Actually, at least in Västerbotten, optical fiber networks are built to most households (even in villages). It currently costs about 20 USD per month (175 SEK) for 100 Mb, although there is an installation fee of about 1000 USD.
Well, don't forget that all energy we consume eventually end up as heat. If we collect solar power in space and beam it down to Earth, it would be the exact opposite of blocking solar radiation, albeit the energy arrives to us in the form of electrical power instead of radiation.
Still, even if you have no control of the computer, at some point the music has to be converted to an analog electric signal to be sent to the speakers. All you need to do is to re-digitize this data. A little messy perhaps, but perfectly possible. (After all, that is essentially how it was done in the old days, when people copied music using tape recorders.)
Yes, I can see your point. But the drawback with a wired "body bus" in a west is of course that one would be confined to wearing that particular west all the time. (Well, unless you equip all your clothes with USB buses.) Perhaps one could simply have a waist belt with a bus in it? Belts are compatible with most clothes.
Yes, possibly (I only took a cursory look at it). But steamlined is a keyword here -- that MIT contraption seems overly messy.
I suppose physical connections would be ok for some of the units, if there were a common interface so that one wouldn't have to rely on one single manufacturer for all of them. Although I think I would prefer to have them attachable directly to each other, instead of having wires going all over the place.
What I would like to have is a modularized system, where the phone/PDA/MP3-player etc is replaced by several independent units that connect using for instance bluetooth.
It could be, for example, an uplink-unit, screen, earpiece and memory-unit. When the technology used to communicate changes, I'll just replace my uplink-unit and so on.
But needless to say, this will never happen, since all those gadget manufacturers (Nokia, Apple or whatever) benefit from me having to buy a new phone+screen+camera+memory+earpiece+mp3-decoder every time I like/have to upgrade one of these technologies.
Re:Dvorak sucks if you're not American.
on
Advocating Dvorak
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· Score: 1
I haven't tried that, but it sounds kind of cumbersome to me. I mean åäö are rather common in swedish, and both my alt keys are located right in the middle of my palm. To press alt+a I have to move my hand completely out of place, since the only finger that reaches alt is already placed on a, and that movement takes time. Or what do you say?
Sounds like a better idea to move ',. to where/=- are, and place åäö where ',. were.
Besides, as I pointed out in a post above, the in-order nature of the Cell has nothing to do with AI being unpredictable. On the contrary, I would say the Cell opens up a whole area of new possibilities, since it should be able to handle many modern AI algorithms very well.
The article sounded reasonable until:
on
A Gamer's Manifesto
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· Score: 5, Insightful
It has to do with the fact that both the XBox 360 and the PS3's Cell CPU use "in-order" processing, which, to greatly simplify, means they've intentionally crippled the ability to make clever A.I. and dynamic, unpredictable, wide-open games in favor of beautiful water reflections and explosion debris that flies through the air prettily.
Wherever did he get this idea? It is completely unrelated. "Unpredictability" only harms in-order processing at the scale of single assembly instructions (nanoseconds). A good bot should hardly do something unpredictable more often than once every other second.
And for that matter, more advanced AI algorithms, such as ANN or SVMs, are usually massively parallelizable and very easy to predict. The Cell would be ideal for such applications.
From what we've seen in the past, even something as simple/straightforward like pressing the shift key can be construed as "intentionally breaking copy protection mechanisms" by sue-happy companies.
How long can you resist the big red press-to-get-sued-button flashing in the middle of the keyboard?
If you by specific-purpose chips mean that we will have a few types of chips that each deal with a whole area of different tasks, then you are possibly right.
But I don't think we will have one extremely specialized chip for every single task in a computer. It will most likely be cheaper to produce 20 semi-general-purpose chips than 10 very specific chips, since the volumes would be much smaller in the latter.
In addition, the more general tasks a chips can handle, the easier it will be to balance varying load between different tasks. With specialized chips, half of them will waste time idling, while others have too much work.
Another interesting thing is that the pro-patent lobby group often claim that software patents would be good for SMEs and will not harm OSS. Since it obviously isn't bad for large corporations either, then what special interest groups are there left really?
