OK, I'm an ex-neuromorphic VLSI researcher, so my impressions may be colored, but let's see...for the last ten years, we've been following Carver Mead's lead that we really need to look at Analog VLSI for simulating cortex and doing cool AI work. It's ulta-low-power, distributed massively parallel computation, defect tolerant, etc. And what has been the result?
Millions of dollars of money going into making bad retinal focal-plane arrays whose output makes QuickCams look good, analog cochlea models that underperform real time digital models, and a handful of other do-nothing circuitry like the one described in this article.
Meanwhile good old digital VLSI has gone from 100 MHz to > 1 GHz, we have actual speech recognition systems running on PCs, and a new range of low-power digital multi-purpose digital CPUs for portable devices.
There has never been a real product developed using neuromorphic VLSI, and the few implementations can now be replaced with faster digital computers.
The best part of neuromorphic VLSI was the electical engineers teaching all the neuroscientists about how electical circuits work, wavelet transforms, etc., to a bunch of people who like to think of the brain more in terms of a Rube Goldberg device where one neuron taps the next neruon instead of a complex chaotic set of electrical network equations.
While it is true that you get amino acids when you subject a mixture of simple hydrocarbon gasses to heat and/or electricity, the ones you get are the easiest ones to make. There are other amino acids that are more energetically complex that cannot be made, and no one has ever generated anything that came close to being RNA/DNA.
What this experiment shows is that there is a rich amount of simple organic building blocks given a particular kind of early earth atmosphere chemistry (the details of which are still sketchy, other atmospheres could have dramatically reduced amino acid production).
The big question is how did these amino acids, and the tough-to-make amino acids come together to form the DNA/RNA based life we have today? The predecessors of organic life may have been inorganic clays that became self-replicating and only later began working with organic molecules. No one has a clue as to the real beginnings of life.
Just for background, Mike Doughney is the co-founder of the ISP DIGEX (purchased by Intermedia Communications, which then spun off a web hosting company called "Digex"). People Easting Tasty Animals took in no money, it was just a parody site. Mike has been dedicated to providing information about cult-like groups for a long time, including transcendental meditation, PETA, and Christian right groups. He makes no money off of this.
After Peta.Org was put on hold in 1996, Mike had his own domain (MTD.com) threatened by the MTD Company (that made lawnmowers). This lead him to form to Domain Name Rights Coalition to fight for the rights of domain name owners.
Rumors are that there will be an appeal of this ruling.
Hearing loss typically occurs in a limited band of frequencies at a time, so you don't normally perceive the loss until enough of your hearing bandwidth is toasted to begin to make it difficult to understand speech. It can be quite insidious, and chances are good that every time you expose yourself to the levels of ear ringing that you are doing some damage (i.e. a few more dB loss over a small band).
The EPA noise limit is an average 70 dBA over 24 hours, and 75 dBA average over an 8 hour working period. This is an average, which means it is safe to be exposed to 3 dBA more power for half the time (i.e. 78 dBA for 4 hours). No exposures should be greater than 100 dBA for any length of time. (Many night clubs come in at 106 dBA or higher).
You Americans really p*ss me off: you live in probably the best country in the world...But you insist on sitting on your hands, shooting each other... instead of leading the technology, the exploration of the world, and the future of Civilization. You drive me up the wall....
I was just talking with a family member from El Salvador about this very topic. The US should be happy that the most exciting piece of news is Bill Clinton's sex habits.
Meanwhile, elsewhere, people are starving. Really starving, not being comparatively well-fed US homeless.
The major issue with this that I see is when do you reach the point where you're peering rather than purchasing bandwith?
You join the peering crowd when you 1) have connectivity at every major NAP 2) have enough traffic that other Tier 1's start calling you up and talking about peering agreements and 3) your traffic is not asymetrically outgoing, because no one wants to peer with someone who is just going to send them lots of traffic and not take any (i.e. hosting providers).
Of course, it is not as easy to get to this level as it was four years ago (when a few million would have launched you to Tier 1 status). Today, it may take hundreds of millions.
Peering itself is still an unsure issue. There is always talk of major Tier 1's dropping peering agreements for settled exchange.
