Lawyers and government types just don't get it. The technological Pandora's Box has been opened, and legislation isn't going to help. Anonymity on the Internet? Try looking into the FreeNet project. It's so anonymous that lawmakers practically don't know it exists. And if they did, they still couldn't do anything about it.
Summary of argument to date (translated from geek-speak):
> Queens English is so dead.
> Yo, it's all about Ebonics.
> Dude, Southern Drawl is *soo* slow... Surfer speak is a way better language.
> Like, Valley Speak is, like, the best networking dialect to know!
> Well, if you want a job with a blue-chip company, go with Chicago Twang.
> I hear that they're porting the Queens English libraries to Chicago English, btw.
> See? Queens English is not dead...
Dialects, people... just dialects. Try to see things in the broader scheme of things. (punny, eh?).
One method of making scalable games is to use recursive based algorithms to generate the graphics. Basically, code up a 'for' loop, and vary the number of iterations depending upon the architecture of the machine it's running on. For things like trees, water, snowflakes, clouds, grass, hair, and so forth, this optimises rather well.
On a low end machine, only two or three iterations would be needed to create a decent snowflake. On a high end machine, you could iterate this function a hundred times with various compounding affects such as rotate, copy, resize, diff, transparency, and so forth. With high end machines, you can do close ups of snowflakes without any resolution loss... And most all of this is using the same algorithm as the lower-end machine would use...
Granted, the fractal algorithms have to be well designed and thought out to achieve this effect. A basic Koch's Snowflake algorithm at high iterations doesn't look too much different from lower iterations... Some transforms would need to be introduced to the algorithm, but those could also be scalable...
I had the unfortunate experience of graduating from college in 2001, when the bubble had burst and the economy was beginning to tank... just three months before 9/11. I thought I was going to get a job as a networking engineer or system admin, as that's what I was doing all though college in work-study programs.... Haha. How wrong I was!
In the subsequent three years, I've been teaching myself how to maintain a consulting business. This 'digitician' position merely gives a silly title to an age-old occupation: that of the consultant. Closely related to the position of 'consultant', is that of the 'general consultant', the 'contractor', and the 'general contractor'.
Although, I do think that $125/hour is a bit much.
Ah... a couple of questions. Have you ever owned your own company? Have you ever incorporated yourself? Have you ever worked as a consultant? Have you ever worked as a contractor?
$125/hr is a typical fee for a consultant or contractor. It gets really crazy when they charge $300/hr or $500/hr. You can definately find people who will charge $5,000 per day to run corporate training workshops ($625/day).
There is a tendency for people to de-value themselves and not consider how much they are worth. It also leads to economic depression and recession when communities thing that all of their jobs are being outsourced and that their efforts, skills, and knowledge aren't not valuable. Remember, value is completely dependent upon the purchaser's perception... A glass of water in the desert could easily be sold for $1,000 / glass, if the buyer was dehydrated. Similarly, computer geeks need to know how to create percieved value of their skills.
Just because you're a 133t h4ck0r, can program in C/C++, you admin your own Cisco router, built a linux/apache/mysql/php/nuke database-enabled content-management web-server, and everything in your house is wireless doesn't mean that anybody necessarily cares. There is not a clear perception of the value of those skills.
Making sure that there is a backup of the wife's or husband's personal files in the case of an accident, when there's never been a backup made at all? Value: $300.
Preventing a divorce because the spouse doesn't find the evidence of an affair? Value: $2,000
Preventing the kids from getting involved in cybersex chatrooms before the age of 13: Value: $2000
The point is... don't undervalue yourself or the rest of the community. You hurt other computer geeks when you say that $125/hr is a bit much. Value is in the perception of the buyer.
Also, consider inflation. I guarantee you that in the next ten years, doctors and lawyers will be billing $500 per hour, and I hope that the average computer geek will be able to charge $250/hr for consulting rates by then.
Bayesian Unsupervised Learning
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DSPAM v2.10 Released
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· Score: 5, Interesting
FYI, modern MRI scanners use bayesian noise reduction during image processing. I used to work in a MRI research laboratory, and our director had pioneered the application of Bayesian noise-filtering algorithms in post-processing of image data.
Oddly enough, our director of research was notoriously difficult person to schedule a meeting with. Makes me wonder about 'unsupervised learning'...
What I find interesting about this article is the inherent variability inherent in the way that modern chips are made.
For those of you less familiar with how chips are made, there is a standard sized silicon "wafer" which Intel uses... I forget the exact diameter, although it's round and about the size of a large diner-plate. Anyhow, it comes as a large cylinder, and they slice off diner-plate sized wafers, and try to fit as many chips on it as possible.
Now, making a chip involves lots of chemical-etching and photo-chemical reactions using ultraviolet light. The interesting thing about all of this is that they'll print hundreds of chips with each go, and each print doesn't create the exact same patterns. It's really alot like using an old typewriter... Ever notice how one of the keys might get bent or out of alignment and it types letter's inconsistently? Same thing happens with printing chips, apparently.
Anyhow, because of photonics angles, chemical flow dynamics, atmospheric pressure, and all sorts of odd little variables within the clean room, the chips are variable, even though they're printed from the same wafer. In the end, a 2.0 Ghz chip may have come from the same wafer that a 2.2 Ghz chip, or even a 2.4 Ghz chip (for example). As I understand it, chips from the outer edges of the wafer are more likely to be slower than ones in the center (increased angle from the lasers, chemical and atmospheric turbulence effects from the edge of the container, etc.) Apparently, the technology is getting to the point where slight changes in entropy within the chip production process will get magnified into performance differences in the end product. Butterfly effect of sorts, actually...
