Is biology. Billions of years of evolution have propeled biological systems to a local optimum in terms of nanomachines that could be made from carbon based molecules.
Are there other optima based on different materials and/or manufacturing and design techniques? These questions are critical to the future of nanotech. As yet, no one has the answer.
ATI Radeon 8500 is a better card, with a nicer fragment path, while NVidia still consistently runs faster due to better drivers.
Wrong!
What Carmack actually says is this:
In order from best to worst for Doom:
I still think that overall, the GeForce 4 Ti is the best card you can buy. It has high speed and excellent driver quality.
Based on the feature set, the Radeon 8500 should be a faster card for Doom than the GF4, because it can do the seven texture accesses that I need in a single pass, while it takes two or three passes (depending on details) on the GF4. However, in practice, the GF4 consistently runs faster due to a highly efficient implementation. For programmers, the 8500 has a much nicer fragment path than the GF4, with more general features and increased precision, but the driver quality is still quite a ways from Nvidia's, so I would be a little hesitant to use it as a primary research platform.
The GF4-MX is a very fast card for existing games, but it is less well suited to Doom, due to the lower texture unit count and the lack of vertex shaders.
On a slow CPU with all features enabled, the GF3 will be faster than the GF4-MX, because it offloads some work. On systems with CPU power to burn, the GF4 may still be faster.
The 128 bit DDR GF2 systems will be faster than the Radeon-7500 systems, again due to low level implementation details overshadowing the extra texture unit.
The slowest cards will be the 64 bit and SDR ram GF and Radeon cards, which will really not be fast enough to play the game properly unless you run at 320x240 or so.
With regards to 8500 vs. GF4, he meant that the 8500 has better hardware on paper, but GF4's efficient hardware implementation makes it faster. He mentioned driver quality as a separate issue from speed.
In talking about ATI's next generation hardware, the R300, he says the following in separate emails. From www.rage3d.com.
Doom III is very much hardware driven, and one of the controversies of this year's E3 was that the game was demonstrated on the latest ATI graphics card rather than a card from NVidia.
"NVidia has been stellar in terms of driver quality and support and doing all of the things right," says Carmack, who has been an outspoken evangelist for NVidia's GeForce technology. "For the past few years, they have been able to consistently outplay ATI on every front. The problem is that they are about one-half step out of synch with the hardware generation because they did Xbox instead of focusing everything on their next board. So they are a little bit behind ATI."
"I told everyone that I was going to demonstrate Doom III on the best hardware, and there has been no collusion or kickbacks or anything like that going on. Our objective is the technical merit."
"The new ATI card was clearly superior. I don't want to ding NVidia for anything because NVidia has done everything they possibly could; but in every test we ran, ATI was faster."
However, he was comparing R300 to a GF4, not NV30. In this email to nvnews:
It [The ATI card used] was compared against a very high speed GF4. It shouldn't be surprising that a next-generation card is faster than a current generation card. What will be very interesting is comparing the next gen cards (and the supporting drivers) from both vendors head to head when they are both in production.
Everyone working on DOOM still uses GF4-Ti cards at the moment, and if someone needs to buy a new video card today, that is what I tell them to get.
But they don't. Creating a viable weapon means integrating off the shelf technologies into a viable weapons platform that can navigate by itself accross hundreds of miles of complex terrain while performing complex obstacle avoidance manuveurs. In reality, just making the software to keep the missle stable in flight would be very challenging. Terrorists certainly do not have the capability to do this. Not without a lot of money, a lot of time, and large testing facilities that will be difficult to conceal.
If you can stop ranting on and on about Americans causing friendly casualties long enough to pull your head out of your ass, then you'll realize that without American planes in the air, there would have been 10 time (very conservatively speaking) as many casualties, 90% of which would be from enemy fire.
Both are important issues. However, having a better military does not necessarily lead to imprudent foreign policy decisions.
