So while Microsoft operates a monopoly, and thus stops all progress except for "approved" progress, the rest of the world continues to advance. The PC platform is actually controlled by the Taiwanese, the Japanese and the Koreans. Who will do what the US says only until it makes economic sense not to.
The current US government and business climate seems to be obsessed with protectionism. Why is this suddenly a good idea when it didn't work for anyone else?
First, I doubt flying height will be a problem. This is nanoscale and the feature height is likely to be less than any sane flying height.
Second, provided a small enough sensor can be made, there is no reason why signal integrity should be a problem. What matters is the local strength of the magnetic field, compared to ambient. If the domains are isolated, inter-domain interference is reduced, and the signal should be, in effect, sharper.
Which leaves rotation as the problem. Perhaps they could try running a grid of minute wires through the substrate, and use currents in the wires to polarise or read the polarisation of the individual domains
Modern hearing aids are a bit more than a microphone and a transducer. Mine has an 8-channel equaliser and enough programmable features to keep a technician busy for a couple of hours just setting it up. Feedback? What's that? However, it lacks a transmitter with the power to reach a cell antenna. And I'd be a bit worried about having the phone transmitter so near my brain. Actually, my beef is I would like a mobile phone with acoustic technology as sophisticated as a modern hearing aid, so the handsfree could be programmed to deal with the hole in my auditory response curve, and I could flip a switch to go from maximum frequency response to maximum non-speech noise rejection. If Siemens can do it with a tiny battery with a 200 hour plus life, Motorola and Nokia surely can.
The technique has been around for some time. It's the monkey/typewriter machine All you need is a very fast random bit sequence generator coupled to a fast enough printer. Given long enough, it will print out every patentable idea (along with the source code to all copyright applications, the scores for all copyrighted music, you name it.)
Now couple the output to a really powerful radio transmitter so all the outputs get published.
Since the system will ultimately produce everything without an inventive step, it being the output of a random process, nothing is patentable.
Mind you, you'll have to kill every lawyer in the universe first.
Amazing, isn't it? Every year teenagers kill themselves with cars, motorbikes, guns, alcohol and drugs, in the first few cases often killing other people in the process. They also develop the smoking habit that will ultimately take years off their lives. Not a big story. Someone accumulates a quantity of radioisotopes and doesn't kill anybody, and this is a big story. Because, unlike all the other things mentioned, radioactivity is really scary and nasty and dangerous and might get used by terrorists Or because most people are totally irrational about radioactivity But yes, I'm prejudiced. Possibly because I was interested in the same things as David but I got encouraged by a sympathetic physics teacher, result a Cambridge science degree. For me this story is about the failure of a useless education system to identify and foster talent, resulting in an underperforming 20 year old who on the face of it had the energy and talent, with a bit of support, to make Harvard.
I would be happier about this idea if we could have a physical motherboard switch (brought out to the panel) that had to be held on manually to enable flashing the BIOS. The ability to change the BIOS by programming is a security vulnerability that can only get bigger as BIOS functionality increases. Yet it could be prevented by a simple single pole momentary switch.
The only emr these devices emit as part of their functioning is light. The microwaves are NOT functional.
This seems to explain it in simple words:
http://www.emclab.umr.edu/emcproc.html The fact that part of the spectrum is not regulated is irrelevant - just as in Europe, these devices are covered if they emit radiation as an incidental byproduct of their functioning. FCC regulations cover separately:
Communications devices using emr and
Devices not for communication but which still produce emr as an intrinsic part of their functioning (like physiotherapy equipment.
Doesn't the FCC have something to say about this? The European EMC Directive covers the emission spectrum from DC to the Big Bang frequency, and I remember well getting all the technical papers as the conventional fluorescent manufacturers faced up to the fact they were going to have to redesign their ballasts and ignitors. Even if this particular bit of spectrum is unregulated, what about harmonics? Surely they would be up there in the key shortwave radar bands, raising the noise floor?
The EMC directive: you're allowed to radiate gibberish, brain-dead stupidity, pornography etc. but NOT NOISE
There does seem to be an important point here about enforcing the rules of games.
In "real world" (whatever that means) games, match fixing, substitution of different players, horses or whatever, and artificial enhancement of performance are contrary to the rules, and indeed are often criminal offences. The companies that have set up to buy and sell identities and capabilities in on-line games are basically set up to do variants of all these illegal things.
