I can't claim to have tested either myself, but the BBC seems to be pushing Dirac pretty hard, and seems to think it's mature enough to be moving into hardwar (VHDL) implementations as well as software:
Leaving aside how crap the article is in terms of what it does cover, it didn't even include any Wavelet CODECs (Dirac, Snow, etc,...) which outperform the DCT based methods, both for video and for still images (JPEG 2000).
Say someone else understands life better than Venter and comes up with a more mininal gene - is this patent going to cover that? What if the discoverer (hard to call cutting back on nature an invention) of the more minimal gene then wants to use it as a base for experimentation and add other stuff back in - they may well find themselves infringing this patent. What this patent does is cut out a huge swathe of the genetic landscape and say "that's mine" - you can't experiment there.
One might also try to search for minimal form of life by an undirected evolutionary search - randomly cut out genes and see if the remainder is viable, etc, and again might find that you've stumbled into the broad territory that Venter is wanting to claim as his own. Just another example of how a promising types of research could be harmed if this patent was granted.
the first mass produced computer for the home was probably the Altair. The first with a video display was, I believe, the Apple ][
The Apple II was launched in 1977, but was preceded by the Apple I in 1976 and the much more sophisticated Processor Technology Sol-10/Sol-20 (8080 with S-100 expansion bus) which not only had a video display but also (unlike the Apple I) came in a nice case (with mahogany sides!) with a keyboard. A hulking "Helios" dual 8" floppy drive was also an option for the Sol-20.
But I'd guess there must have been a few Altair's (launched in 1975) conected to Don Lancaster's "TV typewriter" video terminal (Radio Electronics 1973)that would also compete for the earliest PC with a video display.
This is not true for digital images. They have the potential to last forever. As long as we have computers and networks we will always have the potential to view that image. That digital image has the potential to be as good 10 years, 100 years, even a billion years from now. Yeah, I know dvd degrade, harddrives go bad, and file formats will change
Unfortunately that's exactly the downfall of current digital storage methods... anything digital has the *potential* to last forever, but currently that potential will only be realized if the bits are copied from media to media every few 5-10 years. Once someone forgets to do this periodic copying they will be lost. Analog photos/negatives will last a lot longer and merely degrade with age - no 100% loss.
The only digital storage technology with comparable durability to analog photos is old punched card decks or maybe puched mylar tape (meant at the time to be better than paper, but don't know how well it aged).
Reminds me of the "Cuban missile crisis" - nasty aggressive USSR positioning missiles on out border....... until we learned that it was in *response* to the USA positioning missilies in turkey targetted at the USSR
Bush was probably holding his history book upside down when he was trying to read it.
AFAIK there's nothing to stop Tivo or anyone else continuing to use their current GPLv2 software (for which they have full source of course) after new stuff starts coming out under GPLv3. All it means is that Tivo doesn't get any *more* free software written for them unless they're willing/able to comply with GPLv3.
It seems the only problem Tivo may have is if they want to add new features/fixes to the Linux portions of their product that become GPLv3'd and are unable to do it themselves. Sounds like some GPLv2 authors may have found themselves a nice consulting gig.
Yes, but what's a normal lens on a full frame camera becomes a tele on a point and shoot with a tiny sensor. Also while the definition of normal is useful for photography, it's not useful for privacy since one could crop and enlarge the center portion of a photo taken with a normal lens and high resolution sensor (film or digital) and get a result the same as if it was taken with a tele lens which rightly is seen as in invasion of privacy. It's one thing if someone takes a street photo with your house in the background, but entirely another if they use a zoom lens (or high resolution sensor) to become a remote peeping tom!
Leaving aside the interesting issue of whether there actually are any ancient depictions of dinosaurs vs mythological beasts, the premis that any such depictions prove than man and dinosaurs coexisted is totally illogical (never mind proved wrong by the fossil record).
We know that chinese villagers, for example, built fences out of dinosaur bones that had been uncovered, and it's not be surprising if dino skull finds were the basis for dragons. Knowledge of long extinct dinosaurs isn't limited to modern man - only understanding of them is.
There's no reason to suppose that early man of *any* age failed to observe surface finds of dinosaur bones that had weathered out of rocks. No reason also to suppose that as hunters and butchers they were too stupid to know how a skeleton corresponded to a living animal.
An ancient picture of a dinosaur no more suggests that dinosaurs were alive then than a modern picture suggests that they are alive now.