MAE-East and MAE-West (metropolitan Area Exchange) handle 70-80% of all traffic that goes from one backbone to another., and are paid for by the government.
Although the NSF "designated" several NAPs (Network Access Points) including the MAE-East, I'm not sure any tax money went to support their operations, and very sure that there was no financial support after the end of the NSFNET.
The MAEs are now onwed by MCI/Worldcom, and you have to pay to collocate a router there or run bandwidth into the facility.
I wouldn't say 70-80% of traffic flows through the "public" (i.e. anyone can connect) NAP switches any more. Things are far more complex these days. Every large Tier 1 provider has private peering with several other Tier 1 providers. Besides the MAEs there are all kinds of hosting facilities aimed at attracting routers from various ISPs to exchange traffic in various geographical regions of the world.
For more info on the history of the MAE East, you can watch a "Mysteries of the MAE East" show I did, it is on the bottom of the linked page.
MS wouldn't know innovation if it bit it on their collective asses.
Windows Media Technology is a solid system. WMT is a better live video stream than RealMedia (at least up until RealMedia 8, but I'm still evaluating that recent release).
And I hate to say it, but MFC is one of the better low-end fast-prototyping programming systems I've ever seen.
where were you when Standard Oil was broken up?
Yeah, Standard Oil was terrible - it expanded outputs enormously, innovated continuously, and generally lowered prices for consumers. The price of kerosene dropped from 50 cents per gallon to six cents per gallon from 1860 to 1890. There were 147 competing independent oil refineries when Standard Oil was broken up.
With Microsoft, at least there is the suggestion that there might be some innovation held back. Standard Oil just made oil cheaper and more available.
Most anti-trust decisions were anti-consumer. Such as the American Tobacco Company, broken up despite a decrease in cigarette prices. US Steel dropped steel prices the decade before it was indicted for monopoly activities. Alcoa was indicted for monopolizing the primary ingot aluminum business, despite the fact that there were plenty of scrap aluminum recyclers, and Alcoa reducing the price of aluminum by 90%.
The citizens in the countries are left to decay in the choices of their leaders and the desire of the world rulers.
Perhaps they should change their rulers...
The conditions imposed on these countries usually lead to a deep cut in social spending (education, health, public transportation and other services) and a shift to a mainly export-based economy.
Without an export economy, most developing countries have no economy. Where is all of this money for social spending going to come from?
I'll be the first to admit that the pseudo-government controlled world lending organizations are a crock. If there is a chance a loan might be repaid, private financial markets will be capable of making a loan. But we forget that the World Bank/IMF/IADB/etc. came into being because pseudo-socialist governments of developing countries restricted foreign capital investment in their counties unless it was through these "special" loan organizations, and big suprise, a lot of that loan money ended up in the hands of the psuedo-socialist leaders and friends.
As a result of this, these countries have crushing debt. However, until they kill their dictators or manage to not vote away their democracies, nothing is going to change.
Do you want to see a developing country doing well? Look at El Salvador. After the end of the civil war supported by the US and USSR, inflation has fallen, and exports have grown substantially. It is a working multiparty democracy. GDP has tripled, literacy is up, life expectancy is up. If the US dropped its textile protections, El Salvador would be doing even better.
It wasn't industry that moved us beyond the horrors of the Industrial Revolution, it was social reform and laws.
Yeah, but, where were those laws when kids were put to work from sunup till sundown on the farms? And this was doing backbreaking work, not running machines or sweeping up.
Ludwig Von Mises said it best: "It is a distortion of facts to say that the factories carried off the housewives from the nurseries and the kitchens and the children from their play. These women had nothing to cook with and to feed their children. These children were destitute and starving. Their only refuge was the factory. It saved them, in the strict sense of the term, from death by starvation"
The mass exodus from the less-industrialized Continent to industrial Britain during the first half of the 19th Century shows that plenty of people wanted to get factory jobs. It sucked, but it was better than what they had before industrialization.