It seems to me that if you run a multi-player simulation game, you ought to have the same legal remedies against people trying to subvert your game as do the owners of other games.
The EULA may not be the best way to do it but it is currently the only mechanism available. Perhaps the court took this into account.
In fact, the PM article points out the output from the piezo devices is going to be about 1W ( 4 * "800V" * "a few hundred microamps". It then talks about increasing the current and sending it back. As piezo devices deflect based on applied voltage, not current, this is a bit nonsensical. Not mention the "microelectronic circuit" which contains resistors, inductors and capacitors. And no active circuitry? OK cynical suggestion. The actual damping is due to the composite design of aligned fibres embedded in a matrix. But that's been known about for years and isn't patentable. So add a critical design feature that is barely functional, and make that the basis of a claim. That should give us long enough protection...till the next innovation Would a business do a thing like that? Well, I have to admit I have full details of a US patent, fully granted, that is based on similar principles and for just the same reason. Do, in fact, ursine mammals defecate in sylvian environments?
I'm puzzled by this. What is the overall efficiency of the system going to be? There will be mechanical to electric conversion losses going in, and similar losses going out. The conversion efficiency can only relate to the energy actually transferred to the piezo generator, and this itself is only presumably a small fraction of the energy stored in the frame itself, the strings, and the energy stored in the deformation of the ball - which I imagine is quite large.
Unless I have missed something major here - always possible - the effectiveness of this system could be minimal. Reminds me of those ads that used to offer "Up to a such and such percent change in something" - where, of course, "up to" includes zero.
The situation with things like active suspension is quite different because plenty of outside power (from the alternator) is available to drive the moving parts, the same as with power steering and ABS.
Perhaps the real power source is a cold fusion unit in the handle, running off sweat.
It is coincidental. This may need some explaining to some people, but the clue is all over HHG. 42 is the number of rules of the game of cricket, which as the HHG makes clear is the most important thing in the Universe (Krikkit the planet, Brockian Ultra-Cricket...you get the picture.)
Cricket is a simplified version of baseball in which there are only two bases, but to confuse you the pitchers periodically change direction. Also, the bats are bigger because cricket players are fuelled by beer, and their coordination isn't so hot.
Relevance? well, this thread is about big numbers. And I think it was the Hungarian humorist George Mikes who said that the English, lacking a religion, invented cricket to give themselves an idea of eternity.
No, I confess, completely off topic.
Re:Some uninformed comments
on
Project Eden
·
· Score: 1
Of course they can't, it was an unkind allusion to the ignorance of some US citizens of world geography, and their tendency to stop traveling to Europe as a result of trouble in the Middle east, for instance.
Some uninformed comments
on
Project Eden
·
· Score: 5, Informative
From some people who might actually try visiting, if they're not afraid of Europe being hit by Pakistani or Indian missiles
The relevance to computing is that the geodesic domes were actually designed and the parts built by CIM - all the way from the CAD files to setting up and cutting the metal. As they fit onto a non-level site against the side of a quarry, this is a great demonstration of what can be done with state of the art engineering.
One big function of Eden is education - to explain to kids reared on fast food and television why different habitats are important and why the preservation of rain forests thousands of miles away actually matters to them. At a cost of less than $150 million (not the ludicrous £86 billion one dumbskull suggested) that's less than Hollywood can spend on a film about an adolescent fantasy, and is a fraction of what Disney spends on a theme park intended to give a ludicrously false impression of, say, Europe or of US history.
But perhaps some correspondents are really incensed because the Eden project refers to the way in which some US drug companies have been allowed to patent medicines used by indigenous peoples for years.
Having said that, I was pretty incensed during my visit by a set of untrue statistics quoted above the entrance about world distribution of wealth. It's that kind of carelessness that provides ammunition to the Armalites-and-SUVS-are-in-the-Constitution brigade.
There is a big difference between a VLIW processor and a CISC processor. VLIW is basically a way of carrying out processing more efficiently than CISC, trading off instruction word length and a kind of nanocompiler which works out how to rearrange instructions (and uses a cache of external memory for the rescheduled instructions, btw) for complex decoding hardware and logic for identifying register and pipeline status. So a 256 bit VLIW processor is in no way comparable to a 256 bit CISC processor. In fact, I seem to recall that the original VLIW work in the 80s was done on 512 bit and 1024 bit designs, using bit slice components of course.
