Crikey! If I said that was the biggest load of hype, like, ever... well, I wouldn't be guilty of hype at all. It's beyond hype. It's hyperhype.
Yea, sorry for the sensationalism, but I am a little excited about the role that blogging is starting to take in society. If you think this thing through and imagines the social changes that widescale blogging will naturally produce, you too will probably get pretty excited.
Of course there were precursers like usenet and even BBS's. But let me tell you something, my mom is into blogs and she can't even use Excell and never hit usenet or a BBS. The ubiquity and acceptance of blogs as a tool for specialized collaboration and finely tuned information distribution is the essence of the revolution.
Watch as the U.S. and other parts of the world wake-up from their media-induced-zombie catatosys over the next few years as a direct result of personal choice in information sources.
But anyway, it would take a complete collapse of civilization, a loss of language, sudden geographical isolation, and probably a major ecological shift for humans to evolve radically to fill another nich. Basically where humans are going is taller, less hair, etc, the same characteristics that have been progressing for the past million years or so in our species.
Well, actually, while it is a bit unclear because i was addressing multiple things simultaneously, my main point was this: There will always be pockets of humans that only breed within their "race". Over time ( a long time ), this behavior alone will produce speciation. This is because mutation introduced genetic variations that are not shared across pure-blood boundaries will exaggerate morphological differences to the point of speciation over long periods of time
On another note, we are growing taller because of our diet, not our genes, and there is no evolutionairy pressure that I am aware of that would increase or decrease human body-hair at this time. Evolution isn't a magic vector towards improvement that effects us all simultaneously, it operates by providing breeding advantages to beneficial variations in the genepool.
In civilized times, that usually means intelligence, physical beauty and physical fitness for a variety of reasons. One would have to study individual racial pockets in some detail to flush out the socio-economic pressures that contribute to evolution in modern man.
Well, it's quite obvious that communication is a fundamental activity that underpins all human activity. When you change the way people communicate, you change society in profound ways.
The Gutenberg's printing press broke the Catholic Church, made modern science possible, and gave rise to modern Democracy. There's no question the Internet will have very profound long-term infulence over future structure of society. We're only 10 years into it.
Finally, someone takes my bait and delivers the goods. Thank you, this was exactly my point. And yes, the socioeconomic ramifications of the high-availability personal press will be even more profound.
While companies may think they are using blogging as a marketing tool, I think that the reality is somewhat more complicated. Corporate sponsored blogs tend to end up being a focal point for interaction related to specialized (corporate related) topics. And specialization is the crucial attribute that make blogs so interesting.
For the first time in the history of the world, we now have a direct channel for hyper-specialization. Blogs + RSS amount to a revolution; The high availability personal-press.
Each of us tend to seek out and interact on subject matters that we are interested in, believe in and/or know something about. In the past, that generally meant your choice of friends and organizations that you belonged to. But today, we can gather around micro-press engines that allow us to interact (as I am doing now).
The end result is that like-minded people from all over the world end up exchanging ideas and critical thought with one another over subject matter that is important to them rather than what a media outlet wants to be important to them.
This new explosion of specialization will have profound and unforseen results as it evolves, such as a completely new and transcendent awareness in society. The populations that make use of blogs are literally transforming themselves from network/newspaper zombies into their own people with their own refined views that match their own personalities. In a very real sense, the blog is an attractor that is pulling us towards a new form of collective awareness or sentience.
Society can re-assert itself in somewhere between 100 and 10,000 years, depending on how much technology is lost. Every time society asserts itself, speciation would be halted or reversed.
The key word is could, not would. It is difficult to predict what might become of man over a ten-million year timeframe. We could proliferate out to other star systems or we could become so dependant on some advanced future technology that we end up in a state of critical equilibrium, our civilization collapsing back to the stone age as we accidentally loose our own secrets to recreate a lost technology. There are an infinite number of scenarios. Given enough time and a continued existence for man, it is likely that there will be human speciation that occurs, if not here on earth, then elsewhere.
Or are you suggesting that our morphology has reached it's final form and there will be no further evolution? Or perhaps that it will evolve through mutation and natural selection, but that all humans will somehow acquire the mutated genes?
If you think carefully about this problem you will realize that mutations will occur and that some of them will be significant and beneficial in that time-frame. You will further realize that this will not always result in cross-breeding pressure but will sometimes result in one-sided or multi-faceted discrimination resulting in further racial and eventually species specialization and differentiation.
