It doesn't look too incredibly exciting. First of all, the process by which the diamond is made is substantially different and more flawed than silicon wafers (annealing liquid silicon verses condensation of gasious carbon). They say they've merely discovered a method that reduces condensation disturbances to a usable state.. But when we're designing gate-widths that are only a couple dozen atoms wide, these disturbances will probably be monumental.
The main advantage of these are high temperature (500C instead of 150C with Silicon). One theoretical advantage is running higher voltages at hotter temperatures with less breakdown. So you could over-clock these babby's.:) Another theoretical advantage is the diamond structure should be denser than silicon, which could mean smaller absolute minimum gate lenghts.
One issue will have to be the metalergic process by which copper attaches to the carbon. It took hundreds of small miracles to find the right intermediate layers to get copper to stick to silicon; will it take just as long for carbon?
Don't know if better or worse, just know that it'll be different. And from the looks of it, more expensive
I live in an appartment, so I couldn't get large speakers or a high powered amp.. I got a $500 yamaha receiver with DSP effects (I like the DISCO setting:). It's only like 75Watts / channel (unlike it's more expensive version) but for my appartment that's probably a good thing. Can't afford another noice violation:) Various reviews have given the Boston Acoustics ($1,000 model) a top rating in it's class. Nice rugged old style speakers that work pretty well for both stereo and home-theatre.
I like BOSE Acoustimass, but they apparently aren't good enough at traditional 2-channel stereo. Don't go for BOSE life-style, however. You're speakers are locked with a minimalist BOSE receiver (which doesn't do DTS btw).
That setup exactly costs $1,500 assuming you don't get the extended warranty.
Strangely enough, people seem to prefer the coaxial audio connectors to the digital ones.. The most common reasoning is the breakibility of the fiber cable; you are in danger of crimping it.
I have a CD jukebox and it only has an optical out. Plus Digital TV tends to have optical, so if your DVD player has a coax, you should probably use that.
Other things to look for in a receiver. Make sure it has independant digital inputs. Some receivers (I think mine is included) will share an optical/coaxial input so you're limited. Make sure to get nice high quality speaker connectors (ideally bananna clips) on as many channels as possible (most only have them on the mains).
Make sure that the receiver is capable of compensating for your small-speaker arrangement.. It should be able to suck the base out of the mains and center and divert them towards the sub-woofer (not all can do this).
Don't know if you're using component video with your TV / DVD (I'd highly recommend it), but you probably don't want to mux the video through the receiver because of signal degredation (especially with component). Actually, my new ideal setup is a true progressive scan player and TV - fat chance this decade for me.
Though a MAC address is supposed to be unique, I have friends that have actually come into contact with duplicate MAC adddressed cards. Beyond simply being a script kiddie, it shouldn't cost more than $5 to make a fake NIC card with a programmable address so as to foil the system. Hell, you could possibly even write a fake NIC driver that did this for you.
The next issue is one of requiring people to have NIC cards. I realize that more and more services are requiring the presence of a NIC card, but Windows is ubiquitous; everyone will eventually have at least NT consumer (in whatever form it ultimately takes). Granted, all new machines will have to be built with a NIC card for the OS to be installed properly, but upgrades will be virtually impossible because they'll require people reading the directions in order to make the phone call, etc. Plus you have little chance of grandma (without a NIC card) installing the OS upgrade so that they can use that neat multi-media tool.
What happens when we move to gigabit ether in the home or via faster ISP? Do we have to re-validate our machines? What about those of us with too few PCI slots yet we have a home-network (none NIC) card? Maybe they have compatible MAC addresses, maybe not (As I understand it, modems get assigned a virtual MAC address).
I don't mind something like this from SUN, or HP where they have more control over their systems (plus they are predominantely networked). But a not on a monopolized OS that people's live depend on (and thus depend on easy upgradibility, etc).
My guess is that a minor version of the win95 hardware upgrade madness will ensue. People will buy new machines out of convinience or give lots of business to CompUSA / BestBuy, etc.
Linux was arguably not originally intended for production use. To my understanding it was originally only a more useful version of MINUX. Of course today we've advanced to default RAID support, but I still read articles from places like IBM where replacing the scheduler greatly enhances performance (Solaris still has a superior scheduler to my understanding).
Though Linux can be tuned because of it's open-ness, I'm sure that compatibility still plays an important role in thwarting advancement. And more importantly, generic IT's that purchase Red Hat or SuSe out of the box don't have that many options for tweaking. If an initial design goal wasn't performance, multi-media or what-ever then the addition of those things later on are most likely only bolt-ons (much like OOP in Perl).
I hear that FreeBSD and it's bretheren are superior to Linux and I've been meaning to give it a spin to see if the environment is to my likeing. OS-X, likewise has a lot going for it: It has the potential for being as open source and powerful as Linux / FreeBSD, yet it's user-friendly out of the box (at least I assume). A hard core UNIX programmer should probably feel at home with it (assuming that compilers are provided by default), yet the 8 year old daughter should be able to work it as she would an iMac.
The only draw backs that I see are the fact that the entire system is still pricey.. And.. well, it's being worked by Apple who've managed to shoot themselves in the foot too too many times. Anybody need references?
The big push that I hear Linux users say is: Just put a pretty face and make it easy-to-use-out-of-the-box(tm), and the people will flock to it. Course I hear others say "stay away from my OS evil marketers; I like it how it is". The seriousness of this comes into the corporate world that pushes NT. They want garunteed, single vendor suppliers (like SUN / MS / (Apple?) ), with rigorous certification policies. They want feature bloat and a pretty screen for configuration (usually). With that, Apple stands a chance of being a compromise between MS and SUN which might be able to achieve the best of both worlds.
Linux isn't going to go away since it completely fullfills it's mission statement - which just happens to not use the words multi-media, prettyness or Corporate America. Hell, the words learning and easy-to-use seem like opposites.
At face value I think you missed much of the point.. The OS can't know the intent of the "application". Just because I've performed a write, doesn't mean that only saving that much will have any meaning after a crash. I don't really understand how the author intends to deal with the "begin" and "end" transactions unless they're providing a journalling service (which I'm not familiar enough with). At the very minimum, however, a transaction would be the modification of an inode/directory element and then at least the initially provided data. The fsck is reduced because you'll never have a disk with only part of this info. Beyond that an explicit fsync might provide enough info to the OS to say that everything buffered up till the fsync should be part of that transaction.. I it "possible" to design in such a way that DB writes can write out everything as one piece, call fsync, and then have the OS garuntee an all or nothing write.
If you mean to say that the write-back cache can be used for application meta-data (namely the transaction support), then that's an interesting (albeit proprietary) avenue to explore.. But I can imagine that regular flat SCSI and IDE based systems could benifit as well (since there are definately web servers / DBs out there without RAID). Why not push for a product that works with all drives and fights to become ubiquitous.
ECC.. Or better yet, for expensive boards, use a form of mirrored RAID (in addition to ECC). We're using incredibly inexpensive memory to work with roughly 32Meg of data (anything more is probably asking for trouble.. we're not building a caching system as was pointed out. In fact the system should stall if the buffer starts filling up). If video cards can handle twice 32Meg pipes, a "TRAM" controller should be able to as well.
I wrote the following on this. Basically said that the porn industry again leads the way.. You pay $30 or so a year (or even a month) for a block of web sites that subscribe to a given system. You could have themed setups, such as news organizations, geeky things (like slash, fresh meat, etc), general entetainment, etc. These organizations would compete for famed web sites, so web sites with a lot of fan fare would get to charge a lot of money for the access control providers, or cable blocks, whatever you want to call them.
This undermines advertisements, but so does HBO nobody seems to fight them. A web site could still even have adds, but they just couldn't be obtrusive or real-estate stealing (as part of the agreement). Since this is something that would make web masters more happy than anyone else, I see it really only working as a consortium of web sites with tiered subscriptions.
I'd gladly pay for garunteed uninterrupted slashdot viewing.. It already cuts deeply into my work time as it is.. If I had to spend an additional half hour on advertisements, there would be hell to pay (or worst case, the loss of my viewer ship).
I suggested in my other article that advertisers should set up virtual malls with catchy themes such as the home shopping network (which actually seems more appropriate here). Things like price-watch work really well. Ironically, this could also be part of such a subscription service.. If people pay to use a shopping service, they'll be more likely to use it. There would be a consolidation of web sites, since those with high ratings would have more money, much like the TV industry.
-Michael
Don't know if I agree. Look at DVD's. You don't have _any_ alternatives for Digital video. DVD was started by a consortium of people that wanted to get it right.. They wanted complete control over the content so they could maximize regional profits, which included things like forced airing of the copy protection laws, and now forced airing of commercials in select DVDs.. Are you going to protest a given movie becuase you can't skip past the commericals? If you're like me, and have spent thousands of dollars on a home entertainment center.. Don't you feel cheated if your only "option" is to use cheap VHS pseudo-stereo?
What happens when advertisers "choose" to only pay well for sites that agree to use such intrusive forms of advertising. What happens to Slashdot and friends? Pay themselves for advertisements?
Look at PBS.. Even they can't get away from advertisements.. Their commercial free broadcasting has hours a day (or so it seems whenever I happen to watch it) of "please give us money" segments. Personally I like the entertaining commercials better than that pity fest. The only escape seems to be direct monthly payments. Once again, the porn industry leads the pack. You pay $30 a year and you get to view a block of web sites. So you go out there and say, hey Slash, freshmeat and this and that is part of this premium group. So on and so forth.. That way you pay for the types of content that you think you'll like to watch. Then what's left are the non obtrustive forms of advertisement that I OCCASIONALLY think are cute and curious enough to click through.
The real problem is that people need to advertise. The web is an excelent medium for finding what you want, so a given service provider / producer has a better chance of being matched with perspective clients than anywhere else.. But the old mentality is that people don't even know that they want you yet (consumerism at it's dirtiest). I think portal sites like amazon and price watch are valuable in this respect. People enjoy going to the mall to window shop. So advertisers should be interested in producing consumer attractive online malls. They just need to find the right gimics. One stop shopping that can feed revenue to the millions of dot coms through such portal shopping. It would be just like the home-shopping network, where people purposefully want to see the commercials and gimics. The main difference is that you're not stuck watching a stupid ring that.01% of the people care about at that given moment.
Though I generally agree with you. The performance per clock point is not really representative of a test.. If the PII maxes out at 1GHZ, and the Athlon is pretty close to it's limit at 1.3GHZ, and the P4 debuts at 1.5GHZ, then the likelyhood that the total performance will be higher on a P4 half a year from now is pretty good.
