The best companies realize that it is better to make their products obsolete themselves, rather than waiting for their competitors to do it. There's a good example of this in the current issue of wired - Schwab aggressively moving into on-line trading despite the fact that is would cut into the more lucrative traditional market. Sure the stock price took a short term hit, but the resultant growth more than made up for it.
General purpose fractal graphics compression actually works very well - Iterated Systems' FIF format gives great compression and very high quality, along with the nice fractal-based benefits of providing resolution independence, natural scaling and variable resolution/compression tradeoff. As you say, fractal landscape compression (esp. for things like mountains, clouds, etc) is a very old idea. AFAIK if he's come up with a way of representing 3-D objects that would be novel - not to mention being necessary for anything other than backgrounds - but he doesn't seem to be....
As a Brit who moved to the States to steal your women and take your jobs, I think I should be allowed to gnaw on your sorry-assed bones in this excellent competition!:-(
Janes only knew enough to suspect that they had a crappy article, but not enough to write a better one... I wonder why they have such faith in themselves in being able to judge the/. contributions as any better? Most people here arn't going to have in depth knowledge pertaining to cyberterrorism, but most of us are going to be pretty opinionated, and well capable of spouting of reams of semi-informed good sounding hi-tech bullshit. I think Cringely was dead-on: there's no substitute for real independent research.
When things will get really interesting (probably not for at least another 100 years or so...) will be when we understand the brain enough to build robots with human-level perceptive and cognitive capabilities...
There may well come a point when artificial species are competing along side us in the evolutionary race.
FYI, the phoneme-to-word (or, more generically, feature-vector-to-word) translation is conventionally done with Hidden Markov Models (in a nutshell, creating probability driven state transition models). I'd expect the commercial dictation products probably have a somewhat ad-hoc cleanup stage to post-process the HMM output.
The long path wouldn't have worked if the rename() return value had been checked - lazy programming.
Of course the real problem here was the open() holes, which could have been avoided by the slightly more security conscious approach of validating the generated files names before actually doing the open (file overwrite!).
To me programming is really pattern matching - you translate the requirements into a high level abstraction, then morph/manipulate that abstraction until it fits the form (a meta-pattern) of an interconnected set of previously encountered/implemented forms. In other words, you find the solution rather than solve the problem. It's much easier that way!
It appears that the superscalar speed necessary for faster-than-target emulation comes from a VLIW design. A single VLIW instruction is generally going to correspond to more than one target (x86/whatever) instruction, hence the patent's subject matter of efficient cached memory store and exception determination - you don't want to commit the VLIW memory stores until you've determined that *all* of the corresponding target instructions would have suceeded.
As the patent points out, it applies equally to emulation on other (non-VLIW) superscalar architectures, but the emphasis does appear to be on VLIW.
The postage stamp picture of your wife might not do much for you, but she might like to see the full size picture of you if she's at home. Or maybe you have some of those virtual display goggles in your pocket (another $2,500 - but what the hell!) that you plug into your cellphone/PDA.
As far as pizza guys/bathrobes, etc, I see the video portion of a call being off by default. So you're at home watching TV, the phone rings and you pick it up on the cordless phone and retire back to the couch.. It's the gf/wife - or someone else you care to see - so you hit the video button, and the picture pops up on the TV via the set top box interface (Bluetooth wireless connection again, perhaps). You could switch it to speaker phone too, if you wanted.
BTW, 300K bps is actually pretty good for MPEG-4 or H.264. The older Picturetel video conferencing setups used 128K, and were OK, even using what was probably worse compression.
Katz makes the mistake of reading and responding to his own article on/., and gets caught up in a confusing technology induced downward spiral of Katzian techno-babble overload. Becoming paranoid, Katz fears that Big Brother is hiding in his toilet.
Part 2: Clotho
Afraid of technology taking over his life, Kats proposes an AI agent, Clotho, to take over his life. He hopes that Clotho will provide him with a low tech toilet.
Maybe Katz needs his intelligent agent, Clotho, to protect him from unwanted analysis of his fecal matter, but I think the rest of us have already found the solution. It's called choice.