If one pocket of humans evolved, for some bizarre reason, a sixth digit, that would probably be enough in and of itself to begin the long process of speciation. It is likely that both five and six digit humans would continue to exist, but there would be those that only bred with others of their kind.
You can also see this now in racially biased breeding pressures. While there are certainly large populations of humans that cross-breed between racial lines quite freely, there are others that stick veraciously to their own race. Given enough time, the morphological differences between the *pure bloods* will be exaggerated to the point of speciation.
We'll come back to this when I address your last line, which comes from the same part of your brain as this one.
MS has already hand to hand over 35+ billion in cash to its shareholders just to keep them from dumping the stock. And that was just for this year. The stock growth bubble is coming back to bite MS - the 10.5+ billion shares outstanding have watching their value decline for the past five years and they are not happy.
Microsoft is not required to hand out that cash. They will almost certainly stop doing so if their revenue is in the grave danger that you speculate. While this scenario (revenues vectoring to zero while dividends are similarly slashed to zero) certainly foretells of doom to their stock price, that stock price has a floor which is precisely equal to the cash value of the company (in excess of $35 billion).
In the, quite impossible, case that their revenues are completely irradicated, they will draft up another business plan, fire everyone that isn't relevant and retool to attack that plan. With the cash that they have, they can simultaneously hit half a dozen new markets per year for a dozen or so years without worrying about revenue. Ignore their stock, it is only useful if they need money or want to cash out. If they so choose, they can simply let shareholders scream and do whatever the hell they want. It is, after all, up to the shareholders to continue to hold.
In terms of Microsoft R&D, it certainly appears true that nothing significant has come out of their efforts. But appearances can be deceiving. Pay more attention.
Drop the fucking attitude. It doesn't mix well with your ignorance.
Now lets go back to your first line about me being a fanboy. To be honest, I really despise Microsoft's business practices. I use OS X and Linux and avoid Microsoft products when I can (yes, I bought Office).
My views are, in my opinion, realistic. I was trying to tell the hate-enraged-zealots like yourself that your wish of a Redmond implossion is extremely unlikely. The company is clearly not as stupid as you seem to think.
Use the word ignorance very carefully. You just made the claim that one of the richest and most powerful technology companies in the world is going to go out of business because they had an 8% quarter-after-quarter revenue decrease and because you don't like them. Compared to that, my words are a divine manifestation of enlightenment.
In 10 million years, perhaps all primary terrestrial life will be descendents of Homo Sapiens. Perhaps we are just in the process of a morphological gene renormalization.
We will have human-derivitive predators, human-derivative herbavores, human-derivitive sea mammals, etc..
Sound strange? It shouldn't. Every once in a while, a specific set of genes shows so much ability to dominate that it completely overwhelm all others and then slowly specializes in the ecosystem, taking on the familiar roles we see. The first Dinosaurs were all morphologically identical with differentiation only occuring as the other species in the ecosystem were driven to extinction and leaving room for the different ecological niches to be filled through evolved Dinosaur morphology. Same with Mammals.
I suppose this vision could require a collapse of civilization such that humans actually had to fill all the various niches in the ecosystem, but given 10 million years, I'd say that is pretty likely. It would be pretty gruesome in the beginning, with canabilism and whatnot being fairly common, but after a few hundred millenia it should shake out to a variety of different predators and prey subspecies quite readily.
What drives me crazy is all the programmers I've known who make the connection "I'm socially awkward and like computers, so I am a misunderstood genius and I'm better than everybody!"
I think you are misunderstanding the situation (hehe)... Where do you think misunderstood geniuses end up these days?
The labels "Jock" and "Geek" are not mutually exclusive.
Any geek can also be a jock. With training, any human being (baring physical abnormalities) can become very physically fit. Certainly, there are genetic predispositions towards agility and strength that some carry more than others, but a little exercise can put anyone well past average.
The reverse is also true. While there can be no doubt that intellectual capacity is genetically vectored, very few of us maintain the self discipline to reach as high as we could. With a bit of studying and discipline, an average mind can outperform a lazy but well-wired one.
Before we go patting ourselves on the backs for being geeks, we should think carefully about how we got there and wether we are the geeks that have the geek gene. My guess is that a large percentage of geeks are geeks because they got the ugly gene (not the geek gene) and therefore didn't have many other options than to focus on a little box that would accept them.
