Here's a little details that pretty much summarize the docs:
How it works. Nantero's memory chips consist of billions of nanotubes, each a few hundred nanometres long, suspended from a silicon wafer.... This means that a group of a few dozen nanotubes can act as a memory element, storing a single bit (either a one or a zero) of the binary code that computers use to operate. If the connection between the wafers is live at a particular point, the bit represented is a one. If not, it is a zero.
Speed. Nantero's new memory can read or write a bit in as little as half a nanosecond.
Availability. At the moment, Nantero has only a working prototype. But the firm aims to have memories on the market within a year.
Hurdles. The main difficulty faced by others who have tried to go down the buckytube route is getting the tubes to align with each other when they are hung from the first wafer. Until now, the approach has been to try to grow all of the tubes in the correct orientation to start with. But Nantero's founders came up with a simpler, if less elegant, solution. They use established lithographic techniques to get rid of tubes that are pointing in the wrong direction by zapping them with an electron beam. That leaves only those that are hanging down towards the opposite wafer.
every legitimate mailing list on the planet will get challenges from all the Earthlink subscribers
Not exactly right. It happens only for the first time to detect whether the sender is legitimate or not. Quote the article:
The system automatically recognizes future e-mails from the same sender, so the verification needs only to be performed once.
The problem with this system is that the spammer can still spam using legitimate e-mail accounts as a camouflage (or expired e-mail accounts). Once the legitimate e-mail address is procured, the spam still goes on. It is futile, IMHO.
Good Point.
on
SCO DOS'ed
·
· Score: 5, Informative
For those of you who's lazy to click, here's two paragraphs summary:
The upshot of this GPL paragraph is that by relicensing their own code under non-GPL terms, once having knowingly released said code under the GPL, they have forfeited their own rights to distribute Linux. Or, at least that's how I interpret it. Further, the same paragraph states that the rest of us still hold full GPL rights to the code SCO originally licensed to us via the GPL.
The bottom line to us would appear to be that, even if there is IBM-introduced, SCO-owned, infringing code in Linux, it is now officially released under the GPL by the copyright holder, SCO. And, of course, no sanitizing of the Linux kernel is necessary. This spat should have no effect on Linus, Red Hat, SuSE, or any other Linux developer or distributor.
No it's not $7000 per country.. It's $7000 more per country. When you calculate (app fee is $78K + $200K legal fee), the average is about $12K. So, it implies that his total patent cost in the US is about $5K.
Sorry, but I must disagree. Most of the times, research experiment != unit testing.
To illustrate: Take for example a data mining project. The first phase is data preparation -- which is easily scriptable. But how to prepare the data is different story. We must examine the raw data case by case to decide how to treat it. For example: When to discretize and using what method (linear scale, log scale, etc), when to reduce dimensionality, etc etc. This requires human supervision.
Even after we do the data prep, we look at the result. If the cooked data contains too much loss of information due to prep stage, we have to do it again using different parameters. This is painful.
Then, next on the pipeline: What algorithm to use. This is, again, depend on the characteristics of the cooked data. You know, some "experts" (read: grad students) will determine it using some "random" heuristics of their mind given some reasonable explanations.
If after the result is out and is not desirable, we might go back for different algorithm or choose different data prep parameters, and so forth...
Given this settings, I doubt that there is a silver bullet for this problem...
I also did lots of comp sci empirical experiments. My experience is that the tools used for experimenting itself is very ad-hoc and not easily scriptable. Most of the times we are required to tend the hour-long experiments to see what happened on the output and decide what to do next. And... the decision is often times not clear cut. Some sort of heuristic is needed. Not to mention about the frustations when the errors occur (especially when the tool is buggy, which is very often in research settings). So, considering this, what I would do is to construct a script and do the experiments in phases. Run it and see the result several days after.
I also noticed that from one experiment to another is sometimes radically different that I would doubt it is easily manageable.
