From an earlier IGN article: The first Civilization to discover a technology attached to the founding of a religion will establish a holy city for that religion and it will begin to spread, although slowly. To speed up the process, you can create missionaries and send them out to try to convert other cities. Also, just like the Civics, AI leaders may try to get you to convert to their religion.
My question: I have recently adopted Pastafarian and would like to know if Civ 4 will support it ?
(a) Not long ago (10 yrs), I had to go to library to look up for technical papers. It used to be a pain to brush the dust in library to find your paper, xerox on the old photocopy machine. Often I would be coming out with thick stacks of bound journals. Thanks to good searching capabilities and online publications, I don't have to leave my desk and can access papers dating back to 1930s. Also with keyword search I can look at more papers in the same time. Just because someone forgot (may be intentionally) to reference some paper, I can still find it. Clearly I have saved lot of commute time. Also I can read the articles online and no need to print (save some trees).
(b) Second story is of my becoming more and more dumb because of calculators/computers. I never used calculators till highschool and could estimate things (atleast order of magnitude) easily. Recently I have been crunching numbers so often that I lost that practice. Fortunately I still try to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations before I fire the simulation. Simulations can give you any result you want (if you are not aware/careful).
I remember few years ago I did some simulations and showed it to my adviser. I was new and thought that tool can do anything. My adviser looked at the result and said: "Congratulations, you managed to do something phenomenal. You can quit your phd and can become a billionaire." In short, there are things which technology wouldn't teach. The fundamentals still need to be learnt before you can trust computers/technology.
I disagree that a good innovative design is just about low voltage. A better metric here is energy consumed per operation. I can throttle my design to operate at lower voltage and it will crawl slower than a snail (and in some cases won't work at all). Intel chips boast not only about low voltage but also low power with decently high performance.
Said that it is worth while to mention that IBM is not incompetent. Their embedded cores which are custom designed are even more energy efficient. But again they are expensive (and task specific) and cost drives the market.
From the story: It receives power and control signals from the grid of electrodes it walks on, and moves by bending its body like a caterpillar.
How many microrobots can I control on such a grid ? You definitely don't want to have individual wire to each electrode. So it would be some kind of array similar to in semiconductor memories. I wonder what kind of addressing scheme would be required to make sure that we can control a whole army on the grid. I hope the forthcoming paper will have some discussion about it.
I am not sure if you understand the difference in technologies here. First of all it is 16 Gbit and not Gbyte (and next year it will be 32 Gbit). To compete with regular harddisks you are talking about making atleast 80 GByte harddrives.
(a) Do a cost analysis. Even if they shrink the gatelength to 25 nm (which will not happen because FLASH memories WILL not work at 25 nm gate lenght, regular transistors will), you will be still be limited to say 100 GBit. Yield is another issue which will drive cost. Debugging such large memory arrays is NOT trivial.
(b) Reading mechanism for FLASH memories is different from Harddisks. Larger the memory arrays, slower it becomes. Make arrays smaller ? You will have lot of peripheral overhead which will drive your cost up. Why is peripheral hard to make ? Because peripherals are made in regular CMOS technology as compared to FLASH technology - integrating them together is a pin in the ass. This is one place which requires more improvement, the memory controller on the FLASH chips is still slow (even if access time from the individual cell is fast).
(c) Will 25 nm FLASH be any faster ? Not necessarily. The gate length scales, but interconnect capacitance doesn't. Smaller transistors will have smaller parasitic capacitance but they may not be necessrily able to drive the long bit/word lines. Solution : Make individual cells bigger. What do you lose ? Your memory becomes bigger.
In short there is a reason why magnetic HDD will stay. Yes there are applications where 10-20GB is enough, but not everywhere. That is why digital MP3s are swept by FLASH based drives. And don't forget that FLASH drives have rated endurance of 100,000 write/erase. Do you want such a thing for your laptop ? probably not.
Being a Mac OS X user, I don't see how Google Desktop (even if it is written for OS X) can compete with spotlight which is embedded into OS (or atleast that what Steve said).