In the end... it's the same chicken producing eggs, but sometimes the eggs are different. And the eggs eventually get graded (A, B, C, etc).
note: I've never worked in a chip production facility, so my post is bound have some technical errors in it. Feel free to supplement my post; try not to flame. Just paraphrasing other articles I've read about the process...
Flaws in the basic building blocks of networking and computer science... "It is time to ask the harder questions about the ways of computer architecture we've been using for the past 30 years. Is it time to scrap the von Neumann architecture?"
Sigh... I guess it's back to building the Analytic Engine... Pass me the lathe, will ya...
This has ideal applications in the film and video industries. Technicians in these industries are used to lugging around amplifiers, mixing boards, and computer equipment. With 160GB of hard drive and a DVD burner amd a 17" monitor, this is an ideal portable video editing station for on-set editing. Typically, technicians in the film and video industies will set up their equipment at the beginning of the day on set, and strike at the end of the day. At 16 pounds, it's light enough that it can be easily set up and put away once a day.
One thing it's not meant for, I suspect. is the latte drinking Starbucks crowd who are just word processing and working on the next great American novel. No... this thing is meant for on-set video editing, if you ask me....
Ah, this stuff has been around for like 4 years, at least. We were using this kind of technology at the University of Chicago back in 1999 with WindowsNT images. (The department I worked in was responsible for supporting all of the public-use workstations throughout campus, and we naturally relied on disk imaging technologies.)
If you buy a product like Altiris LabExpert or Norton Ghost and are very clever, you can jury rig an entire operating system environment onto a CD.
Oddly enough, we stumbled on how to do this kind of thing while researching Wake-Over-LAN and PXE technologies. Apparently, the system BIOS just needs to be smart enough that it can look at something other than a PCI/IDE/SCSI hard drive for information with which to load a kernel into memory. If your BIOS is PXE enabled, it's smart enough to tell the system bus to look for a kernel on the network card (in the case of a Wake-On-LAN network boot) or on a CD drive (in the case of a CD boot).
FYI, PXE is Intel's Preboot Execution Environment specification, and is therefore working at the hardware level underneath Microsoft PE (Preinstallation Environment).
Nonetheless, the hardware capabilities which have allowed Windows to be booted from a CD have been around since 1999, at least, as they are part of Intel's PXE specification.
So, does anybody know if Gates is going to be a Knight Commander or a Knight Grand Cross? And if he's going to get the Knight Grand Cross, did somebody have to die in order to free up a spot?
"The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is an order of chivalry within the British honours system and was established in 1917. The motto of the Order is For God and the Empire.
The order has five grades, the top two of which are knightly (post-nominals in parantheses):
Knight/Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire (GBE)
Knight/Dame Commander of Order of the British Empire (KBE/DBE)
Commander of Order of the British Empire (CBE)
Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE)
Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE)
There is an related British Empire Medal (BEM) which is no longer awarded in the United Kingdom, but is still awarded by some Commonwealth countries.
The Order is limited to 120 Knights and Dames Grand Cross, 845 Knights and Dames Commanders, and 8960 Commanders. Also, no more than 858 Officers and 1464 Members may be appointed per year. "
"Is the re-allocation of funds within NASA really for getting to the Moon and Mars?
It's on the record as being re-allocated for those purposes, so that seems like a redundant question. I supose you're asking "is that their real purpose"? Perhaps a longer-term perspective would ask the question of, what is the purpose of getting to the Moon and Mars, besides "exploration"? Historically, exploration has had economic, security, and political motivators. This is just more of the same, it appears...
Or is it just a cover for shifting toward military space applications?
Same argument. When Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and the King and Queen of Spain underwrote his voyage, don't you think that people complained that the government was using that voyage as a cover for shifting towards military nautical applications? Of course they did... Ever heard of the Spanish Armada? Spain succeeded in developing it's military nautical applications... war galleons, collonies in the americas, gold, etc. etc. Of course, they later lost control of most of it, but at the time it was simply an investment which later paid of in terms of economic, political, and military applications...
If true, how badly will NASA's scientific mission be effected if it becomes a conduit for giving research and development money to defense contractors?
Maybe none at all. There is a "science of war" after all... Take the Atlantic Research Corporation, for example... They conducted scientific research into the area of solid-fuel rockets... Pretty serious scientific applications, all things considered. Also very serious defence, political, and economic research as well. All things considered, NASA's scientific mission could possibly be improved if they could develop a new line of shuttle replacements that could also serve defence applications... And the armed services have a repuation of having equipment which works pretty well, now-days... You never know when some extra terrestrial object or species is going to start landing on our chunk of rock... Better be ready...
"Perhaps a condensed matter physicist can dumb the article down for layfolk such as myself?"
Imagine a big block of swiss cheese (the kind of cheese that's got all the holes in it). Now those holes are basically "vacancies" of cheese. Now, imagine if the holes moved around.
Similarly, think of one of those pictures underwater videos of SCUBA divers... You know when they release a breath, and all the bubbles start moving up to the surface of the water... Those are likes 'holes' in the water. More specifically, they are "vacancies" and they move in a somewhat orderly manner (up). Of course, it makes more common sense that vacancies would move around in a liquid than in solids....
