Let me illustrate an aspect here; I'll go overboard and be excessive, but that's just to convey the meaning. I also understand there are two sides to everything, but the following aspect is often lost from perspective. As in everything, balance is the key.
I think the real problem here is that teachers don't intimately know their students anymore. "In former times" teachers would spot plagiarized parts of an essay simply by knowing a student and what his style was and what he was capable of. Only if a teacher gets to intimately know a student can he really do effective teaching anyway, and not only teaching, but education for life. This revolving door system where the teacher doesn't even know who's in his class, and he doesn't even have the time to read all the essays, well, something is wrong with that. Plus a plagiarism site could never spot stuff that you had your older brother or even your parent do for you - but a teacher that intimately knows a student would spot that too in an instant. And anyway, it's not the report itself that's important, but how much the person has retained, has grown, has become more educated. Yes, responsibility and no plagiarism is an important part of a good education, but this itellectual property crap is quite over emphasized these days. None of you know anything completely on your own, just by coming into the world, you're all indebted to the people you've learned from. And the best way to learn anyways is to monkey each other. Even having to recite other people's work is an okay way of learning, so you can absorb ways, style and mechanics of how it's done. I'm also fed up with this everyone having to come up with their "own" idea, and pour them into words, or taking what someone else said, and bending over backward saying the same thing with awkward wording, just so it's not plagiarized and a brainded computer won't flag you for it. Instead, I say use the original. We are all taking part of this "body of human" knowledge that we collectively add to and take from. That is what you really know, what humanity knows, and each of you adds just a tiny bit to it. It's not wrong to "own" the knowledge of humanity as your own, as everyone's. If you find something that someone else said, and relates perfectly to the topic at hand, and you've come to fully understand the ins and outs of what they say, then heck yeah, write it down in its original. I wanna read it the best way it's possibly written, not that bent over backwards way you come up with. Tell me where it's from, too, so I can learn where to find stuff like that. If someone else has done the work for you already, then use it, go with it, but make sure you know it in and out, because if I find out you just took someone's work and didn't even understand it, or bother to read it, oh boy! Personal, one on one verbal examinations are extremely important for this reason. You can't just multiple choice test an education into someone. The teacher can then cross examine you on what you understood, because that's what really counts, not "putting in the miles" or typing up 15 pages. If you can learn more from typing 1 page than from 15 pages, then don't waste your precious time. Knowing what others know is okay, because when it comes it each of us forcibly coming up with original stuff, we all stink, especially while still in school without a breadth of experience. That attitude of this general knowledge is part of me, I must step up to make it mine, to own it all and help others embrace it too, that attitude gets you and me much farther than "let me worry about who thought of what, this idea is mine, that idea is yours, here's the fence between the two, and you owe me two bucks for that idea and I owe you 1.50 for this one here." Even if you excessively block-quote what other people have said in your papers but form a coherent message, you should be okay, and some brainded internet automaton site shouldn't be able to flag you down as a thief. Even the authors you're block-quoting have built on things they've learned from others. Almost
I don't know about you guys, but this whole math I see here is off to me. The author says
# Max sustained transfer rate : FireWire 800: up to 55MB/s
# FireWire 400: up to 35MB/s
# USB 2.0: up to 34MB/s
and cites 8 hr backups for a 40 Gig drive. Now a 40 GB drive to me is 40,000 MB, roughly, so 40,000 MB/34 (MB/s)= 1176.5 seconds=1176.5/60 minutes = 19.6 Minutes. That is nowhere near the math you guys are doing. Even if the raw disk speed is say 11 MB/sec, that's still only 60 minutes. USB2.0 is supposed to have up to 400 Mbit/sec =400/8 MB/s=50 MB/s transfer speed, so I'm guessing his 34 is the disk speed itself. I think his interface is running at USB 1.1 speed which tops at 12 Mbit/s = 12/8 MB/s= 1.5 MB/sec. Now you do get those 8 Hrs. If he wants to cut his backup time from 8 hrs to 20 minutes, get a USB 2.0 PCI card+ USB 2.0 disk enclosure. That's what I got and it roX!
Re:Beavis..this is the coolest thing i have ever s
on
Your Own Mecha
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· Score: 3, Insightful
How the hell did this thread about the "world's largest robot capable of carrying a person" turn into a military discussion. When we see robots, why is it that we automatically think weapons? I realize that the military might be the first to pick up the new technology, just like it happened with airplanes and nuclear fission, but in the long term I can imagine peaceful uses, as they were intented in the first place by their original creators. People who invented airplanes and fission did it to make humans more enabled, happier - flying has always been a dream of humans envying birds, and the scientists thinking about fission meant it as an awesome source of energy. Once you're enabled and more capable, it's up to you what you do with it. You can use your newfound powers to live better, or to destroy something. Right now the military is heavily into unmanned toys, but I think in the future, the ratio of robots used for bettering the lives of humans to the amount used by the military will be very high.. just like the amount of commercial airplane flights outdo the military part. Why isn't anyone thinking about grandma in the nursing home "prison" being able to get out back home because she can take care of herself again, cuz she can 'dress up' into her robot clothes that helps her walk, drive, and shop? Is that such a scary future? The cave people must have been damn scared of fire first but where would we be without fire? Sure you can burn down your enemy's huts with fire, but these day's when we think fire that's not the first thing that comes to mind anymore. I'm sure it will be the same with robots.
Well, as far as asset ownership goes, in my opinion the equal sharing of common property is sort of needed. Most likely it will be the female who sits home and breastfeeds the kids, and unless she has some guarantee of economic support she'll be in a very vulnerable situation. I know times are changing and women can work too, but truth is that more women than men breastfeed. And even if the male stays home, the same argument stands. It's just not right that one member of the couple takes on the burden of staying home, raising kids, taking care of the home, and sacrifices his/her personal career advancement, and then after 10 years, after a divorce, he/she is left with nothing plus no career. Half and half is the fairest thing ever - after all, when you say for better or worse in sickness and health, you're committing a much greater vow, and if you break that, the everybody gets half stuff is more than fair.
As long as KDE relies on the Qt libraries, it's in a vulnerable situation to the Trolltech buyout, or not even buyout, just buy-in, where nobody notices but new people are the bosses at Trolltech. And lo and behold foking of the GPL Qt wouldn't happen til it's too late. It's very easy to run any project into the ground, on purpose, or at least just make it annoying enough so that people silently quit it. I'm not so sure that qt is giving the best performance possible.. right now gnome seems spiffier and faster, though gnome has been going downhill for a while. So before killing KDE, Gnome must be killed off, so that people don't have another option to flock to. Patience, one at a time, methodical erasure. Or maybe I'm just paranoid. But heck, I love using free software, cuz it's free, plus, as far as an end user, it's nice to know the source code is there, and I can edit it if I want to.
