I'm still befuddled by what the deal with this picture is. All I can see are the colours that you can confirm by going into any image editing program and checking the pixels: i.e. a light blue and a golden/brownish colour. Now some people are saying you should make some sort of judgement as to what colour the dress really is, when compensating for the bad exposure, to which I can just say: I don't know. There isn't actually enough information in the picture to make that call. I wonder why this isn't a more common answer; when you can't be sure of something "I don't know" is perfectly acceptable as an answer.
They also killed countless people with nasty practices like bleeding sick patients and prescribing all sorts of other counter-productive remedies, all the while preaching that only God can heal and we are at His mercy. That sort of stubborn attitude born from religious stupidity set back possible advancement in medicine by decades. Any good that did come out of it was entirely despite the religious nonsense, not because of it. Not to mention the church burning so called "witches" who were frequently wise women that actually did help people with their primitive herbal medicines (not that all of their remedies were efficacious either of course).
The reason you don't hear a ton of interesting stuff coming from strong (general) AI research and interest in the field is limited is simple: strong AI is pretty damn useless until you reach the critical point where it matches (or really exceeds) human intelligence. An AI program with the effective intelligence of a worm/mouse/rat/monkey or whatever isn't interesting outside of academia.
I suspect that when strong AI comes around it will be rather sudden for most people, who simply won't see it coming. I doubt it will take long after computers reach the point where they can match the human brain in raw computational power, there is simply too much interest in the field, and honestly human intelligence is really rather unremarkable no matter what some people like to believe.
Get a Kobo, turn off WiFi and drop the ePubs onto the device via USB. That's what I do and no publisher has any control over it whatsoever. Currently reading World Without End this way, which clocks in at nearly 1000 pages and having seen the paper version I'm damn glad I don't have to read it that way. I'd probably sprain my wrists if I did, hefty as it is.
The solution to global warming is simple and we have the technology to slash carbon emissions right now. All it requires is a willingness to replace all fossil fuel fired power plants with nuclear plus some additional capacity, investment in a more robust power grid, and huge subsidies for electric cars combined with slowly increasing taxes on petrol.
Not only would this solve the global warming issue, it will also cut off the money supply to many of the Islamic terrorist organizations and undermine the power of several pathological governments such as Russia and Iran. In fact, it might even end up being cheaper for the U.S. in the long run than fighting constant wars in the Middle East.
I don't get it. I've been using Win8.1 for about 4 months now after my trusty old Vista box gave up the ghost and I haven't used a single metro app, and have only really seen the start screen when I accidentally hit the Windows key on my keyboard and to search for stuff maybe twice. I'm annoyed that they didn't include the option to switch back to the Aero glass window scheme but other than that it's fine. To me it operates the same as Windows always has. It is possible that I'm just weird though, since I never really used the Start Menu much either. All the applications I use are sorted into categories as a toolbar menu on the Taskbar (or pinned to the Taskbar for the most frequently used ones).
I suppose it really depends on personal preference and what you do with your PC, but personally I find XP terrible in comparison to Vista/7/8. I jumped to Vista almost as soon as it was released and used it for many years, and now I'm on 8.1. The biggest thing for me is the user-mode video drivers. The number of system lockups that I had on NT4/Win2k/XP due to video card issues are countless, and they were almost entirely eliminated after that change was made to the operating system. As someone who primarily does 3D graphics programming, this is a huge feature.
It baffles me that some people actually believe that those concerned about global warming think that it will cause the end of humanity. It won't. Even if the most catastrophic predictions come true, not only will life on Earth continue on just fine, but human life will also continue. We are a very adaptive species and even in the case of extreme climate change, parts of the Earth will become more hospitable to humans than they are now. It just happens that people concerned about climate change don't think that 20% or more of the human population being wiped out is an acceptable path to take when reasonable alternatives exist.
It is possible for us to reduce CO2 emissions right now, with minimal economic impact, if we are willing. All it would take would be a concentrated push towards nuclear power generation, coupled with electric vehicles for transport and we could reduce emissions in short order without destroying any economies. Of course instead both Germany and Japan are dialing down their nuclear programs in favour of burning more coal.
Unity has had the ability to create 64bit executables for a while but the editor is still a 32bit program, which can be very limiting if you are developing a large game. A 64bit editor is scheduled for Unity5 and indeed one of the biggest selling points of the new version. There's no release date for Unity5 yet though and I imagine it is at least 6 months out, considering there is at least one more big update to 4.x coming (4.6, which will include the new GUI tools).
