I think it's so funnny that I'm going to subscribe now. I want to encourage this. It cracks me up.
You're too serious and angry; just ignore them, dammit, if it makes you need to up your dosage. "It" not "holding back from any ligitamate news stories" because there aren't any, and it's just 4/1, so STFU. Or, keep going; you're funny too. I love seeing people get angry and indignant over trivialities.
Might have been funny, if you could have gotten the grammar close to right. Thank you for playing. Lose the apostrophe and the hyphen, then please insert coin and try again.
You shouldn't, unless you want to be an engineer. The poster's point was that if you want to be an engineer you have to do more than claim to be one. Of course, we all know that you can claim rightfully to be an artist no matter what.
Enjoy the feeling of accomplishement, respect, and salary as an artist, BTW. There are so few of them we really appreciate your effort. Maybe the extra attention from the ladies will be worth it. Wait, that was 10 years ago. Nevermind.
there is nothing you can come up with that engineers or programmers produce that cannot be described as a tool
The fruit . . . hanging so low . . . must resist . . but can't . . .
I assume your parents were engineers and/or programmers, since this tautology pretty much make you look like a tool. IMHO.:)
Seriously, cmon. Stop with that. Sure, everything is a tool because you can USE it. That pretty much defines a tool, right? So, basically, since anything can be USED in some way or another, even if that way is silly or not-yet apparent, everything is a tool. Including you. (And, alas, me -- to ward of that inevitable comeback in advance).
Lots of professions involve making tools. In fact, just about any profession (being done well, at least) will involve more tool-making than anything else (remember, a better procedure is a tool, since it can be used too -- see the pointlessness?).
That doesn't make it engineering. And it doesn't equate engineering and programming.
That reminds me of this one:
A programmer, a hardware engineer and a departmental manager were on their way to a meeting. They were driving down a steep mountain road when suddenly the brakes on their car failed. The car careened almost out of control down the road, bouncing off the crash barriers, until it miraculously ground to a halt scraping along the mountainside. The car's occupants, shaken but unhurt, now had a problem: they were stuck halfway down a mountain in a car with no brakes. What were they to do?
"I know," said the departmental manager," Let's have a meeting, propose a Vision, formulate a Mission Statement, define some Goals, and by a process of Continuous Improvement find a solution to the Critical Problems, and we can be on our way."
"No, no," said the hardware engineer, "That will take far too long, and besides, that method has never worked before. I've got my Swiss Army knife with me, and in no time at all I can strip down the car's braking system, isolate the fault, fix it, and we can be on our way."
"Well," said the programmer, "before we do anything, I think we should push the car back up the road and see if it happens again."
Engineering itself is the intersection of art, science, and mathematics. Progamming is a necessary subset of many kinds of engineering, but it does not comprise engineering in itself, and certainly isn't some higher form of it as you imply.
Engineers (especially electrical and computer engineers, though most others nowadays as well) often program, but programmers rarely engineer. They embed algorithms in syntactic schema.
Engineers design concrete, tangible things (chips, bridges, cities, whatever). Programmers create algorithms and data structures and adhere to syntax rules.
As the above post about trashpersons and housepeople indicated, the term engineer is tossed about like a hero cookie all-to-often to give a bogus sense of self-esteem and self-importance to the practitioners of otherwise completely respectable professions. These people should be looking for something more meaningful than a token title (that doesn't even apply, and may even mislead).
Yes, I have, a lot! I even have some very informal and unscientific benchmark results (counting 1-mississippi, 2-mississippi, . . after the double click until load) because not long before SP1 came along I was testing my system to see if changing my BIOS RAM timing made any diff on prg load times. It didn't, but I scratched the MS times (that's the state abbrev for mississippi, BTW, which I am quite tired of typing already) on some paper that, as they so often do, stayed on my desk past it's useful life.