I switched from watching TV news to getting it of the web precisely because I wanted control over what I read. I visit my bookmark sites becuase those are what interest me, not surfing into the depths of the web where big brothers intelligent toilets are to be found (unless they're on/., of course). Given the evaulation of your typical portal.com, it seems that most everyone else is also betting that we'll chose self-regulated order over cyberclysmic chaos. I wonder if Katz has registered clotho.com?
To me the article was just trying to marginalize geeks, since that apparently makes it easier for some non-geeks to "understand" us. To me most geeks are simply above average intelligence people who happen to excel in the hard sciences. Sure there may be a few who owe their intelligence to mental illness or "abnormality" of one kind or another, but I find it insulting to suggest that this is the common case. Given the current "taking back" of the term geek from being an insult to an insider term of peer recognition, it seems a shame that some factions of the media appear still to feel the need to analyze geeks in this disparaging kind of way. Sure there's a difference between lack of empathy (to see feeling in others) and lack of feeling (in oneself), but I'm not so sure that this distinction is so important to those who would appear to like to portray geeks as a potentially sociopathic minority. Maybe my vent was a little off focus, though. Personally I'm more inclined to believe that any typically geek social deficiencies are due to lack of social interaction/experience more than anything else.
There is some fascinating speculation going on these days that the well-known stereotype of the computer geek or nerd may actually be a description of mild autism, especially a form of autism known as Asperger's syndrome. Unlike classic autism, which often involves mental retardation and a lack of verbal skills, Asperger's syndrome is at the "high functional" end of the spectrum of autistic behavior, experts say. People with Asperger's syndrome have normal or above-average IQs and may even display savantism, or exceptional abilities in a specific skill. What they lack is human empathy, a deficiency sometimes called "mind-blindness, "which shows up as a distinct inability to read routine human nonverbal cues of attitude such as kindness, anger or love.
Good grief! I guess this explains Columbine, doesn't it - a bunch of those unfeeling geeks gone berserk. This sort of propaganda is usually reserved for when you want to dehumanise the enemy during a war.
.. to put text translation, rather than having to explicitly invoke Bablefish. Just configure English as your preferred language, and the transcoding proxy will automatically do the translation.
It's no coincidence that, differences among languages aside, all of them refer to emotional contact in primarily tactile terms.
I believe this is more a matter of embodied cognition and convergent evolution of languages than it is reflective of the (undisputed) importance of touch. IMHO all of our abstract thought is metaphorical, and the "chosen" metaphors come from the best match with our embodied experience. Emotion and touch just happen to have a lot in common.
Documents are about content. You want to bring a book or article with you, not the means of representing it. Paper's low cost, disposability, portability, foldability, durability etc all make it a pretty transparent way of representating content. PDA's and even the emerging e-paper do not have these attributes - the representation gets in the way of the abstraction ("document") that we are really interested in.
When a piece of e-paper with integrated storage, electronics and battery costs around 25c - cheap enough to be thrown away or left lying around, then it may start to replace paper. How about a copier that rather than spitting out a stack of paper instead spits out a single e-document, and in a fraction of the time! Please forward royalty payments to Spiny Norman, c/o/.:-)
Alvin Toffler, and even Ted Kaczynski appear to have more insight into the effect of technological progress than Katz. Do cars break down more than horses? Perhaps so, but guess what - there are trains, buses and friends with cars too. Technology such as telephones can invade our privacy, but answering machines put us back in control. Does the Internet contain an overwhelming amount of information? Sure - but the people also use it to connect and humanize their lives.
Technology may change the way we do things, and may create new problems as well as solve others, but it is not the one-way path into a fragile complex hell that Katz envisions. We may be becoming increasingly dependent on the net, but surely this is one of the more resilient pieces of technology ever created - almost organic. The net may deliver a dizzying quantity of information that could overwhelm a cyborg trying to suck it all in, but the consumers of technology are people who use it in ways they see fit.
Slashdot Mirror
The best companies realize that it is better to make their products obsolete themselves, rather than waiting for their competitors to do it. There's a good example of this in the current issue of wired - Schwab aggressively moving into on-line trading despite the fact that is would cut into the more lucrative traditional market. Sure the stock price took a short term hit, but the resultant growth more than made up for it.
> Didn't we kick you suckers out of the country a couple times?
;-)
It may have looked like that, but we really left voluntarily because the cheese and beer were so bad!
