Isn't this the nightmare of all anti-freedom lobbyist organisations: Any one can publish anything, while still being anonymous.
IMHO there are three optional futures:
* It is deemed illegal and shut down.
* It is stopped by Palladium and shut down.
* All developers and users are sued and it is shut down.
I remember the good old days when I coded small games for my Atari. It had a 68k CPU with 1MB of RAM (yes, I bought the top notch, I even had it upgraded to 4MB later on).
I coded in asm and C, in order to save RAM I had to use several sprites and compose them into one character (for example, a gnome and an elf are holding a torch, a sword or a bag, simply put the hands of the characters in a fixed locations, use one torch, one sword and one bag to overlay on the character sprite and save loads of memory, i.e. a few kBs at most:P )
A proper use of structs even provided a primitive OO interface (I had a C++ book, but no compiler)...
This is exactly what is missing if Linux is going to make it to the mainstream desktop.
As soon as Linux is recognized as a userfriendly, easy-to-use desktop with lots of free (as in beer) software by the average user Windows will get into real problems. Such an opening would generate a *huge* increase in the number of users and thus in the interest in supporting Linux from different companies.
Two points to avoid flaming: 1) I know that Linux is only the kernel, simply sed 's/Linux/Gnu\\Linux/' and be happy, 2) "as in beer" is how the average user will see it, my mother don't care for open source, she wants to use it as a tool!
"Let's also hope that although MS Word may produce bloated XML, it can still read and process well-formed, simple XML, as good as (or better than) it can read and process non-word files, such as HTML or TXT files."
Wouldn't this just give Word an edge over all other XML producting wordprocessors? It just keep the one-way compatability to M$ products where they can read what others export to them, but no one can (fully) read what they produce.
Just look at an HTML file exported form Word2k. I would not call that compatible with any HTML I've ever learned. Most probably the XML file exported from Office 11 will be a Microsoft specific file, specifying lots of Office specific ActiveX (aka OLE) info that cannot be emulated. And, hey, they can probably store binary data in XML. The only change is that most competing products will emit files that Word can easily read, i.e. M$ will get the biggest benefits.
I'm not only complaining about the ignorance of buying products for these contries and the way our western companies invade the market to exploit the cheap labour. I'm primarily complaining over the chinese way of claiming to be communistic, but then selling the labour of their own citizens for a few bucks a month. I say "selling", as the people allowing the companies to enter the market probably require quite alot of bribing. As for the companies doing this, brinbing is illegal (even in China) and I do not think that "it is worth it".
As for this being the way to industrialisation, then democracy and that this is the way that it goes everywhere. Where are the dreamers. I was hoping for a transition of the 3rd world into industry and knowledge without making all the misstakes we made. Lets not pollute so much, lets have fair labour rules, lets make sure that corruption and bribes don't work, etc. It is we who supply the money, why don't we supply them with some demands too?
As for me prefering or not prefering to do the job myself. I do not mind working on an assembly line, in face, I have been working in the industry for a few years. Now I've got a degree, but I still work close to the production.
Please consider this a reply to all who has been complaining about my previous comment!
We want cheap computers, but don't care for politics. Lets use (next to) slave labour in a communist contry!
My biggest problem with semi-conductor companies producing in 3rd world contries is that these factories do no require much manual labour so the money saved isn't that much. Of course land and construction will be cheap.
It is also nice to see the communist government claiming to be more "fair" letting the "evil" market economy enter whenever it is profitable. This makes them even worse, clinging to a lye preventing the people to gain privileges and a better standard while letting the "right" businesses in. I can't help it, but I suspect that bribes and corruption is very wide spread in this kind of areas.
There is a VHDL version from 1993 supported by most major tools and VHDL supports asyncronous designs. I think that you may run into a number of synthetisations issues though as most of todays tools are intended for syncronous designs.
if I burn my MP3s on a writable DVD, the battery time is to short for me to listen through it all...
Once again we return the problem issue of battery time. This seems to be the limiting factor in portable electronics today, either you can't use it long enough, or it is to heavy to be carried.