After installing SP1 I immediately noticed longer load times. The load times are all, consistently, still the same, and noticeably longer than XP (pro, BTW) before SP1, which I used for almost a year (more?). I really started to take for granted sub-1s ie load times. Sigh. Anyway, here are the data:
ie: 1 MS max, every time. with SP1: 3-4 MS, depending on what else is up
adobe premiere 6.5: 7-9 MS, with SP1: 18-25 MS
excel xp with a 16MB spreadsheet (loaded from a shortcut to the sheet file): 20-25 MS. with SP1: 60-90 MS.
DVArchive (replay tv simulator, all in JAVA 1.4.1, a very slow-loading monkey): 30-35 MS. with SP1: 90-100 or tired of counting MS.
This sucks. Especially now that I know why, for the following reason. Before, I simply attributed the slow down to the mysterious hardware and software gremlins (and I'm an ASIC designer -- we know better than most just how real these critters really are -- ask me about typical chip testing coverage (90-98%), or to compare the MS bugs we cry about to the insane, random bugs in million-dollar EDA software from Cadence and Synopsys), but now I know that an upgrade that ostensibly should have improved system performance has instead worsened it, I'm bummed. Worse, there were some hassles with my (legit) corp key for XP with SP1, causing me quite a bit of hassle getting the thing installed to begin with.
OK, maybe SP1 made it more secure, or less crash-prone (wasn't bad before though, and doesn't seem better now), or something. Yes, I'll tell myself that -- something improved. I'm just not sure exactly what it is.
Nothing new here -- SUN (Stanford University Network) has always has the motto: the network is the computer.
I work very closely with Sun (high-end server engineering in Burlington, MA), and while they have gotten a bit big and slow, and their organizational hierarchy is a little flat (which can lead to too much discussion of the best way to do something and too little actually executing any one of the acceptable ways to do it), I do believe Sun is quite clueful and still making some cool stuff.
They're gonna shock us all when InfiniBand-equipped Solaris boxen start rolling out -- then the network really will be the copmputer, in ways we've not seen before . . .
Hoteling was a buzzword for a while, but how many companies can do it effectively without destroying morale?
Easy -- just let them enjoy the benefits (move your workspace easily for presentations, meetings, etc.) without forcing them to deal with annoyances like an ever-changing office location.
Well, if we can't see the slashdotted pics, we can make our own mental memory lane, eh?
I remember seeing a C64 + 1541 drive with a FastDrive cartridge installed -- 5-10x speed increase (from something 100x too slow to begin with though;)). I was amazed. And I still don't know how it worked -- some sort of caching or somthing? Anyone know the basic idea?
What, those were 170kB (170!) disks right? You could clip out the "unusuable side" write notch on most floppies and make 'em double-sided, for a whopping 340kB of storage in one fragile, wobbly 5.25" piece of plastic and mylar.
I recall having over 1000 C64 floppies. I used many of them a huge number of times (archon, fists of death, mail order monsters . . . *sigh*) and they so rarely went bad. I never backed up, and I was never careful with them.
Contrast "modern" PC 3.5" floppies with their 1.44MB of space and ostensibly stronger storage case, but in my recent experience, much, much higher rate of damage/errors and incompatibility between drives. Anyone else notice that floppies seem less reliable now? (I hate 'em and use compact flash cards and thuimbdrives now, or cdroms for booting whenever possible).
I also recall tape drives and typing in basic programs for magazines. Amazing. Debug skills start here.
Further back: playing on ANSI dumb terminals and teletype machines my dad brought home (he was an RCA Communications field svc rep). I drew a sine wave (or damn close) on a long roll of paper (13 periods, all identical) using a tty (original sense) when I was 5, and my mother still keeps it because it's "pretty". She has no idea what a sine wave is and I didn't either at the time.
