Self timed CPU's have been on the design stages for quite some time now, and some groups have built prototypes.
A group at CalTech built a 16bit RISC style self-timed CPU some years back (early 90's I believe) on a 1.5 micron process (I believe, somebody please correct me if I am wrong)
One of the cool features is that as you coll the cpu, it literarly becomes faster!. The basic design of self timed CPU's has been around for probably more than 20 years. S Unger's Asynchronous Sequential Switching Circuits, Krieger, Malabar, FL, 1983 is probably one of the books one encounters when taking a course in this subject. (the book is pretty rough going though - )
I guess Verne was high on something serious when he came up with that _20,000 Leagues Under the Sea_ nonsense about ships that could travel underwater. That business with a moon shot in _From the Earth to the Moon_ is pretty silly, too. Absolutely no foundation in reality there, no indeedy
I appreciate the sarcasm, but seriously, Jules Verne is ONE AUTHOR among THOUSANDS. For every one such author, there are countless others that write stuff not worth the paper its printed on.
I am not advocating against SF, mind you, just trying to present the idea that most science fiction really should be renamed science friction for the goofy ``science'' ideas.
There are plenty more. Remember, there are quite a few actual scientists writing science fiction. Shouldn't they get some credit for writing down something so far ahead of its time that everyone considers it "sci-fi?"
Sure! Getting credit where credit is due is GREAT! OTOH, Nothing prevents an SF author from patents.
I am not particularly fond of patents as a whole, but it is a system there to be used by the people. Heinlein/A.C.Clarke never *did* anything with their ideas. They deserve respect and admiration for HAVING those ideas, but an idea really is a very small part of a useful end-result.
What was the old proverb? One percent inspiration, Ninety-Nine percent perspiration
Most SF authors really do not have a good grasp on science. Most however do have a firm grasp on authentic sounding technobabble, which is different from science alltogether!
Yes. It is true that some technologies were predicted by SF authors, but they really do not become practical until the required technological infrastructure exists to support such ideas.
Using SF ideas to drive basic science research is a silly idea, as most SF has no basis in reality. Using SF to drive technology on the other hand may be feasable, but for any ``cool'' idea, it becomes realistically implementable only after there is enough infrastructure to support them. (e.g. a single computer is a nice toy, (e.g. ENIAC) but multiple computers on a world wide network, now that kicks ass! Second example: The Chinese were probably the first to invent rockets. But it took until the 20th century to actually develop it into useful forms, such as the jet engine and orbit capable rockets. Both only became useful after there were enough support, such as lots OF airplanes and airports for the former, and the substantial industrial capacity required to build and maintain such rockets.)
Giving credit to where credit is due is of course a noble concept, but we also have to think of the uncountable hours the actual engineers spent on designing/building the inventions and the supporting infrastructure to make them useful!!
So who deserves more credit? The real scientists and engineers who actually DEVELOPED an idea into a realistic form? or the person who had an idea/dream and did nothing with it?
Its the cheapest of the two major services that offer non-contract services. The other is Motorola powered Nextel.
Also, the Denso Touchpoint for Sprint PCS is a kickass phone. It doesn't have voice activation, but all of its other features are top notch. One easy feature it has is the ability to strip phone numbers off of email and text/numeric pages you receive and place it directly in your phone book!
Nextel has unique features as well, which is a ``group'' calling feature almost like a CB radio. You can get unlimited group calls for organizing with your work group at a distance I've seen it work for across at least 10 miles i.e. from Jamaica NYC to Laguardia Airport.
I havent tried their phones yet, but their basic plans are about 40% more expensive then Sprint's plans.
I presume by your adamant claims that you were a first hand witness to the accounts of Rosalind Franklin and Watson/Crick??
If not, you really have no basis in fact, and your claims of women being denied credit (as far as this case is concerned) seems to be nothing more than FUD disguised as righteous indignation.
This is the kind of stupid talk that people who have *NO* idea what anarchy really is spout off, nor any clues of the true state of the Chinese gov't and its people.
First:
> What I don't understand is exactly how many > people in China have internet access, and if > there are > that many people I'm sure there are ways to get > around the firewalls using anonymizing programs > etc...
No. you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a router does. YOu can't anonimize yourself past a router that is blocking packets to and from a list of IP addresses.
> Smart programmers exist in China as well > as in the US.
Of that, there is no doubt, but unless these smart programmers are willing to put their life on the line and put in new underground routers and the miles and miles of cabling required to connect it, the gov't nased Ip filtering is an effective tool.
Second, and more important:
Anarchy would NOT be better for 99.99% of ANY country, unless its population is a minusicule fraction of what it is now.