To destroy Google, someone would have to beat them at what they make their money on - search and ads.M
That's not at all true. Google likely won't be destroyed by being out-Googled - they'll be destroyed by failing to anticipate a change in the computing landscape that someone else is positioned to take advantage of. That's the way evolution usually works. That's the way that Google is "beating" (displacing for relevancy and growth) Microsoft - not by competing head-on but by being better positioned for the times.
Also at some point Google's core businesses, successful as they are now, will naturally stop growing. Online advertising will peak, or advertizing will shift to another venue (handhelds? Internet TV?) that Google fail to take advantage of. No business lasts forever. Without growth the stock P/E will collapse and the stock drop with it, employees will begin to leave, the forward momentum will be lost. Some new hot tech darling will emerge, not necessarily in Google's core business areas at all.
How does the Classmate, which you stipulate is an inferior product due to price, act to the detriment of the OLPC program?
The goal of the OLPC program is to put as many computers as possible (one per child!) into the hands of children in poorer countries. Intel is actively marketing against the OLPC and trying to put it down, but a capitalist victory for Intel with their more expensive machine - to any degree - only acts against the goal of putting the maximum number of computers in the hand of kids.
If Intel convince coutnries to buy the Classmate, then not only are those countries halving the number of machines they get for their money vs the OLPC, but also the OLPC volumes and efficienies of volume decrease hurting it in that way also.
Also, as someone pointed out in the main thread, while Microsoft Windows and Office are relatively affordable for us in the US, in poorer countries the cost of one of these packages equates to a couple of MONTHS salary. Imagine yourself spending $6000 for an OS, and another $6000 for Office? These countries would be better served by a young generation that are familiar with Linux and free software rather than Wintels crack-dealer one-free-crack-rock Classmate program.
I'll take capitalism, thanks you. It's known to work.
Works for who? It works for you and me. Globalism which is the modern face of capitalism doesn't work so well for the poorer countries that the OLPC program is meant to help. When commodity goods like rice and corn get driven up to western prices due to globalism, the poorer countries where these originate from end up unable to afford these western prices themselves and starve. Wintel and $200 software packages is a great Western solution, but it's not so great for poor countries, and while it'd no doubt be a great capitalist triumph for Wintel to squash AMD/Linux, it'd not be a great thing for the people that the OLPC is designed to help.
They claim the OLPC can currently be built for ~$175, so $100 in volume seems doable. Anyway, the argument scales. The Classmate is higher specced and higher priced.. but does the extra cost (a major negative) being any positive that's actually important to the goals of the project (to help kids vs Wintel)?
I guess it depends on exactly what the goals of the OLPC are... my point was that if it's to let kids learn how to program then they don't need much at all. The OLPC spec is already 1000x better than what many of us learnt on.
If it's meant to be an information appliance then all they need is Linux + Mozilla, but there again my generation managed to get educated without computers. Heck, I even know how to use a slide rule and log tables.
So, what really is the point of this? Does having one Classmate vs two OLPCs for the same price really help?
It's be pretty sad if there wasn't *some* advantage to the Classmate given the cost, but since low price was the whole point of these machines, any advantage is rather moot.
I learnt to program back in 1978 on a 1MHz Z80 with 1K of RAM and no software other than a monitor program that let me type hex codes into memory. I turned out OK.
If the point of this is to get computers into as many kids hands as possible, where cost was previously a limit, then cost should in essence be the only consideration once any other minimal design goals have been met. Putting in more features (able to run expensive Microsoft bloatware!) for a higher cost would seem to be a detriment to the overall goal rather than a benefit.
Do you mean for a better opportunity / better salary, or just for a life experience?
From what I've seen UK salaries have caught up with the US a lot since I left the UK 20 years ago, but they are still less, UK house prices are higher than the US, and UK takes are higher.
Quality of living is higher in the UK, but that comes at a cost.
In fact he really was correct since Windows NT was originally known (during development) as NT OS/2 or simply OS/2 3.0, even though it was a different code base. It'd really be quibbling not to give Gates this one. Windows NT really has as much, or more, conceptually in common with OS/2 as it does with Windows 1.x - 3.x.
Well, Poland actually. A few years ago I was in Poland with my wife on way to visit her family in Belarus for the first time. Her mother and cousin had come to meet us in Warswaw and we were all taking the train to Belarus... one of the old fashioned trains with individual compartments for 6 or so people.
The light in the compartment was rather bright, so I decide to shut it off, but no visible switch had any effect, so I try the only one left, the pull-down chain by the ceiling (I guess I was tired), and immediately the train engines cut and it starts coasting to a halt. Being tired but not stupid I immediately sit down and try to look innocent (and not snicker too much), which is helped by the fact that I'm travelling with three females vs a bunch of hooligans. This being eastern Europe, we are very soon visited by three armed military guys who are going compartment to compartment looking for the culprit, but luckily we looked inoccent enough and they moved on.:-)
It was pretty cool the way the train engines cut immediately when I pulled the emergency cord! No doubt made a great first impression on my wife's mother too.