You should include the full quote of Damage, because just quoting out of context can be misleading. Here's the full paragraph (emphasis is mine):
This is really fun, but I am a little concerned about their memory latency numbers. They haven't specified what units those numbers are in, but latency numbers come out of programs like cachemem in CPU cycles. Obviously, processors with higher clock speeds will see more clock cycles pass per second than processors with lower clock speeds. One must convert those numbers into comparable units, such as nanoseconds, in order to compare CPUs at different clock speeds. I do expect the Athlon 64 to have low memory access latencies because of its integrated memory controller, but I don't think the gap will be so great as the X-bit numbers would seem to indicate.
So, the worry is about the units the latency numbers are expressed in. And when you'd see the numbers below, you get an idea why it is so:
Net Evaders: 20% (non-Internet users live with someone who uses the Internet from home).
Net Dropouts: 17% of non-Internet users were once users. (Most of them are dropouts because of technical problems)
Truly Disconnected: Some 24% of Americans are truly offline
Most non-users live physically and socially close to the Internet
60% of non-users know of a place in their community where Internet access is publicly available, while 76% of Internet users know of public access site.
Younger Americans are much more wired than older Americans. Well-to-do Americans are more wired that less well-off Americans, and the employed are far more wired than the unemployed.
Some 56% of non-Internet users do not think they will ever go online. These people are generally the poorer, older segment of the not-online population, and are more likely to be white, female, retired and living in rural areas.
And so forth...
Not the bubble burst per se. Apparently, lots of social factors come into play, which I think were not into the equation on the prediction years ago.
Hard to believe that Microsoft's new language has two public standards and Sun's language has none. Is something wrong with this picture? Microsoft is starting to appear as a reasonable and responsible company and Sun appears as stumbling around in the dark.
Well, it's all about control. Sun fears that once it place the language into standard bodies, it loses the control over the language. Whereas, as you may notice, there are lots of other language features need to be implemented. One of them is genericity / templates -- that is due out for Java 1.5. If Sun put Java into standard, it cannot make the modification easily.
Moreover, Sun also fears of dominant groups (read: Microsoft) may overwhelm or sway the language away from their original intents.
Well, CMU already did this long ago. They use Neural-Nets and they can cruise the highway at 70 mph. The test run is completely automated. Of course there's someone at the driver seat in case that there's something wrong. Interestingly, although the AI system successfully cruising the road, the detection sometimes mistaken a white tree bark for the road divider....
They are right (at least!). RIP. We'll miss you (i loved double dragon).
Well, no... They're wrong again. It's still alive, although not many modern games are in this category.
For example: Dynasty Warriors series in PS2. DW3 is a big seller in Japan and in the US (1 million copy+). DW4 is out in 26 March. This proves that a lot of people still love this genre.
And why did you ask Social Security and Credit Card Numbers too?
Oh... that! It's in order to enable us to automatically char^H^H^H^H credit you when we have some special offers and add some pension benefits too...
*Looks away reciting disclaimers* "Some restrictions apply. Credit can be negative values. Pension benefit is added in after life. Battery is not included.
You should read Carmack's comment that pretty much summed up the gist of the debates:
The R200 path has a slight speed advantage over the ARB2 path on the R300, but only by a small margin, so it defaults to using the ARB2 path for the quality improvements. The NV30 runs the ARB2 path MUCH slower than the NV30 path. Half the speed at the moment. This is unfortunate, because when you do an exact, apples-to-apples comparison using exactly the same API, the R300 looks twice as fast, but when you use the vendor-specific paths, the NV30 wins.
The reason for this is that ATI does everything at high precision all the time, while NVIDIA internally supports three different precisions with different performances. To make it even more complicated, the exact precision that ATI uses is in between the floating point precisions offered by NVIDIA, so when NVIDIA runs fragment programs, they are at a higher precision than ATI's, which is some justification for the slower speed. NVIDIA assures me that there is a lot of room for improving the fragment program performance with improved driver compiler technology.
Although Octave is great to mimic Matlab 5.2, some neat features in Matlab 6.0 are not there yet.
Another drawback is... just like Matlab... It's Slow, with a capital S. I won't recommend it for serious number crunching like encryption or gene data manipulation unless you have really good CPU power and godly patience.
