Human need for company & interaction is understandable, however, what I don't understand is that why are we discussing this in terms of either-or. i have seen plenty of folks who telecommute 1-2 days a week and are perfectly fine with it. This also allows more types/numbers of jobs to be telecommute-able since usually even those jobs that can be done remotely can need occasional 'human touch'.
You are forgetting that there is a big portion of population in India that lives in rural/small town . The penetration of education till high school even tho weak (in villages) & not well managed but DOES exists. I can see tonnes of uses for something like this in such areas. These people are too poor to get full blown computers but they are not so stupid to not realize the value of education. This one device can potentially replace a plethora of textbooks a poor kid has to carry (or does not has access to) to get to school in a nearby village. This has a potential of turning into a mass scale e-book distribution mechanism.
My only concern is about the chances of actually hitting that price target (or ballpark). It seems too low for a device like that. In any case if they do I'll personally buy a bunch to donate.
This is pretty much the smartest remark i have seen in this whole discussion. I can understand why do we have to push our framework of life onto everybody else that seems to 'not conform'. Its almost as if we need everybody to buy into our way of thinking to convince ourselves that we are all fine.
This reminds me of a quote from my favorite philosopher J Krishnamurti: "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
A comment about shale oil & canada's tar sands (has been discussed quite extensively on the oil drum, PO discussion site). Even if the govt ban is lifted and the price of oil hovers above $120/bl still the big problem with these 'non-traditional' sources is a concept called EROEI which is basically the net energy gain over the amount spend extracting the energy source. So basically, the EROEI for traditional oil has been in range of 100:1 to 20:1. for these sources it is quite low (i think 5:1 at best) which will certainly sustain present economic model of the world.
BTW the would you care to guess the net energy for corn ethanol... its is 1.3:1.
Media is not the reflection of what people want its a reflection of what people (as unconscious as they are) would buy into.. that's what the 'big interests' would wrap their arguments up in.
If one just looks at an issue from 2 opposing viewpoints you will find every issue can be broken into pieces that that will be leaning to one side or other. The key to demagoguery is to miss the pieces that don't fit the point you are making.
The problem is here really is that YOU (as in the public) does not really have a more nuanced & insightful source of opinions plus they don't have time to do this research as they have preferences (American idol??).
Sony has a competing video rental service with Play-station network. I'd bet Sony has been fighting this tooth and nail till netflix decided to give em the finger and do it the BD-Live route.
But you see in the end nflx will come out as winner as with this solution they have covered much larger (future) install base than just the ps3s.
This can be used to provide some really good coverage of ski sports if you mount a camera on it. Imagine the kind of angles this can follow if this was one of the 'fellow skiers'.
I think ESPN or winter Olympics coverage folks can definitely make good use of this technology in situations where human beings cannot be present with a reasonably decent photography equipment.
if you are memory bandwidth limited or do too much of interleaved parallel & serial processing then you might find these folks ( http://www.drccomputer.com/ ) interesting. they do a opteron socket based co-processor. In many applications i have seen being able to model the right type of operation while hiding access latency works out best.
Now only if somebody will does the same co-processor with nvidia gpus that would be superb.
My real concern with this is that while this form of marketing is just another way of 'getting to you' but there are longer term (& subtler) aspects of it. I'll elaborate it, Basically every other form of marketing is creating a hypothetical situation which is biased towards the product being pushed. but it still has to go through the assimilate-evaluate mechanism of brain. Worst that can happen to a subject is that they will remember a particular product/tune longer term & hopefully (for the marketer) till he has to make a purchase decision. The evil of these approaches is that the scheme bypasses the mechanisms created through life experiences and directly impresses an idea upon the mind. This in longer term , I think, will have the same kind of effect on brain as something like gambling or cigarette addiction.
There is another way of looking at it, its basically that any given situation can be broken up into variations of gross to subtler aspects. In my experience if you keep playing to grosser aspects sooner or later you will start getting grosser responses & that i think is the real damage such approaches.
I am not a Buddhist but I have been meditating for some time (other techniques). I have spent some time with this debate of 'free will' vs destiny & my take on it was that there no new information one can add to his operation/life based on this knowledge of lack of free will since no matter what conclusion you reach the eventually it is you who is 'applying' it in his life which means you (your system actually) still beleives it is in control.
As it is both neuro-science & religion (at least eastern ones) point to the same conclusion that everything is happening according to the god/nature's design the only thing that is in disaggrement is our personal experience (feeling is a more appropriate word).