How do you think the billion Chinese get their food? Do you think each family grows it all?
No, its much like in the US, where large (read: antithetical to anarchy) groups of people cooperate to get some food to the people's table.
Do you really think mass starvation on a scale of hundreds of millions is a good thing?
Sheesh. Rapid democratization can be almost as bad as constant dictatorship.
case and point: Russia tried the rapid way, and it failed miserably.
Each country needs an approach that is tuned for its unique geography, resources and political and social climate. That is the only way we wiill ALL enjoy basic freedoms without the chaos. Some places will just take a little bit longer, thats all.
Why the heck would anyone actually buy RMS's ``books'' when they are just primnouts of the info files that are available with every software package??
serioulsy, I was looking into the inernal gcc docs and coughed up $50 for the gcc manual from RMS, and was sorely disappointed because it was just a verbatim printout of the gcc info manual..
I agree that the article was a bit vague and sci-fi-like but that's never a reason to debunk it.
Theory is theory is theory until proved (thus it becomes a law) or debunked.
Oh please - a hypothesis becomes a theory when you can at least formulate an experiment to verify or debunk it.
But in this oh-so-new-age-avant-garde quantum quackery (there are quite a few of these) people who should know better attach the word ``quantum'' and ``superstring'' or even ``multiverse'' to practically anything to come up with new ways of hashing old nonsense.
Can you even formulate a single experiment to verify whether this ``multiverse'' exists? No? There is no way to verify or test this, right? Or in other words, we can't manipulate the world in any way to verify the veracity of it, right?
If that is the case, then why bother even wasting calories on it? If you have a hypothesis that CAN NOT BE TESTED, then your hypothesis HAS NO EFFECT on the world!!!! See how it works?
That's the beauty of scientific relevance.
It don't matter how clever your thought experiment is - if you can't demonstrate it, then IT DON'T MATTER, BECAUSE IT DOESN'T MATTER!!!! (pardon the bad grammar)
Pressure to be first to market DOES exist, but I think vary between markets:
e.g. in the console game market, the format of distribution forces the developer to take a verry close look at the stuff being shipped out to be pressed - its very hard to issue patches to CD's and cartridges -
the publishers which DO NOT pay attention to details like this generally don't tend to last very long.
ABC news reported this story as well, and also had a poll asking whether hackers should go to jail if
A: If they steal info for profit
B: If they steal info but don't use it
C: Both
D: Neither
A large majority of about 73% voted "C" !
Tho it was not a scientific poll, this is pretty scary IMO.
(p.s. I submitted this as a story, but the link to the poll is broken and I can't seem to find the correct one again (damn @#$&% ANCBNEWS CGI!!), so I am posting this like this. Sorry for the confusion.).
In one university I know of personally, the supplemental income for the Prof from the grant is fixed at FOUR percent of the money left over after the paper pushers get done with it. I just found this out my self. I think also in many cases, the grant specifies the upper bound on the supplemental income that goes to the PI's.
I highly doubt any sane institution (academia as well as grant giving institutions) would give as much as 25percent of the money as supplemental income, even if the Prof is a proverbial superstar:)
I agree with you that we should all be spending more on scientific discoveries, but to get the general PUBLIC to think so is quite another matter.
As far as I can see, I can't think of a single non PBS TV program that actually gives proper representation to science (Trek doesn't count folks!!)
I guess everyone here in/. already knows that M$ does not hold a track record for providing bug free software. Their internal coding habits are also pretty atrocious and its credit to the programmers that they are producing stuff that are as stable (*cough*) as it is now.
Giving the source out to 70 external agencies is a meaningless gesture. Is it going to be ALL of the code? or some of the code? or maybe just snippets here and there? And of course these agencies will likely have to sign NDA's which will limit the exposure to the people who actually *can* help.
And for helping out, what do we get? Do we get a piece of the M$ pie? Stock mebbe?? I think NOT.
It's likely that M$ will charge for the source as well.. So us grubby non-M$ coders will have to like.. *PAY* to take a look at it.
All in all, its a lose-lose situation for anyone involved in this goofy business..
Limited budgets is not an imaginary problem. It really does exist.
However, many professors DO supplement their income with the grant money. On the surface, this almost seems criminal but often the actual money thats left over to the prof after the school bureaucracy gets through with it is often less than 50cents per dollar.
So lets say that a prof has 4 grants totalling $500,000 over a period of 3 years (assume that all grants are of the same size and start/stop at the same time) and has 4 RA's
The actual money that the professor gets to spend over the period of those 3 years is roughly $250,000 - 4 * (3 * yearly RA salary roughly $15,000) = ~ $70,000 which is not a large sum of money. Of that amount, I am guesstimating at MOST 25percent is used as supplemental income. Of course the actual amount varies depending on the level of bureaucratic leeching, but I believe losing 50percent through bureaucracy is not atypical.