Of course this is a good endeavor to stop piracy, but the question is: Even after they successfully identify each user, can they effectively shut down each of the machine? They can do it for their student, and probably *AA will jump in for the big-brotherism. But can they do it for the rest of the world? I think not.
So, if they do this again -- it's like Napster story once again. New, better P2P softwares will spring up and it's more resilient and equipped with military strength encryption and stuff, which will in turn annul their previous effort.
Why do they sell this thing when winter is about to end? They're supposed to sell it by mid November last year... It would be a perfect time to play WarCraft 3 and keep yourself warm.
I found out that the switcher's story is recursively enumerable. Below is the grammar. Feel free to use this for your application essay.
Hi, my name is <IDENTIFIER>. I am (a|an) <IDENTIFIER> [from <IDENTIFIER>].
I used (Apple|Macintosh) version <FLOAT_LITERAL> for <INTEGER_LITERAL> (years|months) doing (documents | spreadsheets | databases | video editing | MP3 listening | surfing the net | <OTHER_FUN_JOBS>)+. It was all (fun | very nice | pleasant experience) at the beginning.
But, later on I discovered that (it has only one mouse button | some software I bought wasn't supported | their hardwares are so expensive | <REASON_WHY_IT_SUCKS>)+. Since I was only (a yet another broke graduate students | an unemployed bum | a clueless luser | <REASON_WHY_I_SUCKS>)+, I found out that their solution is [completely | absolutely] unviable.
(Enter | Here comes) Microsoft. They provide me (MS Office | MS Windows | <OTHER_MS_SOFTWARE>)+. It is really (a panacea | working like magic | <REASON_WHY_ITS_GREAT>)+. Now I can (surfing a lot faster | do my spreadsheet even better | <OTHER_PRAISES>)+. Even more, I can get added bonus, like (the great blue screen | DRM constricted media player | compulsory activation | <OTHER_STUFF>)+, which makes my computer eXPerience even better.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a little details that pretty much summarize the docs:
How it works. Nantero's memory chips consist of billions of nanotubes, each a few hundred nanometres long, suspended from a silicon wafer. ... This means that a group of a few dozen nanotubes can act as a memory element, storing a single bit (either a one or a zero) of the binary code that computers use to operate. If the connection between the wafers is live at a particular point, the bit represented is a one. If not, it is a zero.
Speed. Nantero's new memory can read or write a bit in as little as half a nanosecond.
Availability. At the moment, Nantero has only a working prototype. But the firm aims to have memories on the market within a year.
Hurdles. The main difficulty faced by others who have tried to go down the buckytube route is getting the tubes to align with each other when they are hung from the first wafer. Until now, the approach has been to try to grow all of the tubes in the correct orientation to start with. But Nantero's founders came up with a simpler, if less elegant, solution. They use established lithographic techniques to get rid of tubes that are pointing in the wrong direction by zapping them with an electron beam. That leaves only those that are hanging down towards the opposite wafer.
every legitimate mailing list on the planet will get challenges from all the Earthlink subscribers
Not exactly right. It happens only for the first time to detect whether the sender is legitimate or not. Quote the article:
The system automatically recognizes future e-mails from the same sender, so the verification needs only to be performed once.
The problem with this system is that the spammer can still spam using legitimate e-mail accounts as a camouflage (or expired e-mail accounts). Once the legitimate e-mail address is procured, the spam still goes on. It is futile, IMHO.
For those of you who's lazy to click, here's two paragraphs summary:
The upshot of this GPL paragraph is that by relicensing their own code under non-GPL terms, once having knowingly released said code under the GPL, they have forfeited their own rights to distribute Linux. Or, at least that's how I interpret it. Further, the same paragraph states that the rest of us still hold full GPL rights to the code SCO originally licensed to us via the GPL.
The bottom line to us would appear to be that, even if there is IBM-introduced, SCO-owned, infringing code in Linux, it is now officially released under the GPL by the copyright holder, SCO. And, of course, no sanitizing of the Linux kernel is necessary. This spat should have no effect on Linus, Red Hat, SuSE, or any other Linux developer or distributor.
