But to say "oog, I reboot windows every day" or "oog, blue screen!!!!" just shows ignorance and the inability to think objectively for yourself.
Ok, I'm offended here by your decreeing that those that say MS products crash are ignorant of the options.. You obviously miss several important limitations of Windows.. First off, unless something radically changed in 2k, MS recommends rebooting after performing almost any serious install. Why? Because of the bloated centralized resource management. This is as opposed to the BSD style of start/stop RC scripts. (Yes you can start and stop services in NT, but I've definately required a reboot on numerous types of changes). Especially if any service goes south.
Next even NT is highly volitale. Least we forget the blue-screen-of-death?? My favorite is when this happened at Bill Gates' presentation.
Hey, I've had my win98 box at work up for weeks at a time, but I only use it to read mail and browse slashdot. But when I had NT4 going, I'd regularly corrupt the system while doing some heafy development.. My Linux box, on the other hand was last shut down a couple months ago when I upgraded the MP3 drive on it. I regularly have hundreds of apps running in all my virtual screens.
One of the biggest reasons to bash MS is that part of it's fundamental principles is quantity over quality. Bloat-ware has inherent problems; no matter how good a release is, the next feature-patch is capable of breaking 50% of everything because of shared bloat-ware libraries. Compare this to the UNIX mentality where processes are discrete, independant, and those libraries that _are_ shared have very well defined time-proven APIs, and can have open-source for the benifit of code-review. Though UNIX isn't a true micro-kernel, you don't depend on the OS to accomplish every menial task (such as window management).
Granted there are greater push for bloat-wear, such as Gnome, but thats only part of a pluggable option to the user-space (as might be a bloated flash extension to Netscape).
MS can only maintain it's status as a cash cow by bloating their software, thereby justifying increased cost to the already 9x% market share. Therefore, they have reached critical mass to be doomed as a corporate deamon. There is nothing they can do to recover from this.
Com Sci is the science of computation. It's a high level abstraction that searches out mathematical algorithms. You learn a programming langauge like you learn english, then you use it to discover new frontiers (such as compression, encryption, AI, etc).
Unfortunately, once someone discovers the frontier, the can it, and it becomes a black box for everyone to use thereafter. "Programmers" are people that use these canned boxes (after hopefully learning at least a little bit about data-structures and basic algorithms). You can go to trade school or pick up a "learn X in 21 days" and be a high paid programmer.
Software Engineers are true engineers that treat a piece of software like a bridge; they handle the whole process from concept, to prototyping, to implementation, to testing. They also program (though not necessarily).
Electrical Engineering (which is what I took), first and foremost teaches about electricity, materials, and the physical devices (like radios, alternators, and computer-parts). You are free to take all the programming and com-sci that you like. EE's also can focus on communication theory or filtering tools (often used in audio / visual). Anything an EE does will involve some type of programming (but rarely in C; More like VHDL, Matlab, or others).
In many Universities, Computer Science requires you to learn some Arts or applied science. Programing is only useful if you use to towards another field. So you'll have to learn "education", for example, so that you can write programs for teachers. Or learn Geology, and write software for them. Etc.
Computer Engineering is Computer science with the focus on computers. It's probably closer to EE than Com-Sci (at least at the University of Delaware), because you learn about material science. Because it's engineering, you're closer to being a "software" Engineer; you have much of that engineering theory (you have many physical design projects throughout the course-work). Once you're CompEng, you have the option of doing literally anything... You could pick up a minor in Medical science and write software for them, or go straight into designing the next great Video Chip, or just rent your services out for web design. In CompEng, you have fewer available electives since much will already be chosen for you (math, physics, EE, com-sci).
Com-sci gives you the most flexible course options, especially if you're not interested in physics or hard math, but Comp-Eng is a more valuable degree over-all (if you purposefully take a diverse set of courses).
I agree with you that macro payments are much more desirable by all parties involved (as opposed to abusive 90%-of-screen/BW adds which I believe will fail in time as well). Though I personally prefer the cable system which uses aggregate subscriber channels in addition to advertisements.
As always, the porn industry leads the way. You subscribe to a "content network" who hires on various content producers. You may then visit the web member web-sites freely and in an unlimited fashion. Because the site can be reasonabily assured a steady income, they're less dependant on the adds, and can thus be more choosy as to what they display. Currently adds are convoluted, so viewers make a point to ignore them all. By having fewer, higher priced, higher quality adds, everybody wins (just like the super-bowl)
Pure subscription web sites like premium cable channels (such as HBO or say the members only section of Toms Hardware which might tout zero commercials), are less likely because you introduce a very high entry barrier for viewers to be willing to surmount. You'd have to be famous on the web from the outset.
Problems I see with subscriber networks are the same sort of beuracracy we currently find on TV: Manditory sensorship, keeping up with what's popular or risking being cut from a profitable network, and others. Sure there'd be lots of options of networks (it's not like they layed the fiber as say com-cast), but bigger names would require exclusive signing and we'd be in a very similar situation as the record companies - an oligopoly.
Lastly, cnn.com is no worse than cnn-the-channel.. It's simple content regurgitation. But even cnn attempts to adhere to the multiple-sources before disclosure of rumors. slashdot isn't the be-all-end-all of rumors/current events, after all. Which furthers the case that what-ever system replaces the failing ad-system, it had better support culturalizm, and not fall into the MTV-look-alike madness - never deviating from the proven formulas - The ubiquitous "bottom line".
Diversity makes the current version of the web very desirable. It was also a fundamental building block of American development: from religion to resources to military organization to banking systems. Unfortunately, it's only natural to wish to replace diversity with efficiency (diversity inherently involves redundancy). We're seeing America approach more traditional European levels of consolidation. What's good for business isn't always good for darwinistic survivability. Sadly it's often only the logistical or ledgislative divides that allow diversity to flurish amid corporatism.