Additionally, apps that really need the horsepower are going to be recompiled to take advantage of the new pipelines and SIMD instructions. What is remarkable is that this new CPU design can even keep up with pre-existing apps without recompilation.
As for having to buy new boards, cases etc.. Do you really think that the majority of CPU purchases are made by people who would even think about opening up their cases? Though I don't have numbers, it is my understanding that businesses are the primary purchaser of computers; especially servers (which is currently the only thing P4s are worthwhile in right now). They don't upgrade; they get all new machines. So the fact that the power supplies are different are irrelevant. Even in light of the fact that they'll be marginally more expensive because of their newness.
Personally I'm not satisfied with the P4. But that probably doesn't really interest Intel too much. They have the highest clock speed and will soon have some of the highest benchmarks.. And brilliant IT people will see these numbers and hurd.
What I am waiting for is a 10Gig (or more) bank of non-volitile memory.. It wouldn't even have to be fast.. Hell, if it were 100 times slower than SDRAM it would still be worth while.. The reason is that you could treat main-memory as a cache into a very very special and protected read-write region of the nvram. With this you could do away with all swapping and most of the complexities of disk-writes.
In fact, you could finally treat files as character devices instead of block devices (though you could maintain the latter for compatibility). When you do this, memory mapping of disk-space is nothing more than literally allocating a chunk of nvram into your address space.
You'd still have to perform disk-syncing, though it would be more like cache flushing than anything else. The disk sector would shrink from 512Bytes to 128Bytes (a typical cache line)
Through the use of memory mapping and independant read/write/execute permissions on memory pages, you could achieve a whole new software design structure which completely eliminates the need for OS-calls for disk access for anything other than setup and shut down. Databases could achieve phenominal performance gains.
I know that nvram disks have been around for a while, but they've been incredibly expensive, and only support very small disk sizes (couple gig max).
Assuming the power requirements on MRAM are low, and that the cell size can be comparable to that of DRAM, then we should be able to achieve 40Gig MRAM disk drives at some point, which are a good size for serious servers. So long as you can daisy-chain them as with SCSI, then you're good to go.
On 64bit machines, all you need are the appropriate drivers and you're golden.. Sadly, 32bit machines would require some sort of banked paging. Thankfully, this would enhance the general desire for 64bit machines and then things like AMDs x86-64 and Intels Italium would receive a brand new source of demand. SUN and Alpha would be the immediate benificiaries, of course.
There are some that speculate that space is not a vacume, but instead is filled with gravitons, photons, gluons, etc. These are generally considered to be massless, though they do contain energy. Some speculate that the "dark matter" in the universe is comprised of such energy, and that gravitons, for example, do in fact, contain weight.
String theory, for example, considers that the vibrational patterns of a graviton/photon work in such a way as to cancel out measurable mass. But this is only true in a macro-scopic scale.. At quatum sizes (plank-lengths) you'd see an undulating massive string as heavy as a grain of salt shifting around too quickly to have a high net mass effect.
Gyron theory suggests that space isn't empty at all, and in fact is filled with little spinning "gyrons". Mass is the cohesive and circular movement of these gyrons. Transmitter 'forces' are the wripples in gyrons much like watter wripples which spread out throughout infinity (or until ubstructed where their inertia is finally transmitted). Support for such theory is based around disproving that trasmitter forces have "transverse waves". A key point by such theorists is that the only reason we detect individual photons is because our measuring instruments are flawed and various resonant points are allowing the detectors to measure threshold breaches randomly such that we don't maintain a continuously visible ray of light.
String theory adheres to General Relativity AND quantum physics; touting itself to be the Theory of Everything. Gyron theory (and friends) says that Relativistic warping of space is hog-wash - that mass and time manipulation can be totally explained by aerodynamic "Mach" theory, where you treat the gyrons as air molecules.
Quantum theory itself suggests that in any given micro-scopic region of space, you have particle-antiparticle pairs creating and distroying themselves so long as to be within the margin of error that Heisenburg predicted (making use of discrete plank energy levels). So the smaller you look, the more stuff is there; and the more violent that stuff is.
I'm sure there are other anti-vacume theories. Personally I see growing trends between String and Gryon theory, (especially with String's M-Theory which speaks of multi-dimentional undulating strings which sound remarkably similar to Gyrons).
With that background. I make the point that movement through space is exactly the same as movement on the surface of a planet.. We use Friction. It's a highly efficient form of action-reaction.. Arguably, it takes less fuel to drive around the world then it does to blast off into space (where-after you'd get trips around the world for free). Additionally, the slower we travel, the more efficient it is.. This is because the same forces of friction that we use for travel also impeed us (incidently, this is the argument made by Gyrists as to why we can't breech the speed of light or why time seems to slow down for us). On Earth, solid friction is greater than air-friction, so we're good to go. In space, however, the cosmic-dust (beit undulating transmitter forces, spontaneously generated partical/anti-particle pairs, or locally dispensed plasma) is both our means of propulsion and resistance. Well, this relates almost identicailly with swimming in the ocean.. Namely that you have to move like a fish.
In fact, I think that within 100 years, we'll develop cosmic-dust sensative machines that allow us to build space-ships just like fish. Most likely, these won't be big clumsy metalic flippers extended in our rear, but more likely gigantic electro-magnetic jelly-fish-like nets. And when you're within a solar system, such as ours, you have to resort to various sea-fearing tactics to move around... Perhaps it's as simple as inverting the polarity of a magnetic web, or sending out graviton waves, etc.
The point is that I believe Friction-based engines are far more efficient, and better suited to space travel.. If we compare these two types of propulsion (the other being explusion action-reaction drives such as rockets/jets), we see that on earth, Rockets are arguably faster though they do have a max velocity, no matter how much force is applied. Friction based propellants, however, can theoretically approach the speed of light, so long as you can conceive of the proper mechanisms. Rocket fuel, for example propells atoms at around 20,000mph (from what I remember). You can't propell a ship any faster no matter what volume of rocket fuel you use (though larger volumes accelerate you to that speed faster). Ion-drives, likewise _can_ get you near to the speed of light, but you'll run out of fuel LONG before you ever get there.. Plus you need incredible amounts of propellent volume to achieve enough thrust to be useful; thereby reducing your payload and ultimate speed-limit accordingly.
But with mechanical friction, small amounts of energy (of virtually any form) can accelerate a spinning object (or an object on a rail) to unimaginable velocities.. Our current limitations are frictional heat. Most likely we'd have to discover how to manipulate massless transmitter forces so as to not to have 'unwanted' friction (friction in any direction other than that against the target).
Theoretically, this assymetric magnetic pulse device could be used to send out photon-waves (the transmitter force for electro-magnetism) which amplifies the interaction between charged particles (in our case, it would be the plasma from the sun). Now normally, what you'd do is create a massive electromagnet and hopefully repell/attract yourself from/to the sun. (Note: I'm not informed well enough of plasma to know if it tends to have a net positive or negative charge or both) Howver, frequency carries with it energy. And higher frequency photons should produce a higher impact force on charged particles (which should reciprocate.. which is the theorized method by which two similarly charged particles emit symmetric forces on each other). Additionally, it might be possible to funnel the magnetic waves (e.g. photons), say towards the SUN, or a planet (which has a magnetosphere). This would essentially have the effect of a limited tractor/repulsor beam.
Now, from what I gather about String theory, high temperature and pressure cause the various forces (and associated transmitters) to unify. We currently consider electro-magnetism to be unified, and we've discovered electro-weak properties at sufficiently high temperatures. My guess is that magnetism can distinguish itself at sufficiently low temperatures. Here, I totally speculate, however. Low-temperature super-conductors asymetriclly undulating might have something to do with this dispersal of magnetic and electric charge. We've closed down the science of Eletric waves, but might these magnetic waves have their own uses?
Additionally, since we know how to produce electric-waves, possibly now magnetic waves, it might be possible to produce gravitational waves. One reader suggested the use of high-speed, counter-rotating fly-wheels which would increase relative mass. Though he was shot down because of conservation of momentum, which we might be able to gain from this, however, is that if the reletavistic mass changes are fast enough, we could produce gravity waves. We might be able to achieve greater apparent gravitation to a body such as a planet or star through the use of such undulations.. Undoubtedly energy IS being transfered into the system... Where is it going? Obviously into frictional heat.. And to the general entropy of the system. But we also know that electro-magnetic waves will radiate outwards; why not gravitational waves (through the acceleration). Given that acceleration might contain the link to gravity waves (due to changing of reletivistic mass which acts as a doppler effect on observers due to the probagation delay of the gravity information), a counter-rotating fly-wheel might not be the bets model. I simple piston might be the best example.. Here, we can make use of a mechanical energy (such as a gas-engine or rail-gun), where there is massive acceleration of a mass, only to have the inertial spread out in lateral directions. Compression-based energy transfer is very efficient (at least compared to rocket engines). If massive pistons can be rapidly accelerated and decelerated, back and forth, it's possible that gravitational waves would be transmitted. What would be needed are materials with tensal strength beyond imagine (but we're still working towards that). Additionally, as with the above, it might be possible to make full use of massless transmitter forces some day.
In short, I concur with several other posters that there can be no reaction-less net force. I personally believe that Space is not a vacume (especially not around a star), and that those particles can be treated as air or water molecules for propulsion. Depending on the power-requirements of such devices, it might be possible to use Solar cells for propulsions around a star, which gives you enough momentum to direct you towards another star. If Fusion ever becomes practical, then when a stellar-ship passes around a star, it could collect light and heavy elements for use in matter-energy conversion (which is what happens in both fission and fusion), so as to maintain power until reaching the next solar system. I don't think it will be very possible to change course in-between end-points, unless we discover unimaginable power-storage capabilities (perhaps such matter dessimation.. Since we can't vary well conjure up anti-matter sufficiently to sustain matter/anti-matter condensation)
References:
"The elegant Universe" by Brian Greene
Though at first, I thought the sparc-like parallel CPU archetecture was kind of cool. But it has some serious flaws. First, there are some serious paracitic forces that impeed parallel operations.. Next it's like the NASA way of doing things.. Cost is irrelevant, we want 2, 3, or 5 way redundancy. Even if volume brings the chip cost way down, you still have to duplicate memory and controller connects, etc.
