No, it's free money for the record companies. If they can put three or four albums on there "if you liked this album, perhaps you'll like these" they can hypothetically sell you 3 additional albums without spending a single cent on marketing them. It's the perfect place to put lesser known or niche acts that don't have enough momentum or mainstream appeal to be marketed on their own. If you use a scalable encoder format, they could offer you teasers at a crap bit rate, and then just sell you the additional bits. (does OGG do this?)
They'd be kinda like a B-side album. Can you imagine the stigma of being a bonus album act, tho? Destined never to sell an album by yourself, never headlining your own album...
There are a few negatives:
1) risk; lose the disc (easy, given the size) and you're down three albums.
2) duplication; if the same bonus album is on several discs, do I get to unlock all of them with one purchase? What if I then give one away?
3) quality; there's only 500 MB, so that works out to 125 MB per album, which isn't going to make the sound quality people happy. Perhaps this can be ameliorated if they use a VBR encoder with manual hinting -- this would be a new trade, the compression engineer, whose job it is to decide the bit-budgets for various parts of the album ("let's give the intro skit 96 kbs, which should allow us to push up this dynamic bit into the 300 odd kbs"). I'd expect some albums to be sold with "gold" compression, and cost more, but take up all 500 MB for one recording. Classical music especially, which will be longer than a typical album, and also appeals the quality conscious and price-insensitive listener.
As near as I can tell, it isn't an RIAA or SDMI initiative. These guys have a good product, but it has nothing to do with any format; they just make a small WORM drive. Of course, if the RIAA has any interest in the device, they wouldn't make it obvious.
They do have the minimum amount of market-speak hoopla to show that using the WORM characteristics, a number of copyright control schemes can be implemented, however, most of these will be at the controller level, not at the device hardware.
Take their unlockable data; basically this means that software is stored in an encrypted state -- the consumer is able to purchase a key which will be stored on a special part of the disc. Other schemes that are possible would be media with a limited lifetime -- just store a timestamp on first listen, and have the controller refuse to play after a certain time.
All of these schemes (and others I haven't discussed) are based on restrictions in the controller. These guys just sell the mechanism, and as near as I can tell, it has no secure policies hardwired into it.
Mind you, that doesn't make it obvious that there will ever be a device sold that without draconian controllers attached. Witness the Minidisc. It would have been a kickass removable media a few years back for computers, but no computer drives were ever produced, as this would have undermined the security of the SCMS that sony was betting on.
well, the thing is that if you have 500MB, you can afford alot more than 256 kbs. That is what sony's ATRAC system uses (and it sounds pretty good, too BTW) to fit 75 mins on a ~ 100MB minidisc. So if you have 4000Gb (500MBx8), you can afford 4000Gb/4000s (~ 66 minutes)=1 Mbs.
So that should sound ok. Perhaps the mp3 codec isn't to your taste? I'm sure ATRAC@ 1Mbs will suffice.
Have you actually taken any biology? Ye gods, man, it's like the experiment the monk did with the peas. He found something called recessive and active genes. After one year, about half of the offspring population will have the recessive gene. The next year, when those moths have hatched, and cacooned, and all adults, approximately (statistically that is) one fourth will not prodece any offspring, and one fourth will spread the gene to the non-mutated group. Contunue this trend untill infinity, and you have the limit of the population of moths due to our messing around. Do yourself a favor, study bilogy, and infinite series.
hrm.
methinks someone forgot to take their prozac today? Running late for biology class?
I'd like to remind you of the parable of the horse and donkey. In the field there were several mares and stallions. They were eating all the cotton (erm, well, some poetic licence to clarify for the prozac addled among us). The farmer was a wise genetic engineer, and introduced glow-in-the-dark male donkeys into the field. Now the donkeys temporarily increased the cotton consumption, but by breeding with the mares, they reduced the size of the herd the following year.
Of course, the resulting mules were sterile. Any amount of medelian (I believe that is the monk you refer to) combination isn't going to get their genes into the next generation, 'cause their tubes have been snipped at birth. Thus, the farmer was able to control the horse population by selecively introducing male donkeys.
