The answer is not because the technology is not good enough. Speech command software has come a long way, and in most situations, with the right microphone, it can be very realiable...if you talk clearly.
The problem is that people don't naturally talk clearly. They repeat themselves, add in lots of "ummm"s and "errr"s and "like"s, and generally speak in ways that only another human could symantically understand. Because of this, using a keyboard or mouse to communicate with a computer is always going to me a more effecient mechanism.
You miss the point. Just like with Pen input, everyone wants to think of the tech as a replacement for keyboards when in reality it is simply an alternative form of input that will be extremely useful given the right situation/environment. One obvious one is allowing input/control for those who are disabled (or close to it). A friend of mine's mother had horrible arthritis in both hands, it really kept her from being able to use her computer much. Using voice input allowed her to utilize it much more than what she would have been capable of otherwise. Another general scenerio is someone who needs to use their hands, but would be convenient to "use" a computer while their doing their activity. Heck, this could be useful even driving. One of the biggest complaints about the fancy computer systems in higher end cars today (e.g. BMW) is their complexity. Well this is perfect since BMW uses WinCE (for now at least) and telling the car to "adjust the temperature to 72 degrees" is simpler than wading through the menus (or to "give directions to Hudson St").
So you are correct in that it's not likely to walk into a cubicle farm and hear "File|Save As|myresume.doc" and "10 of clubs under jack of diamonds" coming from the mouths of four dozen workers. But there are PLENTY of other very useful applications for this technology.
I guess bluetooth might be the tech that opens up the phone market (at least on the high end). Looking at all the info, you scarcely see anything related to using the thing as a phone (or maybe it's too early and my bleary eyes missed something). I'm assuming that you HAVE to use a bluetooth headset with the thing, lord knows the form factor doesn't exactly lend itself to putting it up to your head like a traditional phone.
Seems like you could scale the tech down even more and provide one of these bad boys for every home. So now instead of a plumber, you call some overpriced nuclear engineer (named "Buddy") and have him expose his butt crack while he works on your reactor. Of course he'll never have the "right" part with him and he'll have to fly back to Japan to pick up that spare "reflector thingy" and schedule another service call. In the mean time, the husband will come home and rig something up with cardboard and aluminum foil so he can still watch "the game".
Apple's innovative and patent-pending online "Allowance" feature which allows parents to automatically deposit funds into their kids' iTunes Music Store account every month;
My phone only works with Sprint, still waiting for someone to figure out how to easily switch carriers on the phone end too.
This is already very common place with "unlocked" phones. You can't do it with all phones (e.g. some would have to be physically modified), but many can do it with a simple code.
/. is acting weird, so someone will probably have posted a similar idea, but...
If you could figure out a way to sew this into material, then you could have some really "cool" (literally) clothing. I'm sure people like the Army would be very interested in a suit or body armour that offered effective cooling, esp in the desert where a system with a motor could be undesireable. I know it would be sweet to get a set of motorcycle leathers with something like this built in (those Texas summers get a bit toasty).
It was a too little too late attempt to rectify their mistake. By the time they came out with the 88k all the major workstation manufacturers had already chosen or rolled their own. The 88k would be less than a footnote in history if not for the parts of it that they utilized for the PPC. Fact is that Sun begged and pleaded with Moto to come up with a RISC proccie and Moto's failure to act is one of the biggest management mistakes in the early days of computing.
Well, not totally of course. We'll have to see what type of name they give it, but it's another once proud pioneer of the industry fading into obscurity. Moto's big downfall in the cpu market was their utter failure to acknowledge the importance of RISC to many of their core customers (the workstation manufs). Causing Sun to develop SPARC and opening the door to the likes of MIPS. Sigh....
How does this compare to VLIW?
on
Grid Processing
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Forgive me if I'm off base here, but perhaps a proccie nerd can explain the differences between this design and say VLIW. They seem closely related, breaking the app into parallelizable chunks and sending them to n execution units. The article doesn't mention if the trips processing nodes can 'talk' to each other. If they can't, then this seems very similar in concept to vliw (if not different in physical and logical layout).
In the first controlled experiment of infrasound, Lord and Wiseman played four contemporary pieces of live music, including some laced with infrasound, at a London concert hall and asked the audience to describe their reactions to the music.