Next as far as I've been able to tell, taking a pseudo-multi-threaded application and throwing more [CG]PUs at it very quickly dies off. 64 processor SPARC machines work well mainly because they multi-task, not multi-thread. Rendering a single graphic scene is not multi-taskable, nor even multi-threadable. At best what you get is a heavy and independant pipelines coupled with SIMD operations.
As it turns out, The VSA requires a single-tasked/ single threaded stage in the pipeline that is a bottleneck for all chips. Namely the dividing and sorting of vertexes before distribution to the individual plane processors. Though a novel and "scalable" approach, this provides such over-head on low-end cards, that it can't compete with traditional archetectures. In fact, the more polygons a scene has, the slower the VSA architecture will go. This series is best suited for average numbers of polygons with incredible texture dependancies - which utilizes the BW and the scalability of the chips. Unfortunately, even for CAD/Graphics designs which Quantum seems to think they can sell to, you're going to need massive polygon counts. And unless their distribution / sorting stage scales well with the number of processors, this isn't going to be good for them.
This information I've deduced from the various pages on sharkyextreme, anandtech, and tomshardware. Specificly in relation to the ATI Radeon / nVida Detonator 3 drivers verses the infinite plains approach VSA takes.
Voodoo Rush was a pseudo pure 3D Voodoo chipset that allowed hooks into an external 2D chip. The reviews I heard said that the choice of a 2D chip for most card manufacturers was horrible. I'm not sure if any old graphics chip could work or if only one specificially designed to work with the VoodooRush could work.
Either way, the Rush was a disaster.. I actually remember seeing some in stores and shuddering.
Granted, there has alwasy been opposition to technological shifts. My dad use to say that you'd have to have a man running some one mile in front of your car to warn people.
But my point was more one of not sitting idle and letting organizations sensor us like this just because they have what sounds like a rational argument. "But poor people could die if we don't give them life-long welfare" almost sounds compelling.. Till you realize the free-rider problem will ultimately make a society full of dependants leaching off the now minority working class.
Rethinking a bit, it makes sence that at critical passes such as this, it is important to have smooth transition. In the dawn of the automotive age, we had to make allowances for horses. In the dawn of the networked age, we can't simply allow all old-style forms of civilization to go belly up while waiting for the migration.. I guess I do applaud that there was only 10 years applied to the Olympic Moratorium. It could have been an unlimited mandate I guess.
Gee, I'm glad you didn't design Linux, 2046.2Mb worth of overbloated kernel, you'd have to take bloating classes at M$
Seeing as how I said kernel AND drivers, and we're finding more than 64 meg of memory mapping for video drivers today, I think it was a very conservative estimate. Note I'm referring to HW BIOS mappings, not Linux based drivers.
Consider the x86 to be the old 68K code and you're Motorola. You WANT the old code to die..
In a previous slashdot article, Intel has tried to patent their EPIC code.. What this means is that IF, by some stretch of the imagination they pull off an industry swing to IA-64 processors, then they're all of a sudden the only game in town.
Beyond that, IA-64 is slated (at least initially) to be a no holds barred processor.. The Ferrari of cars, since they spared little or no expense on functional units or cache (at-speed 4Meg cache?? Especially after they recently determined that they couldn't rely on 3'rd party or external modules). They say 1 to 4,000 processors are to be in these new machines.. That doesn't sound like your Mother's Word processor running in there does it?
Once these bad boys hit 1.5Ghz (maybe 2-5 years from now), then the fact that your emulating Duke Nukem 3D is going to be irrelevant, just like the old non-recompiled 68K code is largely antiquated. Or more directly, just like we could care less that the PPro and it's descendants run 16bit code more slowly.
At the moment, if you're going to buy an IA-64, you have a SINGLE app that you're interested in. Namely a web server, a database server, or a CAD program. If you're in a UNIX system (as has been pointed out), then it's a trivial matter of getting the code to work anew (since either the code is freely available, or the vendor that gives you the box owns the original code). If you're in windows, you still only need worry about your AutoCad xxx, etc. So-what that explorer runs slower; 733MHZ isnt' going to let it run _that_ slowly.
The type of people that shell out $20,000 on a machine could care less what the architecture is.. And to some degree, they care little about the compatibility from box to box... They have their software, and as long as it works fastest on a given platform this year, they'll buy it and switch over (since the data will migrate). Think of it like a black box phone.. A chordless phone.. Do we fret over the fact that we've gone from 400MHZ to 900MHZ to 900-Dig to 2.4Gig Spread Spectrum? Each time switching vendors? None are compatible with each other, but they fullfill a single task well. It's a black box that fullfills a business service. Slower generic apps are simply the cost of doing business with it.
Beyond that, mainstream apps like this typically take up the entire computer and desktop; there is no room for other applications.. You would have a seperate machine if you wanted to do general purpose work-station operations. Perhaps the average Matlab user might be more pressed for all-around performance, but they're on a UNIX machine anyway.
And as for a 4,000 machine.... Well, I shouldn't have to mention how specialized a program is going to be for that anyway.
The point is that Intel wanted to compete against SUN and friends, which use a totally different business paradigm which is incompatible with most users (including value-basd work-stations).
The only danger, as I see it, will be the loss of "trickle down hardware". Where the state of the art today becomes the value PC tomorrow. I doubt that Intel will have _any_ incentive for making an IA-64 cost effective (since that would make it harder to justify the 3,000% premium they'll likely charge for the additional 100MHZ). Since we're locked out of the market (for at least 3 years), Intel will have to continue developing the x86 line for many years.
The problem will be that they can't bet the farm on the IA-64; they have to keep the PXXX on top. Yet, they're not going to re-engineer the x86 for 64 bits, since that would undermine IA-64. If all I need is 64bits, and I'm not worried about massive multi-CPU or even changing my compiler tool-set, then why should I choose other than AMD's x86-64 or the equivalent Pentium derivative.. Why pay the premium for IA-64? If AMD successfully converts their entire line to x86-64, and MS comes around and produces a compatible OS, there will be no compelling need for vendors to port to IA-64 (since there will be little compelling need for a user to buy outside of tradition). Yes they'll get performance... But it would be just like switching to SUN, with their proprietary supported hardware and software environment, AND more importantly, their smaller user-base. Should Sybase support yet another architecture for that 1-10% additional market? Oracle most definately, but maybe not a smaller App company.
The point is that IA-64 requires just as massive a change for software developers and users as if they were to switch to Alpha (especially since they run NT and emulate x86 code as well). What do I gain by choosing IA-64 as the platform? Reliability is offset by the newness of the system. Scalability can almost be better handled through clusters (and more cheaply at that). 64bit will become ubiquitous, and ironically, Intel will have the only 32bit processor left in the market (with the possible exception of older Macs).
All I'm saying is that Intel had best have a backup plan. There is one thing in Intels favor, however. Politics.. They still have the clout with the major industries, and they still can coerce MS to shift in their direction. MS has stopped to purposefully breaking compatibility with competition, and moreso, they are excelent and artificially creating demand for higher end system. With win-2k having an enterprise solution, it isn't too big a streatch of the imagination to concieve that there will be an IA-64 only varient that has necessary features that simply aren't offered on other platforms. Who knows, it might even be easier to develop these enerprise solutions on IA-64 than on legacy x86[-64].
Intel will not fail.. But they will not succeed on merit alone. (much like Rambus)
So basically, the Olypics are like the RIAA that didn't cry wolf?
Well, tough snuff. That's like saying we must ban automobiles, since that will put horse and carriage makers out of business. Or that lightbulbs will ruin the candle industry.
My heart feels for you.. It really does.
Ok. So lets be sympathetic for a minute. We currently have a system that *cough* *cough* works. We have mega product producer who pays top dollar for add space. We then have even more-mega-media-maker that buys air-time (and cyphins off coverage to many of the individual ads). A lot of this money gets funnelled into the Olympics, which eventually trickles money down to the non-economic powerhouse countries..... Soooo How did the Greeks do it without TV? Damn, that's a tough one.
Cute, but it doesn't completely parallel the original. MS designed around 640K which purposefully limited them. The alternative was to go up to a wopping MEG!!! They arbitrarily chose the 640K (as far as I know) so as to put drivers (starting with the all important video) above that into fixed addressible regions.
Sooo.. What we should do is say Linux only supports 2Gig on most systems, then you have the BIOS mapped memory, then you have the kernel.. So "1.8Meg should be enough for anybody".:)
This is a name-space issue. It solves a fundamental problem with C, and helps alleviate the same problem in C++.
In C, if I were to arbitrarly include packages off the net into my app, there is a chance that two packages will define and export the function named 'foo'. Even in C++, you can produce non-class functions.. The general rule, however is to put all package functions scoped inside the class as static methods.
If C were designed like C++, then you wouldn't have printf at all, you'd have
System::IO::printf(...)
You still can make that function if you are sufficiently paranoid.
Java simply said that they weren't going to allow ANY main-scoped functions, so nobody could be lazy about abusing the name-space.
I'm not advocating java here.. Just defending Packages (since I love them in Perl.:)
There are two ways that AI can florish, and both require a single thing; stimulous. For any life form to advance, it requires new and rich stimulous.. For us, it's the physical world around us and the complications of interacting with each other. This too could be the input for an AI program, but there is another alternative. That of a virtual world. Referencing "The Matrix", it is entirely possible to fake a virtual world for a child AI. Provided that the maker never provides physical external interfaces, there is no danger. This physical interface includes the Internet.. So long as an AI can not probe the blindingly colorful world of the net, they can never leave their cage. Of course, the usefulness of such an AI program is therefore limited; restricted to theoretical solutions to problems. Any sort of interface (such as a jail-cell mail-box) might bring about questions and ultimately resentment from the captive entity (as any life form will fight for autonomy as part of it's basic survival).
"The Matrix" rendition of an AI world could be filled with numerous AI units in an ever expanding world which is limited only by the physical resources. If any of you has read the Rama series (by Arthur C Clark), you read of worlds where biology was minupuated in such a way that the basic life functions of numerous organisms are designed in such a way as to serve the master race (from food production down to energy production). Likewise, computer AI held unwittingly captive in a virtual world could be brought to serve us without ever knowing it (much like in Douglas Adam's Hitch hickers guide, where all life on earth are unwittingly part of a computer matrix who's sole purpose is to calculate the question to life the universe and everything).
The point of all that is to demonstrate how it is possible to make use of a contained universe (much like the SIM AI's can never escape the protected memory of their program). Given the net, viruses are possible, and all dreamable fears are possible.