I suppose that a small idle loop (x: jmp x) only would affect the program counter, and a few pipe-line registers, so it would probably use less energy. Also, the memory bus would stay untouched if the CPU has a I-cache. So you'r probably right. But I don't think that the difference in power use is big. Still, no need for super computers at the universities, i.e. less power consumption there. As the problem of energy preservation in these kind of situations is very complex, we'd better use the economical benefits for the users (i.e. you don't need to buy a super computer to do a few minutes worth of number crunching).
I'd like to suggest something like the JavaVM, i.e. a standard virtual machine, from which you buy and sell basic ops, i.e. a byte-code instruction.
The biggest problem will probably be that you will not make any real money from letting your CPU be used. Perhaps a good idea would be to let a university supply you with internet access in exchange for CPU time. They usually have quite alot of bandwith.
It would be nice to see a worldwide system. If this is going to work there must be some CPU time quota system, perhaps a quota that can be bought and sold. This could make it interesting for ordinary home users to join (earn quota, sell quota, make $$$). There are many projects in the academic world that could never make a SETI@home launch, since the research is to boring. Still, we need to use all that idle time buring away across the world.
If you can make this cheap enough, imagine the possibilities! Integrate your TV in a glass wall, place info terminals and on-line shopping abilites in the windows of the shows, Integrate timer, thermometer, owen control, etc. in the glass on the kitchen fan... I like the possabilities of this!
<geek> If nothing else, it looks like the PDAs they use in StarTrek are made out of a piece of glass with a handle, this means that we can actually manufacture 'em! </geek>
"The response from players is mixed. It is not open source software, nor is it optional to install."
Neither is windows for playing many of todays top-selling titles. I want an outcry here but I don't see it. Is it because software not being open source does not matter to the average user or is it because people are too ignorant to care? It is funny to see an outcry when a company tries to stop actual cheating which spoils the game for all, instead of putting energy where it matters.
In cloning experiments (copy the DNA from one being into an egg and let it grow - just to be clear) *most* results are in some way defect. I interpret this as this technology not being ready for use. I believe that the people that suggest that this technology is used now are a bit too optimistic. In the future, with more refined techniques though, I think that this is a solution to the lack of transplant organs.
As for determining how long a grown organ will last I suggest cloning and transplantations on animals to refine the DNA replacement technolgies. This has to be done until the probablility for each organ to be good (or a method to measure how good an organ is) is good enough. As we know, transplants today are risky, so we need at least that probability of success before trying. We will never reach 100% though, so there will always be a risk involved.
I don't believe in Mr.Knuth or you being more or less "smart" than I am. I suppose that Mr.Knuth knows more than any of us in this area, since that is his expertice. I believe that I know a fair amount of computer architecture and software design and implementation, but I have a grasp of general sience and I utter my opinions in areas where I don't know the whole truth. Sometimes I utter my concerns as questions to state that I want to gain knowledge, but even when I don't, I still want to learn from the discussion that arises.
I do not want you to judge me as an opposer to new technology, but rather a realist. I work as an engineer, developing new technology, and I feel that it is important to verify that a technology works before appying it to real cases. Just pointing at possible hazards is not "premature optimizations", it is discussing areas that might need attention before the technology is actually used.
this is what's science is all about: instead of being afraid the result will be different "in some way" the researchers are actually finding out the problems and dealing with them one by one.
I'm open minded about this kind of research. I just don't feel ready to have one of these alpha-testing organs put into me.
healthy compared to what ?
If you know that the organ will give you, perhaps a year, then it is good. Do we know that? Do we know that the pain and struggle to recover from a transplant is worth something (a longer life, not just longer pain). I'm just trying to point out the problems with the technology. I truly hope and wish for the to succeed to make custom transplants without problems a reality. That would be a huge step forward!
As for problems with human-origin transplants, I think that I mentioned that in my original post...
I know the difference between cloning and what they do, but the principle of designing (cut'n'paste or just plain copy-all) to build DNA which is inserted into an egg and grown in a creature gives the same problems. You cannot guarantee that the outcome will be healthy, even if it looks good, it will probably differ in some way from what was intended and is therefore more likely to develop some sort of diseace or dysfunction as a consequence from this.