And you seem to have missed the part where "running hotter than SandyBridge" applies only to overclocking. Yes, IB is a worse overclocker than SB, but under normal conditions IvyBridge is faster and uses less power than SandyBridge. Remember that overclockers are a tiny portion of the market. IvyBridge isn't the amazing revolutionary chip some people were expecting but it is a successful, evolutionary step forward. Just like most processor generations.
Thing is for every problem you point out with a AI driven car you can point out 5 problems with human drivers. Humans frequently mess up in hazardous conditions, especially if they aren't used to them, meanwhile an AI car is going to be programmed for all possible conditions before it will ever be released into the wild. As for something being wrong with the car, that's what sensors are for. We have to rely on imperfect queues like smell, the AI on the other hand should be plugged straight into the onboard computer and have an excellent overview of the car's health. It might miss corner cases but once again, humans will miss many more. Also humans will often suspect something is wrong and carry on anyway because they can't be bothered to check it out, while the AI can be forced to pull over and demand a fix before carrying on.
There will still be deaths on the road if we switch over to 100% AI controlled traffic but I'll be damned if it won't drop the road toll to a tenth or less than what it is now. That's a ton of lives that will be saved, as well as the added convenience of not having to drive yourself. Of course convincing people to give up control to a machine is going to be a tough sell.
It might help if Android had some sort of built in performance metric similar to the Windows experience index, that can measure the CPU/GPU/memory/etc... and spew out some easy to understand numbers that a user can use to compare to minimum specs listed in the Android store. Something like you need a minimum score of 3, recommended 4, you check your phone, see it only has a 2.2 and skip buying that particular game. No confusing GPU series numbers, memory amounts, CPU Mhz or Ghz or core count numbers, just a simple score the user can compare (or even the device automatically compares and lets the user know). As far as I know nothing like that exists just yet but it would be simple to implement and really solve the problem of different device capabilities for game developers.
While marketing likes to throw things like 2000 cores!!! around, GPU SIMD units really aren't cores. A core implies a complete processing unit, that includes things like a decoder, memory controller, etc... while the shaders in a GPU are barely more than the SIMD co-processing units found in modern CPUs. Of course the language is already muddled through things like the new Bulldozer "cores" that share a single FPU between two cores, which has many people calling their 8-core processors quad-cores with Hyperthreading on steroids. Still, calling a GPU shader unit a "core" is a pretty serious abuse of that word.
One reason that transistor count matters is that it allows you to make some comparison regarding the efficiency of the processor. If the previous claim of 2 billion transistors were correct the efficiency of BD compared to Intels SB would have been horrible (almost twice the transistor count and significantly lower performance in most benchmarks).
On the other hand if the new 1.2 billion figure is correct it means instead that the transistor density is quite bad (since the die size is still the same) and of course power consumption and performance in benchmarks is still much lower than Intel's SB chips. It does give a glimmer of hope for AMD though, so far as the basic architecture of BD goes and might mean that advancements at GloFo in their process technology might make it competitive in the future (which is better than AMD having to pull a completely new architecture out of their hat).
This whole thing reeks of damage control though, and people have suggested that both numbers are "correct" but just represent different ways of counting the transistors. I just hope AMD can recover and start offering some true competition to Intel because the price of their 6-core SB-E chips is ludicrous.
Any site that really requires strong security (such as banks) should run a suite of standard password cracking programs (including ones using lists of passwords that have come out of large leaks, such as the Sony ones) over all their user passwords at regular intervals and notify users if their password is considered weak (i.e. found by the tools). Sure, it won't help with people that just don't care (if you use "password" as your password you are clearly under no delusion that it is secure) but I'm sure frequently people just don't realize that their password is terrible (or maybe just compromised in a leak).
Sure, throw a bunch of money at technology R&D and you get nice shiny things out. The problem is, if you invest all that space exploration R&D money straight into Earth-centric engineering and technology research you get a far better bang for your buck in terms of real, usable products. Now I'm a huge fan of space exploration for the scientific value of the research and because it inspires people to be involved in science but the neat little spin-off products are just a bonus, not the main reason for doing it. Not even remotely.
I agree that the big studios are just rehashing the same ideas (and often badly at that) but there is plenty of innovation coming from indie developers and mod makers in the community. Look at DotA, which started as a simple UMS map in Starcraft, got ported to Warcraft 3 and has managed to spawn an entire new genre. Or in the indie space we have games like Minecraft and Terraria that are forging the way for yet another new genre of games where the player has the freedom to rebuild/shape his entire game world. That's where I'm betting we will see some really interesting and fun games appear in the future, some more sandboxy like Minecraft and some more like real games (similar to Terraria).