Hmm, I suppose there really was no way to avoid a tech career (ASIC designer for NEC), notwithstanding the valiant efforts of utter disdain for high school (11th grade dropout) and various psychoactive substances.:)
you don't own a PVR, do you? Skipping commercials (either manually via Tivo, or automatically with ReplayTV) is a relatively minor part of the wonderfullness of PVR's. As cool as it is to avoid commercials, it's less than 1% of the overall appeal of PVR to me.
Pause, rewind, auto-record, etc. are the real major advantages of PVR.
And product placement is not an annoying interruption. Not too terrible, methinks.
er, wouldn't they want to make the commercials slower, so they look normal in FF?
Anyway, this doesn't suprise me (except that P&G released the study results). What does surpise me is that you can still use a ReplayTV (Tivo's cousin) and automatically skip all commercials in live (time-shifted) or recorded programming.
It works about 95% of the time on 90% of the shows. 75% of the time on 10% of shows. And, for when it fails, there's the 30s jump button (also available, but undocumented/unsupported on Tivo with a minor hack/code entry).
I see so few commercials I actually started to miss them and now occasionally turn off auto commercial advance, especially during shows that tend to have cool/relevant commercials (such as The Daily Show).
Perhaps even more surprising is that you can send recorded tv shows (or whatever) to another replay using built-in features (ip based), which is especially cool using broadband with the built-in ethernet. You can also program the thing from anywhere over the web if you use the network connection (modem is included too).
Sorry for the replayTV commercial, but it really is that cool. Tivo is cool too, though not quite as apt to enrage The Man as replayTV
(no auto commercial advance on Tivo -- you have to press a button to skip, either 30s jump or FF). And no sending shows anywhere, to PC's or other Tivos. Both are ultra-hackable though, so if you want one, get the smallest/cheapest (40hr) and add a bigger drive (200GB = 200Hrs =~ +$200).
I know replay (sonic Blue) is getting sued over these features, but so far it hasn't affected my service (and I've backed up my system just in case, and found server emulation that will be released if needed). Does anyone have an update on the lawsuit?
Funny to see this here -- I (and Sun) know all too well about this phenomenon, but I am bound to relative secrecy by NDA.
So, I can't share my team's research results that clearly show that this is a bigger problem than most raders probably realize. Nor can I share the steps (advanced ECC, logic-BIST, etc) we're taking to prevent this before it gets well-known enough to be a problem.
But I can say: this is indeed a scoop, way to go./!
You're at least the second testosterone-ball that's felt the need to flex his or her coolness and bravado muscles simultaneously on this thread. Same sort of "I'll stick with my " remark.
I just wanted to say that some of us aren't impressed.
Stick with whatever you want, this idea (and implementation) has merit. There are applications in which this is superior to your "H&K". If you can't say something interesting, stfu. Better still, just relax Tex, no one is trying to take your gun away. You're fingers aren't cold enough yet anyway:).
And, BTW, I support the right to bear arms wholeheartedly. I am not in support of any sort of gun control, but I think this is interesting and, as someone else already mentioned, a possible source of agreement for both gun rights and gun control types.
OK, I'll bite -- what are you talking about? [It is] impossible to re-order words from one architechture to another?
Is this a joke, or a troll, or what? Of course it's possible to do just about anything in software. Maybe you meant impractical or something like that.
Re-ordering, BTW, in hardware or software, is trivial. Maybe we're thinking of two different things, but the micro-topic was big/little-endian compatibility, and changing that is easyif it's known to be one or the other, which it is in this case.
Patent this?:
tmp = a; a = b; b = tmp?
You have to mean something other than what you typed, and I'm interested.
Well how could you not do it this way? Reality is statistical. We expect the sun to rise every day because it always has done so, and we've constructed our theories of the universe based upon observations, not special extra-sensory "understanding" that precedes observing the facts.
If you mean "how could you not do it this way", as in using brute-force as a natural part of the evolutionary path to get some empirical data and a prototype model upon which to develop more accurate models, OK. But that would mean you're missing my point entirely. Another post below points out how useful these results might be in that way, as a stepping stone to more thorough understanding. Agreed. But I don't think that's what you're saying because of the rest of your post.
