with the possibility of having a past and having exterior entities. Who know? Perhaps dark matter was not all sourced from the Big Bang. There are too many possibilities.
if Bush waited
I.e., if Libby was to serve normally, he probably would have gotten as much time as Paris Hilton...does it make sense to send anyone to jail with so much overcrowding that they are let out after a token stay? The system can't do anything solid to prevent crime. The upshot of it all is you could easily be a victim if the system is too weak to deter, and you want to think of either protecting yourself or presenting people with better options so they don't even consider bothering you in a bad way.
It's harder for an individual to make a difference nowadays because one meets more strangers than ever before, as one has more ability to get about achieving numerous little goals, and it's all too easy to overlook a sneak. The government with all its power has too many problems to look after the little guy, who has to reproduce a microcosm of the security that used to be run by government. It doesn't look like it will get any easier in the next 5-10 years.
More RAM? Heh. If the claims of 100x read write is true, swap = RAM. After all, with light, all you have to do is shine at multiple points to eliminate seek. Heck!
Be nice to have an accurate prediction. It would bolster mankind's confidence in mind over matter.
Chaos theory suggests that increasing precision by a decimal point would lead to totally different results, yet the computer isn't considering anything close to accurate.
So throwing chaos into chaos - well, the prediction is chaos.
What may be nice is the investment in computing technology will spin off lots of nice gadgets for us. Just to let the simulate people know, the fact that people are aware they are being simulated and thus should be thinking of randomizing rather than patterning their activities ought to boost hardware requirements by several orders of magnitude.
Perhaps simulation is really moot. People have well known objectives, such as chasing the American dream. Individuals are hard to predict, and it is individuals that cause mayhem when least expected.
All sacred geometry or even cockblockery aside, do you remember the 5, 6, 7 & 8's?
Now, someone help me with trees. I, for one, am unclear how a tree is applicable to ports. If I have an Ethernet router with 5678 ports--perhaps this is even better than 3456 ports-- I don't want some ports to talk immediately to the root node of a 12-ary tree while other ports have to send data meandering through twigs, branches, and trunks. If a 12-ary tree is good, a 3456-ary tree is better. Better yet may be every one of the ports having a single path to each of the 3455 other ports.
probably exploded
Ergo, nothing to see here, please move along
Well, saving money wouldn't be the big statistic to look for because Microsoft would surely offer an educational discount. There are costs in training teachers.
The long term implications may be considered. Students may either find themselves unfamiliar with a Microsoft world in the workplace or they may drive a large changeover to free software when they go to work.
Another statistic of interest - will free software evolve fast enough? Will large groups of students, given the large supply of students, corroborate to implement programs that satisfy new objectives?
At any rate, Microsoft is offering many free software too so the whole world seems to be tilting to a lower cost for starting a computer setup. The cost of any advanced objective still lies in the expertise to achieve and maintain. So we should watch the viewpoint of students as to their desire and insight in applying computers in more aspects of life.
Free software can always use more able programmers.
As the reconfiguring and manual repairing become less and less frequent it becomes easier to automate hot fixes by just installing lots of el-cheapo redundancies. Only after a long list of breakdowns have occurred will it be necessary for a crew to manually overhaul the system.
It's the model that the Hubble telescope works on. The gyroscopes will fail but there are enough to keep the device working between servicing.
Right now there is a hue and cry about so much skilled work requiring people, especially in the trades, but in a few years, more and more automation will just take over basic menial labor and then evolve into skilled work. First there's Stanley driving itself. Next illegal immigration is clamped down. Many governments in South America are taking over oilfields. It's all related to setting economic boundaries, such as division of labor. The clues are there. What were we supposed to think, that the actions are independent? What they're not telling us is the continual encroachment of machines into the labor pool.
How hard is it to swing a hammer or slice a grapefruit? The megapixels of cameras are getting higher per dollar while multiple cores in low-power CPUs permit the construction of autonomous domestic robots.
Outsourcing of task T indicates the regard of task T having less value. If all goes well, task T will become solvable by following a large set of rules. After all, remote staff pretty well have to do their job by rules. If they can't find anyone needing to do anything outside the rules, the rules will have evolved to the point that they can be implemented into the interface between the remote staff and the local server. Goodbye, staff.
This being said, the countries that provide outsourcing are growing economically and technologically. It is all too predictable that the people there will be providing automation equipment, as even basic programming tasks become automated and numerous people are left with nothing better to do than solve more difficult tasks, like AI.
6.02x10^23 times per day
Avogadro's number. I get you.
Also 1000 TFlops is still much much less than 10^23, which means the universe is very complex compared to computing power.
