What parts of the STL you find to be actually useful? I've written my own list (with iterstor) and hashtable template classes, and find that they give me 95% of the data structure support I need.
STL is a nice design with it's orthogonal algorithms and data structures, but each time I've considered using it, I find myself wondering what functionality or ease of coding I'd actaully get out of it!
Itanium may run IA-32 applications, but it does so slower than IA-32 processors such as Pentium or Athlon, since that's not it's native instruction set. Sure, the translation is done in Silicon, but nonetheless it's still there, and the effect on performance is apparent.
AMD's Sledgehammer will run IA-32 applications FASTER than any current IA-32 processors, and therefore seems to be a true upgrade. I'd regard Itanium as a downgrade unless the OS and applications I wanted to run had all been recompiled/rewritten to run native.
It's Itanium (aka Merced) that's predictably inching closer to cancellation, not McKinley which has only just taped out. Intel's IA-64 architecture was a joint Intel/HP effort, but the Merced/Itanium implementation was an Intel only design. McKinley is a complete redesign by HP, and AFAIK is expected to meet it's design goals.
I agree that AMD's Hammer looks better positioned though (mostly due to being IA-32 compatible vs IA-64,s software emulation).
I'm curious how much they're charging for it? I'm too far away for ADSL, and the last time I shopped around IDSL was $79.95/mo vs $39.95 for ADSL. A fraction of the bandwidth for twice the cost!:-(
I'm just over 17,500 feet, so am *JUST* over the limit, and my local phone company (SNET - Connecticut) won't give me DSL... I assumed everyone had the same limit (which, BTW is more about limiting installation costs by keeping things well within limits, than hitting the limit of the technology).
Luckily I've got a T-1 connection and a CD-ROM burner at work!
Re:It's not open source if it involves MPEG patent
on
DivX ;-) Deux Update
·
· Score: 3
That all applies equally well for MPEG-2, but that hasn't stopped that "open source" libraries and players such as libmpeg3 and xmovie.
It seems that the MPEG video patents are currently (in paractice) being treated as "pay for commercial use, free for individual use".
I don't really understand the point of an "open source" MPEG-4 implementation, since there used to be a freely available implementation from the MPEG-4 industry forum, also at first glance that appears to have been removed. Althought the imlpementation was free of any licencing, you'd still have to liceence the patents to be able to *use* it, as would be the case for any other implementation (since the patents are believed to be broad enough to cover ANY implementation).
If you take "embedded" to mean integrated into some device, then Linux makes sense for some uses, but embedded often means real-time for machine/instrument control, and Linux is no way a real-time OS nor likely ever to be - it'll just evolve to behave more nicely and "good enough most of the time" for real-time usage. I'll be very surprised if it ever evolves to be fully preemptable with guaranteed maximum task switch latencies. That is QNX's strength - an awesome hard real-time message based microkernel.
What would be awesome if Linux the OS could relace Linux the kernel with QNX, then you'd have the best of both worlds.
RedHat 5.2 was supposedly "kernel 2.2 ready", and still needed a horrendous update procdeure to get there... Although, to be fair, 2.2 was a nasty upgrade experience all around.
You seem to be confusing the unwitting sources of the DoS attack with the target. Tighter security can prevent servers from getting cracked and used to initite DoS attacks, but security won't help the target. This article is about how potential targets of DoS attacks can prevent one form of attack.
We're only conscious of some things because evolution has found those things to be useful - basically the higher level sensory stuff that pertains to the external world - stuff we need to be able to think about in order to be successful. Obviously a machine would have no such limitation, and we could architect it to be conscious of everything - incl. the low level stuff that is subconscious to us.. it would be interesting to talk to such a machine to have it describe the experience! (which reminds me of an AI researcher's goal I once read - "to build a machine that is proud of me!").
As for "over-brains", certainly intelligence can emerge on many different levels, and I guess consciousness could too, although I'm not sure to what degree it would make sense to use the same word to describe something *so* alien to our experience. It's hard to know at what level one might look for such a thing anyway...
Intesting ideas.
BTW, I've not read Asimov - I'm not really into sci-fi other than at the movies. I'm actually trying to build a brain myself..:-)
The nature of reality/the world and the nature of consciousness are two seperate things (unless you ascribe to one of the aforementioned religious mind memes - of the eastern flavor;-)).
Part of the trouble with defining consciousness is that (in English at least), the word is heavily overloaded, which can make for very circular and pointless conversations unless every one agrees what they are talking about.
What I am talking about "reflective self awareness" - i.e. that fact that we not only exist, but that we are self aware of that fact.