So, basically, they've found a state of matter where the vacancies move around in a solid. In a sense, they're claiming that they found a block of cheese in the refridgerator where the holes keep moving. And this is why there's going to be controversy over this claim: they're alot of people who are going to say "no way - cheese doesn't work that way..."
It would make for a crazy club sandwich... Yum.
FYI: I'm not a condenced matter physicist, although I do happen to have a degree in the History and Philosophy of Science...
First of all, you would have the slight problem of buildinga magnet with a bore large enough to fit a car through... Because the magnetic field strength is proportional to the inverse of the square of the distance, that would have to be a freakin powerfull magnet to fit a truck through.
Assuming that you could build a magnet that large, one would then have a slight problem that any and all ferrous-metallic parts in the car or truck would be attracted to the magnet. Essentially, the magnet would probably pick the car up, off the ground; the car would fly towards the magnet at a very fast velocity; there would be a very large crash; and the car and magnet would become one big mess of magnetic metal.
unfortunately, the only feasible method of implementing this idea would be to have all-plastic cars. also, one would need to implement laws and legislation to prevent anybody with a pacemaker, aneurism clips, or heart pump from driving a car...
anyhow, to make a MRI car scanner, one would probably need to design a low-field magnet (so the cars don't get pulled towards it), and extremely sensitive radio transmitters / receivers. The trick to building an MRI car scanner would be in designing the radio transmit/recieve coils (which could possibly be built in a tunnel kind of way).
If I were to try building this type of scanner (and I happen to work with a 1.5 Tesla MRI cryomagnet every day) I'd try putting a 0.5 tesla magnet *under* the road.
However, one would need damn good lawyers in the case that somebody with a pacemaker was riding in the car being scanned, and the car scanner turned off their pacemaker. The litigation would be a nightmare, I'm sure.... Also, one has to worry about FDA licensing, highway & transportation authorities, etc. etc.
Hmm... I'm not entirely convinced by your arguments. However, I do agree with you that "during the heyday of cray, you got a damn fine box and nothing else."
My thinking, however, is that the same is true today and for all of the top 100 supercomputers in the world. That is to say, each one of those machines is a custom hardware installation, and my educated guess is that software still isn't the driving force in the supercomputing market. Rather, algorithms are the driving force. The supercomputer market is geared towards people who want to very specific tasks, very acurately, and very fast. Example applications might be calculating fourier transforms (spectroscopic analysis), mendelbrot sets (weather simulations), prime numbers (cryptography), and statistical derivatives (markets). Any of these types of applications could feasibly require only a few thousand lines of code... At the same time, however, any of these applications are fully capable of utilizing as much hardware resources as you have available...
The problem is the magnitude at which these few lines of code need to be repeated. Furthermore, each of these types of algorithms can give qualitatively different and more robust results at each order of magnitude increase in speed... thereby creating a driving market force for upgrades.... We have a computer that can predict the weather 48 hours from now? Well, give us a computer that's 10 times as powerful, and we'll predict it 56 hours from now... Give us one 100 times more powerfull, and we'll predict the weather 62 hours from now, and so on, and so on... The point I'm trying to make is that the software isn't the driving force behind these supercomputers... the algorithms are... and the optimized hardware is what the organizations are paying hard cash for, in order to calculate those algorithms fastest.
Remember, we're talking about supercomputers here... we're certainly not talking about super-electronic-typewriters, super-spreadsheet-applications, super-databases, super-webservers, super-videoeditors, etc. etc. Nor are we necessarily talking about super-von-neuman machines, super-turring-machines, or super-mainframes. We're talking about supercomputing and the Cray corporation... the company historically responsible for building the machines which simluated the weather and nuclear explosions for many years... I suspect that there are not many end users of such machines and that user interface software is kept at a minimum...;-) Furthermore, I also suspect that if Cray Inc. built a zettaflop or yottaflop abacus and provided instructions on how to simulate the weather, people around the world would abandon their computers and begin taking abacus lessons... Remember, it's all about the hardware and algorithms in supercomputing...
But, I'm not a physics or computer science major, so what do I know... That, and I'm beginning to ramble... just my $0.02 worth...
My two cents say that this is article written to produce a knee-jerk reaction in the tech-aware reader. Of course robots are going to be replacing humans in the labor force. Of course we're going to automate these jobs. What a lot of people forget is that the term "computer" used to refer to a professional occupation held by a human being (with abacus being the primary tool). Scientific revolutions in the areas of telecommunications, automation, mechanics, transportation, and manufacturing have been replacing people with machines for over 100 years. And this is generally a good thing.
What the article fails to address is all of the new jobs and services (for humans), which will be created by this maneuver. Think: telerobotics operator, droid service engineer, automation systems engineer, protocol designer, grid engineer, droid-user-interface (DUI) designer, droid administrator, telerobotics surgeon, teleconstruction architect, hazardous waste cleanup administrator, droid bounty hunter, droid mechanic, a.i. architect, biotechnician, bioengineer, cyberneticist, etc. etc. Utilizing robotic labor for low-level manual tasks allows humans to assume higher-level roles and positions.
Some suggested reading / viewing materials to consider, in response to this article:
You have some good points, although I must disagree with some of your conclusions...
[Turing] figured we'd have machines capable of passing his "imitation game" test by the end of the 20th century.
