Maybe see if one of their lawyers could be a trustee?
Perhaps the FSF could use the cash to begin a its own investment fund. Raise 35M USD, buy 51% of SCOX, fire that nest of bastards, put Linus and Stallman on the board and make every patent, copywrite, source file and document they own public domain.
If this was done I would personally invest a couple grand and then, forever after, insist that it be known as GNU/Linux.
Sophisticated games won't be found on consoles. Consider this game. The vendor is oblivious to consoles because their customers aren't interested in accepting the necessary compromises. It requires more capacity, performance and flexibility (running multiple clients and third party software (teamspeak, web browsers) distributing software updates, etc.) than a console will provide. The game will always utilize whatever capacity a high-end PC can provide (a moving target,) which will always place it beyond the means of consoles.
Will consoles continue to displace high-end PCs for less sophisticated games? Yep. Will this eliminate non-console gaming? Nope. Developers, naturally, will gravitate toward platforms that offer the largest audience. This is driving unification between the platforms. This is why contemporary consoles all use essentially the same graphics hardware as found in PCs.
In fact - its amazing how much Jedi philosophy, which is generally thought of as fictional religios beliefs, is so closely related to the high levels concepts of Bujinkan...
"There's this huge following, which is weird. They have big meets and conventions, and I find it all a bit frightening." - Ewan McGregor
That statement doesn't mean that the device is slow. It only says that it takes the researchers a long time to establish the necessary conditions. The odds are that the device, having vanishingly small mass, can switch at very high frequency. Imagine if you were asked to operate an ordinary light switch using the passenger side rear corner of a dump truck while blindfolded. This is analogous to what it's like to manipulate individual molecules with an STM.
Finally, I really don't get your point about the recent vote. What's that got do to with anything we're discussing here?
By "recent vote" you mean the EU constitution? I make no point about that. That's an internal EU matter; the US has no say, no relevance, as it should not. I refer to cases where France ("Chirac") Germany and other rivals claim UN authority trumps US sovereignty.
I am no fan of Microsoft, but I think that they have been unfairly treated in these "anti-trust" cases in Europe and the US.
Is this based on the notion of "double jeopardy"? Being tried for the same thing twice is unfair?
If this is the case then, while well intentioned, you're wrong. The only way to eliminate this situation is to federate authority to some higher power. Does that appeal to you? Frankly, I'd rather Microsoft "suffer" with EU politics than Chirac have a vote over the US economy in some international body.
Microsoft has and will continue to make plenty of money in EU markets. The EU runs it's own show and that is how it should be. Microsoft assumed these obligations in Europe; no one held a gun to their heads while billions of EUR poured in.
Study the history of corporations; in the US, at one time, a corporation couldn't cross state lines. The sovereign states wanted no interstate corporations. This limited the scope of corporations, something that fit well with early US tendencies of abhorring "big" things.
I see nothing inherently wrong with this. Microsoft may either comply, or roll up their carpet, lay off a few thousand Europeans and go elsewhere.
...it's got to do with "sovereign countries" etc... oh wait you're from the US so you probably don't know what that means now do you?
Didn't the US rely on sovereign authority when it invaded part of the middle east, despite claims by its European rivals that it had no such authority? Sovereign authority is not lost on the US and it won't be federated away to Chirac anytime soon, friend.
They are correct, if they limit themselves to an idealized case; one execution thread. The real world for me, however, is Eve Online. I usually have two game clients running at the same time plus Teamspeak. I am very much looking forward to SMP for my game machine.
Your suspicion is correct; even single threaded gaming will benefit from dual core (a.k.a. SMP) hardware. If a game involves network traffic, for instance, the overhead of handling the traffic will naturally off load to the other core within the OS network stack. Audio processing can also be scheduled separately because much of that computation occurs in separate threads run on behalf of the audio "driver". There are also some built-in deficiencies in IO subsystems (especially ATA derived hardware) that can block a CPU. Two cores can help paper over the blocking and eliminate stalls. I've used SMP workstations for ordinary work and gaming. They operate smoothly where a single CPU machine will thrash trying to keep up.
