No... Microsoft burned quite a few bridges with alot of people and unless they can turn that PR machine around 180 degrees, people will continue to see them as bullies who are looking out for nobody but themselves.
They got caught with their pants down in 1993-4 with the internet and TCPIP revolution, too. "It's good enough" certainly does sound framiliar. This was a multibillion dollar company that somehow MISSED THE WHOLE INTERNET THING. They pulled that one off and came out of it smelling like roses.
They got caught with their pants down AGAIN in 1997 with the widespread acceptance of Java and the beginnings of true cross-platform computing. They pulled turning that event into a stillbirth and came out of it smelling like roses.
So, here we are in 2005, and they've been caught again with a stagnant product in IE. Not just caught, but being actively made to look stupid by comparison by the third party browsers, and on top of all this, they have OSX and Apple breathing down their necks. I think the wake-up call has been heard.
I'm not a betting man, but I know where I'd be putting my dollars.
It's a moot point unless an alternative to our dependance on fossil fuels is found. Starvation will quickly solve the popluation problem in short order.
It's all about energy. If you have energy, nothing is a problem - period. If you don't have energy, EVERYTHING is a problem. We're past the point where a retreat to an agrarian life is possible without bloody revolution.
The only answer is new energy technologies - efficient fusion, improved fission, better solar, clean burning coal extraction and liquification, etc etc etc.
Cheap ram is great. Run it through memtest. If it passes, it's just as good as the expensive stuff. If it doesn't, then return it, because it's defective. The savings in my experience are more than $10, and all of my systems with "cheap" ram work great.
In 2001? a friend of mine got a great deal at fry's on 1gb DIMMs. This is when memory was PRICY. A weekend of testing found the good ones, the rest went back.
I've had very good luck with cheaper memory. The only time I've been a memory snob is when I bought memory for my powerbook, and that was more for lack of choice than anything else.
I often think about this very topic...if someone or someones would come along and put the pedal to the medal on polishing those things off, Linux would become one hell of a competitor.
Redhat had enough money to do what apple did for BSD.. In a way, apple is the perfect company to put that polish on - it's what they do. I'm not sure there's a place anymore for a polished desktop UNIX the way there was a place for it in, say, 1997.
It certainly is what Linux needs to smash onto the x86 desktop. People seem to get too caught up on Holy Wars (tm) to make this one happen though. Maybe I'm wrong - but I'm writing this on a powerbook, too, and in 1997 I was one of those point-and-laugh at mac types.
This is not related to the lifters. If you read further, you'd know that. But then again, this IS slashdot.
IIRC, the idea is to use a magnetic field to hold in a charged gas. The charged gas will then push back against whatever is on top of it - in effect, making an electric hovercraft. I could be remembering that wrong though, it's been years since I looked into this.
While the math on that holds; the engineering challenge of making it work is a different matter altogether.
IT IS NOT A SOLVED PROBLEM. YOU CANNOT JUST "BUILD YOUR OWN HOVERBOARD" FROM PLANS ON THE INTERNET.
The above link is a good starting point for someone seriously interested. That's about it.
While the LED element will last for tens of thousands of hours, the phosphor coating will not last that long. Based on tests I've seen a difference can been seen in a matter of days, presenting a problem for widespread lighting use.
Mixing red, green and blue LEDs into white does not have this problem.
Most of Canada's population is centered in one of the following:
Vancouver Calgary Toronto Montreal
With perhaps, maybe, a dozen or two dozen other semi-major centers. This gets a very large portion of the populace online without much expense from the telco.
I live in a rural area and have gotten the shaft WRT broadband access, so I am working with my municipality to make a wifi gateway available to get a broadband link to an area where I can link into a commercial DSL line.
Much of the lip service to "private / public" initiatives is politico code for dumping money into the telephone companies with little or NO accountability. If it did not make a business case to install broadband, it didn't get installed. Period, end of discussion.
I don't know about about agrarian culture, but I do know I paid good money to be properly taught the fundamentals of my field. Those fundamentals are the basis for ALL that follows in an engineering program, and you are seriously F'd later on if you don't have an intimate understanding. I worked my ass off to attend university, and I damn well expected to be taught.
There is a certain degree of acceptance of this attitude in academia and it DISGUSTS me.
I can't speak for others, but I know that this just sickens me. A computer program cannot understand ideas yet; nor can it make adjustments for less than perfect mastery of the english language.
Perhaps he should commision an optical recognition system, so he can automatically measure the margins and line spacing.