For the big studios it is simply to risky to invest in new (unproven) ideas when they have to recoup millions in development costs. But once a concept is proven in the mod or indie space the big studios will eventually pick it up and polish it. Again, look at DotA, a small mod project, and now we have Heroes of Newerth, League of Legends and DotA2 all competing in that space. Once the concept was considered proven big studios decided to invest in it.
I just really wished that they would stop forcing console UIs on to the PC versions of games. Just watched a video review of Dungeon Siege 3 today and the whole UI looked like a big console-port clusterfuck. Is it really too much to ask that you have separate UI implementations for the console and PC versions of games? Really?
Where are you getting this information? 5 of the 6 reactors at Fukushima Daiichi use low-enriched uranium fuel and one uses MOX, none of them use thorium.
Thorium is another great solution, especially because it is so abundant. However, the huge advantage of the TerraPower design is that it burns existing nuclear waste, making it very cheap (nobody wants the waste) and solves one of the biggest problems with all those existing reactors (what to do with the waste).
Kazaa/Morpheus/Grokster all connect to the same network, FastTrack. They all have the same content and the only difference between them is what advertising is bundeled with them.
Now that's out of my system I go to the next point. Everyone says the software will live on. Not so. All FastTrack clients have to log in to the network using the FastTrack servers. If they shutdown the servers or deny authentication then nobody will be able to use Kazaa/Morpheus/Grokster anymore. Why do you guys think that they announced that Morpheus2.0 will have "links to the Gnutella network"?
I think they anticipated legal trouble right from the beginning. Limiting to 128k means that they can claim the MP3s to be sub-CD quality and therefore not directly competing with CDs.
On the other hand, the implementation of the Internet in places without certain civil liberties provides an interesting challenge to typical Western (idealist) notions about what the Internet does for society.
We may have idealistic notions about the Internet and all the freedom it gives us but truth is that the Internet makes it easier to take away civil liberties than ever before (Carnivore anyone?). Let's all move to Freenet and then the Chinese will have the same liberties as everyone else 'cause you can't monitor/censor it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm still befuddled by what the deal with this picture is. All I can see are the colours that you can confirm by going into any image editing program and checking the pixels: i.e. a light blue and a golden/brownish colour. Now some people are saying you should make some sort of judgement as to what colour the dress really is, when compensating for the bad exposure, to which I can just say: I don't know. There isn't actually enough information in the picture to make that call. I wonder why this isn't a more common answer; when you can't be sure of something "I don't know" is perfectly acceptable as an answer.
They also killed countless people with nasty practices like bleeding sick patients and prescribing all sorts of other counter-productive remedies, all the while preaching that only God can heal and we are at His mercy. That sort of stubborn attitude born from religious stupidity set back possible advancement in medicine by decades. Any good that did come out of it was entirely despite the religious nonsense, not because of it. Not to mention the church burning so called "witches" who were frequently wise women that actually did help people with their primitive herbal medicines (not that all of their remedies were efficacious either of course).
The reason you don't hear a ton of interesting stuff coming from strong (general) AI research and interest in the field is limited is simple: strong AI is pretty damn useless until you reach the critical point where it matches (or really exceeds) human intelligence. An AI program with the effective intelligence of a worm/mouse/rat/monkey or whatever isn't interesting outside of academia.
I suspect that when strong AI comes around it will be rather sudden for most people, who simply won't see it coming. I doubt it will take long after computers reach the point where they can match the human brain in raw computational power, there is simply too much interest in the field, and honestly human intelligence is really rather unremarkable no matter what some people like to believe.
Get a Kobo, turn off WiFi and drop the ePubs onto the device via USB. That's what I do and no publisher has any control over it whatsoever. Currently reading World Without End this way, which clocks in at nearly 1000 pages and having seen the paper version I'm damn glad I don't have to read it that way. I'd probably sprain my wrists if I did, hefty as it is.
The solution to global warming is simple and we have the technology to slash carbon emissions right now. All it requires is a willingness to replace all fossil fuel fired power plants with nuclear plus some additional capacity, investment in a more robust power grid, and huge subsidies for electric cars combined with slowly increasing taxes on petrol.
Not only would this solve the global warming issue, it will also cut off the money supply to many of the Islamic terrorist organizations and undermine the power of several pathological governments such as Russia and Iran. In fact, it might even end up being cheaper for the U.S. in the long run than fighting constant wars in the Middle East.