Statistical has nothing to do with it. And understanding does not always follow from empirical data, even exhaustive empirical data. For example, if I can watch you play tic-tac-toe, and I saw all possible game states and moves (inputs) and your actions (outputs), I could make a big lookup table that mimics you exactly (assuming you're 100% consistent in your actions, which is unlikelely, and I'd be surprised if the hippocampus is 100% consistent rather than dependent on some internal state in the rest of the brain, but I digress). But then what if you want to lose tic-tac-toe later on for some reason. My brute-force model can't take that into account. It just looked at your behaviour under one very specific set of circumstances and made a simple model. The model breaks when you change goals, or play a different game, or if just about anything changes, which is ostensibly what I was interested in to begin with -- how you act.
On the other hand, if we can make a model that is based on understanding (like a flow chart, if-then sort of decision making and branching), even if it doesn't work as well as the brute-force model at first, it would be more promising and likely to produce a robust replacement part and enhance understanding.
Again, the results are remarkable, and no doubt will help new research in some ways. Maybe this simple model will even serve as a foundation for a more complex model or more understanding, if from no other advantage than this can now be simulated quickly in silicon. A possible drawback to this new convenience may be that we ignore behavior of the hippocampus (under varying rest-of-brain conditions) that was not recorded by the experimenters.
Anyway, I'd be wary about getting one of those to replace my (fried) hippocampus. It's just too much of a simplification of a massively complex system and that often leads to highly unpredictable results.
This is +5 Interesting only to those who didn't read (or understand) the article.
Anyway, when I first saw this headline I was thrilled at the prospect of scientists anywhere actually understanding any chunk of brain well enough to replace it (with a semiconductor, no less -- those must be some awesome I/O buffers on that ASIC -- what's brain voltage, uV? nV?).
Then I saw:
No one understands how the hippocampus encodes information. So the team simply copied its behaviour. Slices of rat hippocampus were stimulated with electrical signals, millions of times over, until they could be sure which electrical input produces a corresponding output. Putting the information from various slices together gave the team a mathematical model of the entire hippocampus.
They just brute-forced it! This is remarkable achievement, but moreso from tech implementation standpoint than a brain understanding standpoint.
The point is, we don't have any clue at all about the uber-divx format that encodes human perception or memory. So the idea of storing it outside of the brain (or even viewing it, or cross-connecting 2 brains) is kinda silly at our level of understanding.
We just found a little chunk (the hippocampus) that is essential to storing memories and happens to get whacked often enough by stroke and such. Then we did an all-possible-input-combos test on this chunk (using rat brains, apparently), recorded the outputs, and burned the whole thing into a look-up table in a chip, and (this is the cool part) connected the chip to a real brain, bypassing a broken hippocampus chunk.
We just mimicked a relatively simple part of the brain with an exhaustive, brute-force approach that may not scale well to human hippocampi.
You actually know someone who tried to stop looking at porn? Why? I can only assume it was to screw some chick who was anti-porn. Not that that's a good excuse, but it's the only possible one.
someone here unequivocally prove it to be a Very Bad Thing(TM).
Re:All chips are protected on a craft like this!
on
SOHO Strikes Back
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Cosmic rays are RAYS not particles, and it's entirely possible to a few to slip by.
wrong:
cosmic ray
A stream of ionizing radiation of extraterrestrial origin, consisting chiefly of protons, alpha particles, and other atomic nuclei but including some high-energy electrons, that enters the atmosphere, collides with atomic nuclei, and produces secondary radiation, principally pions, muons, electrons, and gamma rays.
Sorry I missed that comment -- I really am. Exactly when did a computer "pass the [Turing] test?". If you meant "we", as in us humans, you don't understand what a Turing test is.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's so funnny that I'm going to subscribe now. I want to encourage this. It cracks me up.
