The application they talk about is the programmable transistors in FPGAs.
You can find FPGAs in all kinds of consumer electronics. Typically, the chip has some onboard flash from which it loads its configuration during power on. These transistors which load from flash during power on are the ones the researchers are talking about replacing with memresistors (memristors?). For this kind of application, a 1Hz write speed is completely reasonable. The write will be done once in the factory.
Ok, maybe it isn't really the same thing. However, take a look at this:
HP Computer From 1993
The hardware is somewhere between a laptop and a TI calculator. However, it ran DOS natively, included a PCMCIA expander slot. And in one way it is far superior to current netbooks: it could run for 90+ hours on battery. It just had a slot that you put in off the shelf AA's into it. (I wonder why none of the laptops today do that? Sure, perhaps lower performance than packaged up, but so much cheaper and easy to replace when the life decays.)
HDDs dont need radiation to degrade, room temperature will suffice:
1) Thermal instability of magnetic media leads to degrading of magnetic field. Results in loss of bit.
2) This happens often enough that the ECC is overwhelmed.
As capacity goes up, the energy per bit goes down. The MAJOR design challenge with HDD media is making it writable by a tiny head, yet not writable by random thermal induced fields at room temperature.
The direct temperature effect from cosmic rays are absolutely infinitesimal. The very highest energy particles only carry a single calorie of energy.
google calorie to electron-Volt ratio
It is controversial that cosmic rays have any effect. However, the most likely effect would be cooling by increasing cloud formation.
The Sun is pretty much a black box as far as climate goes. We can observe the radiation output directly. It doesn't matter what is driving the changes.
Solar physicists have most likely thought about this possibility at some point and done the math on some possibilities.
Standards often take a year or more to make it through committees and get ratified. "Not exists" could mean "not yet a standard, still a draft". Often the basic technology and operation is finalized long before the draft makes it into full standard. The last few issues will be working out potentially ambiguous phrasing and correcting small mistakes that won't break compatibility. (e.g. "this says the device 'should' attempt five reconnects, but it should say the device 'may' attempt up to five reconnects")
(This is trying and be as charitable as possible to Apple. That is still a misleading phrasing.)
Isn't the whole idea of a sniper that the enemy doesn't know they are being attacked until after they are hit?
Maybe someone with experience in this area could comment on sniper tactics?
Quoth the wikipedia page on the "Lost Cause" intellectual movement:
"To the old Union they had said that the Federal power had no authority to interfere with slavery issues in a state. To their new nation they would declare that the state had no power to interfere with a federal protection of slavery. Of all the many testimonials to the fact that slavery, and not states rights, really lay at the heart of their movement, this was the most eloquent of all.[15]"
Just wanted to point out that the science in Brin's novels is pretty consistently awful.
For example, in "Sundiver" there is a space-elevator kind of thing. Instead of a wire though, it is a sealed cylinder that blimps float up into outer space. Total fundamental misunderstanding of how air pressure works. Basic basic stuff.
He definitely doesn't consider himself a hard sci-fi writer. He describes hard sci-fi authors as an elitist group that has ghettoized itself.
Hey, just wanted to chime in. I've met some of the "leaders" of my WoW guild in person. Let me just say that well they all had some aspects in common, social ineptness was not among them.
They were all:
unemployed
young (early 20s)
financed by parents
well dressed and sociable
Not to sound racist, but they were also all Asian (although I don't think this was a factor), and all grew up in USA.
I don't know what you want to call "addicted", but they were all doing 4 hour+ instances several times a week. It wasn't like they were junkies or anything, but the gaming schedule would be impractical with a job.
They probably use something like that in the controller, combined with bluetooth to the console. $8.50 each ain't cheap, but I'm sure with volume in the millions like Nintendo has that cost goes way down.
It would be a horrible horrible let down if "motion sensing" means something other than accelerometers in the controller.
I believe the term "law" is in the sense of Newton's laws, Moore's Law is not really something you can test and observe as much as it is a paradigm.
A couple of hours ago a professor put up a slide of the graph of the industry trade group that gets together and makes predictions for feature size, clock speed, and transistor density for 10 years out.
The reason they do this is for planning. I'm not sure why anyone wouldn't believe in Moore's Law at this point, PHBs included. It has been an observed trend for 30+ years.
