But it's a log scale. Don't you think a drop from $5.00/kWh to $0.20/kWh qualifies as "precipitous"? It's under-appreciated because it's still more than fossil fuel, but if that same curve holds for a few more years, the world will be changed.
But now Yahoo can wield its patent threat against Facebook as an asset, increasing its Yahoo's share price for Facebook or whoever else might want to buy it. I'm sure google would like to get some patent ammo against Facebook for example.
Solar has been dropping precipitously in price since at least 1978. How far back do you want to try and blame China?
Re:Sorry, but the conclusion is wrong!
on
The Numbers of a Life
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Leave him alone. He has a vision, he's doing what he likes, and apparently makes a good living at it. And there's a better-than-normal chance he'll find something interesting to the world at large, too.
NP hard doesn't necessarily mean something is hard in any practical sense. It might be a tiny problem instance (like traveling salesman with 3 or 4 cities). Or more commonly, it might be very hard to definitely find an optimal answer, but easy to get a good answer (within a couple percent of optimum), which is the normal way living things get by in the world. And since the computer is solving a mathematical model of your real problem and not the real problem itself, optimizing the model to the tenth decimal point is often a complete waste of time.
If living in an expensive home were a good investment, it would be cheaper in the long run to live in an expensive home than a cheaper one. If that were true, the only rational thing to do would be to buy the most expensive house possible. If people did that, housing prices would skyrocket and create an unsustainable bubble. Then prices would unavoidably collapse and people would owe more on their homes than they're worth, thus becoming a horrible investment.
If living in a really nice home is what you value in life, go ahead and spend your money on it. But if you think you'll be paid to live there, you're most likely wrong.
I suppose they will, simply because it would be a waste of their effort to maintain a fork, thus missing out on map updates from other parties. This is a naturally collaborative task. It's not like source code where patches from different parties are likely to have conflicts.
The US govt's seemingly quixotic investment of hundreds of billions in missile defense seems more justified in light of this. When "some guy" can do it, it can't be long until almost any nation can.
Longer term I have the same concern about nuclear weapons. What if somebody found a simple, cheap way to make highly enriched uranium? It would be a disaster.
What would you accept as proof? As you may know, establishing the true identity of people is dicey. Which is basically the entire issue of DRM in a nutshell.
No, I'm not sure non-integer scalings will be a problem with this screen. With a CRT you never worried whether the dot pitch was a multiple of the resolution, because the dot pitch was too small to see. Individual pixels on this screen may well be the same.
Are you kidding? I'm sure there are some people who would use a tablet as a phone, but do you really think there are enough to worry Apple?
You have it backwards. What I want is a miniature smartphone that does everything, plus a wireless display link for when I need a bigger screen. A wristwatch screen for on-the-go, a tablet screen for goofing off, a desktop screen for work, and a TV screen for goofing off as a group.
I would like to see the ability to use the integrated GPU, even if not for graphics. The traditional CPU is good for sequential logic. But for pattern recognition, physics simulations (which is basically what 3d graphics is), encoding, or code-cracking (e.g. bitcoin), the highly parallel structure of the GPU is better. Now you might argue, my offboard GPU is still the same thing, but better. OK. But these are inherently parallel tasks, so if you could use the one built-in AND the add-on, you wouldn't be wasting anything.
Based on what we've seen, discrete GPUs below the $50 - $60 mark don't make sense if you've got Intel's HD 4000 inside your system. The discrete market above $100 remains fairly safe however.
Probably true, but my kids spend more time playing games in Java (Runescape) and Flash (e.g. Club Penguin and various Barbie-type games) than anything else including the XBox. It's good to have some reserve compute power for inefficiently coded applications, offbeat video codecs without hardware decoding support, etc.
Now that you mention it, computers are even more pervasive now - particularly smartphones. An app to quickly add an item to your 'basket' for your next delivery, without going and sitting down at the computer, would make it more convenient than it used to be. "Siri, add peanut butter to my grocery cart."
How's linux support for Sandy Bridge coming along? Last I checked, about 6 months ago, there was still a lot of bugs/bad performance with the graphics, power management not working, etc. Do any of the distros have good out-of-the-box support yet?
You're just being pedantic. Instead of "why can't it be free," read it as, "why isn't it economically viable (i.e. more efficient than the status quo) to..." That's the real question, which you didn't address at all.
The answer is, there's no intuitive reason, sitting at your desk, to know it wouldn't work. But in the late 90's people thought it would work, and invested millions in getting it going, and still couldn't break even. There is your argument.
I don't see anything that might have changed the equation since then, unless/until gas rises so high that it actually makes people think twice before driving to the grocery store. (I can't believe that a large truck hitting 30 homes on a route wouldn't be more fuel efficient than 30 SUVs, minivans, and cars going point-to-point).
And the best rationalization of all: "if I don't do it, the next guy will, anyways. So the outcome will be the same, except I'll be the loser." And it's often true. It's the main reason why the world really does need ugly things like regulations.
The robot's movements are patterned after those of fast-running animals in nature. The robot increases its stride and running speed by flexing and un-flexing its back on each step, much as an actual cheetah does.
The thing we have working for us is that devices don't have to last forever - just until you die. So in practice, risky procedures (and drugs) become mainstream by starting on patients with extremely short life expectancies or very low quality of life, and then gradually reducing the threshold for using the treatment as the kinks are worked out. But young people who receive joint replacements today are told they'll last 10-20 years until you're back in the shop, which is definitely expensive, inconvenient, and somewhat medically risky. If I were a young vet being considered for some fresh-from-DARPA neural interface, I would seriously consider the fact that I will almost certainly outlast the research program and even the doctors who implanted my one-of-a-kind device. They'll almost certainly end up scraping it out for an upgrade within 15 years.