Game developers will leverage SMP hardware quickly. They will go for the low hanging fruit first; separate physics, audio, bookkeeping, etc., into threads to allow the 3D engine to monopolize one of the cores. Later, as SMP becomes ubiquitous, they will push harder and enable parts of the graphics engine to run in parallel. This pattern is essentially identical to how operating systems were slowly made into highly parallel systems; pushing synchronization locks deeper and deeper until the costs outweighed the gains.
Date line May 31, 2005: Toyota Motor Corp. aims to start selling robots that can help look after elderly people or serve tea to guests by 2010.
Date line April 1, 2011: A Japanese pensioner was found dead today beneath a mountain of tea cups and saucers. A relative claims a Toyota robot given to the man a year before continued to carry out it's tea serving prerogative for months after the victim had expired.
P2P VOIP app. It's main claim to fame is its ability to "just work" despite firewalls. This is done using several techniques that the clients automatically discover. Most frequently clients "hole punch" via UDP packets emerging from both ends so connections work when both sides are behind stateful packet filters. Other stuff fueling Skype popularity includes; multiple platforms supported (Linux, OS-X, etc.,) friendly API terms (thus these sort of plugins appearing) and, best of all, it's free (as in beer.)
I thought of this sometime last week. I was astonished to discover no results when I queried Google. I suppose someone out there is knocking together an IP over Skype stack and has yet to unleash it on the world... but at least I wasn't unsuspecting. I wonder if IP over Skype might win the 5000 EUR award for the Skype API Competition
First, this is outstanding; Google, unsatisfied with traditional machine translation techniques, pioneers their own design. I'm certain their advertisers will be pleased to have their adds auto-translated to whatever language is necessary.
Second, I think we'll witness a case of having the AI ante upped once again when another traditional AI challenge is met. Wikipedia puts this best; When viewed with a moderate dose of cynicism, AI can be viewed as 'the set of computer science problems without good solutions at this point.' Once a sub-discipline results in useful work, it is carved out of artificial intelligence and given its own name.
I have. Karma=Excellent, UID<1000, subscriber. Perhaps it has to do with my habits; I usually log in with the first "Preview" I perform when posting. In the last week or so I've gotten a captcha each time.
...for a while, it was deemed a "very, very difficult problem" to get a robot chassis to walk up stairs. All manner of research teams were working on it. It was eventually solved by a one guy with a z80...
There are many examples of this. Once the secret behind one of our abilities is revealed, we find that it's very resource efficient. How could it be otherwise? There is no magic; the brain is slow, low power system.
OCR and, more specifically, handwriting recognition were once "computationally infeasible." Today, Post Office machines routinely route messages based on handwriting and any given PDA can handle this input.
Piloting all sorts of vehicles through novel terrain is in practical use in many places and quickly becoming feasible for others. I am certain I will one day own a car that can drive itself on ordinary streets and highways using a machine tucked under the dashboard just behind the firewall.
I've already mentioned speech recognition; high quality implementations are now commodities. I'll be retired 20 years before this ceases to astonish me.
Someone clued into the fact that faces are easily distinguished through a handful of biometrics, combined this with machine vision and walla, highly efficient, accurate facial recognition.
Naive Bayesian algorithms are hounding spammers. This is not trivial; research has shown these methods to be better than human recipients at analyzing messages.
Why are we all not astonished by this? This was the stuff of science fiction 30 years ago. Yet, we manage to solve these discrete problems one after the other and, after a headline or two, it's considered trivial. What does that tell us about ourselves?
My instincts and my money are on the position above; I don't think AI will be nearly as complex or resource-intensive as academics and pundits are making it out to be, and furthermore, once we figure it out, we can expect to see it explode in a way that makes the current technological revolution look like molasses in January.
I agree. Eventually, we'll understand that we are not profoundly intelligent beings endowed with a mysterious cognitive magic. We will have discovered that awareness is at once both subtle and efficient. The "programming" done today be on par with a knotted rope relative to what nature will teach us of systems. We'll have to face the consequences of this. Imagine meeting a self-aware machine that, for whatever reason, doesn't like you...