I personally prefer the option to evote. Why get stuck in the past? People who wanna paper vote, can, but those who want to evote, should be able to. Better yet, kind of like online banking and online bill payment, I'd love to vote from home. But one thing that's really missing is a public accounting of the votes, where every citizen can hop online and check their votes against the votes database, and the whole database could be downloaded and counted by anyone - especially historians and university professors would love to dig such databases. That's the ONLY way to have accountability and assure no tampering with the results. I don't trust the paper counters - who gets to pick those guys anyway?
What's really needed is a public SQL database, so that both the government and the voters can download and count the votes themselves. Come on, a DB with less than 300 million people, and a couple hundred issues, storing binary 0/1 data types isn't that big. I'm sure quite a few university professors would download it and count it - you'd have an official.gov vote counting computer, and sites mirroring it kind of like the sourceforge files. Now this info wouldn't make everyone's vote public - you wouldn't go by the social security number, but everyone would request a separate voter ID, which you must absolutely keep private. This way your boss wouldn't know what you voted, and in case your voter ID gets compromised, you go log on to some.gov site, and request a new random voter ID online. Of course it's your job to keep track of your past voter ID's, that is what it was in what election. Of course the voter ID database would be secret, but even if it's breached, the worst thing that happens is that your boss finds out how you voted. But anyone who gets caught knowing or collecting other people's voter ID's without those people's knowledge is guilty of some crime. The worst thing you lose is privacy anyway, so it's not fatal.
This system would ensure full transparency and true democracy down to the individual's level - I could hop online any time, through my computer, and query the system against my votes. Anytime my vote is missing somewhere that I voted, I can start stirring trouble. Anyone have a comment, how to make such a system better, or if it couldn't work, why not?
I think the original poster of this story is making a misleading statement - he must have misunderstood the patent. He states that the patent is about launching browser windows without "chrome" around it.
His link defines chrome like this:
What is Chrome? -
The chrome is that part of the application window that lies outside of a window's content area. Toolbars, menu bars, progress bars, and window title bars are all examples of elements that are typically part of the chrome.
Now read the abstract of the patent below, and tell me, the way you understand it, does it have anything to do with chrome?
United States Patent 6,662,341
Cooper , et al. December 9, 2003
Method and apparatus for writing a windows application in HTML
Abstract
A method, apparatus, and computer-readable medium for authoring and executing HTML application files is disclosed. An HTML application file is basically a standard HTML file that runs in its own window outside of the browser, and is thus not bound by the security restrictions of the browser. The author of an HTML application file can take advantage of the relaxed security. The author of the HTML application file designates the file as an HTML application file by doing one or more of the following: defining the MIME type as an HTML application MIME type; or using an HTML application file extension for the file. When a browser, such as the Internet Explorer, encounters one of the above, it processes the file as an HTML application file rather than a standard HTML file by creating a main window independent of the browser, and rendering the HTML in the main window.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Most existing Windows application development environments require knowledge of specialized computer languages such as C++, or Visual Basic. Learning a specialized computer language is often difficult for non-technical individuals. However, many non-technical individuals can use HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and scripting languages, such as VBScript and JScript. HTML and scripting languages are run inside of a Web browser, and thus, inherit the browser's user interface and security mechanisms. Because non-technical individuals have knowledge of HTML and scripting languages, it would be advantageous to leverage such existing knowledge to implement a Window's application. Such applications should be free to define their own user interface elements and to run as trusted code on the system, i.e., outside of the security model imposed by the Web browser. The present invention is directed to achieving this result.
END EXCERPT
In fact, why don't you go to www.uspto.gov, and search for patent # 6,662,341, and educate yourself a bit about patents. Read the abstract, then the "field of invention" and introduction parts - they are the most important for start, even though the claims are the only things that matter in court. Because of that claims are written in very hard to read lawyer lingo, and only read them after you read the rest, to double check that the claims are actually saying what you understood from the rest of the text.
Basically this patent is about programming, as opposed to C or VB, you end up programming in the C-like javascript. I don't feel this deserves a patent at all - the amount of effort needed to relax securities for a special.hta extension file is quite minuscule. Plus this is a stupid software patent anyway - in my mind it ranks pretty close to the Amazon 1-click shopping patent. Anything that people say "duh" to shouldn't be called an invention. If it's shocking, new, who would have thought kind of thing, then yeah, maybe. Typical embrace and extend behaviour.
Actually, let me change or blur my opinion here a little to be less one-sided, and agree with you about obscurity. I made a mistake above between practicing a hobby, and talking about it. There is an important distinction here - between the act, and the information - i.e. actually building the thing and making it fly, and just hypothetically brainstorming about it, or even if not so hypothetically, even reading about how someone really did it, in real life, and how it could be done. When it comes to information, people should be trusted, and a paternal gov't posing as benevolent should be mistrusted instead. Any gov't that justifies keeping people uninformed, in the darkness, for their own safety, is a bad gov't. We let people own guns, drive cars, and do a variety of dangerous things, then put up with the hassle of catching those few that abuse the power they were entrusted with. That's how it should be. The public (adults, not kids) is the utmost important thing there is, the indiviuals that compose it are THE moral standard, own the gov't and are in charge of their lives. They know what's best for them. People have the right to be informed, even about how weapons work. I for one prefer knowing how weapons work, so I can understand and form an opinion on situations where weapons are involved, compared to it all being a complete mystery to me, and maybe having false preconceptions even. When it comes to practicing the art, with serious payloads, that's where the licensing and limiting should come in, not at the information about how to do it stage. One idea about what the NZ gov't could have done instead is require the owner to put ample legal warnings on the site, about how dangerous this thing is, and what kind of utmost care should be excersized when playing with this thing. Just like high voltage equipment, like hair dryers have it. Perhaps the gov't could ban explosive payloads while practicing. Also the page could have had a PG13 banner on it, just like sex sites, so kids don't view it, (they don't view it in principle at least, they still view it, but that's up to the parents.) Just because the site talks about dangerous things, that doesn't mean that the readers should be banned. That's like banning games like Quake and horror movies, because people will go off and do stuff like that in the real world. If the site is well written, and it carefully explains the dangers that might not be apparent at first, that could be the only thing criticized. And come on, who are we kidding, everyone knows the apparent dangers of a friggin cruise missile, even kids.