As for being too busy working on transistor count to do other things, transistor count is really independent of architecture, and has nothing to do with software. So, they are doing both. In terms of architecture: MMX, two layer caches, hyper threading, and now dual cores just off the top of my head. And as for compilers, the question these days is *which* full featured object-oriented library with support for GUI, networking, and multi-threading with all the utility classes and syntax sugar you can think of thrown in.
Let's take a pedantic tour of the universe starting from the core of a star.
In your typical (not in a super-nova) star, fusion is only taking place in a small fraction of the stars volume.
About as much mass as is in stars is also floating around as a diffuse ionized gas in intergalactic space at a million degrees kelvin.
About 6 times as much mass as there is in both of these combined exists in the form of dark matter.
Finally, approximately 4 times as much mass as all of these combined exists in the form of dark energy.
So, the natural state of the universe is some kind of exotic matter. We are the froth on the surface of the lake of the universe. 5% (not hydrogen or helium gas) of 1/5th (not dark energy) of 1/7th (not dark matter) of the stuff out there.
The first chapter of the group theory textbook I looked at was about all the rotations that could be done to bring a three dimensional object back to an equivalent position.
Maybe the person who wrote this article learned about group theory in the context of encryption? But even there you get a picture of cutting a set perfectly in half.
Sorry to parent, but people seem to be taking this seriously so I gotta point out that this is BS so hopefully noone takes this seriously...
"Consider the semiconductor." Ok, here is the parent posts first fundamental misconception. Digital doesn't necessarily mean semiconductor. Say, for example CDs which encode digital data using light.
"By adding information, you can blend things together, then demodulate them to see what happened as the change in information." that isn't how light works, the waves superpose ontop of each other, just like every other kind of wave... "This modulation mimics how ALUs/accumulators/CPUs work" No, no it doesn't.
There is a difference between storing and transmitting information and actual computation. You need some kind of devices which emit light depending on light inputs implementing AND OR and NOT logic.
Not helping is that this guy sounds like an idiot: WTF does "mosh" mean anyway? "integer algebraic"? "the electromagnetic spectra" (I guess theres more than one of the electromagnetic spectrum) "your basic light switch is your basic computer" see above, a SWITCH is one bit of memory -- computation means implementing AND OR or NOT, at a minimum.
The whole thing is extremely vague. However, what you describe sounds more like relativism to me. The idea is that an action can only be judged relative to the time and place. The way that philosophy plays out it ends up being more like apologism for historical atroicities.
This is like fast talking however, given the "secular" part. It paints all atheists as amoral, or at least very weak morally. To which I would respond: a church or religious organization is a power structure like any other. As such it must constantly fight for its own survival. Thus, strong religion is essentially the same as nationalism. The Pope is therefore a fascist.
That argument is just as valid as equating "moral relativism" and "secular humanism".
The wikipedia article enumerates arguments pro and con. The one article it references has a positive view, but it uses some psychology terms which I'm not sure I understand.
As for the biased sample, I'd say if anything the sample I got was biased towards being more social. I only met them in the first place because they were out doing some social activity. However, sample is too small to draw good conclusions from.
If you have strong views just go ahead and post them, as I've said earlier I'm not trying to condemn homeschooling at all I'm just curious what people think. I was pretty surprised in the wikipedia article when it said 54% of people oppose homeschooling.
Speaking of biased samples, I think most of the people replying to these messages aren't exactly disinterested. See all the "I am homeschooling my children" posts.
Somebody posted in a completely different story yesterday a link to this essay. George Orwell complains that vague language allows for euphamisms and the polite discussion of inhuman topics. If "secular humanistic" is just being used to mean "non-christian" then this is a perfect example.
Imagine someone saying that "non-christian" philosophies are destructive and unnatural. But saying "secular humanism" is destructive and unnatural is less offensive, because the phrase is extremely vague.
Slashdot Mirror
1Hz? Next!
The application they talk about is the programmable transistors in FPGAs.
You can find FPGAs in all kinds of consumer electronics. Typically, the chip has some onboard flash from which it loads its configuration during power on. These transistors which load from flash during power on are the ones the researchers are talking about replacing with memresistors (memristors?). For this kind of application, a 1Hz write speed is completely reasonable. The write will be done once in the factory.
