Curing world hunger would appear to be a political problem as you point out. (Though I think you underestimate the ability of international political organisations such as the U.N. to bring about positive change).
Spending money on putting a man on Mars is also a good investment for bringing about positive change in the world
This is because politics is all about the resolution of competing ideas through voting in democracies and negociation and diplomacy between nations. Given that the USA has the ability to fund space exploration and reap the cultural kudos that this brings world wide it would seem to be an obvious but admittedly unquantifyable boost to the political influence of the USA in the realm of diplomacy. The leaders of any badly run nation whose people see the positive side of space exploration will have a far harder task in resisting the idea that aspects of American culture and the diplomatic pressure of American leaders are powerfull influences. It was definitely the case that old soviet style communism lost as much through the inescapable observation that people had a better standard of living and a more visably enjoyable life in the West than through a military victory in the cold war.
Seen this way the high ideals and aspirations of NASA could look like an excellent investment. Certainly a far better investment than merely using space as an arena for military activiy on its own. Investigation of the potential of space for military activities will occur whether or not civilian space exploration occurs, this is the nature of defence; all avenues of weakness must be and will be investigated unless you plan to lose.
America needs to improve its standing in world opinion. However justifyable the recent actions in the middle east, much of the world feels disapointment with American political leaders. Yes America is powerful and can and will look after its geopolitical interests through military might but it has failed politicaly to carry the body of world opinion as seen by the failure of the U.N. to fully back its actions.
Now would be a very good time to remind us all of the other side of American cultural values. The aspirational side, the forging of human history, the cleverness and technological inovation of the American people. Space exploration is a terrificly good motivational activity and it is also very impressive. It is no suprise that China is becoming more active in this area, it would not surprise me at all if they have plans to try to beat America to Mars, after all at the rate they are expanding they will be able to afford it.
In the meme war spending money on NASA is very good value for America both internaly and externaly. I look forward with much excitement to further sucess in the exploration of space by America.
You have a very good point about getting people to do their job properly, you dont know you have a problem unless you are measuring performance somehow. It is still my contention that if the measurement demotivates the majority for the sake of weeding out the minority. Then the approach is faulty and motivation is being ignored. I know a law graduate who loves working for a small cafe, the pay isnt great and the job is not for ever, her friend who isnt a graduate and has done many similar jobs also enjoys it. Neither of them would enjoy working in a food outlet run by a big chain because of the difference in the working environment and the way they would be treated.
Things like this raise the question of what work is about and why we do it other than for the money...
There is a big debate going on in the UK about whether education at university level should be expanded to cover 50% of school leavers. There is a vocal minority which says that this is undesireable because graduates will not want to work in MacJobs. This is probably true, however there are plenty of jobs like hospital nursing which are looking for graduate level entrants now. The news also reports that hundreds of call center jobs are being exported to India where graduates want this relatively well paid work. Many countries in the world have reached the 50% level - such as Ireland.
It seems to me that to be competitive in the world market you have to look for new ways to be competitive, cutting costs by working people like machines is not going to suceed because there is always going to be an economy lower down the development cycle where people will work for less money. The key to sucess has to be expanding the complexity and added value of products and services. Smarter people doing smarter jobs is something well developed countries should be able to do. The call center is a good example, speech driven interaction with computers is getting close to the point where we can get back the business being exported to India with some clever software. Fewer jobs writing the software - but they are better paid and they need smart creative people - people who are famously bad at starting work early but good at working late.
Work smarter not harder.
On the other hand if you want to eat food that someone else has prepared for you then you want them to be there to do the job when you are hungry. I shouldnt mind paying slightly more than a big fantasticaly efficient chain outlet for these workers to be there when I want them, after all I cant export their jobs to India...
The reason for the whining could be that educated people resent being treated as machines with no intrinsic merit except as units of production.
Consumer society tells you that:
I exist to make money for the shareholders. I'm all right jack. I never clock in late. My wages are low because my job is worthless. I keep an eye on anyone who isnt white and male like me and report them to the management if I can - hopefully I can get them sacked or at least off my shift. I vote to cut taxes. My country is full of spongers and criminals who need locking up.
Human beings in this situation could be thinking:
On the other hand I hate my job, I have five locks on my door, my son says he would rather be a crack dealer like his friends than grow up to be like me, I have a lousy pension - but its ok because I cant afford health insurance and with my dodgy heart I expect to die young,
You could even be thinking about how things could be better:
Sometimes though I wonder what it would be like if I was a shareholder too and my workmates respected me because we work as a team to get the job done like we did in the army. I wonder if the low wages wouldnt be so bad if the mass transit system was free. Sometimes I think those Hispanic types cant be so stupid, a siesta in the middle of the day would be great in summer. That Microsoft guy seems to be pretty smart spending so much money on charity things top of the U.N. priority list, shame my tax dollars dont seem to be spent on the same things. Its got a lot better in my area since the mission college opened and started training and finding jobs for the unemployed youth, cant understand why the city didnt think of it. My job wouldnt be so bad if my boss didnt ignore everything I said, it gets realy cold in the packing room with that broken skylight. I dont know what to do with my son, its a shame he cant get a scholarship as a plumber. If I make it to retirement I'm going to take up painting.