Sorry guys, but that's just the way the cookie crumbles.
Some of the smartest geeks I've ever met have also been the most athletic and physically attractive. That is genetics at it's best. But we are not all so lucky.
For those that seem sceptical, this is actually a reasonably good idea.
The purpose would be to layer a routable network layer on top of the encrypted P2P network that is the skype network, not to layer it on top of VOIP. Privacy, security and anonymity are the keys to making something like this valuable.
I don't think you could use IPv4, however. To make such a scheme work, you would need a very large IP address space that was completely reserved for the Skype nodes themselves to ensure propper routing. But this is a really interesting idea.
IPv6 ontopof (Skype encrypted P2P) ontop of IPv4
I am liking this.
They may not stay in the OS business for PCs, but that business is going to die anyway. We are not in a static market, technology is moving fast. The time of the $2000 home computer is over. The margins are fading. As with all technology, once it becomes ubiquitous and monopoly strangleholds are broken, it's value drops to zero.
Microsoft made it's billions there already. It will enter your wallet from another direction soon enough, you can bet on it. With the type of cash they have, they can command R&D budgets that are the envy of nations. Discounting their capabilities is a serious strategic error.
You don't have to like them. In fact, they are most definitely capatilistic parasites. But they are rich and they are smart. You will probably buy more from them in your lifetime and you will probably, for a time, even like it.
The endgame of proceedural synthesis is that you have a dabatase of known objects (man, woman, tree, car,...) and through the use of semantic instructions alone those objects can be made to create scenes.
So, for example, a script might describe a scene with a man with short brown hair dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt running along a curve.
Those instructions, alone, would be enough for the system to generate the scene (it would make guesses about variables not supplied and interpolate all actions, modify all models, etc...).
This may not sound that revolutionairy to you, but it is. It is quite profound what such systems are capable of. In the limiting case, you could make a movie by descriptions of the scenes alone (in english, no less). This is why the datacompression angle was hit so hard in the Ars article - you could fit a full-length animation in about as much space as it would take to store the text of a novel plus the unique models and textures that occur in the story.
The research that sits behind such tech is also related to machine vision systems where the machine attempts to guess at objects in a scene, slowly forming a mental semantic "image", that when rendered, looks the same as what is being received through the cameras.
Such semantic representations of scenes and actions also provide an infinite upgradability path as the more powerful the hardware and more detailed the databases it runs against (and the better the interpolation and imagination of the synthesis engine), the better the result will look. A game built now will be playable and on par with games built 50 years from now on then modern hardware.
Last, but not least, using such techniques should make spitting out complex 3D game scenes a breeze... Microsoft may have a developer model that is hard to beat with this tech...
No, it's not new. This of course begs the question, "When are the 128bit processors going to hit the streets?"
I am only being partially fasicious there. With all of the attention on media processing these days, it may make sense to throw 16bytes around at a time instead of 8. In fact, aren't many vector processors and GPUs structured around 128bit words already?
Microsoft does have a lot of latitude because of the economies of scale that the XBox 360 will offer. If Microsoft knows for a fact that they will sell 20 million consoles (or 30 million, or whatever), then it gives them pricing power.
Not only power, it gives them the ability to practically dictate prices for parts. Everyone seems awestruck that MS might use DDR3 or a 3core PPC or toss in a DVD burner. Why? Because they are expenseive at frys?
Once past a certain volume, manufacturing DDR3 won't be any more expensive than any other ram. Same with a new processor or even a DVD burner.
This is where economies of scale can be used to crush competitors. MS may have figured out that it can leapfrog the current state-of-the-art by guaranteeing volume to manufacturers of new technology. If so, watch out - they might use this to springboard a play out of Apple's book.
Imagine if Longhorn is released at the same time as a PC that is built out of the same contracted parts (but perhaps more of them and higher clocked) as the XBox 360. MS getting into the hardware business with a system a generation ahead of everyone else?
Frankly, the idea terrifies me. But I wouldn't put it past Bill. He is watching Apple and doesn't want his old nemesis to stomp on his pride anymore.
Not sure, but I'm pretty sure I read that the Greenhouse warming here on Earth was actually supposed to end up causing more of an ice age than Venus' twin.