The audience did not know which pieces included infrasound but 22 percent reported more unusual experiences when it was present in the music.
Their unusual experiences included feeling uneasy or sorrowful, getting chills down the spine or nervous feelings of revulsion or fear.
Of perhaps it was their unfortunate decision to place the infrasound in the Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails songs vs the Kylie Minogue and TATU songs (or is the the other way around?).
Is there some good reason why IBM doesn't just improve gcc? I mean, apple uses gcc; free software users use gcc.
This is IBM's product. IBM doesn't sell MacG5's, they sell AIX based workstations based on their POWER and PPC chips. XLC is the compiler for AIX, so it makes sense for them to optimize the compiler for their products. If Apple gets a side benefit, than good for Apple, but it's not like IBM did this for the primary benefit of Apple.
... Of what he's referring to, then I say thank god for the status quo. I barely made it through the first page and only managed to read a couple of paragraphs of the next. After reading the "intro", I still didn't have a clue as to what his point was. Is he saying that todays game reviewers are not "passionate" enough about the industry/segment/genre of which they are reviewing. He may have a bit of a point. I'm a big sports/racing sim fan, and I am usually disapointed in the reviews, esp of the racing sims, as many are done by those who aren't into the genre, and more importantly, the racing that the "game" is simulating. If that's his point, then I think it could have been said much more succinctly. I hope he isn't mistaking verbosity and useless flowery prose for interesting content, for they are not the same. One thing that makes me think he is (other than the article itself), is his reference to music reviews. Inevitably a great many of the music reviews you read are written by those who perhaps spend a bit TOO MUCH time and have a bit TOO MUCH "passion" for the thing that they review. Their reviews then become an unreadable, uninteresting, and most damning, unuseful bit of self agrandizing "techno speak" (as this post seems to be heading towards, so I'll finish up now).
Anyway, if anyone took the time to read the whole schabang and wants to paraphrase in one paragraph, I think most/.'ers would appreciate it.
Why do they bother with these "standardized" benchmarks. We already know that the manuf. tend to gear their products towards scoring well on these things. That and from a content pov, anybody with the requisite hardware could do what they did. Whatever happened to the days when a group with solid domain knowledge would take some products and run it through their "own" benchmarking? Instead of using some canned 3DStudio simulation benchmark, find a bunch of models you've created and test them out. Run the cards through tests that YOU (not YOU the reader, YOU the ficticious reviewer) know are important. In this way people get a MUCH more realistic feel for what type of performance they can expect and the reviewer actually has some value added to doing the review in the first place (not just running the same thing that the eight "other" benchmarking sites do).
hardware has progressed dramatically over the past decade and left software somewhere behind... there is nt much use for faster and faster servers when software doesn't keep up the phase... this decade will be a "software decade"
Not really. The functionality offered by software has pretty much flatlined (with the major exception being "media", e.g. mp3, mpeg, divx, etc). HOWEVER, the bloat and overhead of software continues to keep pace (and often surpasses) with the speed of hardware. This trend has no end in sight (mo features, mo features, mo features. Lookat those scaled miniature window/icons sitting in my dock updating realtime, oooh, aaaah. Lookat that 3d rotating desktop). Not meaning to pick on Apple here (I own several myself), but they are at the vanguard of eye candy code bloat, with Microsoft trying quickly to catch up.
This is why we need that Martian Nuclear PP
on
Network Blackout
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Everyone could have switched over to ConMars power. Being a Russian installation, they would have just strung about 17million Home Depot Heavy Duty extension cords all plugged together from here to Mars (the outdoor version of course) to access it.
Not only can the Opteron power both 32-bit and 64-bit, but it also performs just as well as the Itanium in either environment.
Oh really, the Opteron performs just as well with natively compiled 64bit apps? Do you have links to 64bit benchmarks that show this. Everything I've seen shows I2 ahead in integer performance and way ahead in floating point. Don't know if the Opteron #'s are for "native" 64bit code though (and what difference it would make if it were, but it's still nice to do a apples/apples comparison).
A search on "to be or not to be" produces an error (non-matching results) in three of the first ten results: a 30% search failure rate. It used to be worse, when most of the links were bad.