I don't get it. I've been using Win8.1 for about 4 months now after my trusty old Vista box gave up the ghost and I haven't used a single metro app, and have only really seen the start screen when I accidentally hit the Windows key on my keyboard and to search for stuff maybe twice. I'm annoyed that they didn't include the option to switch back to the Aero glass window scheme but other than that it's fine. To me it operates the same as Windows always has. It is possible that I'm just weird though, since I never really used the Start Menu much either. All the applications I use are sorted into categories as a toolbar menu on the Taskbar (or pinned to the Taskbar for the most frequently used ones).
I suppose it really depends on personal preference and what you do with your PC, but personally I find XP terrible in comparison to Vista/7/8. I jumped to Vista almost as soon as it was released and used it for many years, and now I'm on 8.1. The biggest thing for me is the user-mode video drivers. The number of system lockups that I had on NT4/Win2k/XP due to video card issues are countless, and they were almost entirely eliminated after that change was made to the operating system. As someone who primarily does 3D graphics programming, this is a huge feature.
It baffles me that some people actually believe that those concerned about global warming think that it will cause the end of humanity. It won't. Even if the most catastrophic predictions come true, not only will life on Earth continue on just fine, but human life will also continue. We are a very adaptive species and even in the case of extreme climate change, parts of the Earth will become more hospitable to humans than they are now. It just happens that people concerned about climate change don't think that 20% or more of the human population being wiped out is an acceptable path to take when reasonable alternatives exist.
It is possible for us to reduce CO2 emissions right now, with minimal economic impact, if we are willing. All it would take would be a concentrated push towards nuclear power generation, coupled with electric vehicles for transport and we could reduce emissions in short order without destroying any economies. Of course instead both Germany and Japan are dialing down their nuclear programs in favour of burning more coal.
Unity has had the ability to create 64bit executables for a while but the editor is still a 32bit program, which can be very limiting if you are developing a large game. A 64bit editor is scheduled for Unity5 and indeed one of the biggest selling points of the new version. There's no release date for Unity5 yet though and I imagine it is at least 6 months out, considering there is at least one more big update to 4.x coming (4.6, which will include the new GUI tools).
And you seem to have missed the part where "running hotter than SandyBridge" applies only to overclocking. Yes, IB is a worse overclocker than SB, but under normal conditions IvyBridge is faster and uses less power than SandyBridge. Remember that overclockers are a tiny portion of the market. IvyBridge isn't the amazing revolutionary chip some people were expecting but it is a successful, evolutionary step forward. Just like most processor generations.
Thing is for every problem you point out with a AI driven car you can point out 5 problems with human drivers. Humans frequently mess up in hazardous conditions, especially if they aren't used to them, meanwhile an AI car is going to be programmed for all possible conditions before it will ever be released into the wild. As for something being wrong with the car, that's what sensors are for. We have to rely on imperfect queues like smell, the AI on the other hand should be plugged straight into the onboard computer and have an excellent overview of the car's health. It might miss corner cases but once again, humans will miss many more. Also humans will often suspect something is wrong and carry on anyway because they can't be bothered to check it out, while the AI can be forced to pull over and demand a fix before carrying on.
There will still be deaths on the road if we switch over to 100% AI controlled traffic but I'll be damned if it won't drop the road toll to a tenth or less than what it is now. That's a ton of lives that will be saved, as well as the added convenience of not having to drive yourself. Of course convincing people to give up control to a machine is going to be a tough sell.
It might help if Android had some sort of built in performance metric similar to the Windows experience index, that can measure the CPU/GPU/memory/etc... and spew out some easy to understand numbers that a user can use to compare to minimum specs listed in the Android store. Something like you need a minimum score of 3, recommended 4, you check your phone, see it only has a 2.2 and skip buying that particular game. No confusing GPU series numbers, memory amounts, CPU Mhz or Ghz or core count numbers, just a simple score the user can compare (or even the device automatically compares and lets the user know). As far as I know nothing like that exists just yet but it would be simple to implement and really solve the problem of different device capabilities for game developers.
While marketing likes to throw things like 2000 cores!!! around, GPU SIMD units really aren't cores. A core implies a complete processing unit, that includes things like a decoder, memory controller, etc... while the shaders in a GPU are barely more than the SIMD co-processing units found in modern CPUs. Of course the language is already muddled through things like the new Bulldozer "cores" that share a single FPU between two cores, which has many people calling their 8-core processors quad-cores with Hyperthreading on steroids. Still, calling a GPU shader unit a "core" is a pretty serious abuse of that word.