Have you considered the implications of
Carson Daily's simulacrum , as being proof-positive that technology is passing the "imitation game"? Granted, as the old saying goes, you can fool some of the people all the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time...
"Pfft! They promised us flying cars and video phones, too, and I haven't seen any of those running lately, either."
I don't know about you, but I was born partially deaf, and have been following video conferencing technology for a long time. Any PC that you have with a network connection, a video monitor, and a microphone is a video-phone. It may not be marketed that way all the time, however the technology is the same. My proposal to you is to consider that perhaps video phones are masquerading as home computers, and that a brand new video phone comes with a 17" monitor (slightly bigger than you were thinking of, perhaps?).
I believe that a relavent point to be made is between the terms "Artificial Intelligence" and "Satisfactory Intelligence"... it's not necessary for the machine to exhibit an intelligence which is artificial, merely satisfactory. Point in case, if the viewers believe that the object being shown on the video screen is an intelligent being located elsewhere, then the viewers will interpret and behave accordingly... even if the object located on the screen was computer generated. Hence the phenomena behind the Carson Daly simulacrum and the Max Headroom television shows.
Remember: "Artificial Intelligence" is not about getting a machine to think... it's about fooling the person who interacts with the machine to think that the machine is thinking.
In the US, "hardcore" drugs have largely been isolated to the underclass. The worthwhile classes don't get beyond marijauna for the most part. A notible exception is extasy.
If that is so, would you be so kind as to explain the large number of reports I read about regarding professional actors, musicians, atheletes, lawyers, and stock brokers who are regularly: 1) checking into rehab clinics, 2) being banned from whatever activity because of drug use, 3) dying of a drug overdose (typically a heart attack from cocain or speed).
Also, could you explain why there are multiple white-collar-exclusive door-to-door delivery services, in major metropolitan cities such as New York, Chicago, and L.A., which cater exclusively to white collar career professionals? And by the way, what's the largest demographic of cocain users? Last I recall, it was employed lawyers, stock brokers, and entertainers who could afford a daily coke habit.
And what's up with the "underclass" and "worthwhile classes" language?
At any rate, I'm not so sure that the war on drugs really is going that well. I believe that there is good propoganda circling the "war", but the issue at hand is enforcibility, and to what extent can laws prohibiting certain activities actually be enforced. (Remember that constitutionally and legally, it is generally considered that if a law is unenforcable, then it is null and void.)
And the difference between drugs transfer and multimedia transfer, is that the former requires a physical object to go from point A to point B; the later requires a data object to go from point A to point B. It's possible to enforce the prohibition of transferring a pound of cocain from person A to person B... all it requires is big dudes with guns. Similarly, one can enforce the prohibition of transferring a CD or DVD from person A to person B with the same tactics. However, when you get to diskless and wireless transfers, big dudes and big guns loose their ability to enforce the prohibition (issues include: warrents, tresspassing, eavesdropping, free speech, etc. etc.).
I'm checking my 1974 edition of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary right here, and on page 494, it clearly states that "orientated" is the past tense of the verb "orientate".
I suspect that you mistook the intended verb to be "orient", with a past tense of "oriented". However, when reading the sentence, one will clearly see that "John Nunn" is the subject of the sentance, and the the "PC" is the subject, with "chess" being the indirect object, upon which the "PC" is oriented towards.
You are completely correct that a subject is oriented towards a direct object.
However, as I understand it, a direct object is orientated towards an indirect object, by a subject.
- Volume comprised of 198 2-D slices (1.1 slices / degree)
- Approximately 768 x 768 pixel slice resolution
- 24 Hz volume refresh
- Full color (21-bit hardware-based stippling)
- 8 colors at highest resolution
- Polygons / sec.: To be announced
- Dual volume buffers
- TI(TM) 1600 MIPS DSP high-performance embedded processor
- 3 Gbit DDR SDRAM (100 Mvoxels x 3 colors x 2 buffers)
Granted, there are only 8 colors available at high resolution, but it points out the fact that 3D graphics cards and monitors have a long way to go yet. I don't mean to be a troll, but I get rather pissed-off when these video card manufacturers, with their planned-obselesence, talk about their latest-and-greatest "3D" video cards. Please; these are pseudo-3D video cards; and if you've worked with a stereoscopic video system (virtual reality system) or an autostereoscopic video system (3D television system), you'll know what I mean...
(Granted, I only got to work with this kind of technology for a couple of months in college, so I'm not an expert on this stuff... still, I know stereo3D from pseudo3D when I see it...)
Re:Reasons for scavenger hunts?
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ScavHunt211
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· Score: 1
At Chicago, the legend is that the scavenger hunt originated because of a student, in the 50s or 60s, who was looking for a phone, in order to call home on mother's day. Since then, it's grown a bit...
Typically only known by network security administrators and greek clasicists, Kerberos is a defacto security protocol at places like MIT and the University of Chicago. The network infrastructure you've described sounds like it could be reaching the point of needing a Kerberos server, which, of course, would consolidate many of your currently existing network security solutions, as well as create new types of headaches you didn't know existed...
Anyhow, as far as low budget goes, Kerberos does run on linux.
Of course, installing a Kerberos network security solution does require that all of your computers run Kerberos enabled operating systems (Win2K, Linux, Solaris, and the like...) and that you and your co-workers can actually complete a secure sneakernet handshake and file transfer between all of your end nodes... Which, in of itself requires a slightly different understanding of network security and network planning...