I'm no geneticist, but couldn't they use this to induce a mutation in the DNA of ape embryos and thus breed something akin to what the 'human' mutation would have looked like?
They already tried it, but the mutated ape wasn't intelligent.
You can read up on the experiment br googling for "dubya".
What to do with dead bodies... Feed them back into the organic system, feed them into the power plant, throw them out the airlock. What else is there to do? Keep them in storage until the ship gets back to Earth?
There's another kind of recycling.... Soylent Green.
How do you cope with sexual desire among healthy young men and women during a mission years long?
Having put some considerable thought into this matter, I've come to the conclusion that strapping yourselves together with bungee cords would be the best way to cope.
If the internet is a bunch of tubes (carrying data), then I guess that'd make the PC that all the data pours into a bucket, right? Or maybe PC's are kitchen sinks that can both hold the water that might come rushing up the drain (yech), or source it from the tap?
It seems that in 2007 people CAN deal with the concept of "computer" rather than having to be told it's a bucket or sink. Most people are of course clueless about what's in a computer how it does what it does, but no moreso than they are about their TV or microwave oven.
So... I say call the internet a "network". People have them in the office, and can generally grok what they do - connect stuff up and transport data. So what if people are unaware of TCP/IP, SMTP, HTTP, routers, etc... they can still grasp the more abstract concept of network, and realize that it's not a tube anymore than a PC isn't a bucket.
Because thin clients (like a web browser) are easier to manage than hosting all the apps yourself and being responsible for updates, backups, etc. It's a trade off of convenience for control.
An incident like this certainly does highlight how reliant we're becoming on data hosts like Google not fucking up and losing or compromising our data (esp. gmail).
Slashdot Mirror
I can't claim to have tested either myself, but the BBC seems to be pushing Dirac pretty hard, and seems to think it's mature enough to be moving into hardwar (VHDL) implementations as well as software:
l
http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/projects/dirac/index.shtm
I'm not sure what you mean about not getting much of a benefit - surely better compression and not getting block artifacts is pretty major.
Leaving aside how crap the article is in terms of what it does cover, it didn't even include any Wavelet CODECs (Dirac, Snow, etc, ...) which outperform the DCT based methods, both for video and for still images (JPEG 2000).
Still seems overly broad to me.
Say someone else understands life better than Venter and comes up with a more mininal gene - is this patent going to cover that? What if the discoverer (hard to call cutting back on nature an invention) of the more minimal gene then wants to use it as a base for experimentation and add other stuff back in - they may well find themselves infringing this patent. What this patent does is cut out a huge swathe of the genetic landscape and say "that's mine" - you can't experiment there.
One might also try to search for minimal form of life by an undirected evolutionary search - randomly cut out genes and see if the remainder is viable, etc, and again might find that you've stumbled into the broad territory that Venter is wanting to claim as his own. Just another example of how a promising types of research could be harmed if this patent was granted.
the first mass produced computer for the home was probably the Altair. The first with a video display was, I believe, the Apple ][
T ypewriter.htm
The Apple II was launched in 1977, but was preceded by the Apple I in 1976 and the much more sophisticated Processor Technology Sol-10/Sol-20 (8080 with S-100 expansion bus) which not only had a video display but also (unlike the Apple I) came in a nice case (with mahogany sides!) with a keyboard. A hulking "Helios" dual 8" floppy drive was also an option for the Sol-20.
But I'd guess there must have been a few Altair's (launched in 1975) conected to Don Lancaster's "TV typewriter" video terminal (Radio Electronics 1973)that would also compete for the earliest PC with a video display.
http://www.swtpc.com/mholley/RadioElectronics/TV_
This is not true for digital images. They have the potential to last forever. As long as we have computers and networks we will always have the potential to view that image. That digital image has the potential to be as good 10 years, 100 years, even a billion years from now. Yeah, I know dvd degrade, harddrives go bad, and file formats will change
Unfortunately that's exactly the downfall of current digital storage methods... anything digital has the *potential* to last forever, but currently that potential will only be realized if the bits are copied from media to media every few 5-10 years. Once someone forgets to do this periodic copying they will be lost. Analog photos/negatives will last a lot longer and merely degrade with age - no 100% loss.
The only digital storage technology with comparable durability to analog photos is old punched card decks or maybe puched mylar tape (meant at the time to be better than paper, but don't know how well it aged).