I think it's more to do with environment than virtue. If you took a guy off a 19-th century farm where there was NOTHING but chores to do and gave him an iPad, he would probably forget to eat for the next 4 days. Look at how they went overboard with alcohol and religion back then.
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But it's a log scale. Don't you think a drop from $5.00/kWh to $0.20/kWh qualifies as "precipitous"? It's under-appreciated because it's still more than fossil fuel, but if that same curve holds for a few more years, the world will be changed.
But now Yahoo can wield its patent threat against Facebook as an asset, increasing its Yahoo's share price for Facebook or whoever else might want to buy it. I'm sure google would like to get some patent ammo against Facebook for example.
Solar has been dropping precipitously in price since at least 1978. How far back do you want to try and blame China?
Leave him alone. He has a vision, he's doing what he likes, and apparently makes a good living at it. And there's a better-than-normal chance he'll find something interesting to the world at large, too.
NP hard doesn't necessarily mean something is hard in any practical sense. It might be a tiny problem instance (like traveling salesman with 3 or 4 cities). Or more commonly, it might be very hard to definitely find an optimal answer, but easy to get a good answer (within a couple percent of optimum), which is the normal way living things get by in the world. And since the computer is solving a mathematical model of your real problem and not the real problem itself, optimizing the model to the tenth decimal point is often a complete waste of time.
You're ignoring Sweeny's entire point and arguing that a different proposition - "gaming is as good as it could ever be!" - is false. So what?
If living in a really nice home is what you value in life, go ahead and spend your money on it. But if you think you'll be paid to live there, you're most likely wrong.
I suppose they will, simply because it would be a waste of their effort to maintain a fork, thus missing out on map updates from other parties. This is a naturally collaborative task. It's not like source code where patches from different parties are likely to have conflicts.
Longer term I have the same concern about nuclear weapons. What if somebody found a simple, cheap way to make highly enriched uranium? It would be a disaster.
He should have put all his money into an unnecessarily large house, like a normal person.
What would you accept as proof? As you may know, establishing the true identity of people is dicey. Which is basically the entire issue of DRM in a nutshell.
Not sure what you mean? That was their final-page conclusion based on a dozen pages of benchmarks.
No, I'm not sure non-integer scalings will be a problem with this screen. With a CRT you never worried whether the dot pitch was a multiple of the resolution, because the dot pitch was too small to see. Individual pixels on this screen may well be the same.
You have it backwards. What I want is a miniature smartphone that does everything, plus a wireless display link for when I need a bigger screen. A wristwatch screen for on-the-go, a tablet screen for goofing off, a desktop screen for work, and a TV screen for goofing off as a group.
I would like to see the ability to use the integrated GPU, even if not for graphics. The traditional CPU is good for sequential logic. But for pattern recognition, physics simulations (which is basically what 3d graphics is), encoding, or code-cracking (e.g. bitcoin), the highly parallel structure of the GPU is better. Now you might argue, my offboard GPU is still the same thing, but better. OK. But these are inherently parallel tasks, so if you could use the one built-in AND the add-on, you wouldn't be wasting anything.
True yesterday, false today:
Probably true, but my kids spend more time playing games in Java (Runescape) and Flash (e.g. Club Penguin and various Barbie-type games) than anything else including the XBox. It's good to have some reserve compute power for inefficiently coded applications, offbeat video codecs without hardware decoding support, etc.
Now that you mention it, computers are even more pervasive now - particularly smartphones. An app to quickly add an item to your 'basket' for your next delivery, without going and sitting down at the computer, would make it more convenient than it used to be. "Siri, add peanut butter to my grocery cart."
How's linux support for Sandy Bridge coming along? Last I checked, about 6 months ago, there was still a lot of bugs/bad performance with the graphics, power management not working, etc. Do any of the distros have good out-of-the-box support yet?
The answer is, there's no intuitive reason, sitting at your desk, to know it wouldn't work. But in the late 90's people thought it would work, and invested millions in getting it going, and still couldn't break even. There is your argument.
I don't see anything that might have changed the equation since then, unless/until gas rises so high that it actually makes people think twice before driving to the grocery store. (I can't believe that a large truck hitting 30 homes on a route wouldn't be more fuel efficient than 30 SUVs, minivans, and cars going point-to-point).
And the best rationalization of all: "if I don't do it, the next guy will, anyways. So the outcome will be the same, except I'll be the loser." And it's often true. It's the main reason why the world really does need ugly things like regulations.
Personally I'd worry more about getting an onboard powerplant, but that's just me.
The thing we have working for us is that devices don't have to last forever - just until you die. So in practice, risky procedures (and drugs) become mainstream by starting on patients with extremely short life expectancies or very low quality of life, and then gradually reducing the threshold for using the treatment as the kinks are worked out. But young people who receive joint replacements today are told they'll last 10-20 years until you're back in the shop, which is definitely expensive, inconvenient, and somewhat medically risky. If I were a young vet being considered for some fresh-from-DARPA neural interface, I would seriously consider the fact that I will almost certainly outlast the research program and even the doctors who implanted my one-of-a-kind device. They'll almost certainly end up scraping it out for an upgrade within 15 years.
I think it's more to do with environment than virtue. If you took a guy off a 19-th century farm where there was NOTHING but chores to do and gave him an iPad, he would probably forget to eat for the next 4 days. Look at how they went overboard with alcohol and religion back then.