It's always good to keep in mind that folks like Minsky at MIT have been completely, utterly wrong about the simplest, most peripheral AI issues, for instance neural nets, wrong to a degree that has actually retarded progress
I have a large reservoir of forgiveness on the matter. It wasn't until the 18th century that science began to accept that humans were not distinct from animals. Couple this inflated view with the astonishing degree that simple mathematics does correctly describe much of physical universe, and I can see how academia misled itself. Trying to shoehorn the slush that is cognition into predicate logic and simple neural networks takes a lot of math.
We still have a long way to go. Nature, at the scale of humans, has had nothing as precise at a straight line to work with. The unambiguous nature of a bit is unknown to evolution. Yet, this is how we think. We're going to have to figure out new ways of thinking before we'll understand thought. We're in over our proverbial heads using our existing tools to understand the product of billions of years of refinement.
When someone says "the brain is X teraflop equivalent if you look at it this way, so you'll need X teraflops in a computer to make a brain" you should definitely snicker a little and go on with your day.
I do. In part because, at some point, I lost any profound respect I once had for my own mind in terms of capacity. Most of what is going on in th
I've actually heard the complexity bruited about as more like 100PFLOPS, given that it's not just the number of cells, but the number of axons, dendrites, receptors, and neurotransmitters.
Numbers like that arouse my skepticism. I wonder if there is any credible way to extrapolate computational capacity from power consumption; can 3lbs of grey matter powered by sugar possibly approach 100PFLOPS without vaporizing? Just how many FLOPS must be performed per synapse to do that?
Please, put away the pitchfork; I'm not making any claims. IANAB, and my credibility with regard to biology approaches zero. However, allow me to cite a paper that presumably has some credibility.
The most interesting part of that work, IMO:
There are considerations other than sheer scale. At 1 MIPS the best results come from finely hand-crafted programs that distill sensor data with utmost efficiency. 100-MIPS processes weigh their inputs against a wide range of hypotheses, with so many parameters, that learning programs adjust better than the overburdened programmers
Nature has had billions of years to write code. If you gave a large number of researchers several thousand years to squeeze maximum performance from 100-MIPS, what would you have?
To what degree do our highly discreet, digital methods limit our ability to emulate the mind? Brains are not discreet, precise mechanisms. Claiming to be able to quantify the capacity of a system we do not understand is highly suspect.
Yet, consider our progress. Today, we market mobile phones with speech recognition as incentives to sign up for service. Once the algorithm was understood we reduced it to a trivial "feature" using poor quality sensors and a few milli-watts of power. Hidden Markov Models make this possible, and I'm still astonished by it.
Simple introspection tells me a great deal about "memory." Our minds have amazing spatial memory; you can probably remember the layout of every place you have ever lived and most places you have visited. I can remember the significant aspects of every Quake map I have spent more than an hour running around "inside." How? Compression, probably. Our brains have managed to reduce spatial data to a tiny fraction of what we consider necessary. The algorithms involved are far beyond our understanding.
I believe, in the end, we will find our minds are actually low capacity, computationally inefficient systems that run profoundly complex, highly lossy algorithms. This bodes well if you wish to achieve sufficiently powerful computers; we probably already have them. The unknown, obviously, is how much time is necessary to "figure out" the methods of the mind.
That, by itself, is not something worthy of drool. To date, energy has been used merely to facilitate larger populations of people. If you haven't already noticed we appear to have enough of those already. At the moment we're supporting 6 giga-people and growing, fast. How many are possible with free power and, thus, free fresh water providing more arable land?
Drool over Space. That's where our species is headed (or else.) That's why this is so important.
Why should VoIP providers be required to provide 911?
Because they are competing with a service that is and has been required to provide 9-1-1 service for 37 years in North America.
9-1-1 is required for the same reason that children living in villages were taught how to ring the church bell to signal a fire. Ever since humans acquired the ability to communicate beyond the range of a shout they have been establishing emergency protocols. 9-1-1 is just the contemporary manifestation. People in orbit around extra-solar planets are going to have a means to yell a virtual "help" at whoever is suppose to be listening for it. You're dealing with something very fundamental here.