General purpose fractal graphics compression actually works very well - Iterated Systems' FIF format gives great compression and very high quality, along with the nice fractal-based benefits of providing resolution independence, natural scaling and variable resolution/compression tradeoff. As you say, fractal landscape compression (esp. for things like mountains, clouds, etc) is a very old idea. AFAIK if he's come up with a way of representing 3-D objects that would be novel - not to mention being necessary for anything other than backgrounds - but he doesn't seem to be....
As a Brit who moved to the States to steal your women and take your jobs, I think I should be allowed to gnaw on your sorry-assed bones in this excellent competition! :-(
Janes only knew enough to suspect that they had a crappy article, but not enough to write a better one... I wonder why they have such faith in themselves in being able to judge the /. contributions as any better? Most people here arn't going to have in depth knowledge pertaining to cyberterrorism, but most of us are going to be pretty opinionated, and well capable of spouting of reams of semi-informed good sounding hi-tech bullshit. I think Cringely was dead-on: there's no substitute for real independent research.
How about attaching a giant-squid-cam to a sperm whale? A GPS and depth sensor might be good too, so we can find out where these suckers hang out.
When things will get really interesting (probably not for at least another 100 years or so...) will be when we understand the brain enough to build robots with human-level perceptive and cognitive capabilities...
There may well come a point when artificial species are competing along side us in the evolutionary race.
> Need I say more?
;-)
Know what you mean, gov!
Sporting girl is she?
I think most British humor is really based on the premise that we're all loonies, and sexually repressed and/or obsessed...
P.S. How about Blackadder for another classic?!
If you've ever wondered why... :-)
The Piranha Brothers
I've always wanted to go someplace incredibly remote, like the top of everest, and order a dominos pizza with an iridium phone. :-)
It might be cold, but it should be free!
FYI, the phoneme-to-word (or, more generically, feature-vector-to-word) translation is conventionally done with Hidden Markov Models (in a nutshell, creating probability driven state transition models). I'd expect the commercial dictation products probably have a somewhat ad-hoc cleanup stage to post-process the HMM output.
More like Rock Stars, perhaps... I'm guessing that there might have been a Spinal Tap member involved! ;-)
The long path wouldn't have worked if the rename() return value had been checked - lazy programming.
Of course the real problem here was the open() holes, which could have been avoided by the slightly more security conscious approach of validating the generated files names before actually doing the open (file overwrite!).
To me programming is really pattern matching - you translate the requirements into a high level abstraction, then morph/manipulate that abstraction until it fits the form (a meta-pattern) of an interconnected set of previously encountered/implemented forms. In other words, you find the solution rather than solve the problem. It's much easier that way!
It appears that the superscalar speed necessary for faster-than-target emulation comes from a VLIW design. A single VLIW instruction is generally going to correspond to more than one target (x86/whatever) instruction, hence the patent's subject matter of efficient cached memory store and exception determination - you don't want to commit the VLIW memory stores until you've determined that *all* of the corresponding target instructions would have suceeded.
As the patent points out, it applies equally to emulation on other (non-VLIW) superscalar architectures, but the emphasis does appear to be on VLIW.
The postage stamp picture of your wife might not do much for you, but she might like to see the full size picture of you if she's at home. Or maybe you have some of those virtual display goggles in your pocket (another $2,500 - but what the hell!) that you plug into your cellphone/PDA.
As far as pizza guys/bathrobes, etc, I see the video portion of a call being off by default. So you're at home watching TV, the phone rings and you pick it up on the cordless phone and retire back to the couch.. It's the gf/wife - or someone else you care to see - so you hit the video button, and the picture pops up on the TV via the set top box interface (Bluetooth wireless connection again, perhaps). You could switch it to speaker phone too, if you wanted.
BTW, 300K bps is actually pretty good for MPEG-4 or H.264. The older Picturetel video conferencing setups used 128K, and were OK, even using what was probably worse compression.
Part 1: Cyberclysm
/., and gets caught up in a confusing technology induced downward spiral of Katzian techno-babble overload. Becoming paranoid, Katz fears that Big Brother is hiding in his toilet.
Katz makes the mistake of reading and responding to his own article on
Part 2: Clotho
Afraid of technology taking over his life, Kats proposes an AI agent, Clotho, to take over his life. He hopes that Clotho will provide him with a low tech toilet.
