I havn't tried the D3D stuff myself, but as far as I can tell from reading the forvms/etc it is working. I assume it's a separate piece from VirtualBox itself - it must be a driver (i.e part of "guest OS extensions") that you install after installing Windows in a VirtualBox VM.
I don't know about other VMs, but FYI Sun's "VirtualBox" (which runs on Windows/Linux/etc - it's not a Solaris-only thing) has recently added accelerated OpenGL support via a driver installed in the VM that basically provides a tunnel through to the real hardware driver on the host OS. They've also added accelerated Direct3D support via code taken from WINE that translates DIRCET3D calls into OpenGL ones.
I highly recommend VirtualBox - much faster and better integrated into the host OS than VMWare, for sure. Very easy to setup and use.
1) You're confusing qualia (plural) and quale (singular). This isn't just pedantry since the answer to the generic "what are qualia" is qualitatively different to "what is the xxx quale" (or better "explain the zzz quale"). If your question really is what are qualia then the WikiPedia answers that question.
2) A deeper misunderstanding is that you seem to think that all visual qualia can be lumped together ("what is this visual sensation") whereas really they (the various visual qualia) need to be explained on a case by case basis.
The answer to the well formulated question "what is the redness/color quale" or in plain english "why is the subjective experience of color the way it is" is quite simple, and can be proved via experiment:
a) Color is a uniform surface attribute of an object, hence the subjective experience is of a quality of the perceived object that is the same everywhere on it's surface. Contrast this, say, to the quale of a sound which is time-domain feature vs a surface one and hence has a completely different subjective experience/quale, or to texture which is also a surface attribute but a non-uniform one, etc, etc.
b) While we detect color via the r/g/b color cones in the eyes, which have an absolute relationship to the quality (i.e. wavelengths of light) being sensed, the brain itself does not know that (it knows nothing). The color of an object is therefore just a sensory pattern associated with it, and associated with other objects of the same color. The experience of color therefore is necessarily a comparative one, not an absolute one. The quale of redness is that of a surface attribute that recalls the experience of other objects of the same/similar color, ditto for blue or any other color. Sounds non-intuitive (athough maybe you logically accept it)? Experiments have shown that if you make someone wear color goggles so that everything (initially...) seems uniformly tinted, after a while (I forget - a week or two, perhaps) the normal sensation of color vision comes back - the color of things look normal to you despite the fact that you are wearing color-tinted goggles!! The reason is because of the necessarily comparative vs absolute nature of color in the brain.
So that's the redness quale - we analytically expect the subjective experience to be a uniform surface attribute that recalls other similarly colored objects, and so it is. Redness is just the shared surface quality of all red objects. That subjective experience of "leaf green" when you look at the greed LED on your router isn't an absolute thing - it's a recall of leaves and other similarly colored objects.
That's a function of the GUI/UI toolkit the app is using, not the fact that it's written in Java. A Java app doesn't need to use the Java-native Swing (or whatever is current) GUI library... for example it could use Qt via the (now under community maintenance) "Qt Jambi" Java binding, and would look the same same any other Qt app (i.e. very close to native).
Not exactly - it really means exactly what it sounds like, although it is essentially idiomatic, not just a descriptive phrase.
Emerging markets are countries/economies that are growing (or rap[idly growing) and becoming more consumer orientated, but have not yet reached the level of the more mature (and slowly growing) established markets such as Europe, America, Japan, etc. i.e. they may well be relatively poor compared to more developed countries, but they have reached a stage where they are undergoing rapid growth. Emerging market mutual funds would usually be expected to grow faster than other international funds, but also exhibit much more volatility.
e.g. South-East Asia, and many South American counties would be considered as "emerging markets", but, say, Africa probably would not since it hasn't yet gotten to that "take off" stage.
what are the chances of Word replacing LaTeX as the editor of choice in academia?
Zero.
Aside from anything else, people don't learn tools like this and give them up at the drop of a hat, but more to the point I'll believe it when I see it for Word to include all the knowledge embedded in LaTeX to make text and equation layout really pleasing.