Child labor only ended when economies grew to the point where only parents were required to work to support the family. This is a recent and post-industrial phenomenon. It could not have happened without the Industrial Revolution. In non-industrialized counties, children still do back breaking work. Actually, this also happens on family farms in the US as well...
Child labor sucks, but let's not imagine that the Industrial Revolution created it. It ended it.
You have areas all over the world being poisoned and desertified by people applying inappropriate agricultural practices foisted upon them in the name of "development".
OK, I'll bite, where is this? Do you think that if the people there were richer that they might perhaps choose to be more environmentally friendly?
On the whole, we do a pretty lousy job of jibing capitalism with environmentalism, and judging by at least the American popular ideology, it will take severe environmental crises to change that reality.
Care to show us the non-capitalist country that has better environmental regulations than the US? For that matter, isn't Europe JUST getting around to banning leaded gas? The Europeans can complain a heck of a lot about the US, but we seem to be better at actually cleaing up our air and water.
There is a reason, of course, and that's because the US is stinking rich and can afford to care about the environment.
And I just wanted to slap someone after watching Ralph Nader whine on television this morning about how "the poor American farmer is working from sunup to sundown to survive against the evil agricultural conglomerates who sell food too cheaply."
I want to know when they'll start supporting the family microchip business. Do you know how expensive chemical vapor deposition machines are? How am I going to make the jump to sub-micron linewidthds? With Intel and AMD, I don't stand a chance. Can someone regulate them, say, back to 2 microns? Now that I can handle.
Far better we fire up a new recession than that the guy at the fiftieth percentile should ever, ever get a raise.
We're you alive in the 1970's? Does "stagflation" mean anything to you?
BTW, housing is CHEAPER now that it was ten years ago, on a per square foot basis. It is just that people prefer bigger houses, the the average house price is higher.
Look at the Industrial Revolution for England and the U.S
That's right, the coming of the steam engine meant that children didn't have to crawl through coal mines, they were replaced with machines. Horrors!
They took those people hapily laboring under the sun in paltry fields to barely feed themselves, and put them in factories where they could afford to feed themselves and perhaps send their kids to school. Horrors! Damn that industrial revolution! I think I'm going to move to Tanzania right now and get back in the pre-industrial world.
Except that there is no such thing as "lassie faire" capitalism except in the minds of the robber barrons of the late 19th century
These "robber barons" were the people who masterminded the greatest technological leaps of the last century (railroad building and steel making) and the greatest economic feats (modern finance.) They turned the US from a backwater agricultural county to a great industrial power. If they didn't happen, I'd be in a field right now instead of an air-conditioned office on a computer.
Plus we would not have the extra wealth to worry about air pollution and water pollution. Serious environmentalism is primarily a concern of rich, developed nations (which right now are those that embrace the free market).
My problem with DVD watching is that I tend to notice the digital artifacting (jaggies, areas of unchanging pixels appear to be sharply unmoving versus more animated areas with slight movement). The analog artifacting of VHS is less noticeable to me, but I'm a video codec nut.
Re:Not On the Front Page
on
Spring Break
·
· Score: 2
We've got the pipes to handle whatever Slashdot can throw at us (and we've done 10 Mbps bursts), but there was some concern by Slashdot readers that GIS is not "news enough" to be on the front page (for every episode, anyway).
We're really glad to be working with the Slashdot crew, and I break down laughing every time I edit the show!
Re:I want more, dammit.
on
Nuke The Moon
·
· Score: 1
Microsoft is doing fine, but lets look at the Linux stocks...
VA Linux Systems: 52 Week High: $320 Currently: $53
Red Hat: 52 Week High: $151 Now: $38
Anti-trust laws have never helped a single consumer. Of course, the Bell System was a product of restrictive government licensing, so I don't count that one.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe they broke the Mackie Pro Tools HUI, not a Mackie Mixer exactly.
OK, I'm an ex-neuromorphic VLSI researcher, so my impressions may be colored, but let's see...for the last ten years, we've been following Carver Mead's lead that we really need to look at Analog VLSI for simulating cortex and doing cool AI work. It's ulta-low-power, distributed massively parallel computation, defect tolerant, etc. And what has been the result?