You're too serious and angry; just ignore them, dammit, if it makes you need to up your dosage. "It" not "holding back from any ligitamate news stories" because there aren't any, and it's just 4/1, so STFU. Or, keep going; you're funny too. I love seeing people get angry and indignant over trivialities.
pidgeon? I don't get it. What's a pidgeon?
It's standards-compliance also sucks.
Might have been funny, if you could have gotten the grammar close to right. Thank you for playing. Lose the apostrophe and the hyphen, then please insert coin and try again.
You shouldn't, unless you want to be an engineer. The poster's point was that if you want to be an engineer you have to do more than claim to be one. Of course, we all know that you can claim rightfully to be an artist no matter what.
Enjoy the feeling of accomplishement, respect, and salary as an artist, BTW. There are so few of them we really appreciate your effort. Maybe the extra attention from the ladies will be worth it. Wait, that was 10 years ago. Nevermind.
there is nothing you can come up with that engineers or programmers produce that cannot be described as a tool
:)
The fruit . . . hanging so low . . . must resist . . but can't . . .
I assume your parents were engineers and/or programmers, since this tautology pretty much make you look like a tool. IMHO.
Seriously, cmon. Stop with that. Sure, everything is a tool because you can USE it. That pretty much defines a tool, right? So, basically, since anything can be USED in some way or another, even if that way is silly or not-yet apparent, everything is a tool. Including you. (And, alas, me -- to ward of that inevitable comeback in advance).
Lots of professions involve making tools. In fact, just about any profession (being done well, at least) will involve more tool-making than anything else (remember, a better procedure is a tool, since it can be used too -- see the pointlessness?).
That doesn't make it engineering. And it doesn't equate engineering and programming.
That reminds me of this one:
A programmer, a hardware engineer and a departmental manager were on their way to a meeting. They were driving down a steep mountain road when suddenly the brakes on their car failed. The car careened almost out of control down the road, bouncing off the crash barriers, until it miraculously ground to a halt scraping along the mountainside. The car's occupants, shaken but unhurt, now had a problem: they were stuck halfway down a mountain in a car with no brakes. What were they to do? "I know," said the departmental manager," Let's have a meeting, propose a Vision, formulate a Mission Statement, define some Goals, and by a process of Continuous Improvement find a solution to the Critical Problems, and we can be on our way."
"No, no," said the hardware engineer, "That will take far too long, and besides, that method has never worked before. I've got my Swiss Army knife with me, and in no time at all I can strip down the car's braking system, isolate the fault, fix it, and we can be on our way."
"Well," said the programmer, "before we do anything, I think we should push the car back up the road and see if it happens again."
mere engineering
sigh.
I can't help but feed this troll. I'm sorry.
Engineering itself is the intersection of art, science, and mathematics. Progamming is a necessary subset of many kinds of engineering, but it does not comprise engineering in itself, and certainly isn't some higher form of it as you imply.
Engineers (especially electrical and computer engineers, though most others nowadays as well) often program, but programmers rarely engineer. They embed algorithms in syntactic schema.
Engineers design concrete, tangible things (chips, bridges, cities, whatever). Programmers create algorithms and data structures and adhere to syntax rules.
As the above post about trashpersons and housepeople indicated, the term engineer is tossed about like a hero cookie all-to-often to give a bogus sense of self-esteem and self-importance to the practitioners of otherwise completely respectable professions. These people should be looking for something more meaningful than a token title (that doesn't even apply, and may even mislead).
it's OK. I thought so, but you can never be too sure on ./ :)
You're kidding right? I did explain the MS thing in the post. And megaseconds would be "Ms", not "MS".
Yes, I have, a lot! I even have some very informal and unscientific benchmark results (counting 1-mississippi, 2-mississippi, . . after the double click until load) because not long before SP1 came along I was testing my system to see if changing my BIOS RAM timing made any diff on prg load times. It didn't, but I scratched the MS times (that's the state abbrev for mississippi, BTW, which I am quite tired of typing already) on some paper that, as they so often do, stayed on my desk past it's useful life.