One reason that transistor count matters is that it allows you to make some comparison regarding the efficiency of the processor. If the previous claim of 2 billion transistors were correct the efficiency of BD compared to Intels SB would have been horrible (almost twice the transistor count and significantly lower performance in most benchmarks). On the other hand if the new 1.2 billion figure is correct it means instead that the transistor density is quite bad (since the die size is still the same) and of course power consumption and performance in benchmarks is still much lower than Intel's SB chips. It does give a glimmer of hope for AMD though, so far as the basic architecture of BD goes and might mean that advancements at GloFo in their process technology might make it competitive in the future (which is better than AMD having to pull a completely new architecture out of their hat). This whole thing reeks of damage control though, and people have suggested that both numbers are "correct" but just represent different ways of counting the transistors. I just hope AMD can recover and start offering some true competition to Intel because the price of their 6-core SB-E chips is ludicrous.
Any site that really requires strong security (such as banks) should run a suite of standard password cracking programs (including ones using lists of passwords that have come out of large leaks, such as the Sony ones) over all their user passwords at regular intervals and notify users if their password is considered weak (i.e. found by the tools). Sure, it won't help with people that just don't care (if you use "password" as your password you are clearly under no delusion that it is secure) but I'm sure frequently people just don't realize that their password is terrible (or maybe just compromised in a leak).
Sure, throw a bunch of money at technology R&D and you get nice shiny things out. The problem is, if you invest all that space exploration R&D money straight into Earth-centric engineering and technology research you get a far better bang for your buck in terms of real, usable products. Now I'm a huge fan of space exploration for the scientific value of the research and because it inspires people to be involved in science but the neat little spin-off products are just a bonus, not the main reason for doing it. Not even remotely.
I agree that the big studios are just rehashing the same ideas (and often badly at that) but there is plenty of innovation coming from indie developers and mod makers in the community. Look at DotA, which started as a simple UMS map in Starcraft, got ported to Warcraft 3 and has managed to spawn an entire new genre. Or in the indie space we have games like Minecraft and Terraria that are forging the way for yet another new genre of games where the player has the freedom to rebuild/shape his entire game world. That's where I'm betting we will see some really interesting and fun games appear in the future, some more sandboxy like Minecraft and some more like real games (similar to Terraria).
For the big studios it is simply to risky to invest in new (unproven) ideas when they have to recoup millions in development costs. But once a concept is proven in the mod or indie space the big studios will eventually pick it up and polish it. Again, look at DotA, a small mod project, and now we have Heroes of Newerth, League of Legends and DotA2 all competing in that space. Once the concept was considered proven big studios decided to invest in it.
I just really wished that they would stop forcing console UIs on to the PC versions of games. Just watched a video review of Dungeon Siege 3 today and the whole UI looked like a big console-port clusterfuck. Is it really too much to ask that you have separate UI implementations for the console and PC versions of games? Really?
Where are you getting this information? 5 of the 6 reactors at Fukushima Daiichi use low-enriched uranium fuel and one uses MOX, none of them use thorium.
Thorium is another great solution, especially because it is so abundant. However, the huge advantage of the TerraPower design is that it burns existing nuclear waste, making it very cheap (nobody wants the waste) and solves one of the biggest problems with all those existing reactors (what to do with the waste).
Kazaa/Morpheus/Grokster all connect to the same network, FastTrack. They all have the same content and the only difference between them is what advertising is bundeled with them.
Now that's out of my system I go to the next point. Everyone says the software will live on. Not so. All FastTrack clients have to log in to the network using the FastTrack servers. If they shutdown the servers or deny authentication then nobody will be able to use Kazaa/Morpheus/Grokster anymore. Why do you guys think that they announced that Morpheus2.0 will have "links to the Gnutella network"?
I think they anticipated legal trouble right from the beginning. Limiting to 128k means that they can claim the MP3s to be sub-CD quality and therefore not directly competing with CDs.
On the other hand, the implementation of the Internet in places without certain civil liberties provides an interesting challenge to typical Western (idealist) notions about what the Internet does for society. We may have idealistic notions about the Internet and all the freedom it gives us but truth is that the Internet makes it easier to take away civil liberties than ever before (Carnivore anyone?). Let's all move to Freenet and then the Chinese will have the same liberties as everyone else 'cause you can't monitor/censor it.