I've worked for Dupont, and have friends that have worked for SGI. Often times they give boring, repetative tasks. But there's a good reason for it. It's hard to develop real projects that are both learning experiences for the co-op and profitable for the company. Anything given to the co-op is most likely going to require constant attention from the supervisor, which doubles the process's cost.
Many times, the descision to hire co-ops is made at a high level, with no clear understanding of what the students will actually be doing. Often times when employees are over-worked and ask for more help, middle-management will jump right to co-ops (if they're sufficiently funded). But from experience, this can actually be counter-productive. Many co-workers will see this and thus resolve the co-ops to menial tasks.
A student is there to learn new things, but a company wants students that are already skilled, so it's adverse selection. Thus I can't imagine there's much practical use of a High school student (though we've managed to hire one or two for a summer).
,i>The half life of carbon 14 atoms is an absolute fact.
Ok everybody. Let's be conservative with the "F" word here. In science, we discover a new caveat to physics every other decade.. Newtonites that threw around the F word before Special/General Relativity probably looked a little silly. It's the "F" word that really heats up the religion/science debates. Neither of us has all the Facts, so lets not be arrogant about it all.
I agree with you whole-heartedly, but the problem comes from the ensuing literature. Much of the post-Jesus culture was derived from specific passages. There has been much debate over how much of the bible's quotes were actually spoken. What is sad is that you can make entire religions from such passages, and still find the authority to war over the differences.
In direct conflict with what you spoke as idiologies, are the passages that build a new church ontop of the "rock". Those that refer to Jesus in a virtually devine light. Then, of course, the're the whole debate about the significance of the "resurection" or angelical conversational passages.
Dude. This sort of question irritates me to no end. Faith in one cultural has almost nothing to do with the physical world around you. Even if divine conversation was the source of the cultural literature, the minds that physically wrote the books could not have comprehended the physics of a world known commonly a thousand years later.
If you learn something new about the world around you, it should have nothing to do with your beliefs of a proper way of life, or what happens in the would-be after-life. Physical and meta-physical should always be separate. The tangibles of the sences and the intagibles of the mind, etc.
Note that in my mind, religion is just an organization of the intangibles. Among other things, it acts as a source of wisdom for the otherwise unknown. Similar things could be said about psychology or even science in general.
What ever religion you hold, your faith should not be based apon success or failure of evidence. To be so would show lack of personal character.
I don't know if scientific creationism is a group or an idea. If it's an idea, then you're stereo-typing.
I am one of those undecided egnostic types. Namely I don't even know if I even believe in God; or at least any previously quantified attributes of what God might be.
Still, logic tells me that our universe and that which we call life came-about through some fashion. I am personally inclined to believe that there was help, possibly at more than one point (anybody read 2001?) At first it seemed totally plausible that the unifing forces of nature brought mater together in ever more complex forms which ultimately formed sustainable and reproducable life.. But then I'd hear from reputable sources that evolution as Darwin suggests could never have happened for x,y,z reasons. But this didn't discourage the idea; A super-entity could still have engineered each life form separately, as an auto-maker designs each model-year.
You can't disprove anything meta-physical - you are mostly reserved to subjective beliefs. It might be possible, however, to find evidence that there is paranormal interfearance with our DNA. But this would only happen by chance, and is thus not worth pursuing.
Additionally, we might find it possible to successfully manipulate DNA ourselves, which could lead us to understand the methods better. Only time will tell.
As there is no 100% secure way to guarantee that you get the right stream, unless you do it yourself, this means that the sender of the message must send this infinite stream.
Sure there's a way you garuntee the right stream. The first part of the encrypted message is a simple validation check. If the recipient doesn't decode it properly, then they know something is wrong, and they can communicate this through un-secure channels (traditional public/private key). The worst that can happen is a denial of communication through either lack of a random-number feed, or by convoluting the feed at different locations.
I believe the suggested method is to have one or more satalite streams, intercepted either by the cell phones, or an IP source which rebroadcasts in multi-cast.
Both methods allow for disruptions in the random-number signal, but so long as the process allows for resyncing, then things are fine; in fact that helps make the channel even more encrypted (except that you could monitor for the breaks, which might possibly let you know which channel they're listening to, and possibly allow ease droppers to sync up as well).
You cannot assume that an eavesdropper will take 1 minute to decode a start message if the real recipient is not doing to take a minute themselves.
I'm sure they are assuming some type of private keying communication to send the start sequence which designates a future exact time to start the decoding (considering network lag). Part of the proof probably involves the requirement of the secrecy of the private keys. If this is thwarted, then you might as well assume that your keyboard has key-strokes running. I don't believe it's possible for a middle man to fully hack into such a system (I'm not a cryptographer) without such a private key.
I also agree that this can only be used for communication channels, and not storage. Seemed obvious to me, actually. But I believe it's great strengths are in cell-phones, or encrypted versions of Messenger services. Two things that are regularly monitored (and some times stored for later encryption). I don't think this could work with traditional email for the reasons you've pointed out, so the practicality is obviously limited.
The greatest boon, however is that if the FED requires you to give up your private key (that initiates a communications channel), it doesn't do them any good. It only temporarily inconviniences you until you get a new one for future communications. This, I think is one of his main excitements.
At UD, root access is regional. Typically to a single building. Only a small set of people have access to root, and few people are administrators of more than one building. So there is a definate sence of accountibility.
Among other reasons, I'm not aware of any hacking bing on our student maintained shared systems. Note that our accounting and central email/file-system servers are not maintained by students.
At the University of Delaware, I'm willing to hazzard that 90% of our computer technical staff is comprised of students. This includes most of the technitians, maintainance, attendents, receptionists, sales people, etc. All working at minimum wage (higher if they like you). We students like it because we get to do something other than buffing tables, while the administration probably likes the reduced cost. The heads probably like it because they get to tout hands on experience.
There is definately a sence of control; professional old-guys are the only ones with root access to the central main frames. But of the thousands of computers on campus, root is known by many a student for their day-to-day jobs. Plus it's just cool to have the title "lab-staff" in certain buildings. Freshmen geeks revear you.