The idea that VoIP providers must provide emergency services is bogus. If you want something for emergencies, then get a land line. The Internet is not reliable enough to depend on for emergency communications like this.
Is this how the product is marketed? "Half backed crap phone service!" No. Is this information magically beamed into your skull when you pick up whatever (intentionally normal appearing POTS-like phone, complete with dial tone phone) happens to be available at the moment your ass is on the line? No. Should the 1% of cases where some network problem interferes with VOIP be a justification for eschewing the other 99%?
Hate to break it to you but people have not died *because* of this. They died because of a lack of understanding on *their* part.
Today we find VOIP phones that are indistinguishable from traditional POTS devices. They are intentionally designed to emulate traditional POTS phones. Yet, somehow, your expectation is that the caller is supposed to somehow "know" whether it's POTS or not. This is unreasonable. Many times 9-1-1 callers are using whatever phone they happen upon under stressful conditions.
The 9-1-1 emergency number has been nearly universal throughout North America for about 37 years. The idea is simple; 9-1-1 works for things with dial tones.
I knew this was going to happen. Over two years ago I posted my thoughts and got modded as a troll. Anything that might impede sticking it to Ma Bell must be dismissed and derided. If you're going to compete with POTS, you're going to be expected to provide parity. That's means 9-1-1 service, no ifs ands or buts.
The solution is simple and obvious; VOIP customers will need to disclose the location of their devices so the phone company can route the 9-1-1 calls.
...should failover to a tested, less automated system...
It did. At least based on the anecdotes posted at edmunds.com by the drivers. The engine shut off, the dashboard lit up like a Christmas tree and the battery continued to power the car. Not surprising that you might conclude total failure from the/. posting and its exceptionally lame, MSM-like allusions to 'crashing'...
Guess what folks; you are expected to be capable of coping with vehicle problems while traveling at the phenomenal rate of "highway speed". Tires blow, people fuck up, things fly off randomly; deal with it.
Gluecode actually goes beyond J2EE; Apache Derby is supplied as a DBMS. It merges all of these independent parts into a cohesive, turn-key J2EE stack with a few extras, like a web based configuration/management interface.
Jetty is the HTTP listener. I really like Jetty. For most small J2EE apps, if you need something that isn't in Jetty Plus (besides the database,) you need to think hard about whether you're over engineering. If you can live within Jetty Plus, your life will be far more pleasant; you need a JVM, tar/winzip and vi/notepad to manage that server.
Why has JBoss moved away from Jetty anyhow? It use to be the default HTTP listener and servlet engine, but it looks like they've diverged. NIH?
...the information exchange system provides a client-side component and a server-side component. The client-side component executes on a user's computer, and the server-side component executes on an information exchange computer. The client-side component, which may be a browser plug-in, a proxy server, or other type of program, monitors a user's access to web pages. When a web page is accessed...
Does that not make you want to retch? Legitimizing spyware with patents.
At least one can be fairly confident it won't "plug-in" to things not Windows.
The element itself is rather common; over.5% of the mass of the Earth is titanium. The high cost is due to the chemically intensive refining process. Due to incremental improvements titanium prices are relatively low and stable. Titanium has only been available in commercial quantity for about 60 years. Our ability to produce it has improved rapidly.
As such, it is no longer thought of as an exotic SR-71 class material by engineers. The A380 is 9% titanium by weight; that's just under 30 short tons of titanium per aircraft.
New processes are being developed that should help drive the cost of processing ores down substantially. There also happens to be large titanium content in moon rocks.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe see if one of their lawyers could be a trustee?
Perhaps the FSF could use the cash to begin a its own investment fund. Raise 35M USD, buy 51% of SCOX, fire that nest of bastards, put Linus and Stallman on the board and make every patent, copywrite, source file and document they own public domain.
If this was done I would personally invest a couple grand and then, forever after, insist that it be known as GNU/Linux.