Millions of dollars of money going into making bad retinal focal-plane arrays whose output makes QuickCams look good, analog cochlea models that underperform real time digital models, and a handful of other do-nothing circuitry like the one described in this article.
Meanwhile good old digital VLSI has gone from 100 MHz to > 1 GHz, we have actual speech recognition systems running on PCs, and a new range of low-power digital multi-purpose digital CPUs for portable devices.
There has never been a real product developed using neuromorphic VLSI, and the few implementations can now be replaced with faster digital computers.
The best part of neuromorphic VLSI was the electical engineers teaching all the neuroscientists about how electical circuits work, wavelet transforms, etc., to a bunch of people who like to think of the brain more in terms of a Rube Goldberg device where one neuron taps the next neruon instead of a complex chaotic set of electrical network equations.
While it is true that you get amino acids when you subject a mixture of simple hydrocarbon gasses to heat and/or electricity, the ones you get are the easiest ones to make. There are other amino acids that are more energetically complex that cannot be made, and no one has ever generated anything that came close to being RNA/DNA.
What this experiment shows is that there is a rich amount of simple organic building blocks given a particular kind of early earth atmosphere chemistry (the details of which are still sketchy, other atmospheres could have dramatically reduced amino acid production).
The big question is how did these amino acids, and the tough-to-make amino acids come together to form the DNA/RNA based life we have today? The predecessors of organic life may have been inorganic clays that became self-replicating and only later began working with organic molecules. No one has a clue as to the real beginnings of life.
Just for background, Mike Doughney is the co-founder of the ISP DIGEX (purchased by Intermedia Communications, which then spun off a web hosting company called "Digex"). People Easting Tasty Animals took in no money, it was just a parody site. Mike has been dedicated to providing information about cult-like groups for a long time, including transcendental meditation, PETA, and Christian right groups. He makes no money off of this.
After Peta.Org was put on hold in 1996, Mike had his own domain (MTD.com) threatened by the MTD Company (that made lawnmowers). This lead him to form to Domain Name Rights Coalition to fight for the rights of domain name owners.
Rumors are that there will be an appeal of this ruling.
Hearing loss typically occurs in a limited band of frequencies at a time, so you don't normally perceive the loss until enough of your hearing bandwidth is toasted to begin to make it difficult to understand speech. It can be quite insidious, and chances are good that every time you expose yourself to the levels of ear ringing that you are doing some damage (i.e. a few more dB loss over a small band).
The EPA noise limit is an average 70 dBA over 24 hours, and 75 dBA average over an 8 hour working period. This is an average, which means it is safe to be exposed to 3 dBA more power for half the time (i.e. 78 dBA for 4 hours). No exposures should be greater than 100 dBA for any length of time. (Many night clubs come in at 106 dBA or higher).
You Americans really p*ss me off: you live in probably the best country in the world...But you insist on sitting on your hands, shooting each other ... instead of leading the technology, the exploration of the world, and the future of Civilization. You drive me up the wall....
I was just talking with a family member from El Salvador about this very topic. The US should be happy that the most exciting piece of news is Bill Clinton's sex habits.
Meanwhile, elsewhere, people are starving. Really starving, not being comparatively well-fed US homeless.
The major issue with this that I see is when do you reach the point where you're peering rather than purchasing bandwith?
You join the peering crowd when you 1) have connectivity at every major NAP 2) have enough traffic that other Tier 1's start calling you up and talking about peering agreements and 3) your traffic is not asymetrically outgoing, because no one wants to peer with someone who is just going to send them lots of traffic and not take any (i.e. hosting providers).
Of course, it is not as easy to get to this level as it was four years ago (when a few million would have launched you to Tier 1 status). Today, it may take hundreds of millions.
Peering itself is still an unsure issue. There is always talk of major Tier 1's dropping peering agreements for settled exchange.
MAE-East and MAE-West (metropolitan Area Exchange) handle 70-80% of all traffic that goes from one backbone to another., and are paid for by the government.
Although the NSF "designated" several NAPs (Network Access Points) including the MAE-East, I'm not sure any tax money went to support their operations, and very sure that there was no financial support after the end of the NSFNET.
