Do you happen to know if the Matrox Millenium I (PCI) is still accelerated?
Is there a list of cards whose PCI acceleration has been been dropped in 4.x? This is pretty relevant to me, since I am/was about to upgrade to Mandrake 8.0...
That may be true for batteries that require to be charged, but the future of batteries is fuel cells that generate electricity directly from alchohol, which is a pretty clean source. Cars in Brazil run on a gas/alchohol mix, with the alchohol coming from fermenting maize (corn). Fuel cells also promise power densities many times that of rechargable battery technologies.
Aside from the fact that your thermostat example is stolen from Chalmers, the real problem is that you both seem to be claiming to have said something deep, but then admitting it all hinges on the definition.
If we define life in such a way as to include thermostats then:
a) that's probably doesn't capture the essence of what we want to use the word for, and
b) it's then not very deep to say that thermostats are alive!
OTOH, if we define life in such a way as to exclude thermostats, then you are wrong.
Wouldn't the opposite of reductionist be emergent, rather than functional? Functionality is the goal rather than the means of achieving it.
If one is approaching something like this at the level of adaptive systems (I havn't read the book either, so this is just a premis), then surely that implies that you're putting together a bunch of lower level behaviors that you hope will provide the adaptability you're hoping for. The actual sum total behaviour is emergent, not designed in, even if you crafted the lower level building blocks to have certain synergies with each other.
A reductionist approach would seem to imply a reductionist hierarchy of modules resulting in well defined top level behavior. Perhaps it's a grey line, but if all the behaviors are programmed in rather than emergent, then that doesn't seem very "adaptive".
You're jumping to conclusions there.. have you actually read the book.
Just because the reviewer states that the book lays out the reductionist explanation for the emergence of life/intelligence, doesn't mean that the author believes that is the way to create it artificially.
In fact, given that adaptive systems are mentioned, it would appear that the author is very much aware of complexity/emergence. Let's face it, one doesn't craft AI bots out of molecules even if we believe that's the desired approach.. one builds them to be adaptive and exhibit certain behaviors - not very reductionist, eh?
I guess you were just shooting for an "insightful" karma troll?
I've got to say that having made quite a few visits to Canada, and the more I hear about it, the more it seems like a VERY cool country.
OTOH, the more I hear about Australia - a country I've always had a soft spot for - the more the regulators there sound like a bunch of Nazis, and the less interested I become in ever going there for more than a vacation.
The Canucks are all right, even if they're a bunch of hosers!
Actually New York is trying to do exactly that. There's some dispute about whether NYC will go first or whether they'll try to make it law for the whole state right away.
It turns out (the reason they're doing it) that cell phone users cause just as many accidents as drunks!
Actually walking and balancing is harder than face recognition (which is old technology now anyway).
If you want to see better walkers then hed over to the MIT web site and visit their "leg lab". This is where walking/hooping/etc robots originated. They even have one with one leg that hops up and down like on a pogo stick!
Seriously, all humor aside, I think you'd have a hard time getting enough contestants to justify it. The only thing I can think of would be getting a number of colleges to put together teams or something. However, a number of them already compete in similar but more serious events, such as the "International Aerial Robotics Competition"
Well I think you said it... you'd probably get plenty of entries, but maybe more from colleges and companies than individuals.. or perhaps not..I'd certainly never build an r/c bot (dull), but an autonomous one would be more fun!
As well as the aerial robotics thing (a bit too hard, really!), there's also the autonomous robotics soccer competition - teams of opposing robots. Not only do these things track each other and the ball in real time, but they can plan intercept paths to hit the moving ball, and even manage to plot intercept paths to pass the ball to each other! Rather than having a dumb selfish "each man for himself algorithm", the better ones at least use team play. I remember reading about one team who's genetic algorithm optimized team algorithm resulted in player roles and positioning very similar to those in real life soccer!!
There's a web site for the competitions - should be easy to find. AAAI magazine also covers the competitions.