According to the report it was not feasible to make intercepts for IBCM weapons based on limited time and accuracy required. I wonder if space weapons will have any less technological challenges ?
I am sure researchers working on CNT (carbon nanotubes) will back me up on this. But what is new in here ?
(a) No, these transistors are no better. If you check the nature article, the contacts to the transistors are still lousy (technically, they are still schottky and not ohmic). And contact resistance is too high.
(b) No, they don't really get the nanotubes where they want as claimed in the article. The alignment using this technique is still worse (will require substantial effort to make it better).
(c) One of the bigger drawbacks which was conveniently ignored was the fact that they still cannnot control the number of tubes between the two contacts. So it can be 1 or 2 or 5 and so your current or other properties will vary that much. This technique doesn't make this problem any better.
(d) Last but not the least, no comment about the role of oxygen. All other researchers struggle due to hysteresis behavior, these devices look similar to them.
Is not in any US state. Neither is it the capital of Denmark: it is a small monarchy, roughly 200 x 300 kilometers at the longest and widest, 16 million inhabitants. Western industrialized country, high standard of living, expensive, lousy food anywhere but on our campsite, but you can drink the tap water. No major injections needed to travel there, no visa requirements for inhabitants of other western industrialized countries but immigration officials can be fairly nasty towards pretty much anyone else.
Showers and toilets
Please be assured there will be enough of both. Due to popular demand (and because the location allows for it this time) many toilets will be of the water-flushing kind.
I came to work at Google late last summer. It gets a lot of media buzz about being geek-sheik and super cool. I have worked at some really cool places before Google, but Google is so much more incredible than any media article or Slashdot post could ever describe. The best phrase I can think of would be nerd-nirvana (or should it be nerdvana?)
Folks, we are not doing a good job here. We need to bump up the number of Google stories per day.
Slashdot Mirror
Patently Silly
Totally Absurd Inventions America's Goofiest Patents!
My question: I have recently adopted Pastafarian and would like to know if Civ 4 will support it ?
On the second day the Nuna 3 covered 835 km, at an avarage speed of 105 km/hr, which is also single-day record for the World Solar Challenge.
I say, GO PERU !! No against at all.
Google links on EnterNetica
(a) OPTICS ADVANCES BRING VOLUMETRIC VIDEO TO LIFE
(b) Pressbox link
(c) Cleaner, Crisper Volumetric Images
Company webpage
But will GoogleTV have text ads at the bottom (especially during Jerry Springer shows) ? :P
We discussed this before on slashdot.
(a) Not long ago (10 yrs), I had to go to library to look up for technical papers. It used to be a pain to brush the dust in library to find your paper, xerox on the old photocopy machine. Often I would be coming out with thick stacks of bound journals. Thanks to good searching capabilities and online publications, I don't have to leave my desk and can access papers dating back to 1930s. Also with keyword search I can look at more papers in the same time. Just because someone forgot (may be intentionally) to reference some paper, I can still find it. Clearly I have saved lot of commute time. Also I can read the articles online and no need to print (save some trees).
(b) Second story is of my becoming more and more dumb because of calculators/computers. I never used calculators till highschool and could estimate things (atleast order of magnitude) easily. Recently I have been crunching numbers so often that I lost that practice. Fortunately I still try to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations before I fire the simulation. Simulations can give you any result you want (if you are not aware/careful).
I remember few years ago I did some simulations and showed it to my adviser. I was new and thought that tool can do anything. My adviser looked at the result and said: "Congratulations, you managed to do something phenomenal. You can quit your phd and can become a billionaire." In short, there are things which technology wouldn't teach. The fundamentals still need to be learnt before you can trust computers/technology.
Is technology evil ? No.
Said that it is worth while to mention that IBM is not incompetent. Their embedded cores which are custom designed are even more energy efficient. But again they are expensive (and task specific) and cost drives the market.
IGOS weblog
INDONESIA GOES REMOTE SENSING OPEN SOURCE (IGORSOS). Not in english.
A quick google search also pointed to SUN Microsystem's press release regarding this effort.
Obviously these astronomers don't read slashdot otherwise they would tried for first post !!