Making money is a good thing but its not a substitute for happiness or human dignity. Palm scanning workers to clock them in and out of work is fine, its the potential for abuse that is not acceptable. Remember that you are entitled to a view on how people treat each other that overides economic efficiency.
I stand corrected, or slump typing to be accurate.. Big Fish looks a little on the serious side so I should have said natural leading comedy role perhaps. Zaphod does have to contend with his dual nature occasionaly although its not developed very far.
Back in the day when the radio series was first broadcast the most exciting aspect of the experience was the groundbreaking music and sound from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
(I have it all on hissing cassette tape recorded off air, complete with fake links at the end of the show announcing availability of the guide from the Megadodo Corporation of Sirius Minor... )
As a story with the premise that nothing is what it seems and that the unexpected should be expected the sound was correspondingly imaginative for the time.
For example the noises used to show that the Hitch Hikers Guide book was being accessed have become part of our world - predating windows startup sound by a decade. Marvin the Paranoid Androids voice is a classic along with the squeaky mouse voices and the mournfull bleeps in the background when all seems lost.
I expect a good sound track for the movie. In fact I now expect that pressing the lift buttons makes a windows startup sound before the talking Sirius Cybernetics corporation lift suggests the basement of the Hitch Hikers office as a good destination before the Frogstar fighter blasts them all into oblivion.
Yes indeed - and (correct me if I am wrong) there are also the people in some areas of Finland who also speak Swedish because of their history, which is something I wasnt aware of until I worked with a Swedish collegue who's family were Finnish but spoke Swedish. I got the feeling that Stockholmers at least, were very fond of the peoples of their neighbours.
Though to be fair a wheel is still a wheel, even when the fashion is to drive a hovercraft. So there may be no functional reason for changing something that works.
However Microsofts older offerings offer no escape from paying for an upgrade when security flaws render them obsolete - arp spoofing comes to mind. It is no suprise that Microsoft stops supporting Win98. No one can sue them for flaws that render people wide open to theft.
This is one reason why Linux could prove very attractive to organisations unable or unwilling to pay the Microsoft tax for fashionable features.
Although there is a similarity in the Nordic lilt of Finnish and Swedish to our untrained ears - Finnish is a language with its roots in something closer to Hungarian. Finns and Swedes cannot communicate although Norwegians and Swedes can understand each other. Or so I am led to believe having lived in Sweden for a couple of years.
No No No, it is far too complacent to just accept that it is "[largely] public information".
Stuff like this really winds me up, I mean smoke comes out of my ears and I feel like shouting "look out! look out! this is very, very, bad!"
Speeding fines are just another tax collection, so yes, no big deal - or at least they aren't here in the UK - along with parking fines, we just put up with them, after all, everybody is a criminal these days. (Social historians are going to have a field day working out just exactly when everybody in society came to accept that being a criminal is ok...)
The fact that the rules are arbitary and unfair are just a fact of life. (And you should remember that when the bad results of a DNA test at birth denies your child the possibility of ever taking out a loan, or getting life or health insurance for example, er, well it doesnt happen yet - but its comming).
"Get over it" as our famously self centered cultural norm is oft heard to exclaim.
However it strikes me that for a country that prides itself on the freedom of the individual, that you let big business, government administrations and political correctness walk all over individuals. Allowing information collected for one purpose to be used for another is one such example, dont let it happen!
What is apparent is that you and everything you do is going to be tracked in databases more and more as you grow older. I for one do not want to live in a society that gives that information to anybody who might use it to become your master - just because it is "[largely] public information".
Bear that in mind the next time you get all exercised about how bad the federal government is and how they are taking away your freedom. They may well be, but very soon they will pose an insignificant threat to you personally, compared to somebody smart with every little detail of your life in their databases.
It seems obvious to me that the smart person who wants to control you will most likely be someone who wants to make money out of you, most likely by 0WN1NG you. It would seem logical that business competition will get there first - long before your big cuddly government gets there.
I predict mass emigration to the safety of the unjoined-up third world... good theme for a scaremongering SciFi novel anyway.
Whois reports from ARIN that the host is unreachable (ping) but that it belongs to
NFT 333 S 520 W Suite 300 Lindon UT 84042 United States
My ISP's DNS server is unable to give me the name from the address but gives me the address from the name - so why doesnt a web browser work without the ip.
Its more than 17 hops away from the UK by traceroute via London, New York, Chicago, Denver and Salt Lake City, nothing unusual about that though.
Talking of bad things by the way, how do I protect myself against arp poisoning/spoofing - no one seems to know....
Tempting though it is to ridicule you back, I would rather like to hear what reversible computing is as I have never heard of it.
On the other hand I am convinced that the Intel people know what they are talking about. The heat generated by transistor switching is dependant on the speed and the voltage applied assuming that the device structure is still somewhat like CMOS.
Voltages have been reduced to compensate as the speed has gone up, there is a limit to how low a voltage you can switch a transistor with using the designs we have. Each stacked layer in a 3d planar device creates as much heat as the first one. It was these factors which led me to expect a less than a mindblowing improvement in chip performance without a fundamental breakthrough in compute element design. Maybe self organising superconducting molecules or something? Whatever the replacement is we do not yet have a clue what it is. That is why I take Intels proposition seriously that a CPU performance endstop will arrive in about 20 years.