Except that the Apple Lisa wasn't the first computer with a GUI, mouse, etc (back in the day referred to as WIMP - Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer) - that would be the Xerox Star, which is what the Lisa copied.
Incidently, I saw the Lisa demoed when it was launched, and it was a dog - slow as molasses.
Obviously it doesn't have the bandwidth to be high performance, but nowadays you even get "docking stations" (I use the scare quotes because I was horrified when I realized this) that use a single USB connection (i.e monitor, network, keboard, mouse - the whole shebang over a single USB connection).
If you've just doing business graphics I guess it's OK. Not really meant for viewing video or playing games, etc.
A typical book page has text on in in parallel lines which can be used to correct for curvature, straight-edge formatted into rectangles which can be used to correct for skew. Who needs another grid?
If a page doesn't have suitable text on it (e.g. a graphic), then just assume it's warped the same as the previous page (the one it's lying on top of).
The precursors to life would have been nothing more than chemical chain reactions that consumed other chemicals in the environment. Separate a number of these reactions from each other (all consuming the same chemicals - i.e. competing - in the environment) and you've got the beginnings of evolution. Anything as complex as RNA may have taken millions of years, or more, to evolve from these simple beginnings.
Actually, if you RTFA, the Scientist who discovered this did it by trying all possible combinations - an effort that took him about 10 years. It doesn't seem in the least bit implausible, rather the opposite, that nature would have also tried all combinations given a few million rock pools and few million years of random change.
I don't know in what sense you consider bag-o-servos humanoid robots to be advanced - you do realise they're just radio controlled, not autonomous, right? Most people just buy them as kits and screw them together. IMO anything you design yourself, or anything with any autonomy is miles ahead.
Of course Japanese research robots - e.g. Asimo - are another story. But, ROBO-1 sumo competitions? Puhleeze....
Well, at least this reviewer understands what Alpaha is and presents it clearly, unlike the other 2 (or is it more?) stories Slashdot has run on it where the article writers (and most of Slashot readership!) seem to think it's a search engine.
It's more like comparing a ford pinto to a shoebox... you can put shoes in either one, but that's about the extent of it.
From what I've read Alpha simply isn't a search engine - it's an expert system that answers queries via it's built-in (Mathematica based) rules and built-in hand "curated" data. I'd guess Alpha may link to some live internet feeds for things like exchange rates, but don't expect it top have access to much (if any) data that hasn't been sucked into Wolfram HQ and hand-scrubbed and organized.
The reviewer (not that I read TFA - this is slashdot after all) seems to believe that just because you can enter "queeries" of some sort into both Google and Alpha that they must both be search engines... by this criteria a ford pinto is (an explosive) shoe box.
Not only is this not a Google killer (it's not even a search engine, so how can it be?!), I very much doubt it'll be of any use/interest to anyone outside of the intellectual elite. Googling for "swine flue" is of widespread interest, but I suspect that Alpha-ing for computed relationships and statistics is not.
For anyone who has yet to read about Alpha, what it is is basically a large expert system written in Mathematica that computes the answers to queries covering a very large real-world knowledge domain. I havn't even read that it goes out to the web at all - it's basically based on a huge human collated/organized ("curated" in the Alpha parlance) data set of statistics and relationships. Apparently the results are presented in a very slick way including charts and graphics.
No doubt Alpha is a huge achievement in it's chosen domain of knowledge organization and computation, but I find it hard to imagine that a significant portion of the population will find it useful.
The primary cause of death during the 1918 "Spanish Flu" was "Ctyokine storms" - basically overactivity of the immune system in reaction to the virus if had never seen before. That's why it killed the young and healthy (i.e those with string immune systems) rather than the young and old who are nomally flu victims. I'm not aware of anything modern healthcare could do for them.
Everyone on the planet has been exposed to *some* type of flu virus, but not this one - it's a very unusual mix of pig, avian and human influenza DNA which your immune system has never seen before. All flus are different, which is why sometimes your annual flu shot protects you (when they guess right about the strains that are likely to be around that year), and sometimes doesn't (like last year, when they guessed wrong).
But that article won't clue them in much other that mentioning that he dropped out of Harvard to co-found Microsoft.