After installing SP1 I immediately noticed longer load times. The load times are all, consistently, still the same, and noticeably longer than XP (pro, BTW) before SP1, which I used for almost a year (more?). I really started to take for granted sub-1s ie load times. Sigh. Anyway, here are the data:
ie: 1 MS max, every time. with SP1: 3-4 MS, depending on what else is up
adobe premiere 6.5: 7-9 MS, with SP1: 18-25 MS
excel xp with a 16MB spreadsheet (loaded from a shortcut to the sheet file): 20-25 MS. with SP1: 60-90 MS.
DVArchive (replay tv simulator, all in JAVA 1.4.1, a very slow-loading monkey): 30-35 MS. with SP1: 90-100 or tired of counting MS.
This sucks. Especially now that I know why, for the following reason. Before, I simply attributed the slow down to the mysterious hardware and software gremlins (and I'm an ASIC designer -- we know better than most just how real these critters really are -- ask me about typical chip testing coverage (90-98%), or to compare the MS bugs we cry about to the insane, random bugs in million-dollar EDA software from Cadence and Synopsys), but now I know that an upgrade that ostensibly should have improved system performance has instead worsened it, I'm bummed. Worse, there were some hassles with my (legit) corp key for XP with SP1, causing me quite a bit of hassle getting the thing installed to begin with.
OK, maybe SP1 made it more secure, or less crash-prone (wasn't bad before though, and doesn't seem better now), or something. Yes, I'll tell myself that -- something improved. I'm just not sure exactly what it is.
Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) is in tech now? Or is that American Direct Mail? I'm confused.
Nothing new here -- SUN (Stanford University Network) has always has the motto: the network is the computer.
I work very closely with Sun (high-end server engineering in Burlington, MA), and while they have gotten a bit big and slow, and their organizational hierarchy is a little flat (which can lead to too much discussion of the best way to do something and too little actually executing any one of the acceptable ways to do it), I do believe Sun is quite clueful and still making some cool stuff.
They're gonna shock us all when InfiniBand-equipped Solaris boxen start rolling out -- then the network really will be the copmputer, in ways we've not seen before . . .
Hoteling was a buzzword for a while, but how many companies can do it effectively without destroying morale?
Easy -- just let them enjoy the benefits (move your workspace easily for presentations, meetings, etc.) without forcing them to deal with annoyances like an ever-changing office location.
Well, if we can't see the slashdotted pics, we can make our own mental memory lane, eh?
;)). I was amazed. And I still don't know how it worked -- some sort of caching or somthing? Anyone know the basic idea?
:)
I remember seeing a C64 + 1541 drive with a FastDrive cartridge installed -- 5-10x speed increase (from something 100x too slow to begin with though
What, those were 170kB (170!) disks right? You could clip out the "unusuable side" write notch on most floppies and make 'em double-sided, for a whopping 340kB of storage in one fragile, wobbly 5.25" piece of plastic and mylar.
I recall having over 1000 C64 floppies. I used many of them a huge number of times (archon, fists of death, mail order monsters . . . *sigh*) and they so rarely went bad. I never backed up, and I was never careful with them.
Contrast "modern" PC 3.5" floppies with their 1.44MB of space and ostensibly stronger storage case, but in my recent experience, much, much higher rate of damage/errors and incompatibility between drives. Anyone else notice that floppies seem less reliable now? (I hate 'em and use compact flash cards and thuimbdrives now, or cdroms for booting whenever possible).
I also recall tape drives and typing in basic programs for magazines. Amazing. Debug skills start here.
Further back: playing on ANSI dumb terminals and teletype machines my dad brought home (he was an RCA Communications field svc rep). I drew a sine wave (or damn close) on a long roll of paper (13 periods, all identical) using a tty (original sense) when I was 5, and my mother still keeps it because it's "pretty". She has no idea what a sine wave is and I didn't either at the time.
