The gentleman is very intelligent and personable, as well as slightly mad. (I believe this is a prerequisite for working in his field.) Some of the main points in his speech:
There are ten billion neurons in the human brain. We regularly sell machines with 8 billion bytes of RAM for not that much money. (This was last year, remember.) It doesn't take much thought to realise that the capacity is affordable. The only problem is interconnections between neurons.
The easiest way to produce a neural net on that scale is to grow neural paths via a genetic algorithm within an array of fabricated cells. This has the added benefit that you can "work around" mis-fabricated cells. (Silicon fabrication is still imperfect.)
Robokoneko is still very much a toy. They planned out the motions in advance (i.e. the kitten is working on pre-written reflexes) and are basically teaching the neural system to run the algorithms. This is fairly unexciting except as a proof of concept that a "real" implementation of CAM can learn at the appropriate rates.
He did speak at length with the FPGA foundry and told them about what he would want to implement CAM. Reports were very encouraging, and it looks like that project succeeded.
Eventually, we will have the technology to build huge neural systems, the size of asteroids. There will be factions of humans who think this is a good idea and factions of those who don't. This will result in war on an unprecedented scale. (BTW, he brought a copy of one of Asimov's Foundation books in with him. Maybe he was reading it a bit too much?)
BTW, he's not a Britisher. He's an Australian. Not that most Japanese care. He describes Japan as a harsh environment for any Westerner to work in, and says he's only still there because the funding is good.
Don't jump the gun. We only know one sentence that the EFA said, and is probably quite out of context. I eagerly await the EFA's next press release, to see what they really think of it.
One can't help thinking that the IIA is laughing behind its back, having both placated Senator Alston and effectively let the Internet industry ignore the new rules.
I eagerly await the EFA's next press release, to see what they really think of it.
Carriers in Australia can't, by law, implement time-charged local calls for residential customers. Business customers are another matter, though.
There was some talk a couple of years ago about Telstra implementing technology to tell the difference between a voice and a data call, and time charging data calls. Quite frightening, actually. Thankfully, nothing came of it.
Back on topic, this is excellent news, but it comes too late for the mobile phone system. Australia has three sets of GSM cell towers, one belonging to each carrier, due to exactly this kind of pig-headedness on Telstra's part.
If you're just using normal (stream or datagram) sockets, the interface isn't very different. The main issues are that you're now in the AF_INET6 domain, and sockaddr_* structs for IPv6 have a different address layout. Apart from that, your code should be pretty much the same.
You can avoid having to worry about this by using the POSIX getaddrinfo() function, but sadly it's not available everywhere yet.
It's not Java, but in our current project we've found the Perl system Mason (available from CPAN as HTML::Mason) to be very good. There are a couple of annoying bugs, but supports a scalable rapid prototyping model better than anything else I've seen.
Aside: The project we're working on is a University intranet/extranet, designed to support about 40,000 users across two continents. All pages are dynamically generated, written in Perl with Oracle and LDAP helpers. HTML::Mason handles the task extremely well on sufficiently grunty hardware.
I'm sure that the remaining clauses can be justified as easily (I don't have them in front of me, so I can't come up with the justifications).
The one I don't understand is the "perpetual" part. The licence gives Geocities/Yahoo the right to distribute in perpetuity your content on any medium available now or in the future.
So let's say you have inaccurate information on your site, which Geocities/Yahoo distribute on CD (using the "perpetual" provision), after which you fix the inaccurate information and publish any necessary retractions, like a good Geocitizen. Someone then complains to Geocities/Yahoo about the inaccurate information on their CD. You did the right thing, but you wear the blame for Geocities/Yahoo's distribution of inaccurate information.
What are they thinking? Seems like everybody on Linux is anxious to replicate the DLL hell of Windoze.