This is a bit of a misrepesentation. Google will toss the words 'to' 'be' and 'or'. So you effectively end up searching on 'not'. It does this to eliminate words that show up to frequently and make the searches faster (and the overloading of the word 'or'). If you really want that text, then either quote the whole thing, or place a '+' in front of those words, which will give you exactly what you're looking for. So there is no problem with it's acurracy when you understand the proper way to ask it for something.
Don't bend your fiber. I could of swore not bending optial equipment was a given.....
Obviously you have to allow for some amount of bending, or it would be a useless technology. The issue here is that radii originally thought to be "safe", might not be if you pump a strong enough signal through. So the current standards are fine as long as you keep your power at a certain level. If you do need to increase signal strength, then things may start failing.
It's also about better (not just faster) computing
on
Time For A Cray Comeback?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Don't just think about solving a static problem faster, it's also about solving a problem better through the use of more variables. Take weather simulation. If having too many variables stretches todays forcast into next week, then it's useless. So you limit the amount of variables to come up with a "close enough" forcast in a more timely manner. With a faster computer, you can get a more accurate simulation in a more reasonable time period. This increase in accuracy/complexity is then useful in many fields.
Nearly all of them are designs to be put on black t-shirts... Probably because black doesn't show pit/food stains as easily and can be reworn for months on end without washing.
Don't forget it's slimming qualities as all those years of sitting on ones arse, eating pizza/chocolate doughnuts, and slamming 500 calorie super energy drinks start to catch up.
This means that they can sell the CDs for $4 and still make a profit. Why can't RIAA sell CDs at $10, get more sales, and make a profit?
Because the artists don't see a dime from these "pirated" cd's. Because the pirates don't have to go through legitmate means to manufacture and distribute (payrolls are smaller, no taxes, etc). Because the pirates can fend of competition with a Glock or an AK. Because the pirates don't have to advertise or have marketing campains (the industry does it for them). etc, etc, etc. Not to say that all these factors add up to the $15 that the legit versions sell for, but you obviously can't take the price that the piraters are selling for and in any way extrapolate what a reasonable "legit" price would be (other than to say that it is probably more than $4.00).
Slashdot Mirror
The answer is not because the technology is not good enough. Speech command software has come a long way, and in most situations, with the right microphone, it can be very realiable...if you talk clearly. The problem is that people don't naturally talk clearly. They repeat themselves, add in lots of "ummm"s and "errr"s and "like"s, and generally speak in ways that only another human could symantically understand. Because of this, using a keyboard or mouse to communicate with a computer is always going to me a more effecient mechanism.
You miss the point. Just like with Pen input, everyone wants to think of the tech as a replacement for keyboards when in reality it is simply an alternative form of input that will be extremely useful given the right situation/environment. One obvious one is allowing input/control for those who are disabled (or close to it). A friend of mine's mother had horrible arthritis in both hands, it really kept her from being able to use her computer much. Using voice input allowed her to utilize it much more than what she would have been capable of otherwise. Another general scenerio is someone who needs to use their hands, but would be convenient to "use" a computer while their doing their activity. Heck, this could be useful even driving. One of the biggest complaints about the fancy computer systems in higher end cars today (e.g. BMW) is their complexity. Well this is perfect since BMW uses WinCE (for now at least) and telling the car to "adjust the temperature to 72 degrees" is simpler than wading through the menus (or to "give directions to Hudson St").
So you are correct in that it's not likely to walk into a cubicle farm and hear "File|Save As|myresume.doc" and "10 of clubs under jack of diamonds" coming from the mouths of four dozen workers. But there are PLENTY of other very useful applications for this technology.
I guess bluetooth might be the tech that opens up the phone market (at least on the high end). Looking at all the info, you scarcely see anything related to using the thing as a phone (or maybe it's too early and my bleary eyes missed something). I'm assuming that you HAVE to use a bluetooth headset with the thing, lord knows the form factor doesn't exactly lend itself to putting it up to your head like a traditional phone.
Now Chairface Chippendale can finally finish writing his name on the moon!
That thing must have one heck of an adjustable platten!
Seems like you could scale the tech down even more and provide one of these bad boys for every home. So now instead of a plumber, you call some overpriced nuclear engineer (named "Buddy") and have him expose his butt crack while he works on your reactor. Of course he'll never have the "right" part with him and he'll have to fly back to Japan to pick up that spare "reflector thingy" and schedule another service call. In the mean time, the husband will come home and rig something up with cardboard and aluminum foil so he can still watch "the game".
