If you are at all interested in your brain, artificial intelligence, and artificial thought - you owe it to yourself to get a copy of this book.
I've been experimenting with neural networks implemented on FPGAs for awhile as a hobby - not much commercial interest in these systems just yet - but there is a lot of interesting work being done.
Remember 15 years ago, when people thought it would take decades and decades to sequence the human genome? Then someone came along and figured out a much faster technique. This same kind of thing is starting to happen in artificial intelligence; people from backgrounds OTHER than computational AI and biology are starting to get involved, and the new perspectives have brought new ideas IMHO.
Anyway, if you're interested in AI, get Hawkin's book 'On Intelligence'. It's damn good. One of the best I've read on the genre, and the references in the book will save you a lot of time delving further.
It's an accellerometer! There have been inertial mice based off these guys for as long as the sensors have been available.
There's some projects out there to hack one of these into some earlier palmpilots directly onto the bus, a nifty hack. Oh, wait, starting to get that feeling..
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/03/30/1546247.sh tm l
Sigh. I have a powerbook and like it, but new kind of HID? Please.
Call me when they have a camera in there like the Sony vaio picturebook used to, and you can wave your arms at it and such. Then it might be a new interface device.
There is no need for the outragous fees charged undergraduate students for the first half of engineering and science programs. Physics at the undergraduate level does not change much. I learned the same calculus my father did 30 years previous to I.
Let me send a shout out to these guys - no hassles at all in the years I've got bits and pieces from them, and the odd time I didn't get a part that worked they sent me a new one no questions asked.
There's no need to get crap from radio shack anymore with the advent of Digikey and Mouser.
Unfortunately the price is an order of magnitude (or two.. or three) too high for FPGAs to really be a consumer tech. The issue I think is an ASIC costs so little in volume, rather than spend all the money on an FPGA design that might be obsoleted next year anyway - a vendor is more likely to commit a design to silicon and then sell that.
There's also the speed issue - I've spent DAYS of CPU time to get a design syntheized from VHDL for a moderately complicated IC built up from available cores.
Factor in optimizing floorplans and the like, and you're talking about serious time commitments to optimize the hardware.
It works; I've been paid to do it in the past; but it's not something I can see in the consumer market for the time being.
An exciting hybrid is intersting though, putting silicon CPU cores on the same die with an FPGA. They've been around for awhile, and I haven't done any FPGA projects in ~18 months - but I haven't seen any real movement outside of areas where FPGAs are already popular.
See Open Cores (no, not sores..:-) ) if you're interested in this - there is open source hardware out there, some really good designs at that.
Those people who have done this with standard hard drives.. how do they stand up to being kicked around over time? I've seen a few people with carPC projects, but I've always wondered how the hard drives deal with the additional abuse over time.
You'd think a notebook HD would be alright. I assume that's what the mac mini is using?
I've done a lot of projects requiring scientific and mathematical visualization; with a couple exceptions, I was better served by having a background working with OpenGL than expertise with an existing graphics library.
On average, producing something that looked great and was exactly what I wanted I would estimate the labour effort at between 3-5 productive days. This is at least comparable to the effort I would have spent learning a graphing library, or working around something that I didn't like with an off the shelf solution.
I vaguely recal asus pimping something like this in the past, a small slot where you could put a 56k modem or some other media perhiprial, but it always baffled me why it was there - you almost never actually heard of anyone carrying the card, and even if they did, why would you ever want it?
The only theory I could come up with was an OEM customer wanted it and it was cheaper to leave it there for the retail version of the board than take it off.
A fact that is glazed over by advocates of commerical ethanol production from Corn. If you don't have modern fertilizers - which come from petroleum - then your yeilds drop.
I haven't seen a good analysis of the whole corn / ethanol situation that assumed an organic fertilizing scheme that would scale to even 5% of the USA's petroleum consumption figures.
The answer nobody wants to hear is there is plenty of coal for the next hundred years, and there's nuclear as well. Unless you actually looked at how much energy is consumed in the USA on a daily basis, you don't understand how bad the problem is.
If you don't understand your own products, you are going to suck as a leader. I don't care what the current nonsense is, but that's something I really believe - perhaps it explains the success of lawyers as politicians?
This is a theme you see in education all the time - you don't need to understand or have a degree in, oh, say physics in order to teach physics. Yeah, right. You can't teach something you don't understand at a fundamental level.
This goes to show that people with pure business backgrounds are not automatically assumed success in any field. Mr. Hewlett and Packard made wonderful products, by and for engineers. You can see it clear as day in what they produced. I love my HP48 calculator. I own oscilloscopes and function generators made by HP that dates back to the 70's and the gear still works flawlessly and looks great.
Watch for intel to make the same kind of mistakes - the best leaders for tech companies are those with BOTH business acumen and technical backgrounds.
Hopefully this Carly FIASCO will scare some brains into those who make the big decisions, but maybe I'm just dreaming. Short term profits, damn the cost!
OBD wouldn't make a great choice for this; the update speed is much to slow for a really meaningful speedo or tach. You'd be better off reading the coil drive and Vss sensor directly.