By introducing half-sterile animals into the wild the chances for losing control are much diminished. The manipulated moths are unable to procreate without a normal moth, and the offspring thus produced will be completely sterile. That's how I understood the reasoning.
Thus, after two generations, the manipulations should be completely removed from the environment.
It is supposed to do so, but an overapplication of smoothing can make things look fuzzy, which will have your eyes trying to focus better. Of course, this is impossible as the original is blurry (by definition of AA).
This is where clear type and sub-pixel AA on LCDs kicks ass, as it doesn't suffer from the blur problem of CRTs.
There is an art to choosing good convolution kernels for AA, and judging from these comments, it seems that different people on different output devices have different optimal kernels. I hope the final product has this as a configuration option.
I'm partial to the Logitech Trackman FX. Logitech has a nasty habit of putting the trackball under thumb control while clicking with fingers, but the FX is the other way around: a nice BIG trackball, ergonomic shape, and four buttons (two fumb activated, two pinkie) for your clicking pleasure. it is a GREAT input device; well worth the $70 it cost me at compusa.
1) calling party pays. This has been covered already, so I won't ellaborate.
2) No one standardised system. Europe had its share of incompatible standards, but it wasn't until they and most of the rest of the world standardised on GSM that it took off. This opens up the market for handsets much more. The competetion also means that there is effectively no lock-in. I can shop for the handset and the service separately. I can borrow people's handsets to try them out with my SIM before buying. A large part of the growth of GSMs in europe was the "my handset is cooler than yours".
3) the biggest factor, which is slowly coming through in the US, is that when x% of a demographic has something (where x was around the 30 mark for GSMs among young adults in Finland, IIRC), it becomes a percieved draw-back not to have it. Europe's cell-phone chic of point 2 above probably inflated the perceived number of cell phones, hence lowering the real value of x needed. Have you ever tried to coordinate a few groups of friends to meet for a drink downtown without cell phones? it can't be done. People just don't sit at home waiting for the phone to ring. They don't make as predictable plans anymore. Why? because they don't have to; they have cellphones... the circle becomes when this is true for x% of the population.
Europe never had pagers like common in the US, which probably has decreased the need for cell phones (ie raised the value of x).
I'd expect the adoption rate to grow logarithmically over time, so that a small increase/decrease in x is a large change in the time needed to rise to the cusp of adoption.
Apparently this is pretty much how Netware works. ( and they get pretty good numbers for file sharing performance on modest hardware)
IF you have a hugeass (== $$$) DB system, you can probably get away with only supporting a very limited set of hardware configs. Putting everything in what is effectively the kernel probably helps ALOT.
i know about the aimster pig latin stuff, but my question is who has the burden to identify a particular song as copyrighted, and who is responsible in the case of false positives and negatives.
I would like to see a system where the RIAA has to implement servers to answer go/nogo for each song to be listed by napster -- with answers in reasonable time frames and with reasonable penalties for false positives. I guess any song they haven't flagged in 1 minute is assumed to be ok.
So each time a user logs on with a list of songs, Napster's servers sling a bunch of URLs to the RIAA and they go through and flag any they disapprove of. Since the SDMI watermarks worked so well, they already have a technology they claim can do this.
just design it as a data-flow chip, with functional units propagating answers when they are availible and halting on partial inputs (you can even envisage a system which allows out-of-order execution of ALU operations). The main difficulty is likely to be getting in-order commit to work out.
appart from that, it is basically an excersise in bookkeeping -- tag all values as belonging to a subinstruction, so that you are able to get the data dependencies right.
I could go on, but I think you get the idea. However, let me emphasize that the situation of the whole chip waiting on the slowest component is what we AVOID by going asynchonous, as this is exactly the reason why intel needs to pipeline so damn deep to get the clock rate up. They need to split the pipeline into steps small enought that each step can be done in one clock. Asynch circuitry wouldn't have that problem.
I know GPS was encrypted with a perturbation signal, which if you could decrypt it allowed you to determine your position more precisely. Now that they've turned off those codes, that is no longer the case.
There was one perturbation code for all the GPS satelites; the behavior shown during the gulf war (turning the encryption off rather than distributing secure receivers to troops) indicates that the satelites cannot be re-keyed.