Hmm, I suppose there really was no way to avoid a tech career (ASIC designer for NEC), notwithstanding the valiant efforts of utter disdain for high school (11th grade dropout) and various psychoactive substances.
you don't own a PVR, do you? Skipping commercials (either manually via Tivo, or automatically with ReplayTV) is a relatively minor part of the wonderfullness of PVR's. As cool as it is to avoid commercials, it's less than 1% of the overall appeal of PVR to me.
Pause, rewind, auto-record, etc. are the real major advantages of PVR.
And product placement is not an annoying interruption. Not too terrible, methinks.
er, wouldn't they want to make the commercials slower, so they look normal in FF?
Anyway, this doesn't suprise me (except that P&G released the study results). What does surpise me is that you can still use a ReplayTV (Tivo's cousin) and automatically skip all commercials in live (time-shifted) or recorded programming.
It works about 95% of the time on 90% of the shows. 75% of the time on 10% of shows. And, for when it fails, there's the 30s jump button (also available, but undocumented/unsupported on Tivo with a minor hack/code entry).
I see so few commercials I actually started to miss them and now occasionally turn off auto commercial advance, especially during shows that tend to have cool/relevant commercials (such as The Daily Show).
Perhaps even more surprising is that you can send recorded tv shows (or whatever) to another replay using built-in features (ip based), which is especially cool using broadband with the built-in ethernet. You can also program the thing from anywhere over the web if you use the network connection (modem is included too).
Most amazing, though, is that you can use OS software to send mpg's to/from your PC!. Any PC. It's rather cool.
Sorry for the replayTV commercial, but it really is that cool. Tivo is cool too, though not quite as apt to enrage The Man as replayTV (no auto commercial advance on Tivo -- you have to press a button to skip, either 30s jump or FF). And no sending shows anywhere, to PC's or other Tivos. Both are ultra-hackable though, so if you want one, get the smallest/cheapest (40hr) and add a bigger drive (200GB = 200Hrs =~ +$200).
I know replay (sonic Blue) is getting sued over these features, but so far it hasn't affected my service (and I've backed up my system just in case, and found server emulation that will be released if needed). Does anyone have an update on the lawsuit?
This one seems somehow apropriate for ./:
97 Berkelium
just academic
protesting commercial use
feels it in his bones
Funny to see this here -- I (and Sun) know all too well about this phenomenon, but I am bound to relative secrecy by NDA.
./!
So, I can't share my team's research results that clearly show that this is a bigger problem than most raders probably realize. Nor can I share the steps (advanced ECC, logic-BIST, etc) we're taking to prevent this before it gets well-known enough to be a problem.
But I can say: this is indeed a scoop, way to go
You're at least the second testosterone-ball that's felt the need to flex his or her coolness and bravado muscles simultaneously on this thread. Same sort of "I'll stick with my " remark.
:).
I just wanted to say that some of us aren't impressed.
Stick with whatever you want, this idea (and implementation) has merit. There are applications in which this is superior to your "H&K". If you can't say something interesting, stfu. Better still, just relax Tex, no one is trying to take your gun away. You're fingers aren't cold enough yet anyway
And, BTW, I support the right to bear arms wholeheartedly. I am not in support of any sort of gun control, but I think this is interesting and, as someone else already mentioned, a possible source of agreement for both gun rights and gun control types.
OK, I'll bite -- what are you talking about? [It is] impossible to re-order words from one architechture to another?
Is this a joke, or a troll, or what? Of course it's possible to do just about anything in software. Maybe you meant impractical or something like that.
Re-ordering, BTW, in hardware or software, is trivial. Maybe we're thinking of two different things, but the micro-topic was big/little-endian compatibility, and changing that is easyif it's known to be one or the other, which it is in this case.