Sure, if we only nudge it a little bit - because the polar caps will melt and that will lower the temperature of the oceans creating what we perceive as an ice age. But the overall amount of energy in our system is increasing, not decreasing. Liberating water from ice takes a ton of energy and only gives us the illusion of an overall cooling because it is geographically spread-out (e.g. liquid water spreads spreads around a lot, absorbing ambient heat).
But if we pump enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to overcome the counter-pressure built up in the poles... It could become a runaway greenhouse effect, which I believe were the words I used. In that scenario, our weather will head for a new equilibrium much like that of Venus.
By the way, a runaway greenhouse effect does not have to occur quickly. it could happen over thousands of years (or more). The telling sign will be if the earth is absorbing more energy than it is radiating back to space. If we have a sustained condition such as that, the earth is heating up and will continue to until it reaches a new balance (radiation in = radiation out).
FYI: There was recently an article on slashdot about this very condition being analyzed from space. It appears that we are there now, but we could have a few thousand years to fix the problem before our oceans are gone. If you think it is silly to talk about our oceans boiling away, please consider that water->steam is just another phase transition like ice->water, just a little further down the same road we are currently traveling.
So my question is, since the passing of eons basically describe the amount of control and impact life has on its environment, isn't the speed and sophistication of humanity's effect on the environment so profound that we should be entering the Anthropean eon?
Sure, sounds very reasonable. Let's just hope that our decendents gain the technology that will be needed to ensure that the anthropean eon isn't marked by a runaway greenhouse effect that boils the oceans and produces Venus's twin sister...
As unlikely as that might sound to most of you, that is exactly what the graphs show happening if everything keeps moving in the direction that it is moving today...
Consider what educational institutions deal in; They deal in the free exchange of ideas and the exploration of knowledge.
When you introduce computers into the mix, OSS provides an interesting oportunity. Because OSS has the same creed (e.g. free exchange of ideas and exploration of knowledge related), there is an inherent compatibility.
If a student chooses to dig deeply into how his/her computer works, it is all there with OSS.
For that reason alone, I would say that money is not the most important factor.
Gangsters are starting to roam the streets, killing people at a rate of 8-9 people a day. Do you then propose "normal" citizens should get a gun and shoot them motherfsckers down?
Yes, absolutely. If the establishment is not sucessful in getting them off the street, the citizens should.
What if a stray shot kills an innocent? (And no, the analogy isn't inept. You *WILL* hurt innocent systems by doing this)
The gangsters are shooting 8-9 people a day and citizens can successfuly eliminate the problem at some risk to innocents. You are asking if they should? Are you serious? Yes. If the police are not solving the problem, the residents should definitely arm themselves and take care of the problem. Even the innocents would probably rather get hit by a bullet that is meant for a gangster than one that was from a gangster.
Are you willing to be liable for taking down a major international corporations headquarters? Killing off millions of Windows PC's that are in a different locale than the worm, because you hit a locale-specific bug in Chinese Windows? Or maybe your worm manages to knock out Cisco routers (Code Red crashed my i677DIR). Now that'd be real fun, wouldn't it?
What about the amount of bandwidth this worm creates. If this worm of yours is 220kb, and I'm getting hit by it repeatedly while surfing over GPRS, will you pay the cost? (Currently, that'd cost me almost 1 USD)
Or, your worm has a bug that overwrites a random file in the filesystem. Who will pay for the damages? "You destroyed my thesis! I've been working two months writing it!"
The amount of damage being done to society by black-hat worms is outrageous. Like your example, sometimes it is necessary to take a few risks especially when confronting great evil. Even those that are negatively affected are generally understanding when they are effected in the name of bringing down a great evil.
No matter the reasoning behind it. There are millions of different windows configurations, hundreds of different windows versions (if not thousands). How the hell are you going to QA this worm?
I mentioned before that this should be done in the name of national security. I mean that. Consider the types of problems that zombie machines are causing. They interrupt trade, they are used to extort corporations, they are used to overwhelm our mailboxes, spread viruses, etc.. They most definitely can and are being used for terrorism and espionage.
Much like our body's immune system uses techniques that are somtimes extreme to rid our bodies of poisons (such as a fever to burn out infections, killing normal cells in the process), our establishment should have virus response, worm response and immunization services that occassionally use extreme techniques. This should probably be government run and overseen. It would be better to not leave this to the public (vigilante) or private enterprise. But if it goes to long without a public response, it probably will ignite vigilante efforts.