It seems to me, however, that Clark wants a machine that fully interacts with Humans. I have not read the essay 'The Singularity', but I'd rather draw my own conclusions beforehand, lest I be biased into another's point of view. As another reader pointed out, all life is contingent on an ecosystem.. No entity can be self sustained. The only thing that a matured robotic race could achieve is high discipline with focused goals. (a la the borg) It is entirely possible that they could eventually advance to the point of not needing us, or more importantly to the point that we are competitors. Undisciplined, biased, and religiously zellous humans would of course make life very difficult for sentient robots, and would probably pose a threat which, in self defence would require retaliation. If the robots were truely AI, then given enough time they would transcend any initial programming (and "prime directives" a la robo-cop). When you back a life form into a corner, there is no logic or predictability to be seen. Faced with their own mortality, there is the chance that they will evolve right there on the spot; most likely into something more aggressive as the environment there and then dictates.
Human nature, among other things, contains laziness and greed. Even well informed and good intending humans will hold onto a rewarding thing for as long as they can; greedily grabbing for more, and lazilly avoiding the long-term consequences. Such is apparent in over-eating, poor-dietary eating, getting exercize, watching too much TV, wasting of fuel, not wasting money on cleaner emmissions, and the general desolation of the environment. More immediate consequences tend to hold us in check.. We feed our pets lest they die tomorrow. We pay our bills lest we be evicted. We shut down toxic waste (when discovered) lest we lose our drinking water. The care of a robot race could initially be treated with awe, wonder, and responsibility.. But those responsibilities will most likely be financial (as with a car a computer). Later, as AI advances in these robots, humans will neglect to care for their sensibilities. Legislation will continue to exploit them, and disregaurd them, even though they slowly develop complex life-like reactions to kind and cruel interactions. Man will most likely enact the robotic death sentence for disidence, which will further narrow their tolerance of us, and so on.. Those wise among us will fight to maintain the proper treatment of sentient robotics, for fear of the longer term effects.. But their chantings will go along with those of global warming, and detereoration of the rain-forests... Green-liberal-radicals we will become... Ultimately, if a problem persists, supposed fail-safes will go into effect where terminations will take place.. This is the proverbial corner in which they'll be backed into. Another attribute of life is cohesion with one's own kind. That could be one's mother or child being terminated.. Those life-forms with capacity to react towards interactions will treat this with great negativity.
As for robots having the option to leave our planet (since they obviously have different needs than we), this is assuming that they haven't adapted to our way of life.. Becomming more cyborg than robot or human. There are definate efficiencies such as self-replication and repair inherent to micro-organics. A cyborg is just as bound to our bountiful planet as a human. I personally do not believe that terraforming is possible; the amount of energy required is more than we currently know how to wield. To say nothing of the complexity of eco-forming (just look at how we botch the simplest ecological activities of ridding over-population in Hawaii and Austrailia through the introduction of one or two non-native creatures). I doubt that a machine would be any more capable of having wisdom in the chaotic nature of ecosystems.. It would be like making a robot that could consistently predict the direction of the stock-market... It's practically impossible since the amount of knowledge and influence you'd have to have is beyond comprehension. What's more, chaos theory (to my knowledge) suggests that you can't ever know.
On the other hand.. Man is willed to create, just like beavers are willed to make damns. We will eventually produce some semblance of persistent AI. We will eventually produce some sort of human-aiding robitics (even if we never see the likes of the Jetsons). Perhaps the speed at which we achieve this is a prime factor. As people are allowed to experience mechanical wonders with a virtual will of their own, they will become comfortable with it, and learn the consequences (on smaller scales) of what abuse might mean. Much like a child being confined to a house, and feeling the consequences of cuts and bruses while playing in their realm. Only later are they allowed to learn the consequences of crossign the road or driving too fast.
Humanity will never achieve "harmony".. That's simply not the way life works.. True harmony would involve no coersion, malis, disgust, hatred, anger, etc. But without these, we have no motivating forces for change.. Without change we become a decaying log, who will only last as long as our environment. If our focus was uniform, then we would then battle our environment, fighting to grow and spread - Slowly destroying our environment. At some point me may learn to travel. But we have two major directions, that of Star Trek (where we take in moderation, and greet new sentient beings) or that of Independance day, where we've learned that we can't cohabitate with other cohesive life-forms and it's best if we don't even try and communicate, but simply take their resources. The borg might be another example.
It is, however, unrealistic to believe that we'll be able to do away with human laziness, greed, and selfishness.. It's part of every life-forms basic survival instincts. It's part of life's exponential responses.. The weak are killed by the strong, which thus empowers them, and ultimately makes the strong stronger, and less reachable... So long as the colony thrives, this continues exponentially.. Then when a colony takes over an eco-system, they die off almost instantly since they have no food left.. And what little is left is quickly killed. Without this, you'd have the equivalent of stagflation. All life forms would degrade to a lazy, weak, hungry bunch. I doubt it's even possible to conceive of a balanced eco-system without death and conflict. To presume that Robots will get it right is probably fanciful. Just as with engineering, we learn that there are no right answers.. No best answers.. In fact, there typically is many more than one correct way of accomplishing something.. Each will have its own pitfalls.. The key is to find those solutions whos' pitfalls will not be exploited by the surrounding environment (including people). Thus a robot may find thousands of potential ways of structuring it's society, but unless there is variety (as exists in all other communities of life), they may be exploited by "single points of failure". For a robotic race to evolve and survive, they will have to be as varied as humans.. But this means that there will be conflicts in the robotic world...
Essentially, 10,000 years from now (assuming Earth stille exists), I believe that Robots will be indistinguishable from Humans.. With the same petty disputes, wars, hopes and aspirations.. You will have zeallots that utterly profess their version of truth and what should be, you'll have the moderates (typically in control) who are just trying to scrape a living, and you'll have to ambitious who plot and hold few morals or concerns for others (including any remaining humans).
As I alluded to before, I believe that if we survive long enough, robitcs and humans will meld into an all new race. Merging the cold power of raw calculation and programmable discipline along with the adaptebility of organic life, with the occasional physicla augmentation of semi-organics or even inorganics. Alongside the chemical anti-bodies will be the nano-probes. Along with the bone structures are programmed organic construction workers that repair the body with incredible efficiency.
In summary, there is no certainty about the future, since it lies in the realm of chaos. There is no single direction that our future could take. We may outlaw AI, we may be over-run by AI (which would then, most likely either die off, or attempt to revive our life once they are in trouble). We could discover aliens and thereby change everything in an instant (making the whole point irrelavent). We could learn that we don't know how to create functional AI (just as we've persistently failed at eco-system control). Or we could evolve as a race.
The IA-64 is a completely differnet CPU.. It's actually one of the most novel ideas I've ever seen in silicon.. This doesn't mean it's practical or will be any faster than a good ole fashioned post-RISC processor.
The x86 comes in through a translation layer (kind of like the PowerPC's translation of the old 68K ops).
In fact, Intel changed their entire strategy so that they could make the market ready for the IA-64.. The main issue is that we wanted to have high band-width memory that could work with many many simultaneous memory requests.. We wanted deep pipelines, and speculative out-of-order operations. We wanted to make heavy use of instruction caching.. These are all the sorts of technology Intel has been trying to force feed the industry (See RDRAM).. The reason for this was that Italium (IA-64) is a super-pipelined, multi-way, parallel-op processor that can do all of it's memory prefetching at the beginning of every function call speculatively (meaning that it can even survive accidental illegal-memory references, much like with C++ exeptions.. Fast on the norm, slow on the rarely found case of an exception).
Intel needed motherboards in place that demonstrated to the public the ability to handle large CPU's with heavy power loads. Multi-path memory structures that work best in a pipelined manner where latency wasn't even an issue (most memory accesses in IA-64 aren't needed for many many instructions).. Additionally, they needed to address the huge CPU to memory disparity. The ability to handle concurrent operation (a la SPARC). In short, Intel has basically taken ideas from just about every CPU manufacturer that I've ever heard of.
Thankfully, the industry has benifited by some of Intel's exuberance. We've had the war of the memory architectures which has given us DDR-SDRAM. We have massive transistor busses.. We have competition with Alphas and SPARCs (since their turf has officially been shared). We have competing ideas for how a high-end server should look (see AMD's K8 line).
For better or worse, IA-64 is here today.. Even if nobody buys it 2 years from now.:)
But this still doesn't mean that a foreign firm is responsible for what they may receive through a broad-cast medium. My point was that the French jammed US air-waves to avoid such incidents, so they can use similar (and even more sophisticated) methods today.. It should be easy to require by French law to filter incomming operations of objectionable nature. Are they going to order the shutting down of all Nazi propaganda web-sites around the world?
There are two points of view here.. The US FCC, among other things, considers broad-cast air-waves to be hazzardous to minors and otherwise sensative individuals, so they regulate it... Likewise with Broad-cast TV. Other pseudo public media such as Theaters are now getting similar forms of enforcement through the MPAA. The internet is just another broadcast media that many believe should also be restricted.. Or at least provide road-blocks that physically prevent sensative viewers from reaching them... The only way this could truely work is if all web sites were legally bound to post ratings with their web site... Or that all web servers apply a ratings filters on all outgoing HTTP packets.. Violators could be prosecuted... Thus home viewers could simply set their browsers to a max rating and the world is safe once again.
This is unlikely since, only ascii text could be easily filtered / rated. Images would have to be on a voluntary basis. Course, I think web sites are taking the right step in placing initial "over 18 only" pages. I'm sure they'd be willing to rate their entire web sites as X or what-ever to further avoid litigation. It would be a simple extension to the HTTP protocol to add a rating header field. At this point, you could argue a finer grain of rating, which, among other things would rate propoganda such as Nazi's as at a minimum R, or even to be flagged. Course flagging would get into a hairy situation (since you could have an infinite number of them).. And politicians and courts would be independantly mandating their use to the point that the over-head is insane.
This whole point of view is based on the idea that responsibility lies with the broad-caster.
The other point of view is that responsibility lies with the recipient.. This point of view works more like Gun laws.. Do you hold a gun manufacturer or salesman responsible if a parent doesn't lock their gun properly such that a child can't get to it? If your country outlaws public owning of guns, then you can block imports (for the most part).. I personally believe the internet can be viewed more like a gun than a broad-cast PA system. You can filter or modify the data at every node with the internet, much like you have "customs" at every shipping point.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't look too incredibly exciting. First of all, the process by which the diamond is made is substantially different and more flawed than silicon wafers (annealing liquid silicon verses condensation of gasious carbon). They say they've merely discovered a method that reduces condensation disturbances to a usable state.. But when we're designing gate-widths that are only a couple dozen atoms wide, these disturbances will probably be monumental.