Just so you know, grants reaching that amount are somewhat rare on classic fields such as physics.
Now, if you were to ask me where does the bureaucracy use this money, I have no idea. But the first goal of any entity is survival.
And using grant money as supplemental budgetary cash FOR THE SCHOOL is probably roughly the same.
For every 1 professor, there is at least 2 or 3 other personnel that needs to be payed, the same as RA's:) Secretaries need to eat too ya know.
This is not to say that corruption does not occur, but I hardly think that its to the point where reasearcher's salary to a professional football players at least for 99percent of faculty members.
Academia (unless one sells out completely, which happens on occasion) is NOT a place for earning a krapload of money. PhD faculty members often earn less than their industry counterparts.
1. AI is a misnomer. It should really be called Intelligence Mimicking Heuristics and Algorithms, as we DON'T have a scientific definition of what intelligence is (otherwise we would be able to MODEL it in an acceptable manner). So we can't have an ``artificial'' version of something that really can't be defined, can we? so AI is a meta-meta-terminology..... ugh.
2. G.E.B is a long book, entertaining at times but is not really intended as a serious book on IMHA (or AI, if you prefer) A large chunk of the material is metaphorical in nature, not scientific.
The word describes nothing. It does not mean anything in particular. The WWW is NOT ``cyberspace'' in the William Gibson sense. Not even close.
Silly metaphorical word association games aside, the technology involved in the WWW has absolutely no direct bearing on religion and the myriad mounds of new-age nonsense. Unless of course the WWW (or its future variants) are used as ICONS for said social phenomenon, but then again, almost anything can be a religious/spiritual focal point.
If quacks and hippies really do gather via IRC/chatrooms/etc... and generate terabytes of nonsense, nothing has changed except that the S/N ratio is dropping just that much faster.
Slashdot Mirror
A group at CalTech built a 16bit RISC style self-timed CPU some years back (early 90's I believe) on a 1.5 micron process (I believe, somebody please correct me if I am wrong)
One of the cool features is that as you coll the cpu, it literarly becomes faster!.
The basic design of self timed CPU's has been around for probably more than 20 years.
S Unger's Asynchronous Sequential Switching Circuits, Krieger, Malabar, FL, 1983 is probably one of the books one encounters when taking a course in this subject. (the book is pretty rough going though - )
I guess Verne was high on something serious when he came up with that _20,000 Leagues Under the Sea_ nonsense about ships that could travel underwater. That business with a moon shot in _From the Earth to the Moon_ is pretty silly, too. Absolutely no foundation in reality there, no indeedy
I appreciate the sarcasm, but seriously, Jules
Verne is ONE AUTHOR among THOUSANDS.
For every one such author, there are countless others that write stuff not worth the paper its printed on.
I am not advocating against SF, mind you,
just trying to present the idea that most
science fiction really should be renamed science
friction for the goofy ``science'' ideas.
There are plenty more. Remember, there are quite a few actual scientists writing science fiction. Shouldn't
they get some credit for writing down something so far ahead of its time that everyone considers it "sci-fi?"
Sure! Getting credit where credit is due is GREAT! OTOH, Nothing prevents an SF author from patents.
I am not particularly fond of patents as a whole,
but it is a system there to be used by the people.
Heinlein/A.C.Clarke never *did* anything with their ideas. They deserve respect and admiration
for HAVING those ideas, but an idea really
is a very small part of a useful end-result.
What was the old proverb? One percent inspiration, Ninety-Nine percent perspiration
Ok folks, lets think about this:
Most SF authors really do not have a good grasp
on science. Most however do have a firm grasp on authentic sounding technobabble,
which is different from science alltogether!
Yes. It is true that some technologies were predicted by SF authors, but they really do
not become practical until the required
technological infrastructure exists to support such ideas.
Using SF ideas to drive basic science research
is a silly idea, as most SF has no basis
in reality. Using SF to drive technology on the other hand may be feasable, but for any ``cool'' idea, it becomes realistically implementable only after there is enough infrastructure to support them.
(e.g. a single computer is a nice toy, (e.g. ENIAC) but multiple computers on a world wide network, now that kicks ass! Second example: The Chinese were probably the first to invent rockets. But it took until the 20th century to actually develop it into useful forms, such as the jet engine and orbit capable rockets. Both only became useful after there were enough support, such as lots OF airplanes and airports for the former, and the
substantial industrial capacity required to build and maintain such rockets.)