Maybe Katz needs his intelligent agent, Clotho, to protect him from unwanted analysis of his fecal matter, but I think the rest of us have already found the solution. It's called choice.
/., of course). Given the evaulation of your typical portal.com, it seems that most everyone else is also betting that we'll chose self-regulated order over cyberclysmic chaos. I wonder if Katz has registered clotho.com?
I switched from watching TV news to getting it of the web precisely because I wanted control over what I read. I visit my bookmark sites becuase those are what interest me, not surfing into the depths of the web where big brothers intelligent toilets are to be found (unless they're on
Real plants made out of plastic? Cool!
Now if they can just genetically modify tigers to have acrylic fur!
To me the article was just trying to marginalize geeks, since that apparently makes it easier for some non-geeks to "understand" us. To me most geeks are simply above average intelligence people who happen to excel in the hard sciences. Sure there may be a few who owe their intelligence to mental illness or "abnormality" of one kind or another, but I find it insulting to suggest that this is the common case. Given the current "taking back" of the term geek from being an insult to an insider term of peer recognition, it seems a shame that some factions of the media appear still to feel the need to analyze geeks in this disparaging kind of way. Sure there's a difference between lack of empathy (to see feeling in others) and lack of feeling (in oneself), but I'm not so sure that this distinction is so important to those who would appear to like to portray geeks as a potentially sociopathic minority. Maybe my vent was a little off focus, though. Personally I'm more inclined to believe that any typically geek social deficiencies are due to lack of social interaction/experience more than anything else.
There is some fascinating speculation going on these days that the well-known stereotype of the computer geek or nerd may actually be a description of mild autism, especially a form of autism known as Asperger's syndrome. Unlike classic autism, which often involves mental retardation and a lack of verbal skills, Asperger's syndrome is at the "high functional" end of the spectrum of autistic behavior, experts say. People with Asperger's syndrome have normal or above-average IQs and may even display savantism, or exceptional abilities in a specific skill. What they lack is human empathy, a deficiency sometimes called "mind-blindness, "which shows up as a distinct inability to read routine human nonverbal cues of attitude such as kindness, anger or love.
Good grief! I guess this explains Columbine, doesn't it - a bunch of those unfeeling geeks gone berserk. This sort of propaganda is usually reserved for when you want to dehumanise the enemy during a war.
.. to put text translation, rather than having to explicitly invoke Bablefish. Just configure English as your preferred language, and the transcoding proxy will automatically do the translation.
It's no coincidence that, differences among languages aside, all of them refer to emotional contact in primarily tactile terms.
I believe this is more a matter of embodied cognition and convergent evolution of languages than it is reflective of the (undisputed) importance of touch. IMHO all of our abstract thought is metaphorical, and the "chosen" metaphors come from the best match with our embodied experience. Emotion and touch just happen to have a lot in common.
Documents are about content. You want to bring a book or article with you, not the means of representing it. Paper's low cost, disposability, portability, foldability, durability etc all make it a pretty transparent way of representating content. PDA's and even the emerging e-paper do not have these attributes - the representation gets in the way of the abstraction ("document") that we are really interested in.
/. :-)
When a piece of e-paper with integrated storage, electronics and battery costs around 25c - cheap enough to be thrown away or left lying around, then it may start to replace paper. How about a copier that rather than spitting out a stack of paper instead spits out a single e-document, and in a fraction of the time! Please forward royalty payments to Spiny Norman, c/o
Alvin Toffler, and even Ted Kaczynski appear to have more insight into the effect of technological progress than Katz. Do cars break down more than horses? Perhaps so, but guess what - there are trains, buses and friends with cars too. Technology such as telephones can invade our privacy, but answering machines put us back in control. Does the Internet contain an overwhelming amount of information? Sure - but the people also use it to connect and humanize their lives.
Technology may change the way we do things, and may create new problems as well as solve others, but it is not the one-way path into a fragile complex hell that Katz envisions. We may be becoming increasingly dependent on the net, but surely this is one of the more resilient pieces of technology ever created - almost organic. The net may deliver a dizzying quantity of information that could overwhelm a cyborg trying to suck it all in, but the consumers of technology are people who use it in ways they see fit.