The obvious and most practically useful approach to speed grading async. CPUs would be to bin them into lots that meet a set of minimum performance standards.
I somewhat diagree about where speed grades would be an issue. The obvious market for async. CPUs like Amulet is in handheld consumer devices where precise performance characteristics don't matter (hence the acceptability of conventional power management techniques), but power consuption does.
For embedded real-time applications, however, you need repeatability more than power savings or peak performance.
How come one Amulet post is modded "3 informative", and this one is modded "3 offtopic"???
I'd have thought that a post about a commercially available async. processor and the benefits of async. design are rather "on topic" for a story on an async CPU... particularly when the story claims this is something new when the idea itself is decades old, and Amulet itself (async. ARM, designed by Steve Furber, the original ARM architect, now a professor at Manchester University) has been around for quite a while.
As this post points out, not only is async. (i.e. data driven) design good for low power (you only use power when doing something!), but it also promises to raise performance by allowing each part of the chip to independently run as fast as it is able, and compute results as soon as it's operands are available rather than waiting for the next clock.
Replace Katz with a good columnist
on
C.S.I.
·
· Score: 1
How come everyone agrees Katz is useless troll, yet he's still here?
The argument that we can disable him is crap -/. could post kiddie porn or articles on knitting and we could disable those too.
If/. wants to have a regular tech columnist, then how about looking for a good one that the readers actually like?! Pretty radical idea eh? Even cooler, how bout having an essay competition and seeing if there arn't slashdotters who would fill the role nicely (you know that there must be).
The only reason Katz stays is obviously because his trolls generate hits for the advertizers, which is very sad. Surely a good columnist could generate interest as well?
Well, if Micro$haft would ever write a real OS rather than all these BIOS/DOS extensions they keep churning out, then it'd be no problem. I abandoned Microsoft at Win95, so for all I know some of the new Win variants may have already done this.
If there does exist a Windows with real hardware initialization and device drivers, then just put a boot loader like LILO or GRUB in the BIOS, and you're ready to multi-boot. It'd definitely work for multiple versions of Linux.
Yeah, there a a few non-volatile memory technologies on the horizon. I think FRAM (ferro-electric RAM) is a bit more advanced than MRAM - it's been shipping for a while.
I guess you could to the same no-boot thing on a regular PC by having the shutdown code just write the memory image to disk, and read it back in when you restart (i.e turn the power back on). Of course with todays common memory sizes of 128-256M and up, it'd still take a few seconds with a fast disk to read it back in.
Nowadays I just leave my PC on all the time anyway.
True, and this sort of thing is why Napster is likely never going to survive in any way that allows copyright protection to be circumvented.
The RIAA is now crowing "told you so" that Napster now "admits" they can block copyrighted files, after having always maintained that they could not. I wouldn't be surprised to see Napster come out and state the obvious truth that they havn't done a 180, but rather that that are not now blocking copyrighted works - only blocking certain file names.
If Napster is to survive they will have to come up with a scheme that while allowing fair (non-infringing) use actually *does* protect copyrighted works, and that can only mean either some kind of digital watermarking and verification or perhaps some kind of verifiable public key encryption.
IF there genuinely is an argument that Napster is good for CD sales by letting people preview stuff they'd never have otherwise tried, then the only way to get the attention of the record labels and make them go along will be to kick them where it hurts (in the wallet).
If RIAA succeeds in shutting down Napster, how about a pre-agreed comsumer boycott of CD purchases for a 1-month period after it happens? I would imagine that RIAA might suddenly see the light, and decide that previewing music isn't such a bad idea after all...
The real danger here is inspiring new, talented creators and inventors to continue to think like the people who originally developed the first PC's. These people were innovative, but the technology is aging... badly... and we need new innovation and new, original ideas to speed up and destabilize the computer industry.