Ah, wishful thinking. Happy Friday.
Sophisticated games won't be found on consoles. Consider this game. The vendor is oblivious to consoles because their customers aren't interested in accepting the necessary compromises. It requires more capacity, performance and flexibility (running multiple clients and third party software (teamspeak, web browsers) distributing software updates, etc.) than a console will provide. The game will always utilize whatever capacity a high-end PC can provide (a moving target,) which will always place it beyond the means of consoles.
Will consoles continue to displace high-end PCs for less sophisticated games? Yep. Will this eliminate non-console gaming? Nope. Developers, naturally, will gravitate toward platforms that offer the largest audience. This is driving unification between the platforms. This is why contemporary consoles all use essentially the same graphics hardware as found in PCs.
In fact - its amazing how much Jedi philosophy, which is generally thought of as fictional religios beliefs, is so closely related to the high levels concepts of Bujinkan...
"There's this huge following, which is weird. They have big meets and conventions, and I find it all a bit frightening."
- Ewan McGregor
Vader:You're either with me, or my enemy/Bush:You're either with or against us/Obi-Wan:Only the Sith deal in absolutes
Do, or do not. There is no 'try'/Yoda
Your TV education is showing.
The speed will probably be improved...
That statement doesn't mean that the device is slow. It only says that it takes the researchers a long time to establish the necessary conditions. The odds are that the device, having vanishingly small mass, can switch at very high frequency. Imagine if you were asked to operate an ordinary light switch using the passenger side rear corner of a dump truck while blindfolded. This is analogous to what it's like to manipulate individual molecules with an STM.
Finally, I really don't get your point about the recent vote. What's that got do to with anything we're discussing here?
By "recent vote" you mean the EU constitution? I make no point about that. That's an internal EU matter; the US has no say, no relevance, as it should not. I refer to cases where France ("Chirac") Germany and other rivals claim UN authority trumps US sovereignty.
I am no fan of Microsoft, but I think that they have been unfairly treated in these "anti-trust" cases in Europe and the US.
Is this based on the notion of "double jeopardy"? Being tried for the same thing twice is unfair?
If this is the case then, while well intentioned, you're wrong. The only way to eliminate this situation is to federate authority to some higher power. Does that appeal to you? Frankly, I'd rather Microsoft "suffer" with EU politics than Chirac have a vote over the US economy in some international body.
Microsoft has and will continue to make plenty of money in EU markets. The EU runs it's own show and that is how it should be. Microsoft assumed these obligations in Europe; no one held a gun to their heads while billions of EUR poured in.
Study the history of corporations; in the US, at one time, a corporation couldn't cross state lines. The sovereign states wanted no interstate corporations. This limited the scope of corporations, something that fit well with early US tendencies of abhorring "big" things.
I see nothing inherently wrong with this. Microsoft may either comply, or roll up their carpet, lay off a few thousand Europeans and go elsewhere.
Or more simply, because we can...
How... unilateral of you.
Please, do that.
Didn't the US rely on sovereign authority when it invaded part of the middle east, despite claims by its European rivals that it had no such authority? Sovereign authority is not lost on the US and it won't be federated away to Chirac anytime soon, friend.
They keep saying...
They are correct, if they limit themselves to an idealized case; one execution thread. The real world for me, however, is Eve Online. I usually have two game clients running at the same time plus Teamspeak. I am very much looking forward to SMP for my game machine.
Your suspicion is correct; even single threaded gaming will benefit from dual core (a.k.a. SMP) hardware. If a game involves network traffic, for instance, the overhead of handling the traffic will naturally off load to the other core within the OS network stack. Audio processing can also be scheduled separately because much of that computation occurs in separate threads run on behalf of the audio "driver". There are also some built-in deficiencies in IO subsystems (especially ATA derived hardware) that can block a CPU. Two cores can help paper over the blocking and eliminate stalls. I've used SMP workstations for ordinary work and gaming. They operate smoothly where a single CPU machine will thrash trying to keep up.