:) Another theoretical advantage is the diamond structure should be denser than silicon, which could mean smaller absolute minimum gate lenghts.
The main advantage of these are high temperature (500C instead of 150C with Silicon). One theoretical advantage is running higher voltages at hotter temperatures with less breakdown. So you could over-clock these babby's.
One issue will have to be the metalergic process by which copper attaches to the carbon. It took hundreds of small miracles to find the right intermediate layers to get copper to stick to silicon; will it take just as long for carbon?
Don't know if better or worse, just know that it'll be different. And from the looks of it, more expensive
I live in an appartment, so I couldn't get large speakers or a high powered amp.. I got a $500 yamaha receiver with DSP effects (I like the DISCO setting :). It's only like 75Watts / channel (unlike it's more expensive version) but for my appartment that's probably a good thing. Can't afford another noice violation :) Various reviews have given the Boston Acoustics ($1,000 model) a top rating in it's class. Nice rugged old style speakers that work pretty well for both stereo and home-theatre.
I like BOSE Acoustimass, but they apparently aren't good enough at traditional 2-channel stereo. Don't go for BOSE life-style, however. You're speakers are locked with a minimalist BOSE receiver (which doesn't do DTS btw).
That setup exactly costs $1,500 assuming you don't get the extended warranty.
Strangely enough, people seem to prefer the coaxial audio connectors to the digital ones.. The most common reasoning is the breakibility of the fiber cable; you are in danger of crimping it.
I have a CD jukebox and it only has an optical out. Plus Digital TV tends to have optical, so if your DVD player has a coax, you should probably use that.
Other things to look for in a receiver. Make sure it has independant digital inputs. Some receivers (I think mine is included) will share an optical/coaxial input so you're limited. Make sure to get nice high quality speaker connectors (ideally bananna clips) on as many channels as possible (most only have them on the mains).
Make sure that the receiver is capable of compensating for your small-speaker arrangement.. It should be able to suck the base out of the mains and center and divert them towards the sub-woofer (not all can do this).
Don't know if you're using component video with your TV / DVD (I'd highly recommend it), but you probably don't want to mux the video through the receiver because of signal degredation (especially with component). Actually, my new ideal setup is a true progressive scan player and TV - fat chance this decade for me.
Enjoy
-Michael
Though a MAC address is supposed to be unique, I have friends that have actually come into contact with duplicate MAC adddressed cards. Beyond simply being a script kiddie, it shouldn't cost more than $5 to make a fake NIC card with a programmable address so as to foil the system. Hell, you could possibly even write a fake NIC driver that did this for you.
The next issue is one of requiring people to have NIC cards. I realize that more and more services are requiring the presence of a NIC card, but Windows is ubiquitous; everyone will eventually have at least NT consumer (in whatever form it ultimately takes). Granted, all new machines will have to be built with a NIC card for the OS to be installed properly, but upgrades will be virtually impossible because they'll require people reading the directions in order to make the phone call, etc. Plus you have little chance of grandma (without a NIC card) installing the OS upgrade so that they can use that neat multi-media tool.
What happens when we move to gigabit ether in the home or via faster ISP? Do we have to re-validate our machines? What about those of us with too few PCI slots yet we have a home-network (none NIC) card? Maybe they have compatible MAC addresses, maybe not (As I understand it, modems get assigned a virtual MAC address).
I don't mind something like this from SUN, or HP where they have more control over their systems (plus they are predominantely networked). But a not on a monopolized OS that people's live depend on (and thus depend on easy upgradibility, etc).
My guess is that a minor version of the win95 hardware upgrade madness will ensue. People will buy new machines out of convinience or give lots of business to CompUSA / BestBuy, etc.
-Michael
Linux was arguably not originally intended for production use. To my understanding it was originally only a more useful version of MINUX. Of course today we've advanced to default RAID support, but I still read articles from places like IBM where replacing the scheduler greatly enhances performance (Solaris still has a superior scheduler to my understanding).
Though Linux can be tuned because of it's open-ness, I'm sure that compatibility still plays an important role in thwarting advancement. And more importantly, generic IT's that purchase Red Hat or SuSe out of the box don't have that many options for tweaking. If an initial design goal wasn't performance, multi-media or what-ever then the addition of those things later on are most likely only bolt-ons (much like OOP in Perl).
I hear that FreeBSD and it's bretheren are superior to Linux and I've been meaning to give it a spin to see if the environment is to my likeing. OS-X, likewise has a lot going for it: It has the potential for being as open source and powerful as Linux / FreeBSD, yet it's user-friendly out of the box (at least I assume). A hard core UNIX programmer should probably feel at home with it (assuming that compilers are provided by default), yet the 8 year old daughter should be able to work it as she would an iMac.
The only draw backs that I see are the fact that the entire system is still pricey.. And.. well, it's being worked by Apple who've managed to shoot themselves in the foot too too many times. Anybody need references?
The big push that I hear Linux users say is: Just put a pretty face and make it easy-to-use-out-of-the-box(tm), and the people will flock to it. Course I hear others say "stay away from my OS evil marketers; I like it how it is". The seriousness of this comes into the corporate world that pushes NT. They want garunteed, single vendor suppliers (like SUN / MS / (Apple?) ), with rigorous certification policies. They want feature bloat and a pretty screen for configuration (usually). With that, Apple stands a chance of being a compromise between MS and SUN which might be able to achieve the best of both worlds.
Linux isn't going to go away since it completely fullfills it's mission statement - which just happens to not use the words multi-media, prettyness or Corporate America. Hell, the words learning and easy-to-use seem like opposites.
-Michael
All the EEs in the house so hooo!
At face value I think you missed much of the point.. The OS can't know the intent of the "application". Just because I've performed a write, doesn't mean that only saving that much will have any meaning after a crash. I don't really understand how the author intends to deal with the "begin" and "end" transactions unless they're providing a journalling service (which I'm not familiar enough with). At the very minimum, however, a transaction would be the modification of an inode/directory element and then at least the initially provided data. The fsck is reduced because you'll never have a disk with only part of this info. Beyond that an explicit fsync might provide enough info to the OS to say that everything buffered up till the fsync should be part of that transaction.. I it "possible" to design in such a way that DB writes can write out everything as one piece, call fsync, and then have the OS garuntee an all or nothing write.
If you mean to say that the write-back cache can be used for application meta-data (namely the transaction support), then that's an interesting (albeit proprietary) avenue to explore.. But I can imagine that regular flat SCSI and IDE based systems could benifit as well (since there are definately web servers / DBs out there without RAID). Why not push for a product that works with all drives and fights to become ubiquitous.
-Michael
ECC.. Or better yet, for expensive boards, use a form of mirrored RAID (in addition to ECC). We're using incredibly inexpensive memory to work with roughly 32Meg of data (anything more is probably asking for trouble.. we're not building a caching system as was pointed out. In fact the system should stall if the buffer starts filling up). If video cards can handle twice 32Meg pipes, a "TRAM" controller should be able to as well.
-Michael
I wrote the following on this. Basically said that the porn industry again leads the way.. You pay $30 or so a year (or even a month) for a block of web sites that subscribe to a given system. You could have themed setups, such as news organizations, geeky things (like slash, fresh meat, etc), general entetainment, etc. These organizations would compete for famed web sites, so web sites with a lot of fan fare would get to charge a lot of money for the access control providers, or cable blocks, whatever you want to call them. This undermines advertisements, but so does HBO nobody seems to fight them. A web site could still even have adds, but they just couldn't be obtrusive or real-estate stealing (as part of the agreement). Since this is something that would make web masters more happy than anyone else, I see it really only working as a consortium of web sites with tiered subscriptions. I'd gladly pay for garunteed uninterrupted slashdot viewing.. It already cuts deeply into my work time as it is.. If I had to spend an additional half hour on advertisements, there would be hell to pay (or worst case, the loss of my viewer ship). I suggested in my other article that advertisers should set up virtual malls with catchy themes such as the home shopping network (which actually seems more appropriate here). Things like price-watch work really well. Ironically, this could also be part of such a subscription service.. If people pay to use a shopping service, they'll be more likely to use it. There would be a consolidation of web sites, since those with high ratings would have more money, much like the TV industry. -Michael
Don't know if I agree. Look at DVD's. You don't have _any_ alternatives for Digital video. DVD was started by a consortium of people that wanted to get it right.. They wanted complete control over the content so they could maximize regional profits, which included things like forced airing of the copy protection laws, and now forced airing of commercials in select DVDs.. Are you going to protest a given movie becuase you can't skip past the commericals? If you're like me, and have spent thousands of dollars on a home entertainment center.. Don't you feel cheated if your only "option" is to use cheap VHS pseudo-stereo?
.01% of the people care about at that given moment.
What happens when advertisers "choose" to only pay well for sites that agree to use such intrusive forms of advertising. What happens to Slashdot and friends? Pay themselves for advertisements?
Look at PBS.. Even they can't get away from advertisements.. Their commercial free broadcasting has hours a day (or so it seems whenever I happen to watch it) of "please give us money" segments. Personally I like the entertaining commercials better than that pity fest. The only escape seems to be direct monthly payments. Once again, the porn industry leads the pack. You pay $30 a year and you get to view a block of web sites. So you go out there and say, hey Slash, freshmeat and this and that is part of this premium group. So on and so forth.. That way you pay for the types of content that you think you'll like to watch. Then what's left are the non obtrustive forms of advertisement that I OCCASIONALLY think are cute and curious enough to click through.
The real problem is that people need to advertise. The web is an excelent medium for finding what you want, so a given service provider / producer has a better chance of being matched with perspective clients than anywhere else.. But the old mentality is that people don't even know that they want you yet (consumerism at it's dirtiest). I think portal sites like amazon and price watch are valuable in this respect. People enjoy going to the mall to window shop. So advertisers should be interested in producing consumer attractive online malls. They just need to find the right gimics. One stop shopping that can feed revenue to the millions of dot coms through such portal shopping. It would be just like the home-shopping network, where people purposefully want to see the commercials and gimics. The main difference is that you're not stuck watching a stupid ring that
Though I generally agree with you. The performance per clock point is not really representative of a test.. If the PII maxes out at 1GHZ, and the Athlon is pretty close to it's limit at 1.3GHZ, and the P4 debuts at 1.5GHZ, then the likelyhood that the total performance will be higher on a P4 half a year from now is pretty good.
