Actually, the paper at http://atg.fen.bris.ac.uk/picet.htm makes it clear that the costs will be one quarter, and the safety ten times as great. Read before posting. Idiot.
Power source - a portable fusion reactor seems the most likely
Sorry but this is exeedingly Unlikely. Nuclear fusion at present has several characteristics that make it unsuitable at preeent.
1) It's big. Think many tons not a few kilograms for a tokamk or other fusion plant.
2) It doen't work yet. Currently and for the near future it takes more energy to produce the fusion than the fusion produces.
3) It's radioactivly dirty - yes, as dirty or dirtier than a fission power plant. Even if 1 and 2 where fixed, tons of heavy shielding are needed to bring the radiation levels down to acceptible levels. You want to have Chernobyl strapped to your back?
.. the more consumers will slip through your fingers. And MS knows this, they aren't that dumb.
If nothing else, MS trying to "strike a huge blow to the general purpose PC business, which will either drive it out of existence, or drive prices way up will sure increase sales of apple machines. And they know this.
Over the long term, consumers will lose interest in hacking/development. It might take an entire generation, but it will happen.
If MS's monolopy was absolute, you'd be right. But it isn't. They know this. They will not introduce features that virtually hand market share to thier competitors.
No plan ever survives contact with the enemy
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 2
Both sides could perfectly predict the results of their attacks before the attack even began... They could predict the enemy attacks also, perfectly
I think I see the first flaw that seperates this fiction from reality right here. For any suficiently complex scenario, especially when intelligent antagonistic agents are trying to outguess each other, the only simulation that we have is called reality.
The computer would design new attacks and communicate the attacks to the enemy computer,
Second flaw: What's to stop them from bullshitting, eg "yeah we just 'launched' 10^16 antimatter meganukes. Y'all go kill yourselves now please."
2. You can still learn something from the source code of bad software, even if it's only what not to do.
You can learn a lot from failed software. My experience has been that software fails when requirements are vauge and the developers spend time architecting kewl stuff and polishing it rather than letting the marketing dept make sure it gives the users a few key features, and push it out the door when it's barely good enough (this is what makes MS what they are today).
Anyways the sad truth is that failed software often has really neat code. Beos, anyone?
Some of these will be applicable to managing your algorithyms or making your software more flexible.
Am I just being close minded to the ideas of OOP or do my problems just require 'procedural' solutions, which are better solved using procedural techniques?
It is possible that your key algorythyms will remain lumps of procedural code, OO languages allow this. There is advantage in an application of any size in the judicious use of OO techniques.
I don't get it. Every time this crank posts the same offtopic junk, plugging his pet project (AI in VB and Javascript? Have some taste please!) he gets modded up. Moderators, look at his posting history and realise that you screwed up.
With the currently popular 32-bit CPU chips, Robot AI memory limitations are too severe because a memory of 2^32 size is not enough.
Ah, an attempt to be somewhat on topic. Hovever, I don't buy it - how much memory is enough - do you know or are you blowing smoke? And seeing as few machines have this much ram (2^32 = 4Gb ram) don't they use disk swap files or databases anyway? There are many file systems that can handle files this size already, so how exactly will 64bit processors suddenly enable AI in VB that can't be done at present?
An increase in computer power is a rising tide that lifts all boats, even crank AI, but how exactly is the move to 64 bits a sudden huge leap for your Javascript "mind"?
There is no exact answer to Frank Drake's famous equation,
That is somewhat of an understatement. For most of those numbers, we simply haven't the faintest clue. How many real experts, for instance, do you think we have on "The fraction of planets with intelligent life that develop technological civilizations"
but it nonetheless a tool for the scientific community
Not really, as it makes no predictions at all except "once you have studied and done statistical anysysis on a large number of solar systems, inhabited and not inhabited, you will be in a position to estimate how many of them are inhabited" Well, Duh!
The Drake Equation's only use is to underscore just how ignorant we are of so many factors that might determine what's out there.
and the story was decent too. Certainly better that the majority of SF movies.