I, however, like to approach this problem from a different angle.. basically the debate of free will boils down to one single fact that is who is it who is creating the thoughts in my mind, is it happening automatically (destiny) or is it produced by something which is 'independent'. this question is directly unanswerable by me!! however applying some lateral thinking leads to a interesting direction.. basically the idea is that at any given time when we are thinking one thing which let us say is a product of our free will it also means that we are not thinking about a million other things. If you see this from the perspective i am looking at you will start to question the meaning of the word 'free'. It seems to me that 'freedom of action' as we see it is a creation of our mind... to sum up i would end with a bumper sticker style thought...
"What meaning freedom has when things happen only once"
In the last paragraph of you post you just described how a real neuron in the brain generally works, which is fairly accurate. but brain is way more sophisticated than that, instead of running a if-then-else (at a higher lever) all the time it works with images & patterns. or simply speaking your perception of a situation changes as your capabilities to it.
however, there are issues with the reasoning in 1,2,3... partucularly when you say why not give it up, if you truly & honestly belive that you have no free will then you are back to square one because then the choice of giving it up or holding on to it is also not yours. if you think a little more into it you will find yourself in a theological mess because of the fact that *you* are deciding to give it up is also a decision *you* are making, hence, you do not really believe in 'no free will'.
that being said, I, to some degree believe that this would be the way 'realized ones' in past like buddha have been functioning, who have by some freak of nature or meditating come to a point of being able to observe a large portion of the thought & reaction mechanism.
far as free will is concerned i believe our normal logic & reasoning is not capable of figuring it out but it really is more a matter of observation & intuition... in my opinion all this article really is saying is that the neurons in brain store/contain the information required to make a choice nothing about generation & freedom of that generation.
on a side note, even if there is something like soul/ghost most likely it will not be a indevisable entity in itself (otherwise you/god will run into huge logistic problems:-), even it could be breakable into smaller tiny portions which together give a feel of a 'person'
The whole idea behind patents is to make sure that the innovator gets 'credit' for the Idea/Innovation but In my view there are 2 very crucial elements in this process of protection/ownership of innovation, first is the definition of innovation itself & second is the duration of protection. The definition of innovation should come as a measure of new-ness of the idea/innovation i mean what the hell is one click shopping patent for!!.
Second is duration of protection, this has become very important in current times because duration of protection is basically a measure of 'how much time can one reasonably expect somebody else to come up with same/similiar idea given the present pace of development in this field'. Any lesser protection & you are screwing the inventor, any more & you are screwing the rest of society. In present times the pace of development has caught up & also the ability to innovate is also increased due to much better availability of information & resources (like computer/os/compiler) so the patent office should adjust the ability acquire patent protection accordingly. It really is as simple as that. Also, in not doing this patent office really is hurting itself because if everything one dreams of is patentable then effectivly the meaning of protection will be lost & it will just become another legal process that a company/institution has to go through... of course individuals will be screwed as always:-(
Just finished reading through the article... one thing i realized was that this can be very useful if somebody is doing a hardware implementation (e.g.. math coprocessor). then we can do away with the floating point calc for the most part ( by keeping the numerator & denominator of fraction intact until the last step).. i guess the real challange would be in representing the rest of math like calculus in these terms only then this can be anywhere near useful.
no i dont think so but microsoft runs it anyways, in fact, there is no way simple to turn it off. Actually they have tied it with most ms internet programs, so every time you start Outlook express it automaticly starts messanger. with messenger running in background all the time & longhorn's black box technology imagine the possibilities!!!
i disagree with you on linux installation, i would call my self an experienced linux developer & have been on linux since floppy based linux installation days but still i face the 'dependency hell' every now and then. i know you would say just do apt-get or yum or something but consider a simple case of having to search for one right component not found in the 'repositries' will blow you out. yes i agree those problems are solvable but they require effort & experience, which is enough to turn people off ( it will blow my & your fuse on a bad day too!!!)
IMHO the dependency management will be a lot simpler & maintainable if there was a standard to comply to.
far as compiling the software yourself is concerned, i think most people realise that its not an option if we are talking about ease of installation.
i think coming out with a 'review' posting definitly improves slashdot credibility (hell i started to have doubts about slashdot when i saw that posting in here).
this also work as a warning note to quakes for trying to using slashdot for publicity.
wait, there is more to the story.. i went to a nearby blockbuster after i heard of this no late fees BS.. guess what now instead of charging a late fee they charge you the cost of the dvd itself if you are more that a week late & if you return after that time they wont give you your money back instead you get a store credit.. which means u will have to rent more movies from them to recover the damage... and the saga continues... i just got netflix account which is far cheaper & without hidden clauses
a tru statement, yes almost every business is for profit but i find this argument too general, it cam practically be used to justify almost any 'legally correct' action by them
I think graphic cards need to step out of the cute display & gamers market a bit, i mean there is a hell of a lot processing power which can be used for someting serious, especially when u are not busy playing games with it. for instance, the massively parallel computional power can be used for better audio processing, better speech processing & all kinds of graph optimization.. in fact, it would be cool if someone came up with a way of utilizing this unused power to do something useful like google did with folding@stanford in google toolbar.