I imagine that many of the secret keys are hardcoded into the programs, thus mudding the line between the two. Is a program partially evaluated over a key secure or obscure or both?
Hopefully there is significant redundant security in the system. You know that the NSA aint that stupid. They realise that obscurity != security, but they DO know that obscurity AND security is better than either of the alternatives alone.
Hopefully the cipher codes remain secret, while the algorithms and protocols have been exposed.
So many common day goods (flash freezing, microwaves, teflon...) that we all know and love and depend on are direct spin-offs of the huge investment made in bleeding edge exploration. It is highly unlikely that any company could have afforded to develop these, had they even forseen the market.
SO in a way, yes. NASA is welfare for scientists, but everyone benefits.
In this light, I'd have to say that the budget cuts for NASA were the right thing. The ISS has never been that cutting edge or exploratary, so it is unclear what technological advances it would drive -- the earth is too close and will always be a crutch. A base on the MOON tho. Now that would be cool and useful!
I'm thinking that aluminum lined jackets will be all the rage in a couple year's time; de rigeur for protesters. IIRC aluminum should absorb microwave energy quite nicely. Add insulation on the inside, and a grounding wire, and you're all set.
IT is provably impossible to retrieve the original text from a hash -- a simple counting argument suffices. What you meant is probably that it is hoped to be difficult to construct a message with any given hash (strong requirement) or find two documents with the same hash (weak).
The value of this is that if someone signs a document, this is typically done by encrypting a hash of the document. A weak hash will let Oscar contruct another document to have the same hash, and hence "trick" the signer into having signed that one too. So the security of digital signature relies on this being difficult.
As a counter example, I give CRC-32, which an Oscar only needs control over 33 consecutive bits in order to modify the checksum to be anything he desires.
Someone once said that anything that has to call itself a science isn't. By that argument computer science isn't a science, while physics is. (many excellent professional programmers were physiscists who needed to solve a problem and got hooked -- the problem decomposition skills and intuitive understanding considerably between the two fields)
But the grandparent poster is actually quite accurate. In many cases, you'll be better served by getting a broad liberal arts education with a few key comp-sci courses and then self study.
Programming is not yet a science, not even an engineering discipline. There are a few basics that you will need to learn, in order to get the right foundation for your self-study, such as good problem solving decomosition, algorithm analysis, language theory (P, NP, P-Space...), fundamentals of OS, networking.
After that, you really need to just program program program until you develop your own understanding. Only then are you able to fully grasp what the later courses in a Comp Sci education can get you -- the problem being that you often need more than 4 years in total before you reach that stage.
Hence, I'd recommend getting the basic Comp Sci courses, and then getting as broad an education as you can. You'd be suprised how easy other subjects become when you can attack them with your programming knowledge. I really enjoyed statistics, econometrics, and economics, because I was able to tackle semi-real problems for my papers by using computer simulation; find a good model of consumer behavior, find some economic historic data, see if it fits: instant ecomics paper.
I was under the impression that matrix multiplication paralleized fairly well, if the matrices were big enough. It's kinda Cilk's poster problem, isn't it?
Mind you, if the matrices are small, then the ILP you get from a well unrolled inner loop will be hard to beat.
And as already pointed out, the speed at which the individual FLOPs are done counts too -- tho I hadn't expected the PIII to be twice as slow, for equal Mhz.
I would have thought they had some sort of active aim, to compensate for heat distortion, tall buildings swaying in the wind?
The only problem with that is that moving parts are a maintenance nightmare. Anyone know whether there exists technology to redirect laser in w/o a moving mirror (akin to sweeping an electron beam over a fixed area by applying a varying charge field). I think gravitational lensing is out, but maybe some materials change their index of refraction under charge?
Re:This is part of our destiny.
on
Solar Sails
·
· Score: 1
you can always travel a shorter distance by opening up a wormhole. You mightkill your father before you were conceived, but if you want to go faster than light, you'll have to accept the consequences.