Large processors need large data and address buses, which means a lot of power hungry transistors on the periphery of the chip, as well as the longer array of the various bus gates inside the chip. The technical challenges in doubling the bus width are enormous.
In fact, a major feature of the Transmeta design is the way the internal compiler reviews code, rearranges it and caches the streamlined code for repeat execution. It means that, just like JIT compilation in Java, the first time through a loop is slower than subsequent accesses. The wider the instruction word, the greater the opportunity for this kind of rescheduling, but also the more cache memory is needed and the more the initial performance hit. Great for playing DVDs or database searches, not so good for office work.
The big benefit for me came from going over to an optical mouse. I still haven't found a perfect one, but any of them is better than one of those things with balls in. If I have to do a lot of typing (rare in these days of graphical IDEs) I use a great big heavy mechanical switch keyboard with loads of tilt and full travel keys. I have a (perhaps ludicrous) idea that simply being able to whack the keys with little force control is actually less stressful than the more controlled action needed on short travel keyboards.
That, and all that boring stuff about getting seat height right in relation to keyboard, monitor etc. Plus I alternate between a kneel seat and a heavy duty office chair.
Speaking of which, a careful review of the specs shows that some very expensive office chairs are in fact not suitable for prolonged use. They seem to be for the busy exec who never sits down.
This thing is hardly practical with a dual-CPU system. FWIW(2c)
Split the box so the drives and PSU are in a separate compartment, then use Peltier on the CPU(s), and duct cold air from a small industrial air chiller onto all the heatsinks and areas that need local cooling. You might need some form of discharge brush system to stop static (there's a bit of a Van Der Graaff effect). I've never tried it on a PC but the version we built in the 80s got the main board down to -5C, allowing the memory and IO buses to run rather faster than the makers intended.
When a consultant I know moved to our part of the world, BT told him he could have DSL in six months. That was two years ago. And you know how long before he gets DSL? Still six months. And he lives a mile from a great big central office.
I suspect that this is purely a ploy by BT. Look, regulator, so we haven't rolled out broadband. But it's obsolete anyway: we're going wireless. Real soon. You wouldn't want us to raise the rentals to pay for a technology no-one will want, would you?
Should give them another few years of failing to make progress.
Back in 1990, I was talking to some guys from BT labs. The future was going to be video phones. They were just 6 months from commercialising the technology.
All the above, of course, is just my personal opinion.
One major benefit of silicon
on
Future Computers
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Is its ruggedness. It has a fairly wide range of operating temperatures, and it's fairly easy to make shockproof enclosures (mobile phones, for instance.)
Anything based on a more delicate technology like DNA (which is only stable over a narrow temperature range) would need some kind of homeostatic enclosure. Potential candidates are cheaply available.
That isn't a herd of cows, that's the Pentagon's decryption engine farm. And Bin Laden's successors are really going to have to worry about what the cockroaches might be up to, especially if Dolly the supercomputing sheep is better at processing operational intelligence than the FBI and the CIA - not, on the face of it, difficult.
Check the $$ rate. UK unmetered cable access is £25/month, less than $40. And I guess the Pittsburgh corporation might not be saddled with the level of debt of Telewest/NTL.
I believe Alan Turing did quite a lot of work on cellular automata in the last years of his life, with especial reference to growth patterns and chemical reactions.
Which is not to knock the present author, just to add that he may be more mainstream than is widely appreciated.
Now will someone hurry up with the time machine so I can read this book?
Dawkins has an unfortunate tendency to make anti-religion remarks that are embarrassingly naive, especially to "popular" audiences. If people like Gould characterise him as a reductionist, it's his fault.
Slashdot Mirror
The current US government and business climate seems to be obsessed with protectionism. Why is this suddenly a good idea when it didn't work for anyone else?
Second, provided a small enough sensor can be made, there is no reason why signal integrity should be a problem. What matters is the local strength of the magnetic field, compared to ambient. If the domains are isolated, inter-domain interference is reduced, and the signal should be, in effect, sharper.
Which leaves rotation as the problem. Perhaps they could try running a grid of minute wires through the substrate, and use currents in the wires to polarise or read the polarisation of the individual domains
Oh, wait a minute...core
Modern hearing aids are a bit more than a microphone and a transducer. Mine has an 8-channel equaliser and enough programmable features to keep a technician busy for a couple of hours just setting it up. Feedback? What's that?