The transistors would be more like the nucleic acids. Of which there are obviously many orders of magnitude more than transistors in even a modern CPU.
The genes would be more like the computer's functional units. Protein synthesis might be related to the bit-patterns in the registers. Though finite, it's a rather large set of possibilities. Thus through the reuse of various functional units, you can reproduce
certain types of register bit combinations.
Though it's kind of hard to relate protein synthesis - This doesn't totally fit the analogy since it seems that only one biological functional unit / gene can be used for a protein, unlike the computer with inter-connected units.
Who knows, maybe this will be the next great discovery. I call first patent!!!
I heard a great analogy on the Discovery channel one day (arguably aimed at kids):
Nature invents each life form separately (I'm paraphrasing to fit my argument). In order to do this, it has a certain amount of money (resources). It can spend that money however it wishes. Some expenditures will be more fruitful than others. But you always only have a fixed amount.
The show then went on to describe how some creatures had night vision (though there was some other trade off), others had the ability to fly, so on and so forth. Each attribute had a fundamental limitation.
You will not be able to produce the super-being (the quisak sadarak?). Animals today don't see in the dark - they just have highly sensative eyes. If you put a cat in a locked room with no windows, it wouldn't see jack. Its vision is based on moon-light. One trade off is limited color-vision (more rods than cones). The flashlight requires, dun dun daa, batteries; A power-source. Now in order to achieve a power source great enough to luminesce, you've got to have a massive internal re-engineering. Most likely it would be some excessive use of ATP, which would in turn require massive cooling, storage, etc.
How about temperature regulation? We use clothing today, so couldn't we make sheddable fur that's designable just like modern clothing? Possibly, but then you alter the texture of your base skin; that might not be too attractive or sexy (same with fire-retardant / weather resistant skin).
Flight should be out for obvious reasons? Don't think anyone wants to go to weaker bones (especially foot-ball players).
Want bones of steel? Well if we use iron, then we have a problem with rust, jaggad edges or general issue of toxic solubility. All of which require massive chemical modification for stability. Before countering this, understand the basic point that you can not trivially alter a system (i.e. replace calcium with Titanium). There are millions of variables which affect the dynamic system. Yes anything's possible, but often times at enormous trade-off-costs.
Another important issue that separates biology from our mechanical world is adaptability. Sure a 747 can hold more, go faster, and withstand greater stresses, but it can't repair itself. A sheet of metal can only increase it's imperfections, where-as a grouping of cells can grow and repair weak-points. If we replaced some brain-cells with diamond lattice silicone, we'd be suceptible to E&M interfearance (as in an MRI scan), we'd risk fracturing the diamond over time, or tearing the surrounding tissue due to its rigidity.
The point is that this is a non-polynomial problem. There is not single best solution, and most likely there's an infinite number of them. What's more, none of them are ideal for more than a handful of cases - They all have exploitable weaknesses. Nature has been kind to us in that we've managed a working set of genes that's been durable for a couple thousand years in lots of different environments (including space and underwater). The only way we'd be able to learn if a human designed (computer assisted) working set of genes is viable is to go through several life cycles in various environments. But I don't think human right's activists would let us treat babies like lab-rats. Sure we can simulate, but Nature's a little sneaky, the number of paracites and short-commings are much more numerous than a case-study tool can speculate. It's the same digitally controlled v.s. Analog argument as Vinyl Records sound better than [theoretical] infinite precision digital CD's (technically they do, and I'll mathematically demonstrate if you so require). Of course the trade-off here, is increased noise with each use.
Terrestrian nature is the most resource intensive, longest running genetic search algorithm discovered to date. It would be kind of hard to top it with a few meager billion transistors.
Note that you've referenced religious intentions. I would like to add that religion is not necessary for this argument. Instead this is practical caution. The best we can hope for is the identification of systems that are desirable and to make attempts to duplicate (with possible slight modifications) in subsequent generations. Doesn't this sound a lot like evolution?
Now for those on the relgious side / anti-evolutionists, don't worry, I'm not attacking.. There's nothing to say that one or more super-beings didn't sit at their cray equivalent and play out similar NP guessing games, while making 'releases' every once in a while. Or that they didn't clean their.bashrc file on occasion. Even if their system is voice activated AI like Genesis suggests.:)
Ok, it's bad to reply to flames, but I couldn't resist.
If someone is genetically identical to yourself then (to the extetn that behaviour is gentically determined), you'll know EXACTLY what their strengths and weaknessess are - it's YOU!
Unless someone actually clones a human, and we find out otherwise, only a certain percentage of the traits of the ancestors (note the plural) are garunteed. The manner in which they are raised plays an essential role. Other posts in this chain have already addressed this.
Hey, does anybody know what the statistics are on say, idential propensities towards math / music in twins? A clone is almost identical to a twin except that they're brought up in a different time with different people (and with more worn DNA).
Another issue that I seem to recall is that the birthing development period plays an important role in the child's ultimate character. Obviously things like gender can't be manipulated, but something as simple as brain development might be. The DNA just sets up the protein structures, not necessarily their arrangement.
So, say you did something rather stupid that was inevitable due to your personality, but it changed you for the better, taught you some valuable lesson. Well, when you saw your little copy coming close to this, you stopped it to keep it from getting hurt. It never learns from it's mistake and keeps stumbling on in blind ignorance.
You started off with a good argument, then you fell off.. This is exactly what all parents do with their non-cloned offspring. They try and prevent their children from repeating their mistakes, which often times (especially in the case with my father towards my brother) prevent them from developing common wisdom.
I agree with much of what has been said, but I still feel that e-books potentially can offer greater overall utility - I believe they could achieve "killer-app" status.
But first they need to overcome their disadvantages.