Also, I wonder if anyone with a better understanding of these things could talk about the implications/restrictions implied by a multi-dimensional view of the universe. Like 1) is the theory of relativity a statement of life in 3-space, or does it hold if we can decide to move in time as well? 2) String theory claims that there are 11 odd smaller dimensions. is it theoretically possible to translate a position vector to these dimensions, do a song and a dance, and arrive at your destination in a jiffy?
Re:Better technologies out there
on
Solar Sails
·
· Score: 2
well, slow accellerating might be more the ticket. Keep in mind that it is perfectly feasable to concentrate and redirect the sunlight, and also to capture the reflected photons for use as energy (perhaps to power a hydrogen scoop and thruster)?
For better interplanetary missions, I read the really enjoyable Web between Worlds by Sheffield. He toys with the idea of space rotors (I think Forward wrote about these as well) which basically store ALOT of angular momentum. You jump on in the middle and lower your way out on a rotor. By the time you're at the end, you're up to speed and just let go when you are pointing in the right direction.
Both Velocity and acceleration at the tip are linear in radius, but Acceleration is quadratic in rotation while Velocity is linear, so by doubling arm length and reducing rotation speed by sqrt(2), you maintain a constant acceleration, but increase outgoing velocity by sqrt(2). Tensile requirements go up linerally by radius (it's longer, but acceleration is constant) so the material requirements are not too stringent.
The one caveat is that you have to catch as much as you throw or else inject energy into the rotor some other way.
what happens when the temperature rises above superconductivity? Will we see a catastrophic failure?
The scenario I'm envisaging is that the computer is chugging along, pumping alot of juice through its superconducting wires. However, the cooling unit failed a while back and now the temperature is rising... all of a sudden the CPU is no longer superconducting, and start heating up from the resistance. Because there's so much juice going through them, they heat up A LOT, until the whole thing just melts.
Is that what would happen? or is there not that sort of phase change behavior?
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's free money for the record companies. If they can put three or four albums on there "if you liked this album, perhaps you'll like these" they can hypothetically sell you 3 additional albums without spending a single cent on marketing them. It's the perfect place to put lesser known or niche acts that don't have enough momentum or mainstream appeal to be marketed on their own. If you use a scalable encoder format, they could offer you teasers at a crap bit rate, and then just sell you the additional bits. (does OGG do this?)
They'd be kinda like a B-side album. Can you imagine the stigma of being a bonus album act, tho? Destined never to sell an album by yourself, never headlining your own album...
There are a few negatives:
1) risk; lose the disc (easy, given the size) and you're down three albums.
2) duplication; if the same bonus album is on several discs, do I get to unlock all of them with one purchase? What if I then give one away?
3) quality; there's only 500 MB, so that works out to 125 MB per album, which isn't going to make the sound quality people happy. Perhaps this can be ameliorated if they use a VBR encoder with manual hinting -- this would be a new trade, the compression engineer, whose job it is to decide the bit-budgets for various parts of the album ("let's give the intro skit 96 kbs, which should allow us to push up this dynamic bit into the 300 odd kbs"). I'd expect some albums to be sold with "gold" compression, and cost more, but take up all 500 MB for one recording. Classical music especially, which will be longer than a typical album, and also appeals the quality conscious and price-insensitive listener.
As near as I can tell, it isn't an RIAA or SDMI initiative. These guys have a good product, but it has nothing to do with any format; they just make a small WORM drive. Of course, if the RIAA has any interest in the device, they wouldn't make it obvious.
They do have the minimum amount of market-speak hoopla to show that using the WORM characteristics, a number of copyright control schemes can be implemented, however, most of these will be at the controller level, not at the device hardware.
Take their unlockable data; basically this means that software is stored in an encrypted state -- the consumer is able to purchase a key which will be stored on a special part of the disc. Other schemes that are possible would be media with a limited lifetime -- just store a timestamp on first listen, and have the controller refuse to play after a certain time.
All of these schemes (and others I haven't discussed) are based on restrictions in the controller. These guys just sell the mechanism, and as near as I can tell, it has no secure policies hardwired into it.