Game developers will leverage SMP hardware quickly. They will go for the low hanging fruit first; separate physics, audio, bookkeeping, etc., into threads to allow the 3D engine to monopolize one of the cores. Later, as SMP becomes ubiquitous, they will push harder and enable parts of the graphics engine to run in parallel. This pattern is essentially identical to how operating systems were slowly made into highly parallel systems; pushing synchronization locks deeper and deeper until the costs outweighed the gains.
Date line May 31, 2005:
Toyota Motor Corp. aims to start selling robots that can help look after elderly people or serve tea to guests by 2010.
Date line April 1, 2011:
A Japanese pensioner was found dead today beneath a mountain of tea cups and saucers. A relative claims a Toyota robot given to the man a year before continued to carry out it's tea serving prerogative for months after the victim had expired.
for something other then windows
Erm. So, ATI finally has their drivers working well for Windows?
Honestly, how many of you actually believe ATI is capable of making multiple GPUs work reliably? And on Linux?
Go ahead ATI fanbois, I can spare the karma.
P2P VOIP app. It's main claim to fame is its ability to "just work" despite firewalls. This is done using several techniques that the clients automatically discover. Most frequently clients "hole punch" via UDP packets emerging from both ends so connections work when both sides are behind stateful packet filters. Other stuff fueling Skype popularity includes; multiple platforms supported (Linux, OS-X, etc.,) friendly API terms (thus these sort of plugins appearing) and, best of all, it's free (as in beer.)
I thought of this sometime last week. I was astonished to discover no results when I queried Google. I suppose someone out there is knocking together an IP over Skype stack and has yet to unleash it on the world... but at least I wasn't unsuspecting. I wonder if IP over Skype might win the 5000 EUR award for the Skype API Competition
First, this is outstanding; Google, unsatisfied with traditional machine translation techniques, pioneers their own design. I'm certain their advertisers will be pleased to have their adds auto-translated to whatever language is necessary.
Second, I think we'll witness a case of having the AI ante upped once again when another traditional AI challenge is met. Wikipedia puts this best; When viewed with a moderate dose of cynicism, AI can be viewed as 'the set of computer science problems without good solutions at this point.' Once a sub-discipline results in useful work, it is carved out of artificial intelligence and given its own name.
I haven't seen any captchas.
I have. Karma=Excellent, UID<1000, subscriber. Perhaps it has to do with my habits; I usually log in with the first "Preview" I perform when posting. In the last week or so I've gotten a captcha each time.
...for a while, it was deemed a "very, very difficult problem" to get a robot chassis to walk up stairs. All manner of research teams were working on it. It was eventually solved by a one guy with a z80...
There are many examples of this. Once the secret behind one of our abilities is revealed, we find that it's very resource efficient. How could it be otherwise? There is no magic; the brain is slow, low power system.
OCR and, more specifically, handwriting recognition were once "computationally infeasible." Today, Post Office machines routinely route messages based on handwriting and any given PDA can handle this input.
Piloting all sorts of vehicles through novel terrain is in practical use in many places and quickly becoming feasible for others. I am certain I will one day own a car that can drive itself on ordinary streets and highways using a machine tucked under the dashboard just behind the firewall.
I've already mentioned speech recognition; high quality implementations are now commodities. I'll be retired 20 years before this ceases to astonish me.
Someone clued into the fact that faces are easily distinguished through a handful of biometrics, combined this with machine vision and walla, highly efficient, accurate facial recognition.
Naive Bayesian algorithms are hounding spammers. This is not trivial; research has shown these methods to be better than human recipients at analyzing messages.
Why are we all not astonished by this? This was the stuff of science fiction 30 years ago. Yet, we manage to solve these discrete problems one after the other and, after a headline or two, it's considered trivial. What does that tell us about ourselves?
My instincts and my money are on the position above; I don't think AI will be nearly as complex or resource-intensive as academics and pundits are making it out to be, and furthermore, once we figure it out, we can expect to see it explode in a way that makes the current technological revolution look like molasses in January.