Giving credit to where credit is due is of course
a noble concept, but we also have to think of
the uncountable hours the actual engineers spent on designing/building the inventions and the supporting infrastructure to make them useful!!
So who deserves more credit? The real scientists
and engineers who actually DEVELOPED an idea
into a realistic form? or the person who
had an idea/dream and did nothing with it?
Its the cheapest of the two major services
that offer non-contract services. The other
is Motorola powered Nextel.
Also, the Denso Touchpoint for Sprint PCS is a kickass phone. It doesn't have voice activation, but all of its other features are top notch. One easy feature it has is the ability to strip phone numbers off of email and text/numeric pages you receive and place it directly in your phone book!
Nextel has unique features as well, which is
a ``group'' calling feature almost like a CB radio. You can get unlimited group calls for organizing with your work group at a distance
I've seen it work for across at least 10 miles
i.e. from Jamaica NYC to Laguardia Airport.
I havent tried their phones yet, but their basic
plans are about 40% more expensive then Sprint's plans.
AVOID CONTRACT PLANS AT ALL COSTS!
I presume by your adamant claims that you
were a first hand witness to the accounts of
Rosalind Franklin and Watson/Crick??
If not, you really have no basis in fact, and your
claims of women being denied credit (as far as this case is concerned) seems to be nothing more than FUD disguised as righteous indignation.
just my 2 cents worth.
This is the kind of stupid talk that people
who have *NO* idea what anarchy really is spout off, nor any clues of the true state of the Chinese gov't and its people.
First:
> What I don't understand is exactly how many
> people in China have internet access, and if
> there are
> that many people I'm sure there are ways to get > around the firewalls using anonymizing programs
> etc...
No. you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a router does. YOu can't anonimize yourself
past a router that is blocking packets to and from
a list of IP addresses.
> Smart programmers exist in China as well
> as in the US.
Of that, there is no doubt, but unless these smart programmers are willing to put their life on the line and put in new underground routers and the miles and miles of cabling required to connect it,
the gov't nased Ip filtering is an effective tool.
Second, and more important:
Anarchy would NOT be better for 99.99% of ANY country, unless its population is a minusicule fraction of what it is now.
How do you think the billion Chinese get their food? Do you think each family grows it all?
No, its much like in the US, where large (read: antithetical to anarchy) groups of people
cooperate to get some food to the people's table.
Do you really think mass starvation on a scale of
hundreds of millions is a good thing?
Sheesh. Rapid democratization can be almost as bad
as constant dictatorship.
case and point: Russia tried the rapid way, and it failed miserably.
Each country needs an approach that is tuned
for its unique geography, resources and political and social climate. That is the only way we wiill ALL enjoy basic freedoms without the chaos. Some places will just take a little bit longer, thats all.
Why the heck would anyone actually buy RMS's ``books'' when
they are just primnouts of the info files that
are available with every software package??
serioulsy, I was looking into the inernal gcc
docs and coughed up $50 for the gcc manual from RMS, and was sorely disappointed because it was just a verbatim printout of the gcc info manual..
I wound up giving it 2/5 stars (not on amazon)
I agree that the article was a bit vague and sci-fi-like but that's never a reason to debunk it.
Theory is theory is theory until proved (thus it becomes a law) or debunked.
Oh please - a hypothesis becomes a theory when
you can at least formulate an experiment to
verify or debunk it.
But in this oh-so-new-age-avant-garde quantum quackery (there are quite a few of these)
people who should know better attach the word
``quantum'' and ``superstring'' or even ``multiverse'' to practically anything to come up with new ways of hashing old nonsense.
Can you even formulate a single experiment to
verify whether this ``multiverse'' exists?
No? There is no way to verify or test this, right? Or in other words, we can't manipulate the world in any way to verify the veracity of it, right?
If that is the case, then why bother even wasting calories on it? If you have a hypothesis that CAN NOT BE TESTED, then your hypothesis HAS NO EFFECT on the world!!!! See how it works?
That's the beauty of scientific relevance.
It don't matter how clever your thought experiment is - if you can't demonstrate it, then IT DON'T MATTER, BECAUSE IT DOESN'T MATTER!!!!
(pardon the bad grammar)
yeesh.
Pressure to be first to market DOES exist, but
I think vary between markets:
e.g. in the console game market, the format of distribution forces the developer to take a verry close look at the stuff being shipped out to be pressed - its very hard to issue patches to CD's and cartridges -
the publishers which DO NOT pay attention to details like this generally don't tend to last very long.
