How many DVDs have you watched where, if you paused it (and sometimes without even doing that) you could see encoding artifacts?
Like you, I see artifacts in all DVDs and digital cable -- fast-moving scenes, jaggies around edges, pixelation during jump cuts, MPEG grain in dark scenes, yuck, yuck, yuck!. People fawn over "digital pictures" but I see all the compression artifacts. Where people got the idea that real images are composed of little squares of sinusoids is beyond me (FFTs or DCTs may be easy to compute, but that doesn't make them good). Sadly, you and I are in the minority and will have to put up with media products geared toward less disciminating visual systems.
Regarding your other good points, I have a feeling that the MPAA might have much to say over the adoption of EVD. Perhaps internal marketshare in China might be driven by govt incentives, but I remain skeptical that most people have a enough problems with MPEG or region codes to switch to EVD.
I don't see EVD being much of a issue outside of China because it does not offer any advantage to consumers (DVD has HDTV plans too). Unless China wants to spend $100 million (or more) marketing the new format to Western consumers, they aren't going to get any market share here. Even in China, it will be an uphill battle. I don't see why Chinese consumers would buy the more expensive format, unless they are Patriotic and have money to burn. Also, I'd bet that media production has reached critical mass for DVD. How will China convince pressing plants to adapt to EVD?
Servers and workstations have been available in 64-bit versions for more than a decade with Alpha, R4000, SPARC, and other high-end machines. Computers with more than 4 GB of RAM are common in enterprise systems. Intensive applications have already moved to 64-bit long ago. We don't need new processors to address this issue (although cheaper processors are always appreciated by the CFO). This move was directly driven by the specialized applications used in enterprises and workstations.
Since I don't see a need for the average consumer or corporate PC user to host a 1,000 user SAP instance or do real-time fluid dynamics simulations of nuclear explosions, it seems less likely that they will "need" 64-bit computing. You don't need more than 4 GB of RAM to get e-mail, browse the web, write a memo, or edit a 5-megapixel image (frankly, 128 MB should be more than enough, unless your OS & apps are bloatware).
That said, one could argue that people don't need massive 4-wheel-drive SUVs, but that doesn't stop them from buying them. And if, as you suggest, the incremental cost of 64-bit is neglible, then the move will occur anyway.
Perhaps you are right, 64-bit is inevitable. If so, I predict a massive windfall for distributed computing projects like SETI@Home when home PC users find their CPU utilization in the single digits. Either that, or the folks in Redmond better start dreaming up new ways to soak up all that extra RAM and CPU cycles.
I wonder what applications will drive the adoption of 64-bit computers? Besides playing the latest games, most real-world applications seem to run fine on older 32-bit processors, even sub-GHz processors. AMD's prediction is self serving.
That said, I have my eye on a new dual G5, so I guess I've bought into the hype that size (word size) matters.
But the bilateral symmetry also explains its own frequency: each solution for the left half forms a complete solution when paired with any solution for the right half (assuming they use disjoint sets of pieces, if I understand the rules of the game properly)
Very good point. Assuming the pairing that you describe, bilateral symmetry would multiply the number of seemingly unique solutions by a factor of 8.
Even so, only 48 of the solutions lack the bilaterally symmetric 2-rectangle construction. 488 solutions have this symmetry (or 61 unique solutions after factoring out reflections and rotations of the component rectangles.). Thus, even after removing the solution-multiplying effects of symmetry, we still have a majority of solutions (61 out of 109) that have the square cut in half into two rectangles. Its less compelling than 488-out-of-536, but still interesting.
Although a whistle-based language is certainly possible, as the article proves, I don't think that producing sound is the challenge for computers or robots.
Speech recognition is continuing to improve. Currently, computers can either recognize most speech from a single person or most people on a single topic. Speaker-to-speaker variations (that make fully automated ay-person, any-word recognition hard) would plague even a whistle language - people would whistle with an accent.
The real challenge is in producing meaning, not sound. Understanding the meaning and intent of the words (however they are voiced) is a challenge as is constructing langauge that is in turn properly understood by human listeners.
that powerbook would go very nice with the rumored 30" cinema display that should be out early next year - even though dell beat them to the 2.5 feet punch.
Its not clear that Dell beat Apple to the punch until Apple's display comes out. Dell's 30" display is a very low resolution LCD TV (1280 x 768) while Apple's current 23" display is 1920 x 1200. Although Apple is reticent on the spec (even the existance) of its 30" display, it seems unlikely that they will introduce a TV. But then, with Apple, you never know.