What is needed to ensure the first goes hand in hand with the second are people who device and advocate balanced approachs to achieving the strategic interests of the US. Currently, there are think tanks that try to fulfill this role. What is missing are grass roots groups that advocate pragmatic non-military solutions that can be alternatives to or work in concert with military action. Today, no grass roots peace movement offers pragmatic solutions. Instead, their birdbrained dependence on useless idealisms has made them utterly ineffective.
There needs to be, IMHO, grass roots movements and political action committees that employ, contribute to and cooperate with policy think tanks such as the Rand Corporation and Stratfor.
From the point of view of peace movements, these ties will serve two functions:
1. Through the exchange of views, personnel, and money, peace momvements will be able to influence Pentagon thinking by influencing think tanks that help shape defense policy.
2. Through dealing with people who grapple with practical political, military, and economic issues, peace movements will be able to find pragmatic and effective policy positions which they can then publicize, popularize, and politicize through grass-roots campaigns and lobbying of politicians.
Without doing the above, blind opposition to military development unaccompanied by real alternatives born of concern for and careful and rational consideration of America's strategic interests will continue to be rightfully ignored.
With all due resepect, you're wrong about UCAV
on
X-45 Makes Debut Flight
·
· Score: 2, Informative
With all due respect to your military service, I think you're wrong about UCAVs increasing undesired casualties.
1. Having soldiers on the ground do not mitigate the problem of dealing with an enemy that blends into the civilian population. Such enemies tend to dress and act like civilians, so that they are hard to identify even for a soldier within visual range. This has been a common complaint in Vietnam and other places where an army has tried to deal with guerrilla war. The advantage of having a soldier on the ground is that a soldier can walk a 3 miles and hour, go into places cameras can't see, and be shot at. In the future, small squad level UAVs will be able to do the same thing.
2. UCAVs in their current incarnation are designed for dangerous 1st day of war duties. Their targets, SAM sites, radar installations, command bunkers, government offices, power plants, are likely to be well known, high value fixed targets that are unlikely to be confused with civilian buildings.
3. Human operators will make the shoot/don't shoot decision for UCAV's. Being physically away from the combat environment, the human operator will have a lower stress level and be more careful in verifying the target than a pilot in a dangerous combat environment.
4. Modern pilots fly most bombing missions from high altitude out of concern for ground fire. As a result, the closest to a visual inspection that he'll do is watch the target through a camera attached to his aircraft from 10000 feet. This is no different than what a UCAV operator will do excpet for the fact that UCAV's will be able to fly lower and closer to their targets, bringing the camera closer and giving the UCAV operator a better view than the pilot.
The problem is real firefights last for hours and hours. Nobody runs out since you'll die with a single bullet shot. This game sounds interesting, and it will be fun to run around raping newebies. However, if you're playing against some skilled people, then it's not gonna be much fun, especially if you get killed early in the round.
Since I'll be here during the summer, I'm going to sit in on some lectures.
Not to say that DNA won't have other niches
on
Future Computers
·
· Score: 1
Due to the difference between the environment that DNA computers require and the environment supported by the modern infrastructure we have built for computing, the type of DNA computers studied in today's laboratories will never replace the silicon chip.
Not to say that there won't be other niches. What I mean is that, there will be huge issues with reliability, durability, and interface if one ever tries to replicate the functionality of silicon chips with DNA computing based on base-pair recombination. It is probably easier to shrink circuit density, power consumption and cost of manufacture to those scales comparable to computing DNA base pair recombination. It's possible that the materials we would use to make those circuits would be chemically similar to DNA, but the way they compute would be closer electrical or magnetic switching than base-pair recombination
Every second of every day, our genetic material and their supporting machinery regulate an inimaginable number of complex chemical pathways by carrying out the entire range of sensing, analysis and control. If they didn't, we'd just be a mush of amino acids.
Machinery that regulate chemical processes in our bodies are an inherent part of the processes themselves. In fact, it's productive and enlightening to think of biological systems as computational and chemical processes within them as
algorithms. Researchers like Prof.
Erik Winfree at Caltech are beginning the difficult process of applying
this insight into research.