The MAEs are now onwed by MCI/Worldcom, and you have to pay to collocate a router there or run bandwidth into the facility.
I wouldn't say 70-80% of traffic flows through the "public" (i.e. anyone can connect) NAP switches any more. Things are far more complex these days. Every large Tier 1 provider has private peering with several other Tier 1 providers. Besides the MAEs there are all kinds of hosting facilities aimed at attracting routers from various ISPs to exchange traffic in various geographical regions of the world.
For more info on the history of the MAE East, you can watch a "Mysteries of the MAE East" show I did, it is on the bottom of the linked page.
MS wouldn't know innovation if it bit it on their collective asses.
Windows Media Technology is a solid system. WMT is a better live video stream than RealMedia (at least up until RealMedia 8, but I'm still evaluating that recent release).
And I hate to say it, but MFC is one of the better low-end fast-prototyping programming systems I've ever seen.
where were you when Standard Oil was broken up?
Yeah, Standard Oil was terrible - it expanded outputs enormously, innovated continuously, and generally lowered prices for consumers. The price of kerosene dropped from 50 cents per gallon to six cents per gallon from 1860 to 1890. There were 147 competing independent oil refineries when Standard Oil was broken up.
With Microsoft, at least there is the suggestion that there might be some innovation held back. Standard Oil just made oil cheaper and more available.
Most anti-trust decisions were anti-consumer. Such as the American Tobacco Company, broken up despite a decrease in cigarette prices. US Steel dropped steel prices the decade before it was indicted for monopoly activities. Alcoa was indicted for monopolizing the primary ingot aluminum business, despite the fact that there were plenty of scrap aluminum recyclers, and Alcoa reducing the price of aluminum by 90%.
Please read Antitrust Policy: Reform or Repeal for more information.
The DNS registration record was created on 11 May 1999, which was before the first Geeks in Space broadcast was released.
;)
Now the interesting thing is that my email shows that the name for the show was first decided on 4 May 1999, so maybe there was a "leak"
Yep, US cars consume on average about twice as much petrol per mile as the average European's car.
This is true, but it is because Americans drive SUVs with catalytic converters instead of running around in lead-gassed Fiats...
I'll agree that the US has little regulation of vehicular CO2, but no one else does either.
The US economy produces more tonnes of rubbish per tonne of stuff than any other developed economy
The citizens in the countries are left to decay in the choices of their leaders and the desire of the world rulers.
Perhaps they should change their rulers...
The conditions imposed on these countries usually lead to a deep cut in social spending (education, health, public transportation and other services) and a shift to a mainly export-based economy.
Without an export economy, most developing countries have no economy. Where is all of this money for social spending going to come from?
I'll be the first to admit that the pseudo-government controlled world lending organizations are a crock. If there is a chance a loan might be repaid, private financial markets will be capable of making a loan. But we forget that the World Bank/IMF/IADB/etc. came into being because pseudo-socialist governments of developing countries restricted foreign capital investment in their counties unless it was through these "special" loan organizations, and big suprise, a lot of that loan money ended up in the hands of the psuedo-socialist leaders and friends.
As a result of this, these countries have crushing debt. However, until they kill their dictators or manage to not vote away their democracies, nothing is going to change.
Do you want to see a developing country doing well? Look at El Salvador. After the end of the civil war supported by the US and USSR, inflation has fallen, and exports have grown substantially. It is a working multiparty democracy. GDP has tripled, literacy is up, life expectancy is up. If the US dropped its textile protections, El Salvador would be doing even better.
It wasn't industry that moved us beyond the horrors of the Industrial Revolution, it was social reform and laws.
Yeah, but, where were those laws when kids were put to work from sunup till sundown on the farms? And this was doing backbreaking work, not running machines or sweeping up.
Ludwig Von Mises said it best: "It is a distortion of facts to say that the factories carried off the housewives from the nurseries and the kitchens and the children from their play. These women had nothing to cook with and to feed their children. These children were destitute and starving. Their only refuge was the factory. It saved them, in the strict sense of the term, from death by starvation"
The mass exodus from the less-industrialized Continent to industrial Britain during the first half of the 19th Century shows that plenty of people wanted to get factory jobs. It sucked, but it was better than what they had before industrialization.