Is an organ developed using transgenetics likely to be healthy? That is what I'm trying to ask!
Does this mean that a doctor can extract stem cells from me, clone a genetically designed pig with a suitable spare part for my body and then make a transplant without any complications and added toxins to prevent my body from rejecting the organ. In that case it sounds great
How do they address the issue that most cloned animals turn out sick, I don't want a sick organ in replacement for my allready sick organ!
One can patent an invention, such as a method of detecting a disease, but one cannot patent a discorvery, such as the function of a gene or an island, planet or anything such.
Thus is the mentioned patent a load of crap and can happily be ignored! (IMHO)
I still prefer a printed book. That is, if there is any useful info in it. Usually ATAPI units like this just plug and plays nicely. Since the software burners ship with usually is crap you don't have to bother about that either, just install the drivers, start Nero (or cdrecord from Linux) and burn away.
I hope that I actually get the manual in the complete release:
"The package contains:
1 x Pioneer DVR-105 DVD Writer
1 x Manual (online)"
I'd have to say that it looks good, even the cons section had an awful lot of items solved by having a second read-only drive (which you usually have).
When on the subject I'd like to discuss a reliability issue. Burned CDs, and even more CDRWs, have a tendency to break after a while (don't expect a CDRW to hold data more than 1-2 years). Judging from the added complexity I doubt that burned DVDs are better. How does a burned DVD rate as a backup media? What is the error rate compared to your average tape?
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't this the nightmare of all anti-freedom lobbyist organisations: Any one can publish anything, while still being anonymous.
IMHO there are three optional futures:
* It is deemed illegal and shut down.
* It is stopped by Palladium and shut down.
* All developers and users are sued and it is shut down.
I still wounder why everything good has to go.
I remember the good old days when I coded small games for my Atari. It had a 68k CPU with 1MB of RAM (yes, I bought the top notch, I even had it upgraded to 4MB later on). :P )
I coded in asm and C, in order to save RAM I had to use several sprites and compose them into one character (for example, a gnome and an elf are holding a torch, a sword or a bag, simply put the hands of the characters in a fixed locations, use one torch, one sword and one bag to overlay on the character sprite and save loads of memory, i.e. a few kBs at most
A proper use of structs even provided a primitive OO interface (I had a C++ book, but no compiler)...
Even though I've read the article, I remain a sceptic. It wouldn't be much fun if everyone just agreed with the main article, would it!
IMHO:
1) I think that all alternatives should try to read Word files properly.
2) I think that all alternatives should support a proper open XML standard that will be truly interchangeable.
3) I think that the alternatives need to provide viewers for this standard format in an easy-to-install and easy-to-use format for all Word users.
4) I hope that M$ not will gain more advantages by polluting yet another standard format.
This is exactly what is missing if Linux is going to make it to the mainstream desktop.
As soon as Linux is recognized as a userfriendly, easy-to-use desktop with lots of free (as in beer) software by the average user Windows will get into real problems. Such an opening would generate a *huge* increase in the number of users and thus in the interest in supporting Linux from different companies.
Two points to avoid flaming: 1) I know that Linux is only the kernel, simply sed 's/Linux/Gnu\\Linux/' and be happy, 2) "as in beer" is how the average user will see it, my mother don't care for open source, she wants to use it as a tool!
"Let's also hope that although MS Word may produce bloated XML, it can still read and process well-formed, simple XML, as good as (or better than) it can read and process non-word files, such as HTML or TXT files."
Wouldn't this just give Word an edge over all other XML producting wordprocessors? It just keep the one-way compatability to M$ products where they can read what others export to them, but no one can (fully) read what they produce.
Just look at an HTML file exported form Word2k. I would not call that compatible with any HTML I've ever learned. Most probably the XML file exported from Office 11 will be a Microsoft specific file, specifying lots of Office specific ActiveX (aka OLE) info that cannot be emulated. And, hey, they can probably store binary data in XML. The only change is that most competing products will emit files that Word can easily read, i.e. M$ will get the biggest benefits.