If your opinion is to leave things as they are, let these thugs control the zombie computers, don't take immediate steps to secure our Internet from terrorism, espionage and organized crime, then it makes me wonder what your intentions are... Or maybe you don't understand the true scope of the problem?
If they really did write Cherry OS from scratch, as was asserted over and over by these thugs, then consider his comments again:
I decided that C-OS is not worth the hassle, not now or in the future. C-OS went to work without brushing its teeth or taking a shower, it was not ready.
Or to rephrase: "I decided that even though I spent millions of dollars and several years of my life building this product, the moment I was challenged by these horrible guys that want to ruin me by claiming I stole their GPL code it became clear to me that my product (which I was so loudly glamorizing a copule months ago) really isn't ready and I am just gonna drop it."
Someone should write a white-hat worm that brings the machines up-to-date with security patches, turns on auto-update, sanitizes the computer and reboots...
Before everyone starts screaming that you can't release a white-hat worm, please consider the situation we are in today; Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of zombie machines are sitting out there doing the bidding of criminals to extort money from sites that fear DoS, fill our inboxes with Spam, spread virus and trojans that install keyloggers, attempt to get access to your financial and other accounts, etc.. etc..
On the one hand, we have total anarchtic hacker mayhem (today) and on the other, a sanitized Internet at the cost of using the techniques employed by the shadowy side of society.
I really doubt that many people would have issue with this. Hell, it should be done in the name of national security. Really... And anyway, if your machine is susceptible to a white hat worm, it is equallyt susceptible to the bad stuff, which means it is pretty much guaranteed that you already have a bunch of nasty stuff installed on it. A white hat worm will provide some relief.
China's middle class is quickly rising and is currently approximately twice the entire U.S. population (a bit more than 600 million middle class people in China).
Sorry, but this seems rather unlikely. Do you really think Core Image is going to use more video ram than Doom3? And if it was such an amazing breakthrough for Core Image, why wouldn't ATI have advertised that at least a little? G-d knows they've got no reason anybody else can figure out for releasing specs for this particular card.
Yes, it does matter.. Take a look at this. Mac OS X even has graphics memory virtualized in order to maximize the new processing models that are being utilized by Quartz 2D extreme. More VRAM = Much greater speed. Period.
Just because Windows can't find a better use for VRAM than holding DOOM3 textures doesn't mean that 's all it's good for. It turns out that if you do your entire UI in VRAM, having more VRAM dramatically reduces the load on your CPU and massively increases the OS's responsiveness...
Yes, my bet is that these cards are targeted at Apple and Tiger.
The obvious question that derives from this conversation is "Why doesn't someone take the Doom3 engine (or Quake engine)" and build a damned VRML browser with it?
It would probably be pretty fun bouncing between VRML nodes and interacting via the multiplayer module with other users at the custom nodes at 78fps with a BFG (err.. you get the idea)...
Slashdot Mirror
Take a look at Tipler's website on the Omeha Point.. As bizarre as it may sound, there just might be something there.
Of course there were precursers like usenet and even BBS's. But let me tell you something, my mom is into blogs and she can't even use Excell and never hit usenet or a BBS. The ubiquity and acceptance of blogs as a tool for specialized collaboration and finely tuned information distribution is the essence of the revolution.
Watch as the U.S. and other parts of the world wake-up from their media-induced-zombie catatosys over the next few years as a direct result of personal choice in information sources.
On another note, we are growing taller because of our diet, not our genes, and there is no evolutionairy pressure that I am aware of that would increase or decrease human body-hair at this time. Evolution isn't a magic vector towards improvement that effects us all simultaneously, it operates by providing breeding advantages to beneficial variations in the genepool.
In civilized times, that usually means intelligence, physical beauty and physical fitness for a variety of reasons. One would have to study individual racial pockets in some detail to flush out the socio-economic pressures that contribute to evolution in modern man.
Well, it's quite obvious that communication is a fundamental activity that underpins all human activity. When you change the way people communicate, you change society in profound ways.
The Gutenberg's printing press broke the Catholic Church, made modern science possible, and gave rise to modern Democracy. There's no question the Internet will have very profound long-term infulence over future structure of society. We're only 10 years into it.
Finally, someone takes my bait and delivers the goods. Thank you, this was exactly my point. And yes, the socioeconomic ramifications of the high-availability personal press will be even more profound.