I am sure that Intel will be looking very closely at anything else that looks promising in research labs over the comming 20 years...
Slowing down the electrons does nothing to the "uncertainty of their momentum". Slowing down electrons will reduce their momentum and therefore reduce the energy they have available to penetrate a potential barrier such as an insulator. In practise tunneling then takes over when the electron is already someway through the potential barrier of the insulator because of its thermal energy.
What you are thinking of is the Heisenburg uncertainty principle which says you can know the position of something and not when it was there, or you can know when something is there but not exactly where it is - the mechanism of tunneling.
It turns out that the thermal velocity is much much larger than the velocity from electric fields in transistors anyway - looked it up in my college text book from 1974
Electron velocity is thermally dominated at room temperature, current flows under an applied voltage by electron drift - thermal velocity 1.2 * 10**6 m/s and drift velocity at 1A cm**2 is 7.4 * 10**-6 m/s. thermal velocity is a stagering 1000000000000 times faster.
Removing the heat generated by this scenario would constitute the application of a new law of nature - Doing the impossible.
There are certainly some gains to be had from using more layers on a chip or stacking chips in the same package but there is a fixed limit somewhere - say ten times better.
Larger chips are more expensive and there is still a limit of about 200 devices on a single wafer. You could make larger wafers in space but the cost would be too much.
Please explain your second point, I do not understand what you are trying to say. The Microsoft paperclip was an attempt to provide an intelligent assistant for their office programs. Nobody liked it and it has since been dropped from the product. Artificial intelligence is still an academic curiosity confined to strictly limited applications such as voice or image recognition. The subject has been studied for about forty years without much progress.
Take an idea no matter how unlikely and look for a way to build it.
Leonado Da Vinci saw birds fly and drew a helicopter but couldnt make it work
Scientific description of the universe is full of bird like theories like M-Theory. You can see them fly but cannot figure out how to make a thing that takes advantage of them.
Keep on thinking, this time you just might get lucky...
A very good point, but I do not quite share your optimisim - digital electronics will hit the endstop in your lifetime and I havent read any post with an alternative yet - though I'm still reading:-)
Also I think your otherwise excellent technology development analogy is broken in this case because there are no known semiconductors that are a heck of a lot better than silicon and a lot of other semiconductors have been studied since way back (1930's ?) So any silicon replacement is only going to be a bit better - not more than ten times better, then thats it, the endstop for digital electronics.
A possible replacement that might have some milage could be a transistor like structure based on superconductors, SQUIDs or Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices have a Trans / Resistor (Transistor) like property and they actualy rely on tunneling to function. These have been capable of running at many GHz for at least the last decade and are used in some specialised frequency and magnetic field measuring meters. However nobody has been able to build anything more sophisticated than a few devices on one substrate and they need to live in liquid helium to function. Maybe room temperature superconducters have a future here. The big deal at the momment is that even if you could make a chip out of them the Intel finding is probably still relevant.
Any three terminal device where one terminal gates a current flow between the other two terminals will run into the tunneling failure and hence the minimum size problem because you just cant get two connections to any physical device any closer together and not expect electrons to start randomly jumping across the device - its a physical limitation of the electron.
So ok you might get realy clever and figure out how to use some new material that has better properties than silicon and better pattern writing tools to draw your circuit even smaller but at some point the physical elements of the circuits get so close together that electrons have a high probability of being anywhere in your circuit - at random! Hence the digital circuit no longer exists in a 1 or 0 state. End of digital electronics.
Interestingly though seem to recall that there is no such thing as a quanta of magnetic flux - so if you could build a computing device that ran on magnetism rather than electrons then you might get somewhere.... mind you electrons and magnets seem to live in the same house, so I dont know, what do you think?
not a dumb question at all, though I dont realy know the answer as to how much it helps, its a while since I did this stuff. Could someone help me out here..
My take on why this would not help is..
Cooling a semiconductor reduces the number of electrons available to participate in the transport of current through a pn junction. A cmos transistor contains two pn junctions joined by a region of semiconductor which is switched between a p type and an n type semiconductor by means of the gate.
The gate is a conducting electrode held away from the chip by a very thin layer of insulator - thats where the "transistor" name comes from - a voltage applied to the gate sees a very high resistance and enables a current to flow between the pn np or np pn junctions at a low resistance - hence transistor is trans / resistor (pn np and np pn because CMOS is Complementary Metal Oxide Switch, the idea being that whilst one is on the other is off and current only flows through the two when driving the join between the two between one power rail and the other by switching one on and the other off, all in the interests of reducing power dissipation. These days the gate is silicon and not metal, SMOS never caught on in market speak)
( in theory no current flows through the gate insulating layer of silicon oxide except when the voltage is flipped between positive and negative - however in practise making this gate very thin without a current flowing all the time by tunneling and leakage is a complete nightmare for the chip manufacturer - because leakage = current = heat = meltdown).
The big deal however is that, if you cool a semiconductor down enough, be it p or n type - is that the holes and electrons that make the semiconductor able to carry current - they get fewer and fewer because they only exist because the thermal vibrations in the semiconductor crystal have set them free. You end up with a thing that isnt a transistor any more because there is nothing left to carry a current in it.