You're pretty much alone in that opinion. It wasn't SF, it was cornball fantasy dressed up as SF.
Maybe people just aren't ready for animation that approaches (but not yet reaches) photographic quality.
I disagree. Me and most of my friends liked the work on FF, even though the characters were wooden (or rather, plastic). But it wasn't enough to carry the movie. IMHO shrek was the best CGI movie I've seen yet (Yes I have seen mosters Inc.)
A win32 FTP client called GetRight as been capable of doing this since several years ago.
They called it "Segmented Downloads", ie the program would hit multiple ftp sites for the same file, doing a resume to get different parts at the same time. Heck, it would even locate the mirrors for you.
And yes, it caused a substantial improvement in download speed. It seems thus that the bottleneck is seldom in the last mile.
But this has little to do with the article, which as far as I can tell is mostly gibberish.
one day Linux will become the only OS that still makes it possible to... gain free access to intellectual property.
You mean apart from *BSD, GNU/HURD, Atheos, and all other present and potential free open OSs. Which is everyone except for Microsoft and some niche players (Apple, Sun).
So what if Atheos is not even a niche player? It's GPL'd and therefor not going to vanish like BeOS did if some random company folds.
I did read it, the paper. More or less, as it "used alot of big acidemic words" and found it difficult to follow what it was saying.
Yeah, it's not the easist to follow. As far as I can tell, it seems to be an anlaysis of *why* open source comes into being.
One conclusion that I got is that public funding (eg via universities, (e.g. Linus at U. Helsinki)) plays a larger role than is acklowledged.
From the abstract This finding throws doubt on the Schumpeterian assumption that the efficiency of industrial systems can be measured without reference to the social institutions that bind them.
I think translates as "public funding and other social institiutions (European progmatism/Social tendencies rather than USA'ian free-for all coporate capitalism) creates open source, despite wahat ESR says, open source makes your industry more efficient, this is not what was expected by an orthodox economist called Schumpeter.
And I think this is just so right: this affinity hackers hold for cultural assertions of their uniqueness is probably a manifestation of the basic human need to imbue meaning into those activities which define the individual's place in society.
Moores "Law" (roughly): Silicon chip bang for the back doubles in a fixed time, estimated at 1 year to a year and a half.
Having been postponed or negated several times now
Nope, it hasn't. Fears of it running out of steam have however been postponed or negated several times now. However it must run out sometime. The physical universe has limits.
Interesting note is that that Ray Kurzweil has tracked this trend back to 1890s through several generations of technologies, and it holds all the way. Therefor there is no particular reason to believe that it will end when we move from silicon to something else. However, as I said, the physical universe does have lmits. It will end, likely sometime in the 20xx years, since it is doubling.
should we call Moore's law a postulation at best?
Moore's observation is probably the best term, since that's what it is: an empirical observation of what is happening, and was never intended to be taken as a law of nature, which it certainly isn't.
Considering the title of the paper... I think it's safe to say
I really don't understand how someone gets +3 interesting for reading the title of the article and then replying to it, and naturally coming to completely the wrong conclusions about what it says.
To the morons who moded up Mentifex's repetitive drivel and modded down my post. I can spare the karma, but you need to distinguish style from substance, cranks who post obsessively from AI researchers who code quietly, and maybe follow some of the links.
How many of you ever thought about getting your code to work on Chinese Windows?... The code now works perfectly, but the byte arrays are a little bit uglier than strings. If ten years from now somebody rewrites CityDesk from scratch, I'll guarantee you that 95% of the Windows programmers working today would make the same mistake again, and stay up all night again.
Nope.
The right solution, which many would take if doing it again today, is to do it all in Unicode.
Excluding a color screen, what more could one want in a toy
3G or at very least, GPRS. That's what I would want.
At least the Handsping Treo will be upgradable to limited GPRS.
Re:Whats the "lighest" you can get?
on
Lightweight Languages
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· Score: 3, Informative
Looking at their choice of languages, light appears to mean: easy to program, easy to understand, but powerful, interpreted languages
Yup, BF, turing machines & lambda calculus are "light" in the sense that they are tiny but theretically complete & of not much practical programming use. For instance, you can't do TCP sockets in Brainfuch no matter how hard you code, cos there's no way to get to the OS socket API.
