Maybe there's an easier way than qubits. What if you could use natural resonance of something like a torus pipe. Set up one frequency to represent the quantity you are trying factorize as a ratio of the quantity to the circumference of the torus. This would define a standing wave pattern. Create some white noise into the system at one point. Factors of the value would then create points of minimum and maximum amplitude around the torus.
The general rule for qubits seems to be anything that requires a unique solution but has to consider every possible combination of boolean states. Since they are Boolean zero or one values, that leads to cryptography because a relatively few number of bits would be required; 256,512,1024.
GPU's do floating-point calculations in parallel, which is really good for those problems which have to apply the same algorithm to different data points, like CFD, physics, AI, image and signal processing.
To represent floating-point data would require at least 16 qubits for half-floats, 32-bits for IEEE 754 standard floats, and 64-bits for doubles. But to do anything useful like CFD, would require storage of the entire state of the system which would require gigabits of data.
Unless someone could shrink the problem of CFD modelling down to atomic scales using phantom atoms, and overlapping qubits onto the same logic, GPU's won't have any competition.
Was that the RNG (Random Number Generator) on an arcade unit which had shorted out, so that every time it was rebooted, it would deal the same set of cards like something out of Groundhog Day? He just memorized the order the cards were dealt and repeatedly played that machine.
Then there is card-counting at Poker which simply involves keeping track of the ratio of high-cards and low-cards which have been dealt.
More than two decades ago, Trivial Pursuit arcade units were extremely popular in bars and restaurants. Then over a period of months, owners were concerned by a decline in earnings despite the fact the machines were still extremely popular. Turns out punters were going to the libraries, reading up the encylopedias, and acquiring enough knowledge to win up to £100 each time.
The 80's and 90's were the time any hardware vendor could "Be different" from everyone else and get away with it - custom file systems, stylised computer cases and keyboards and monitors. All those home computers; Apple II, Atari, BBC, Dragon 32, Commodore 64, Oric, and even luggable computers like the Osborne as well as workstations.
Once the IBM PC came out, that set the standard for keyboards and PC hardware layouts (transformer, motherboard, CPU socket, graphics card, serial/parallel/network communications). In terms of where things are placed, there is much difference from a tower unit from the 1990's and a gaming rig now. Everything then had to have a FAT-16/ FAT-32 compatible filesystem.
Apple wants to go after the creative artists. To do that they have to bring out something new, improved, different and better than the original each time. Enterprise market just wants something that is more cost-effective, faster, cheaper, more power-efficient but works just the same as the original. I don't think those two markets can be accomodated at the same time.
There's an article in the EE Times, about how car owners are no longer bothering to buy custom navigation hardware but are instead relying on applications written for the iPhone.
The advantages are that it is easier to update an IPhone application, you can take it with you and use it for street navigation as well as prevent theft. Having any electronic gadget bolted to the dashboard is just inviting someone to break in and try and steal it.
From expatriate workers who have worked in Libya, Saudia Arabia and Dubai, these countries are mostly desert, but the majority of all the populations live in high-density air-conditioned apartment/office block cities, even if they are rather dusty from the desert storms. Like any cities, there is a middle class of doctors, dentists and university staff which is usually Western educated.
The irony is that back in the DOS command prompt days, every DOS application had it's own user interface down to the color scheme. Application would either have their own text-based windows system (Borland C++, WordStar, Modula-2) or a full-screen graphics renderer like AutoCAD.
Windows 3.1 was an attempt to standardize the appearance of all these applications, but was limited to 256 and 16-bit color. Even then, application vendors still designed their applications for full-screen mode and maintained their own GUI systems.
Windows 95/NT was another attempt to standardize developers onto using the same consistent GUI widget system. Then developers started developing and implementing custom "skins" to differentiate their apps from each other.
Funny how the industry keeps flip-flopping between the two ideals.
They will keep filing new patents on every little idea that comes out of brainstorming sessions. It will cost competitors more to get the patent struck down in a court of law than it would do to sign a royalty contract.
Sounds like a programming concept called "lazy evaluation". A particular data field might be a combination of different input parameters. Sometimes it becomes more efficient not to update such values just when their inputs change, but only when they are read.