Slashdot Mirror
Lawyers and government types just don't get it. The technological Pandora's Box has been opened, and legislation isn't going to help. Anonymity on the Internet? Try looking into the FreeNet project. It's so anonymous that lawmakers practically don't know it exists. And if they did, they still couldn't do anything about it.
Summary of argument to date (translated from geek-speak):
> Queens English is so dead.
> Yo, it's all about Ebonics.
> Dude, Southern Drawl is *soo* slow... Surfer speak is a way better language.
> Like, Valley Speak is, like, the best networking dialect to know!
> Well, if you want a job with a blue-chip company, go with Chicago Twang.
> I hear that they're porting the Queens English libraries to Chicago English, btw.
> See? Queens English is not dead...
Dialects, people... just dialects. Try to see things in the broader scheme of things. (punny, eh?).
One method of making scalable games is to use recursive based algorithms to generate the graphics. Basically, code up a 'for' loop, and vary the number of iterations depending upon the architecture of the machine it's running on. For things like trees, water, snowflakes, clouds, grass, hair, and so forth, this optimises rather well.
For example, refer to Koch's Snowflake
On a low end machine, only two or three iterations would be needed to create a decent snowflake. On a high end machine, you could iterate this function a hundred times with various compounding affects such as rotate, copy, resize, diff, transparency, and so forth. With high end machines, you can do close ups of snowflakes without any resolution loss... And most all of this is using the same algorithm as the lower-end machine would use...
Granted, the fractal algorithms have to be well designed and thought out to achieve this effect. A basic Koch's Snowflake algorithm at high iterations doesn't look too much different from lower iterations... Some transforms would need to be introduced to the algorithm, but those could also be scalable...
Anyhow... $0.02 cents
I had the unfortunate experience of graduating from college in 2001, when the bubble had burst and the economy was beginning to tank... just three months before 9/11. I thought I was going to get a job as a networking engineer or system admin, as that's what I was doing all though college in work-study programs.... Haha. How wrong I was!
In the subsequent three years, I've been teaching myself how to maintain a consulting business. This 'digitician' position merely gives a silly title to an age-old occupation: that of the consultant. Closely related to the position of 'consultant', is that of the 'general consultant', the 'contractor', and the 'general contractor'.
Although, I do think that $125/hour is a bit much.
Ah... a couple of questions. Have you ever owned your own company? Have you ever incorporated yourself? Have you ever worked as a consultant? Have you ever worked as a contractor?
$125/hr is a typical fee for a consultant or contractor. It gets really crazy when they charge $300/hr or $500/hr. You can definately find people who will charge $5,000 per day to run corporate training workshops ($625/day).
There is a tendency for people to de-value themselves and not consider how much they are worth. It also leads to economic depression and recession when communities thing that all of their jobs are being outsourced and that their efforts, skills, and knowledge aren't not valuable. Remember, value is completely dependent upon the purchaser's perception... A glass of water in the desert could easily be sold for $1,000 / glass, if the buyer was dehydrated. Similarly, computer geeks need to know how to create percieved value of their skills.
Just because you're a 133t h4ck0r, can program in C/C++, you admin your own Cisco router, built a linux/apache/mysql/php/nuke database-enabled content-management web-server, and everything in your house is wireless doesn't mean that anybody necessarily cares. There is not a clear perception of the value of those skills.
Making sure that there is a backup of the wife's or husband's personal files in the case of an accident, when there's never been a backup made at all? Value: $300.
Preventing a divorce because the spouse doesn't find the evidence of an affair? Value: $2,000
Preventing the kids from getting involved in cybersex chatrooms before the age of 13: Value: $2000
The point is... don't undervalue yourself or the rest of the community. You hurt other computer geeks when you say that $125/hr is a bit much. Value is in the perception of the buyer.
Also, consider inflation. I guarantee you that in the next ten years, doctors and lawyers will be billing $500 per hour, and I hope that the average computer geek will be able to charge $250/hr for consulting rates by then.
FYI, modern MRI scanners use bayesian noise reduction during image processing. I used to work in a MRI research laboratory, and our director had pioneered the application of Bayesian noise-filtering algorithms in post-processing of image data.
Oddly enough, our director of research was notoriously difficult person to schedule a meeting with. Makes me wonder about 'unsupervised learning'...
What I find interesting about this article is the inherent variability inherent in the way that modern chips are made.
For those of you less familiar with how chips are made, there is a standard sized silicon "wafer" which Intel uses... I forget the exact diameter, although it's round and about the size of a large diner-plate. Anyhow, it comes as a large cylinder, and they slice off diner-plate sized wafers, and try to fit as many chips on it as possible.
Now, making a chip involves lots of chemical-etching and photo-chemical reactions using ultraviolet light. The interesting thing about all of this is that they'll print hundreds of chips with each go, and each print doesn't create the exact same patterns. It's really alot like using an old typewriter... Ever notice how one of the keys might get bent or out of alignment and it types letter's inconsistently? Same thing happens with printing chips, apparently.
Anyhow, because of photonics angles, chemical flow dynamics, atmospheric pressure, and all sorts of odd little variables within the clean room, the chips are variable, even though they're printed from the same wafer. In the end, a 2.0 Ghz chip may have come from the same wafer that a 2.2 Ghz chip, or even a 2.4 Ghz chip (for example). As I understand it, chips from the outer edges of the wafer are more likely to be slower than ones in the center (increased angle from the lasers, chemical and atmospheric turbulence effects from the edge of the container, etc.) Apparently, the technology is getting to the point where slight changes in entropy within the chip production process will get magnified into performance differences in the end product. Butterfly effect of sorts, actually...