No it's not $7000 per country.. It's $7000 more per country. When you calculate (app fee is $78K + $200K legal fee), the average is about $12K. So, it implies that his total patent cost in the US is about $5K.
Sorry, but I must disagree. Most of the times, research experiment != unit testing.
To illustrate: Take for example a data mining project. The first phase is data preparation -- which is easily scriptable. But how to prepare the data is different story. We must examine the raw data case by case to decide how to treat it. For example: When to discretize and using what method (linear scale, log scale, etc), when to reduce dimensionality, etc etc. This requires human supervision.
Even after we do the data prep, we look at the result. If the cooked data contains too much loss of information due to prep stage, we have to do it again using different parameters. This is painful.
Then, next on the pipeline: What algorithm to use. This is, again, depend on the characteristics of the cooked data. You know, some "experts" (read: grad students) will determine it using some "random" heuristics of their mind given some reasonable explanations.
If after the result is out and is not desirable, we might go back for different algorithm or choose different data prep parameters, and so forth...
Given this settings, I doubt that there is a silver bullet for this problem...
I also did lots of comp sci empirical experiments. My experience is that the tools used for experimenting itself is very ad-hoc and not easily scriptable. Most of the times we are required to tend the hour-long experiments to see what happened on the output and decide what to do next. And... the decision is often times not clear cut. Some sort of heuristic is needed. Not to mention about the frustations when the errors occur (especially when the tool is buggy, which is very often in research settings). So, considering this, what I would do is to construct a script and do the experiments in phases. Run it and see the result several days after.
I also noticed that from one experiment to another is sometimes radically different that I would doubt it is easily manageable.
You should include the full quote of Damage, because just quoting out of context can be misleading. Here's the full paragraph (emphasis is mine):
This is really fun, but I am a little concerned about their memory latency numbers. They haven't specified what units those numbers are in, but latency numbers come out of programs like cachemem in CPU cycles. Obviously, processors with higher clock speeds will see more clock cycles pass per second than processors with lower clock speeds. One must convert those numbers into comparable units, such as nanoseconds, in order to compare CPUs at different clock speeds. I do expect the Athlon 64 to have low memory access latencies because of its integrated memory controller, but I don't think the gap will be so great as the X-bit numbers would seem to indicate.
So, the worry is about the units the latency numbers are expressed in. And when you'd see the numbers below, you get an idea why it is so:
Athlon 64 2800+
Athlon XP 1.6GHz
Pentium 4 2.8C
See it for yourself.
The study shows:
Not the bubble burst per se. Apparently, lots of social factors come into play, which I think were not into the equation on the prediction years ago.
Well, it depends. For the music industry, they would rather call it Digital Reprobate Management.
But for most slashdotters, I believe we would call it Digital Reproach Management. :-)
Not only with timely manner, but also with an affordable price. That's the most important part for the music industry to learn.
Most Annoyingly Stupid Award
Wrong... It should be awarded to this guy, when explaining the security in Iraq.
</joke>
Hard to believe that Microsoft's new language has two public standards and Sun's language has none. Is something wrong with this picture? Microsoft is starting to appear as a reasonable and responsible company and Sun appears as stumbling around in the dark.
Well, it's all about control. Sun fears that once it place the language into standard bodies, it loses the control over the language. Whereas, as you may notice, there are lots of other language features need to be implemented. One of them is genericity / templates -- that is due out for Java 1.5. If Sun put Java into standard, it cannot make the modification easily.
Moreover, Sun also fears of dominant groups (read: Microsoft) may overwhelm or sway the language away from their original intents.
Well, CMU already did this long ago. They use Neural-Nets and they can cruise the highway at 70 mph. The test run is completely automated. Of course there's someone at the driver seat in case that there's something wrong. Interestingly, although the AI system successfully cruising the road, the detection sometimes mistaken a white tree bark for the road divider....
2. Beat 'Em Up
They are right (at least!). RIP. We'll miss you (i loved double dragon).
Well, no... They're wrong again. It's still alive, although not many modern games are in this category.