Portability: Until e-books are literally paper-thin (which it definately looks like they'll eventually achieve) there will be discontent.. I should be able to curl up in my bed or relaxing chair and read with zero additional stress over a paper-back. As for power, it seems to me that future devices will be passive - only requireing juice to change the displayed contents. Thus as with an uploading of a book, you should be able to recharge the book so as to at least be able to read 110% of the book (including back-flips). As for weather resistance, I have a wrist watch that's advertised as 300m water resistance (for whatever it's worth).. The technology is there. Soaking a book leaves you with a sence of loss.
Ease of use: We're living in an age where people are accepting the difficulties of learning curves.. It's our general nature to adapt and learn.. We have to be taught to drive a car, bike, etc. And you can even argue that we first go to school so that we can learn to learn. So I don't believe it's unacceptible to require a moderate learning curve. Beyond that, highlighting, annotations, book-marking and most importantly searching are the bed and breakfast of e-media. True it expends electricity, and requires some sort of input, which adds to the complexity. But these aren't used in a continual basis. The fact that you can't always highlight a cool phrase in a web page is the fault of the browser, not the computer. Word-files, PDFs and XML allow for very nice annotation / bookmarking capabilities, so long as the browser supports it. Herein lies the Utility aspect of e-media.
Durability: It is definately true that a book should outlast a desk-top and it's hard drive. I even hear that burned CD's don't have incredible shelf life. But since digital media can be 100% reproduced, active libraries can maintain the data. And it's always possible to use a robust long-term digital storage medium (such as a digital vinal recording which isn't suseptible to E&M or cosmic disturbances). In general, however, I'll give you this one (for hard-backs at least).
There will, in no way, be a death of the printed page. But I believe that the added utility, plus the idea that we're saving a few trees will assure an eventual migration to e-media for mainstream use.
From what I understand, reading the ATI Radeon spec several months ago, there is an issue with at least setting the Z-values to zero at the beginning of each frame. Though I don't know that compression affects this or related stages, there are still flushes that need to occur. And without specialized memory with block operations (SGRAM?) it takes time.
Lack of resistance (up to a point), and greater over-all power capacity.. The article says 150 times, meaning if we had 50 or so separatly maxed out copper cables running at a constant voltage, we could combine them into 1 (with the same voltage or current (or combination of the two)). Traditionally if you wanted greater power capacity, you'd do what you needed to the wire to allow higher and higher voltages to minimize the current. Higher voltage usually requires greater separation between lines (since there is significantly enhanced potential for shorts). So by not _having_ to up the voltage, you can keep lines closer together.
So the benifits are power efficiency, and that you need less total physical stuff to get the power downtown.
Isn't it obvious? Hollywood should be really excited now because they've identified a whole new region that consists of a growing handful of wealthy people.. Just imagine. A handfull of people willing to pay thousands of times above sticker for copies of Apollo 13. Man what a lucrative market. Wish I could have gotten in.
Difference in price for standard SDRAM is neglegable. (pricewatch has 512Meg sticks for under $200, meaning the $5,000 price-tag is most likely NOT mainly comprised of DRAM)
But here's what happens when you underclock: The pipeline get's slowed so your latency increases.
Random read access should take a hit of about 5 clock ticks per access (actually more because of intermediate custom hardware). So random single byte reads suddenly are slowed to 105MBps, but since we were only interested in a word, we only got 13Mega accesses / second. By staying at PC133, you effectively double that minimum rate.
Now the difference in price from CAS3 to CAS2 PC133 is significant, I'll grant you.. Probably not worth the premium.
I admit that most if not all "virtual disk accesses" are going to be in 512B blocks, which comes out to 16 indepedant cache-line-bursts (8B/cycle * 4 cycles), and should thus take overhead(approx 5 cycles) + 4 cycles * 16, or under 70 clock ticks for a full sector read. That's about 1.9Million sectors per second theoretical peek (not bad). At that point, we have to contend with main-memory BW saturation and CPU over-head for disk-drivers. I believe that depending on how intelligent the drivers are, the PCI bus isn't the real bottle-neck for over-all system performance on such a ram-drive.
I am curious about the prospects of converting this PCI card into a UATA-100 hard virtual drive. You'd have higher peek bandwith, PLUS you'd be able to perfectly emulate a hard drive.. However, there is probably an advatage to putting memory on the PCI bus - namely that the OS drivers could directly access the media in little segments based on the actually requested data instead of duplicating disk-block-buffers in main memory, just to ultimately copy out to user-space.
Question:
how is sony expecting to get decent yields on such a big die? The probablity of a chip flaw goes up with the surface area
Answer:
256Mbit = 128Meg Byte = approx 500Meg of HIGHLY symmetric transistors. We're already building chips with 20, 30 and even 100Meg of complex transistor layouts (granted, most is in symmetric caching or register sets). Additionally, single ported memory is a lot simpler than multi-ported LRU-tagged cache. So while Intel, AMD, Alpha, SUN fuss over 4Meg L2 cache sizes, we're all in a similar ball-park.
Next, a little over a year ago, I read an article about a new DRAM memory architecture that was designed for extremely high yields.. Basically you'd have dozens, hundreds or thousands of mostly independant memory cells, then after the testing stage, you marked which cells were good, which then allowed the memory to ignore bad chunks transparently. As long as you met a minimum memory-size, you were golden. If a similar technology is used here, then they'll probably over-allocate it a bit, and allow down to like 70Meg to be considered passing.
However, I've read other interesting questions such as "are they going to optimize this for power consumption / heat dessipation or performance?"
Slashdot Mirror
But to say "oog, I reboot windows every day" or "oog, blue screen!!!!" just shows ignorance and the inability to think objectively for yourself.
Ok, I'm offended here by your decreeing that those that say MS products crash are ignorant of the options.. You obviously miss several important limitations of Windows.. First off, unless something radically changed in 2k, MS recommends rebooting after performing almost any serious install. Why? Because of the bloated centralized resource management. This is as opposed to the BSD style of start/stop RC scripts. (Yes you can start and stop services in NT, but I've definately required a reboot on numerous types of changes). Especially if any service goes south.