How many microrobots can I control on such a grid ? You definitely don't want to have individual wire to each electrode. So it would be some kind of array similar to in semiconductor memories. I wonder what kind of addressing scheme would be required to make sure that we can control a whole army on the grid. I hope the forthcoming paper will have some discussion about it.
Does anyone have invites ? :)
Just kidding, JUnit, one with capital U.
(a) Do a cost analysis. Even if they shrink the gatelength to 25 nm (which will not happen because FLASH memories WILL not work at 25 nm gate lenght, regular transistors will), you will be still be limited to say 100 GBit. Yield is another issue which will drive cost. Debugging such large memory arrays is NOT trivial.
(b) Reading mechanism for FLASH memories is different from Harddisks. Larger the memory arrays, slower it becomes. Make arrays smaller ? You will have lot of peripheral overhead which will drive your cost up. Why is peripheral hard to make ? Because peripherals are made in regular CMOS technology as compared to FLASH technology - integrating them together is a pin in the ass. This is one place which requires more improvement, the memory controller on the FLASH chips is still slow (even if access time from the individual cell is fast).
(c) Will 25 nm FLASH be any faster ? Not necessarily. The gate length scales, but interconnect capacitance doesn't. Smaller transistors will have smaller parasitic capacitance but they may not be necessrily able to drive the long bit/word lines. Solution : Make individual cells bigger. What do you lose ? Your memory becomes bigger.
In short there is a reason why magnetic HDD will stay. Yes there are applications where 10-20GB is enough, but not everywhere. That is why digital MP3s are swept by FLASH based drives. And don't forget that FLASH drives have rated endurance of 100,000 write/erase. Do you want such a thing for your laptop ? probably not.
Sorry couldn't help it.
(a) Maintenance costs
(b) Support and systems administration costs
(c) Application-server support and system administration costs.
Are these really fixed costs ?
Being a Mac OS X user, I don't see how Google Desktop (even if it is written for OS X) can compete with spotlight which is embedded into OS (or atleast that what Steve said).
U.S. Army Guide to Code Breaking.
According to the report it was not feasible to make intercepts for IBCM weapons based on limited time and accuracy required. I wonder if space weapons will have any less technological challenges ?
Dot ComBack, Or More Of The Same?
Dotcom Era Fads
Dot-Com Service Memories?
The Dot Com Super Bowl
Another Dot-com Boom?
*sigh* the goo' ol' days
(a) No, these transistors are no better. If you check the nature article, the contacts to the transistors are still lousy (technically, they are still schottky and not ohmic). And contact resistance is too high.
(b) No, they don't really get the nanotubes where they want as claimed in the article. The alignment using this technique is still worse (will require substantial effort to make it better).
(c) One of the bigger drawbacks which was conveniently ignored was the fact that they still cannnot control the number of tubes between the two contacts. So it can be 1 or 2 or 5 and so your current or other properties will vary that much. This technique doesn't make this problem any better.
(d) Last but not the least, no comment about the role of oxygen. All other researchers struggle due to hysteresis behavior, these devices look similar to them.
Whatthehack wiki has details about the various events.
If you read the FAQ from the main site
The Netherlands
Is not in any US state. Neither is it the capital of Denmark: it is a small monarchy, roughly 200 x 300 kilometers at the longest and widest, 16 million inhabitants. Western industrialized country, high standard of living, expensive, lousy food anywhere but on our campsite, but you can drink the tap water. No major injections needed to travel there, no visa requirements for inhabitants of other western industrialized countries but immigration officials can be fairly nasty towards pretty much anyone else.
Showers and toilets
Please be assured there will be enough of both. Due to popular demand (and because the location allows for it this time) many toilets will be of the water-flushing kind.
I came to work at Google late last summer. It gets a lot of media buzz about being geek-sheik and super cool. I have worked at some really cool places before Google, but Google is so much more incredible than any media article or Slashdot post could ever describe. The best phrase I can think of would be nerd-nirvana (or should it be nerdvana?)
Folks, we are not doing a good job here. We need to bump up the number of Google stories per day.
But you told me One Third of All Studies Are Nonsense