I'd love to get a copy of this program so it could be demonstrated how badly it could be gamed. In fact, if this person was so confident he was basing his marks on it, maybe he should share this teaching wonder with the world.
If you're really concerned, write to the opposition party leaders and/or their shadow cabinet representatives as well. I am uncertain how to get this information directly, so I send it to the opposition party leaders.
It is like a library. If one day we decide to move all our books to electronic formats, who is to say a tyrant one day can't remove or change items, slowly, so that nobody notices. Maybe I am 1984-ish paranoid, but I want it on paper.
The easy solution to the problem, of course, is a secure crypto signature. If you want to verify, compare signatures with the authors copy, or maintain many registries outside of central control.
ARM completely owns this industry. Their IP is everywhere. They're in gameboys, they're in PDAs, they're in network applicances. Low power consumption, cheap price, great toolchains, and wide support.
High range (ARM baby, Nat Semi's Geode is in here too)
From there you move into things like the motorola G4 architecture, via's C3, intels pentium M, etc.
Transmeta's advantages to risk are questionable, from this engineer's perspective, and yes, I actually HAVE used transmeta's hardware. It was too expensive relative to a Geode processor).
If this is the case, there are some IDE controller projects available on opencores. It shouldn't be a serious problem for someone to build a board that would allow you to mount the drive so you can copy data off of it - there are also open, well tested, PCI bridge modules freely available now.
If it is indeed the serious concern that people indicate, and it can be broken by the means you suggest - I challenge someone with a few dollars to donate it to opencores with the objective of getting this done.
Indeed, the "sticking it to the man" factor is high enough that I am intrigued enough to have a more in depth look.:)
The most effective means to deal with an unauthorized transmission is make it very easy to see when someone is not performing the authentication right, or there is transmissions from a source or type or format that you do not expect. Then the person can go looking for the offender with an appropriately sized stick (literal, or otherwise).
The biggest reason to buy is taking a chance flying internationally is a big deal. You could find yourself explaining to nontechnical people who maybe don't speak english as a primary language what your "device" is used for.
If you're going to fly, you're pretty much limited to the sealed lead-acid type batteries as you mentioned, UPS ones. You can get lithium cells from a company like digikey but you also need to have a proper charger setup for them.
As other posters have mentioned, get the best power supply you can afford for your system. This is the single biggest factor. If you can, consider a notebook you can run off of low voltage DC. The solution could be as simple as running the computer always offline, and swapping batteries out of a charger on the fly.
The power requirement would be low enough that looking at absorbing the one time shipping cost of a solar panel might not be out of the question.
Next you need to take care of large spikes and voltage outages. This is where a decent APC UPS comes in. You can find them very cheap on ebay. They are also very trivially modified if you want to run them from large deep cycle batteries - make sure to consider a model that has built in fans (1400+) if you want to do this. If you need to ask how to do this, you probably shouldn't go that way.:)
If you don't need a large reserve capacity, a smaller cheapie UPS might be enough.
I'd seriously evaluate how badly you need a full-fledged PC in an environment like that though. A notebook would be much better; if you have connectivity, perhaps you could do your heavy lifting in another location?
Hawkins does not publish a completely unique algorithm per se. He puts together a number of ideas that until recently were not explained in a clear or concise manner. He spends a good deal of time talking about this specificially, and has an excellent set of references and cites. I've been reading neural network texts and research since the early 90's, and I personally found his insights extremely valuable.
There is some commonality between neural networks and his concepts, but one would expect that given the structure of our own brains.
The work Hawkins describes has roots in research on perceptrons back in the 1950s.
Did you even READ the book?
Most of it speaks about how theories about how the brain classifies and processes information - and spends very little time on existing artificial intelligence constructs such as neural networks. Another good piece of the book details the author's troubles with trying to do academic research into AI, a viewpoint that I share.
Slashdot Mirror
No... Microsoft burned quite a few bridges with alot of people and unless they can turn that PR machine around 180 degrees, people will continue to see them as bullies who are looking out for nobody but themselves.
They got caught with their pants down in 1993-4 with the internet and TCPIP revolution, too. "It's good enough" certainly does sound framiliar. This was a multibillion dollar company that somehow MISSED THE WHOLE INTERNET THING. They pulled that one off and came out of it smelling like roses.
They got caught with their pants down AGAIN in 1997 with the widespread acceptance of Java and the beginnings of true cross-platform computing. They pulled turning that event into a stillbirth and came out of it smelling like roses.
So, here we are in 2005, and they've been caught again with a stagnant product in IE. Not just caught, but being actively made to look stupid by comparison by the third party browsers, and on top of all this, they have OSX and Apple breathing down their necks. I think the wake-up call has been heard.