The PHP that I use at work (and the Perl, Python, Ruby etc that other people use for similar tasks) are "light" in the sense of flexible, and quick to knock something together, inegrates well & comes with a great big heavy library full of usefull stuff.
Re:Whats the "lighest" you can get?
on
Lightweight Languages
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The lightest computer mathematically proven to be equivalent to any other lanuage is the Turing machine,
If you want to experience the Turing tarpit (where anything is possible, but nothing is easy enough to actually do) firsthand, try the Brainfuck language, based closely on the turing machine. the language has 8 instructions, and only one of them (input) has any arguments beyond an implicit current location. The compiler is 240 bytes!
LIKE the imperfections inherent in record.... a record be more subjectively pleasing to some peoples' ears.
Yup, like that portishead disk, with all the crackles & vinyl noise on the CD.
Consider this: Take CD out, pass it through a unit that generates a bit of noise and fuzzes the signal a bit, and voila: Vinyl quality.
But if you have vinyl. and you prefer CD quality, you are SOL. Thus, CD (or any high-sample rate lossless digital format really) is better 'cos it can emulate vinyl's analogue fuzzy sound, while the reverse is not true.
You're not the only one who has programmed in Object Pascal, you know.
*shrug* I never claimed to be. You're not exactly forthcoming about yourself, Mr Coward, so how would I know.
Object Pascal is a haphazard language compared to Java.
Of course: That's because it's been through about 14 major versions from borland pascal 1. I respect the purity of Java's design, but wait a while.
It is obvious that Hejlsberg just copied the features from Object Pascal to C#,
Of course: take the good, try to improve on the rest. Every progamming language designed since day 1 has tried to do that. You say it like it's a bad thing.
obviously he thinks they're good, which doesn't count for much.
I beg to differ.
Properties are unnecessary syntactic sugar
Yup. So's operator overloading.
to the language with potentially difficult to detect side effects making the code maintenance harder. I'm glad Java does not have properties
based on years of programming Dlephi, I beg to differ. It make code maintainence so much easier when you don't need to know or care if you are reading a public data, function return value or property gettor. The implementation is free to change while leaving the client code the same, so long as the interface semantics don't change. Sure you can shoot yourself in the foot. Idiot-proof things are only worth using by idiots. IMHO operator overloading and multiple inheritance are *far* easier to abuse and obfuscate.
OMG, I just realized that you are seriously advocating implicit side effects as a Good Thing.
Jesus H. Christ. Are you just stupid, or is it that you have never done a day of professional programming
Well, the Borland Delphi VCL library, whcih I used profesionally for several years before switching to Java, does precisely what I described. The VCL is widely regarded as a very good class library.
Add it up yourself.
Properties are a power tool - you can do stupid things with them, but not nearly as stupid as with operator overloading. That is not a good argument against them.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the paper at http://atg.fen.bris.ac.uk/picet.htm makes it clear that the costs will be one quarter, and the safety ten times as great. Read before posting. Idiot.
Insightfull? not.
Sorry but this is exeedingly Unlikely. Nuclear fusion at present has several characteristics that make it unsuitable at preeent.
1) It's big. Think many tons not a few kilograms for a tokamk or other fusion plant. 2) It doen't work yet. Currently and for the near future it takes more energy to produce the fusion than the fusion produces. 3) It's radioactivly dirty - yes, as dirty or dirtier than a fission power plant. Even if 1 and 2 where fixed, tons of heavy shielding are needed to bring the radiation levels down to acceptible levels. You want to have Chernobyl strapped to your back?
If nothing else, MS trying to "strike a huge blow to the general purpose PC business, which will either drive it out of existence, or drive prices way up will sure increase sales of apple machines. And they know this.
Over the long term, consumers will lose interest in hacking/development. It might take an entire generation, but it will happen.
If MS's monolopy was absolute, you'd be right. But it isn't. They know this. They will not introduce features that virtually hand market share to thier competitors.