In the end... it's the same chicken producing eggs, but sometimes the eggs are different. And the eggs eventually get graded (A, B, C, etc).
note: I've never worked in a chip production facility, so my post is bound have some technical errors in it. Feel free to supplement my post; try not to flame. Just paraphrasing other articles I've read about the process...
Flaws in the basic building blocks of networking and computer science... "It is time to ask the harder questions about the ways of computer architecture we've been using for the past 30 years. Is it time to scrap the von Neumann architecture?"
Sigh... I guess it's back to building the Analytic Engine... Pass me the lathe, will ya...
This has ideal applications in the film and video industries. Technicians in these industries are used to lugging around amplifiers, mixing boards, and computer equipment. With 160GB of hard drive and a DVD burner amd a 17" monitor, this is an ideal portable video editing station for on-set editing. Typically, technicians in the film and video industies will set up their equipment at the beginning of the day on set, and strike at the end of the day. At 16 pounds, it's light enough that it can be easily set up and put away once a day.
One thing it's not meant for, I suspect. is the latte drinking Starbucks crowd who are just word processing and working on the next great American novel. No... this thing is meant for on-set video editing, if you ask me....
Ah, this stuff has been around for like 4 years, at least. We were using this kind of technology at the University of Chicago back in 1999 with WindowsNT images. (The department I worked in was responsible for supporting all of the public-use workstations throughout campus, and we naturally relied on disk imaging technologies.)
If you buy a product like Altiris LabExpert or Norton Ghost and are very clever, you can jury rig an entire operating system environment onto a CD.
Oddly enough, we stumbled on how to do this kind of thing while researching Wake-Over-LAN and PXE technologies. Apparently, the system BIOS just needs to be smart enough that it can look at something other than a PCI/IDE/SCSI hard drive for information with which to load a kernel into memory. If your BIOS is PXE enabled, it's smart enough to tell the system bus to look for a kernel on the network card (in the case of a Wake-On-LAN network boot) or on a CD drive (in the case of a CD boot).
FYI, PXE is Intel's Preboot Execution Environment specification, and is therefore working at the hardware level underneath Microsoft PE (Preinstallation Environment).
Nonetheless, the hardware capabilities which have allowed Windows to be booted from a CD have been around since 1999, at least, as they are part of Intel's PXE specification.
Just my two cents...
At $4,000 per carat, I sure wish that I could afford to collect jewelry!
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From Wikipedia.org:
"Is the re-allocation of funds within NASA really for getting to the Moon and Mars?
It's on the record as being re-allocated for those purposes, so that seems like a redundant question. I supose you're asking "is that their real purpose"? Perhaps a longer-term perspective would ask the question of, what is the purpose of getting to the Moon and Mars, besides "exploration"? Historically, exploration has had economic, security, and political motivators. This is just more of the same, it appears...
Or is it just a cover for shifting toward military space applications?
Same argument. When Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and the King and Queen of Spain underwrote his voyage, don't you think that people complained that the government was using that voyage as a cover for shifting towards military nautical applications? Of course they did... Ever heard of the Spanish Armada? Spain succeeded in developing it's military nautical applications... war galleons, collonies in the americas, gold, etc. etc. Of course, they later lost control of most of it, but at the time it was simply an investment which later paid of in terms of economic, political, and military applications...
If true, how badly will NASA's scientific mission be effected if it becomes a conduit for giving research and development money to defense contractors?
Maybe none at all. There is a "science of war" after all... Take the Atlantic Research Corporation, for example... They conducted scientific research into the area of solid-fuel rockets... Pretty serious scientific applications, all things considered. Also very serious defence, political, and economic research as well. All things considered, NASA's scientific mission could possibly be improved if they could develop a new line of shuttle replacements that could also serve defence applications... And the armed services have a repuation of having equipment which works pretty well, now-days... You never know when some extra terrestrial object or species is going to start landing on our chunk of rock... Better be ready...
"Perhaps a condensed matter physicist can dumb the article down for layfolk such as myself?"
Imagine a big block of swiss cheese (the kind of cheese that's got all the holes in it). Now those holes are basically "vacancies" of cheese. Now, imagine if the holes moved around.
Similarly, think of one of those pictures underwater videos of SCUBA divers... You know when they release a breath, and all the bubbles start moving up to the surface of the water... Those are likes 'holes' in the water. More specifically, they are "vacancies" and they move in a somewhat orderly manner (up). Of course, it makes more common sense that vacancies would move around in a liquid than in solids....
So, basically, they've found a state of matter where the vacancies move around in a solid. In a sense, they're claiming that they found a block of cheese in the refridgerator where the holes keep moving. And this is why there's going to be controversy over this claim: they're alot of people who are going to say "no way - cheese doesn't work that way..."
It would make for a crazy club sandwich... Yum.
FYI: I'm not a condenced matter physicist, although I do happen to have a degree in the History and Philosophy of Science...
Hrrmmm.... =/
First of all, you would have the slight problem of buildinga magnet with a bore large enough to fit a car through... Because the magnetic field strength is proportional to the inverse of the square of the distance, that would have to be a freakin powerfull magnet to fit a truck through.