However, it lacks a transmitter with the power to reach a cell antenna. And I'd be a bit worried about having the phone transmitter so near my brain.
Actually, my beef is I would like a mobile phone with acoustic technology as sophisticated as a modern hearing aid, so the handsfree could be programmed to deal with the hole in my auditory response curve, and I could flip a switch to go from maximum frequency response to maximum non-speech noise rejection. If Siemens can do it with a tiny battery with a 200 hour plus life, Motorola and Nokia surely can.
All you need is a very fast random bit sequence generator coupled to a fast enough printer. Given long enough, it will print out every patentable idea (along with the source code to all copyright applications, the scores for all copyrighted music, you name it.)
Now couple the output to a really powerful radio transmitter so all the outputs get published.
Since the system will ultimately produce everything without an inventive step, it being the output of a random process, nothing is patentable.
Mind you, you'll have to kill every lawyer in the universe first.
Amazing, isn't it? Every year teenagers kill themselves with cars, motorbikes, guns, alcohol and drugs, in the first few cases often killing other people in the process. They also develop the smoking habit that will ultimately take years off their lives. Not a big story. Someone accumulates a quantity of radioisotopes and doesn't kill anybody, and this is a big story.
Because, unlike all the other things mentioned, radioactivity is really scary and nasty and dangerous and might get used by terrorists
Or because most people are totally irrational about radioactivity
But yes, I'm prejudiced. Possibly because I was interested in the same things as David but I got encouraged by a sympathetic physics teacher, result a Cambridge science degree. For me this story is about the failure of a useless education system to identify and foster talent, resulting in an underperforming 20 year old who on the face of it had the energy and talent, with a bit of support, to make Harvard.
***yawn*** offline data input with verification before transfer to the mainframe just got smaller.
Could I point out this is a troll, Stephen Byers, whatever he did do, did not do what the author claims.
I would be happier about this idea if we could have a physical motherboard switch (brought out to the panel) that had to be held on manually to enable flashing the BIOS. The ability to change the BIOS by programming is a security vulnerability that can only get bigger as BIOS functionality increases. Yet it could be prevented by a simple single pole momentary switch.
This seems to explain it in simple words:
http://www.emclab.umr.edu/emcproc.html
The fact that part of the spectrum is not regulated is irrelevant - just as in Europe, these devices are covered if they emit radiation as an incidental byproduct of their functioning. FCC regulations cover separately:
Communications devices using emr and
Devices not for communication but which still produce emr as an intrinsic part of their functioning (like physiotherapy equipment.
The EMC directive: you're allowed to radiate gibberish, brain-dead stupidity, pornography etc. but NOT NOISE
In "real world" (whatever that means) games, match fixing, substitution of different players, horses or whatever, and artificial enhancement of performance are contrary to the rules, and indeed are often criminal offences. The companies that have set up to buy and sell identities and capabilities in on-line games are basically set up to do variants of all these illegal things.
It seems to me that if you run a multi-player simulation game, you ought to have the same legal remedies against people trying to subvert your game as do the owners of other games.
The EULA may not be the best way to do it but it is currently the only mechanism available. Perhaps the court took this into account.
Hard cases make bad law.
Not mention the "microelectronic circuit" which contains resistors, inductors and capacitors. And no active circuitry?
OK cynical suggestion. The actual damping is due to the composite design of aligned fibres embedded in a matrix. But that's been known about for years and isn't patentable. So add a critical design feature that is barely functional, and make that the basis of a claim. That should give us long enough protection...till the next innovation
Would a business do a thing like that?
Well, I have to admit I have full details of a US patent, fully granted, that is based on similar principles and for just the same reason.
Do, in fact, ursine mammals defecate in sylvian environments?
All a bit like .net, really.
Unless I have missed something major here - always possible - the effectiveness of this system could be minimal. Reminds me of those ads that used to offer "Up to a such and such percent change in something" - where, of course, "up to" includes zero.
The situation with things like active suspension is quite different because plenty of outside power (from the alternator) is available to drive the moving parts, the same as with power steering and ABS.
Perhaps the real power source is a cold fusion unit in the handle, running off sweat.