Additionally, apps that really need the horsepower are going to be recompiled to take advantage of the new pipelines and SIMD instructions. What is remarkable is that this new CPU design can even keep up with pre-existing apps without recompilation.
As for having to buy new boards, cases etc.. Do you really think that the majority of CPU purchases are made by people who would even think about opening up their cases? Though I don't have numbers, it is my understanding that businesses are the primary purchaser of computers; especially servers (which is currently the only thing P4s are worthwhile in right now). They don't upgrade; they get all new machines. So the fact that the power supplies are different are irrelevant. Even in light of the fact that they'll be marginally more expensive because of their newness.
Personally I'm not satisfied with the P4. But that probably doesn't really interest Intel too much. They have the highest clock speed and will soon have some of the highest benchmarks.. And brilliant IT people will see these numbers and hurd.
-Michael
What I am waiting for is a 10Gig (or more) bank of non-volitile memory.. It wouldn't even have to be fast.. Hell, if it were 100 times slower than SDRAM it would still be worth while.. The reason is that you could treat main-memory as a cache into a very very special and protected read-write region of the nvram. With this you could do away with all swapping and most of the complexities of disk-writes.
In fact, you could finally treat files as character devices instead of block devices (though you could maintain the latter for compatibility). When you do this, memory mapping of disk-space is nothing more than literally allocating a chunk of nvram into your address space.
You'd still have to perform disk-syncing, though it would be more like cache flushing than anything else. The disk sector would shrink from 512Bytes to 128Bytes (a typical cache line)
Through the use of memory mapping and independant read/write/execute permissions on memory pages, you could achieve a whole new software design structure which completely eliminates the need for OS-calls for disk access for anything other than setup and shut down. Databases could achieve phenominal performance gains.
I know that nvram disks have been around for a while, but they've been incredibly expensive, and only support very small disk sizes (couple gig max).
Assuming the power requirements on MRAM are low, and that the cell size can be comparable to that of DRAM, then we should be able to achieve 40Gig MRAM disk drives at some point, which are a good size for serious servers. So long as you can daisy-chain them as with SCSI, then you're good to go.
On 64bit machines, all you need are the appropriate drivers and you're golden.. Sadly, 32bit machines would require some sort of banked paging. Thankfully, this would enhance the general desire for 64bit machines and then things like AMDs x86-64 and Intels Italium would receive a brand new source of demand. SUN and Alpha would be the immediate benificiaries, of course.
Links
gyrons
vacum-less aether
There are some that speculate that space is not a vacume, but instead is filled with gravitons, photons, gluons, etc. These are generally considered to be massless, though they do contain energy. Some speculate that the "dark matter" in the universe is comprised of such energy, and that gravitons, for example, do in fact, contain weight.
String theory, for example, considers that the vibrational patterns of a graviton/photon work in such a way as to cancel out measurable mass. But this is only true in a macro-scopic scale.. At quatum sizes (plank-lengths) you'd see an undulating massive string as heavy as a grain of salt shifting around too quickly to have a high net mass effect.
Gyron theory suggests that space isn't empty at all, and in fact is filled with little spinning "gyrons". Mass is the cohesive and circular movement of these gyrons. Transmitter 'forces' are the wripples in gyrons much like watter wripples which spread out throughout infinity (or until ubstructed where their inertia is finally transmitted). Support for such theory is based around disproving that trasmitter forces have "transverse waves". A key point by such theorists is that the only reason we detect individual photons is because our measuring instruments are flawed and various resonant points are allowing the detectors to measure threshold breaches randomly such that we don't maintain a continuously visible ray of light.
String theory adheres to General Relativity AND quantum physics; touting itself to be the Theory of Everything. Gyron theory (and friends) says that Relativistic warping of space is hog-wash - that mass and time manipulation can be totally explained by aerodynamic "Mach" theory, where you treat the gyrons as air molecules.
Quantum theory itself suggests that in any given micro-scopic region of space, you have particle-antiparticle pairs creating and distroying themselves so long as to be within the margin of error that Heisenburg predicted (making use of discrete plank energy levels). So the smaller you look, the more stuff is there; and the more violent that stuff is.
I'm sure there are other anti-vacume theories. Personally I see growing trends between String and Gryon theory, (especially with String's M-Theory which speaks of multi-dimentional undulating strings which sound remarkably similar to Gyrons).
With that background. I make the point that movement through space is exactly the same as movement on the surface of a planet.. We use Friction. It's a highly efficient form of action-reaction.. Arguably, it takes less fuel to drive around the world then it does to blast off into space (where-after you'd get trips around the world for free). Additionally, the slower we travel, the more efficient it is.. This is because the same forces of friction that we use for travel also impeed us (incidently, this is the argument made by Gyrists as to why we can't breech the speed of light or why time seems to slow down for us). On Earth, solid friction is greater than air-friction, so we're good to go. In space, however, the cosmic-dust (beit undulating transmitter forces, spontaneously generated partical/anti-particle pairs, or locally dispensed plasma) is both our means of propulsion and resistance. Well, this relates almost identicailly with swimming in the ocean.. Namely that you have to move like a fish.
In fact, I think that within 100 years, we'll develop cosmic-dust sensative machines that allow us to build space-ships just like fish. Most likely, these won't be big clumsy metalic flippers extended in our rear, but more likely gigantic electro-magnetic jelly-fish-like nets. And when you're within a solar system, such as ours, you have to resort to various sea-fearing tactics to move around... Perhaps it's as simple as inverting the polarity of a magnetic web, or sending out graviton waves, etc.
The point is that I believe Friction-based engines are far more efficient, and better suited to space travel.. If we compare these two types of propulsion (the other being explusion action-reaction drives such as rockets/jets), we see that on earth, Rockets are arguably faster though they do have a max velocity, no matter how much force is applied. Friction based propellants, however, can theoretically approach the speed of light, so long as you can conceive of the proper mechanisms. Rocket fuel, for example propells atoms at around 20,000mph (from what I remember). You can't propell a ship any faster no matter what volume of rocket fuel you use (though larger volumes accelerate you to that speed faster). Ion-drives, likewise _can_ get you near to the speed of light, but you'll run out of fuel LONG before you ever get there.. Plus you need incredible amounts of propellent volume to achieve enough thrust to be useful; thereby reducing your payload and ultimate speed-limit accordingly.
But with mechanical friction, small amounts of energy (of virtually any form) can accelerate a spinning object (or an object on a rail) to unimaginable velocities.. Our current limitations are frictional heat. Most likely we'd have to discover how to manipulate massless transmitter forces so as to not to have 'unwanted' friction (friction in any direction other than that against the target).
Theoretically, this assymetric magnetic pulse device could be used to send out photon-waves (the transmitter force for electro-magnetism) which amplifies the interaction between charged particles (in our case, it would be the plasma from the sun). Now normally, what you'd do is create a massive electromagnet and hopefully repell/attract yourself from/to the sun. (Note: I'm not informed well enough of plasma to know if it tends to have a net positive or negative charge or both) Howver, frequency carries with it energy. And higher frequency photons should produce a higher impact force on charged particles (which should reciprocate.. which is the theorized method by which two similarly charged particles emit symmetric forces on each other). Additionally, it might be possible to funnel the magnetic waves (e.g. photons), say towards the SUN, or a planet (which has a magnetosphere). This would essentially have the effect of a limited tractor/repulsor beam.
Now, from what I gather about String theory, high temperature and pressure cause the various forces (and associated transmitters) to unify. We currently consider electro-magnetism to be unified, and we've discovered electro-weak properties at sufficiently high temperatures. My guess is that magnetism can distinguish itself at sufficiently low temperatures. Here, I totally speculate, however. Low-temperature super-conductors asymetriclly undulating might have something to do with this dispersal of magnetic and electric charge. We've closed down the science of Eletric waves, but might these magnetic waves have their own uses?
Additionally, since we know how to produce electric-waves, possibly now magnetic waves, it might be possible to produce gravitational waves. One reader suggested the use of high-speed, counter-rotating fly-wheels which would increase relative mass. Though he was shot down because of conservation of momentum, which we might be able to gain from this, however, is that if the reletavistic mass changes are fast enough, we could produce gravity waves. We might be able to achieve greater apparent gravitation to a body such as a planet or star through the use of such undulations.. Undoubtedly energy IS being transfered into the system... Where is it going? Obviously into frictional heat.. And to the general entropy of the system. But we also know that electro-magnetic waves will radiate outwards; why not gravitational waves (through the acceleration). Given that acceleration might contain the link to gravity waves (due to changing of reletivistic mass which acts as a doppler effect on observers due to the probagation delay of the gravity information), a counter-rotating fly-wheel might not be the bets model. I simple piston might be the best example.. Here, we can make use of a mechanical energy (such as a gas-engine or rail-gun), where there is massive acceleration of a mass, only to have the inertial spread out in lateral directions. Compression-based energy transfer is very efficient (at least compared to rocket engines). If massive pistons can be rapidly accelerated and decelerated, back and forth, it's possible that gravitational waves would be transmitted. What would be needed are materials with tensal strength beyond imagine (but we're still working towards that). Additionally, as with the above, it might be possible to make full use of massless transmitter forces some day.
In short, I concur with several other posters that there can be no reaction-less net force. I personally believe that Space is not a vacume (especially not around a star), and that those particles can be treated as air or water molecules for propulsion. Depending on the power-requirements of such devices, it might be possible to use Solar cells for propulsions around a star, which gives you enough momentum to direct you towards another star. If Fusion ever becomes practical, then when a stellar-ship passes around a star, it could collect light and heavy elements for use in matter-energy conversion (which is what happens in both fission and fusion), so as to maintain power until reaching the next solar system. I don't think it will be very possible to change course in-between end-points, unless we discover unimaginable power-storage capabilities (perhaps such matter dessimation.. Since we can't vary well conjure up anti-matter sufficiently to sustain matter/anti-matter condensation)
References:
"The elegant Universe" by Brian Greene
Though at first, I thought the sparc-like parallel CPU archetecture was kind of cool. But it has some serious flaws. First, there are some serious paracitic forces that impeed parallel operations.. Next it's like the NASA way of doing things.. Cost is irrelevant, we want 2, 3, or 5 way redundancy. Even if volume brings the chip cost way down, you still have to duplicate memory and controller connects, etc.