his motives dont matter.. long as he is not using any insider information to discover the flaws & vulnerabilities.
lets put this in perspective that most slashdot users will appreciate.. suppose there is a 'critical flaw' in MS IE which leads to a major security hole & vulnerability that leaves your system open to all kinds of attacks.now if someone figures this out i dont see why he should seek a "permission" from teh (ir)responsible company to publish that information. In fact it is rather immatureish to assume that someone else does not know about the same issue & is not actively involved in making the next 'killer app' or spyware as we know it.. i mean someone's gotta be writing the viruses & trojans we hear about & obviously they are actively looking for such issues.
Sadly the stand law has taken actually discourages reporting of the issues found in commercial software & actually goes in the direction of protecting the vendor. i mean imagine the someone getting sued by microsoft because there was a serious hole in MSIE & he pointed it out..
but it can be optimized without having to use all that raw power, for example instead of having just one head to read a track now we can have multiple heads which speed up read/write by n times.
if i let my imagination loose , could this be used for making a LCOS like chip or was it an offshoot of the same development???
--
we are always correct.. even when we realize we were wrong.
i use visual slickedit & its code browser works just great for me , it uses incremental search to update the tags so it dosent takes hell of a time updating tags database, if u want 2 use a free too then use kscope which uses cscope & ctags.
totally agree with you, i dont care if one has little more space but i definitly care if can hold my 'memories' for long enough, how does it handles tampering & what happens if there is a hairline scratch. with capacities that huge we need to worry about error recovery & handling more than ever.. another matter of consideration would be writing speeds!!
i also had an account with hotmail since '98 (or was is 97).. but 2 yrs back i made a mistake of buying more space from them... that seems to be the only reason they have not increased my acct size , every now & then they throw in the usual warning messages that ur acct is nearly close to its limit & i need to buy more space , but thanks to google i m very close to move all my conversations to gmail !!
Slashdot Mirror
Human need for company & interaction is understandable, however, what I don't understand is that why are we discussing this in terms of either-or. i have seen plenty of folks who telecommute 1-2 days a week and are perfectly fine with it. This also allows more types/numbers of jobs to be telecommute-able since usually even those jobs that can be done remotely can need occasional 'human touch'.
You are forgetting that there is a big portion of population in India that lives in rural/small town . The penetration of education till high school even tho weak (in villages) & not well managed but DOES exists. I can see tonnes of uses for something like this in such areas. These people are too poor to get full blown computers but they are not so stupid to not realize the value of education. This one device can potentially replace a plethora of textbooks a poor kid has to carry (or does not has access to) to get to school in a nearby village. This has a potential of turning into a mass scale e-book distribution mechanism. My only concern is about the chances of actually hitting that price target (or ballpark). It seems too low for a device like that. In any case if they do I'll personally buy a bunch to donate.
This is pretty much the smartest remark i have seen in this whole discussion. I can understand why do we have to push our framework of life onto everybody else that seems to 'not conform'. Its almost as if we need everybody to buy into our way of thinking to convince ourselves that we are all fine.
This reminds me of a quote from my favorite philosopher J Krishnamurti:
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
A comment about shale oil & canada's tar sands (has been discussed quite extensively on the oil drum, PO discussion site). Even if the govt ban is lifted and the price of oil hovers above $120/bl still the big problem with these 'non-traditional' sources is a concept called EROEI which is basically the net energy gain over the amount spend extracting the energy source. So basically, the EROEI for traditional oil has been in range of 100:1 to 20:1. for these sources it is quite low (i think 5:1 at best) which will certainly sustain present economic model of the world.
BTW the would you care to guess the net energy for corn ethanol ... its is 1.3:1.
Media is not the reflection of what people want its a reflection of what people (as unconscious as they are) would buy into .. that's what the 'big interests' would wrap their arguments up in.
If one just looks at an issue from 2 opposing viewpoints you will find every issue can be broken into pieces that that will be leaning to one side or other. The key to demagoguery is to miss the pieces that don't fit the point you are making.
The problem is here really is that YOU (as in the public) does not really have a more nuanced & insightful source of opinions plus they don't have time to do this research as they have preferences (American idol??).