Right, the intent to harm is that counts, not any kind of device. No matter how hard you try, there will always be ways to do harm - for instance, they might be banning plastic knives from air flights in the US, but then people can kill with their fingers and hands - are fingers going to be banned? Also kitchen knives and cars can be used for many purposes, same with compressed gas cylinders. What really matters is trying to control intent.
On the other hand a cruise missile is a very dangerous thing, with very little positive uses, besides entertainment. Just like radio amateurs need a license to broadcast, just to make sure they are skilled enough to not pollute some emergency frequency and put people's lives at danger, and just like car drivers need driver licenses, to make sure they do no harm to the rest of the public - the only conceivable way to allow people to practice this cruise missile building hobby is by making sure they know what they are doing and they can control the destination of their rockets. Saying "oops, I didn't mean that" doesn't work in this case. Now controlling rocket destinations is a very hard thing - even the heat seaking, laser quided, top of the tech missiles used by the US military miss their target quite a lot, and hit some hospital or apartment building. You pretty much can't practice this as a safe hobby, unless you live out in the woods, with 100 square miles of land that you own, and making sure your rocket doesn't have enough fuel to get out. But oh, you can play that already, as long as you don't tell anyone about it. Teaching the idiots how to do it, so anyone with an agenda - without the delight of constructing something as a hobby - can cook it up in a weekend and exact revenge somewhere well, that's not a very good idea. If you find passion in the challenge of constructing something that works, well go ahead, and don't tell anyone about it. When you're told all the details, that kinda loses the whole point, and being told the details only helps people with bad intent.
"For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the labour of my hands, and I found, that by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living." - Henry David Thoreau
You could already redesign the social labor structure, but when robots take over the simple work, the issue will be more looming. These days everyone is ushered into a hampsterwheel of 'jobs' and 'debt,' just so you never get bored and you always have something to keep you busy, something to strive for. Problem is that if you get everything you need too easily, then you just sit back and become bored, and people, especially males, when they are bored they end up going to war. Just watch the native american tribes after they obtained the horse, and suddenly, their greatest enemy, distance, was conquered. Now they had plenty food, more than they ever need, but what do these idiots do? Go run for glory, heroic death. In Egypt and during the Inca heydays food surplus resulted in humongous oppression too. Yes, some day 5% of the population will work in growing food, 5% in providing all the material needs, 5% designing robots for the two before, and the rest, well the rest can sit on their asses, like couch potatoes, or root for football teams, or battle it out in quake. Not everybody is scientifically inclined, but under such conditions I'd hope that at least 50% of the population would choose scientific challenges for themselves, even if they are on the simpler level of amateur radio - not every scientific endeavour has to be on the forefront of technology. The biggest problem is: will people stay sane when they are totally free and bored, or will they start acting crazy?
I think the length of copyright term has gotten out of hand: it was 70 years in the US for corporates up to around 2000, but now it's 90 years.In the first time in history nothing of corporate authorship is passing into public domain til 2020 - including Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and suck cliche logos created around 1930, you still owe royalty to Disney if you wanna press them on tshirts. And then, in 2020, watch them lobby Congress to extend it even more. Originally, back in 1790s when the Founding Fathers created copyright law, it was for a 14 years term. 14 years when news travelled slow and it took forever to print and distribute intellectual creations. These days a fair copyright seems to be something like 5 years to me. What's your opinion? So new songs and movies you would have to buy, in the strictest sense of property, just so that the artists have a contractual incentive to create new songs. Also you'd buy directly from the artist through some sites like ebay, cutting out the parasites like RIAA who pretty much do nothing except suck both the artist's and cosumers's blood like mosquitos, and don't contribute anything valuable. Actually they do contribute something valuable, distribution and marketing is hard work just like any, but it should have a fair price tag, on the lines of 95cents of a dollar going to the artist, and 5cents to the distributors, and not the other way around. When musicians and book writers make the most money off their creations, and distribution sites compete for the artist's favors, not the other way around, that's when intellectual creations will really spur. And thus P2P would be a living, vibrating creation, in 2003 sharing songs and movies created before 1998 - I think that's a fair tradeoff. If you want something newer, go the the site like ebay, and purchase the songs for a buck a piece, directly from the artists.
What happens once you develop artificial intelligence, put it into a rust resistant titanium robot with diamond teeth and infrared/visible/uv/em/xray eyes, give it an oozie, plus tools to mine titanium and reproduce itself - what happens under accidental release?
So there is a new story out on slashdot how the FAT partition is patented too. After reading the posts, here are some ideas: Frankly, FAT has been around for so long and I've seen so many things creating/reading/writing FAT filesystems for free, that basically MS lost their right to royalties. According to patent law you can't allow the unpoliced proliferation of a technology without collecting royalties, and then once everyone is hooked, start asking for fees. Or at least that's how the law should read. Also FAT is hardly an invention, it's such a poor knocked-together file system design that anyone skilled in the art would have taken from granted. Yeah back in 1980 it made sense to keep things simple because there wasn't enough speed/power back in those days, but still, FAT is hardly an invention.
Actually, the ntfs file system is patented or something. So you can't write anything from scratch that uses ntfs and make it completely free, because unlike copyright, where only the form but not the content is protected, patents block even writing around things. Luckily patents expire in 20 years, while copyright takes lifetime of author + 70 years, or 90 years if corporate authorship. So anyway, what we need instead is a good ext3 driver for windows. Personally, I have 3 major partitions on my disk - win2k ntfs, linux ext3, and a huge common FAT32 partition storing the common data, that both OS's can access and read/write. However, the other day I found out during video recording that FAT32 only supports 4 GB file sizes, so while I'm fine with FAT32 for now, it's clearly gotta go in the future. What I really need is just a way to easily access my data drive from both linux and windows. Also, my portable USB disk is FAT32 too, so it mounts nicely in linux and also in university computers that run windows. Unfortunately even if there were a ext3 driver for windows, I would not have permission to install it on university/library computers. So FAT32 on the USB drive is fine for me now, for a long long time. Not gonna store bigger than 4 gig files there.
I seldom use windows anymore, but there are some situations, such as when self-extracting pdf files only come as exe's, where I must reboot just to run those, then right back to linux.
Yeah, okay, say you can launch the train into outer space, but what then? how do you get it back? parachute it down? or make it extend artificial wings? It would be very hard to aim so that the train shoots out of one tunnel, goes into outer space, comes back and lands right on the track in another city, by the millimeter. Maybe you could parachute it down in an area of a football field nearby a city, then have some trucks gather the railcars filled with people and drag them into a hangar where a crane puts them back on a railtrack, with precision. Then they are loaded with people again, then enter a decompression chamber, then slingshot them back out into outer space and from there into the next city. Yeehaww! Hold on to your hats! (PS. City distances should be intercontinental for this to make sense at all.)