Due to the difference between the environment that DNA computers require and
the environment supported by the modern infrastructure we have built for
computing, the type of DNA computers studied in today's laboratories will never
replace the silicon chip. Also, unlike quantum computing, DNA computing does not offer
exponential growth in computing power with the number of elements used.
However, DNA computing may find a niche in bioinformatics by offering a way to
probe, analyze and ultimately control complex biological processes in vitro.
Hence, research into DNA computing may offer us a way to understand, interact
with, and ultimately control nature's algorithms in biological systems.
The challenge for computation over the next century is to overcome barriers
in the shrinking of circuit size for conventional computers, create practically
useful quantum computers, apply conventional and quantum computers along with
experimentation to understand the role of computation in complex processes
(notably biological systems), and use the understanding gained to create a
unified architecture for computation that will allow us to embed synthetic
algorithms into every complex dynamic system we design and create and extend our control to the atomic
level. When that happens, nanotechnology
will finally fulfill its promise.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually funny stuff welcomed.
No lame attempts at humor please. :p
Hot girl: Baby common!
Geek: Alright baby, let me put on my nano-condom.
Hot girl: Your what?!! Oh my GOD that's pathetic!
Is biology. Billions of years of evolution have propeled biological systems to a local optimum in terms of nanomachines that could be made from carbon based molecules.
Are there other optima based on different materials and/or manufacturing and design techniques? These questions are critical to the future of nanotech. As yet, no one has the answer.
Better examples of nanotechnology or microtechnology than the ones found in the articles have been around for years and years:
Harddisk drive heads
Microprocessors
DNA arrays
Genetically engineered organisms
LCD screens
Engineering of better chemical catalysts
Arrays of micro-mirror for projection displays
Integrated optical switches
Ink jet printer heads
et cetera
Pretty interesting comments from the man himself.
Wrong!
What Carmack actually says is this:
With regards to 8500 vs. GF4, he meant that the 8500 has better hardware on paper, but GF4's efficient hardware implementation makes it faster. He mentioned driver quality as a separate issue from speed.
In talking about ATI's next generation hardware, the R300, he says the following in separate emails. From www.rage3d.com.
However, he was comparing R300 to a GF4, not NV30. In this email to nvnews:
But they don't. Creating a viable weapon means integrating off the shelf technologies into a viable weapons platform that can navigate by itself accross hundreds of miles of complex terrain while performing complex obstacle avoidance manuveurs. In reality, just making the software to keep the missle stable in flight would be very challenging. Terrorists certainly do not have the capability to do this. Not without a lot of money, a lot of time, and large testing facilities that will be difficult to conceal.
If you can stop ranting on and on about Americans causing friendly casualties long enough to pull your head out of your ass, then you'll realize that without American planes in the air, there would have been 10 time (very conservatively speaking) as many casualties, 90% of which would be from enemy fire.
1. Creating a more effective military.
2. Wise foreign policy.
Both are important issues. However, having a better military does not necessarily lead to imprudent foreign policy decisions.
What is needed to ensure the first goes hand in hand with the second are people who device and advocate balanced approachs to achieving the strategic interests of the US. Currently, there are think tanks that try to fulfill this role. What is missing are grass roots groups that advocate pragmatic non-military solutions that can be alternatives to or work in concert with military action. Today, no grass roots peace movement offers pragmatic solutions. Instead, their birdbrained dependence on useless idealisms has made them utterly ineffective.
There needs to be, IMHO, grass roots movements and political action committees that employ, contribute to and cooperate with policy think tanks such as the Rand Corporation and Stratfor.
From the point of view of peace movements, these ties will serve two functions:
1. Through the exchange of views, personnel, and money, peace momvements will be able to influence Pentagon thinking by influencing think tanks that help shape defense policy.
2. Through dealing with people who grapple with practical political, military, and economic issues, peace movements will be able to find pragmatic and effective policy positions which they can then publicize, popularize, and politicize through grass-roots campaigns and lobbying of politicians.