I'm not surprised that unsual particles like this are being discovered. Perhaps the long halflife of this particle suggests that aggregation can lead to stablization. In the same way that neutrons are stabilized by protons on the nuclei of everyday matter, I'd bet that mesons can be stabilized either by other mesons or baryons.
Perhaps this won't overturn pre-existing models for elementary particles, but lead to extensions of theories on how aggregates of these particles behave.
There may be 536 solutions, but the original creator started with a single solution in the form of the original pattern and order of cuts. We may never know the exact order and pattern of cuts that created the puzzle, but I'd bet we can guess how most people would attempt to create such a puzzle.
For example the fact that the vast majority of 536 solutions are bilaterally symmetric suggests that the first cut in the creation of the puzzle was right down the middle. I'd also wager that cuts that bisect fragments are more likely than cuts that nick a fragment. Such straight-line, bisecting cutting behaviors are more likely than cutting polygons out of the middle of the whole square.
It may be a math puzzle solved by a computer, but I wonder if we can learn something about how people think from it.
I wonder if any companies are fielding artificial forum participants. A bit of programming, a bit of AI, and you could create software that automatically writes short postings to a forum and masquerades as a person. An artificial forum member does not need to pass the Turing test because it does not need to respond coherently to any and all questions.
A business could then spawn multiple copies with different personality tweaks or language usage parameters and let them post freely to online forums. Over the years, such artificial agents would likely become respected and carry great weight with other participants. Of course, these pseudo-posters would have carefully tuned fanboy/troll behaviors that tend to tout the company and trash the competition. Constant presence on the forum and subtle messages would bias the forum's mood toward the company.
Hmmm....are all members of/. real? How do we know?
Flying cars of any practical everyday use would be very difficult to build, wouldn't be very economical, would be extremely noisy etc.
I somewhat disagree with you on this. You can get kit airplanes and helicopters for less than the price of a luxury car. And if these machines were manufactured the way cars are (volume production with massive economies of scale), the price would drop further. Noise can be reduced with ducted fans and better blade shaping (besides, noise is a societal prohibition, not a technological problem). As for not being economical, that issue does not seem to stop people from buying massive SUVs.
Concorde died because it was not economical enough. Even at upteen thousand a round-trip ticket, the fuel costs were too high. Add in increasing maintenance of aging airframes and a depressed travel market, and you have death for that design.
But aerospace engineering has advanced since Concorde first took to the skies. Better, lighter materials, and computer-aided design mean a better, most efficient airframe. Supersonic cruise engines (derived from military jet fighters) would improve fuel efficiency.
The problem is convincing Boeing or Airbus that airlines want to order at least $10-20 billion or more in some next-gen supersonic passenger liner. Even if the next Concorde is fuel efficient, designing a new passenger jet is not cheap.
Fast low-latency connectivity to every home, via a low-cost fiber-optic cable?
The gap between first demo, hyped press releases, and widespread acceptance is very very long. Consider the very long convoluted history of video telephony. Even the people that have the bandwidth for video telephony do not use it much.
Those pesky customers -- there's not enough of them, they're all waiting for others to adopt the technology, and then they don't want to pay much for the service when it gets to them.
Given the uproar created by the Segway, its not surprising that flying cars and jetpacks never "took off." This is not an issue of what engineers can do technologically, but an issue of what society says they can do in public.
I wonder if they can keep things going for a while by auctioning off time of the telescope? I doubt they could raise 600 million, but I'd bet they could keep things going for a while.
I don't see how Microsoft can patent a schema. I believe that there are only four primary statutory classes of patentable things: 1) processes; 2) machines; 3) manufacturing methods; or 4) compositions of matter (chemicals/pharmaceuticals). They may be able to patent the processes, methods or mechanisms (software) that read and write documents adhering to the schema. But the schema itself does not seem patentable, only copyrightable.
IANAL, so maybe I missed something that Microsoft's $1000/hr attorneys did not. For example, maybe they are claiming that a schema defines a composition of matter????
I wonder how many IT gurus are members of ACM or IEEE Computer Society? The % of/. members who are in ACM must be very small because ACM only has 75,000 members in total.
What about a front wheel shaft drive or two-wheel shaft drive for mountain bikes and bicycling on slick surfaces. With a properly designed shaft drive (counterrotating shafts in the front fork), you could deliver torque to the front wheels as well as the back. It may not be "efficient" (if you really want exercise, why worry about efficiency) but it would improve traction.
Often you want to speak to a few specific people at a conference. These badges could help you find that person by asking other badges "have you seen Mr. X?" Other badges might reply "no" or "yes, just 15 seconds ago." The system would thus act as a warmer-colder guidance system. And if the bages had internal location tracking (maybe via a low-level RF field in the venue) then the badge could even report where it was when it saw Mr. X.