In fact I welcome such a move - if it's free for everyone to make their own home movies, without having to pay royalties for mpeg2 compression patents, and you can still fit the same amount of movie in a DVD, then why not? I hope the players will have hardware to play EVD movies, and if so, I'm a consumer, whatever is cheaper/better for me I take it, no matter where it comes from. Why is it that we have free bzip2 and ogg vorbis and similar compression methods, but for video we all must pay royalties. The tmpgenc program used to be a complete freeware, used to do mpeg2's for svcd's and dvd's for free, but the mpeg consortium got on the author's case so now he must collect payment for his program, now you only get 30 days evaluation time. Hey if someone wants to give me something equivalent or better for free, I'm not gonna be stupid and say no.
We already have a system of vouchers which can be given to artists, who in turn can exchange them for goods and services. Those vouchers are called "money."
Exactly. What I'd really like to see is no government involvment where doesn't have to be any. Here are some ideas for a system:
Every artist should create their own PGP-like key, have a central registrar like IP addresses in the DNS - so that no 2 keys are duplicated, just like IP addresses. Then that artist can include this indentity key into any creation they make - software, music, movies, books. This way everyone is uniquely tagged and at least when you consume a movie, you automatically have a list of identities that created it. Next you need a private software utility to aid you, sort of a monitor/journal that keeps track of what artistic things you consume - say you surf with mozilla a 90% of the time and 3 hrs a day, that's a bit of info, then yahoo is your homepage and you look at finance and news there, or google is your search engine, and you use linux a lot, and you listen to music made by a band of 5 musicians) You might wish to be able to see at the end of each month a statistic - a bar chart of what you actually used. Then you can make up your mind how you want to donate to these people. For instance say there was a movie like Basic Instinct. This is a collective art - so how do you reward the individuals in it? Does everybody gets paid equally including the lighting technician and Sharon Stone? That'd be wrong. Well you could either click high votes for Sharon Stone flashing her cooter for you, but also to the writers to come up with such a funky content, or agree with a group of like minded people who have already come up with a collective discrimination of what the % would be for each person - for instance a database like cddb/slashdot could show the current rating of how other people donate - 30% to the writers/20% to Stone, 20%% to the director, with the distribution curve down to some standard 1% for the lighting tehcnicians, etc. If you really want, you could tweak this curve up or down say up stone to 31%, director to 19%, leave the lighting techs and makeup artists alone - those could be kept at the default of "manufacturer recommended setting." You could hire professional critics to do the work for you, because all this is a hassle, just like you can hire accountants and tax people to handle a similar information hassles for you. Or, you could rely on the average of a bunch of critics. Or you could go by some standard understanding that in a restaurant you tip 15%. Yeah some people tip 30%, some tip 5% but very few tip 200% or.05%, unless you have very speacial reasons. Just as interest rates could go up and down, so could these %s. Then you decide you're about to donate say 100 bux, and look at your bar chart of who gets how much of it: - the linux team would get 5%,(out of witch say KDE would get.1%, gnome would get.1%, (out of which Miguel de Icaza 0.001% - you get the picture)), Sharon Stone would get 1%, the Basic Instinct lighting techs fund 0.0001%. You'd look at this, and say nah, Stone is getting too much, and Linus not enough, so you tweak it til you like it. Is it fair? No. You could get circular things that don't make sense at all when you want to rank people: like Linus>Sharon, Sharon>Britney, Britney>Linux - ok not a good example, but you get the point. How do you measure artistic value exactly? You can't, artistic value is not measurable, it defies logic. So what's the whole point then to measure? Well, the whole point is a sustainable economy where the artist gets to feed. This depends purely on your donations. It would be like tips in a restaurant - sure if you don't want to, you don't have to tip - in a restaurant you stare the waitress in the face, it's one on one there so it's stressful not to donate. In a church of 100 people, it's even less stressful not to donate. And in a society of a few hundred million, just taking and not giving back,
I totally agree with this post. I'd really like to see Dillo improved, with more coders on it. Apple chose KHTML over mozilla because of codesize, and thus loading time/speed. The linux kernel now prefers modules too. Why do mega-corporation run websites end up in bloat? java, openoffice, mozilla, or even eclipse, to name a few? look at dillo, the linux kernel, anjuta, gtk - come on guys, performance does matter. How about that X-server fork that's been talked about for some extra speed? I don't think the "get a faster computer" is the answer.
Actually, there are two ways to increase the rating of a processor: 1 is to make the GHz speed it runs on faster, and the wiring corners curvier, this is the hard way. The other way is pipelining, where the pipeline effectively multiplies the work done during each tick - this is the easy way. Now the problem is pipeline stalls, and here is where the instruction scheduler and result predictions come in.. they are kind of like cache managers, they do "guess" work, so they feed the new instruction into the pipeline before they are sure about the results coming out the end. Now a pipeline miss, when you guess wrong, is a very severe penalty, because the whole pipe has to be flushed, and recharged, and the deeper the pipeline is, the larger the penalty. So there is a practical limit of about 10 stages in processors, it's a balance between the penalties you pay during a miss, and increasing the processing work during each tick. The P4 is deeply pipelined, and it excels at no branching routines (no if/then situations) and it kicks AMD all over in things like video compression, and any sausage grinder activity where you feed work in on one end and you don't care what comes out the other, you don't make if/then decisions based on results. But it sucks at heavily branched instructions, such as compiling the linux kernel, or office applications, compared to AMD. To get to the point, GPU's are totally different beasts, because they never have to deal with if/then situations.. just feed the work on one end, dump the results out the other, and they can be very very deeply pipelined and run at low 200-300 MHz and still beat the CPU's running at 3 GHz in matrix processing. But try doing some branching code on them, if you can at all, I bet they would suck majorly, probably like a P75 or maybe a 486DX4 100MHz. Of course they kick ass in matrix processing and such mathematical routines, but they are definitely not made to replace processors. They only do one or two things well, but that's it, give'm something else and they choke.
Biotech is another hype industry that will go bust. Biological beings need a constant expanding of energy just to repair and upkeep their organic shape. A lot of complex organic compounds degrade without this constant repair work going on. So a real biotech harddrive will either be "alive," and have a mechanism to upkeep itself, replicating damaged parts, or it would not be true biotech, but a news on the level of "tiny magnets encapsulated in a polymer or organic binder" - so what?
I wonder what the lifetime of such a device would be - personally I prefer inorganic storage devices, even if they themselves have short lifetimes: flash cards can only be written to for a few thousand times, CDR ink degrades in a decade or two(depends on light exposure), and harddrive magnetic media starts to forget after a decade. Now throw proteins into the coctail and see how long they last. I wonder.