Now, it is possible to set up the networking between processors to compute a specific calculation quickly. There is an architecture called systolic arrays that basically treats unrolls a loop into a long pipeline. If you arrange processors into a grid and you chain certain processors together depending on the job they each have to do, you can run the loop many different times, each time with a different set of initial parameters. Generally you assume that the loop always has the same number of iterations (so you assign different sized grids to each of the different lengths of loops).
For example, a chess playing program can be assumed to search a similar sized tree for each move. Therefore, pipeline each possible move into the systolic array and the answers come out the end all in a bunch. The idea is that a general purpose grid of processors would take time figuring out where to send each intermediate result but a special purpose grid already has these decisions hardwired. Of course, chess is a fanciful example because there would be so many processors barking up the wrong proverbial tree that they would be wasted. Feedback loops could be used to reload search trees with useful searches once useless search directions are identified.
Multimedia processing where a large array of data needs to be processed is very appropriate for systolic arrays.
First of all, knocking sequences on a door may be a bit insecure as I'll justify below. It's unusual though and could be a novelty. Now, programs could be protected from casual or accidental execution if mouse clicks are customized.
changes every time
The alphabet is so small though. Short and long beats and short, long, and zero rests. That's 4 characters. If it can be assumed that no one will use consecutive rests, there is still limited number of passwords.
Remembering different passwords is painful, especially if they change often. Therefore, they will be have to be short and sweet. All a break-in artist has to do is get a unit of his own and get familiar with the most common knocks. They should get recycled eventually and the probability of finding the right knock in 3 tries could be quite good.
It is nice to have software that spots human error, and if a certain human error is common, software is designed specificly to prevent that problem. However, there are rare problems that cannot be seen until software is smart to the n-th degree. The probability of an n-th degree error is so small that the cost of the error is weighed against the cost of protecting against it. Even if special protections are built for a predictable error, there will still be rare bugs in other parts that can cause just as much harm. Computers are used to enable handling more items or more detail. This makes it harder for people to double check for problems.
Caveat emptor - the analogy is, if you have a lot to lose, don't just trust a computer or a bureaucracy. You have to put in your own checks and balances
shrinking numbers of Pirates
The RIAA doesn't see things your way.
However, after x years copyrights and patents will expire anyways. I can just picture the Far-Side-styled cartoon that has pirates arriving, with a bagful of raw materials in tow, dressed colorfully and flying the jolly roger, at a site replete with intellectual property only to perform a copying process rather than a depriving process. Software copying essentially involves altering your own matter rather than taking someone else's. But today's pirates sneak around with spyware, phone cameras, USB keys, handheld scanners, etc. Very technical and not prone to lose any bodyparts with sudden attacks.
The link between decreased piracy encouraging economic growth may be actually better piracy encourages economic growth. Technology has enabled third world countries to gain knowledge more easily, and competing companies seek breakthroughs because they know they cannot be complacent. Escalation in competition between hackers and security people also causes greater demand for goods and services. It just makes you wonder though, because some of us regard piracy as wasteful, and with the advent of global warming, even more harmful. Many of us regard malice as evil and want to fight it, but we can be somewhat thankful for the impetus to think and to strive to stay one step ahead, for if we didn't have this force, we would well have a greater probability of sliding into blissful complacency and be blindsided by global climate change and succumbing. Did someone say "a little paranoia goes a long way"?
There have been violations of the "rules of civilized warfare" as long as people have had the misconception that there can be 'civilized' warfare.
Well, aside from "all's fair in love and war", war involves killing and hurting. How can anyone judge combatants when no one charges soldiers with murder?? In most so-called enlightened or free or democratic nations, murder results in the greatest punishment yet murder is not considered a war crime.
It's a bit of a paradox. There is an interesting distinction between countries that are willing to prosecute their own for war crimes and countries that use them for an advantage. Then again, if you're fighting against a nuclear superpower while unable to trust your own government to forgive any reason for failure, you might be tempted to prevail with a greedy algorithm.
What I continually fail to understand is why everyone I know logs in as an Administrator under Windows
In Windows 2000, as far as I know, if I'm not logged in as an administrator but I need to, then I cannot log in as root, as I would in Unix, do something, and log out. Windows XP gives more leeway by allowing "switch-user". Does Windows 2003 do this? Is there any way with Windows 2000 to log in as another user without logging out first?
Ever wonder why the worlds' pyramids are in equatorial regions?
You know, when I had my tires balanced, the weights had to be placed very carefully. We ought to be thankful that monkeys crawled out of the trees and prevented mass extinctions by stabilizing the spin of the earth. Break out the typewriters. We've never believed in monkey genius, but isn't it time we mined the gold in that data?
A pyramid - I actually like the concept because it can be made practical. There's no need to make it solid because that would make a big-time gravitational anomaly. There's no need to even have solid sides. Stability is achieved with a single point at the top, and if something is raised high enough, it's weight is low enough that you can just shove it away into orbit.