Ok, maybe it isn't really the same thing. However, take a look at this:
HP Computer From 1993
The hardware is somewhere between a laptop and a TI calculator. However, it ran DOS natively, included a PCMCIA expander slot. And in one way it is far superior to current netbooks: it could run for 90+ hours on battery. It just had a slot that you put in off the shelf AA's into it. (I wonder why none of the laptops today do that? Sure, perhaps lower performance than packaged up, but so much cheaper and easy to replace when the life decays.)
He is going to feel so silly 4.5 billion years from now ;-)
The really silly thing is that HDD block sizes come in 512 byte. (They are talking about moving to 4096 byte soon).
"Number of blocks" is the most natural way to report disk size. However, this is usually a decimal number.
HDDs dont need radiation to degrade, room temperature will suffice:
1) Thermal instability of magnetic media leads to degrading of magnetic field. Results in loss of bit.
2) This happens often enough that the ECC is overwhelmed.
As capacity goes up, the energy per bit goes down. The MAJOR design challenge with HDD media is making it writable by a tiny head, yet not writable by random thermal induced fields at room temperature.
Sponges
The direct temperature effect from cosmic rays are absolutely infinitesimal. The very highest energy particles only carry a single calorie of energy.
google calorie to electron-Volt ratio
It is controversial that cosmic rays have any effect. However, the most likely effect would be cooling by increasing cloud formation.
Wikipedia: cosmic ray role in climate change
The Sun is pretty much a black box as far as climate goes. We can observe the radiation output directly. It doesn't matter what is driving the changes.
Solar physicists have most likely thought about this possibility at some point and done the math on some possibilities.
Standards often take a year or more to make it through committees and get ratified. "Not exists" could mean "not yet a standard, still a draft". Often the basic technology and operation is finalized long before the draft makes it into full standard. The last few issues will be working out potentially ambiguous phrasing and correcting small mistakes that won't break compatibility. (e.g. "this says the device 'should' attempt five reconnects, but it should say the device 'may' attempt up to five reconnects") (This is trying and be as charitable as possible to Apple. That is still a misleading phrasing.)
Isn't the whole idea of a sniper that the enemy doesn't know they are being attacked until after they are hit? Maybe someone with experience in this area could comment on sniper tactics?
Quoth the wikipedia page on the "Lost Cause" intellectual movement: "To the old Union they had said that the Federal power had no authority to interfere with slavery issues in a state. To their new nation they would declare that the state had no power to interfere with a federal protection of slavery. Of all the many testimonials to the fact that slavery, and not states rights, really lay at the heart of their movement, this was the most eloquent of all.[15]"
Just wanted to point out that the science in Brin's novels is pretty consistently awful.
For example, in "Sundiver" there is a space-elevator kind of thing. Instead of a wire though, it is a sealed cylinder that blimps float up into outer space. Total fundamental misunderstanding of how air pressure works. Basic basic stuff.
He definitely doesn't consider himself a hard sci-fi writer. He describes hard sci-fi authors as an elitist group that has ghettoized itself.
Hey, just wanted to chime in. I've met some of the "leaders" of my WoW guild in person. Let me just say that well they all had some aspects in common, social ineptness was not among them.
They were all:Not to sound racist, but they were also all Asian (although I don't think this was a factor), and all grew up in USA.
I don't know what you want to call "addicted", but they were all doing 4 hour+ instances several times a week. It wasn't like they were junkies or anything, but the gaming schedule would be impractical with a job.
Maybe we should use switch grass.
Ten times as many gallons / ton, and grows like the weed that it is!
Well... yea, you can't. Denying evolution is equivalent to denying gravity. It is reason versus zealotry.
I think the sensor bar is just for pointing at the screen with the infra-red thing on the front.
t ml
http://www.analog.com/en/prod/0,2877,ADXL202,00.h
They probably use something like that in the controller, combined with bluetooth to the console. $8.50 each ain't cheap, but I'm sure with volume in the millions like Nintendo has that cost goes way down.
It would be a horrible horrible let down if "motion sensing" means something other than accelerometers in the controller.
I believe the term "law" is in the sense of Newton's laws, Moore's Law is not really something you can test and observe as much as it is a paradigm.
A couple of hours ago a professor put up a slide of the graph of the industry trade group that gets together and makes predictions for feature size, clock speed, and transistor density for 10 years out.
The reason they do this is for planning. I'm not sure why anyone wouldn't believe in Moore's Law at this point, PHBs included. It has been an observed trend for 30+ years.