I think I see the first flaw that seperates this fiction from reality right here. For any suficiently complex scenario, especially when intelligent antagonistic agents are trying to outguess each other, the only simulation that we have is called reality.
The computer would design new attacks and communicate the attacks to the enemy computer,
Second flaw: What's to stop them from bullshitting, eg "yeah we just 'launched' 10^16 antimatter meganukes. Y'all go kill yourselves now please."
You can learn a lot from failed software. My experience has been that software fails when requirements are vauge and the developers spend time architecting kewl stuff and polishing it rather than letting the marketing dept make sure it gives the users a few key features, and push it out the door when it's barely good enough (this is what makes MS what they are today).
Anyways the sad truth is that failed software often has really neat code. Beos, anyone?
Some of these will be applicable to managing your algorithyms or making your software more flexible.
Am I just being close minded to the ideas of OOP or do my problems just require 'procedural' solutions, which are better solved using procedural techniques?
It is possible that your key algorythyms will remain lumps of procedural code, OO languages allow this. There is advantage in an application of any size in the judicious use of OO techniques.
With the currently popular 32-bit CPU chips, Robot AI memory limitations are too severe because a memory of 2^32 size is not enough.
Ah, an attempt to be somewhat on topic. Hovever, I don't buy it - how much memory is enough - do you know or are you blowing smoke? And seeing as few machines have this much ram (2^32 = 4Gb ram) don't they use disk swap files or databases anyway? There are many file systems that can handle files this size already, so how exactly will 64bit processors suddenly enable AI in VB that can't be done at present?
An increase in computer power is a rising tide that lifts all boats, even crank AI, but how exactly is the move to 64 bits a sudden huge leap for your Javascript "mind"?
That is somewhat of an understatement. For most of those numbers, we simply haven't the faintest clue. How many real experts, for instance, do you think we have on "The fraction of planets with intelligent life that develop technological civilizations"
but it nonetheless a tool for the scientific community
Not really, as it makes no predictions at all except "once you have studied and done statistical anysysis on a large number of solar systems, inhabited and not inhabited, you will be in a position to estimate how many of them are inhabited" Well, Duh!
The Drake Equation's only use is to underscore just how ignorant we are of so many factors that might determine what's out there.
You're pretty much alone in that opinion. It wasn't SF, it was cornball fantasy dressed up as SF.
Maybe people just aren't ready for animation that approaches (but not yet reaches) photographic quality.
I disagree. Me and most of my friends liked the work on FF, even though the characters were wooden (or rather, plastic). But it wasn't enough to carry the movie. IMHO shrek was the best CGI movie I've seen yet (Yes I have seen mosters Inc.)
Nope. 4 or 5 different servers.
They called it "Segmented Downloads", ie the program would hit multiple ftp sites for the same file, doing a resume to get different parts at the same time. Heck, it would even locate the mirrors for you.
And yes, it caused a substantial improvement in download speed. It seems thus that the bottleneck is seldom in the last mile.
But this has little to do with the article, which as far as I can tell is mostly gibberish.
You mean apart from *BSD, GNU/HURD, Atheos, and all other present and potential free open OSs. Which is everyone except for Microsoft and some niche players (Apple, Sun).
So what if Atheos is not even a niche player? It's GPL'd and therefor not going to vanish like BeOS did if some random company folds.
Yeah, it's not the easist to follow. As far as I can tell, it seems to be an anlaysis of *why* open source comes into being.
One conclusion that I got is that public funding (eg via universities, (e.g. Linus at U. Helsinki)) plays a larger role than is acklowledged.
From the abstract This finding throws doubt on the Schumpeterian assumption that the efficiency of industrial systems can be measured without reference to the social institutions that bind them. I think translates as "public funding and other social institiutions (European progmatism/Social tendencies rather than USA'ian free-for all coporate capitalism) creates open source, despite wahat ESR says, open source makes your industry more efficient, this is not what was expected by an orthodox economist called Schumpeter.