In order to counterbalance, it is recommended that the pyramid be built as six pyramids, with a square around the earth within each of the orthogonal planes. Thus, there are two pyramid peaks on the +/- x-axis, two peaks on the +/- y-axis, and two peaks on the +/- z-axis. Loads can be moved along or even within the sides of the squares.
Firstly, no one is going to raise an item to the top floor (all the way up to 62000 mi) by elevator. Space work can be done in less than 1000 mi elevation.
Secondly, the path to the 62000 will not be vertical!!
Now according to TFA the test setup was in place for 6 hours while a payload was just lifted to 1500 feet in an unspecified time. A mile is 5280 feet. There may have been several loads lifted up and down simultaneously (cue Beowulf commentary). It may be surmised that as an item is lifted higher and higher the effect of gravity and atmosphere will be low enough that it can be accelerated heavily to the final altitude.
Before the celebrations begin, recall how a governor on a spinning shaft can be used to slow down the shaft by extending weights farther away from the axis of rotation. This is not to say the space elevator will risk slowing the earth down, but rather any item moved farther and farther from the earth will have a greater and greater kinetic energy in the tangential direction if said item is maintained hovering over the same spot on the ground. If you just lift a feather to an altitude several miles from the ground, inside a vertical vacuum shaft, the feather will have an extremely high speed in a direction parallel to the ground.
If you are raising some load by space elevator but you don't want to spend energy to accelerate it tangentially, you have to allow the load to lag relative to the earth. The space elevator will spiral behind the platform at sea, perhaps going a good number of times around the world. This will result in a very very very long tether.
The geostationary point applies to a centre of mass, does it not? But what happens when a load is being raised? The centre of mass will be lowered, and to prevent the space elevator from collapsing, the counterweight in space may have to be initially raised in altitude, which implies the tether may be much higher than 62000 mi. As loads move up and down, the centre of mass will have to be maintained by moving the counterweight. If the tether spirals in closer and closer loops at higher and higher altitudes, the counterweight will have to move very fast just to keep the centre of mass at 62000 mi. Very fast means high energy requirements, which means massive motors. There will have to be some energy storage because the spiral will be partially in night shadow.
I know someone who is study very hard for the LSAT. He says it shows mental abilities that are presumably required for being a lawyer.
Seems more like the law is just about knowing arbitrary and specific things. If someone does well on the LSAT, it would be a shame to waste that brain on being a lawyer. I suppose that with enough knowledge of the law it would be legal to achieve almost any purpose as long as the method goes through all the loopholes. Anyone committing a felony is a person who didn't hire a lawyer to help with the planning.
If you never had cable, you would never really be aware of those shows. Maybe it's not so bad.
Now the cost of entertainment ought to drop so cable just has to provide more bang for the buck. Personally, it's always been too expensive and distracting, especially with so much info available in the written word. The ante has been raised - let's see whether cable will bring something I can't help buying.
What I really like is the ability to watch something I like any time I want. Having the ability to buy video entertainment online is so much better than missing it on TV.
Does this mean bandwidth is getting bigger and better (as required for video sales)? That would be a bonus - and I'm not adverse to having advertisers pay for improved bandwidth. Let's have video ads running in a window, as long as they are not too disturbing. 24/7 video advertising should help create employment for prospective artists, Internet technologists, as well as provide el cheapo TV and movies over the Internet. So can we finally put to bed the questions of who is paying for entertainment? Where there is throughput there should be a way.
doesnt care
With the advent of dual core and hyperthreading, processing speed has almost doubled but most of the time computers sit idle. In the media and the culture people have little desire to use the spare cycles. People are used to newer and faster 2-3 months later anyways so why shouldn't Intel just milk as much as it can from a successful product line? It buys time and only when AMD becomes a real threat Intel will be able to introduce something for the next generation. If Intel has so much fabrication technology, they have to have something up their sleeve.
The real question is what people are going to do with all the raw power? Does it give computers enough power to recognize voice commands in noisy environments? Do people want to render their own 3D animation? Once people feel they can almost do this stuff they will spend more money on it and the processor manufacturers will be ready to sell. It's dependent on whether the software makers or the hardware makers have taken us to the next level. Right now, we're in the process of making a quantum leap.
it just pisses me off to see them exclusively sell Intel processors
Would you be happier if Dell used AMD as well, boosting competition between rival CPU makers and lowering computer prices? Or does Dell have a deal with Intel to allow them to sell computers for less? So would we be better off if Dell used AMD? Dell has so much advertising it's my benchmark for computer pricing. I know I can get a better deal than a Dell but I wouldn't take a worse deal.