Next as far as I've been able to tell, taking a pseudo-multi-threaded application and throwing more [CG]PUs at it very quickly dies off. 64 processor SPARC machines work well mainly because they multi-task, not multi-thread. Rendering a single graphic scene is not multi-taskable, nor even multi-threadable. At best what you get is a heavy and independant pipelines coupled with SIMD operations.
As it turns out, The VSA requires a single-tasked/ single threaded stage in the pipeline that is a bottleneck for all chips. Namely the dividing and sorting of vertexes before distribution to the individual plane processors. Though a novel and "scalable" approach, this provides such over-head on low-end cards, that it can't compete with traditional archetectures. In fact, the more polygons a scene has, the slower the VSA architecture will go. This series is best suited for average numbers of polygons with incredible texture dependancies - which utilizes the BW and the scalability of the chips. Unfortunately, even for CAD/Graphics designs which Quantum seems to think they can sell to, you're going to need massive polygon counts. And unless their distribution / sorting stage scales well with the number of processors, this isn't going to be good for them.
This information I've deduced from the various pages on sharkyextreme, anandtech, and tomshardware. Specificly in relation to the ATI Radeon / nVida Detonator 3 drivers verses the infinite plains approach VSA takes.
-Michael
Voodoo Rush was a pseudo pure 3D Voodoo chipset that allowed hooks into an external 2D chip. The reviews I heard said that the choice of a 2D chip for most card manufacturers was horrible. I'm not sure if any old graphics chip could work or if only one specificially designed to work with the VoodooRush could work.
Either way, the Rush was a disaster.. I actually remember seeing some in stores and shuddering.
Granted, there has alwasy been opposition to technological shifts. My dad use to say that you'd have to have a man running some one mile in front of your car to warn people.
But my point was more one of not sitting idle and letting organizations sensor us like this just because they have what sounds like a rational argument. "But poor people could die if we don't give them life-long welfare" almost sounds compelling.. Till you realize the free-rider problem will ultimately make a society full of dependants leaching off the now minority working class.
Rethinking a bit, it makes sence that at critical passes such as this, it is important to have smooth transition. In the dawn of the automotive age, we had to make allowances for horses. In the dawn of the networked age, we can't simply allow all old-style forms of civilization to go belly up while waiting for the migration.. I guess I do applaud that there was only 10 years applied to the Olympic Moratorium. It could have been an unlimited mandate I guess.
-Michael
Seeing as how I said kernel AND drivers, and we're finding more than 64 meg of memory mapping for video drivers today, I think it was a very conservative estimate. Note I'm referring to HW BIOS mappings, not Linux based drivers.
-Michael
Consider the x86 to be the old 68K code and you're Motorola. You WANT the old code to die..
In a previous slashdot article, Intel has tried to patent their EPIC code.. What this means is that IF, by some stretch of the imagination they pull off an industry swing to IA-64 processors, then they're all of a sudden the only game in town.
Beyond that, IA-64 is slated (at least initially) to be a no holds barred processor.. The Ferrari of cars, since they spared little or no expense on functional units or cache (at-speed 4Meg cache?? Especially after they recently determined that they couldn't rely on 3'rd party or external modules). They say 1 to 4,000 processors are to be in these new machines.. That doesn't sound like your Mother's Word processor running in there does it?
Once these bad boys hit 1.5Ghz (maybe 2-5 years from now), then the fact that your emulating Duke Nukem 3D is going to be irrelevant, just like the old non-recompiled 68K code is largely antiquated. Or more directly, just like we could care less that the PPro and it's descendants run 16bit code more slowly.
At the moment, if you're going to buy an IA-64, you have a SINGLE app that you're interested in. Namely a web server, a database server, or a CAD program. If you're in a UNIX system (as has been pointed out), then it's a trivial matter of getting the code to work anew (since either the code is freely available, or the vendor that gives you the box owns the original code). If you're in windows, you still only need worry about your AutoCad xxx, etc. So-what that explorer runs slower; 733MHZ isnt' going to let it run _that_ slowly.
The type of people that shell out $20,000 on a machine could care less what the architecture is.. And to some degree, they care little about the compatibility from box to box... They have their software, and as long as it works fastest on a given platform this year, they'll buy it and switch over (since the data will migrate). Think of it like a black box phone.. A chordless phone.. Do we fret over the fact that we've gone from 400MHZ to 900MHZ to 900-Dig to 2.4Gig Spread Spectrum? Each time switching vendors? None are compatible with each other, but they fullfill a single task well. It's a black box that fullfills a business service. Slower generic apps are simply the cost of doing business with it.
Beyond that, mainstream apps like this typically take up the entire computer and desktop; there is no room for other applications.. You would have a seperate machine if you wanted to do general purpose work-station operations. Perhaps the average Matlab user might be more pressed for all-around performance, but they're on a UNIX machine anyway.
And as for a 4,000 machine.... Well, I shouldn't have to mention how specialized a program is going to be for that anyway.
The point is that Intel wanted to compete against SUN and friends, which use a totally different business paradigm which is incompatible with most users (including value-basd work-stations).
The only danger, as I see it, will be the loss of "trickle down hardware". Where the state of the art today becomes the value PC tomorrow. I doubt that Intel will have _any_ incentive for making an IA-64 cost effective (since that would make it harder to justify the 3,000% premium they'll likely charge for the additional 100MHZ). Since we're locked out of the market (for at least 3 years), Intel will have to continue developing the x86 line for many years.
The problem will be that they can't bet the farm on the IA-64; they have to keep the PXXX on top. Yet, they're not going to re-engineer the x86 for 64 bits, since that would undermine IA-64. If all I need is 64bits, and I'm not worried about massive multi-CPU or even changing my compiler tool-set, then why should I choose other than AMD's x86-64 or the equivalent Pentium derivative.. Why pay the premium for IA-64? If AMD successfully converts their entire line to x86-64, and MS comes around and produces a compatible OS, there will be no compelling need for vendors to port to IA-64 (since there will be little compelling need for a user to buy outside of tradition). Yes they'll get performance... But it would be just like switching to SUN, with their proprietary supported hardware and software environment, AND more importantly, their smaller user-base. Should Sybase support yet another architecture for that 1-10% additional market? Oracle most definately, but maybe not a smaller App company.
The point is that IA-64 requires just as massive a change for software developers and users as if they were to switch to Alpha (especially since they run NT and emulate x86 code as well). What do I gain by choosing IA-64 as the platform? Reliability is offset by the newness of the system. Scalability can almost be better handled through clusters (and more cheaply at that). 64bit will become ubiquitous, and ironically, Intel will have the only 32bit processor left in the market (with the possible exception of older Macs).
All I'm saying is that Intel had best have a backup plan. There is one thing in Intels favor, however. Politics.. They still have the clout with the major industries, and they still can coerce MS to shift in their direction. MS has stopped to purposefully breaking compatibility with competition, and moreso, they are excelent and artificially creating demand for higher end system. With win-2k having an enterprise solution, it isn't too big a streatch of the imagination to concieve that there will be an IA-64 only varient that has necessary features that simply aren't offered on other platforms. Who knows, it might even be easier to develop these enerprise solutions on IA-64 than on legacy x86[-64].
Intel will not fail.. But they will not succeed on merit alone. (much like Rambus)
-Michael
So basically, the Olypics are like the RIAA that didn't cry wolf?
Well, tough snuff. That's like saying we must ban automobiles, since that will put horse and carriage makers out of business. Or that lightbulbs will ruin the candle industry.
My heart feels for you.. It really does.
Ok. So lets be sympathetic for a minute. We currently have a system that *cough* *cough* works. We have mega product producer who pays top dollar for add space. We then have even more-mega-media-maker that buys air-time (and cyphins off coverage to many of the individual ads). A lot of this money gets funnelled into the Olympics, which eventually trickles money down to the non-economic powerhouse countries..... Soooo How did the Greeks do it without TV? Damn, that's a tough one.
-Michael
Cute, but it doesn't completely parallel the original. MS designed around 640K which purposefully limited them. The alternative was to go up to a wopping MEG!!! They arbitrarily chose the 640K (as far as I know) so as to put drivers (starting with the all important video) above that into fixed addressible regions.
:)
Sooo.. What we should do is say Linux only supports 2Gig on most systems, then you have the BIOS mapped memory, then you have the kernel.. So "1.8Meg should be enough for anybody".
-Michael
This is a name-space issue. It solves a fundamental problem with C, and helps alleviate the same problem in C++.
:)
In C, if I were to arbitrarly include packages off the net into my app, there is a chance that two packages will define and export the function named 'foo'. Even in C++, you can produce non-class functions.. The general rule, however is to put all package functions scoped inside the class as static methods.
If C were designed like C++, then you wouldn't have printf at all, you'd have
System::IO::printf(...)
You still can make that function if you are sufficiently paranoid.
Java simply said that they weren't going to allow ANY main-scoped functions, so nobody could be lazy about abusing the name-space.
I'm not advocating java here.. Just defending Packages (since I love them in Perl.
-Michael
I don't know, 1-800-DRUIDIA is pretty easy to remember. :)
There are two ways that AI can florish, and both require a single thing; stimulous. For any life form to advance, it requires new and rich stimulous.. For us, it's the physical world around us and the complications of interacting with each other. This too could be the input for an AI program, but there is another alternative. That of a virtual world. Referencing "The Matrix", it is entirely possible to fake a virtual world for a child AI. Provided that the maker never provides physical external interfaces, there is no danger. This physical interface includes the Internet.. So long as an AI can not probe the blindingly colorful world of the net, they can never leave their cage. Of course, the usefulness of such an AI program is therefore limited; restricted to theoretical solutions to problems. Any sort of interface (such as a jail-cell mail-box) might bring about questions and ultimately resentment from the captive entity (as any life form will fight for autonomy as part of it's basic survival).
"The Matrix" rendition of an AI world could be filled with numerous AI units in an ever expanding world which is limited only by the physical resources. If any of you has read the Rama series (by Arthur C Clark), you read of worlds where biology was minupuated in such a way that the basic life functions of numerous organisms are designed in such a way as to serve the master race (from food production down to energy production). Likewise, computer AI held unwittingly captive in a virtual world could be brought to serve us without ever knowing it (much like in Douglas Adam's Hitch hickers guide, where all life on earth are unwittingly part of a computer matrix who's sole purpose is to calculate the question to life the universe and everything).
The point of all that is to demonstrate how it is possible to make use of a contained universe (much like the SIM AI's can never escape the protected memory of their program). Given the net, viruses are possible, and all dreamable fears are possible.