The reason is one of good, modern component-based software design. It's the same reason that I have dynamically loadable kernel modules on my Linux system: I shouldn't have to pay for the memory penalty of a Javascript interpreter if I have Javascript turned off, and I shouldn't have to pay the resource cost of loading Netscape's own DNS lookup software if my local machine is a DNS server.
Oh, an aside: DLL hell is caused not by using dynamically loadable components but by other Win32 brain damage such as no PIC and no support for versioning of DLLs (something which, I might add, the Unix community have solved extremely simply and elegantly).
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I have a Vectra VE P2 model, and had this problem with XFree86 3.3.3.1. Anything after that version has a fix for the problem.
I don't know about fb. Haven't used it.
I went to a seminar by Dr. de Garis last year.
The gentleman is very intelligent and personable, as well as slightly mad. (I believe this is a prerequisite for working in his field.) Some of the main points in his speech:
BTW, he's not a Britisher. He's an Australian. Not that most Japanese care. He describes Japan as a harsh environment for any Westerner to work in, and says he's only still there because the funding is good.
Don't jump the gun. We only know one sentence that the EFA said, and is probably quite out of context. I eagerly await the EFA's next press release, to see what they really think of it.
One can't help thinking that the IIA is laughing behind its back, having both placated Senator Alston and effectively let the Internet industry ignore the new rules.
I eagerly await the EFA's next press release, to see what they really think of it.
Carriers in Australia can't, by law, implement time-charged local calls for residential customers. Business customers are another matter, though.
There was some talk a couple of years ago about Telstra implementing technology to tell the difference between a voice and a data call, and time charging data calls. Quite frightening, actually. Thankfully, nothing came of it.
Back on topic, this is excellent news, but it comes too late for the mobile phone system. Australia has three sets of GSM cell towers, one belonging to each carrier, due to exactly this kind of pig-headedness on Telstra's part.
If you're just using normal (stream or datagram) sockets, the interface isn't very different. The main issues are that you're now in the AF_INET6 domain, and sockaddr_* structs for IPv6 have a different address layout. Apart from that, your code should be pretty much the same.
You can avoid having to worry about this by using the POSIX getaddrinfo() function, but sadly it's not available everywhere yet.
It's not Java, but in our current project we've found the Perl system Mason (available from CPAN as HTML::Mason) to be very good. There are a couple of annoying bugs, but supports a scalable rapid prototyping model better than anything else I've seen.
Aside: The project we're working on is a University intranet/extranet, designed to support about 40,000 users across two continents. All pages are dynamically generated, written in Perl with Oracle and LDAP helpers. HTML::Mason handles the task extremely well on sufficiently grunty hardware.
I'm sure that the remaining clauses can be justified as easily (I don't have them in front of me, so I can't come up with the justifications).
The one I don't understand is the "perpetual" part. The licence gives Geocities/Yahoo the right to distribute in perpetuity your content on any medium available now or in the future.
So let's say you have inaccurate information on your site, which Geocities/Yahoo distribute on CD (using the "perpetual" provision), after which you fix the inaccurate information and publish any necessary retractions, like a good Geocitizen. Someone then complains to Geocities/Yahoo about the inaccurate information on their CD. You did the right thing, but you wear the blame for Geocities/Yahoo's distribution of inaccurate information.
Scary.
What are they thinking? Seems like everybody on Linux is anxious to replicate the DLL hell of Windoze.
The reason is one of good, modern component-based software design. It's the same reason that I have dynamically loadable kernel modules on my Linux system: I shouldn't have to pay for the memory penalty of a Javascript interpreter if I have Javascript turned off, and I shouldn't have to pay the resource cost of loading Netscape's own DNS lookup software if my local machine is a DNS server.
Oh, an aside: DLL hell is caused not by using dynamically loadable components but by other Win32 brain damage such as no PIC and no support for versioning of DLLs (something which, I might add, the Unix community have solved extremely simply and elegantly).
But bear in mind that R7 is a pre-alpa.
...and that IE5 doesn't implement CSS1.