I'm not only complaining about the ignorance of buying products for these contries and the way our western companies invade the market to exploit the cheap labour. I'm primarily complaining over the chinese way of claiming to be communistic, but then selling the labour of their own citizens for a few bucks a month. I say "selling", as the people allowing the companies to enter the market probably require quite alot of bribing. As for the companies doing this, brinbing is illegal (even in China) and I do not think that "it is worth it".
As for this being the way to industrialisation, then democracy and that this is the way that it goes everywhere. Where are the dreamers. I was hoping for a transition of the 3rd world into industry and knowledge without making all the misstakes we made. Lets not pollute so much, lets have fair labour rules, lets make sure that corruption and bribes don't work, etc. It is we who supply the money, why don't we supply them with some demands too?
As for me prefering or not prefering to do the job myself. I do not mind working on an assembly line, in face, I have been working in the industry for a few years. Now I've got a degree, but I still work close to the production.
Please consider this a reply to all who has been complaining about my previous comment!
We want cheap computers, but don't care for politics. Lets use (next to) slave labour in a communist contry!
My biggest problem with semi-conductor companies producing in 3rd world contries is that these factories do no require much manual labour so the money saved isn't that much. Of course land and construction will be cheap.
It is also nice to see the communist government claiming to be more "fair" letting the "evil" market economy enter whenever it is profitable. This makes them even worse, clinging to a lye preventing the people to gain privileges and a better standard while letting the "right" businesses in. I can't help it, but I suspect that bribes and corruption is very wide spread in this kind of areas.
There is a VHDL version from 1993 supported by most major tools and VHDL supports asyncronous designs. I think that you may run into a number of synthetisations issues though as most of todays tools are intended for syncronous designs.
if I burn my MP3s on a writable DVD, the battery time is to short for me to listen through it all...
Once again we return the problem issue of battery time. This seems to be the limiting factor in portable electronics today, either you can't use it long enough, or it is to heavy to be carried.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/22/121521 1&mode=thread&tid=137
I suppose that a small idle loop (x: jmp x) only would affect the program counter, and a few pipe-line registers, so it would probably use less energy. Also, the memory bus would stay untouched if the CPU has a I-cache. So you'r probably right.
But I don't think that the difference in power use is big. Still, no need for super computers at the universities, i.e. less power consumption there.
As the problem of energy preservation in these kind of situations is very complex, we'd better use the economical benefits for the users (i.e. you don't need to buy a super computer to do a few minutes worth of number crunching).
"Exactly what are you selling?"
I'd like to suggest something like the JavaVM, i.e. a standard virtual machine, from which you buy and sell basic ops, i.e. a byte-code instruction.
The biggest problem will probably be that you will not make any real money from letting your CPU be used. Perhaps a good idea would be to let a university supply you with internet access in exchange for CPU time. They usually have quite alot of bandwith.
Not all CPUs power down when being idle. Most OSs has an idle task, burning away computer power in an endless loop.
When usage is 50%, the CPU is probably not turned off at all, since turning on and off clock trees (and getting the PLLs to sync) take time.
Since most home computers will not power down, we can use that potential computer power to save energy by not running super computers elsewhere.
"The Network is the Computer"
It would be nice to see a worldwide system. If this is going to work there must be some CPU time quota system, perhaps a quota that can be bought and sold. This could make it interesting for ordinary home users to join (earn quota, sell quota, make $$$). There are many projects in the academic world that could never make a SETI@home launch, since the research is to boring. Still, we need to use all that idle time buring away across the world.
If you can make this cheap enough, imagine the possibilities! Integrate your TV in a glass wall, place info terminals and on-line shopping abilites in the windows of the shows, Integrate timer, thermometer, owen control, etc. in the glass on the kitchen fan... I like the possabilities of this!
<geek>
If nothing else, it looks like the PDAs they use in StarTrek are made out of a piece of glass with a handle, this means that we can actually manufacture 'em!