Next even NT is highly volitale. Least we forget the blue-screen-of-death?? My favorite is when this happened at Bill Gates' presentation.
Hey, I've had my win98 box at work up for weeks at a time, but I only use it to read mail and browse slashdot. But when I had NT4 going, I'd regularly corrupt the system while doing some heafy development.. My Linux box, on the other hand was last shut down a couple months ago when I upgraded the MP3 drive on it. I regularly have hundreds of apps running in all my virtual screens.
One of the biggest reasons to bash MS is that part of it's fundamental principles is quantity over quality. Bloat-ware has inherent problems; no matter how good a release is, the next feature-patch is capable of breaking 50% of everything because of shared bloat-ware libraries. Compare this to the UNIX mentality where processes are discrete, independant, and those libraries that _are_ shared have very well defined time-proven APIs, and can have open-source for the benifit of code-review. Though UNIX isn't a true micro-kernel, you don't depend on the OS to accomplish every menial task (such as window management).
Granted there are greater push for bloat-wear, such as Gnome, but thats only part of a pluggable option to the user-space (as might be a bloated flash extension to Netscape).
MS can only maintain it's status as a cash cow by bloating their software, thereby justifying increased cost to the already 9x% market share. Therefore, they have reached critical mass to be doomed as a corporate deamon. There is nothing they can do to recover from this.
-Michael
Com Sci is the science of computation. It's a high level abstraction that searches out mathematical algorithms. You learn a programming langauge like you learn english, then you use it to discover new frontiers (such as compression, encryption, AI, etc).
Unfortunately, once someone discovers the frontier, the can it, and it becomes a black box for everyone to use thereafter. "Programmers" are people that use these canned boxes (after hopefully learning at least a little bit about data-structures and basic algorithms). You can go to trade school or pick up a "learn X in 21 days" and be a high paid programmer.
Software Engineers are true engineers that treat a piece of software like a bridge; they handle the whole process from concept, to prototyping, to implementation, to testing. They also program (though not necessarily).
Electrical Engineering (which is what I took), first and foremost teaches about electricity, materials, and the physical devices (like radios, alternators, and computer-parts). You are free to take all the programming and com-sci that you like. EE's also can focus on communication theory or filtering tools (often used in audio / visual). Anything an EE does will involve some type of programming (but rarely in C; More like VHDL, Matlab, or others).
In many Universities, Computer Science requires you to learn some Arts or applied science. Programing is only useful if you use to towards another field. So you'll have to learn "education", for example, so that you can write programs for teachers. Or learn Geology, and write software for them. Etc.
Computer Engineering is Computer science with the focus on computers. It's probably closer to EE than Com-Sci (at least at the University of Delaware), because you learn about material science. Because it's engineering, you're closer to being a "software" Engineer; you have much of that engineering theory (you have many physical design projects throughout the course-work). Once you're CompEng, you have the option of doing literally anything... You could pick up a minor in Medical science and write software for them, or go straight into designing the next great Video Chip, or just rent your services out for web design. In CompEng, you have fewer available electives since much will already be chosen for you (math, physics, EE, com-sci).
Com-sci gives you the most flexible course options, especially if you're not interested in physics or hard math, but Comp-Eng is a more valuable degree over-all (if you purposefully take a diverse set of courses).
I agree with you that macro payments are much more desirable by all parties involved (as opposed to abusive 90%-of-screen/BW adds which I believe will fail in time as well). Though I personally prefer the cable system which uses aggregate subscriber channels in addition to advertisements.
As always, the porn industry leads the way. You subscribe to a "content network" who hires on various content producers. You may then visit the web member web-sites freely and in an unlimited fashion. Because the site can be reasonabily assured a steady income, they're less dependant on the adds, and can thus be more choosy as to what they display. Currently adds are convoluted, so viewers make a point to ignore them all. By having fewer, higher priced, higher quality adds, everybody wins (just like the super-bowl)
Pure subscription web sites like premium cable channels (such as HBO or say the members only section of Toms Hardware which might tout zero commercials), are less likely because you introduce a very high entry barrier for viewers to be willing to surmount. You'd have to be famous on the web from the outset.
Problems I see with subscriber networks are the same sort of beuracracy we currently find on TV: Manditory sensorship, keeping up with what's popular or risking being cut from a profitable network, and others. Sure there'd be lots of options of networks (it's not like they layed the fiber as say com-cast), but bigger names would require exclusive signing and we'd be in a very similar situation as the record companies - an oligopoly.
Lastly, cnn.com is no worse than cnn-the-channel.. It's simple content regurgitation. But even cnn attempts to adhere to the multiple-sources before disclosure of rumors. slashdot isn't the be-all-end-all of rumors/current events, after all. Which furthers the case that what-ever system replaces the failing ad-system, it had better support culturalizm, and not fall into the MTV-look-alike madness - never deviating from the proven formulas - The ubiquitous "bottom line".
Diversity makes the current version of the web very desirable. It was also a fundamental building block of American development: from religion to resources to military organization to banking systems. Unfortunately, it's only natural to wish to replace diversity with efficiency (diversity inherently involves redundancy). We're seeing America approach more traditional European levels of consolidation. What's good for business isn't always good for darwinistic survivability. Sadly it's often only the logistical or ledgislative divides that allow diversity to flurish amid corporatism.
-Michael
I've worked for Dupont, and have friends that have worked for SGI. Often times they give boring, repetative tasks. But there's a good reason for it. It's hard to develop real projects that are both learning experiences for the co-op and profitable for the company. Anything given to the co-op is most likely going to require constant attention from the supervisor, which doubles the process's cost.
Many times, the descision to hire co-ops is made at a high level, with no clear understanding of what the students will actually be doing. Often times when employees are over-worked and ask for more help, middle-management will jump right to co-ops (if they're sufficiently funded). But from experience, this can actually be counter-productive. Many co-workers will see this and thus resolve the co-ops to menial tasks.