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Let me illustrate an aspect here; I'll go overboard and be excessive, but that's just to convey the meaning. I also understand there are two sides to everything, but the following aspect is often lost from perspective. As in everything, balance is the key.
I think the real problem here is that teachers don't intimately know their students anymore. "In former times" teachers would spot plagiarized parts of an essay simply by knowing a student and what his style was and what he was capable of. Only if a teacher gets to intimately know a student can he really do effective teaching anyway, and not only teaching, but education for life. This revolving door system where the teacher doesn't even know who's in his class, and he doesn't even have the time to read all the essays, well, something is wrong with that. Plus a plagiarism site could never spot stuff that you had your older brother or even your parent do for you - but a teacher that intimately knows a student would spot that too in an instant. And anyway, it's not the report itself that's important, but how much the person has retained, has grown, has become more educated. Yes, responsibility and no plagiarism is an important part of a good education, but this itellectual property crap is quite over emphasized these days. None of you know anything completely on your own, just by coming into the world, you're all indebted to the people you've learned from. And the best way to learn anyways is to monkey each other. Even having to recite other people's work is an okay way of learning, so you can absorb ways, style and mechanics of how it's done. I'm also fed up with this everyone having to come up with their "own" idea, and pour them into words, or taking what someone else said, and bending over backward saying the same thing with awkward wording, just so it's not plagiarized and a brainded computer won't flag you for it. Instead, I say use the original. We are all taking part of this "body of human" knowledge that we collectively add to and take from. That is what you really know, what humanity knows, and each of you adds just a tiny bit to it. It's not wrong to "own" the knowledge of humanity as your own, as everyone's. If you find something that someone else said, and relates perfectly to the topic at hand, and you've come to fully understand the ins and outs of what they say, then heck yeah, write it down in its original. I wanna read it the best way it's possibly written, not that bent over backwards way you come up with. Tell me where it's from, too, so I can learn where to find stuff like that. If someone else has done the work for you already, then use it, go with it, but make sure you know it in and out, because if I find out you just took someone's work and didn't even understand it, or bother to read it, oh boy! Personal, one on one verbal examinations are extremely important for this reason. You can't just multiple choice test an education into someone. The teacher can then cross examine you on what you understood, because that's what really counts, not "putting in the miles" or typing up 15 pages. If you can learn more from typing 1 page than from 15 pages, then don't waste your precious time. Knowing what others know is okay, because when it comes it each of us forcibly coming up with original stuff, we all stink, especially while still in school without a breadth of experience. That attitude of this general knowledge is part of me, I must step up to make it mine, to own it all and help others embrace it too, that attitude gets you and me much farther than "let me worry about who thought of what, this idea is mine, that idea is yours, here's the fence between the two, and you owe me two bucks for that idea and I owe you 1.50 for this one here." Even if you excessively block-quote what other people have said in your papers but form a coherent message, you should be okay, and some brainded internet automaton site shouldn't be able to flag you down as a thief. Even the authors you're block-quoting have built on things they've learned from others. Almost
I don't know about you guys, but this whole math I see here is off to me. The author says
# Max sustained transfer rate : FireWire 800: up to 55MB/s
# FireWire 400: up to 35MB/s
# USB 2.0: up to 34MB/s
and cites 8 hr backups for a 40 Gig drive. Now a 40 GB drive to me is 40,000 MB, roughly, so 40,000 MB/34 (MB/s)= 1176.5 seconds=1176.5/60 minutes = 19.6 Minutes. That is nowhere near the math you guys are doing. Even if the raw disk speed is say 11 MB/sec, that's still only 60 minutes. USB2.0 is supposed to have up to 400 Mbit/sec =400/8 MB/s=50 MB/s transfer speed, so I'm guessing his 34 is the disk speed itself. I think his interface is running at USB 1.1 speed which tops at 12 Mbit/s = 12/8 MB/s= 1.5 MB/sec. Now you do get those 8 Hrs. If he wants to cut his backup time from 8 hrs to 20 minutes, get a USB 2.0 PCI card+ USB 2.0 disk enclosure. That's what I got and it roX!
How the hell did this thread about the "world's largest robot capable of carrying a person" turn into a military discussion. When we see robots, why is it that we automatically think weapons? I realize that the military might be the first to pick up the new technology, just like it happened with airplanes and nuclear fission, but in the long term I can imagine peaceful uses, as they were intented in the first place by their original creators. People who invented airplanes and fission did it to make humans more enabled, happier - flying has always been a dream of humans envying birds, and the scientists thinking about fission meant it as an awesome source of energy. Once you're enabled and more capable, it's up to you what you do with it. You can use your newfound powers to live better, or to destroy something. Right now the military is heavily into unmanned toys, but I think in the future, the ratio of robots used for bettering the lives of humans to the amount used by the military will be very high.. just like the amount of commercial airplane flights outdo the military part. Why isn't anyone thinking about grandma in the nursing home "prison" being able to get out back home because she can take care of herself again, cuz she can 'dress up' into her robot clothes that helps her walk, drive, and shop? Is that such a scary future? The cave people must have been damn scared of fire first but where would we be without fire? Sure you can burn down your enemy's huts with fire, but these day's when we think fire that's not the first thing that comes to mind anymore. I'm sure it will be the same with robots.
Well, as far as asset ownership goes, in my opinion the equal sharing of common property is sort of needed. Most likely it will be the female who sits home and breastfeeds the kids, and unless she has some guarantee of economic support she'll be in a very vulnerable situation. I know times are changing and women can work too, but truth is that more women than men breastfeed. And even if the male stays home, the same argument stands. It's just not right that one member of the couple takes on the burden of staying home, raising kids, taking care of the home, and sacrifices his/her personal career advancement, and then after 10 years, after a divorce, he/she is left with nothing plus no career. Half and half is the fairest thing ever - after all, when you say for better or worse in sickness and health, you're committing a much greater vow, and if you break that, the everybody gets half stuff is more than fair.
As long as KDE relies on the Qt libraries, it's in a vulnerable situation to the Trolltech buyout, or not even buyout, just buy-in, where nobody notices but new people are the bosses at Trolltech. And lo and behold foking of the GPL Qt wouldn't happen til it's too late. It's very easy to run any project into the ground, on purpose, or at least just make it annoying enough so that people silently quit it. I'm not so sure that qt is giving the best performance possible.. right now gnome seems spiffier and faster, though gnome has been going downhill for a while. So before killing KDE, Gnome must be killed off, so that people don't have another option to flock to. Patience, one at a time, methodical erasure. Or maybe I'm just paranoid. But heck, I love using free software, cuz it's free, plus, as far as an end user, it's nice to know the source code is there, and I can edit it if I want to.