And I think this is just so right: this affinity hackers hold for cultural assertions of their uniqueness is probably a manifestation of the basic human need to imbue meaning into those activities which define the individual's place in society.
Having been postponed or negated several times now
Nope, it hasn't. Fears of it running out of steam have however been postponed or negated several times now. However it must run out sometime. The physical universe has limits.
Interesting note is that that Ray Kurzweil has tracked this trend back to 1890s through several generations of technologies, and it holds all the way. Therefor there is no particular reason to believe that it will end when we move from silicon to something else. However, as I said, the physical universe does have lmits. It will end, likely sometime in the 20xx years, since it is doubling.
should we call Moore's law a postulation at best?
Moore's observation is probably the best term, since that's what it is: an empirical observation of what is happening, and was never intended to be taken as a law of nature, which it certainly isn't.
I really don't understand how someone gets +3 interesting for reading the title of the article and then replying to it, and naturally coming to completely the wrong conclusions about what it says.
To the morons who moded up Mentifex's repetitive drivel and modded down my post. I can spare the karma, but you need to distinguish style from substance, cranks who post obsessively from AI researchers who code quietly, and maybe follow some of the links.
AI in VB? *Chuckle*
You say that like it's a good thing.
It's not. It's a symptom of crap software.
Nope.
The right solution, which many would take if doing it again today, is to do it all in Unicode.
3G or at very least, GPRS. That's what I would want.
At least the Handsping Treo will be upgradable to limited GPRS.
Yup, BF, turing machines & lambda calculus are "light" in the sense that they are tiny but theretically complete & of not much practical programming use. For instance, you can't do TCP sockets in Brainfuch no matter how hard you code, cos there's no way to get to the OS socket API.
The PHP that I use at work (and the Perl, Python, Ruby etc that other people use for similar tasks) are "light" in the sense of flexible, and quick to knock something together, inegrates well & comes with a great big heavy library full of usefull stuff.
If you want to experience the Turing tarpit (where anything is possible, but nothing is easy enough to actually do) firsthand, try the Brainfuck language, based closely on the turing machine. the language has 8 instructions, and only one of them (input) has any arguments beyond an implicit current location. The compiler is 240 bytes!
Yup, like that portishead disk, with all the crackles & vinyl noise on the CD.
Consider this: Take CD out, pass it through a unit that generates a bit of noise and fuzzes the signal a bit, and voila: Vinyl quality.
But if you have vinyl. and you prefer CD quality, you are SOL. Thus, CD (or any high-sample rate lossless digital format really) is better 'cos it can emulate vinyl's analogue fuzzy sound, while the reverse is not true.
*shrug* I never claimed to be. You're not exactly forthcoming about yourself, Mr Coward, so how would I know.
Object Pascal is a haphazard language compared to Java.
Of course: That's because it's been through about 14 major versions from borland pascal 1. I respect the purity of Java's design, but wait a while.
It is obvious that Hejlsberg just copied the features from Object Pascal to C#,
Of course: take the good, try to improve on the rest. Every progamming language designed since day 1 has tried to do that. You say it like it's a bad thing.
obviously he thinks they're good, which doesn't count for much.
I beg to differ.
Properties are unnecessary syntactic sugar
Yup. So's operator overloading.
to the language with potentially difficult to detect side effects making the code maintenance harder. I'm glad Java does not have properties
based on years of programming Dlephi, I beg to differ. It make code maintainence so much easier when you don't need to know or care if you are reading a public data, function return value or property gettor. The implementation is free to change while leaving the client code the same, so long as the interface semantics don't change. Sure you can shoot yourself in the foot. Idiot-proof things are only worth using by idiots. IMHO operator overloading and multiple inheritance are *far* easier to abuse and obfuscate.
Jesus H. Christ. Are you just stupid, or is it that you have never done a day of professional programming Well, the Borland Delphi VCL library, whcih I used profesionally for several years before switching to Java, does precisely what I described. The VCL is widely regarded as a very good class library. Add it up yourself.
Properties are a power tool - you can do stupid things with them, but not nearly as stupid as with operator overloading. That is not a good argument against them.