Incidently my belief in consciousnes (as defined above) being an inward lookign sense - i.e. an architectural feature - is supported by certain types of brain damage where you think you are blind - i.e. have no conscious experience of seeing - yet *can* still see as proved by scoring well above random when asked to "guess" what's on flash cards!
What he was talking about was how he, in 1990, before 99% of Slashdot readers even knew about the Internet [...]
I guess I'm in the other 1% then... I was using the net (when it was still called the Arpanet) back in '82 using a 2400bps acoustic coupler. None of this graphical WWW shit back then!
You don't need to be too bright too figure out what consciusness is - just objective. The trouble [for some people] is that the explanation treats the brain as a machine, and therefore:
a) [in some peopls's view] devalues humans
b) reduces the role of religion to a mind meme panacea for the masses
c) allows that animals are also conscious
d) allows that machines could be made conscious
There's also the problem that the subjective experience of consciousness has a unique "quale" that seems not to be explained by any mechanistic explanation. However, the same thing could be said about the subjective experience of any sensory experience, just that consciousness is much more of a loaded issue. An explanation is always going to *seem *to leave something out because that's the nature of explanations - they reduce something mysterious to a colder set of facts.
I fully expect that a mechanistic explanation of consciousness will never be universally (or perhaps even widely accepted). Robots will be built that *will* be conscious, but many people will not accept that they are (how do I even know that *you* are, other than the reasonable assumption that since we're both human that you also have this "consciousness" thing I have myself?).
As for implementing consciousness, the problem is implementing the *rest* of an artificial mind that would support it. If you can build an artificial brain/mind that has most important human-level capabilities other than consciousness, then it would be easy to add the missing piece of the architecture.
Oh, what is consciousness: It's an inward looking "sensory" input. Just as our visual sense is based on the optic nerve carrying signals from external sensors into our brain (wah, but why does green look green?!;-), conscousness is based on connections that give access to *some* areas of our brain to others.
Some guy already hacked his Tivo to connect via the satellite box serial port instead of the modem, which he then fed into a linux box and out onto the net to the tivo service site.
Tivo have already stated that an ethernet port will be added in a future version.
I guess the Sun kit is like Napster or DeCSS - it doesn't actually break any copyright or licence itself - it just enables the user to to it (i.e. to create a binary only derivation of a GPL'd work).
No!.AVI *IS* a very specific Microsoft standard file format, not a generic reference to Audio Video files..MOV are Quicktime file format, and.MPG are MPEG 1/2 file format. These are all very specific and different.
An AVI file identifies the video CODEC (compression format) by referring to it's standard FourCC (four character code) identifier (e.g. "CVID" for Cinepac, "MJPG" for motion JPEG, or "DIV3"/"DIV4" for the fast/slow motion DivX MPEG4 CODECs). Windows associates the FourCC to an installed CODEC.dll via entries in the registry put there when you install a new CODEC.
DivX files are.avi because that's exactly what they are - AVI format files using the DivX CODEC ("DIV3"/"DIV4" FourCC).
You're confusing the compression (CODEC) format and the file format. Quicktime is a file format that contains media streams compressed with the CODEC of your choice (e.g. Sorenson, DivX, Cinepac). MPEG-2 is a file format AND a CODEC, although one could choose to store MPEG-2 compressed video in an AVI or Quicktime file rather than an MPEG-2 file (although I don't think anyone actually does this). MPEG-4 is also both a file format and a CODEC, but the file format is - AFAIK - basically Quicktime. People also store MPEG-4 compressed video in AVI files using the DivX MPEG-4 CODEC as disussed in Tom's article. The DivX CODEC is just a hacked version of Microsoft's MPEG-4 CODEC that allows use in AVIs as well as Microsoft's Active Streaming Format (ASF) which is what they wanted to restrict it to. DivX AVI's typically encode the audio to MPEG 1 audio layer III (MP3) format.
Our emobodied perception and experience of the world, coupled with our sensory and brain architecture, create our lowest level mental models - the stuff of our thoughts. The chunking provided by higher level language based concepts adds to our set of models. Models do not so much control our thoughts as being the basis of our thoughts. Lanuage per-se (as opposed to the concepts/models we aquire via language) is just the means of expression of our thoughts.
I havn't been following the kernel very closely recently, but Mandrake 7.2 beta is just out and includes the 2.4.0-test? kernel, so it's got to be reasonably stable!
Slashdot Mirror
What parts of the STL you find to be actually useful? I've written my own list (with iterstor) and hashtable template classes, and find that they give me 95% of the data structure support I need.
STL is a nice design with it's orthogonal algorithms and data structures, but each time I've considered using it, I find myself wondering what functionality or ease of coding I'd actaully get out of it!