Great title .. "Putin Threatens US" ..
... until we learned that it was in *response* to the USA positioning missilies in turkey targetted at the USSR
who is threatening who ???
Reminds me of the "Cuban missile crisis" - nasty aggressive USSR positioning missiles on out border....
Bush was probably holding his history book upside down when he was trying to read it.
AFAIK there's nothing to stop Tivo or anyone else continuing to use their current GPLv2 software (for which they have full source of course) after new stuff starts coming out under GPLv3. All it means is that Tivo doesn't get any *more* free software written for them unless they're willing/able to comply with GPLv3.
It seems the only problem Tivo may have is if they want to add new features/fixes to the Linux portions of their product that become GPLv3'd and are unable to do it themselves. Sounds like some GPLv2 authors may have found themselves a nice consulting gig.
Yes, but what's a normal lens on a full frame camera becomes a tele on a point and shoot with a tiny sensor. Also while the definition of normal is useful for photography, it's not useful for privacy since one could crop and enlarge the center portion of a photo taken with a normal lens and high resolution sensor (film or digital) and get a result the same as if it was taken with a tele lens which rightly is seen as in invasion of privacy. It's one thing if someone takes a street photo with your house in the background, but entirely another if they use a zoom lens (or high resolution sensor) to become a remote peeping tom!
Leaving aside the interesting issue of whether there actually are any ancient depictions of dinosaurs vs mythological beasts, the premis that any such depictions prove than man and dinosaurs coexisted is totally illogical (never mind proved wrong by the fossil record).
We know that chinese villagers, for example, built fences out of dinosaur bones that had been uncovered, and it's not be surprising if dino skull finds were the basis for dragons. Knowledge of long extinct dinosaurs isn't limited to modern man - only understanding of them is.
There's no reason to suppose that early man of *any* age failed to observe surface finds of dinosaur bones that had weathered out of rocks. No reason also to suppose that as hunters and butchers they were too stupid to know how a skeleton corresponded to a living animal.
An ancient picture of a dinosaur no more suggests that dinosaurs were alive then than a modern picture suggests that they are alive now.
Charles Darwin agreed with Lamarck
No he didn't. Darwin (correctly) believed that change came about though variation and natural selection.
Darwin believed that animials behaviour some how directly influenced genetic changes
No he ddn't. You are thinking of Lamark.
We'll all be toast anyway when our Sun goes supernova. Game o-vah.
To destroy Google, someone would have to beat them at what they make their money on - search and ads.M
That's not at all true. Google likely won't be destroyed by being out-Googled - they'll be destroyed by failing to anticipate a change in the computing landscape that someone else is positioned to take advantage of. That's the way evolution usually works. That's the way that Google is "beating" (displacing for relevancy and growth) Microsoft - not by competing head-on but by being better positioned for the times.
Also at some point Google's core businesses, successful as they are now, will naturally stop growing. Online advertising will peak, or advertizing will shift to another venue (handhelds? Internet TV?) that Google fail to take advantage of. No business lasts forever. Without growth the stock P/E will collapse and the stock drop with it, employees will begin to leave, the forward momentum will be lost. Some new hot tech darling will emerge, not necessarily in Google's core business areas at all.
How does the Classmate, which you stipulate is an inferior product due to price, act to the detriment of the OLPC program?
The goal of the OLPC program is to put as many computers as possible (one per child!) into the hands of children in poorer countries. Intel is actively marketing against the OLPC and trying to put it down, but a capitalist victory for Intel with their more expensive machine - to any degree - only acts against the goal of putting the maximum number of computers in the hand of kids.
If Intel convince coutnries to buy the Classmate, then not only are those countries halving the number of machines they get for their money vs the OLPC, but also the OLPC volumes and efficienies of volume decrease hurting it in that way also.
Also, as someone pointed out in the main thread, while Microsoft Windows and Office are relatively affordable for us in the US, in poorer countries the cost of one of these packages equates to a couple of MONTHS salary. Imagine yourself spending $6000 for an OS, and another $6000 for Office? These countries would be better served by a young generation that are familiar with Linux and free software rather than Wintels crack-dealer one-free-crack-rock Classmate program.
I'll take capitalism, thanks you. It's known to work.
Works for who? It works for you and me. Globalism which is the modern face of capitalism doesn't work so well for the poorer countries that the OLPC program is meant to help. When commodity goods like rice and corn get driven up to western prices due to globalism, the poorer countries where these originate from end up unable to afford these western prices themselves and starve. Wintel and $200 software packages is a great Western solution, but it's not so great for poor countries, and while it'd no doubt be a great capitalist triumph for Wintel to squash AMD/Linux, it'd not be a great thing for the people that the OLPC is designed to help.