Cricket is a simplified version of baseball in which there are only two bases, but to confuse you the pitchers periodically change direction. Also, the bats are bigger because cricket players are fuelled by beer, and their coordination isn't so hot.
Relevance? well, this thread is about big numbers. And I think it was the Hungarian humorist George Mikes who said that the English, lacking a religion, invented cricket to give themselves an idea of eternity.
No, I confess, completely off topic.
Of course they can't, it was an unkind allusion to the ignorance of some US citizens of world geography, and their tendency to stop traveling to Europe as a result of trouble in the Middle east, for instance.
The relevance to computing is that the geodesic domes were actually designed and the parts built by CIM - all the way from the CAD files to setting up and cutting the metal. As they fit onto a non-level site against the side of a quarry, this is a great demonstration of what can be done with state of the art engineering.
One big function of Eden is education - to explain to kids reared on fast food and television why different habitats are important and why the preservation of rain forests thousands of miles away actually matters to them. At a cost of less than $150 million (not the ludicrous £86 billion one dumbskull suggested) that's less than Hollywood can spend on a film about an adolescent fantasy, and is a fraction of what Disney spends on a theme park intended to give a ludicrously false impression of, say, Europe or of US history.
But perhaps some correspondents are really incensed because the Eden project refers to the way in which some US drug companies have been allowed to patent medicines used by indigenous peoples for years.
Having said that, I was pretty incensed during my visit by a set of untrue statistics quoted above the entrance about world distribution of wealth. It's that kind of carelessness that provides ammunition to the Armalites-and-SUVS-are-in-the-Constitution brigade.
In fact, I seem to recall that the original VLIW work in the 80s was done on 512 bit and 1024 bit designs, using bit slice components of course.
Large processors need large data and address buses, which means a lot of power hungry transistors on the periphery of the chip, as well as the longer array of the various bus gates inside the chip. The technical challenges in doubling the bus width are enormous.
In fact, a major feature of the Transmeta design is the way the internal compiler reviews code, rearranges it and caches the streamlined code for repeat execution. It means that, just like JIT compilation in Java, the first time through a loop is slower than subsequent accesses. The wider the instruction word, the greater the opportunity for this kind of rescheduling, but also the more cache memory is needed and the more the initial performance hit. Great for playing DVDs or database searches, not so good for office work.
Well, of course. Processor gets faster, RAM gets faster, bits in between have to get faster too. You can't run an F1 car on a dirt track, you know.
Speaking of which, a careful review of the specs shows that some very expensive office chairs are in fact not suitable for prolonged use. They seem to be for the busy exec who never sits down.
This thing is hardly practical with a dual-CPU system.
FWIW(2c)
Split the box so the drives and PSU are in a separate compartment, then use Peltier on the CPU(s), and duct cold air from a small industrial air chiller onto all the heatsinks and areas that need local cooling.
You might need some form of discharge brush system to stop static (there's a bit of a Van Der Graaff effect). I've never tried it on a PC but the version we built in the 80s got the main board down to -5C, allowing the memory and IO buses to run rather faster than the makers intended.
I suspect that this is purely a ploy by BT. Look, regulator, so we haven't rolled out broadband. But it's obsolete anyway: we're going wireless. Real soon. You wouldn't want us to raise the rentals to pay for a technology no-one will want, would you?
Should give them another few years of failing to make progress.
Back in 1990, I was talking to some guys from BT labs. The future was going to be video phones. They were just 6 months from commercialising the technology.
All the above, of course, is just my personal opinion.
Anything based on a more delicate technology like DNA (which is only stable over a narrow temperature range) would need some kind of homeostatic enclosure. Potential candidates are cheaply available.
That isn't a herd of cows, that's the Pentagon's decryption engine farm. And Bin Laden's successors are really going to have to worry about what the cockroaches might be up to, especially if Dolly the supercomputing sheep is better at processing operational intelligence than the FBI and the CIA - not, on the face of it, difficult.
Check the $$ rate. UK unmetered cable access is £25/month, less than $40. And I guess the Pittsburgh corporation might not be saddled with the level of debt of Telewest/NTL.
Which is not to knock the present author, just to add that he may be more mainstream than is widely appreciated.
Now will someone hurry up with the time machine so I can read this book?
Dawkins has an unfortunate tendency to make anti-religion remarks that are embarrassingly naive, especially to "popular" audiences.
If people like Gould characterise him as a reductionist, it's his fault.