Just a FYI; but LCDs will wash out very badly in sunlight, and you want to be able to read your gauges in the daytime. Try using a PDA on a bright day in the car and you'll see the problem.
This is the primary reason that the old-style gauges are still the standard. You can even get "digital" analog gauges driven by servomotors.
People are not going to accept a lower standard of living, period, end of discussion. It's not in the cards. I've realized that some time ago, and the level of change in standard of living to bring things back in check - things like energy and oil consumption - isn't going to happen and we're all very ignornant of human nature to think it will.
However, climate change is NOT going to be the end of mankind, no matter what the granola-eating hippies tell you. We have lots of energy reserves in the form of fission power and coal - not clean energy, but energy. We will soon, hopefully, have energy from fusion sources, space based solar, or even from the quantum vacuum itself.
With energy you can have everything; you can produce your own air; you can clean your own water, you can grow your own food in absolutely controlled environments. Is this the ideal situation? Sure isn't. Is it likely? Yep.
Either way, homo sapiens isn't going anywhere anytime soon, no matter what the fear mongers might say. Western civilization might be headed down the drain, and much unpleasantness too - probably unavoidable so long as birth rates remain positive. If you want to do something for the planet, DON'T HAVE KIDS, hint: there are enough people - again, nobody will make that level of sacrifice volantarily.
The problem with DC voltages is that you can't easily run them through a transformer to step up or down.. interestingly enough this is no longer the case, and modern power switching technology is very efficient and very good - to the point where it is now viable, and as far as I am aware, used by some electric utilities.
DC voltages offer other advantages too, for example, minimal radiation and reactance losses.
You don't jam from your person - then you've effectively set up a tracking device. You jam the entire area of interest from a neutral location, or better yet, many semi-random locations - for example, by hiding jammers in other people's cars local to the area.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are at all interested in your brain, artificial intelligence, and artificial thought - you owe it to yourself to get a copy of this book.
I've been experimenting with neural networks implemented on FPGAs for awhile as a hobby - not much commercial interest in these systems just yet - but there is a lot of interesting work being done.
Remember 15 years ago, when people thought it would take decades and decades to sequence the human genome? Then someone came along and figured out a much faster technique. This same kind of thing is starting to happen in artificial intelligence; people from backgrounds OTHER than computational AI and biology are starting to get involved, and the new perspectives have brought new ideas IMHO.
Anyway, if you're interested in AI, get Hawkin's book 'On Intelligence'. It's damn good. One of the best I've read on the genre, and the references in the book will save you a lot of time delving further.
That'd be every ISP user in the state.
It's UTAH.
No guessing or assuming required.
It's an accellerometer! There have been inertial mice based off these guys for as long as the sensors have been available.
h tm l
There's some projects out there to hack one of these into some earlier palmpilots directly onto the bus, a nifty hack. Oh, wait, starting to get that feeling..
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/03/30/1546247.s
Sigh. I have a powerbook and like it, but new kind of HID? Please.
Call me when they have a camera in there like the Sony vaio picturebook used to, and you can wave your arms at it and such. Then it might be a new interface device.
There is no need for the outragous fees charged undergraduate students for the first half of engineering and science programs. Physics at the undergraduate level does not change much. I learned the same calculus my father did 30 years previous to I.
Ditto statics and mechanics. Ditto introductory chemistry. Ditto analytical geometery. Ditto, ditto, ditto.
One can make all sorts of conspiracy theories as to why students need these texts foisted upon them.
Wikibooks has a lot of promise for a top notch open-source reference textbook. Consider writing or revising some material in there.
I won't even get into how badly it sucked lugging around 50lbs of textbooks my first year of engineering.
Let me send a shout out to these guys - no hassles at all in the years I've got bits and pieces from them, and the odd time I didn't get a part that worked they sent me a new one no questions asked.
There's no need to get crap from radio shack anymore with the advent of Digikey and Mouser.
more entertaining than badly written software, anyway.
Subtitles are your friends.
Unfortunately the price is an order of magnitude (or two.. or three) too high for FPGAs to really be a consumer tech. The issue I think is an ASIC costs so little in volume, rather than spend all the money on an FPGA design that might be obsoleted next year anyway - a vendor is more likely to commit a design to silicon and then sell that.
:-) ) if you're interested in this - there is open source hardware out there, some really good designs at that.
There's also the speed issue - I've spent DAYS of CPU time to get a design syntheized from VHDL for a moderately complicated IC built up from available cores.
Factor in optimizing floorplans and the like, and you're talking about serious time commitments to optimize the hardware.
It works; I've been paid to do it in the past; but it's not something I can see in the consumer market for the time being.
An exciting hybrid is intersting though, putting silicon CPU cores on the same die with an FPGA. They've been around for awhile, and I haven't done any FPGA projects in ~18 months - but I haven't seen any real movement outside of areas where FPGAs are already popular.
See Open Cores (no, not sores..
Those people who have done this with standard hard drives.. how do they stand up to being kicked around over time? I've seen a few people with carPC projects, but I've always wondered how the hard drives deal with the additional abuse over time.