I think they should build little wireless websites into tombstones. That way anyone with a WiFi or bluetooth enabled phone/pda/computer would get be able to access the dearly-departed's website at the gravesite. The device would consist of a small PDA as the core computer, some storage, the wireless interfaces, a battery, and an external solar panel for power. You could even build a blog/wiki into the tombstone so that gravesite visitors could leave their messages.
This contest brings back fond memories of creating line printer art on a CDC6600. Better than ASCII art, it relied on the ability to to use carriage returns (without line feeds) to create especially dark overprinted characters for a much wider pallette of gray values ("8" "X" ":" was pretty dark if the ribbon was fresh). You could make some pretty cool pictures (within the restrictions of 80 cols of overprinted chars). The biggest problem was that it tended to irritate the computer center gnomes when you sent your job to the printer.
And why did it have to be a virus. Why not a cute little kitten or something?
They created an artificial virus because viruses are excellent for getting genetic code installed in other organisms. Instead of creating a complex organism from scratch, you create a virus that installs a patch on your favorite organism. People could then create and install patches that give plants the ability to directly use nitrogen from the air (avoiding costly, polluting fertilizers), fix genetic diseases in people), make glow-in-the dark cats, or craft new microbes that generate hydrogen from sunlight (the reason the Dept of Energy funded the research).
These online games seemed doomed to recreate the complications that drive people to play games in the first place. I wonder if Second Life will now have a PTO in the game to register and regulate player-created IP. I wonder if the games will become so much like real-life that some people will craft a simplier MMORPG to play inside a more complex one ("Third Life" anyone???).
What is the world coming to when one must escape from even escapist entertainments?
This feat is not that hard because a virus can have such a simple, compact codebase. I remember studying a biological retrovirus that had only 4000 nucleotide bases (equivalent of only 1 kilobyte of data) and only 4 genes total. Gene 1 encoded a reverse transcriptase to convert the virus' RNA into DNA that could be replicated by the host. Genes 2 and 3 encoded two self-asssembling capsule proteins that make the shell of the virus. And gene 4 was actually a corrupted dud (so the real code base was actually smaller than 1 kB).
For better or for worse, it does nto take much to construct a virus.
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How many DVDs have you watched where, if you paused it (and sometimes without even doing that) you could see encoding artifacts?
Like you, I see artifacts in all DVDs and digital cable -- fast-moving scenes, jaggies around edges, pixelation during jump cuts, MPEG grain in dark scenes, yuck, yuck, yuck!. People fawn over "digital pictures" but I see all the compression artifacts. Where people got the idea that real images are composed of little squares of sinusoids is beyond me (FFTs or DCTs may be easy to compute, but that doesn't make them good). Sadly, you and I are in the minority and will have to put up with media products geared toward less disciminating visual systems.
Regarding your other good points, I have a feeling that the MPAA might have much to say over the adoption of EVD. Perhaps internal marketshare in China might be driven by govt incentives, but I remain skeptical that most people have a enough problems with MPEG or region codes to switch to EVD.
I don't see EVD being much of a issue outside of China because it does not offer any advantage to consumers (DVD has HDTV plans too). Unless China wants to spend $100 million (or more) marketing the new format to Western consumers, they aren't going to get any market share here. Even in China, it will be an uphill battle. I don't see why Chinese consumers would buy the more expensive format, unless they are Patriotic and have money to burn. Also, I'd bet that media production has reached critical mass for DVD. How will China convince pressing plants to adapt to EVD?
Servers and workstations have been available in 64-bit versions for more than a decade with Alpha, R4000, SPARC, and other high-end machines. Computers with more than 4 GB of RAM are common in enterprise systems. Intensive applications have already moved to 64-bit long ago. We don't need new processors to address this issue (although cheaper processors are always appreciated by the CFO). This move was directly driven by the specialized applications used in enterprises and workstations.
Since I don't see a need for the average consumer or corporate PC user to host a 1,000 user SAP instance or do real-time fluid dynamics simulations of nuclear explosions, it seems less likely that they will "need" 64-bit computing. You don't need more than 4 GB of RAM to get e-mail, browse the web, write a memo, or edit a 5-megapixel image (frankly, 128 MB should be more than enough, unless your OS & apps are bloatware).
That said, one could argue that people don't need massive 4-wheel-drive SUVs, but that doesn't stop them from buying them. And if, as you suggest, the incremental cost of 64-bit is neglible, then the move will occur anyway.