Assuming that you could build a magnet that large, one would then have a slight problem that any and all ferrous-metallic parts in the car or truck would be attracted to the magnet. Essentially, the magnet would probably pick the car up, off the ground; the car would fly towards the magnet at a very fast velocity; there would be a very large crash; and the car and magnet would become one big mess of magnetic metal.
unfortunately, the only feasible method of implementing this idea would be to have all-plastic cars. also, one would need to implement laws and legislation to prevent anybody with a pacemaker, aneurism clips, or heart pump from driving a car...
anyhow, to make a MRI car scanner, one would probably need to design a low-field magnet (so the cars don't get pulled towards it), and extremely sensitive radio transmitters / receivers. The trick to building an MRI car scanner would be in designing the radio transmit/recieve coils (which could possibly be built in a tunnel kind of way). If I were to try building this type of scanner (and I happen to work with a 1.5 Tesla MRI cryomagnet every day) I'd try putting a 0.5 tesla magnet *under* the road.
However, one would need damn good lawyers in the case that somebody with a pacemaker was riding in the car being scanned, and the car scanner turned off their pacemaker. The litigation would be a nightmare, I'm sure.... Also, one has to worry about FDA licensing, highway & transportation authorities, etc. etc.
Hmm... I'm not entirely convinced by your arguments. However, I do agree with you that "during the heyday of cray, you got a damn fine box and nothing else."
;-) Furthermore, I also suspect that if Cray Inc. built a zettaflop or yottaflop abacus and provided instructions on how to simulate the weather, people around the world would abandon their computers and begin taking abacus lessons... Remember, it's all about the hardware and algorithms in supercomputing...
My thinking, however, is that the same is true today and for all of the top 100 supercomputers in the world. That is to say, each one of those machines is a custom hardware installation, and my educated guess is that software still isn't the driving force in the supercomputing market. Rather, algorithms are the driving force. The supercomputer market is geared towards people who want to very specific tasks, very acurately, and very fast. Example applications might be calculating fourier transforms (spectroscopic analysis), mendelbrot sets (weather simulations), prime numbers (cryptography), and statistical derivatives (markets). Any of these types of applications could feasibly require only a few thousand lines of code... At the same time, however, any of these applications are fully capable of utilizing as much hardware resources as you have available...
The problem is the magnitude at which these few lines of code need to be repeated. Furthermore, each of these types of algorithms can give qualitatively different and more robust results at each order of magnitude increase in speed... thereby creating a driving market force for upgrades.... We have a computer that can predict the weather 48 hours from now? Well, give us a computer that's 10 times as powerful, and we'll predict it 56 hours from now... Give us one 100 times more powerfull, and we'll predict the weather 62 hours from now, and so on, and so on... The point I'm trying to make is that the software isn't the driving force behind these supercomputers... the algorithms are... and the optimized hardware is what the organizations are paying hard cash for, in order to calculate those algorithms fastest.
Remember, we're talking about supercomputers here... we're certainly not talking about super-electronic-typewriters, super-spreadsheet-applications, super-databases, super-webservers, super-videoeditors, etc. etc. Nor are we necessarily talking about super-von-neuman machines, super-turring-machines, or super-mainframes. We're talking about supercomputing and the Cray corporation... the company historically responsible for building the machines which simluated the weather and nuclear explosions for many years... I suspect that there are not many end users of such machines and that user interface software is kept at a minimum...
But, I'm not a physics or computer science major, so what do I know... That, and I'm beginning to ramble... just my $0.02 worth...
My two cents say that this is article written to produce a knee-jerk reaction in the tech-aware reader. Of course robots are going to be replacing humans in the labor force. Of course we're going to automate these jobs. What a lot of people forget is that the term "computer" used to refer to a professional occupation held by a human being (with abacus being the primary tool). Scientific revolutions in the areas of telecommunications, automation, mechanics, transportation, and manufacturing have been replacing people with machines for over 100 years. And this is generally a good thing.
What the article fails to address is all of the new jobs and services (for humans), which will be created by this maneuver. Think: telerobotics operator, droid service engineer, automation systems engineer, protocol designer, grid engineer, droid-user-interface (DUI) designer, droid administrator, telerobotics surgeon, teleconstruction architect, hazardous waste cleanup administrator, droid bounty hunter, droid mechanic, a.i. architect, biotechnician, bioengineer, cyberneticist, etc. etc. Utilizing robotic labor for low-level manual tasks allows humans to assume higher-level roles and positions.
Some suggested reading / viewing materials to consider, in response to this article:
BladeRunner
Star Wars
A.I.
You have some good points, although I must disagree with some of your conclusions...
[Turing] figured we'd have machines capable of passing his "imitation game" test by the end of the 20th century.
Have you considered the implications of Carson Daily's simulacrum , as being proof-positive that technology is passing the "imitation game"? Granted, as the old saying goes, you can fool some of the people all the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time...
"Pfft! They promised us flying cars and video phones, too, and I haven't seen any of those running lately, either."
I don't know about you, but I was born partially deaf, and have been following video conferencing technology for a long time. Any PC that you have with a network connection, a video monitor, and a microphone is a video-phone. It may not be marketed that way all the time, however the technology is the same. My proposal to you is to consider that perhaps video phones are masquerading as home computers, and that a brand new video phone comes with a 17" monitor (slightly bigger than you were thinking of, perhaps?).