No mention there of things like Microsoft's first product MITS Altair BASIC (sold on punchtape for the iconic MITS Altair 8800), or how later Seattle Computer's QDOS was sneakily bought by Microsoft to be renamed as MS-DOS when IBM came knocking for an OS for it's new "IBM PC"...
Flash and YouTube are two different things as far as ARM is concerned.
The iPhone is ARM based and supports YouTube just fine, because YouTube videos are also accessible as H.264 streams meaning you just need a decoder, not Flash.
Adobe are reportedly working on a Flash port for ARM - there's no reason for it to be a big deal.
The easy response to someone with such a "signed thru a hole cut in another document" would be to show the court the photo recorded by the device of the document it appeared to be signing, where the signature would be identical to the one they were presenting... Two genuine signatures by the same person are never precisely identical.
In reality I doubt you could cut a hole in a document that would not be visible in a hi-res close-up photo.
If you search for LongPen videos on youtube you can see a demo of this at a trade show...
It's more than just a remote signature product - it's really meant for legal/financial use where there may possibly be disputes over what was signed, who was present. etc.
What the product does is transmit a photo of the document in the robo-pen device to the remote signing end where it appears in a display built into to the tablet device you sign on - it's as if you're singing the real document on the appropriate line/whereever. The system also takes and stores before/after photos of the signed document and saves audio/video of the remote signer (& robot end?) so that these can be brought up if there's any legal challenge... It should be noted that the anticipated legal challenges arn't because of this being a remote signature device, but rather that the whole photo/audio/video capture system is designed to address the challenges that already occur with traditional signed documents.
There are various comments in reply to this article about how this is nothing new, but from the video it seems that not only is it an entire singing/verification system, but also the signature reproduction quality is very high - it detects/reproduces 60 different pressure levels and samples at 2000/samples sec.
it sounds like the new support suggestion is aimed to match the MS support policy, not that they're looking to take advantage of anything in SP3
I think you must be right... Why don't they just go the whole hog and make FireFox Vista/netbook only?!
Seems an odd move unless they're getting some very major incentive from Microsoft, and even than rather a slap in the face to FireFox's OSS roots/fans.
I remember stories of Google buying up lots of dark fiber during the dot com crash... but I've never read exactly what they're doing with it. It would seem reasonable to assume they're using it for something though, such as pumping craploads of date thru it.
I know if I was Google I'd not be paying an ISP to connect my youtube farm to the internet - I'd be colocating youtube servers with massive storage in major ISPs, feeding them with my own fiber, and paying for the colo costs with bandwidth.
TFA author pulled a random number out of his backside and for bandwidth costs which make up 50% of the total costs. If that bandwidth number is way off, as it easily could be, then the rest of the conclusions are off too. GIGO.
I thought the windows service packs were more or less bug fixes and security updates - not new APIs or suchlike that make any difference to applications.
So... what does FireFox need from Win XP SP3 that isn't in SP2?
One motivation for putting an ARM in a netbook is to make a better product (overall coat-performance-battery life trade-off), not just a cheaper one, so why would a manufacturer not put a decent/large amount of RAM in one? Have you checked RAM prices recently - it's practically being given away.
As far as web compatibility, note that the iPhone is ARM based and has a decent browser (youtube compatible since youtube switched to H.264 video), and incidently Adobe is trying to get Flash working on the iPhone...
FYI Google's new JavaScript VM is here in the Google Chrome browser... The JVM is called V8 and does indeed compile to native code when it wants to (JIT), and runs rings around other JavaScript implementations (such as that in Firefox) in terms of speed. Considering how simple ARM machine code is (it's a totally orthogonal instruction set)it's hard to imagine porting the JIT compiler to ARM would be a big deal. As far as security, JIT makes no difference.
Slashdot Mirror
I havn't tried the D3D stuff myself, but as far as I can tell from reading the forvms/etc it is working. I assume it's a separate piece from VirtualBox itself - it must be a driver (i.e part of "guest OS extensions") that you install after installing Windows in a VirtualBox VM.