Itanium may run IA-32 applications, but it does so slower than IA-32 processors such as Pentium or Athlon, since that's not it's native instruction set. Sure, the translation is done in Silicon, but nonetheless it's still there, and the effect on performance is apparent.
AMD's Sledgehammer will run IA-32 applications FASTER than any current IA-32 processors, and therefore seems to be a true upgrade. I'd regard Itanium as a downgrade unless the OS and applications I wanted to run had all been recompiled/rewritten to run native.
It's Itanium (aka Merced) that's predictably inching closer to cancellation, not McKinley which has only just taped out. Intel's IA-64 architecture was a joint Intel/HP effort, but the Merced/Itanium implementation was an Intel only design. McKinley is a complete redesign by HP, and AFAIK is expected to meet it's design goals.
I agree that AMD's Hammer looks better positioned though (mostly due to being IA-32 compatible vs IA-64,s software emulation).
Don't Covad connect via your telco's CO anyway?
I'll give them a call... even 56K doesn't work for me, and 28.8 really isn't cutting it...
I'm curious how much they're charging for it? I'm too far away for ADSL, and the last time I shopped around IDSL was $79.95/mo vs $39.95 for ADSL. A fraction of the bandwidth for twice the cost! :-(
How far away (line distance) from the CO are you?
I'm just over 17,500 feet, so am *JUST* over the limit, and my local phone company (SNET - Connecticut) won't give me DSL... I assumed everyone had the same limit (which, BTW is more about limiting installation costs by keeping things well within limits, than hitting the limit of the technology).
Luckily I've got a T-1 connection and a CD-ROM burner at work!
That all applies equally well for MPEG-2, but that hasn't stopped that "open source" libraries and players such as libmpeg3 and xmovie.
4 .htm
It seems that the MPEG video patents are currently (in paractice) being treated as "pay for commercial use, free for individual use".
I don't really understand the point of an "open source" MPEG-4 implementation, since there used to be a freely available implementation from the MPEG-4 industry forum, also at first glance that appears to have been removed. Althought the imlpementation was free of any licencing, you'd still have to liceence the patents to be able to *use* it, as would be the case for any other implementation (since the patents are believed to be broad enough to cover ANY implementation).
http://www.cselt.it/mpeg/standards/mpeg-4/mpeg-
http://www.m4if.org/
If you take "embedded" to mean integrated into some device, then Linux makes sense for some uses, but embedded often means real-time for machine/instrument control, and Linux is no way a real-time OS nor likely ever to be - it'll just evolve to behave more nicely and "good enough most of the time" for real-time usage. I'll be very surprised if it ever evolves to be fully preemptable with guaranteed maximum task switch latencies. That is QNX's strength - an awesome hard real-time message based microkernel.
What would be awesome if Linux the OS could relace Linux the kernel with QNX, then you'd have the best of both worlds.
I'll believe it when I see it...
RedHat 5.2 was supposedly "kernel 2.2 ready", and still needed a horrendous update procdeure to get there... Although, to be fair, 2.2 was a nasty upgrade experience all around.
It's called evolution.
:-)
Havn't you seen the annual Darwin awards?
You seem to be confusing the unwitting sources of the DoS attack with the target. Tighter security can prevent servers from getting cracked and used to initite DoS attacks, but security won't help the target. This article is about how potential targets of DoS attacks can prevent one form of attack.
Any idea if the GeForce 2 MX supports XvImages (hardware YUV->RGB conversion and scaling) under XFree4.x?
I assume that was a joke?
AMD will be at 1.2GHz THIS year, not Q3/2001!
We're only conscious of some things because evolution has found those things to be useful - basically the higher level sensory stuff that pertains to the external world - stuff we need to be able to think about in order to be successful. Obviously a machine would have no such limitation, and we could architect it to be conscious of everything - incl. the low level stuff that is subconscious to us.. it would be interesting to talk to such a machine to have it describe the experience! (which reminds me of an AI researcher's goal I once read - "to build a machine that is proud of me!").
:-)
As for "over-brains", certainly intelligence can emerge on many different levels, and I guess consciousness could too, although I'm not sure to what degree it would make sense to use the same word to describe something *so* alien to our experience. It's hard to know at what level one might look for such a thing anyway...
Intesting ideas.
BTW, I've not read Asimov - I'm not really into sci-fi other than at the movies. I'm actually trying to build a brain myself..
The nature of reality/the world and the nature of consciousness are two seperate things (unless you ascribe to one of the aforementioned religious mind memes - of the eastern flavor ;-)).
Part of the trouble with defining consciousness is that (in English at least), the word is heavily overloaded, which can make for very circular and pointless conversations unless every one agrees what they are talking about.