Tunneling and therefore the size of the circle an electron could be located in is dependant on the temperature of the material it lives in so cooling sounds like a good idea because tunneling would then depend upon the speed it is moving at due to the applied voltage - so you could get somewhere by lowering the voltage after you have cooled the material down enough so that the electron speed depends on the voltage and not just its speed given to it by thermal excitation. But as noted above it couldnt be done in a normal transistor structure anyway because transistors rely on thermal energy to create carriers in the conduction band - and make the n and p type regions that allow it to work in the first place.
so yes cooling makes the circle smaller but it also breaks the transistor.
Talking of Branes : why not tap into all those trillions of similar but not quite the same chips that lie in all those parallel universes that string theory says are just a realy strong hot cup of tea away...
One of the super clever things a human brain does is to choose between a bunch of options on the basis of almost no actual data.
The answer is to build a Psychic chip, anybody have the faintest idea how to go about it?? (hint quantum tunneling of electrons depends on probability - is that cat dead yet or not?)
Its not a technology issue though, electron tunneling is a fundamental limit that says you just cannot pile any more transistors into chips made of any solid.
I think this paper is 'more' (sigh) significant than many are taking it to be. What they are saying is that the electron will no longer be able to provide us with greater computing power in twenty or so years time. Super computer builders prepared to pay will get a little extra milage out of stacking and clever parallelism but your desktop computer will never get any faster after this time using electronics as we understand it.
What we need is a breakthrough as fundamental as the discovery of a new law of nature to get any further.
Quantum computers show some possibility along with self organising molecules to instantate them - but we are still at the practical ability to do this, that we were at with electricity when kite flying in the clouds was a good way to study electrons.
It is prahaps somewhat significant that the number of gates on a chip will be comparable to the number of neurons in the human brain by the end of this decade. Maybe we dont need faster computers at all, maybe the clever thing will be expecting a computer to do something that it cannot do at the momment - think for itself. Sadly creating artificial intelligence has proven a brick wall that has almost no mainstream spin off so far unless you count Microsofts ghastly paper clip...
However my bet is that when the megahertz race is over, the new race will be how to make the compute element more intelligent - through a mixture of software and hardware. Sadly it seems to be a lot more than twenty years away as we cant even program all human brains to read and write despite the several hundred thousand years of development that have been applied to the grey matter:-)
Oh so true, Access is not a "database" at all... However I strongly disagree that it is not useful
Access is a tool which allows rapid application development, ideal for example in building a departmental data warehouse and analysis of data extracted from an enterprise database.
If the resulting information proves sufficiently useful to an organisation then it has to be migrated into something more robust.
It is typical of the IT expert to view this as a problem rather than as a convenient way of discovering what the organisation needs to fill in the gaps left by deployment of enterprise applications. It is an opportunity to improve your business and should be welcomed. You can always rebuild the whole thing from scratch or do it a different way - if the enterprise strength thing you are putting it into allows you do an interface with the same functionality, and often it is very difficult.
The relational model is often held in reverence because of its efficiency, vital for scaleability. Hardware is a lot cheaper and faster than it used to be so this is not the greatest problem. What is a problem is a poor data structure. If you spent a little time helping to ensure that your "managers" understood how to keep the data clean then all you are left with is solving the problem of shoehorning the answer they have built into your enterprise strength relational database. Its not their fault that character case is not supported. Why shouldnt it be?
Sounds more like the complaint of "not invented here" more than anything else to me. Although it could also be something to do with the cost in time and effort to migrate the application - something which the average departmental manager might find prohibitive.
So in the end its a case of neither Access or Enterprise databases being perfect, roll on the day when it gets easier to migrate between RAD tools and robust solutions. I also will be very interested to see just how good this new application is at providing this.
I agree it would cost more to improve the reliability, however how much does it cost for all consumers to purchase individual backup and how much did this power outage cost the economy and your society for the lost work hours, claims for destruction of frozen or chilled foodstuffs and degraded health support systems?
Engineering systems which are robust do not necessarily cost a lot more than unreliable ones. For example we generaly take it for granted that aeroplanes are safer to use than our personal automobiles but I do not see a large number of complaints that the safety measures incorporated into air travel have imposed an excessive cost.
Thankyou for this information, I would question however whether the logic of an assured fail rate of 8 hours per year is sufficiently good - especially as the predictive statistics is working at the level where chaotic effects will make gaussian statistics look like complete bolloks. This fail is not at the edge of the normal population as you suggest because it was a non linear cascade of fails.
Conclusion - redesign the power system so that it does not suffer from cascade or beef up the supply so that the predicted fail rate is 8 hours a century.
In this case I am definitely not a lawyer, I am an engineer. Though I am dating a lawyer so I have learned how to speak with complete assurance:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Curing world hunger would appear to be a political problem as you point out. (Though I think you underestimate the ability of international political organisations such as the U.N. to bring about positive change).