I believe that a relavent point to be made is between the terms "Artificial Intelligence" and "Satisfactory Intelligence"... it's not necessary for the machine to exhibit an intelligence which is artificial, merely satisfactory. Point in case, if the viewers believe that the object being shown on the video screen is an intelligent being located elsewhere, then the viewers will interpret and behave accordingly... even if the object located on the screen was computer generated. Hence the phenomena behind the Carson Daly simulacrum and the Max Headroom television shows.
Remember: "Artificial Intelligence" is not about getting a machine to think... it's about fooling the person who interacts with the machine to think that the machine is thinking.
In the US, "hardcore" drugs have largely been isolated to the underclass. The worthwhile classes don't get beyond marijauna for the most part. A notible exception is extasy.
If that is so, would you be so kind as to explain the large number of reports I read about regarding professional actors, musicians, atheletes, lawyers, and stock brokers who are regularly: 1) checking into rehab clinics, 2) being banned from whatever activity because of drug use, 3) dying of a drug overdose (typically a heart attack from cocain or speed).
Also, could you explain why there are multiple white-collar-exclusive door-to-door delivery services, in major metropolitan cities such as New York, Chicago, and L.A., which cater exclusively to white collar career professionals? And by the way, what's the largest demographic of cocain users? Last I recall, it was employed lawyers, stock brokers, and entertainers who could afford a daily coke habit.
And what's up with the "underclass" and "worthwhile classes" language?
At any rate, I'm not so sure that the war on drugs really is going that well. I believe that there is good propoganda circling the "war", but the issue at hand is enforcibility, and to what extent can laws prohibiting certain activities actually be enforced. (Remember that constitutionally and legally, it is generally considered that if a law is unenforcable, then it is null and void.)
And the difference between drugs transfer and multimedia transfer, is that the former requires a physical object to go from point A to point B; the later requires a data object to go from point A to point B. It's possible to enforce the prohibition of transferring a pound of cocain from person A to person B... all it requires is big dudes with guns. Similarly, one can enforce the prohibition of transferring a CD or DVD from person A to person B with the same tactics. However, when you get to diskless and wireless transfers, big dudes and big guns loose their ability to enforce the prohibition (issues include: warrents, tresspassing, eavesdropping, free speech, etc. etc.).
name one street drug that used to be available, and is no longer
Absinthe and other worm-wood derivatives are generally not available, and they used to be street drugs...
Sure it is.
I'm checking my 1974 edition of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary right here, and on page 494, it clearly states that "orientated" is the past tense of the verb "orientate".
I suspect that you mistook the intended verb to be "orient", with a past tense of "oriented". However, when reading the sentence, one will clearly see that "John Nunn" is the subject of the sentance, and the the "PC" is the subject, with "chess" being the indirect object, upon which the "PC" is oriented towards.
You are completely correct that a subject is oriented towards a direct object.
However, as I understand it, a direct object is orientated towards an indirect object, by a subject.
Clearly all of these people subscribe to the Perl doctrine of job preservation: "If nobody else can figure out how it works - they can't fire you".
Yeah, but you can't be promoted either...
The question becomes whether or not Rutan can do it, and then teach others how to do the same thing....
Yeah, but does either of them have 3 Gbit DDR SDRAM for 360 degree autostereoscopic 3D viewing? I think not...
I quote the Resolution / Color / Performance / Memory specifications of the Perspecta 3D, which is available from Actuality Systems.
- Volume comprised of 198 2-D slices (1.1 slices / degree)
- Approximately 768 x 768 pixel slice resolution
- 24 Hz volume refresh
- Full color (21-bit hardware-based stippling)
- 8 colors at highest resolution
- Polygons / sec.: To be announced
- Dual volume buffers
- TI(TM) 1600 MIPS DSP high-performance embedded processor
- 3 Gbit DDR SDRAM (100 Mvoxels x 3 colors x 2 buffers)
Granted, there are only 8 colors available at high resolution, but it points out the fact that 3D graphics cards and monitors have a long way to go yet. I don't mean to be a troll, but I get rather pissed-off when these video card manufacturers, with their planned-obselesence, talk about their latest-and-greatest "3D" video cards. Please; these are pseudo-3D video cards; and if you've worked with a stereoscopic video system (virtual reality system) or an autostereoscopic video system (3D television system), you'll know what I mean...
(Granted, I only got to work with this kind of technology for a couple of months in college, so I'm not an expert on this stuff... still, I know stereo3D from pseudo3D when I see it...)
At Chicago, the legend is that the scavenger hunt originated because of a student, in the 50s or 60s, who was looking for a phone, in order to call home on mother's day. Since then, it's grown a bit...
Typically only known by network security administrators and greek clasicists, Kerberos is a defacto security protocol at places like MIT and the University of Chicago. The network infrastructure you've described sounds like it could be reaching the point of needing a Kerberos server, which, of course, would consolidate many of your currently existing network security solutions, as well as create new types of headaches you didn't know existed...
Anyhow, as far as low budget goes, Kerberos does run on linux.
Of course, installing a Kerberos network security solution does require that all of your computers run Kerberos enabled operating systems (Win2K, Linux, Solaris, and the like...) and that you and your co-workers can actually complete a secure sneakernet handshake and file transfer between all of your end nodes... Which, in of itself requires a slightly different understanding of network security and network planning...
Just my two cents....