They claim the OLPC can currently be built for ~$175, so $100 in volume seems doable. Anyway, the argument scales. The Classmate is higher specced and higher priced.. but does the extra cost (a major negative) being any positive that's actually important to the goals of the project (to help kids vs Wintel)?
I guess it depends on exactly what the goals of the OLPC are... my point was that if it's to let kids learn how to program then they don't need much at all. The OLPC spec is already 1000x better than what many of us learnt on.
If it's meant to be an information appliance then all they need is Linux + Mozilla, but there again my generation managed to get educated without computers. Heck, I even know how to use a slide rule and log tables.
So, what really is the point of this? Does having one Classmate vs two OLPCs for the same price really help?
It's be pretty sad if there wasn't *some* advantage to the Classmate given the cost, but since low price was the whole point of these machines, any advantage is rather moot.
I learnt to program back in 1978 on a 1MHz Z80 with 1K of RAM and no software other than a monitor program that let me type hex codes into memory. I turned out OK.
If the point of this is to get computers into as many kids hands as possible, where cost was previously a limit, then cost should in essence be the only consideration once any other minimal design goals have been met. Putting in more features (able to run expensive Microsoft bloatware!) for a higher cost would seem to be a detriment to the overall goal rather than a benefit.
You moved from the US to the UK for work?
Do you mean for a better opportunity / better salary, or just for a life experience?
From what I've seen UK salaries have caught up with the US a lot since I left the UK 20 years ago, but they are still less, UK house prices are higher than the US, and UK takes are higher.
Quality of living is higher in the UK, but that comes at a cost.
Just curious as to your situation.
In fact he really was correct since Windows NT was originally known (during development) as NT OS/2 or simply OS/2 3.0, even though it was a different code base. It'd really be quibbling not to give Gates this one. Windows NT really has as much, or more, conceptually in common with OS/2 as it does with Windows 1.x - 3.x.
Well, Poland actually. A few years ago I was in Poland with my wife on way to visit her family in Belarus for the first time. Her mother and cousin had come to meet us in Warswaw and we were all taking the train to Belarus... one of the old fashioned trains with individual compartments for 6 or so people.
:-)
The light in the compartment was rather bright, so I decide to shut it off, but no visible switch had any effect, so I try the only one left, the pull-down chain by the ceiling (I guess I was tired), and immediately the train engines cut and it starts coasting to a halt. Being tired but not stupid I immediately sit down and try to look innocent (and not snicker too much), which is helped by the fact that I'm travelling with three females vs a bunch of hooligans. This being eastern Europe, we are very soon visited by three armed military guys who are going compartment to compartment looking for the culprit, but luckily we looked inoccent enough and they moved on.
It was pretty cool the way the train engines cut immediately when I pulled the emergency cord! No doubt made a great first impression on my wife's mother too.
I'm no geneticist, but couldn't they use this to induce a mutation in the DNA of ape embryos and thus breed something akin to what the 'human' mutation would have looked like?
They already tried it, but the mutated ape wasn't intelligent.
You can read up on the experiment br googling for "dubya".
Feed them back into the organic system, feed them into the power plant, throw them out the airlock. What else is there to do? Keep them in storage until the ship gets back to Earth?
There's another kind of recycling.... Soylent Green.
How do you cope with sexual desire among healthy young men and women during a mission years long?
Having put some considerable thought into this matter, I've come to the conclusion that strapping yourselves together with bungee cords would be the best way to cope.
If the internet is a bunch of tubes (carrying data), then I guess that'd make the PC that all the data pours into a bucket, right? Or maybe PC's are kitchen sinks that can both hold the water that might come rushing up the drain (yech), or source it from the tap?
It seems that in 2007 people CAN deal with the concept of "computer" rather than having to be told it's a bucket or sink. Most people are of course clueless about what's in a computer how it does what it does, but no moreso than they are about their TV or microwave oven.
So... I say call the internet a "network". People have them in the office, and can generally grok what they do - connect stuff up and transport data. So what if people are unaware of TCP/IP, SMTP, HTTP, routers, etc... they can still grasp the more abstract concept of network, and realize that it's not a tube anymore than a PC isn't a bucket.
Because thin clients (like a web browser) are easier to manage than hosting all the apps yourself and being responsible for updates, backups, etc. It's a trade off of convenience for control.
An incident like this certainly does highlight how reliant we're becoming on data hosts like Google not fucking up and losing or compromising our data (esp. gmail).