While companies may think they are using blogging as a marketing tool, I think that the reality is somewhat more complicated. Corporate sponsored blogs tend to end up being a focal point for interaction related to specialized (corporate related) topics. And specialization is the crucial attribute that make blogs so interesting.
For the first time in the history of the world, we now have a direct channel for hyper-specialization. Blogs + RSS amount to a revolution; The high availability personal-press.
Each of us tend to seek out and interact on subject matters that we are interested in, believe in and/or know something about. In the past, that generally meant your choice of friends and organizations that you belonged to. But today, we can gather around micro-press engines that allow us to interact (as I am doing now).
The end result is that like-minded people from all over the world end up exchanging ideas and critical thought with one another over subject matter that is important to them rather than what a media outlet wants to be important to them.
This new explosion of specialization will have profound and unforseen results as it evolves, such as a completely new and transcendent awareness in society. The populations that make use of blogs are literally transforming themselves from network/newspaper zombies into their own people with their own refined views that match their own personalities. In a very real sense, the blog is an attractor that is pulling us towards a new form of collective awareness or sentience.
So in summary, I think it is a good thing.
Or are you suggesting that our morphology has reached it's final form and there will be no further evolution? Or perhaps that it will evolve through mutation and natural selection, but that all humans will somehow acquire the mutated genes?
If you think carefully about this problem you will realize that mutations will occur and that some of them will be significant and beneficial in that time-frame. You will further realize that this will not always result in cross-breeding pressure but will sometimes result in one-sided or multi-faceted discrimination resulting in further racial and eventually species specialization and differentiation.
If one pocket of humans evolved, for some bizarre reason, a sixth digit, that would probably be enough in and of itself to begin the long process of speciation. It is likely that both five and six digit humans would continue to exist, but there would be those that only bred with others of their kind.
You can also see this now in racially biased breeding pressures. While there are certainly large populations of humans that cross-breed between racial lines quite freely, there are others that stick veraciously to their own race. Given enough time, the morphological differences between the *pure bloods* will be exaggerated to the point of speciation.
It's all about time.
In the, quite impossible, case that their revenues are completely irradicated, they will draft up another business plan, fire everyone that isn't relevant and retool to attack that plan. With the cash that they have, they can simultaneously hit half a dozen new markets per year for a dozen or so years without worrying about revenue. Ignore their stock, it is only useful if they need money or want to cash out. If they so choose, they can simply let shareholders scream and do whatever the hell they want. It is, after all, up to the shareholders to continue to hold.
In terms of Microsoft R&D, it certainly appears true that nothing significant has come out of their efforts. But appearances can be deceiving. Pay more attention. Now lets go back to your first line about me being a fanboy. To be honest, I really despise Microsoft's business practices. I use OS X and Linux and avoid Microsoft products when I can (yes, I bought Office).
My views are, in my opinion, realistic. I was trying to tell the hate-enraged-zealots like yourself that your wish of a Redmond implossion is extremely unlikely. The company is clearly not as stupid as you seem to think.
Use the word ignorance very carefully. You just made the claim that one of the richest and most powerful technology companies in the world is going to go out of business because they had an 8% quarter-after-quarter revenue decrease and because you don't like them. Compared to that, my words are a divine manifestation of enlightenment.
In 10 million years, perhaps all primary terrestrial life will be descendents of Homo Sapiens. Perhaps we are just in the process of a morphological gene renormalization.
We will have human-derivitive predators, human-derivative herbavores, human-derivitive sea mammals, etc..
Sound strange? It shouldn't. Every once in a while, a specific set of genes shows so much ability to dominate that it completely overwhelm all others and then slowly specializes in the ecosystem, taking on the familiar roles we see. The first Dinosaurs were all morphologically identical with differentiation only occuring as the other species in the ecosystem were driven to extinction and leaving room for the different ecological niches to be filled through evolved Dinosaur morphology. Same with Mammals.
I suppose this vision could require a collapse of civilization such that humans actually had to fill all the various niches in the ecosystem, but given 10 million years, I'd say that is pretty likely. It would be pretty gruesome in the beginning, with canabilism and whatnot being fairly common, but after a few hundred millenia it should shake out to a variety of different predators and prey subspecies quite readily.
What drives me crazy is all the programmers I've known who make the connection "I'm socially awkward and like computers, so I am a misunderstood genius and I'm better than everybody!"