I'm not a betting man, but I know where I'd be putting my dollars.
god help you if it doesn't. :-)
Energy consumption.
It's a moot point unless an alternative to our dependance on fossil fuels is found. Starvation will quickly solve the popluation problem in short order.
It's all about energy. If you have energy, nothing is a problem - period. If you don't have energy, EVERYTHING is a problem. We're past the point where a retreat to an agrarian life is possible without bloody revolution.
The only answer is new energy technologies - efficient fusion, improved fission, better solar, clean burning coal extraction and liquification, etc etc etc.
Upset I didn't think of it first. :)
Cheap ram is great. Run it through memtest. If it passes, it's just as good as the expensive stuff. If it doesn't, then return it, because it's defective. The savings in my experience are more than $10, and all of my systems with "cheap" ram work great.
In 2001? a friend of mine got a great deal at fry's on 1gb DIMMs. This is when memory was PRICY. A weekend of testing found the good ones, the rest went back.
I've had very good luck with cheaper memory. The only time I've been a memory snob is when I bought memory for my powerbook, and that was more for lack of choice than anything else.
I often think about this very topic...if someone or someones would come along and put the pedal to the medal on polishing those things off, Linux would become one hell of a competitor.
Redhat had enough money to do what apple did for BSD.. In a way, apple is the perfect company to put that polish on - it's what they do. I'm not sure there's a place anymore for a polished desktop UNIX the way there was a place for it in, say, 1997.
It certainly is what Linux needs to smash onto the x86 desktop. People seem to get too caught up on Holy Wars (tm) to make this one happen though. Maybe I'm wrong - but I'm writing this on a powerbook, too, and in 1997 I was one of those point-and-laugh at mac types.
This is not related to the lifters. If you read further, you'd know that. But then again, this IS slashdot.
IIRC, the idea is to use a magnetic field to hold in a charged gas. The charged gas will then push back against whatever is on top of it - in effect, making an electric hovercraft. I could be remembering that wrong though, it's been years since I looked into this.
While the math on that holds; the engineering challenge of making it work is a different matter altogether.
IT IS NOT A SOLVED PROBLEM. YOU CANNOT JUST "BUILD YOUR OWN HOVERBOARD" FROM PLANS ON THE INTERNET.
The above link is a good starting point for someone seriously interested. That's about it.
Check out this as a good starting point;
http://www.amazing1.com/grav.htm
There's some good stuff out there, and some people have gotten decent lift results with ion containment approaches.
If companies are giving money to poor starving people, thats a GOOD THING.
Is it still a good thing if the governments of those people are able to spend more money on weapons, because others look after feeding their people?
While the LED element will last for tens of thousands of hours, the phosphor coating will not last that long. Based on tests I've seen a difference can been seen in a matter of days, presenting a problem for widespread lighting use.
Mixing red, green and blue LEDs into white does not have this problem.
Most of Canada's population is centered in one of the following:
Vancouver
Calgary
Toronto
Montreal
With perhaps, maybe, a dozen or two dozen other semi-major centers. This gets a very large portion of the populace online without much expense from the telco.
I live in a rural area and have gotten the shaft WRT broadband access, so I am working with my municipality to make a wifi gateway available to get a broadband link to an area where I can link into a commercial DSL line.
Much of the lip service to "private / public" initiatives is politico code for dumping money into the telephone companies with little or NO accountability. If it did not make a business case to install broadband, it didn't get installed. Period, end of discussion.
Spite, however, is a powerful motivator.
With anti-aircraft missles easily mountable on each soilder, perhaps air power will not always be king?
It's called a Stinger. And yes, it is very, very effective against close range airborne attacks. Not so effective against cruise missiles or
bombers.
No need for an exoskeleton, either.
http://www.phatnav.com/wiki/index.php?title=FIM
I don't know about about agrarian culture, but I do know I paid good money to be properly taught the fundamentals of my field. Those fundamentals are the basis for ALL that follows in an engineering program, and you are seriously F'd later on if you don't have an intimate understanding. I worked my ass off to attend university, and I damn well expected to be taught.
There is a certain degree of acceptance of this attitude in academia and it DISGUSTS me.
I can't speak for others, but I know that this just sickens me. A computer program cannot understand ideas yet; nor can it make adjustments for less than perfect mastery of the english language.
Perhaps he should commision an optical recognition system, so he can automatically measure the margins and line spacing.