The Computer Revolution was over in the mid 90's. We're more in sort of the Computer Middle Age now. Let's just hope we can avoid a 'Dark Age' by not making religous text out of historical fact.
I think the introduction of personal computers and the profileration of competition was far more radical and desatabilizing than anything that is currently going on!
Think about it - we have gone from a time when the notion of individuals (let alone non-engineers) having any use for computers was absurd, to a time when they are ubiquitous and outselling TV sets!
In the early days there was a mass of creative innovation and competition. Apple I/II vs the Comodore PET, Ratshack TRS-80, Acorn computer in the UK, etc, etc. Compare that to today where it would seem futile to try to compete with the Wintel x86/Windows monopoly or whereever they want to lead us.
In a way the open source movement, and the mindblowingly fast adoptation rate of Linux is a return back to the good old days - a return to the joyous celebration of computer technology without regard to viable business models, and an implicit faith that if you build stuff people find interesting the market will come. A field of dreams. This is what it was like in the early 80's when I worked for Acorn - computers were designed as much by engineers who defined what was possible or cool, as by marketing groups who decided how to one-up the competition with spec. sheet features.
Reminding people of the time of revolution isn't making it into a religious text, but rather reminding people that computers and personal electronics can be as much entertainment as business, and perhaps that's not so bad as a business model going forwards.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you happen to know if the Matrox Millenium I (PCI) is still accelerated?
...
:-)
Is there a list of cards whose PCI acceleration has been been dropped in 4.x? This is pretty relevant to me, since I am/was about to upgrade to Mandrake 8.0
BTW, cool user # !
Which means - if G450 is detected and the closed-source module "mga_hal" is not found, don't try to use the "mga" driver - it won't work.
;-)
This certainly qualifies as an improvement, especially if the error message if clear enough and mentions where to get "mga_hal".
But should I really enjoy it?
Well, let me put it this way:
Do you enjoy women even though you don't have clue what the operating software looks like?
Closed source - it's nature's way!
Guess you didn't see the GeForce 3 demos?
75 GFLOPS of shadow producing goodness.
That may be true for batteries that require to be charged, but the future of batteries is fuel cells that generate electricity directly from alchohol, which is a pretty clean source. Cars in Brazil run on a gas/alchohol mix, with the alchohol coming from fermenting maize (corn). Fuel cells also promise power densities many times that of rechargable battery technologies.
Aside from the fact that your thermostat example is stolen from Chalmers, the real problem is that you both seem to be claiming to have said something deep, but then admitting it all hinges on the definition.
If we define life in such a way as to include thermostats then:
a) that's probably doesn't capture the essence of what we want to use the word for, and
b) it's then not very deep to say that thermostats are alive!
OTOH, if we define life in such a way as to exclude thermostats, then you are wrong.
I'm going for the latter.
Wouldn't the opposite of reductionist be emergent, rather than functional? Functionality is the goal rather than the means of achieving it.
If one is approaching something like this at the level of adaptive systems (I havn't read the book either, so this is just a premis), then surely that implies that you're putting together a bunch of lower level behaviors that you hope will provide the adaptability you're hoping for. The actual sum total behaviour is emergent, not designed in, even if you crafted the lower level building blocks to have certain synergies with each other.
A reductionist approach would seem to imply a reductionist hierarchy of modules resulting in well defined top level behavior. Perhaps it's a grey line, but if all the behaviors are programmed in rather than emergent, then that doesn't seem very "adaptive".
You're jumping to conclusions there.. have you actually read the book.
Just because the reviewer states that the book lays out the reductionist explanation for the emergence of life/intelligence, doesn't mean that the author believes that is the way to create it artificially.
In fact, given that adaptive systems are mentioned, it would appear that the author is very much aware of complexity/emergence. Let's face it, one doesn't craft AI bots out of molecules even if we believe that's the desired approach.. one builds them to be adaptive and exhibit certain behaviors - not very reductionist, eh?
I guess you were just shooting for an "insightful" karma troll?