I agree. Eventually, we'll understand that we are not profoundly intelligent beings endowed with a mysterious cognitive magic. We will have discovered that awareness is at once both subtle and efficient. The "programming" done today be on par with a knotted rope relative to what nature will teach us of systems. We'll have to face the consequences of this. Imagine meeting a self-aware machine that, for whatever reason, doesn't like you...
It's always good to keep in mind that folks like Minsky at MIT have been completely, utterly wrong about the simplest, most peripheral AI issues, for instance neural nets, wrong to a degree that has actually retarded progress
I have a large reservoir of forgiveness on the matter. It wasn't until the 18th century that science began to accept that humans were not distinct from animals. Couple this inflated view with the astonishing degree that simple mathematics does correctly describe much of physical universe, and I can see how academia misled itself. Trying to shoehorn the slush that is cognition into predicate logic and simple neural networks takes a lot of math.
We still have a long way to go. Nature, at the scale of humans, has had nothing as precise at a straight line to work with. The unambiguous nature of a bit is unknown to evolution. Yet, this is how we think. We're going to have to figure out new ways of thinking before we'll understand thought. We're in over our proverbial heads using our existing tools to understand the product of billions of years of refinement.
When someone says "the brain is X teraflop equivalent if you look at it this way, so you'll need X teraflops in a computer to make a brain" you should definitely snicker a little and go on with your day.
I do. In part because, at some point, I lost any profound respect I once had for my own mind in terms of capacity. Most of what is going on in th
I've actually heard the complexity bruited about as more like 100PFLOPS, given that it's not just the number of cells, but the number of axons, dendrites, receptors, and neurotransmitters.
Numbers like that arouse my skepticism. I wonder if there is any credible way to extrapolate computational capacity from power consumption; can 3lbs of grey matter powered by sugar possibly approach 100PFLOPS without vaporizing? Just how many FLOPS must be performed per synapse to do that?
Please, put away the pitchfork; I'm not making any claims. IANAB, and my credibility with regard to biology approaches zero. However, allow me to cite a paper that presumably has some credibility.
The most interesting part of that work, IMO:
There are considerations other than sheer scale. At 1 MIPS the best results come from finely hand-crafted programs that distill sensor data with utmost efficiency. 100-MIPS processes weigh their inputs against a wide range of hypotheses, with so many parameters, that learning programs adjust better than the overburdened programmers
Nature has had billions of years to write code. If you gave a large number of researchers several thousand years to squeeze maximum performance from 100-MIPS, what would you have?
To what degree do our highly discreet, digital methods limit our ability to emulate the mind? Brains are not discreet, precise mechanisms. Claiming to be able to quantify the capacity of a system we do not understand is highly suspect.
Yet, consider our progress. Today, we market mobile phones with speech recognition as incentives to sign up for service. Once the algorithm was understood we reduced it to a trivial "feature" using poor quality sensors and a few milli-watts of power. Hidden Markov Models make this possible, and I'm still astonished by it.
Simple introspection tells me a great deal about "memory." Our minds have amazing spatial memory; you can probably remember the layout of every place you have ever lived and most places you have visited. I can remember the significant aspects of every Quake map I have spent more than an hour running around "inside." How? Compression, probably. Our brains have managed to reduce spatial data to a tiny fraction of what we consider necessary. The algorithms involved are far beyond our understanding.
I believe, in the end, we will find our minds are actually low capacity, computationally inefficient systems that run profoundly complex, highly lossy algorithms. This bodes well if you wish to achieve sufficiently powerful computers; we probably already have them. The unknown, obviously, is how much time is necessary to "figure out" the methods of the mind.
i drool at the thought of unlimited energy
That, by itself, is not something worthy of drool. To date, energy has been used merely to facilitate larger populations of people. If you haven't already noticed we appear to have enough of those already. At the moment we're supporting 6 giga-people and growing, fast. How many are possible with free power and, thus, free fresh water providing more arable land?
Drool over Space. That's where our species is headed (or else.) That's why this is so important.
Why should VoIP providers be required to provide 911?
Because they are competing with a service that is and has been required to provide 9-1-1 service for 37 years in North America.