I think you are misunderstanding the situation (hehe)... Where do you think misunderstood geniuses end up these days?
The labels "Jock" and "Geek" are not mutually exclusive.
Any geek can also be a jock. With training, any human being (baring physical abnormalities) can become very physically fit. Certainly, there are genetic predispositions towards agility and strength that some carry more than others, but a little exercise can put anyone well past average.
The reverse is also true. While there can be no doubt that intellectual capacity is genetically vectored, very few of us maintain the self discipline to reach as high as we could. With a bit of studying and discipline, an average mind can outperform a lazy but well-wired one.
Before we go patting ourselves on the backs for being geeks, we should think carefully about how we got there and wether we are the geeks that have the geek gene. My guess is that a large percentage of geeks are geeks because they got the ugly gene (not the geek gene) and therefore didn't have many other options than to focus on a little box that would accept them.
Sorry guys, but that's just the way the cookie crumbles.
Some of the smartest geeks I've ever met have also been the most athletic and physically attractive. That is genetics at it's best. But we are not all so lucky.
For those that seem sceptical, this is actually a reasonably good idea.
The purpose would be to layer a routable network layer on top of the encrypted P2P network that is the skype network, not to layer it on top of VOIP. Privacy, security and anonymity are the keys to making something like this valuable.
I don't think you could use IPv4, however. To make such a scheme work, you would need a very large IP address space that was completely reserved for the Skype nodes themselves to ensure propper routing. But this is a really interesting idea. IPv6 ontopof (Skype encrypted P2P) ontop of IPv4 I am liking this.
They may not stay in the OS business for PCs, but that business is going to die anyway. We are not in a static market, technology is moving fast. The time of the $2000 home computer is over. The margins are fading. As with all technology, once it becomes ubiquitous and monopoly strangleholds are broken, it's value drops to zero.
Microsoft made it's billions there already. It will enter your wallet from another direction soon enough, you can bet on it. With the type of cash they have, they can command R&D budgets that are the envy of nations. Discounting their capabilities is a serious strategic error.
You don't have to like them. In fact, they are most definitely capatilistic parasites. But they are rich and they are smart. You will probably buy more from them in your lifetime and you will probably, for a time, even like it.
That is the way of things. Get used to it.
The endgame of proceedural synthesis is that you have a dabatase of known objects (man, woman, tree, car, ...) and through the use of semantic instructions alone those objects can be made to create scenes.
So, for example, a script might describe a scene with a man with short brown hair dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt running along a curve.
Those instructions, alone, would be enough for the system to generate the scene (it would make guesses about variables not supplied and interpolate all actions, modify all models, etc...).
This may not sound that revolutionairy to you, but it is. It is quite profound what such systems are capable of. In the limiting case, you could make a movie by descriptions of the scenes alone (in english, no less). This is why the datacompression angle was hit so hard in the Ars article - you could fit a full-length animation in about as much space as it would take to store the text of a novel plus the unique models and textures that occur in the story.
The research that sits behind such tech is also related to machine vision systems where the machine attempts to guess at objects in a scene, slowly forming a mental semantic "image", that when rendered, looks the same as what is being received through the cameras.
Such semantic representations of scenes and actions also provide an infinite upgradability path as the more powerful the hardware and more detailed the databases it runs against (and the better the interpolation and imagination of the synthesis engine), the better the result will look. A game built now will be playable and on par with games built 50 years from now on then modern hardware.
Last, but not least, using such techniques should make spitting out complex 3D game scenes a breeze... Microsoft may have a developer model that is hard to beat with this tech...
No, it's not new. This of course begs the question, "When are the 128bit processors going to hit the streets?"
I am only being partially fasicious there. With all of the attention on media processing these days, it may make sense to throw 16bytes around at a time instead of 8. In fact, aren't many vector processors and GPUs structured around 128bit words already?
Microsoft does have a lot of latitude because of the economies of scale that the XBox 360 will offer. If Microsoft knows for a fact that they will sell 20 million consoles (or 30 million, or whatever), then it gives them pricing power.
Not only power, it gives them the ability to practically dictate prices for parts. Everyone seems awestruck that MS might use DDR3 or a 3core PPC or toss in a DVD burner. Why? Because they are expenseive at frys?
Once past a certain volume, manufacturing DDR3 won't be any more expensive than any other ram. Same with a new processor or even a DVD burner.