Perhaps you are right, 64-bit is inevitable. If so, I predict a massive windfall for distributed computing projects like SETI@Home when home PC users find their CPU utilization in the single digits. Either that, or the folks in Redmond better start dreaming up new ways to soak up all that extra RAM and CPU cycles.
I wonder what applications will drive the adoption of 64-bit computers? Besides playing the latest games, most real-world applications seem to run fine on older 32-bit processors, even sub-GHz processors. AMD's prediction is self serving.
That said, I have my eye on a new dual G5, so I guess I've bought into the hype that size (word size) matters.
But the bilateral symmetry also explains its own frequency: each solution for the left half forms a complete solution when paired with any solution for the right half (assuming they use disjoint sets of pieces, if I understand the rules of the game properly)
Very good point. Assuming the pairing that you describe, bilateral symmetry would multiply the number of seemingly unique solutions by a factor of 8.
Even so, only 48 of the solutions lack the bilaterally symmetric 2-rectangle construction. 488 solutions have this symmetry (or 61 unique solutions after factoring out reflections and rotations of the component rectangles.). Thus, even after removing the solution-multiplying effects of symmetry, we still have a majority of solutions (61 out of 109) that have the square cut in half into two rectangles. Its less compelling than 488-out-of-536, but still interesting.
Although a whistle-based language is certainly possible, as the article proves, I don't think that producing sound is the challenge for computers or robots.
Speech recognition is continuing to improve. Currently, computers can either recognize most speech from a single person or most people on a single topic. Speaker-to-speaker variations (that make fully automated ay-person, any-word recognition hard) would plague even a whistle language - people would whistle with an accent.
The real challenge is in producing meaning, not sound. Understanding the meaning and intent of the words (however they are voiced) is a challenge as is constructing langauge that is in turn properly understood by human listeners.
that powerbook would go very nice with the rumored 30" cinema display that should be out early next year - even though dell beat them to the 2.5 feet punch.
Its not clear that Dell beat Apple to the punch until Apple's display comes out. Dell's 30" display is a very low resolution LCD TV (1280 x 768) while Apple's current 23" display is 1920 x 1200. Although Apple is reticent on the spec (even the existance) of its 30" display, it seems unlikely that they will introduce a TV. But then, with Apple, you never know.
I'm not surprised that unsual particles like this are being discovered. Perhaps the long halflife of this particle suggests that aggregation can lead to stablization. In the same way that neutrons are stabilized by protons on the nuclei of everyday matter, I'd bet that mesons can be stabilized either by other mesons or baryons.
Perhaps this won't overturn pre-existing models for elementary particles, but lead to extensions of theories on how aggregates of these particles behave.
There may be 536 solutions, but the original creator started with a single solution in the form of the original pattern and order of cuts. We may never know the exact order and pattern of cuts that created the puzzle, but I'd bet we can guess how most people would attempt to create such a puzzle.
For example the fact that the vast majority of 536 solutions are bilaterally symmetric suggests that the first cut in the creation of the puzzle was right down the middle. I'd also wager that cuts that bisect fragments are more likely than cuts that nick a fragment. Such straight-line, bisecting cutting behaviors are more likely than cutting polygons out of the middle of the whole square.
It may be a math puzzle solved by a computer, but I wonder if we can learn something about how people think from it.
I wonder if any companies are fielding artificial forum participants. A bit of programming, a bit of AI, and you could create software that automatically writes short postings to a forum and masquerades as a person. An artificial forum member does not need to pass the Turing test because it does not need to respond coherently to any and all questions.
/. real? How do we know?
A business could then spawn multiple copies with different personality tweaks or language usage parameters and let them post freely to online forums. Over the years, such artificial agents would likely become respected and carry great weight with other participants. Of course, these pseudo-posters would have carefully tuned fanboy/troll behaviors that tend to tout the company and trash the competition. Constant presence on the forum and subtle messages would bias the forum's mood toward the company.
Hmmm....are all members of
Flying cars of any practical everyday use would be very difficult to build, wouldn't be very economical, would be extremely noisy etc.
I somewhat disagree with you on this. You can get kit airplanes and helicopters for less than the price of a luxury car. And if these machines were manufactured the way cars are (volume production with massive economies of scale), the price would drop further. Noise can be reduced with ducted fans and better blade shaping (besides, noise is a societal prohibition, not a technological problem). As for not being economical, that issue does not seem to stop people from buying massive SUVs.
Concorde died because it was not economical enough. Even at upteen thousand a round-trip ticket, the fuel costs were too high. Add in increasing maintenance of aging airframes and a depressed travel market, and you have death for that design.
But aerospace engineering has advanced since Concorde first took to the skies. Better, lighter materials, and computer-aided design mean a better, most efficient airframe. Supersonic cruise engines (derived from military jet fighters) would improve fuel efficiency.