For example: Dynasty Warriors series in PS2. DW3 is a big seller in Japan and in the US (1 million copy+). DW4 is out in 26 March. This proves that a lot of people still love this genre.
...
And why did you ask Social Security and Credit Card Numbers too?
Oh... that! It's in order to enable us to automatically char^H^H^H^H credit you when we have some special offers and add some pension benefits too...
*Looks away reciting disclaimers* "Some restrictions apply. Credit can be negative values. Pension benefit is added in after life. Battery is not included.
The dialog went out like this:
Ok, laptop, one sip for you, one sip for me...
Here you can find a more technical details than just press release.
Here is the actual spec about the PowerPC 970.
Ars Technica articles. Apparently, PPC 970 just last year's news. The real news is just the cranked-up speed...
If only they can make a program to predict "slashdotability", their server wouldn't have to suffer like this.
You should read Carmack's comment that pretty much summed up the gist of the debates:
The R200 path has a slight speed advantage over the ARB2 path on the R300, but only by a small margin, so it defaults to using the ARB2 path for the quality improvements. The NV30 runs the ARB2 path MUCH slower than the NV30 path. Half the speed at the moment. This is unfortunate, because when you do an exact, apples-to-apples comparison using exactly the same API, the R300 looks twice as fast, but when you use the vendor-specific paths, the NV30 wins.
The reason for this is that ATI does everything at high precision all the time, while NVIDIA internally supports three different precisions with different performances. To make it even more complicated, the exact precision that ATI uses is in between the floating point precisions offered by NVIDIA, so when NVIDIA runs fragment programs, they are at a higher precision than ATI's, which is some justification for the slower speed. NVIDIA assures me that there is a lot of room for improving the fragment program performance with improved driver compiler technology.
Although Octave is great to mimic Matlab 5.2, some neat features in Matlab 6.0 are not there yet.
Another drawback is... just like Matlab... It's Slow, with a capital S. I won't recommend it for serious number crunching like encryption or gene data manipulation unless you have really good CPU power and godly patience.
Of course this is a good endeavor to stop piracy, but the question is: Even after they successfully identify each user, can they effectively shut down each of the machine? They can do it for their student, and probably *AA will jump in for the big-brotherism. But can they do it for the rest of the world? I think not.
So, if they do this again -- it's like Napster story once again. New, better P2P softwares will spring up and it's more resilient and equipped with military strength encryption and stuff, which will in turn annul their previous effort.
Is here.
I suppose $459 price tag doesn't warrant the additional 10-15% performance increase...
Why do they sell this thing when winter is about to end? They're supposed to sell it by mid November last year... It would be a perfect time to play WarCraft 3 and keep yourself warm.
Even "better" punishment: Recite 1000 spam everyday for 5 years....
I found out that the switcher's story is recursively enumerable. Below is the grammar. Feel free to use this for your application essay.
Hi, my name is <IDENTIFIER>. I am (a|an) <IDENTIFIER> [from <IDENTIFIER>].
I used (Apple|Macintosh) version <FLOAT_LITERAL> for <INTEGER_LITERAL> (years|months) doing (documents | spreadsheets | databases | video editing | MP3 listening | surfing the net | <OTHER_FUN_JOBS>)+. It was all (fun | very nice | pleasant experience) at the beginning.
But, later on I discovered that (it has only one mouse button | some software I bought wasn't supported | their hardwares are so expensive | <REASON_WHY_IT_SUCKS>)+. Since I was only (a yet another broke graduate students | an unemployed bum | a clueless luser | <REASON_WHY_I_SUCKS>)+, I found out that their solution is [completely | absolutely] unviable.
(Enter | Here comes) Microsoft. They provide me (MS Office | MS Windows | <OTHER_MS_SOFTWARE>)+. It is really (a panacea | working like magic | <REASON_WHY_ITS_GREAT>)+. Now I can (surfing a lot faster | do my spreadsheet even better | <OTHER_PRAISES>)+. Even more, I can get added bonus, like (the great blue screen | DRM constricted media player | compulsory activation | <OTHER_STUFF>)+, which makes my computer eXPerience even better.
Now that I switched. How about you?