Large non metallic element, has an affinity for anything silicon. Has a half-life of 30 years. Found mostly in IT departments and university research labs.
I was thinking of the 1960 bit, the "common market". Guess they never talked about the coal and steel bit at high school, except for the economic success of the German Ruhr Valley.
Uh, a federation is a collection of states or empires that have agreed to come together on certain issues.
EU started out with the goals of guaranteeing food security for Europe with agricultural programs to stabilize prices, and also to boost international trade by harmonizing safety and export legislation. They also allowed free movement of people between countries without the bureaucracy of visa permits.
Problem now is that basic foods are now traded on world markets, manufactured goods come from China, and we get illegal immigrants from South of Europe migrating to certain islands on West Europe. At the same time the UK pays 18 billion pounds/year to help subsidize other EU countries like Italy. It's like the Roman Emptre but 2000 years on.
There was this inventor guy who proposed a new fire extinguisher for cars - it basically vaporized water into a fine mist that smothered flames by reducing the oxygen levels, rather than trying to cover every burning surface with a layer of water. Maybe that's where he ended up working.
Assuming you had a perfectly spherical object burning evenly. Some easy to consider examples down on Earth are the hazards of igniting powders like coal dust and flour, hazards in coal mines and traditional windmills. These would cause explosions simply because of the small particle size and rapid oxidisation. No need to consider gravity, as Brownian motion of air molecules compensate for the force of gravity.
A large burning object like a candle or one of those jumbo matchsticks would probably spin around if not propel itself a bit like a rocket.
I believe a stream processor is a processor dedicated to processing pipelines of data. More optimized for sequential memory access and arithmetic/trigonometric calculations than for branching and conditional instructions.
A core is just the basic CPU with or without an FPU, but will have support for multiple threads (shared code/data space but separate execution points). Multiple cores will have specially adapted cache memory to allow data sharing.
Marketroids talk about graphs and curves all the time. They will have cost vs. performance, cost vs. time.
Imagine a basic bell curve. You start at zero, which is no sales, as there has been a pre-release advertising campaign and the products have been reviewed before going on the shelves. Then they start to sell. The inflection point is where word of mouth has gone out about a product, and market demand is highest.
After competitors start bringing out equivalent products, the demand starts to slow down. The peak of the curve is when you have made the most sales ever in one week or month. Then demand starts to fall.
Eventually, demand will fall down to zero if they don't do something about the price. Then it's time to bring out a new advanced model, drop the price or offer a two-for-one deal.
You don't want to bring your next generation product too soon otherwise your developers get pissed off they that haven't had time to develop applications for the current generation, and your customers get pissed off that they are having to upgrade, or have just brought a current generation product. Like the Adam Osborne effect with "luggable computers".
Things like that were happening 25 years ago. Once company designed their their network hardware to have hardware MAC addresses written to flash memory upon bootup. The theory being that these systems would only be powered up once every few weeks at the most.
Unfortunately, they didn't consider a unavailable network combined with a hardware reboot mechanism invoked by network timeouts. The side-effect was that a machine would end up burning its own flash memory if there wasn't a network already set up.
You'd get a point from me too, if I had mod points.
Remembered life in the 1970's. Every TV program for all ages seemed to emphasize looking out for each other.
But around 1975, an agreement called the Lima Declaration of 1975 seemed to promise that we should share 30% of our manufacturing ability with developing countries. That was when the downfall started.
Remember there was a short length sci-fi story based on this theme back in the 80's. It was in a hard-cover Nova/Nebula/Supernova awards book, with an orangy-red cover.
Anyway the story involved a patient going into cryogenic storage until a cure for terminal cancer was found. Unfortunately, for him, and other patients sharing the safe cryo-store, that took around 1000 years, by which time the declining human population had been replaced by androids and robotic machinery programmed to serve humans.
He was the last human on Earth and proceeded to search for any other survivors initially across the continent, the planet, the solar system and ultimately the entire. galaxy. In each case, the search progressively long eras of time, until he was spending billions of year in cryostasis.