The problem is convincing Boeing or Airbus that airlines want to order at least $10-20 billion or more in some next-gen supersonic passenger liner. Even if the next Concorde is fuel efficient, designing a new passenger jet is not cheap.
Fast low-latency connectivity to every home, via a low-cost fiber-optic cable?
The gap between first demo, hyped press releases, and widespread acceptance is very very long. Consider the very long convoluted history of video telephony. Even the people that have the bandwidth for video telephony do not use it much.
Those pesky customers -- there's not enough of them, they're all waiting for others to adopt the technology, and then they don't want to pay much for the service when it gets to them.
Given the uproar created by the Segway, its not surprising that flying cars and jetpacks never "took off." This is not an issue of what engineers can do technologically, but an issue of what society says they can do in public.
I wonder if they can keep things going for a while by auctioning off time of the telescope? I doubt they could raise 600 million, but I'd bet they could keep things going for a while.
Maybe Aussie officials are upset that the game would have people drive on the wrong side of the road.
I don't see how Microsoft can patent a schema. I believe that there are only four primary statutory classes of patentable things: 1) processes; 2) machines; 3) manufacturing methods; or 4) compositions of matter (chemicals/pharmaceuticals). They may be able to patent the processes, methods or mechanisms (software) that read and write documents adhering to the schema. But the schema itself does not seem patentable, only copyrightable.
IANAL, so maybe I missed something that Microsoft's $1000/hr attorneys did not. For example, maybe they are claiming that a schema defines a composition of matter????
I wonder how many IT gurus are members of ACM or IEEE Computer Society? The % of /. members who are in ACM must be very small because ACM only has 75,000 members in total.
What about a front wheel shaft drive or two-wheel shaft drive for mountain bikes and bicycling on slick surfaces. With a properly designed shaft drive (counterrotating shafts in the front fork), you could deliver torque to the front wheels as well as the back. It may not be "efficient" (if you really want exercise, why worry about efficiency) but it would improve traction.
Often you want to speak to a few specific people at a conference. These badges could help you find that person by asking other badges "have you seen Mr. X?" Other badges might reply "no" or "yes, just 15 seconds ago." The system would thus act as a warmer-colder guidance system. And if the bages had internal location tracking (maybe via a low-level RF field in the venue) then the badge could even report where it was when it saw Mr. X.
I think they should build little wireless websites into tombstones. That way anyone with a WiFi or bluetooth enabled phone/pda/computer would get be able to access the dearly-departed's website at the gravesite. The device would consist of a small PDA as the core computer, some storage, the wireless interfaces, a battery, and an external solar panel for power. You could even build a blog/wiki into the tombstone so that gravesite visitors could leave their messages.
This contest brings back fond memories of creating line printer art on a CDC6600. Better than ASCII art, it relied on the ability to to use carriage returns (without line feeds) to create especially dark overprinted characters for a much wider pallette of gray values ("8" "X" ":" was pretty dark if the ribbon was fresh). You could make some pretty cool pictures (within the restrictions of 80 cols of overprinted chars). The biggest problem was that it tended to irritate the computer center gnomes when you sent your job to the printer.
Ahhh....nostalgia.....
And why did it have to be a virus. Why not a cute little kitten or something?
They created an artificial virus because viruses are excellent for getting genetic code installed in other organisms. Instead of creating a complex organism from scratch, you create a virus that installs a patch on your favorite organism. People could then create and install patches that give plants the ability to directly use nitrogen from the air (avoiding costly, polluting fertilizers), fix genetic diseases in people), make glow-in-the dark cats, or craft new microbes that generate hydrogen from sunlight (the reason the Dept of Energy funded the research).
These online games seemed doomed to recreate the complications that drive people to play games in the first place. I wonder if Second Life will now have a PTO in the game to register and regulate player-created IP. I wonder if the games will become so much like real-life that some people will craft a simplier MMORPG to play inside a more complex one ("Third Life" anyone???).
What is the world coming to when one must escape from even escapist entertainments?
This feat is not that hard because a virus can have such a simple, compact codebase. I remember studying a biological retrovirus that had only 4000 nucleotide bases (equivalent of only 1 kilobyte of data) and only 4 genes total. Gene 1 encoded a reverse transcriptase to convert the virus' RNA into DNA that could be replicated by the host. Genes 2 and 3 encoded two self-asssembling capsule proteins that make the shell of the virus. And gene 4 was actually a corrupted dud (so the real code base was actually smaller than 1 kB).
For better or for worse, it does nto take much to construct a virus.