What I am talking about "reflective self awareness" - i.e. that fact that we not only exist, but that we are self aware of that fact.
Incidently my belief in consciousnes (as defined above) being an inward lookign sense - i.e. an architectural feature - is supported by certain types of brain damage where you think you are blind - i.e. have no conscious experience of seeing - yet *can* still see as proved by scoring well above random when asked to "guess" what's on flash cards!
Cool sig! :-)
What he was talking about was how he, in 1990, before 99% of Slashdot readers even knew about the Internet [...]
I guess I'm in the other 1% then... I was using the net (when it was still called the Arpanet) back in '82 using a 2400bps acoustic coupler. None of this graphical WWW shit back then!
You don't need to be too bright too figure out what consciusness is - just objective. The trouble [for some people] is that the explanation treats the brain as a machine, and therefore:
;-), conscousness is based on connections that give access to *some* areas of our brain to others.
a) [in some peopls's view] devalues humans
b) reduces the role of religion to a mind meme panacea for the masses
c) allows that animals are also conscious
d) allows that machines could be made conscious
There's also the problem that the subjective experience of consciousness has a unique "quale" that seems not to be explained by any mechanistic explanation. However, the same thing could be said about the subjective experience of any sensory experience, just that consciousness is much more of a loaded issue. An explanation is always going to *seem *to leave something out because that's the nature of explanations - they reduce something mysterious to a colder set of facts.
I fully expect that a mechanistic explanation of consciousness will never be universally (or perhaps even widely accepted). Robots will be built that *will* be conscious, but many people will not accept that they are (how do I even know that *you* are, other than the reasonable assumption that since we're both human that you also have this "consciousness" thing I have myself?).
As for implementing consciousness, the problem is implementing the *rest* of an artificial mind that would support it. If you can build an artificial brain/mind that has most important human-level capabilities other than consciousness, then it would be easy to add the missing piece of the architecture.
Oh, what is consciousness: It's an inward looking "sensory" input. Just as our visual sense is based on the optic nerve carrying signals from external sensors into our brain (wah, but why does green look green?!
Some guy already hacked his Tivo to connect via the satellite box serial port instead of the modem, which he then fed into a linux box and out onto the net to the tivo service site.
Tivo have already stated that an ethernet port will be added in a future version.
I guess the Sun kit is like Napster or DeCSS - it doesn't actually break any copyright or licence itself - it just enables the user to to it (i.e. to create a binary only derivation of a GPL'd work).
No! .AVI *IS* a very specific Microsoft standard file format, not a generic reference to Audio Video files. .MOV are Quicktime file format, and .MPG are MPEG 1/2 file format. These are all very specific and different.
.dll via entries in the registry put there when you install a new CODEC.
.avi because that's exactly what they are - AVI format files using the DivX CODEC ("DIV3"/"DIV4" FourCC).
An AVI file identifies the video CODEC (compression format) by referring to it's standard FourCC (four character code) identifier (e.g. "CVID" for Cinepac, "MJPG" for motion JPEG, or "DIV3"/"DIV4" for the fast/slow motion DivX MPEG4 CODECs). Windows associates the FourCC to an installed CODEC
DivX files are
You're confusing the compression (CODEC) format and the file format. Quicktime is a file format that contains media streams compressed with the CODEC of your choice (e.g. Sorenson, DivX, Cinepac). MPEG-2 is a file format AND a CODEC, although one could choose to store MPEG-2 compressed video in an AVI or Quicktime file rather than an MPEG-2 file (although I don't think anyone actually does this). MPEG-4 is also both a file format and a CODEC, but the file format is - AFAIK - basically Quicktime. People also store MPEG-4 compressed video in AVI files using the DivX MPEG-4 CODEC as disussed in Tom's article. The DivX CODEC is just a hacked version of Microsoft's MPEG-4 CODEC that allows use in AVIs as well as Microsoft's Active Streaming Format (ASF) which is what they wanted to restrict it to. DivX AVI's typically encode the audio to MPEG 1 audio layer III (MP3) format.
Interlaced video (VHS) is going to look better on an interlaced display - TV, than on a monitor.
Our emobodied perception and experience of the world, coupled with our sensory and brain architecture, create our lowest level mental models - the stuff of our thoughts. The chunking provided by higher level language based concepts adds to our set of models. Models do not so much control our thoughts as being the basis of our thoughts. Lanuage per-se (as opposed to the concepts/models we aquire via language) is just the means of expression of our thoughts.
I havn't been following the kernel very closely recently, but Mandrake 7.2 beta is just out and includes the 2.4.0-test? kernel, so it's got to be reasonably stable!