You'd think a notebook HD would be alright. I assume that's what the mac mini is using?
(article slashdotted)
I've done a lot of projects requiring scientific and mathematical visualization; with a couple exceptions, I was better served by having a background working with OpenGL than expertise with an existing graphics library.
On average, producing something that looked great and was exactly what I wanted I would estimate the labour effort at between 3-5 productive days. This is at least comparable to the effort I would have spent learning a graphing library, or working around something that I didn't like with an off the shelf solution.
YMMV.
I miss those plugins.
I vaguely recal asus pimping something like this in the past, a small slot where you could put a 56k modem or some other media perhiprial, but it always baffled me why it was there - you almost never actually heard of anyone carrying the card, and even if they did, why would you ever want it?
The only theory I could come up with was an OEM customer wanted it and it was cheaper to leave it there for the retail version of the board than take it off.
Boot from the CDROM. Use the USB key for a user directory, or whatever.
Isn't this easier than always writing to the CDROM, a slow and more likely to fail matter?
Wouldn't using a flash USB key make a lot more sense? Or am I missing something here?
A fact that is glazed over by advocates of commerical ethanol production from Corn. If you don't have modern fertilizers - which come from petroleum - then your yeilds drop.
I haven't seen a good analysis of the whole corn / ethanol situation that assumed an organic fertilizing scheme that would scale to even 5% of the USA's petroleum consumption figures.
The answer nobody wants to hear is there is plenty of coal for the next hundred years, and there's nuclear as well. Unless you actually looked at how much energy is consumed in the USA on a daily basis, you don't understand how bad the problem is.
But that's not the most politically correct answer, is it?
One needs to look at not just absolute energy consumption but the growth in energy consumption over the last 5 years. It's a difficult problem.
If you don't understand your own products, you are going to suck as a leader. I don't care what the current nonsense is, but that's something I really believe - perhaps it explains the success of lawyers as politicians?
This is a theme you see in education all the time - you don't need to understand or have a degree in, oh, say physics in order to teach physics. Yeah, right. You can't teach something you don't understand at a fundamental level.
This goes to show that people with pure business backgrounds are not automatically assumed success in any field. Mr. Hewlett and Packard made wonderful products, by and for engineers. You can see it clear as day in what they produced. I love my HP48 calculator. I own oscilloscopes and function generators made by HP that dates back to the 70's and the gear still works flawlessly and looks great.
Watch for intel to make the same kind of mistakes - the best leaders for tech companies are those with BOTH business acumen and technical backgrounds.
Hopefully this Carly FIASCO will scare some brains into those who make the big decisions, but maybe I'm just dreaming. Short term profits, damn the cost!
Specializing in high speed caching of the internet's raunchiest and most controversial sites.
It would be interestng to compare the bandwidth statistics, even in Utah.
pr0n is a multi-billion dollar industry that doesn't exist.
..an american icon?
Is there a fund set up yet where we can donate to their legal defense?
I'm sure I'm not the only one who apprecates (immensely!) the efforts of MAME.. god knows I spent enough time in arcades.
OBD wouldn't make a great choice for this; the update speed is much to slow for a really meaningful speedo or tach. You'd be better off reading the coil drive and Vss sensor directly.
Just a FYI; but LCDs will wash out very badly in sunlight, and you want to be able to read your gauges in the daytime. Try using a PDA on a bright day in the car and you'll see the problem.
This is the primary reason that the old-style gauges are still the standard. You can even get "digital" analog gauges driven by servomotors.
People are not going to accept a lower standard of living, period, end of discussion. It's not in the cards. I've realized that some time ago, and the level of change in standard of living to bring things back in check - things like energy and oil consumption - isn't going to happen and we're all very ignornant of human nature to think it will.
However, climate change is NOT going to be the end of mankind, no matter what the granola-eating hippies tell you. We have lots of energy reserves in the form of fission power and coal - not clean energy, but energy. We will soon, hopefully, have energy from fusion sources, space based solar, or even from the quantum vacuum itself.
With energy you can have everything; you can produce your own air; you can clean your own water, you can grow your own food in absolutely controlled environments. Is this the ideal situation? Sure isn't. Is it likely? Yep.
Either way, homo sapiens isn't going anywhere anytime soon, no matter what the fear mongers might say. Western civilization might be headed down the drain, and much unpleasantness too - probably unavoidable so long as birth rates remain positive. If you want to do something for the planet, DON'T HAVE KIDS, hint: there are enough people - again, nobody will make that level of sacrifice volantarily.
Humans aren't going anywhere. Period.
The problem with DC voltages is that you can't easily run them through a transformer to step up or down.. interestingly enough this is no longer the case, and modern power switching technology is very efficient and very good - to the point where it is now viable, and as far as I am aware, used by some electric utilities.
DC voltages offer other advantages too, for example, minimal radiation and reactance losses.
You don't jam from your person - then you've effectively set up a tracking device. You jam the entire area of interest from a neutral location, or better yet, many semi-random locations - for example, by hiding jammers in other people's cars local to the area.