Without doing the above, blind opposition to military development unaccompanied by real alternatives born of concern for and careful and rational consideration of America's strategic interests will continue to be rightfully ignored.
With all due respect to your military service, I think you're wrong about UCAVs increasing undesired casualties.
1. Having soldiers on the ground do not mitigate the problem of dealing with an enemy that blends into the civilian population. Such enemies tend to dress and act like civilians, so that they are hard to identify even for a soldier within visual range. This has been a common complaint in Vietnam and other places where an army has tried to deal with guerrilla war. The advantage of having a soldier on the ground is that a soldier can walk a 3 miles and hour, go into places cameras can't see, and be shot at. In the future, small squad level UAVs will be able to do the same thing.
2. UCAVs in their current incarnation are designed for dangerous 1st day of war duties. Their targets, SAM sites, radar installations, command bunkers, government offices, power plants, are likely to be well known, high value fixed targets that are unlikely to be confused with civilian buildings.
3. Human operators will make the shoot/don't shoot decision for UCAV's. Being physically away from the combat environment, the human operator will have a lower stress level and be more careful in verifying the target than a pilot in a dangerous combat environment.
4. Modern pilots fly most bombing missions from high altitude out of concern for ground fire. As a result, the closest to a visual inspection that he'll do is watch the target through a camera attached to his aircraft from 10000 feet. This is no different than what a UCAV operator will do excpet for the fact that UCAV's will be able to fly lower and closer to their targets, bringing the camera closer and giving the UCAV operator a better view than the pilot.
The problem is real firefights last for hours and hours. Nobody runs out since you'll die with a single bullet shot. This game sounds interesting, and it will be fun to run around raping newebies. However, if you're playing against some skilled people, then it's not gonna be much fun, especially if you get killed early in the round.
Since I'll be here during the summer, I'm going to sit in on some lectures.
Not to say that there won't be other niches. What I mean is that, there will be huge issues with reliability, durability, and interface if one ever tries to replicate the functionality of silicon chips with DNA computing based on base-pair recombination. It is probably easier to shrink circuit density, power consumption and cost of manufacture to those scales comparable to computing DNA base pair recombination. It's possible that the materials we would use to make those circuits would be chemically similar to DNA, but the way they compute would be closer electrical or magnetic switching than base-pair recombination
Every second of every day, our genetic material and their supporting machinery regulate an inimaginable number of complex chemical pathways by carrying out the entire range of sensing, analysis and control. If they didn't, we'd just be a mush of amino acids.
Machinery that regulate chemical processes in our bodies are an inherent part of the processes themselves. In fact, it's productive and enlightening to think of biological systems as computational and chemical processes within them as algorithms. Researchers like Prof. Erik Winfree at Caltech are beginning the difficult process of applying this insight into research.
Due to the difference between the environment that DNA computers require and the environment supported by the modern infrastructure we have built for computing, the type of DNA computers studied in today's laboratories will never replace the silicon chip. Also, unlike quantum computing, DNA computing does not offer exponential growth in computing power with the number of elements used. However, DNA computing may find a niche in bioinformatics by offering a way to probe, analyze and ultimately control complex biological processes in vitro.
Hence, research into DNA computing may offer us a way to understand, interact with, and ultimately control nature's algorithms in biological systems.
The challenge for computation over the next century is to overcome barriers in the shrinking of circuit size for conventional computers, create practically useful quantum computers, apply conventional and quantum computers along with experimentation to understand the role of computation in complex processes (notably biological systems), and use the understanding gained to create a unified architecture for computation that will allow us to embed synthetic algorithms into every complex dynamic system we design and create and extend our control to the atomic level. When that happens, nanotechnology will finally fulfill its promise.
Stephen Wolfram, Erik Winfree, Hideo Mabuchi, Jeff Kimble, John Preskill, Bill Goddard, Isaac Chuang are leaders on the bleeding edge of computation. There are many many others I don't know about.
On that note, I will end my foray into wild speculation.
Here's Nick Lampson's homepage.
I absolutely agree. Here is an article from Space.com about nuclear propulsion.