As for being too busy working on transistor count to do other things, transistor count is really independent of architecture, and has nothing to do with software. So, they are doing both. In terms of architecture: MMX, two layer caches, hyper threading, and now dual cores just off the top of my head. And as for compilers, the question these days is *which* full featured object-oriented library with support for GUI, networking, and multi-threading with all the utility classes and syntax sugar you can think of thrown in.
Let's take a pedantic tour of the universe starting from the core of a star.
In your typical (not in a super-nova) star, fusion is only taking place in a small fraction of the stars volume.
About as much mass as is in stars is also floating around as a diffuse ionized gas in intergalactic space at a million degrees kelvin.
About 6 times as much mass as there is in both of these combined exists in the form of dark matter.
Finally, approximately 4 times as much mass as all of these combined exists in the form of dark energy.
So, the natural state of the universe is some kind of exotic matter. We are the froth on the surface of the lake of the universe. 5% (not hydrogen or helium gas) of 1/5th (not dark energy) of 1/7th (not dark matter) of the stuff out there.
Thank you for saying that, I agree completely.
The first chapter of the group theory textbook I looked at was about all the rotations that could be done to bring a three dimensional object back to an equivalent position.
Maybe the person who wrote this article learned about group theory in the context of encryption? But even there you get a picture of cutting a set perfectly in half.
Heh, those led computer cases are gonna be heavy
This is done all the time. You muse correctly, it is done as an abstraction ontop of binary. Google for "BCD" (binary coded decimal).
Sorry to parent, but people seem to be taking this seriously so I gotta point out that this is BS so hopefully noone takes this seriously...
"Consider the semiconductor."
Ok, here is the parent posts first fundamental misconception. Digital doesn't necessarily mean semiconductor. Say, for example CDs which encode digital data using light.
"By adding information, you can blend things together, then demodulate them to see what happened as the change in information."
that isn't how light works, the waves superpose ontop of each other, just like every other kind of wave...
"This modulation mimics how ALUs/accumulators/CPUs work"
No, no it doesn't.
There is a difference between storing and transmitting information and actual computation. You need some kind of devices which emit light depending on light inputs implementing AND OR and NOT logic.
Not helping is that this guy sounds like an idiot:
WTF does "mosh" mean anyway?
"integer algebraic"?
"the electromagnetic spectra" (I guess theres more than one of the electromagnetic spectrum)
"your basic light switch is your basic computer" see above, a SWITCH is one bit of memory -- computation means implementing AND OR or NOT, at a minimum.
PLEASE PLEASE mod parent down.
I know alot of people have allready said this, but I'd just like to join the chorus saying Laplace transforms.
err... of course, the Laplace transformation itself is defined using an integration between 0 and infinity
The whole thing is extremely vague. However, what you describe sounds more like relativism to me. The idea is that an action can only be judged relative to the time and place. The way that philosophy plays out it ends up being more like apologism for historical atroicities.
This is like fast talking however, given the "secular" part. It paints all atheists as amoral, or at least very weak morally. To which I would respond: a church or religious organization is a power structure like any other. As such it must constantly fight for its own survival. Thus, strong religion is essentially the same as nationalism. The Pope is therefore a fascist.
That argument is just as valid as equating "moral relativism" and "secular humanism".
The wikipedia article enumerates arguments pro and con. The one article it references has a positive view, but it uses some psychology terms which I'm not sure I understand.
As for the biased sample, I'd say if anything the sample I got was biased towards being more social. I only met them in the first place because they were out doing some social activity. However, sample is too small to draw good conclusions from.
If you have strong views just go ahead and post them, as I've said earlier I'm not trying to condemn homeschooling at all I'm just curious what people think. I was pretty surprised in the wikipedia article when it said 54% of people oppose homeschooling.
Speaking of biased samples, I think most of the people replying to these messages aren't exactly disinterested. See all the "I am homeschooling my children" posts.
Somebody posted in a completely different story yesterday a link to this essay. George Orwell complains that vague language allows for euphamisms and the polite discussion of inhuman topics. If "secular humanistic" is just being used to mean "non-christian" then this is a perfect example.
Imagine someone saying that "non-christian" philosophies are destructive and unnatural. But saying "secular humanism" is destructive and unnatural is less offensive, because the phrase is extremely vague.