In the end, the Sun has become a red-giant and is about to roast Earth, the androids have evolved to beyond physical form, and have guided the terraforming of another planet until human life there has exceeded Earth technology, and a space-yacht is sent to collect him from Earth at the very moment that the oceans have boiled away, outside temperature is 350C and all the cooling systems are starting to fail.
Dr. Who also had that theme with Abslom Daak, D.K., whose girlfriend was placed in cryogenic storage until he could find a resurrection centre.
Strangely enough, you can still buy punched-hole ticker tape. I imagine there must be some remote sites out there where the signal/noise ratio is that bad.
I'm not saying ionizing radiation isn't hazardous. Radar systems on aircraft, microwave radio transmitters, and high-frequency transmitters have warnings for that exact reason.
What I was trying to say, is that any wavelength in the electronmagnetic spectrum is dangerous at a level inversely proportional to the wavelength. Shorter wavelengths like gamma-rays, X-rays, UV are enough to penetrate the skin and cause damage to DNA with just photon.
Cellular repair from burns leads to rapid cell divisions and more chances of mutations which in turn leads to an increased risk of cancer. The effect of heat is to damage proteins and chemical bonds in both the cell and DNA. Why else would cells die off? The hot feeling from sunburn is caused by the cells repairing themselves.
Buying property takes more skill than buying just any pile of bricks in exchange for a large mortgage.
When there's a property boom, everyone is desperate to buy anything in order to get a foothold in the property market, and hopefully trade up to a "desirable" area. That's why homes get built in flood-plains, next to chemical factories, under power-lines and runway flight-paths. It's the "desirable" homes that keep their value. Either they are close to public transport, yet away from busy roads, or within walking distance of a good school, in a leafy-green area with a nice view.
As far as restauarants go, it's how quickly you get served, whether they always have a spare table, take group bookings, reservations and how close they are to the workplace that are the influencing factors.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe there's an easier way than qubits. What if you could use natural resonance of something like a torus pipe. Set up one frequency to represent the quantity you are trying factorize as a ratio of the quantity to the circumference of the torus. This would define a standing wave pattern. Create some white noise into the system at one point. Factors of the value would then create points of minimum and maximum amplitude around the torus.
The general rule for qubits seems to be anything that requires a unique solution but has to consider every possible combination of boolean states. Since they are Boolean zero or one values, that leads to cryptography because a relatively few number of bits would be required; 256,512,1024.
GPU's do floating-point calculations in parallel, which is really good for those problems which have to apply the same algorithm to different data points, like CFD, physics, AI, image and signal processing.
To represent floating-point data would require at least 16 qubits for half-floats, 32-bits for IEEE 754 standard floats, and 64-bits for doubles. But to do anything useful like CFD, would require storage of the entire state of the system which would require gigabits of data.
Unless someone could shrink the problem of CFD modelling down to atomic scales using phantom atoms, and overlapping qubits onto the same logic, GPU's won't have any competition.
Was that the RNG (Random Number Generator) on an arcade unit which had shorted out, so that every time it was rebooted, it would deal the same set of cards like something out of Groundhog Day? He just memorized the order the cards were dealt and repeatedly played that machine.
Then there is card-counting at Poker which simply involves keeping track of the ratio of high-cards and low-cards which have been dealt.
More than two decades ago, Trivial Pursuit arcade units were extremely popular in bars and restaurants. Then over a period of months, owners were concerned by a decline in earnings despite the fact the machines were still extremely popular. Turns out punters were going to the libraries, reading up the encylopedias, and acquiring enough knowledge to win up to £100 each time.
That would be awesome to see - a hammock made of woven cat-5 cables.
Once saw the interconnect of a supercomputer/rack server "styled" into ocean waves, rather than just some snake-pit of cables.
The 80's and 90's were the time any hardware vendor could "Be different" from everyone else and get away with it - custom file systems, stylised computer cases and keyboards and monitors. All those home computers; Apple II, Atari, BBC, Dragon 32, Commodore 64, Oric, and even luggable computers like the Osborne as well as workstations.
Once the IBM PC came out, that set the standard for keyboards and PC hardware layouts (transformer, motherboard, CPU socket, graphics card, serial/parallel/network communications). In terms of where things are placed, there is much difference from a tower unit from the 1990's and a gaming rig now. Everything then had to have a FAT-16/ FAT-32 compatible filesystem.