Mind you, that doesn't make it obvious that there will ever be a device sold that without draconian controllers attached. Witness the Minidisc. It would have been a kickass removable media a few years back for computers, but no computer drives were ever produced, as this would have undermined the security of the SCMS that sony was betting on.
well, the thing is that if you have 500MB, you can afford alot more than 256 kbs. That is what sony's ATRAC system uses (and it sounds pretty good, too BTW) to fit 75 mins on a ~ 100MB minidisc. So if you have 4000Gb (500MBx8), you can afford 4000Gb/4000s (~ 66 minutes)=1 Mbs.
So that should sound ok. Perhaps the mp3 codec isn't to your taste? I'm sure ATRAC@ 1Mbs will suffice.
Have you actually taken any biology? Ye gods, man, it's like the experiment the monk did with the peas. He found something called recessive and active genes. After one year, about half of the offspring population will have the recessive gene. The next year, when those moths have hatched, and cacooned, and all adults, approximately (statistically that is) one fourth will not prodece any offspring, and one fourth will spread the gene to the non-mutated group. Contunue this trend untill infinity, and you have the limit of the population of moths due to our messing around. Do yourself a favor, study bilogy, and infinite series.
hrm.
methinks someone forgot to take their prozac today? Running late for biology class?
I'd like to remind you of the parable of the horse and donkey. In the field there were several mares and stallions. They were eating all the cotton (erm, well, some poetic licence to clarify for the prozac addled among us). The farmer was a wise genetic engineer, and introduced glow-in-the-dark male donkeys into the field. Now the donkeys temporarily increased the cotton consumption, but by breeding with the mares, they reduced the size of the herd the following year.
Of course, the resulting mules were sterile. Any amount of medelian (I believe that is the monk you refer to) combination isn't going to get their genes into the next generation, 'cause their tubes have been snipped at birth. Thus, the farmer was able to control the horse population by selecively introducing male donkeys.
By introducing half-sterile animals into the wild the chances for losing control are much diminished. The manipulated moths are unable to procreate without a normal moth, and the offspring thus produced will be completely sterile. That's how I understood the reasoning.
Thus, after two generations, the manipulations should be completely removed from the environment.
It is supposed to do so, but an overapplication of smoothing can make things look fuzzy, which will have your eyes trying to focus better. Of course, this is impossible as the original is blurry (by definition of AA).
This is where clear type and sub-pixel AA on LCDs kicks ass, as it doesn't suffer from the blur problem of CRTs.
There is an art to choosing good convolution kernels for AA, and judging from these comments, it seems that different people on different output devices have different optimal kernels. I hope the final product has this as a configuration option.
I'm partial to the Logitech Trackman FX. Logitech has a nasty habit of putting the trackball under thumb control while clicking with fingers, but the FX is the other way around: a nice BIG trackball, ergonomic shape, and four buttons (two fumb activated, two pinkie) for your clicking pleasure. it is a GREAT input device; well worth the $70 it cost me at compusa.
Public airports have free speech areas? what? who? where?
I have NEVER seen this. Smoking areas yes. free speech areas, no. Unless you mean the bathrooms?
Three reasons:
1) calling party pays. This has been covered already, so I won't ellaborate.
2) No one standardised system. Europe had its share of incompatible standards, but it wasn't until they and most of the rest of the world standardised on GSM that it took off. This opens up the market for handsets much more. The competetion also means that there is effectively no lock-in. I can shop for the handset and the service separately. I can borrow people's handsets to try them out with my SIM before buying. A large part of the growth of GSMs in europe was the "my handset is cooler than yours".
3) the biggest factor, which is slowly coming through in the US, is that when x% of a demographic has something (where x was around the 30 mark for GSMs among young adults in Finland, IIRC), it becomes a percieved draw-back not to have it. Europe's cell-phone chic of point 2 above probably inflated the perceived number of cell phones, hence lowering the real value of x needed. Have you ever tried to coordinate a few groups of friends to meet for a drink downtown without cell phones? it can't be done. People just don't sit at home waiting for the phone to ring. They don't make as predictable plans anymore. Why? because they don't have to; they have cellphones... the circle becomes when this is true for x% of the population.
Europe never had pagers like common in the US, which probably has decreased the need for cell phones (ie raised the value of x).
I'd expect the adoption rate to grow logarithmically over time, so that a small increase/decrease in x is a large change in the time needed to rise to the cusp of adoption.