A student is there to learn new things, but a company wants students that are already skilled, so it's adverse selection. Thus I can't imagine there's much practical use of a High school student (though we've managed to hire one or two for a summer).
-Michael
,i>The half life of carbon 14 atoms is an absolute fact.
Ok everybody. Let's be conservative with the "F" word here. In science, we discover a new caveat to physics every other decade.. Newtonites that threw around the F word before Special/General Relativity probably looked a little silly. It's the "F" word that really heats up the religion/science debates. Neither of us has all the Facts, so lets not be arrogant about it all.
-Michael
Society for a Fact Free America!
I agree with you whole-heartedly, but the problem comes from the ensuing literature. Much of the post-Jesus culture was derived from specific passages. There has been much debate over how much of the bible's quotes were actually spoken. What is sad is that you can make entire religions from such passages, and still find the authority to war over the differences.
In direct conflict with what you spoke as idiologies, are the passages that build a new church ontop of the "rock". Those that refer to Jesus in a virtually devine light. Then, of course, the're the whole debate about the significance of the "resurection" or angelical conversational passages.
-Michael
Dude. This sort of question irritates me to no end. Faith in one cultural has almost nothing to do with the physical world around you. Even if divine conversation was the source of the cultural literature, the minds that physically wrote the books could not have comprehended the physics of a world known commonly a thousand years later.
If you learn something new about the world around you, it should have nothing to do with your beliefs of a proper way of life, or what happens in the would-be after-life. Physical and meta-physical should always be separate. The tangibles of the sences and the intagibles of the mind, etc.
Note that in my mind, religion is just an organization of the intangibles. Among other things, it acts as a source of wisdom for the otherwise unknown. Similar things could be said about psychology or even science in general.
What ever religion you hold, your faith should not be based apon success or failure of evidence. To be so would show lack of personal character.
-Michael
I don't know if scientific creationism is a group or an idea. If it's an idea, then you're stereo-typing.
I am one of those undecided egnostic types. Namely I don't even know if I even believe in God; or at least any previously quantified attributes of what God might be.
Still, logic tells me that our universe and that which we call life came-about through some fashion. I am personally inclined to believe that there was help, possibly at more than one point (anybody read 2001?) At first it seemed totally plausible that the unifing forces of nature brought mater together in ever more complex forms which ultimately formed sustainable and reproducable life.. But then I'd hear from reputable sources that evolution as Darwin suggests could never have happened for x,y,z reasons. But this didn't discourage the idea; A super-entity could still have engineered each life form separately, as an auto-maker designs each model-year.
You can't disprove anything meta-physical - you are mostly reserved to subjective beliefs. It might be possible, however, to find evidence that there is paranormal interfearance with our DNA. But this would only happen by chance, and is thus not worth pursuing.
Additionally, we might find it possible to successfully manipulate DNA ourselves, which could lead us to understand the methods better. Only time will tell.
-Michael
As there is no 100% secure way to guarantee that you get the right stream, unless you do it yourself, this means that the sender of the message must send this infinite stream.
Sure there's a way you garuntee the right stream. The first part of the encrypted message is a simple validation check. If the recipient doesn't decode it properly, then they know something is wrong, and they can communicate this through un-secure channels (traditional public/private key). The worst that can happen is a denial of communication through either lack of a random-number feed, or by convoluting the feed at different locations.
I believe the suggested method is to have one or more satalite streams, intercepted either by the cell phones, or an IP source which rebroadcasts in multi-cast.
Both methods allow for disruptions in the random-number signal, but so long as the process allows for resyncing, then things are fine; in fact that helps make the channel even more encrypted (except that you could monitor for the breaks, which might possibly let you know which channel they're listening to, and possibly allow ease droppers to sync up as well).
-Michael
You cannot assume that an eavesdropper will take 1 minute to decode a start message if the real recipient is not doing to take a minute themselves.
I'm sure they are assuming some type of private keying communication to send the start sequence which designates a future exact time to start the decoding (considering network lag). Part of the proof probably involves the requirement of the secrecy of the private keys. If this is thwarted, then you might as well assume that your keyboard has key-strokes running. I don't believe it's possible for a middle man to fully hack into such a system (I'm not a cryptographer) without such a private key.
I also agree that this can only be used for communication channels, and not storage. Seemed obvious to me, actually. But I believe it's great strengths are in cell-phones, or encrypted versions of Messenger services. Two things that are regularly monitored (and some times stored for later encryption). I don't think this could work with traditional email for the reasons you've pointed out, so the practicality is obviously limited.
The greatest boon, however is that if the FED requires you to give up your private key (that initiates a communications channel), it doesn't do them any good. It only temporarily inconviniences you until you get a new one for future communications. This, I think is one of his main excitements.
-Michael
At UD, root access is regional. Typically to a single building. Only a small set of people have access to root, and few people are administrators of more than one building. So there is a definate sence of accountibility.
/file-system servers are not maintained by students.
Among other reasons, I'm not aware of any hacking bing on our student maintained shared systems. Note that our accounting and central email
-Michael
At the University of Delaware, I'm willing to hazzard that 90% of our computer technical staff is comprised of students. This includes most of the technitians, maintainance, attendents, receptionists, sales people, etc. All working at minimum wage (higher if they like you). We students like it because we get to do something other than buffing tables, while the administration probably likes the reduced cost. The heads probably like it because they get to tout hands on experience.
There is definately a sence of control; professional old-guys are the only ones with root access to the central main frames. But of the thousands of computers on campus, root is known by many a student for their day-to-day jobs. Plus it's just cool to have the title "lab-staff" in certain buildings. Freshmen geeks revear you.
-Michael
Lab-staff could-have-been
But isn't half the fun in life seeing what random kookie things that Windows does?
... err.. personality any day over a cold / impersonal Solaris.
Take the Win NT 4.0 show case, for example. It just made my week to see it crash during Bill Gates' demo.
I'd take a brain damaged AI with incredible
-Michael
p.s. For the feminist advocates out there, In real life I date a Linux Box, I just play the Windows whore on screen.