Apple's innovative and patent-pending online "Allowance" feature which allows parents to automatically deposit funds into their kids' iTunes Music Store account every month;
Yet another worthless, obvious patent. Sigh.
My phone only works with Sprint, still waiting for someone to figure out how to easily switch carriers on the phone end too.
This is already very common place with "unlocked" phones. You can't do it with all phones (e.g. some would have to be physically modified), but many can do it with a simple code.
/. is acting weird, so someone will probably have posted a similar idea, but ...
If you could figure out a way to sew this into material, then you could have some really "cool" (literally) clothing. I'm sure people like the Army would be very interested in a suit or body armour that offered effective cooling, esp in the desert where a system with a motor could be undesireable. I know it would be sweet to get a set of motorcycle leathers with something like this built in (those Texas summers get a bit toasty).
So what was the 88000?
It was a too little too late attempt to rectify their mistake. By the time they came out with the 88k all the major workstation manufacturers had already chosen or rolled their own. The 88k would be less than a footnote in history if not for the parts of it that they utilized for the PPC. Fact is that Sun begged and pleaded with Moto to come up with a RISC proccie and Moto's failure to act is one of the biggest management mistakes in the early days of computing.
Well, not totally of course. We'll have to see what type of name they give it, but it's another once proud pioneer of the industry fading into obscurity. Moto's big downfall in the cpu market was their utter failure to acknowledge the importance of RISC to many of their core customers (the workstation manufs). Causing Sun to develop SPARC and opening the door to the likes of MIPS. Sigh ....
Forgive me if I'm off base here, but perhaps a proccie nerd can explain the differences between this design and say VLIW. They seem closely related, breaking the app into parallelizable chunks and sending them to n execution units. The article doesn't mention if the trips processing nodes can 'talk' to each other. If they can't, then this seems very similar in concept to vliw (if not different in physical and logical layout).
In the first controlled experiment of infrasound, Lord and Wiseman played four contemporary pieces of live music, including some laced with infrasound, at a London concert hall and asked the audience to describe their reactions to the music.
The audience did not know which pieces included infrasound but 22 percent reported more unusual experiences when it was present in the music.
Their unusual experiences included feeling uneasy or sorrowful, getting chills down the spine or nervous feelings of revulsion or fear.
Of perhaps it was their unfortunate decision to place the infrasound in the Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails songs vs the Kylie Minogue and TATU songs (or is the the other way around?).
Is there some good reason why IBM doesn't just improve gcc? I mean, apple uses gcc; free software users use gcc.
This is IBM's product. IBM doesn't sell MacG5's, they sell AIX based workstations based on their POWER and PPC chips. XLC is the compiler for AIX, so it makes sense for them to optimize the compiler for their products. If Apple gets a side benefit, than good for Apple, but it's not like IBM did this for the primary benefit of Apple.
... Of what he's referring to, then I say thank god for the status quo. I barely made it through the first page and only managed to read a couple of paragraphs of the next. After reading the "intro", I still didn't have a clue as to what his point was. Is he saying that todays game reviewers are not "passionate" enough about the industry/segment/genre of which they are reviewing. He may have a bit of a point. I'm a big sports/racing sim fan, and I am usually disapointed in the reviews, esp of the racing sims, as many are done by those who aren't into the genre, and more importantly, the racing that the "game" is simulating. If that's his point, then I think it could have been said much more succinctly. I hope he isn't mistaking verbosity and useless flowery prose for interesting content, for they are not the same. One thing that makes me think he is (other than the article itself), is his reference to music reviews. Inevitably a great many of the music reviews you read are written by those who perhaps spend a bit TOO MUCH time and have a bit TOO MUCH "passion" for the thing that they review. Their reviews then become an unreadable, uninteresting, and most damning, unuseful bit of self agrandizing "techno speak" (as this post seems to be heading towards, so I'll finish up now).
/.'ers would appreciate it.