Sony has a competing video rental service with Play-station network. I'd bet Sony has been fighting this tooth and nail till netflix decided to give em the finger and do it the BD-Live route.
But you see in the end nflx will come out as winner as with this solution they have covered much larger (future) install base than just the ps3s.
OK OK before you mod me down hear me out.
This can be used to provide some really good coverage of ski sports if you mount a camera on it. Imagine the kind of angles this can follow if this was one of the 'fellow skiers'.
I think ESPN or winter Olympics coverage folks can definitely make good use of this technology in situations where human beings cannot be present with a reasonably decent photography equipment.
if you are memory bandwidth limited or do too much of interleaved parallel & serial processing then you might find these folks ( http://www.drccomputer.com/ ) interesting. they do a opteron socket based co-processor. In many applications i have seen being able to model the right type of operation while hiding access latency works out best. Now only if somebody will does the same co-processor with nvidia gpus that would be superb.
My real concern with this is that while this form of marketing is just another way of 'getting to you' but there are longer term (& subtler) aspects of it. I'll elaborate it, Basically every other form of marketing is creating a hypothetical situation which is biased towards the product being pushed. but it still has to go through the assimilate-evaluate mechanism of brain. Worst that can happen to a subject is that they will remember a particular product/tune longer term & hopefully (for the marketer) till he has to make a purchase decision. The evil of these approaches is that the scheme bypasses the mechanisms created through life experiences and directly impresses an idea upon the mind. This in longer term , I think, will have the same kind of effect on brain as something like gambling or cigarette addiction.
There is another way of looking at it, its basically that any given situation can be broken up into variations of gross to subtler aspects. In my experience if you keep playing to grosser aspects sooner or later you will start getting grosser responses & that i think is the real damage such approaches.
I am not a Buddhist but I have been meditating for some time (other techniques). I have spent some time with this debate of 'free will' vs destiny & my take on it was that there no new information one can add to his operation/life based on this knowledge of lack of free will since no matter what conclusion you reach the eventually it is you who is 'applying' it in his life which means you (your system actually) still beleives it is in control.
...
As it is both neuro-science & religion (at least eastern ones) point to the same conclusion that everything is happening according to the god/nature's design the only thing that is in disaggrement is our personal experience (feeling is a more appropriate word).
I, however, like to approach this problem from a different angle.. basically the debate of free will boils down to one single fact that is who is it who is creating the thoughts in my mind, is it happening automatically (destiny) or is it produced by something which is 'independent'. this question is directly unanswerable by me!! however applying some lateral thinking leads to a interesting direction.. basically the idea is that at any given time when we are thinking one thing which let us say is a product of our free will it also means that we are not thinking about a million other things. If you see this from the perspective i am looking at you will start to question the meaning of the word 'free'. It seems to me that 'freedom of action' as we see it is a creation of our mind... to sum up i would end with a bumper sticker style thought
"What meaning freedom has when things happen only once"
Amit
In the last paragraph of you post you just described how a real neuron in the brain generally works, which is fairly accurate. but brain is way more sophisticated than that, instead of running a if-then-else (at a higher lever) all the time it works with images & patterns. or simply speaking your perception of a situation changes as your capabilities to it.
... partucularly when you say why not give it up, if
... in my opinion all this article really is saying
:-), even it could be breakable into smaller tiny portions which together give a feel of a 'person'
however, there are issues with the reasoning in 1,2,3
you truly & honestly belive that you have no free will then you are back to square one because then the
choice of giving it up or holding on to it is also not yours. if you think a little more into it you will
find yourself in a theological mess because of the fact that *you* are deciding to give it up is also a
decision *you* are making, hence, you do not really believe in 'no free will'.
that being said, I, to some degree believe that this would be the way 'realized ones' in past like buddha have been functioning, who have by some freak of nature or meditating come to a point of being able to observe a large portion of the thought & reaction mechanism.
far as free will is concerned i believe our normal logic & reasoning is not capable of figuring it out but
it really is more a matter of observation & intuition
is that the neurons in brain store/contain the information required to make a choice nothing about
generation & freedom of that generation.
on a side note, even if there is something like soul/ghost most likely it will not be a indevisable entity in itself (otherwise you/god will run into huge logistic problems
thanks for listening
The whole idea behind patents is to make sure that the innovator gets 'credit' for the Idea/Innovation but In my view there are 2 very crucial elements in this process of protection/ownership of innovation, first is the definition of innovation itself & second is the duration of protection. The definition of innovation should come as a measure of new-ness of the idea/innovation i mean what the hell is one click shopping patent for!!.