I don't know about other VMs, but FYI Sun's "VirtualBox" (which runs on Windows/Linux/etc - it's not a Solaris-only thing) has recently added accelerated OpenGL support via a driver installed in the VM that basically provides a tunnel through to the real hardware driver on the host OS. They've also added accelerated Direct3D support via code taken from WINE that translates DIRCET3D calls into OpenGL ones.
I highly recommend VirtualBox - much faster and better integrated into the host OS than VMWare, for sure. Very easy to setup and use.
http://www.virtualbox.org/
Your post is also gibberish.
1) You're confusing qualia (plural) and quale (singular). This isn't just pedantry since the answer to the generic "what are qualia" is qualitatively different to "what is the xxx quale" (or better "explain the zzz quale"). If your question really is what are qualia then the WikiPedia answers that question.
2) A deeper misunderstanding is that you seem to think that all visual qualia can be lumped together ("what is this visual sensation") whereas really they (the various visual qualia) need to be explained on a case by case basis.
The answer to the well formulated question "what is the redness/color quale" or in plain english "why is the subjective experience of color the way it is" is quite simple, and can be proved via experiment:
a) Color is a uniform surface attribute of an object, hence the subjective experience is of a quality of the perceived object that is the same everywhere on it's surface. Contrast this, say, to the quale of a sound which is time-domain feature vs a surface one and hence has a completely different subjective experience/quale, or to texture which is also a surface attribute but a non-uniform one, etc, etc.
b) While we detect color via the r/g/b color cones in the eyes, which have an absolute relationship to the quality (i.e. wavelengths of light) being sensed, the brain itself does not know that (it knows nothing). The color of an object is therefore just a sensory pattern associated with it, and associated with other objects of the same color. The experience of color therefore is necessarily a comparative one, not an absolute one. The quale of redness is that of a surface attribute that recalls the experience of other objects of the same/similar color, ditto for blue or any other color. Sounds non-intuitive (athough maybe you logically accept it)? Experiments have shown that if you make someone wear color goggles so that everything (initially...) seems uniformly tinted, after a while (I forget - a week or two, perhaps) the normal sensation of color vision comes back - the color of things look normal to you despite the fact that you are wearing color-tinted goggles!! The reason is because of the necessarily comparative vs absolute nature of color in the brain.
So that's the redness quale - we analytically expect the subjective experience to be a uniform surface attribute that recalls other similarly colored objects, and so it is. Redness is just the shared surface quality of all red objects. That subjective experience of "leaf green" when you look at the greed LED on your router isn't an absolute thing - it's a recall of leaves and other similarly colored objects.
That's a function of the GUI/UI toolkit the app is using, not the fact that it's written in Java. A Java app doesn't need to use the Java-native Swing (or whatever is current) GUI library... for example it could use Qt via the (now under community maintenance) "Qt Jambi" Java binding, and would look the same same any other Qt app (i.e. very close to native).
Not exactly - it really means exactly what it sounds like, although it is essentially idiomatic, not just a descriptive phrase.
Emerging markets are countries/economies that are growing (or rap[idly growing) and becoming more consumer orientated, but have not yet reached the level of the more mature (and slowly growing) established markets such as Europe, America, Japan, etc. i.e. they may well be relatively poor compared to more developed countries, but they have reached a stage where they are undergoing rapid growth. Emerging market mutual funds would usually be expected to grow faster than other international funds, but also exhibit much more volatility.
e.g. South-East Asia, and many South American counties would be considered as "emerging markets", but, say, Africa probably would not since it hasn't yet gotten to that "take off" stage.
what are the chances of Word replacing LaTeX as the editor of choice in academia?
Zero.
Aside from anything else, people don't learn tools like this and give them up at the drop of a hat, but more to the point I'll believe it when I see it for Word to include all the knowledge embedded in LaTeX to make text and equation layout really pleasing.
Except that the Apple Lisa wasn't the first computer with a GUI, mouse, etc (back in the day referred to as WIMP - Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer) - that would be the Xerox Star, which is what the Lisa copied.
Incidently, I saw the Lisa demoed when it was launched, and it was a dog - slow as molasses.