All your ideas are belong to David Chalmers!
It appears SOUP is just going to be a GNOME interface to the .NET SOAP (XML based remote object invocation) interfaces.
.NET SOAP interfaces.
There's no reason KDE can't also use the
I've got to say that having made quite a few visits to Canada, and the more I hear about it, the more it seems like a VERY cool country.
OTOH, the more I hear about Australia - a country I've always had a soft spot for - the more the regulators there sound like a bunch of Nazis, and the less interested I become in ever going there for more than a vacation.
The Canucks are all right, even if they're a bunch of hosers!
...when we had to switch the price tags by hand.
We used to think that poor people would be at a disadvantage by having to buy dead tree porn.
Now it turns out they not only are buying bigscreen TV's, but PCs too, so they can enjoy e-porn.
Another killer article, Katz.
***
Go ahead and mod me down. If you don't like my opinion or sarcasm that makes me a troll or flamebait, right?
Actually New York is trying to do exactly that. There's some dispute about whether NYC will go first or whether they'll try to make it law for the whole state right away.
It turns out (the reason they're doing it) that cell phone users cause just as many accidents as drunks!
It does sound more interesting.
Do they show the British version on American TV?
They had Adam Corrola (and his man show sidekick) as guests on Battlebots, and they were pretty funny, but I agree the hosts suck.
Actually walking and balancing is harder than face recognition (which is old technology now anyway).
If you want to see better walkers then hed over to the MIT web site and visit their "leg lab". This is where walking/hooping/etc robots originated. They even have one with one leg that hops up and down like on a pogo stick!
Seriously, all humor aside, I think you'd have a hard time getting enough contestants to justify it. The only thing I can think of would be getting a number of colleges to put together teams or something. However, a number of them already compete in similar but more serious events, such as the "International Aerial Robotics Competition"
Well I think you said it... you'd probably get plenty of entries, but maybe more from colleges and companies than individuals.. or perhaps not..I'd certainly never build an r/c bot (dull), but an autonomous one would be more fun!
As well as the aerial robotics thing (a bit too hard, really!), there's also the autonomous robotics soccer competition - teams of opposing robots. Not only do these things track each other and the ball in real time, but they can plan intercept paths to hit the moving ball, and even manage to plot intercept paths to pass the ball to each other! Rather than having a dumb selfish "each man for himself algorithm", the better ones at least use team play. I remember reading about one team who's genetic algorithm optimized team algorithm resulted in player roles and positioning very similar to those in real life soccer!!
There's a web site for the competitions - should be easy to find. AAAI magazine also covers the competitions.
How's the British version different?
Huh? You've never taped a CD to listen to it in the car?
If this CD copying prevention stuff works, I guess it'll be a major blow for car CD manifacturers, and a return to tape.
The obvious and most practically useful approach to speed grading async. CPUs would be to bin them into lots that meet a set of minimum performance standards.
I somewhat diagree about where speed grades would be an issue. The obvious market for async. CPUs like Amulet is in handheld consumer devices where precise performance characteristics don't matter (hence the acceptability of conventional power management techniques), but power consuption does.
For embedded real-time applications, however, you need repeatability more than power savings or peak performance.
How come one Amulet post is modded "3 informative", and this one is modded "3 offtopic"???
I'd have thought that a post about a commercially available async. processor and the benefits of async. design are rather "on topic" for a story on an async CPU... particularly when the story claims this is something new when the idea itself is decades old, and Amulet itself (async. ARM, designed by Steve Furber, the original ARM architect, now a professor at Manchester University) has been around for quite a while.
As this post points out, not only is async. (i.e. data driven) design good for low power (you only use power when doing something!), but it also promises to raise performance by allowing each part of the chip to independently run as fast as it is able, and compute results as soon as it's operands are available rather than waiting for the next clock.
How come everyone agrees Katz is useless troll, yet he's still here?
/. could post kiddie porn or articles on knitting and we could disable those too.