Patent this?:
tmp = a; a = b; b = tmp?
You have to mean something other than what you typed, and I'm interested.
If you mean "how could you not do it this way", as in using brute-force as a natural part of the evolutionary path to get some empirical data and a prototype model upon which to develop more accurate models, OK. But that would mean you're missing my point entirely. Another post below points out how useful these results might be in that way, as a stepping stone to more thorough understanding. Agreed. But I don't think that's what you're saying because of the rest of your post.
Statistical has nothing to do with it. And understanding does not always follow from empirical data, even exhaustive empirical data. For example, if I can watch you play tic-tac-toe, and I saw all possible game states and moves (inputs) and your actions (outputs), I could make a big lookup table that mimics you exactly (assuming you're 100% consistent in your actions, which is unlikelely, and I'd be surprised if the hippocampus is 100% consistent rather than dependent on some internal state in the rest of the brain, but I digress). But then what if you want to lose tic-tac-toe later on for some reason. My brute-force model can't take that into account. It just looked at your behaviour under one very specific set of circumstances and made a simple model. The model breaks when you change goals, or play a different game, or if just about anything changes, which is ostensibly what I was interested in to begin with -- how you act.
On the other hand, if we can make a model that is based on understanding (like a flow chart, if-then sort of decision making and branching), even if it doesn't work as well as the brute-force model at first, it would be more promising and likely to produce a robust replacement part and enhance understanding.
Again, the results are remarkable, and no doubt will help new research in some ways. Maybe this simple model will even serve as a foundation for a more complex model or more understanding, if from no other advantage than this can now be simulated quickly in silicon. A possible drawback to this new convenience may be that we ignore behavior of the hippocampus (under varying rest-of-brain conditions) that was not recorded by the experimenters.
Anyway, I'd be wary about getting one of those to replace my (fried) hippocampus. It's just too much of a simplification of a massively complex system and that often leads to highly unpredictable results.
Anyway, when I first saw this headline I was thrilled at the prospect of scientists anywhere actually understanding any chunk of brain well enough to replace it (with a semiconductor, no less -- those must be some awesome I/O buffers on that ASIC -- what's brain voltage, uV? nV?).
Then I saw:
They just brute-forced it! This is remarkable achievement, but moreso from tech implementation standpoint than a brain understanding standpoint.
The point is, we don't have any clue at all about the uber-divx format that encodes human perception or memory. So the idea of storing it outside of the brain (or even viewing it, or cross-connecting 2 brains) is kinda silly at our level of understanding.
We just found a little chunk (the hippocampus) that is essential to storing memories and happens to get whacked often enough by stroke and such. Then we did an all-possible-input-combos test on this chunk (using rat brains, apparently), recorded the outputs, and burned the whole thing into a look-up table in a chip, and (this is the cool part) connected the chip to a real brain, bypassing a broken hippocampus chunk.
We just mimicked a relatively simple part of the brain with an exhaustive, brute-force approach that may not scale well to human hippocampi.
I'm sorry, but are you serious?
You actually know someone who tried to stop looking at porn? Why? I can only assume it was to screw some chick who was anti-porn. Not that that's a good excuse, but it's the only possible one.
It's sad, really. Porn is not a problem.
Have I been trolled?
someone here unequivocally prove it to be a Very Bad Thing(TM).
Cosmic rays are RAYS not particles, and it's entirely possible to a few to slip by.
wrong:
cosmic ray
A stream of ionizing radiation of extraterrestrial origin, consisting chiefly of protons, alpha particles, and other atomic nuclei but including some high-energy electrons, that enters the atmosphere, collides with atomic nuclei, and produces secondary radiation, principally pions, muons, electrons, and gamma rays.
We've passed the test
Sorry I missed that comment -- I really am. Exactly when did a computer "pass the [Turing] test?". If you meant "we", as in us humans, you don't understand what a Turing test is.