9-1-1 is required for the same reason that children living in villages were taught how to ring the church bell to signal a fire. Ever since humans acquired the ability to communicate beyond the range of a shout they have been establishing emergency protocols. 9-1-1 is just the contemporary manifestation. People in orbit around extra-solar planets are going to have a means to yell a virtual "help" at whoever is suppose to be listening for it. You're dealing with something very fundamental here.
The idea that VoIP providers must provide emergency services is bogus. If you want something for emergencies, then get a land line. The Internet is not reliable enough to depend on for emergency communications like this.
Is this how the product is marketed? "Half backed crap phone service!" No. Is this information magically beamed into your skull when you pick up whatever (intentionally normal appearing POTS-like phone, complete with dial tone phone) happens to be available at the moment your ass is on the line? No. Should the 1% of cases where some network problem interferes with VOIP be a justification for eschewing the other 99%?
No.
Hate to break it to you but people have not died *because* of this. They died because of a lack of understanding on *their* part.
Today we find VOIP phones that are indistinguishable from traditional POTS devices. They are intentionally designed to emulate traditional POTS phones. Yet, somehow, your expectation is that the caller is supposed to somehow "know" whether it's POTS or not. This is unreasonable. Many times 9-1-1 callers are using whatever phone they happen upon under stressful conditions.
The 9-1-1 emergency number has been nearly universal throughout North America for about 37 years. The idea is simple; 9-1-1 works for things with dial tones.
I knew this was going to happen. Over two years ago I posted my thoughts and got modded as a troll. Anything that might impede sticking it to Ma Bell must be dismissed and derided. If you're going to compete with POTS, you're going to be expected to provide parity. That's means 9-1-1 service, no ifs ands or buts.
The solution is simple and obvious; VOIP customers will need to disclose the location of their devices so the phone company can route the 9-1-1 calls.
#include <obYouMustBeNewHere.h>
LOL. Note the user id, Mr. 151611.
...should failover to a tested, less automated system...
/. posting and its exceptionally lame, MSM-like allusions to 'crashing'...
It did. At least based on the anecdotes posted at edmunds.com by the drivers. The engine shut off, the dashboard lit up like a Christmas tree and the battery continued to power the car. Not surprising that you might conclude total failure from the
Guess what folks; you are expected to be capable of coping with vehicle problems while traveling at the phenomenal rate of "highway speed". Tires blow, people fuck up, things fly off randomly; deal with it.
...it's a J2EE server.
So is Websphere...
o.O
Gluecode actually goes beyond J2EE; Apache Derby is supplied as a DBMS. It merges all of these independent parts into a cohesive, turn-key J2EE stack with a few extras, like a web based configuration/management interface.
Jetty is the HTTP listener. I really like Jetty. For most small J2EE apps, if you need something that isn't in Jetty Plus (besides the database,) you need to think hard about whether you're over engineering. If you can live within Jetty Plus, your life will be far more pleasant; you need a JVM, tar/winzip and vi/notepad to manage that server.
Why has JBoss moved away from Jetty anyhow? It use to be the default HTTP listener and servlet engine, but it looks like they've diverged. NIH?
...the information exchange system provides a client-side component and a server-side component. The client-side component executes on a user's computer, and the server-side component executes on an information exchange computer. The client-side component, which may be a browser plug-in, a proxy server, or other type of program, monitors a user's access to web pages. When a web page is accessed...
Does that not make you want to retch? Legitimizing spyware with patents.
At least one can be fairly confident it won't "plug-in" to things not Windows.
Thats some really expensive material.
.5% of the mass of the Earth is titanium. The high cost is due to the chemically intensive refining process. Due to incremental improvements titanium prices are relatively low and stable. Titanium has only been available in commercial quantity for about 60 years. Our ability to produce it has improved rapidly.
The element itself is rather common; over
As such, it is no longer thought of as an exotic SR-71 class material by engineers. The A380 is 9% titanium by weight; that's just under 30 short tons of titanium per aircraft.
New processes are being developed that should help drive the cost of processing ores down substantially. There also happens to be large titanium content in moon rocks.