Long live the PSX
Long live the Dreamcast
:)
ABC news reported this story as well, and
also had a poll asking whether hackers should go to jail if
A: If they steal info for profit
B: If they steal info but don't use it
C: Both
D: Neither
A large majority of about 73% voted "C" !
Tho it was not a scientific poll, this is pretty scary IMO.
(p.s. I submitted this as a story, but
the link to the poll is broken and I can't seem to find the correct one again (damn @#$&% ANCBNEWS CGI!!), so I am posting this like this. Sorry for the confusion.).
In one university I know of personally, the supplemental income for the Prof from the grant is fixed at FOUR percent of the money left over after the paper pushers get done with it. I just found this out my self. I think also in many cases, the grant specifies the upper bound on the supplemental income that goes to the PI's.
:)
I highly doubt any sane institution (academia as well as grant giving institutions) would
give as much as 25percent of the money as
supplemental income, even if the Prof is a proverbial superstar
I agree with you that we should all be spending
more on scientific discoveries, but to get the general PUBLIC to think so is quite another matter.
As far as I can see, I can't think of a single
non PBS TV program that actually gives proper representation to science (Trek doesn't count folks!!)
I guess everyone here in /. already knows that M$ does not hold a track record for providing bug free software. Their internal coding habits are also pretty atrocious and its credit to the programmers that they are producing stuff that are as stable (*cough*) as it is now.
Giving the source out to 70 external agencies is a
meaningless gesture. Is it going to be ALL of the code? or some of the code? or maybe just snippets here and there? And of course these agencies will
likely have to sign NDA's which will limit the exposure to the people who actually *can* help.
And for helping out, what do we get? Do we get a piece of the M$ pie? Stock mebbe?? I think NOT.
It's likely that M$ will charge for the source as well.. So us grubby non-M$ coders will have to like.. *PAY* to take a look at it.
All in all, its a lose-lose situation for anyone
involved in this goofy business..
Sheesh.
-vanth
Limited budgets is not an imaginary problem.
:) Secretaries need to eat too ya know.
It really does exist.
However, many professors DO supplement their income with the grant money. On the surface, this almost seems criminal but often the actual money thats left over to the prof after the school bureaucracy gets through with it is often less than 50cents per dollar.
So lets say that a prof has 4 grants totalling
$500,000 over a period of 3 years (assume that all grants are of the same size and start/stop at the same time) and has 4 RA's
The actual money that the professor gets to spend over the period of those 3 years is roughly
$250,000 - 4 * (3 * yearly RA salary roughly $15,000) = ~ $70,000 which is not a large sum
of money. Of that amount, I am guesstimating
at MOST 25percent is used as supplemental income.
Of course the actual amount varies depending on
the level of bureaucratic leeching, but
I believe losing 50percent through bureaucracy
is not atypical.
Just so you know, grants reaching that amount are somewhat rare on classic fields such as physics.
Now, if you were to ask me where does the
bureaucracy use this money, I have no idea.
But the first goal of any entity is survival.
And using grant money as supplemental budgetary cash FOR THE SCHOOL is probably roughly the same.
For every 1 professor, there is at least 2 or 3 other personnel that needs to be payed, the same as RA's
This is not to say that corruption does not occur,
but I hardly think that its to the point where reasearcher's salary to a professional football players at least for 99percent of
faculty members.
Academia (unless one sells out completely, which happens on occasion) is NOT a place for earning
a krapload of money. PhD faculty members often earn less than their industry counterparts.
1. AI is a misnomer. It should really be called Intelligence Mimicking Heuristics and Algorithms, as we DON'T have a scientific definition of what intelligence is (otherwise we would be able to MODEL it in an acceptable manner).
So we can't have an ``artificial'' version of something that really can't be defined, can we?
so AI is a meta-meta-terminology..... ugh.
2. G.E.B is a long book, entertaining at times but is not really intended as a serious book on IMHA (or AI, if you prefer) A large chunk of the material is metaphorical in nature, not scientific.
Apparently Not.
Looks like Jonkatz actually believes the stuff he writes.
Some people believe that because they cause controversy, or becuase they hold the minority view, it makes their ideas more "correct".
Sad. Isn't it?
The word describes nothing. It does not mean
anything in particular. The WWW is NOT ``cyberspace'' in the William Gibson sense. Not even close.
Silly metaphorical word association games aside, the technology involved in the WWW has absolutely no direct bearing on religion and the myriad mounds of new-age nonsense. Unless of course the WWW (or its future variants) are used as ICONS for said social phenomenon, but then again, almost anything can be a religious/spiritual focal point.
If quacks and hippies really do gather via IRC/chatrooms/etc... and generate terabytes of nonsense, nothing has changed except that the S/N ratio is dropping just that much faster.