Spending money on putting a man on Mars is also a good investment for bringing about positive change in the world
This is because politics is all about the resolution of competing ideas through voting in democracies and negociation and diplomacy between nations. Given that the USA has the ability to fund space exploration and reap the cultural kudos that this brings world wide it would seem to be an obvious but admittedly unquantifyable boost to the political influence of the USA in the realm of diplomacy. The leaders of any badly run nation whose people see the positive side of space exploration will have a far harder task in resisting the idea that aspects of American culture and the diplomatic pressure of American leaders are powerfull influences. It was definitely the case that old soviet style communism lost as much through the inescapable observation that people had a better standard of living and a more visably enjoyable life in the West than through a military victory in the cold war.
Seen this way the high ideals and aspirations of NASA could look like an excellent investment. Certainly a far better investment than merely using space as an arena for military activiy on its own. Investigation of the potential of space for military activities will occur whether or not civilian space exploration occurs, this is the nature of defence; all avenues of weakness must be and will be investigated unless you plan to lose.
America needs to improve its standing in world opinion. However justifyable the recent actions in the middle east, much of the world feels disapointment with American political leaders. Yes America is powerful and can and will look after its geopolitical interests through military might but it has failed politicaly to carry the body of world opinion as seen by the failure of the U.N. to fully back its actions.
Now would be a very good time to remind us all of the other side of American cultural values. The aspirational side, the forging of human history, the cleverness and technological inovation of the American people. Space exploration is a terrificly good motivational activity and it is also very impressive. It is no suprise that China is becoming more active in this area, it would not surprise me at all if they have plans to try to beat America to Mars, after all at the rate they are expanding they will be able to afford it.
In the meme war spending money on NASA is very good value for America both internaly and externaly. I look forward with much excitement to further sucess in the exploration of space by America.
You have a very good point about getting people to do their job properly, you dont know you have a problem unless you are measuring performance somehow. It is still my contention that if the measurement demotivates the majority for the sake of weeding out the minority. Then the approach is faulty and motivation is being ignored. I know a law graduate who loves working for a small cafe, the pay isnt great and the job is not for ever, her friend who isnt a graduate and has done many similar jobs also enjoys it. Neither of them would enjoy working in a food outlet run by a big chain because of the difference in the working environment and the way they would be treated.
Things like this raise the question of what work is about and why we do it other than for the money...
There is a big debate going on in the UK about whether education at university level should be expanded to cover 50% of school leavers. There is a vocal minority which says that this is undesireable because graduates will not want to work in MacJobs. This is probably true, however there are plenty of jobs like hospital nursing which are looking for graduate level entrants now. The news also reports that hundreds of call center jobs are being exported to India where graduates want this relatively well paid work. Many countries in the world have reached the 50% level - such as Ireland.
It seems to me that to be competitive in the world market you have to look for new ways to be competitive, cutting costs by working people like machines is not going to suceed because there is always going to be an economy lower down the development cycle where people will work for less money. The key to sucess has to be expanding the complexity and added value of products and services. Smarter people doing smarter jobs is something well developed countries should be able to do. The call center is a good example, speech driven interaction with computers is getting close to the point where we can get back the business being exported to India with some clever software. Fewer jobs writing the software - but they are better paid and they need smart creative people - people who are famously bad at starting work early but good at working late.
Work smarter not harder.
On the other hand if you want to eat food that someone else has prepared for you then you want them to be there to do the job when you are hungry. I shouldnt mind paying slightly more than a big fantasticaly efficient chain outlet for these workers to be there when I want them, after all I cant export their jobs to India...
The reason for the whining could be that educated people resent being treated as machines with no intrinsic merit except as units of production.
Consumer society tells you that:
I exist to make money for the shareholders.
I'm all right jack.
I never clock in late.
My wages are low because my job is worthless.
I keep an eye on anyone who isnt white and male like me and report them to the management if I can - hopefully I can get them sacked or at least off my shift.
I vote to cut taxes.
My country is full of spongers and criminals who need locking up.
Human beings in this situation could be thinking:
On the other hand I hate my job,
I have five locks on my door,
my son says he would rather be a crack dealer like his friends than grow up to be like me,
I have a lousy pension - but its ok because I cant afford health insurance and with my dodgy heart I expect to die young,
You could even be thinking about how things could be better:
Sometimes though I wonder what it would be like if I was a shareholder too and my workmates respected me because we work as a team to get the job done like we did in the army. I wonder if the low wages wouldnt be so bad if the mass transit system was free. Sometimes I think those Hispanic types cant be so stupid, a siesta in the middle of the day would be great in summer. That Microsoft guy seems to be pretty smart spending so much money on charity things top of the U.N. priority list, shame my tax dollars dont seem to be spent on the same things. Its got a lot better in my area since the mission college opened and started training and finding jobs for the unemployed youth, cant understand why the city didnt think of it. My job wouldnt be so bad if my boss didnt ignore everything I said, it gets realy cold in the packing room with that broken skylight. I dont know what to do with my son, its a shame he cant get a scholarship as a plumber. If I make it to retirement I'm going to take up painting.
Making money is a good thing but its not a substitute for happiness or human dignity. Palm scanning workers to clock them in and out of work is fine, its the potential for abuse that is not acceptable. Remember that you are entitled to a view on how people treat each other that overides economic efficiency.