Apparently this is pretty much how Netware works. ( and they get pretty good numbers for file sharing performance on modest hardware)
IF you have a hugeass (== $$$) DB system, you can probably get away with only supporting a very limited set of hardware configs. Putting everything in what is effectively the kernel probably helps ALOT.
So the sole discriminant here is title?
i know about the aimster pig latin stuff, but my question is who has the burden to identify a particular song as copyrighted, and who is responsible in the case of false positives and negatives.
I would like to see a system where the RIAA has to implement servers to answer go/nogo for each song to be listed by napster -- with answers in reasonable time frames and with reasonable penalties for false positives. I guess any song they haven't flagged in 1 minute is assumed to be ok.
So each time a user logs on with a list of songs, Napster's servers sling a bunch of URLs to the RIAA and they go through and flag any they disapprove of. Since the SDMI watermarks worked so well, they already have a technology they claim can do this.
I don't get it. why would you go to all the trouble of getting a sound card with digital in, when you could use your cd rom drive?
just design it as a data-flow chip, with functional units propagating answers when they are availible and halting on partial inputs (you can even envisage a system which allows out-of-order execution of ALU operations). The main difficulty is likely to be getting in-order commit to work out.
appart from that, it is basically an excersise in bookkeeping -- tag all values as belonging to a subinstruction, so that you are able to get the data dependencies right.
I could go on, but I think you get the idea. However, let me emphasize that the situation of the whole chip waiting on the slowest component is what we AVOID by going asynchonous, as this is exactly the reason why intel needs to pipeline so damn deep to get the clock rate up. They need to split the pipeline into steps small enought that each step can be done in one clock. Asynch circuitry wouldn't have that problem.
There seems to be a bit of confusion about this.
I know GPS was encrypted with a perturbation signal, which if you could decrypt it allowed you to determine your position more precisely. Now that they've turned off those codes, that is no longer the case.
There was one perturbation code for all the GPS satelites; the behavior shown during the gulf war (turning the encryption off rather than distributing secure receivers to troops) indicates that the satelites cannot be re-keyed.
I imagine that many of the secret keys are hardcoded into the programs, thus mudding the line between the two. Is a program partially evaluated over a key secure or obscure or both?
Hopefully there is significant redundant security in the system. You know that the NSA aint that stupid. They realise that obscurity != security, but they DO know that obscurity AND security is better than either of the alternatives alone.
Hopefully the cipher codes remain secret, while the algorithms and protocols have been exposed.
So many common day goods (flash freezing, microwaves, teflon ...) that we all know and love and depend on are direct spin-offs of the huge investment made in bleeding edge exploration. It is highly unlikely that any company could have afforded to develop these, had they even forseen the market.
SO in a way, yes. NASA is welfare for scientists, but everyone benefits.
In this light, I'd have to say that the budget cuts for NASA were the right thing. The ISS has never been that cutting edge or exploratary, so it is unclear what technological advances it would drive -- the earth is too close and will always be a crutch. A base on the MOON tho. Now that would be cool and useful!
what? RIAA would sue users for infringing on Aimster's ToS?
That makes no sense, so that's probably not what you meant. What did you mean?
I'm thinking that aluminum lined jackets will be all the rage in a couple year's time; de rigeur for protesters. IIRC aluminum should absorb microwave energy quite nicely. Add insulation on the inside, and a grounding wire, and you're all set.
IT is provably impossible to retrieve the original text from a hash -- a simple counting argument suffices. What you meant is probably that it is hoped to be difficult to construct a message with any given hash (strong requirement) or find two documents with the same hash (weak).
The value of this is that if someone signs a document, this is typically done by encrypting a hash of the document. A weak hash will let Oscar contruct another document to have the same hash, and hence "trick" the signer into having signed that one too. So the security of digital signature relies on this being difficult.
As a counter example, I give CRC-32, which an Oscar only needs control over 33 consecutive bits in order to modify the checksum to be anything he desires.
Someone once said that anything that has to call itself a science isn't. By that argument computer science isn't a science, while physics is. (many excellent professional programmers were physiscists who needed to solve a problem and got hooked -- the problem decomposition skills and intuitive understanding considerably between the two fields)
...), fundamentals of OS, networking.