I personally prefer the option to evote. Why get stuck in the past? People who wanna paper vote, can, but those who want to evote, should be able to. Better yet, kind of like online banking and online bill payment, I'd love to vote from home. But one thing that's really missing is a public accounting of the votes, where every citizen can hop online and check their votes against the votes database, and the whole database could be downloaded and counted by anyone - especially historians and university professors would love to dig such databases. That's the ONLY way to have accountability and assure no tampering with the results. I don't trust the paper counters - who gets to pick those guys anyway?
What's really needed is a public SQL database, so that both the government and the voters can download and count the votes themselves. Come on, a DB with less than 300 million people, and a couple hundred issues, storing binary 0/1 data types isn't that big. I'm sure quite a few university professors would download it and count it - you'd have an official .gov vote counting computer, and sites mirroring it kind of like the sourceforge files. Now this info wouldn't make everyone's vote public - you wouldn't go by the social security number, but everyone would request a separate voter ID, which you must absolutely keep private. This way your boss wouldn't know what you voted, and in case your voter ID gets compromised, you go log on to some .gov site, and request a new random voter ID online. Of course it's your job to keep track of your past voter ID's, that is what it was in what election. Of course the voter ID database would be secret, but even if it's breached, the worst thing that happens is that your boss finds out how you voted. But anyone who gets caught knowing or collecting other people's voter ID's without those people's knowledge is guilty of some crime. The worst thing you lose is privacy anyway, so it's not fatal.
This system would ensure full transparency and true democracy down to the individual's level - I could hop online any time, through my computer, and query the system against my votes. Anytime my vote is missing somewhere that I voted, I can start stirring trouble.
Anyone have a comment, how to make such a system better, or if it couldn't work, why not?
I think the original poster of this story is making a misleading statement - he must have misunderstood the patent. He states that the patent is about launching browser windows without "chrome" around it.
.hta extension file is quite minuscule. Plus this is a stupid software patent anyway - in my mind it ranks pretty close to the Amazon 1-click shopping patent. Anything that people say "duh" to shouldn't be called an invention. If it's shocking, new, who would have thought kind of thing, then yeah, maybe. Typical embrace and extend behaviour.
His link defines chrome like this:
What is Chrome? - The chrome is that part of the application window that lies outside of a window's content area. Toolbars, menu bars, progress bars, and window title bars are all examples of elements that are typically part of the chrome.
Now read the abstract of the patent below, and tell me, the way you understand it, does it have anything to do with chrome?
United States Patent 6,662,341
Cooper , et al. December 9, 2003
Method and apparatus for writing a windows application in HTML
Abstract
A method, apparatus, and computer-readable medium for authoring and executing HTML application files is disclosed. An HTML application file is basically a standard HTML file that runs in its own window outside of the browser, and is thus not bound by the security restrictions of the browser. The author of an HTML application file can take advantage of the relaxed security. The author of the HTML application file designates the file as an HTML application file by doing one or more of the following: defining the MIME type as an HTML application MIME type; or using an HTML application file extension for the file. When a browser, such as the Internet Explorer, encounters one of the above, it processes the file as an HTML application file rather than a standard HTML file by creating a main window independent of the browser, and rendering the HTML in the main window.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Most existing Windows application development environments require knowledge of specialized computer languages such as C++, or Visual Basic. Learning a specialized computer language is often difficult for non-technical individuals. However, many non-technical individuals can use HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and scripting languages, such as VBScript and JScript. HTML and scripting languages are run inside of a Web browser, and thus, inherit the browser's user interface and security mechanisms. Because non-technical individuals have knowledge of HTML and scripting languages, it would be advantageous to leverage such existing knowledge to implement a Window's application. Such applications should be free to define their own user interface elements and to run as trusted code on the system, i.e., outside of the security model imposed by the Web browser. The present invention is directed to achieving this result.
END EXCERPT
In fact, why don't you go to www.uspto.gov, and search for patent # 6,662,341, and educate yourself a bit about patents. Read the abstract, then the "field of invention" and introduction parts - they are the most important for start, even though the claims are the only things that matter in court. Because of that claims are written in very hard to read lawyer lingo, and only read them after you read the rest, to double check that the claims are actually saying what you understood from the rest of the text.
Basically this patent is about programming, as opposed to C or VB, you end up programming in the C-like javascript. I don't feel this deserves a patent at all - the amount of effort needed to relax securities for a special
Actually, let me change or blur my opinion here a little to be less one-sided, and agree with you about obscurity. I made a mistake above between practicing a hobby, and talking about it. There is an important distinction here - between the act, and the information - i.e. actually building the thing and making it fly, and just hypothetically brainstorming about it, or even if not so hypothetically, even reading about how someone really did it, in real life, and how it could be done. When it comes to information, people should be trusted, and a paternal gov't posing as benevolent should be mistrusted instead. Any gov't that justifies keeping people uninformed, in the darkness, for their own safety, is a bad gov't. We let people own guns, drive cars, and do a variety of dangerous things, then put up with the hassle of catching those few that abuse the power they were entrusted with. That's how it should be. The public (adults, not kids) is the utmost important thing there is, the indiviuals that compose it are THE moral standard, own the gov't and are in charge of their lives. They know what's best for them. People have the right to be informed, even about how weapons work. I for one prefer knowing how weapons work, so I can understand and form an opinion on situations where weapons are involved, compared to it all being a complete mystery to me, and maybe having false preconceptions even. When it comes to practicing the art, with serious payloads, that's where the licensing and limiting should come in, not at the information about how to do it stage. One idea about what the NZ gov't could have done instead is require the owner to put ample legal warnings on the site, about how dangerous this thing is, and what kind of utmost care should be excersized when playing with this thing. Just like high voltage equipment, like hair dryers have it. Perhaps the gov't could ban explosive payloads while practicing. Also the page could have had a PG13 banner on it, just like sex sites, so kids don't view it, (they don't view it in principle at least, they still view it, but that's up to the parents.) Just because the site talks about dangerous things, that doesn't mean that the readers should be banned. That's like banning games like Quake and horror movies, because people will go off and do stuff like that in the real world. If the site is well written, and it carefully explains the dangers that might not be apparent at first, that could be the only thing criticized. And come on, who are we kidding, everyone knows the apparent dangers of a friggin cruise missile, even kids.
Right, the intent to harm is that counts, not any kind of device. No matter how hard you try, there will always be ways to do harm - for instance, they might be banning plastic knives from air flights in the US, but then people can kill with their fingers and hands - are fingers going to be banned? Also kitchen knives and cars can be used for many purposes, same with compressed gas cylinders. What really matters is trying to control intent.