This is where economies of scale can be used to crush competitors. MS may have figured out that it can leapfrog the current state-of-the-art by guaranteeing volume to manufacturers of new technology. If so, watch out - they might use this to springboard a play out of Apple's book.
Imagine if Longhorn is released at the same time as a PC that is built out of the same contracted parts (but perhaps more of them and higher clocked) as the XBox 360. MS getting into the hardware business with a system a generation ahead of everyone else?
Frankly, the idea terrifies me. But I wouldn't put it past Bill. He is watching Apple and doesn't want his old nemesis to stomp on his pride anymore.
Whatever the case, this should be interesting...
But if we pump enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to overcome the counter-pressure built up in the poles... It could become a runaway greenhouse effect, which I believe were the words I used. In that scenario, our weather will head for a new equilibrium much like that of Venus.
By the way, a runaway greenhouse effect does not have to occur quickly. it could happen over thousands of years (or more). The telling sign will be if the earth is absorbing more energy than it is radiating back to space. If we have a sustained condition such as that, the earth is heating up and will continue to until it reaches a new balance (radiation in = radiation out).
FYI: There was recently an article on slashdot about this very condition being analyzed from space. It appears that we are there now, but we could have a few thousand years to fix the problem before our oceans are gone. If you think it is silly to talk about our oceans boiling away, please consider that water->steam is just another phase transition like ice->water, just a little further down the same road we are currently traveling.
As unlikely as that might sound to most of you, that is exactly what the graphs show happening if everything keeps moving in the direction that it is moving today...
Consider what educational institutions deal in; They deal in the free exchange of ideas and the exploration of knowledge.
When you introduce computers into the mix, OSS provides an interesting oportunity. Because OSS has the same creed (e.g. free exchange of ideas and exploration of knowledge related), there is an inherent compatibility.
If a student chooses to dig deeply into how his/her computer works, it is all there with OSS.
For that reason alone, I would say that money is not the most important factor.
Much like our body's immune system uses techniques that are somtimes extreme to rid our bodies of poisons (such as a fever to burn out infections, killing normal cells in the process), our establishment should have virus response, worm response and immunization services that occassionally use extreme techniques. This should probably be government run and overseen. It would be better to not leave this to the public (vigilante) or private enterprise. But if it goes to long without a public response, it probably will ignite vigilante efforts.
If your opinion is to leave things as they are, let these thugs control the zombie computers, don't take immediate steps to secure our Internet from terrorism, espionage and organized crime, then it makes me wonder what your intentions are... Or maybe you don't understand the true scope of the problem?
Someone should write a white-hat worm that brings the machines up-to-date with security patches, turns on auto-update, sanitizes the computer and reboots...
Before everyone starts screaming that you can't release a white-hat worm, please consider the situation we are in today; Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of zombie machines are sitting out there doing the bidding of criminals to extort money from sites that fear DoS, fill our inboxes with Spam, spread virus and trojans that install keyloggers, attempt to get access to your financial and other accounts, etc.. etc..
On the one hand, we have total anarchtic hacker mayhem (today) and on the other, a sanitized Internet at the cost of using the techniques employed by the shadowy side of society.
I really doubt that many people would have issue with this. Hell, it should be done in the name of national security. Really... And anyway, if your machine is susceptible to a white hat worm, it is equallyt susceptible to the bad stuff, which means it is pretty much guaranteed that you already have a bunch of nasty stuff installed on it. A white hat worm will provide some relief.
China's middle class is quickly rising and is currently approximately twice the entire U.S. population (a bit more than 600 million middle class people in China).
Think about that for a moment...
Just because Windows can't find a better use for VRAM than holding DOOM3 textures doesn't mean that 's all it's good for. It turns out that if you do your entire UI in VRAM, having more VRAM dramatically reduces the load on your CPU and massively increases the OS's responsiveness...
Yes, my bet is that these cards are targeted at Apple and Tiger.
I've already checked the papers from that time period, and it does looke like a large number of out-of-place looking people showed up.
Someone looked out-of-place at Mardi Gras? Really?
That is weird...
Okay, I'll bite...
The obvious question that derives from this conversation is "Why doesn't someone take the Doom3 engine (or Quake engine)" and build a damned VRML browser with it?
It would probably be pretty fun bouncing between VRML nodes and interacting via the multiplayer module with other users at the custom nodes at 78fps with a BFG (err.. you get the idea)...