...
But the grandparent poster is actually quite accurate. In many cases, you'll be better served by getting a broad liberal arts education with a few key comp-sci courses and then self study.
Programming is not yet a science, not even an engineering discipline. There are a few basics that you will need to learn, in order to get the right foundation for your self-study, such as good problem solving decomosition, algorithm analysis, language theory (P, NP, P-Space
After that, you really need to just program program program until you develop your own understanding. Only then are you able to fully grasp what the later courses in a Comp Sci education can get you -- the problem being that you often need more than 4 years in total before you reach that stage.
Hence, I'd recommend getting the basic Comp Sci courses, and then getting as broad an education as you can. You'd be suprised how easy other subjects become when you can attack them with your programming knowledge. I really enjoyed statistics, econometrics, and economics, because I was able to tackle semi-real problems for my papers by using computer simulation; find a good model of consumer behavior, find some economic historic data, see if it fits: instant ecomics paper.
ramble ramble
I was under the impression that matrix multiplication paralleized fairly well, if the matrices were big enough. It's kinda Cilk's poster problem, isn't it?
Mind you, if the matrices are small, then the ILP you get from a well unrolled inner loop will be hard to beat.
And as already pointed out, the speed at which the individual FLOPs are done counts too -- tho I hadn't expected the PIII to be twice as slow, for equal Mhz.
I would have thought they had some sort of active aim, to compensate for heat distortion, tall buildings swaying in the wind?
The only problem with that is that moving parts are a maintenance nightmare. Anyone know whether there exists technology to redirect laser in w/o a moving mirror (akin to sweeping an electron beam over a fixed area by applying a varying charge field). I think gravitational lensing is out, but maybe some materials change their index of refraction under charge?
you can always travel a shorter distance by opening up a wormhole. You mightkill your father before you were conceived, but if you want to go faster than light, you'll have to accept the consequences.
Also, I wonder if anyone with a better understanding of these things could talk about the implications/restrictions implied by a multi-dimensional view of the universe. Like 1) is the theory of relativity a statement of life in 3-space, or does it hold if we can decide to move in time as well? 2) String theory claims that there are 11 odd smaller dimensions. is it theoretically possible to translate a position vector to these dimensions, do a song and a dance, and arrive at your destination in a jiffy?
well, slow accellerating might be more the ticket. Keep in mind that it is perfectly feasable to concentrate and redirect the sunlight, and also to capture the reflected photons for use as energy (perhaps to power a hydrogen scoop and thruster)?
For better interplanetary missions, I read the really enjoyable Web between Worlds by Sheffield. He toys with the idea of space rotors (I think Forward wrote about these as well) which basically store ALOT of angular momentum. You jump on in the middle and lower your way out on a rotor. By the time you're at the end, you're up to speed and just let go when you are pointing in the right direction.
Both Velocity and acceleration at the tip are linear in radius, but Acceleration is quadratic in rotation while Velocity is linear, so by doubling arm length and reducing rotation speed by sqrt(2), you maintain a constant acceleration, but increase outgoing velocity by sqrt(2). Tensile requirements go up linerally by radius (it's longer, but acceleration is constant) so the material requirements are not too stringent.
The one caveat is that you have to catch as much as you throw or else inject energy into the rotor some other way.
ok, you seem to know about this sort of thing.
what happens when the temperature rises above superconductivity? Will we see a catastrophic failure?
The scenario I'm envisaging is that the computer is chugging along, pumping alot of juice through its superconducting wires. However, the cooling unit failed a while back and now the temperature is rising... all of a sudden the CPU is no longer superconducting, and start heating up from the resistance. Because there's so much juice going through them, they heat up A LOT, until the whole thing just melts.
Is that what would happen? or is there not that sort of phase change behavior?
I'm not sure I follow you here. Are you suggesting that an opensourced algorithm would somehow change the licence of the data?
That's like claiming that gcc can only produce binaries that are GPLed, because gcc is GPLed. This is patently false.
It seems to me the licence of the codec is completely immaterial.