On the other hand a cruise missile is a very dangerous thing, with very little positive uses, besides entertainment. Just like radio amateurs need a license to broadcast, just to make sure they are skilled enough to not pollute some emergency frequency and put people's lives at danger, and just like car drivers need driver licenses, to make sure they do no harm to the rest of the public - the only conceivable way to allow people to practice this cruise missile building hobby is by making sure they know what they are doing and they can control the destination of their rockets. Saying "oops, I didn't mean that" doesn't work in this case. Now controlling rocket destinations is a very hard thing - even the heat seaking, laser quided, top of the tech missiles used by the US military miss their target quite a lot, and hit some hospital or apartment building. You pretty much can't practice this as a safe hobby, unless you live out in the woods, with 100 square miles of land that you own, and making sure your rocket doesn't have enough fuel to get out. But oh, you can play that already, as long as you don't tell anyone about it. Teaching the idiots how to do it, so anyone with an agenda - without the delight of constructing something as a hobby - can cook it up in a weekend and exact revenge somewhere well, that's not a very good idea. If you find passion in the challenge of constructing something that works, well go ahead, and don't tell anyone about it. When you're told all the details, that kinda loses the whole point, and being told the details only helps people with bad intent.
"For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the labour of my hands, and I found, that by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living." - Henry David Thoreau You could already redesign the social labor structure, but when robots take over the simple work, the issue will be more looming. These days everyone is ushered into a hampsterwheel of 'jobs' and 'debt,' just so you never get bored and you always have something to keep you busy, something to strive for. Problem is that if you get everything you need too easily, then you just sit back and become bored, and people, especially males, when they are bored they end up going to war. Just watch the native american tribes after they obtained the horse, and suddenly, their greatest enemy, distance, was conquered. Now they had plenty food, more than they ever need, but what do these idiots do? Go run for glory, heroic death. In Egypt and during the Inca heydays food surplus resulted in humongous oppression too. Yes, some day 5% of the population will work in growing food, 5% in providing all the material needs, 5% designing robots for the two before, and the rest, well the rest can sit on their asses, like couch potatoes, or root for football teams, or battle it out in quake. Not everybody is scientifically inclined, but under such conditions I'd hope that at least 50% of the population would choose scientific challenges for themselves, even if they are on the simpler level of amateur radio - not every scientific endeavour has to be on the forefront of technology. The biggest problem is: will people stay sane when they are totally free and bored, or will they start acting crazy?
I think the length of copyright term has gotten out of hand: it was 70 years in the US for corporates up to around 2000, but now it's 90 years.In the first time in history nothing of corporate authorship is passing into public domain til 2020 - including Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and suck cliche logos created around 1930, you still owe royalty to Disney if you wanna press them on tshirts. And then, in 2020, watch them lobby Congress to extend it even more. Originally, back in 1790s when the Founding Fathers created copyright law, it was for a 14 years term. 14 years when news travelled slow and it took forever to print and distribute intellectual creations. These days a fair copyright seems to be something like 5 years to me. What's your opinion? So new songs and movies you would have to buy, in the strictest sense of property, just so that the artists have a contractual incentive to create new songs. Also you'd buy directly from the artist through some sites like ebay, cutting out the parasites like RIAA who pretty much do nothing except suck both the artist's and cosumers's blood like mosquitos, and don't contribute anything valuable. Actually they do contribute something valuable, distribution and marketing is hard work just like any, but it should have a fair price tag, on the lines of 95cents of a dollar going to the artist, and 5cents to the distributors, and not the other way around. When musicians and book writers make the most money off their creations, and distribution sites compete for the artist's favors, not the other way around, that's when intellectual creations will really spur.
And thus P2P would be a living, vibrating creation, in 2003 sharing songs and movies created before 1998 - I think that's a fair tradeoff. If you want something newer, go the the site like ebay, and purchase the songs for a buck a piece, directly from the artists.
What happens once you develop artificial intelligence, put it into a rust resistant titanium robot with diamond teeth and infrared/visible/uv/em/xray eyes, give it an oozie, plus tools to mine titanium and reproduce itself - what happens under accidental release?
So there is a new story out on slashdot how the FAT partition is patented too. After reading the posts, here are some ideas: Frankly, FAT has been around for so long and I've seen so many things creating/reading/writing FAT filesystems for free, that basically MS lost their right to royalties. According to patent law you can't allow the unpoliced proliferation of a technology without collecting royalties, and then once everyone is hooked, start asking for fees. Or at least that's how the law should read. Also FAT is hardly an invention, it's such a poor knocked-together file system design that anyone skilled in the art would have taken from granted. Yeah back in 1980 it made sense to keep things simple because there wasn't enough speed/power back in those days, but still, FAT is hardly an invention.
Actually, the ntfs file system is patented or something. So you can't write anything from scratch that uses ntfs and make it completely free, because unlike copyright, where only the form but not the content is protected, patents block even writing around things. Luckily patents expire in 20 years, while copyright takes lifetime of author + 70 years, or 90 years if corporate authorship. So anyway, what we need instead is a good ext3 driver for windows. Personally, I have 3 major partitions on my disk - win2k ntfs, linux ext3, and a huge common FAT32 partition storing the common data, that both OS's can access and read/write. However, the other day I found out during video recording that FAT32 only supports 4 GB file sizes, so while I'm fine with FAT32 for now, it's clearly gotta go in the future. What I really need is just a way to easily access my data drive from both linux and windows. Also, my portable USB disk is FAT32 too, so it mounts nicely in linux and also in university computers that run windows. Unfortunately even if there were a ext3 driver for windows, I would not have permission to install it on university/library computers. So FAT32 on the USB drive is fine for me now, for a long long time. Not gonna store bigger than 4 gig files there. I seldom use windows anymore, but there are some situations, such as when self-extracting pdf files only come as exe's, where I must reboot just to run those, then right back to linux.
Yeah, okay, say you can launch the train into outer space, but what then? how do you get it back? parachute it down? or make it extend artificial wings? It would be very hard to aim so that the train shoots out of one tunnel, goes into outer space, comes back and lands right on the track in another city, by the millimeter. Maybe you could parachute it down in an area of a football field nearby a city, then have some trucks gather the railcars filled with people and drag them into a hangar where a crane puts them back on a railtrack, with precision. Then they are loaded with people again, then enter a decompression chamber, then slingshot them back out into outer space and from there into the next city. Yeehaww! Hold on to your hats! (PS. City distances should be intercontinental for this to make sense at all.)