Anyway, if anyone took the time to read the whole schabang and wants to paraphrase in one paragraph, I think most
Why do they bother with these "standardized" benchmarks. We already know that the manuf. tend to gear their products towards scoring well on these things. That and from a content pov, anybody with the requisite hardware could do what they did. Whatever happened to the days when a group with solid domain knowledge would take some products and run it through their "own" benchmarking? Instead of using some canned 3DStudio simulation benchmark, find a bunch of models you've created and test them out. Run the cards through tests that YOU (not YOU the reader, YOU the ficticious reviewer) know are important. In this way people get a MUCH more realistic feel for what type of performance they can expect and the reviewer actually has some value added to doing the review in the first place (not just running the same thing that the eight "other" benchmarking sites do).
hardware has progressed dramatically over the past decade and left software somewhere behind... there is nt much use for faster and faster servers when software doesn't keep up the phase... this decade will be a "software decade"
Not really. The functionality offered by software has pretty much flatlined (with the major exception being "media", e.g. mp3, mpeg, divx, etc). HOWEVER, the bloat and overhead of software continues to keep pace (and often surpasses) with the speed of hardware. This trend has no end in sight (mo features, mo features, mo features. Lookat those scaled miniature window/icons sitting in my dock updating realtime, oooh, aaaah. Lookat that 3d rotating desktop). Not meaning to pick on Apple here (I own several myself), but they are at the vanguard of eye candy code bloat, with Microsoft trying quickly to catch up.
Everyone could have switched over to ConMars power. Being a Russian installation, they would have just strung about 17million Home Depot Heavy Duty extension cords all plugged together from here to Mars (the outdoor version of course) to access it.
1. Build Nuclear Power Plant on Mars
2.
3. Profit!
Not only can the Opteron power both 32-bit and 64-bit, but it also performs just as well as the Itanium in either environment.
Oh really, the Opteron performs just as well with natively compiled 64bit apps? Do you have links to 64bit benchmarks that show this. Everything I've seen shows I2 ahead in integer performance and way ahead in floating point. Don't know if the Opteron #'s are for "native" 64bit code though (and what difference it would make if it were, but it's still nice to do a apples/apples comparison).
A search on "to be or not to be" produces an error (non-matching results) in three of the first ten results: a 30% search failure rate. It used to be worse, when most of the links were bad.
This is a bit of a misrepesentation. Google will toss the words 'to' 'be' and 'or'. So you effectively end up searching on 'not'. It does this to eliminate words that show up to frequently and make the searches faster (and the overloading of the word 'or'). If you really want that text, then either quote the whole thing, or place a '+' in front of those words, which will give you exactly what you're looking for. So there is no problem with it's acurracy when you understand the proper way to ask it for something.
Don't bend your fiber. I could of swore not bending optial equipment was a given.....
Obviously you have to allow for some amount of bending, or it would be a useless technology. The issue here is that radii originally thought to be "safe", might not be if you pump a strong enough signal through. So the current standards are fine as long as you keep your power at a certain level. If you do need to increase signal strength, then things may start failing.
Don't just think about solving a static problem faster, it's also about solving a problem better through the use of more variables. Take weather simulation. If having too many variables stretches todays forcast into next week, then it's useless. So you limit the amount of variables to come up with a "close enough" forcast in a more timely manner. With a faster computer, you can get a more accurate simulation in a more reasonable time period. This increase in accuracy/complexity is then useful in many fields.
But when can I see the results of the Wet /. T-Shirt contest??
/.'ers out there in wet tshirts, all of whom could use the "bro" or the "manssiere" just about made me lose my lunch.
Dude, the image of all those
Nearly all of them are designs to be put on black t-shirts... Probably because black doesn't show pit/food stains as easily and can be reworn for months on end without washing.
Don't forget it's slimming qualities as all those years of sitting on ones arse, eating pizza/chocolate doughnuts, and slamming 500 calorie super energy drinks start to catch up.
Fans of Madge, Thomas Conrad and IBM rejoice!
This means that they can sell the CDs for $4 and still make a profit. Why can't RIAA sell CDs at $10, get more sales, and make a profit?
Because the artists don't see a dime from these "pirated" cd's. Because the pirates don't have to go through legitmate means to manufacture and distribute (payrolls are smaller, no taxes, etc). Because the pirates can fend of competition with a Glock or an AK. Because the pirates don't have to advertise or have marketing campains (the industry does it for them). etc, etc, etc. Not to say that all these factors add up to the $15 that the legit versions sell for, but you obviously can't take the price that the piraters are selling for and in any way extrapolate what a reasonable "legit" price would be (other than to say that it is probably more than $4.00).