Insightful, but I figured I'd give my $0.02.
The transistors would be more like the nucleic acids. Of which there are obviously many orders of magnitude more than transistors in even a modern CPU.
The genes would be more like the computer's functional units. Protein synthesis might be related to the bit-patterns in the registers. Though finite, it's a rather large set of possibilities. Thus through the reuse of various functional units, you can reproduce
certain types of register bit combinations.
Though it's kind of hard to relate protein synthesis - This doesn't totally fit the analogy since it seems that only one biological functional unit / gene can be used for a protein, unlike the computer with inter-connected units.
Who knows, maybe this will be the next great discovery. I call first patent!!!
-Michael
I heard a great analogy on the Discovery channel one day (arguably aimed at kids):
.bashrc file on occasion. Even if their system is voice activated AI like Genesis suggests. :)
Nature invents each life form separately (I'm paraphrasing to fit my argument). In order to do this, it has a certain amount of money (resources). It can spend that money however it wishes. Some expenditures will be more fruitful than others. But you always only have a fixed amount.
The show then went on to describe how some creatures had night vision (though there was some other trade off), others had the ability to fly, so on and so forth. Each attribute had a fundamental limitation.
You will not be able to produce the super-being (the quisak sadarak?). Animals today don't see in the dark - they just have highly sensative eyes. If you put a cat in a locked room with no windows, it wouldn't see jack. Its vision is based on moon-light. One trade off is limited color-vision (more rods than cones). The flashlight requires, dun dun daa, batteries; A power-source. Now in order to achieve a power source great enough to luminesce, you've got to have a massive internal re-engineering. Most likely it would be some excessive use of ATP, which would in turn require massive cooling, storage, etc.
How about temperature regulation? We use clothing today, so couldn't we make sheddable fur that's designable just like modern clothing? Possibly, but then you alter the texture of your base skin; that might not be too attractive or sexy (same with fire-retardant / weather resistant skin).
Flight should be out for obvious reasons? Don't think anyone wants to go to weaker bones (especially foot-ball players).
Want bones of steel? Well if we use iron, then we have a problem with rust, jaggad edges or general issue of toxic solubility. All of which require massive chemical modification for stability. Before countering this, understand the basic point that you can not trivially alter a system (i.e. replace calcium with Titanium). There are millions of variables which affect the dynamic system. Yes anything's possible, but often times at enormous trade-off-costs.
Another important issue that separates biology from our mechanical world is adaptability. Sure a 747 can hold more, go faster, and withstand greater stresses, but it can't repair itself. A sheet of metal can only increase it's imperfections, where-as a grouping of cells can grow and repair weak-points. If we replaced some brain-cells with diamond lattice silicone, we'd be suceptible to E&M interfearance (as in an MRI scan), we'd risk fracturing the diamond over time, or tearing the surrounding tissue due to its rigidity.
The point is that this is a non-polynomial problem. There is not single best solution, and most likely there's an infinite number of them. What's more, none of them are ideal for more than a handful of cases - They all have exploitable weaknesses. Nature has been kind to us in that we've managed a working set of genes that's been durable for a couple thousand years in lots of different environments (including space and underwater). The only way we'd be able to learn if a human designed (computer assisted) working set of genes is viable is to go through several life cycles in various environments. But I don't think human right's activists would let us treat babies like lab-rats. Sure we can simulate, but Nature's a little sneaky, the number of paracites and short-commings are much more numerous than a case-study tool can speculate. It's the same digitally controlled v.s. Analog argument as Vinyl Records sound better than [theoretical] infinite precision digital CD's (technically they do, and I'll mathematically demonstrate if you so require). Of course the trade-off here, is increased noise with each use.
Terrestrian nature is the most resource intensive, longest running genetic search algorithm discovered to date. It would be kind of hard to top it with a few meager billion transistors.
Note that you've referenced religious intentions. I would like to add that religion is not necessary for this argument. Instead this is practical caution. The best we can hope for is the identification of systems that are desirable and to make attempts to duplicate (with possible slight modifications) in subsequent generations. Doesn't this sound a lot like evolution?
Now for those on the relgious side / anti-evolutionists, don't worry, I'm not attacking.. There's nothing to say that one or more super-beings didn't sit at their cray equivalent and play out similar NP guessing games, while making 'releases' every once in a while. Or that they didn't clean their
-Michael
Ok, it's bad to reply to flames, but I couldn't resist.
If someone is genetically identical to yourself then (to the extetn that behaviour is gentically determined), you'll know EXACTLY what their strengths and weaknessess are - it's YOU!
Unless someone actually clones a human, and we find out otherwise, only a certain percentage of the traits of the ancestors (note the plural) are garunteed. The manner in which they are raised plays an essential role. Other posts in this chain have already addressed this.
Hey, does anybody know what the statistics are on say, idential propensities towards math / music in twins? A clone is almost identical to a twin except that they're brought up in a different time with different people (and with more worn DNA).
Another issue that I seem to recall is that the birthing development period plays an important role in the child's ultimate character. Obviously things like gender can't be manipulated, but something as simple as brain development might be. The DNA just sets up the protein structures, not necessarily their arrangement.
So, say you did something rather stupid that was inevitable due to your personality, but it changed you for the better, taught you some valuable lesson. Well, when you saw your little copy coming close to this, you stopped it to keep it from getting hurt. It never learns from it's mistake and keeps stumbling on in blind ignorance.
You started off with a good argument, then you fell off.. This is exactly what all parents do with their non-cloned offspring. They try and prevent their children from repeating their mistakes, which often times (especially in the case with my father towards my brother) prevent them from developing common wisdom.
-Michael
I agree with much of what has been said, but I still feel that e-books potentially can offer greater overall utility - I believe they could achieve "killer-app" status.
But first they need to overcome their disadvantages.