Is it any more then a small display gimmick ?
Obviously it doesn't have the bandwidth to be high performance, but nowadays you even get "docking stations" (I use the scare quotes because I was horrified when I realized this) that use a single USB connection (i.e monitor, network, keboard, mouse - the whole shebang over a single USB connection).
If you've just doing business graphics I guess it's OK. Not really meant for viewing video or playing games, etc.
A typical book page has text on in in parallel lines which can be used to correct for curvature, straight-edge formatted into rectangles which can be used to correct for skew. Who needs another grid?
If a page doesn't have suitable text on it (e.g. a graphic), then just assume it's warped the same as the previous page (the one it's lying on top of).
RNA, being simpler, surely came before DNA, but before RNA there'd have been much simpler self-replicators:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6QYDdgP9eg
The precursors to life would have been nothing more than chemical chain reactions that consumed other chemicals in the environment. Separate a number of these reactions from each other (all consuming the same chemicals - i.e. competing - in the environment) and you've got the beginnings of evolution. Anything as complex as RNA may have taken millions of years, or more, to evolve from these simple beginnings.
Actually, if you RTFA, the Scientist who discovered this did it by trying all possible combinations - an effort that took him about 10 years. It doesn't seem in the least bit implausible, rather the opposite, that nature would have also tried all combinations given a few million rock pools and few million years of random change.
I don't know in what sense you consider bag-o-servos humanoid robots to be advanced - you do realise they're just radio controlled, not autonomous, right? Most people just buy them as kits and screw them together. IMO anything you design yourself, or anything with any autonomy is miles ahead.
Of course Japanese research robots - e.g. Asimo - are another story. But, ROBO-1 sumo competitions? Puhleeze....
Well, at least this reviewer understands what Alpaha is and presents it clearly, unlike the other 2 (or is it more?) stories Slashdot has run on it where the article writers (and most of Slashot readership!) seem to think it's a search engine.
Car analogy time...
It's more like comparing a ford pinto to a shoebox... you can put shoes in either one, but that's about the extent of it.
From what I've read Alpha simply isn't a search engine - it's an expert system that answers queries via it's built-in (Mathematica based) rules and built-in hand "curated" data. I'd guess Alpha may link to some live internet feeds for things like exchange rates, but don't expect it top have access to much (if any) data that hasn't been sucked into Wolfram HQ and hand-scrubbed and organized.
The reviewer (not that I read TFA - this is slashdot after all) seems to believe that just because you can enter "queeries" of some sort into both Google and Alpha that they must both be search engines... by this criteria a ford pinto is (an explosive) shoe box.
Yeah but twitter is specifically sound-bite media(140 char max tweets, so it's essentially context-free.
Mind you, the same can be said for sound-bite orientated TV news "coming up, american idol scandal, swine flu kills 100".
OTOH more in depth media like weekly magazines (Time, NewsWeek) and sunday newspapers give a more considered account.
Not only is this not a Google killer (it's not even a search engine, so how can it be?!), I very much doubt it'll be of any use/interest to anyone outside of the intellectual elite. Googling for "swine flue" is of widespread interest, but I suspect that Alpha-ing for computed relationships and statistics is not.
http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends
For anyone who has yet to read about Alpha, what it is is basically a large expert system written in Mathematica that computes the answers to queries covering a very large real-world knowledge domain. I havn't even read that it goes out to the web at all - it's basically based on a huge human collated/organized ("curated" in the Alpha parlance) data set of statistics and relationships. Apparently the results are presented in a very slick way including charts and graphics.
No doubt Alpha is a huge achievement in it's chosen domain of knowledge organization and computation, but I find it hard to imagine that a significant portion of the population will find it useful.
Wrong.
The primary cause of death during the 1918 "Spanish Flu" was "Ctyokine storms" - basically overactivity of the immune system in reaction to the virus if had never seen before. That's why it killed the young and healthy (i.e those with string immune systems) rather than the young and old who are nomally flu victims. I'm not aware of anything modern healthcare could do for them.