It seems to me, however, that Clark wants a machine that fully interacts with Humans. I have not read the essay 'The Singularity', but I'd rather draw my own conclusions beforehand, lest I be biased into another's point of view. As another reader pointed out, all life is contingent on an ecosystem.. No entity can be self sustained. The only thing that a matured robotic race could achieve is high discipline with focused goals. (a la the borg) It is entirely possible that they could eventually advance to the point of not needing us, or more importantly to the point that we are competitors. Undisciplined, biased, and religiously zellous humans would of course make life very difficult for sentient robots, and would probably pose a threat which, in self defence would require retaliation. If the robots were truely AI, then given enough time they would transcend any initial programming (and "prime directives" a la robo-cop). When you back a life form into a corner, there is no logic or predictability to be seen. Faced with their own mortality, there is the chance that they will evolve right there on the spot; most likely into something more aggressive as the environment there and then dictates.
Human nature, among other things, contains laziness and greed. Even well informed and good intending humans will hold onto a rewarding thing for as long as they can; greedily grabbing for more, and lazilly avoiding the long-term consequences. Such is apparent in over-eating, poor-dietary eating, getting exercize, watching too much TV, wasting of fuel, not wasting money on cleaner emmissions, and the general desolation of the environment. More immediate consequences tend to hold us in check.. We feed our pets lest they die tomorrow. We pay our bills lest we be evicted. We shut down toxic waste (when discovered) lest we lose our drinking water. The care of a robot race could initially be treated with awe, wonder, and responsibility.. But those responsibilities will most likely be financial (as with a car a computer). Later, as AI advances in these robots, humans will neglect to care for their sensibilities. Legislation will continue to exploit them, and disregaurd them, even though they slowly develop complex life-like reactions to kind and cruel interactions. Man will most likely enact the robotic death sentence for disidence, which will further narrow their tolerance of us, and so on.. Those wise among us will fight to maintain the proper treatment of sentient robotics, for fear of the longer term effects.. But their chantings will go along with those of global warming, and detereoration of the rain-forests... Green-liberal-radicals we will become... Ultimately, if a problem persists, supposed fail-safes will go into effect where terminations will take place.. This is the proverbial corner in which they'll be backed into. Another attribute of life is cohesion with one's own kind. That could be one's mother or child being terminated.. Those life-forms with capacity to react towards interactions will treat this with great negativity.
As for robots having the option to leave our planet (since they obviously have different needs than we), this is assuming that they haven't adapted to our way of life.. Becomming more cyborg than robot or human. There are definate efficiencies such as self-replication and repair inherent to micro-organics. A cyborg is just as bound to our bountiful planet as a human. I personally do not believe that terraforming is possible; the amount of energy required is more than we currently know how to wield. To say nothing of the complexity of eco-forming (just look at how we botch the simplest ecological activities of ridding over-population in Hawaii and Austrailia through the introduction of one or two non-native creatures). I doubt that a machine would be any more capable of having wisdom in the chaotic nature of ecosystems.. It would be like making a robot that could consistently predict the direction of the stock-market... It's practically impossible since the amount of knowledge and influence you'd have to have is beyond comprehension. What's more, chaos theory (to my knowledge) suggests that you can't ever know.
On the other hand.. Man is willed to create, just like beavers are willed to make damns. We will eventually produce some semblance of persistent AI. We will eventually produce some sort of human-aiding robitics (even if we never see the likes of the Jetsons). Perhaps the speed at which we achieve this is a prime factor. As people are allowed to experience mechanical wonders with a virtual will of their own, they will become comfortable with it, and learn the consequences (on smaller scales) of what abuse might mean. Much like a child being confined to a house, and feeling the consequences of cuts and bruses while playing in their realm. Only later are they allowed to learn the consequences of crossign the road or driving too fast.
Humanity will never achieve "harmony".. That's simply not the way life works.. True harmony would involve no coersion, malis, disgust, hatred, anger, etc. But without these, we have no motivating forces for change.. Without change we become a decaying log, who will only last as long as our environment. If our focus was uniform, then we would then battle our environment, fighting to grow and spread - Slowly destroying our environment. At some point me may learn to travel. But we have two major directions, that of Star Trek (where we take in moderation, and greet new sentient beings) or that of Independance day, where we've learned that we can't cohabitate with other cohesive life-forms and it's best if we don't even try and communicate, but simply take their resources. The borg might be another example.
It is, however, unrealistic to believe that we'll be able to do away with human laziness, greed, and selfishness.. It's part of every life-forms basic survival instincts. It's part of life's exponential responses.. The weak are killed by the strong, which thus empowers them, and ultimately makes the strong stronger, and less reachable... So long as the colony thrives, this continues exponentially.. Then when a colony takes over an eco-system, they die off almost instantly since they have no food left.. And what little is left is quickly killed. Without this, you'd have the equivalent of stagflation. All life forms would degrade to a lazy, weak, hungry bunch. I doubt it's even possible to conceive of a balanced eco-system without death and conflict. To presume that Robots will get it right is probably fanciful. Just as with engineering, we learn that there are no right answers.. No best answers.. In fact, there typically is many more than one correct way of accomplishing something.. Each will have its own pitfalls.. The key is to find those solutions whos' pitfalls will not be exploited by the surrounding environment (including people). Thus a robot may find thousands of potential ways of structuring it's society, but unless there is variety (as exists in all other communities of life), they may be exploited by "single points of failure". For a robotic race to evolve and survive, they will have to be as varied as humans.. But this means that there will be conflicts in the robotic world...
Essentially, 10,000 years from now (assuming Earth stille exists), I believe that Robots will be indistinguishable from Humans.. With the same petty disputes, wars, hopes and aspirations.. You will have zeallots that utterly profess their version of truth and what should be, you'll have the moderates (typically in control) who are just trying to scrape a living, and you'll have to ambitious who plot and hold few morals or concerns for others (including any remaining humans).
As I alluded to before, I believe that if we survive long enough, robitcs and humans will meld into an all new race. Merging the cold power of raw calculation and programmable discipline along with the adaptebility of organic life, with the occasional physicla augmentation of semi-organics or even inorganics. Alongside the chemical anti-bodies will be the nano-probes. Along with the bone structures are programmed organic construction workers that repair the body with incredible efficiency.
In summary, there is no certainty about the future, since it lies in the realm of chaos. There is no single direction that our future could take. We may outlaw AI, we may be over-run by AI (which would then, most likely either die off, or attempt to revive our life once they are in trouble). We could discover aliens and thereby change everything in an instant (making the whole point irrelavent). We could learn that we don't know how to create functional AI (just as we've persistently failed at eco-system control). Or we could evolve as a race.
One thing, however, is enevitable... Change.
-Michael
The IA-64 is a completely differnet CPU.. It's actually one of the most novel ideas I've ever seen in silicon.. This doesn't mean it's practical or will be any faster than a good ole fashioned post-RISC processor.
:)
The x86 comes in through a translation layer (kind of like the PowerPC's translation of the old 68K ops).
In fact, Intel changed their entire strategy so that they could make the market ready for the IA-64.. The main issue is that we wanted to have high band-width memory that could work with many many simultaneous memory requests.. We wanted deep pipelines, and speculative out-of-order operations. We wanted to make heavy use of instruction caching.. These are all the sorts of technology Intel has been trying to force feed the industry (See RDRAM).. The reason for this was that Italium (IA-64) is a super-pipelined, multi-way, parallel-op processor that can do all of it's memory prefetching at the beginning of every function call speculatively (meaning that it can even survive accidental illegal-memory references, much like with C++ exeptions.. Fast on the norm, slow on the rarely found case of an exception).
Intel needed motherboards in place that demonstrated to the public the ability to handle large CPU's with heavy power loads. Multi-path memory structures that work best in a pipelined manner where latency wasn't even an issue (most memory accesses in IA-64 aren't needed for many many instructions).. Additionally, they needed to address the huge CPU to memory disparity. The ability to handle concurrent operation (a la SPARC). In short, Intel has basically taken ideas from just about every CPU manufacturer that I've ever heard of.
Thankfully, the industry has benifited by some of Intel's exuberance. We've had the war of the memory architectures which has given us DDR-SDRAM. We have massive transistor busses.. We have competition with Alphas and SPARCs (since their turf has officially been shared). We have competing ideas for how a high-end server should look (see AMD's K8 line).
For better or worse, IA-64 is here today.. Even if nobody buys it 2 years from now.
-Michael
But this still doesn't mean that a foreign firm is responsible for what they may receive through a broad-cast medium. My point was that the French jammed US air-waves to avoid such incidents, so they can use similar (and even more sophisticated) methods today.. It should be easy to require by French law to filter incomming operations of objectionable nature. Are they going to order the shutting down of all Nazi propaganda web-sites around the world?
There are two points of view here.. The US FCC, among other things, considers broad-cast air-waves to be hazzardous to minors and otherwise sensative individuals, so they regulate it... Likewise with Broad-cast TV. Other pseudo public media such as Theaters are now getting similar forms of enforcement through the MPAA. The internet is just another broadcast media that many believe should also be restricted.. Or at least provide road-blocks that physically prevent sensative viewers from reaching them... The only way this could truely work is if all web sites were legally bound to post ratings with their web site... Or that all web servers apply a ratings filters on all outgoing HTTP packets.. Violators could be prosecuted... Thus home viewers could simply set their browsers to a max rating and the world is safe once again.
This is unlikely since, only ascii text could be easily filtered / rated. Images would have to be on a voluntary basis. Course, I think web sites are taking the right step in placing initial "over 18 only" pages. I'm sure they'd be willing to rate their entire web sites as X or what-ever to further avoid litigation. It would be a simple extension to the HTTP protocol to add a rating header field. At this point, you could argue a finer grain of rating, which, among other things would rate propoganda such as Nazi's as at a minimum R, or even to be flagged. Course flagging would get into a hairy situation (since you could have an infinite number of them).. And politicians and courts would be independantly mandating their use to the point that the over-head is insane.
This whole point of view is based on the idea that responsibility lies with the broad-caster.
The other point of view is that responsibility lies with the recipient.. This point of view works more like Gun laws.. Do you hold a gun manufacturer or salesman responsible if a parent doesn't lock their gun properly such that a child can't get to it? If your country outlaws public owning of guns, then you can block imports (for the most part).. I personally believe the internet can be viewed more like a gun than a broad-cast PA system. You can filter or modify the data at every node with the internet, much like you have "customs" at every shipping point.
-Michael