Apple wants to go after the creative artists. To do that they have to bring out something new, improved, different and better than the original each time. Enterprise market just wants something that is more cost-effective, faster, cheaper, more power-efficient but works just the same as the original. I don't think those two markets can be accomodated at the same time.
There's an article in the EE Times, about how car owners are no longer bothering to buy custom navigation hardware but are instead relying on applications written for the iPhone.
The advantages are that it is easier to update an IPhone application, you can take it with you and use it for street navigation as well as prevent theft. Having any electronic gadget bolted to the dashboard is just inviting someone to break in and try and steal it.
From expatriate workers who have worked in Libya, Saudia Arabia and Dubai, these countries are mostly desert, but the majority of all the populations live in high-density air-conditioned apartment/office block cities, even if they are rather dusty from the desert storms. Like any cities, there is a middle class of doctors, dentists and university staff which is usually Western educated.
The irony is that back in the DOS command prompt days, every DOS application had it's own user interface down to the color scheme. Application would either have their own text-based windows system (Borland C++, WordStar, Modula-2) or a full-screen graphics renderer like AutoCAD.
Windows 3.1 was an attempt to standardize the appearance of all these applications, but was limited to 256 and 16-bit color. Even then, application vendors still designed their applications for full-screen mode and maintained their own GUI systems.
Windows 95/NT was another attempt to standardize developers onto using the same consistent GUI widget system. Then developers started developing and implementing custom "skins" to differentiate their apps from each other.
Funny how the industry keeps flip-flopping between the two ideals.
They will keep filing new patents on every little idea that comes out of brainstorming sessions. It will cost competitors more to get the patent struck down in a court of law than it would do to sign a royalty contract.
Is this more of a Dead Hand system?
Sounds like a programming concept called "lazy evaluation". A particular data field might be a combination of different input parameters. Sometimes it becomes more efficient not to update such values just when their inputs change, but only when they are read.
Dilbertium?
Large non metallic element, has an affinity for anything silicon. Has a half-life of 30 years. Found mostly in IT departments and university research labs.
I was thinking of the 1960 bit, the "common market". Guess they never talked about the coal and steel bit at high school, except for the economic success of the German Ruhr Valley.
Uh, a federation is a collection of states or empires that have agreed to come together on certain issues.
EU started out with the goals of guaranteeing food security for Europe with agricultural programs to stabilize prices, and also to boost international trade by harmonizing safety and export legislation. They also allowed free movement of people between countries without the bureaucracy of visa permits.
Problem now is that basic foods are now traded on world markets, manufactured goods come from China, and we get illegal immigrants from South of Europe migrating to certain islands on West Europe. At the same time the UK pays 18 billion pounds/year to help subsidize other EU countries like Italy. It's like the Roman Emptre but 2000 years on.
There was this inventor guy who proposed a new fire extinguisher for cars - it basically vaporized water into a fine mist that smothered flames by reducing the oxygen levels, rather than trying to cover every burning surface with a layer of water. Maybe that's where he ended up working.
Assuming you had a perfectly spherical object burning evenly. Some easy to consider examples down on Earth are the hazards of igniting powders like coal dust and flour, hazards in coal mines and traditional windmills. These would cause explosions simply because of the small particle size and rapid oxidisation. No need to consider gravity, as Brownian motion of air molecules compensate for the force of gravity.
A large burning object like a candle or one of those jumbo matchsticks would probably spin around if not propel itself a bit like a rocket.
I believe a stream processor is a processor dedicated to processing pipelines of data. More optimized for sequential memory access and arithmetic/trigonometric calculations than for branching and conditional instructions.
A core is just the basic CPU with or without an FPU, but will have support for multiple threads (shared code/data space but separate execution points). Multiple cores will have specially adapted cache memory to allow data sharing.
Marketroids talk about graphs and curves all the time. They will have cost vs. performance, cost vs. time.