Everyone on the planet has been exposed to *some* type of flu virus, but not this one - it's a very unusual mix of pig, avian and human influenza DNA which your immune system has never seen before. All flus are different, which is why sometimes your annual flu shot protects you (when they guess right about the strains that are likely to be around that year), and sometimes doesn't (like last year, when they guessed wrong).
But that article won't clue them in much other that mentioning that he dropped out of Harvard to co-found Microsoft.
No mention there of things like Microsoft's first product MITS Altair BASIC (sold on punchtape for the iconic MITS Altair 8800), or how later Seattle Computer's QDOS was sneakily bought by Microsoft to be renamed as MS-DOS when IBM came knocking for an OS for it's new "IBM PC"...
Flash and YouTube are two different things as far as ARM is concerned.
The iPhone is ARM based and supports YouTube just fine, because YouTube videos are also accessible as H.264 streams meaning you just need a decoder, not Flash.
Adobe are reportedly working on a Flash port for ARM - there's no reason for it to be a big deal.
The easy response to someone with such a "signed thru a hole cut in another document" would be to show the court the photo recorded by the device of the document it appeared to be signing, where the signature would be identical to the one they were presenting... Two genuine signatures by the same person are never precisely identical.
In reality I doubt you could cut a hole in a document that would not be visible in a hi-res close-up photo.
If you search for LongPen videos on youtube you can see a demo of this at a trade show...
It's more than just a remote signature product - it's really meant for legal/financial use where there may possibly be disputes over what was signed, who was present. etc.
What the product does is transmit a photo of the document in the robo-pen device to the remote signing end where it appears in a display built into to the tablet device you sign on - it's as if you're singing the real document on the appropriate line/whereever. The system also takes and stores before/after photos of the signed document and saves audio/video of the remote signer (& robot end?) so that these can be brought up if there's any legal challenge... It should be noted that the anticipated legal challenges arn't because of this being a remote signature device, but rather that the whole photo/audio/video capture system is designed to address the challenges that already occur with traditional signed documents.
There are various comments in reply to this article about how this is nothing new, but from the video it seems that not only is it an entire singing/verification system, but also the signature reproduction quality is very high - it detects/reproduces 60 different pressure levels and samples at 2000/samples sec.
it sounds like the new support suggestion is aimed to match the MS support policy, not that they're looking to take advantage of anything in SP3
I think you must be right... Why don't they just go the whole hog and make FireFox Vista/netbook only?!
Seems an odd move unless they're getting some very major incentive from Microsoft, and even than rather a slap in the face to FireFox's OSS roots/fans.
I remember stories of Google buying up lots of dark fiber during the dot com crash... but I've never read exactly what they're doing with it. It would seem reasonable to assume they're using it for something though, such as pumping craploads of date thru it.
I know if I was Google I'd not be paying an ISP to connect my youtube farm to the internet - I'd be colocating youtube servers with massive storage in major ISPs, feeding them with my own fiber, and paying for the colo costs with bandwidth.
TFA author pulled a random number out of his backside and for bandwidth costs which make up 50% of the total costs. If that bandwidth number is way off, as it easily could be, then the rest of the conclusions are off too. GIGO.
I thought the windows service packs were more or less bug fixes and security updates - not new APIs or suchlike that make any difference to applications.
So... what does FireFox need from Win XP SP3 that isn't in SP2?
One motivation for putting an ARM in a netbook is to make a better product (overall coat-performance-battery life trade-off), not just a cheaper one, so why would a manufacturer not put a decent/large amount of RAM in one? Have you checked RAM prices recently - it's practically being given away.
As far as web compatibility, note that the iPhone is ARM based and has a decent browser (youtube compatible since youtube switched to H.264 video), and incidently Adobe is trying to get Flash working on the iPhone...
FYI Google's new JavaScript VM is here in the Google Chrome browser... The JVM is called V8 and does indeed compile to native code when it wants to (JIT), and runs rings around other JavaScript implementations (such as that in Firefox) in terms of speed. Considering how simple ARM machine code is (it's a totally orthogonal instruction set)it's hard to imagine porting the JIT compiler to ARM would be a big deal. As far as security, JIT makes no difference.