Portability: Until e-books are literally paper-thin (which it definately looks like they'll eventually achieve) there will be discontent.. I should be able to curl up in my bed or relaxing chair and read with zero additional stress over a paper-back. As for power, it seems to me that future devices will be passive - only requireing juice to change the displayed contents. Thus as with an uploading of a book, you should be able to recharge the book so as to at least be able to read 110% of the book (including back-flips). As for weather resistance, I have a wrist watch that's advertised as 300m water resistance (for whatever it's worth).. The technology is there. Soaking a book leaves you with a sence of loss.
Ease of use: We're living in an age where people are accepting the difficulties of learning curves.. It's our general nature to adapt and learn.. We have to be taught to drive a car, bike, etc. And you can even argue that we first go to school so that we can learn to learn. So I don't believe it's unacceptible to require a moderate learning curve. Beyond that, highlighting, annotations, book-marking and most importantly searching are the bed and breakfast of e-media. True it expends electricity, and requires some sort of input, which adds to the complexity. But these aren't used in a continual basis. The fact that you can't always highlight a cool phrase in a web page is the fault of the browser, not the computer. Word-files, PDFs and XML allow for very nice annotation / bookmarking capabilities, so long as the browser supports it. Herein lies the Utility aspect of e-media.
Durability: It is definately true that a book should outlast a desk-top and it's hard drive. I even hear that burned CD's don't have incredible shelf life. But since digital media can be 100% reproduced, active libraries can maintain the data. And it's always possible to use a robust long-term digital storage medium (such as a digital vinal recording which isn't suseptible to E&M or cosmic disturbances). In general, however, I'll give you this one (for hard-backs at least).
There will, in no way, be a death of the printed page. But I believe that the added utility, plus the idea that we're saving a few trees will assure an eventual migration to e-media for mainstream use.
-Michael
From what I understand, reading the ATI Radeon spec several months ago, there is an issue with at least setting the Z-values to zero at the beginning of each frame. Though I don't know that compression affects this or related stages, there are still flushes that need to occur. And without specialized memory with block operations (SGRAM?) it takes time.
-Michael
Lack of resistance (up to a point), and greater over-all power capacity.. The article says 150 times, meaning if we had 50 or so separatly maxed out copper cables running at a constant voltage, we could combine them into 1 (with the same voltage or current (or combination of the two)). Traditionally if you wanted greater power capacity, you'd do what you needed to the wire to allow higher and higher voltages to minimize the current. Higher voltage usually requires greater separation between lines (since there is significantly enhanced potential for shorts). So by not _having_ to up the voltage, you can keep lines closer together.
So the benifits are power efficiency, and that you need less total physical stuff to get the power downtown.
-Michael
What ever happened to that old and lovable transliterate (of the sed veriety) y/x/y/? Have we all become too lazy to use anything other than a reg-ex?
-Michael
Isn't it obvious? Hollywood should be really excited now because they've identified a whole new region that consists of a growing handful of wealthy people.. Just imagine. A handfull of people willing to pay thousands of times above sticker for copies of Apollo 13. Man what a lucrative market. Wish I could have gotten in.
-Michael
PC133 => 133MHZ * 64bits (8 bytes) = 1GBps.
PC66 => 528MBps
Difference in price for standard SDRAM is neglegable. (pricewatch has 512Meg sticks for under $200, meaning the $5,000 price-tag is most likely NOT mainly comprised of DRAM)
But here's what happens when you underclock: The pipeline get's slowed so your latency increases.
Random read access should take a hit of about 5 clock ticks per access (actually more because of intermediate custom hardware). So random single byte reads suddenly are slowed to 105MBps, but since we were only interested in a word, we only got 13Mega accesses / second. By staying at PC133, you effectively double that minimum rate.
Now the difference in price from CAS3 to CAS2 PC133 is significant, I'll grant you.. Probably not worth the premium.
I admit that most if not all "virtual disk accesses" are going to be in 512B blocks, which comes out to 16 indepedant cache-line-bursts (8B/cycle * 4 cycles), and should thus take overhead(approx 5 cycles) + 4 cycles * 16, or under 70 clock ticks for a full sector read. That's about 1.9Million sectors per second theoretical peek (not bad). At that point, we have to contend with main-memory BW saturation and CPU over-head for disk-drivers. I believe that depending on how intelligent the drivers are, the PCI bus isn't the real bottle-neck for over-all system performance on such a ram-drive.
I am curious about the prospects of converting this PCI card into a UATA-100 hard virtual drive. You'd have higher peek bandwith, PLUS you'd be able to perfectly emulate a hard drive.. However, there is probably an advatage to putting memory on the PCI bus - namely that the OS drivers could directly access the media in little segments based on the actually requested data instead of duplicating disk-block-buffers in main memory, just to ultimately copy out to user-space.
-Michael
First off.. The memory size was a typo, but too late for that.
Second, Mega means 1E6. M/Meg often refers to 2^20, but not always.. Depends on what you're talking about (such as hard drive, system memory, etc).
Question:
how is sony expecting to get decent yields on such a big die? The probablity of a chip flaw goes up with the surface area
Answer:
256Mbit = 128Meg Byte = approx 500Meg of HIGHLY symmetric transistors. We're already building chips with 20, 30 and even 100Meg of complex transistor layouts (granted, most is in symmetric caching or register sets). Additionally, single ported memory is a lot simpler than multi-ported LRU-tagged cache. So while Intel, AMD, Alpha, SUN fuss over 4Meg L2 cache sizes, we're all in a similar ball-park.
Next, a little over a year ago, I read an article about a new DRAM memory architecture that was designed for extremely high yields.. Basically you'd have dozens, hundreds or thousands of mostly independant memory cells, then after the testing stage, you marked which cells were good, which then allowed the memory to ignore bad chunks transparently. As long as you met a minimum memory-size, you were golden. If a similar technology is used here, then they'll probably over-allocate it a bit, and allow down to like 70Meg to be considered passing.
However, I've read other interesting questions such as "are they going to optimize this for power consumption / heat dessipation or performance?"
-Michael