I stand corrected, or slump typing to be accurate.. Big Fish looks a little on the serious side so I should have said natural leading comedy role perhaps. Zaphod does have to contend with his dual nature occasionaly although its not developed very far.
Back in the day when the radio series was first broadcast the most exciting aspect of the experience was the groundbreaking music and sound from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
(I have it all on hissing cassette tape recorded off air, complete with fake links at the end of the show announcing availability of the guide from the Megadodo Corporation of Sirius Minor... )
As a story with the premise that nothing is what it seems and that the unexpected should be expected the sound was correspondingly imaginative for the time.
For example the noises used to show that the Hitch Hikers Guide book was being accessed have become part of our world - predating windows startup sound by a decade. Marvin the Paranoid Androids voice is a classic along with the squeaky mouse voices and the mournfull bleeps in the background when all seems lost.
I expect a good sound track for the movie. In fact I now expect that pressing the lift buttons makes a windows startup sound before the talking Sirius Cybernetics corporation lift suggests the basement of the Hitch Hikers office as a good destination before the Frogstar fighter blasts them all into oblivion.
Its the first natural role for conjoined twins :-)
casting director take note!!
Yes indeed - and (correct me if I am wrong) there are also the people in some areas of Finland who also speak Swedish because of their history, which is something I wasnt aware of until I worked with a Swedish collegue who's family were Finnish but spoke Swedish. I got the feeling that Stockholmers at least, were very fond of the peoples of their neighbours.
Exactly
Though to be fair a wheel is still a wheel, even when the fashion is to drive a hovercraft. So there may be no functional reason for changing something that works.
However Microsofts older offerings offer no escape from paying for an upgrade when security flaws render them obsolete - arp spoofing comes to mind. It is no suprise that Microsoft stops supporting Win98. No one can sue them for flaws that render people wide open to theft.
This is one reason why Linux could prove very attractive to organisations unable or unwilling to pay the Microsoft tax for fashionable features.
Although there is a similarity in the Nordic lilt of Finnish and Swedish to our untrained ears - Finnish is a language with its roots in something closer to Hungarian. Finns and Swedes cannot communicate although Norwegians and Swedes can understand each other. Or so I am led to believe having lived in Sweden for a couple of years.
:-)
Finnish is uniquely odd, enjoy
No No No, it is far too complacent to just accept that it is "[largely] public information".
Stuff like this really winds me up, I mean smoke comes out of my ears and I feel like shouting "look out! look out! this is very, very, bad!"
Speeding fines are just another tax collection, so yes, no big deal - or at least they aren't here in the UK - along with parking fines, we just put up with them, after all, everybody is a criminal these days. (Social historians are going to have a field day working out just exactly when everybody in society came to accept that being a criminal is ok...)
The fact that the rules are arbitary and unfair are just a fact of life. (And you should remember that when the bad results of a DNA test at birth denies your child the possibility of ever taking out a loan, or getting life or health insurance for example, er, well it doesnt happen yet - but its comming).
"Get over it" as our famously self centered cultural norm is oft heard to exclaim.
However it strikes me that for a country that prides itself on the freedom of the individual, that you let big business, government administrations and political correctness walk all over individuals. Allowing information collected for one purpose to be used for another is one such example, dont let it happen!
What is apparent is that you and everything you do is going to be tracked in databases more and more as you grow older. I for one do not want to live in a society that gives that information to anybody who might use it to become your master - just because it is "[largely] public information".
Bear that in mind the next time you get all exercised about how bad the federal government is and how they are taking away your freedom. They may well be, but very soon they will pose an insignificant threat to you personally, compared to somebody smart with every little detail of your life in their databases.
It seems obvious to me that the smart person who wants to control you will most likely be someone who wants to make money out of you, most likely by 0WN1NG you. It would seem logical that business competition will get there first - long before your big cuddly government gets there.
I predict mass emigration to the safety of the unjoined-up third world... good theme for a scaremongering SciFi novel anyway.
As Spock used to say ... interesting ...
Whois reports from ARIN that the host is unreachable (ping) but that it belongs to
NFT
333 S 520 W Suite 300
Lindon
UT
84042
United States
My ISP's DNS server is unable to give me the name from the address but gives me the address from the name - so why doesnt a web browser work without the ip.
Its more than 17 hops away from the UK by traceroute via London, New York, Chicago, Denver and Salt Lake City, nothing unusual about that though.
Talking of bad things by the way, how do I protect myself against arp poisoning/spoofing - no one seems to know....
The paperclip has been gone for quite a while now I come to think of it, glad someone else remembers :-)
I should change my signature to something more hip i guess like
" Linux rocks..... free packet sniffing tools too! "
Hmm maybe not
Tempting though it is to ridicule you back, I would rather like to hear what reversible computing is as I have never heard of it.
On the other hand I am convinced that the Intel people know what they are talking about. The heat generated by transistor switching is dependant on the speed and the voltage applied assuming that the device structure is still somewhat like CMOS.
Voltages have been reduced to compensate as the speed has gone up, there is a limit to how low a voltage you can switch a transistor with using the designs we have. Each stacked layer in a 3d planar device creates as much heat as the first one. It was these factors which led me to expect a less than a mindblowing improvement in chip performance without a fundamental breakthrough in compute element design. Maybe self organising superconducting molecules or something? Whatever the replacement is we do not yet have a clue what it is. That is why I take Intels proposition seriously that a CPU performance endstop will arrive in about 20 years.