... of course individuals will be screwed as always :-(
Second is duration of protection, this has become very important in current times because duration of protection is basically a measure of 'how much time can one reasonably expect somebody else to come up with same/similiar idea given the present pace of development in this field'. Any lesser protection & you are screwing the inventor, any more & you are screwing the rest of society. In present times the pace of development has caught up & also the ability to innovate is also increased due to much better availability of information & resources (like computer/os/compiler) so the patent office should adjust the ability acquire patent protection accordingly. It really is as simple as that. Also, in not doing this patent office really is hurting itself because if everything one dreams of is patentable then effectivly the meaning of protection will be lost & it will just become another legal process that a company/institution has to go through
Just finished reading through the article
i guess the real challange would be in representing the rest of math like calculus in these terms only then this can be anywhere near useful.
no i dont think so but microsoft runs it anyways, in fact, there is no way simple to turn it off. Actually they have tied it with most ms internet programs, so every time you start Outlook express it automaticly starts messanger. with messenger running in background all the time & longhorn's black box technology imagine the possibilities!!!
i disagree with you on linux installation, i would call my self an experienced linux developer & have been on linux since floppy based linux installation days but still i face the 'dependency hell' every now and then. i know you would say just do apt-get or yum or something but consider a simple case of having to search for one right component not found in the 'repositries' will blow you out.
yes i agree those problems are solvable but they require effort & experience, which is enough to turn people off ( it will blow my & your fuse on a bad day too!!!)
IMHO the dependency management will be a lot simpler & maintainable if there was a standard to comply to.
far as compiling the software yourself is concerned, i think most people realise that its not an option if we are talking about ease of installation.
i think coming out with a 'review' posting definitly improves slashdot credibility (hell i started to have doubts about slashdot when i saw that posting in here).
this also work as a warning note to quakes for trying to using slashdot for publicity.
wait, there is more to the story.. i went to a nearby blockbuster after i heard of this no late fees BS .. guess what now instead of charging a late fee they charge you the cost of the dvd itself if you are more that a week late & if you return after that time they wont give you your money back instead you get a store credit .. which means u will have to rent more movies from them to recover the damage ... and the saga continues ... i just got netflix account which is far cheaper & without hidden clauses
how would this perform with new 2.6 linux kernel ..
the one they are using seems pretty old suse distribution
a tru statement, yes almost every business is for profit but i find this argument too general, it cam practically be used to justify almost any 'legally correct' action by them
I think graphic cards need to step out of the cute display & gamers market a bit, i mean there is a hell of a lot processing power which can be used for someting serious, especially when u are not busy playing games with it. for instance, the massively parallel computional power can be used for better audio processing, better speech processing & all kinds of graph optimization..
in fact, it would be cool if someone came up with a way of utilizing this unused power to do something useful like google did with folding@stanford in google toolbar.
refs: http://gpgpu.org/
his motives dont matter .. long as he is not using any insider information to discover the flaws & vulnerabilities.
lets put this in perspective that most slashdot users will appreciate.. suppose there is a 'critical flaw' in MS IE which leads to a major security hole & vulnerability that leaves your system open to all kinds of attacks.now if someone figures this out i dont see why he should seek a "permission" from teh (ir)responsible company to publish that information.
In fact it is rather immatureish to assume that someone else does not know about the same issue & is not actively involved in making the next 'killer app' or spyware as we know it.. i mean someone's gotta be writing the viruses & trojans we hear about & obviously they are actively looking for such issues.
Sadly the stand law has taken actually discourages reporting of the issues found in commercial software & actually goes in the direction of protecting the vendor. i mean imagine the someone getting sued by microsoft because there was a serious hole in MSIE & he pointed it out..
but it can be optimized without having to use all that raw power, for example instead of having just one head to read a track
now we can have multiple heads which speed up read/write by n times.
if i let my imagination loose , could this be used for making a LCOS like chip or was it an offshoot of the same development???
--
we are always correct.. even when we realize we were wrong.
i use visual slickedit & its code browser works just great for me , it uses incremental search to update the tags so it dosent takes hell of a time updating tags database, if u want 2 use a free too then use kscope which uses cscope & ctags.
totally agree with you, i dont care if one has little more space but i definitly care if can hold my 'memories' for long enough, how does it handles tampering & what happens if there is a hairline scratch. with capacities that huge we need to worry about error recovery & handling more than ever .. another matter of consideration would be writing speeds!!
i also had an account with hotmail since '98 (or was is 97) .. but 2 yrs back i made a mistake of buying more space from them ... that seems to be the only reason they have not increased my acct size , every now & then they throw in the usual warning messages that ur acct is nearly close to its limit & i need to buy more space , but thanks to google i m very close to move all my conversations to gmail !!