In fact I welcome such a move - if it's free for everyone to make their own home movies, without having to pay royalties for mpeg2 compression patents, and you can still fit the same amount of movie in a DVD, then why not? I hope the players will have hardware to play EVD movies, and if so, I'm a consumer, whatever is cheaper/better for me I take it, no matter where it comes from. Why is it that we have free bzip2 and ogg vorbis and similar compression methods, but for video we all must pay royalties. The tmpgenc program used to be a complete freeware, used to do mpeg2's for svcd's and dvd's for free, but the mpeg consortium got on the author's case so now he must collect payment for his program, now you only get 30 days evaluation time. Hey if someone wants to give me something equivalent or better for free, I'm not gonna be stupid and say no.
We already have a system of vouchers which can be given to artists, who in turn can exchange them for goods and services. Those vouchers are called "money." .05%, unless you have very speacial reasons. Just as interest rates could go up and down, so could these %s. Then you decide you're about to donate say 100 bux, and look at your bar chart of who gets how much of it: - the linux team would get 5%,(out of witch say KDE would get .1%, gnome would get .1%, (out of which Miguel de Icaza 0.001% - you get the picture)), Sharon Stone would get 1%, the Basic Instinct lighting techs fund 0.0001%. You'd look at this, and say nah, Stone is getting too much, and Linus not enough, so you tweak it til you like it. Is it fair? No. You could get circular things that don't make sense at all when you want to rank people: like Linus>Sharon, Sharon>Britney, Britney>Linux - ok not a good example, but you get the point. How do you measure artistic value exactly? You can't, artistic value is not measurable, it defies logic. So what's the whole point then to measure? Well, the whole point is a sustainable economy where the artist gets to feed. This depends purely on your donations. It would be like tips in a restaurant - sure if you don't want to, you don't have to tip - in a restaurant you stare the waitress in the face, it's one on one there so it's stressful not to donate. In a church of 100 people, it's even less stressful not to donate. And in a society of a few hundred million, just taking and not giving back,
Exactly. What I'd really like to see is no government involvment where doesn't have to be any. Here are some ideas for a system: Every artist should create their own PGP-like key, have a central registrar like IP addresses in the DNS - so that no 2 keys are duplicated, just like IP addresses. Then that artist can include this indentity key into any creation they make - software, music, movies, books. This way everyone is uniquely tagged and at least when you consume a movie, you automatically have a list of identities that created it. Next you need a private software utility to aid you, sort of a monitor/journal that keeps track of what artistic things you consume - say you surf with mozilla a 90% of the time and 3 hrs a day, that's a bit of info, then yahoo is your homepage and you look at finance and news there, or google is your search engine, and you use linux a lot, and you listen to music made by a band of 5 musicians) You might wish to be able to see at the end of each month a statistic - a bar chart of what you actually used. Then you can make up your mind how you want to donate to these people. For instance say there was a movie like Basic Instinct. This is a collective art - so how do you reward the individuals in it? Does everybody gets paid equally including the lighting technician and Sharon Stone? That'd be wrong. Well you could either click high votes for Sharon Stone flashing her cooter for you, but also to the writers to come up with such a funky content, or agree with a group of like minded people who have already come up with a collective discrimination of what the % would be for each person - for instance a database like cddb/slashdot could show the current rating of how other people donate - 30% to the writers/20% to Stone, 20%% to the director, with the distribution curve down to some standard 1% for the lighting tehcnicians, etc. If you really want, you could tweak this curve up or down say up stone to 31%, director to 19%, leave the lighting techs and makeup artists alone - those could be kept at the default of "manufacturer recommended setting." You could hire professional critics to do the work for you, because all this is a hassle, just like you can hire accountants and tax people to handle a similar information hassles for you. Or, you could rely on the average of a bunch of critics. Or you could go by some standard understanding that in a restaurant you tip 15%. Yeah some people tip 30%, some tip 5% but very few tip 200% or
I totally agree with this post. I'd really like to see Dillo improved, with more coders on it. Apple chose KHTML over mozilla because of codesize, and thus loading time/speed. The linux kernel now prefers modules too. Why do mega-corporation run websites end up in bloat? java, openoffice, mozilla, or even eclipse, to name a few? look at dillo, the linux kernel, anjuta, gtk - come on guys, performance does matter. How about that X-server fork that's been talked about for some extra speed? I don't think the "get a faster computer" is the answer.
Actually, there are two ways to increase the rating of a processor: 1 is to make the GHz speed it runs on faster, and the wiring corners curvier, this is the hard way. The other way is pipelining, where the pipeline effectively multiplies the work done during each tick - this is the easy way. Now the problem is pipeline stalls, and here is where the instruction scheduler and result predictions come in.. they are kind of like cache managers, they do "guess" work, so they feed the new instruction into the pipeline before they are sure about the results coming out the end. Now a pipeline miss, when you guess wrong, is a very severe penalty, because the whole pipe has to be flushed, and recharged, and the deeper the pipeline is, the larger the penalty. So there is a practical limit of about 10 stages in processors, it's a balance between the penalties you pay during a miss, and increasing the processing work during each tick. The P4 is deeply pipelined, and it excels at no branching routines (no if/then situations) and it kicks AMD all over in things like video compression, and any sausage grinder activity where you feed work in on one end and you don't care what comes out the other, you don't make if/then decisions based on results. But it sucks at heavily branched instructions, such as compiling the linux kernel, or office applications, compared to AMD. To get to the point, GPU's are totally different beasts, because they never have to deal with if/then situations.. just feed the work on one end, dump the results out the other, and they can be very very deeply pipelined and run at low 200-300 MHz and still beat the CPU's running at 3 GHz in matrix processing. But try doing some branching code on them, if you can at all, I bet they would suck majorly, probably like a P75 or maybe a 486DX4 100MHz. Of course they kick ass in matrix processing and such mathematical routines, but they are definitely not made to replace processors. They only do one or two things well, but that's it, give'm something else and they choke.
Biotech is another hype industry that will go bust. Biological beings need a constant expanding of energy just to repair and upkeep their organic shape. A lot of complex organic compounds degrade without this constant repair work going on. So a real biotech harddrive will either be "alive," and have a mechanism to upkeep itself, replicating damaged parts, or it would not be true biotech, but a news on the level of "tiny magnets encapsulated in a polymer or organic binder" - so what? I wonder what the lifetime of such a device would be - personally I prefer inorganic storage devices, even if they themselves have short lifetimes: flash cards can only be written to for a few thousand times, CDR ink degrades in a decade or two(depends on light exposure), and harddrive magnetic media starts to forget after a decade. Now throw proteins into the coctail and see how long they last. I wonder.