I am sure that Intel will be looking very closely at anything else that looks promising in research labs over the comming 20 years...
Thanks for the information, glad to see there are people reading with an interest in the subject :-)
I admit that the magnetic flux comment was a troll, I just wondered whether there were any exotic devices which relied on quantised magnetic flux.
Ummm depends what you are talking about
:-)
Slowing down the electrons does nothing to the "uncertainty of their momentum". Slowing down electrons will reduce their momentum and therefore reduce the energy they have available to penetrate a potential barrier such as an insulator. In practise tunneling then takes over when the electron is already someway through the potential barrier of the insulator because of its thermal energy.
What you are thinking of is the Heisenburg uncertainty principle which says you can know the position of something and not when it was there, or you can know when something is there but not exactly where it is - the mechanism of tunneling.
It turns out that the thermal velocity is much much larger than the velocity from electric fields in transistors anyway - looked it up in my college text book from 1974
Electron velocity is thermally dominated at room temperature, current flows under an applied voltage by electron drift - thermal velocity 1.2 * 10**6 m/s and drift velocity at 1A cm**2 is 7.4 * 10**-6 m/s. thermal velocity is a stagering 1000000000000 times faster.
An interesting subject
Removing the heat generated by this scenario would constitute the application of a new law of nature - Doing the impossible.
There are certainly some gains to be had from using more layers on a chip or stacking chips in the same package but there is a fixed limit somewhere - say ten times better.
Larger chips are more expensive and there is still a limit of about 200 devices on a single wafer. You could make larger wafers in space but the cost would be too much.
Please explain your second point, I do not understand what you are trying to say.
The Microsoft paperclip was an attempt to provide an intelligent assistant for their office programs. Nobody liked it and it has since been dropped from the product. Artificial intelligence is still an academic curiosity confined to strictly limited applications such as voice or image recognition. The subject has been studied for about forty years without much progress.
Spoken like a true engineer
Take an idea no matter how unlikely and look for a way to build it.
Leonado Da Vinci saw birds fly and drew a helicopter but couldnt make it work
Scientific description of the universe is full of bird like theories like M-Theory. You can see them fly but cannot figure out how to make a thing that takes advantage of them.
Keep on thinking, this time you just might get lucky...
A very good point, but I do not quite share your optimisim - digital electronics will hit the endstop in your lifetime and I havent read any post with an alternative yet - though I'm still reading :-)
Also I think your otherwise excellent technology development analogy is broken in this case because there are no known semiconductors that are a heck of a lot better than silicon and a lot of other semiconductors have been studied since way back (1930's ?) So any silicon replacement is only going to be a bit better - not more than ten times better, then thats it, the endstop for digital electronics.
A possible replacement that might have some milage could be a transistor like structure based on superconductors, SQUIDs or Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices have a Trans / Resistor (Transistor) like property and they actualy rely on tunneling to function. These have been capable of running at many GHz for at least the last decade and are used in some specialised frequency and magnetic field measuring meters. However nobody has been able to build anything more sophisticated than a few devices on one substrate and they need to live in liquid helium to function. Maybe room temperature superconducters have a future here. The big deal at the momment is that even if you could make a chip out of them the Intel finding is probably still relevant.
Any three terminal device where one terminal gates a current flow between the other two terminals will run into the tunneling failure and hence the minimum size problem because you just cant get two connections to any physical device any closer together and not expect electrons to start randomly jumping across the device - its a physical limitation of the electron.
So ok you might get realy clever and figure out how to use some new material that has better properties than silicon and better pattern writing tools to draw your circuit even smaller but at some point the physical elements of the circuits get so close together that electrons have a high probability of being anywhere in your circuit - at random! Hence the digital circuit no longer exists in a 1 or 0 state. End of digital electronics.
Interestingly though seem to recall that there is no such thing as a quanta of magnetic flux - so if you could build a computing device that ran on magnetism rather than electrons then you might get somewhere.... mind you electrons and magnets seem to live in the same house, so I dont know, what do you think?
not a dumb question at all, though I dont realy know the answer as to how much it helps, its a while since I did this stuff. Could someone help me out here..
My take on why this would not help is..
Cooling a semiconductor reduces the number of electrons available to participate in the transport of current through a pn junction. A cmos transistor contains two pn junctions joined by a region of semiconductor which is switched between a p type and an n type semiconductor by means of the gate.
The gate is a conducting electrode held away from the chip by a very thin layer of insulator - thats where the "transistor" name comes from - a voltage applied to the gate sees a very high resistance and enables a current to flow between the pn np or np pn junctions at a low resistance - hence transistor is trans / resistor (pn np and np pn because CMOS is Complementary Metal Oxide Switch, the idea being that whilst one is on the other is off and current only flows through the two when driving the join between the two between one power rail and the other by switching one on and the other off, all in the interests of reducing power dissipation. These days the gate is silicon and not metal, SMOS never caught on in market speak)
( in theory no current flows through the gate insulating layer of silicon oxide except when the voltage is flipped between positive and negative - however in practise making this gate very thin without a current flowing all the time by tunneling and leakage is a complete nightmare for the chip manufacturer - because leakage = current = heat = meltdown).