</geek>
"The response from players is mixed. It is not open source software, nor is it optional to install."
Neither is windows for playing many of todays top-selling titles. I want an outcry here but I don't see it. Is it because software not being open source does not matter to the average user or is it because people are too ignorant to care? It is funny to see an outcry when a company tries to stop actual cheating which spoils the game for all, instead of putting energy where it matters.
In cloning experiments (copy the DNA from one being into an egg and let it grow - just to be clear) *most* results are in some way defect. I interpret this as this technology not being ready for use. I believe that the people that suggest that this technology is used now are a bit too optimistic. In the future, with more refined techniques though, I think that this is a solution to the lack of transplant organs.
As for determining how long a grown organ will last I suggest cloning and transplantations on animals to refine the DNA replacement technolgies. This has to be done until the probablility for each organ to be good (or a method to measure how good an organ is) is good enough. As we know, transplants today are risky, so we need at least that probability of success before trying. We will never reach 100% though, so there will always be a risk involved.
I don't believe in Mr.Knuth or you being more or less "smart" than I am. I suppose that Mr.Knuth knows more than any of us in this area, since that is his expertice. I believe that I know a fair amount of computer architecture and software design and implementation, but I have a grasp of general sience and I utter my opinions in areas where I don't know the whole truth. Sometimes I utter my concerns as questions to state that I want to gain knowledge, but even when I don't, I still want to learn from the discussion that arises.
I do not want you to judge me as an opposer to new technology, but rather a realist. I work as an engineer, developing new technology, and I feel that it is important to verify that a technology works before appying it to real cases. Just pointing at possible hazards is not "premature optimizations", it is discussing areas that might need attention before the technology is actually used.
this is what's science is all about: instead of being afraid the result will be different "in some way" the researchers are actually finding out the problems and dealing with them one by one.
I'm open minded about this kind of research. I just don't feel ready to have one of these alpha-testing organs put into me.
healthy compared to what ?
If you know that the organ will give you, perhaps a year, then it is good. Do we know that? Do we know that the pain and struggle to recover from a transplant is worth something (a longer life, not just longer pain). I'm just trying to point out the problems with the technology. I truly hope and wish for the to succeed to make custom transplants without problems a reality. That would be a huge step forward!
As for problems with human-origin transplants, I think that I mentioned that in my original post...
I know the difference between cloning and what they do, but the principle of designing (cut'n'paste or just plain copy-all) to build DNA which is inserted into an egg and grown in a creature gives the same problems. You cannot guarantee that the outcome will be healthy, even if it looks good, it will probably differ in some way from what was intended and is therefore more likely to develop some sort of diseace or dysfunction as a consequence from this.
Is an organ developed using transgenetics likely to be healthy? That is what I'm trying to ask!
Does this mean that a doctor can extract stem cells from me, clone a genetically designed pig with a suitable spare part for my body and then make a transplant without any complications and added toxins to prevent my body from rejecting the organ. In that case it sounds great
How do they address the issue that most cloned animals turn out sick, I don't want a sick organ in replacement for my allready sick organ!
One can patent an invention, such as a method of detecting a disease, but one cannot patent a discorvery, such as the function of a gene or an island, planet or anything such.
Thus is the mentioned patent a load of crap and can happily be ignored! (IMHO)
I still prefer a printed book. That is, if there is any useful info in it. Usually ATAPI units like this just plug and plays nicely. Since the software burners ship with usually is crap you don't have to bother about that either, just install the drivers, start Nero (or cdrecord from Linux) and burn away.
I hope that I actually get the manual in the complete release:
"The package contains:
1 x Pioneer DVR-105 DVD Writer
1 x Manual (online) "
I'd have to say that it looks good, even the cons section had an awful lot of items solved by having a second read-only drive (which you usually have).
When on the subject I'd like to discuss a reliability issue. Burned CDs, and even more CDRWs, have a tendency to break after a while (don't expect a CDRW to hold data more than 1-2 years). Judging from the added complexity I doubt that burned DVDs are better. How does a burned DVD rate as a backup media? What is the error rate compared to your average tape?