I'd love to get a copy of this program so it could be demonstrated how badly it could be gamed. In fact, if this person was so confident he was basing his marks on it, maybe he should share this teaching wonder with the world.
If you're really concerned, write to the opposition party leaders and/or their shadow cabinet representatives as well. I am uncertain how to get this information directly, so I send it to the opposition party leaders.
http://canada.gc.ca/directories/direct_e.html
Your voice DOES MATTER IN CANADA. People will pay attention. Write something.
Is that you felt you had to post that anonymously.
Get with the programme.. not mainstream, but certainly not new.
http://www.electrosexstore.com
http://www.peselectro.com
It is like a library. If one day we decide to move all our books to electronic formats, who is to say a tyrant one day can't remove or change items, slowly, so that nobody notices. Maybe I am 1984-ish paranoid, but I want it on paper.
The easy solution to the problem, of course, is a secure crypto signature. If you want to verify, compare signatures with the authors copy, or maintain many registries outside of central control.
Therein is the problem.
They are also very jammable by their nature.
The only question is how good the crypto used is, and how good it's implementation is. Once the crypto is broken, it can be spoofed VERY easily.
ARM completely owns this industry. Their IP is everywhere. They're in gameboys, they're in PDAs, they're in network applicances. Low power consumption, cheap price, great toolchains, and wide support.
The embedded tree is something like this:
PLD (22V10 devices)
Low power MCU (Atmel AVR, Microchip PIC)
Mid-range (8051; Upstart Rabbitcore; Motorola CPUS)
High range (ARM baby, Nat Semi's Geode is in here too)
From there you move into things like the motorola G4 architecture, via's C3, intels pentium M, etc.
Transmeta's advantages to risk are questionable, from this engineer's perspective, and yes, I actually HAVE used transmeta's hardware. It was too expensive relative to a Geode processor).
I've been doing more work with FPGA's recently:
:)
If this is the case, there are some IDE controller projects available on opencores. It shouldn't be a serious problem for someone to build a board that would allow you to mount the drive so you can copy data off of it - there are also open, well tested, PCI bridge modules freely available now.
http://www.opencores.org/browse.cgi/by_category
If it is indeed the serious concern that people indicate, and it can be broken by the means you suggest - I challenge someone with a few dollars to donate it to opencores with the objective of getting this done.
Indeed, the "sticking it to the man" factor is high enough that I am intrigued enough to have a more in depth look.
The most effective means to deal with an unauthorized transmission is make it very easy to see when someone is not performing the authentication right, or there is transmissions from a source or type or format that you do not expect. Then the person can go looking for the offender with an appropriately sized stick (literal, or otherwise).
The biggest reason to buy is taking a chance flying internationally is a big deal. You could find yourself explaining to nontechnical people who maybe don't speak english as a primary language what your "device" is used for.
If you're going to fly, you're pretty much limited to the sealed lead-acid type batteries as you mentioned, UPS ones. You can get lithium cells from a company like digikey but you also need to have a proper charger setup for them.
As other posters have mentioned, get the best power supply you can afford for your system. This is the single biggest factor. If you can, consider a notebook you can run off of low voltage DC. The solution could be as simple as running the computer always offline, and swapping batteries out of a charger on the fly.
:)
The power requirement would be low enough that looking at absorbing the one time shipping cost of a solar panel might not be out of the question.
Next you need to take care of large spikes and voltage outages. This is where a decent APC UPS comes in. You can find them very cheap on ebay. They are also very trivially modified if you want to run them from large deep cycle batteries - make sure to consider a model that has built in fans (1400+) if you want to do this. If you need to ask how to do this, you probably shouldn't go that way.
If you don't need a large reserve capacity, a smaller cheapie UPS might be enough.
I'd seriously evaluate how badly you need a full-fledged PC in an environment like that though. A notebook would be much better; if you have connectivity, perhaps you could do your heavy lifting in another location?
You need to read the book.
Hawkins does not publish a completely unique algorithm per se. He puts together a number of ideas that until recently were not explained in a clear or concise manner. He spends a good deal of time talking about this specificially, and has an excellent set of references and cites. I've been reading neural network texts and research since the early 90's, and I personally found his insights extremely valuable.
There is some commonality between neural networks and his concepts, but one would expect that given the structure of our own brains.
The work Hawkins describes has roots in research on perceptrons back in the 1950s.
Did you even READ the book?
Most of it speaks about how theories about how the brain classifies and processes information - and spends very little time on existing artificial intelligence constructs such as neural networks. Another good piece of the book details the author's troubles with trying to do academic research into AI, a viewpoint that I share.