Child labor only ended when economies grew to the point where only parents were required to work to support the family. This is a recent and post-industrial phenomenon. It could not have happened without the Industrial Revolution. In non-industrialized counties, children still do back breaking work. Actually, this also happens on family farms in the US as well...
Child labor sucks, but let's not imagine that the Industrial Revolution created it. It ended it.
You have areas all over the world being poisoned and desertified by people applying inappropriate agricultural practices foisted upon them in the name of "development".
OK, I'll bite, where is this? Do you think that if the people there were richer that they might perhaps choose to be more environmentally friendly?
On the whole, we do a pretty lousy job of jibing capitalism with environmentalism, and judging by at least the American popular ideology, it will take severe environmental crises to change that reality.
Care to show us the non-capitalist country that has better environmental regulations than the US? For that matter, isn't Europe JUST getting around to banning leaded gas? The Europeans can complain a heck of a lot about the US, but we seem to be better at actually cleaing up our air and water.
There is a reason, of course, and that's because the US is stinking rich and can afford to care about the environment.
And I just wanted to slap someone after watching Ralph Nader whine on television this morning about how "the poor American farmer is working from sunup to sundown to survive against the evil agricultural conglomerates who sell food too cheaply."
I want to know when they'll start supporting the family microchip business. Do you know how expensive chemical vapor deposition machines are? How am I going to make the jump to sub-micron linewidthds? With Intel and AMD, I don't stand a chance. Can someone regulate them, say, back to 2 microns? Now that I can handle.
Far better we fire up a new recession than that the guy at the fiftieth percentile should ever, ever get a raise.
We're you alive in the 1970's? Does "stagflation" mean anything to you?
BTW, housing is CHEAPER now that it was ten years ago, on a per square foot basis. It is just that people prefer bigger houses, the the average house price is higher.
Look at the Industrial Revolution for England and the U.S
That's right, the coming of the steam engine meant that children didn't have to crawl through coal mines, they were replaced with machines. Horrors!
They took those people hapily laboring under the sun in paltry fields to barely feed themselves, and put them in factories where they could afford to feed themselves and perhaps send their kids to school. Horrors! Damn that industrial revolution! I think I'm going to move to Tanzania right now and get back in the pre-industrial world.
I WANT TO STARVE!
Except that there is no such thing as "lassie faire" capitalism except in the minds of the robber barrons of the late 19th century
These "robber barons" were the people who masterminded the greatest technological leaps of the last century (railroad building and steel making) and the greatest economic feats (modern finance.) They turned the US from a backwater agricultural county to a great industrial power.
If they didn't happen, I'd be in a field right now instead of an air-conditioned office on a computer.
Plus we would not have the extra wealth to worry about air pollution and water pollution. Serious environmentalism is primarily a concern of rich, developed nations (which right now are those that embrace the free market).
My problem with DVD watching is that I tend to notice the digital artifacting (jaggies, areas of unchanging pixels appear to be sharply unmoving versus more animated areas with slight movement). The analog artifacting of VHS is less noticeable to me, but I'm a video codec nut.
We've got the pipes to handle whatever Slashdot can throw at us (and we've done 10 Mbps bursts), but there was some concern by Slashdot readers that GIS is not "news enough" to be on the front page (for every episode, anyway).
We're really glad to be working with the Slashdot crew, and I break down laughing every time I edit the show!
OK, now changed to "nearly-weekly"
How does DivX compare with ASF for low bitrate streaming (20 kbps, 34 kbps)?
Life would be simpler the way you state if (IF) everyone thought like us *nixers did, and like having a bunch of little tools that all mesh together.
;)
Oh yeah, kind of like EMACS for instance?
Microsoft is doing fine, but lets look at the Linux stocks...
VA Linux Systems: 52 Week High: $320 Currently: $53
Red Hat: 52 Week High: $151 Now: $38
Anti-trust laws have never helped a single consumer. Of course, the Bell System was a product of restrictive government licensing, so I don't count that one.