Imagine a basic bell curve. You start at zero, which is no sales, as there has been a pre-release advertising campaign and the products have been reviewed before going on the shelves. Then they start to sell. The inflection point is where word of mouth has gone out about a product, and market demand is highest.
After competitors start bringing out equivalent products, the demand starts to slow down. The peak of the curve is when you have made the most sales ever in one week or month. Then demand starts to fall.
Eventually, demand will fall down to zero if they don't do something about the price. Then it's time to bring out a new advanced model, drop the price or offer a two-for-one deal.
You don't want to bring your next generation product too soon otherwise your developers get pissed off they that haven't had time to develop applications for the current generation, and your customers get pissed off that they are having to upgrade, or have just brought a current generation product. Like the Adam Osborne effect with "luggable computers".
Things like that were happening 25 years ago. Once company designed their their network hardware to have hardware MAC addresses written to flash memory upon bootup. The theory being that these systems would only be powered up once every few weeks at the most.
Unfortunately, they didn't consider a unavailable network combined with a hardware reboot mechanism invoked by network timeouts. The side-effect was that a machine would end up burning its own flash memory if there wasn't a network already set up.
My first PC in 1988 was around £2000 or $3000.
Now, even smartphones and USB sticks are getting GPU's to do texture-mapping at HD resolutions.
To think that it used to $150,000+ just to get a basic 24-bit color framebuffer and basic graphics API.
You'd get a point from me too, if I had mod points.
Remembered life in the 1970's. Every TV program for all ages seemed to emphasize looking out for each other.
But around 1975, an agreement called the Lima Declaration of 1975 seemed to promise that we should share 30% of our manufacturing ability with developing countries. That was when the downfall started.
Therapeutic Hypothermia is the closest we have just now.
Remember there was a short length sci-fi story based on this theme back in the 80's. It was in a hard-cover Nova/Nebula/Supernova awards book, with an orangy-red cover.
Anyway the story involved a patient going into cryogenic storage until a cure for terminal cancer was found. Unfortunately, for him, and other patients sharing the safe cryo-store, that took around 1000 years, by which time the declining human population had been replaced by androids and robotic machinery programmed to serve humans.
He was the last human on Earth and proceeded to search for any other survivors initially across the continent, the planet, the solar system and ultimately the entire. galaxy. In each case, the search progressively long eras of time, until he was spending billions of year in cryostasis.
In the end, the Sun has become a red-giant and is about to roast Earth, the androids have evolved to beyond physical form, and have guided the terraforming of another planet until human life there has exceeded Earth technology, and a space-yacht is sent to collect him from Earth at the very moment that the oceans have boiled away, outside temperature is 350C and all the cooling systems are starting to fail.
Dr. Who also had that theme with Abslom Daak, D.K., whose girlfriend was placed in cryogenic storage until he could find a resurrection centre.
Strangely enough, you can still buy punched-hole ticker tape. I imagine there must be some remote sites out there where the signal/noise ratio is that bad.
I'm not saying ionizing radiation isn't hazardous. Radar systems on aircraft, microwave radio transmitters, and high-frequency transmitters have warnings for that exact reason.
What I was trying to say, is that any wavelength in the electronmagnetic spectrum is dangerous at a level inversely proportional to the wavelength. Shorter wavelengths like gamma-rays, X-rays, UV are enough to penetrate the skin and cause damage to DNA with just photon.
Cellular repair from burns leads to rapid cell divisions and more chances of mutations which in turn leads to an increased risk of cancer. The effect of heat is to damage proteins and chemical bonds in both the cell and DNA. Why else would cells die off? The hot feeling from sunburn is caused by the cells repairing themselves.
Buying property takes more skill than buying just any pile of bricks in exchange for a large mortgage.
When there's a property boom, everyone is desperate to buy anything in order to get a foothold in the property market, and hopefully trade up to a "desirable" area. That's why homes get built in flood-plains, next to chemical factories, under power-lines and runway flight-paths. It's the "desirable" homes that keep their value. Either they are close to public transport, yet away from busy roads, or within walking distance of a good school, in a leafy-green area with a nice view.
As far as restauarants go, it's how quickly you get served, whether they always have a spare table, take group bookings, reservations and how close they are to the workplace that are the influencing factors.