The big deal however is that, if you cool a semiconductor down enough, be it p or n type - is that the holes and electrons that make the semiconductor able to carry current - they get fewer and fewer because they only exist because the thermal vibrations in the semiconductor crystal have set them free. You end up with a thing that isnt a transistor any more because there is nothing left to carry a current in it.
Tunneling and therefore the size of the circle an electron could be located in is dependant on the temperature of the material it lives in so cooling sounds like a good idea because tunneling would then depend upon the speed it is moving at due to the applied voltage - so you could get somewhere by lowering the voltage after you have cooled the material down enough so that the electron speed depends on the voltage and not just its speed given to it by thermal excitation. But as noted above it couldnt be done in a normal transistor structure anyway because transistors rely on thermal energy to create carriers in the conduction band - and make the n and p type regions that allow it to work in the first place.
so yes cooling makes the circle smaller but it also breaks the transistor.
Talking of Branes : why not tap into all those trillions of similar but not quite the same chips that lie in all those parallel universes that string theory says are just a realy strong hot cup of tea away...
One of the super clever things a human brain does is to choose between a bunch of options on the basis of almost no actual data.
The answer is to build a Psychic chip, anybody have the faintest idea how to go about it?? (hint quantum tunneling of electrons depends on probability - is that cat dead yet or not?)
Its not a technology issue though, electron tunneling is a fundamental limit that says you just cannot pile any more transistors into chips made of any solid.
:-)
I think this paper is 'more' (sigh) significant than many are taking it to be. What they are saying is that the electron will no longer be able to provide us with greater computing power in twenty or so years time. Super computer builders prepared to pay will get a little extra milage out of stacking and clever parallelism but your desktop computer will never get any faster after this time using electronics as we understand it.
What we need is a breakthrough as fundamental as the discovery of a new law of nature to get any further.
Quantum computers show some possibility along with self organising molecules to instantate them - but we are still at the practical ability to do this, that we were at with electricity when kite flying in the clouds was a good way to study electrons.
It is prahaps somewhat significant that the number of gates on a chip will be comparable to the number of neurons in the human brain by the end of this decade. Maybe we dont need faster computers at all, maybe the clever thing will be expecting a computer to do something that it cannot do at the momment - think for itself. Sadly creating artificial intelligence has proven a brick wall that has almost no mainstream spin off so far unless you count Microsofts ghastly paper clip...
However my bet is that when the megahertz race is over, the new race will be how to make the compute element more intelligent - through a mixture of software and hardware. Sadly it seems to be a lot more than twenty years away as we cant even program all human brains to read and write despite the several hundred thousand years of development that have been applied to the grey matter
Oh so true, Access is not a "database" at all... However I strongly disagree that it is not useful
Access is a tool which allows rapid application development, ideal for example in building a departmental data warehouse and analysis of data extracted from an enterprise database.
If the resulting information proves sufficiently useful to an organisation then it has to be migrated into something more robust.
It is typical of the IT expert to view this as a problem rather than as a convenient way of discovering what the organisation needs to fill in the gaps left by deployment of enterprise applications. It is an opportunity to improve your business and should be welcomed. You can always rebuild the whole thing from scratch or do it a different way - if the enterprise strength thing you are putting it into allows you do an interface with the same functionality, and often it is very difficult.
The relational model is often held in reverence because of its efficiency, vital for scaleability. Hardware is a lot cheaper and faster than it used to be so this is not the greatest problem. What is a problem is a poor data structure. If you spent a little time helping to ensure that your "managers" understood how to keep the data clean then all you are left with is solving the problem of shoehorning the answer they have built into your enterprise strength relational database. Its not their fault that character case is not supported. Why shouldnt it be?
Sounds more like the complaint of "not invented here" more than anything else to me. Although it could also be something to do with the cost in time and effort to migrate the application - something which the average departmental manager might find prohibitive.
So in the end its a case of neither Access or Enterprise databases being perfect, roll on the day when it gets easier to migrate between RAD tools and robust solutions. I also will be very interested to see just how good this new application is at providing this.
I agree it would cost more to improve the reliability, however how much does it cost for all consumers to purchase individual backup and how much did this power outage cost the economy and your society for the lost work hours, claims for destruction of frozen or chilled foodstuffs and degraded health support systems?
Engineering systems which are robust do not necessarily cost a lot more than unreliable ones. For example we generaly take it for granted that aeroplanes are safer to use than our personal automobiles but I do not see a large number of complaints that the safety measures incorporated into air travel have imposed an excessive cost.
Thankyou for this information, I would question however whether the logic of an assured fail rate of 8 hours per year is sufficiently good - especially as the predictive statistics is working at the level where chaotic effects will make gaussian statistics look like complete bolloks. This fail is not at the edge of the normal population as you suggest because it was a non linear cascade of fails.
:-)
Conclusion - redesign the power system so that it does not suffer from cascade or beef up the supply so that the predicted fail rate is 8 hours a century.
In this case I am definitely not a lawyer, I am an engineer. Though I am dating a lawyer so I have learned how to speak with complete assurance