/. wants to have a regular tech columnist, then how about looking for a good one that the readers actually like?! Pretty radical idea eh? Even cooler, how bout having an essay competition and seeing if there arn't slashdotters who would fill the role nicely (you know that there must be).
The argument that we can disable him is crap -
If
The only reason Katz stays is obviously because his trolls generate hits for the advertizers, which is very sad. Surely a good columnist could generate interest as well?
Can Katz now.
Well, if Micro$haft would ever write a real OS rather than all these BIOS/DOS extensions they keep churning out, then it'd be no problem. I abandoned Microsoft at Win95, so for all I know some of the new Win variants may have already done this.
If there does exist a Windows with real hardware initialization and device drivers, then just put a boot loader like LILO or GRUB in the BIOS, and you're ready to multi-boot. It'd definitely work for multiple versions of Linux.
Yeah, there a a few non-volatile memory technologies on the horizon. I think FRAM (ferro-electric RAM) is a bit more advanced than MRAM - it's been shipping for a while.
I guess you could to the same no-boot thing on a regular PC by having the shutdown code just write the memory image to disk, and read it back in when you restart (i.e turn the power back on). Of course with todays common memory sizes of 128-256M and up, it'd still take a few seconds with a fast disk to read it back in.
Nowadays I just leave my PC on all the time anyway.
True, and this sort of thing is why Napster is likely never going to survive in any way that allows copyright protection to be circumvented.
The RIAA is now crowing "told you so" that Napster now "admits" they can block copyrighted files, after having always maintained that they could not. I wouldn't be surprised to see Napster come out and state the obvious truth that they havn't done a 180, but rather that that are not now blocking copyrighted works - only blocking certain file names.
If Napster is to survive they will have to come up with a scheme that while allowing fair (non-infringing) use actually *does* protect copyrighted works, and that can only mean either some kind of digital watermarking and verification or perhaps some kind of verifiable public key encryption.
IF there genuinely is an argument that Napster is good for CD sales by letting people preview stuff they'd never have otherwise tried, then the only way to get the attention of the record labels and make them go along will be to kick them where it hurts (in the wallet).
If RIAA succeeds in shutting down Napster, how about a pre-agreed comsumer boycott of CD purchases for a 1-month period after it happens? I would imagine that RIAA might suddenly see the light, and decide that previewing music isn't such a bad idea after all...
The real danger here is inspiring new, talented creators and inventors to continue to think like the people who originally developed the first PC's. These people were innovative, but the technology is aging... badly... and we need new innovation and new, original ideas to speed up and destabilize the computer industry.
The Computer Revolution was over in the mid 90's. We're more in sort of the Computer Middle Age now. Let's just hope we can avoid a 'Dark Age' by not making religous text out of historical fact.
I think the introduction of personal computers and the profileration of competition was far more radical and desatabilizing than anything that is currently going on!
Think about it - we have gone from a time when the notion of individuals (let alone non-engineers) having any use for computers was absurd, to a time when they are ubiquitous and outselling TV sets!
In the early days there was a mass of creative innovation and competition. Apple I/II vs the Comodore PET, Ratshack TRS-80, Acorn computer in the UK, etc, etc. Compare that to today where it would seem futile to try to compete with the Wintel x86/Windows monopoly or whereever they want to lead us.
In a way the open source movement, and the mindblowingly fast adoptation rate of Linux is a return back to the good old days - a return to the joyous celebration of computer technology without regard to viable business models, and an implicit faith that if you build stuff people find interesting the market will come. A field of dreams. This is what it was like in the early 80's when I worked for Acorn - computers were designed as much by engineers who defined what was possible or cool, as by marketing groups who decided how to one-up the competition with spec. sheet features.
Reminding people of the time of revolution isn't making it into a religious text, but rather reminding people that computers and personal electronics can be as much entertainment as business, and perhaps that's not so bad as a business model going forwards.