One reason why they shouldn't get access to the data is that they probably would draw too far-reaching conclusions from it.
Even if a certain behaviour is correlated to an increased risk for accidents, it does not mean that persons showing this behaviour necessarily have a higher risk of causing an accident. Perhaps there are other reasons why your eyes move in such a way that the system regards you half-asleep.
For example, did you know that there is a strong correlation between the size of your feet and you intelligence? Smaller feet means lower IQ. However, at a closer inspection, one will find a simple explaination for this: children have small feet.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, at least in Västerbotten, optical fiber networks are built to most households (even in villages). It currently costs about 20 USD per month (175 SEK) for 100 Mb, although there is an installation fee of about 1000 USD.
Well, don't forget that all energy we consume eventually end up as heat. If we collect solar power in space and beam it down to Earth, it would be the exact opposite of blocking solar radiation, albeit the energy arrives to us in the form of electrical power instead of radiation.
Still, even if you have no control of the computer, at some point the music has to be converted to an analog electric signal to be sent to the speakers. All you need to do is to re-digitize this data. A little messy perhaps, but perfectly possible. (After all, that is essentially how it was done in the old days, when people copied music using tape recorders.)
Yes, I can see your point. But the drawback with a wired "body bus" in a west is of course that one would be confined to wearing that particular west all the time. (Well, unless you equip all your clothes with USB buses.) Perhaps one could simply have a waist belt with a bus in it? Belts are compatible with most clothes.
I suppose physical connections would be ok for some of the units, if there were a common interface so that one wouldn't have to rely on one single manufacturer for all of them. Although I think I would prefer to have them attachable directly to each other, instead of having wires going all over the place.
It could be, for example, an uplink-unit, screen, earpiece and memory-unit. When the technology used to communicate changes, I'll just replace my uplink-unit and so on.
But needless to say, this will never happen, since all those gadget manufacturers (Nokia, Apple or whatever) benefit from me having to buy a new phone+screen+camera+memory+earpiece+mp3-decoder every time I like/have to upgrade one of these technologies.
Sounds like a better idea to move ',. to where /=- are, and place åäö where ',. were.
Besides, as I pointed out in a post above, the in-order nature of the Cell has nothing to do with AI being unpredictable. On the contrary, I would say the Cell opens up a whole area of new possibilities, since it should be able to handle many modern AI algorithms very well.
Wherever did he get this idea? It is completely unrelated. "Unpredictability" only harms in-order processing at the scale of single assembly instructions (nanoseconds). A good bot should hardly do something unpredictable more often than once every other second.
And for that matter, more advanced AI algorithms, such as ANN or SVMs, are usually massively parallelizable and very easy to predict. The Cell would be ideal for such applications.
That's 200.000 billion.
Don't worry. In Europe it is only 200 billion.
How long can you resist the big red press-to-get-sued-button flashing in the middle of the keyboard?
You could of course require that the sending machine listens to SMTP, and simply throw away any email sent from machines that do not.
If you by specific-purpose chips mean that we will have a few types of chips that each deal with a whole area of different tasks, then you are possibly right.
But I don't think we will have one extremely specialized chip for every single task in a computer. It will most likely be cheaper to produce 20 semi-general-purpose chips than 10 very specific chips, since the volumes would be much smaller in the latter.
In addition, the more general tasks a chips can handle, the easier it will be to balance varying load between different tasks. With specialized chips, half of them will waste time idling, while others have too much work.
Another interesting thing is that the pro-patent lobby group often claim that software patents would be good for SMEs and will not harm OSS. Since it obviously isn't bad for large corporations either, then what special interest groups are there left really?
Suppose you could install a small program on your computer that mirrored a fraction of wikipedia when you are on-line.
One reason why they shouldn't get access to the data is that they probably would draw too far-reaching conclusions from it. Even if a certain behaviour is correlated to an increased risk for accidents, it does not mean that persons showing this behaviour necessarily have a higher risk of causing an accident. Perhaps there are other reasons why your eyes move in such a way that the system regards you half-asleep. For example, did you know that there is a strong correlation between the size of your feet and you intelligence? Smaller feet means lower IQ. However, at a closer inspection, one will find a simple explaination for this: children have small feet.