I fail to see how a planar surface with an index of refraction of 1.4 (or whatever) being struck perpendicular to its surface is going to evoke any form of a focusing mechanism. This is why lens must have curvature (assuming a uniform index of refraction).
And please elaborate on what you mean by "most definately deformed"? Are you referring to the optical transparency properties of the spot? That has more to do with what happens to the dye when it is heated then anything else.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "pits are burned into plastic" and "the difficulty of precision coating the dye".
That was bascially rewording the parent post. The reason I put them there is that the parent post talked about the laser burning the plastic, yet made no reference nor even alluded to the purpose of the dye.
I suggest you look at a burned disk via AFM to prove this to yourself.
<sarcasm>
Sorry, my AFM is in the shop.
</sarcasm>
Feel free to post some pictures though.
So sad, trying to be pedantic and you get the process for CD-R's all wrong. The pits are most definately not burned into the polycarbonate. The way to think through your theory is to first realize that the bulk of the disc is made of the same plastic. So with that, how does one keep the laser from burning a hold clean through the disc?
Hint: the real method has something to do with the dye you mentioned. I also really don't understand how you can go from one sentence saying the pits are burned into the plastic, then turn around and talk of the difficulty of precision coating of dye...
Actually, a long long time ago Coca-Cola did try to charge Pepsi-Cola with trademark infringement. From what I could find the year was 1938, details get fuzzy after that. Just because something is overwhelming common today does not mean that at one point people thought otherwise. Also, Coke as it is usually called is close to losing any association with the Coca-Cola company, becoming gerneric like aspirin.
How much did Apple pay to license the 1-click patent? My guess is on the order of $1. Jobs and Bezos are buddies, the patent was controversial, other companies licensing it only helps Amazon. Kind of like MS licensing Unix from SCO.
One thing I still do not know is the $110,000 fee a one-time only fee or is it only for the version they certify? If it is only for a particular version then it is worthless. My guess is that TOG is not going to risk a court case because they could lose, instead they will settle with Apple to cert MacOS for much much less moola.
What I'd like to know is does the cert carry forward for all future versions (I would assume not). Are they then really saying that "no company is required to pay more than $110,000* for every major release version for the rest of time."
*Price may rise in the future.
False advertising is false advertising regardless of whether anyone owns the words. MS recently got slapped for touting their crap as secure because it was deemed misleading advertising.
Well your loop seems to have some flaws.
You allocate
nextRedds = zeros(1, x+2*runs);
But you only use a range of [1:x+1+runs]. Is the rest meant to be zero?
Regardless,
copyRedds for example will at its largest be 2*numIters + x+2*sum([1:numIters]).
redds will add to its initial size x*sum([1:numIters]) elements.
And nextRedds will at most be x+2*numIters.
You should allocate all of these at the max sizes required, and use the necessary indicies within the loop instead.
e.g.,
redds = [redds; nextRedds(1, a:b)];
would be
redds(length(redds)+ [1:x] = nextRedds(1, runs+[1:x]);
I have no idea where you got your 1.49GB figure from as `x' is unknown to me.
sum([1:N]) = (N+1)*(N/2) is about N^2. For N=10k then that's about 3/4 GB of RAM.
So I guess your number is plausible.
If you don't have that much RAM then now you know why it runs so slow,
you can't escape that fact that that is indeed how much RAM will be trying
to use at the end of the loop. I'm not sure about Windows, but I think it will continually allocate swap on the local harddrives which would allow you to run this monstrosity without running out of memory.
I'd be willing to bet that the computer at the
school has several GBs of RAM, that would explain the enourmous speed difference.
Ah you did post the code, I thought you were pulling a SCO for a minute there.
Looks to me like the problem is the line right above the part you posted:
nextRedds = zeros(1, x+2*runs);
The reason this is bad is because you reallocate it slightly bigger at the beginning
of every run. This wastes a lot of time in malloc. You should allocate it before the
loop at the biggest size necessary, and then initialize it as you already are.
This part
redds = [redds; nextRedds(1, a:b)];
is especially bad because you are forcing Octave to grow your matrix on every loop.
You should also preallocate this before the loop.
In general, allowing Matlab/Octave to automatically enlarge arrays as needed results in disasterous performance. This is in general bad style, especially if one day you decide to code this up in
C or something for speed, you would have to recode all your allocation code.
Just curious but are you generating plots just for looking or for eps? I've been looking for awhile for the best eps plot generator (for latex) and I'm currently using epstk with octave. Seems to be the best, most importantly it allows one to numerically specify dash length, thickness, and color of plot lines. Necessary for busy plots. It also has the ability to use arbitrary symbols for plotting.
Yeah that $40billion is quite a bit. But if their market is stagnated, their sales flat, there will be no demand for their stock since it won't be a growth stock anymore. At some point they will have to start tapping that cash reserve to do stock buy backs in order to hold their stock up. Not to mention that a lot of people will jump ship if their stock incentive is no longer worthwhile. Having been in a dying company let me tell you that it is always better to be the first off the boat, if you're wrong you can always come back. Win win either way.
Re:Cringley, Linus, and Christoph Hellwig
on
Today's SCO News
·
· Score: 1
Yup. I always thought Connectix was MSs plan to migrate to something like a non-x86 64bit Intel chip. Similar to the way Apple migrated from the 68k to the PPC.
Interesting. Another aspect is that it creates a barrier to entry. Presummably by paying the $35 mil they are saying that Amazon et al would also have to pay $35 mil. Kinda sneaky if you ask me.
Nice comment. I wanted to point out that in Japan the health care system is oddly setup such that families must pay for the birth of a child themselves. I won't go into details, but the important thing is that you have to stay for two weeks due to gov't regs. This has resulted in a situation where families have to decide where to spend their own money for two weeks of medical service. The effect is that there are now many centers whose sole purpose is for this two week stay. Some have big screen TVs, guest rooms for husband and family. Fancy french dinners for the night after the birth, etc... And of course, you know exactly how much this will cost up front (ignoring omiyage, the gifts afterwards). It is truly bizarre, they are advertised like vacation getaways.
I think to start the process towards this type of model is that non-emergency services could be handled similar to what is done for car insurance. The insurance company would give you the necessary quantity of money for the operation and you get to choose the rest. Any savings go in your pocket. There probably should be a requirement that some portion of the money be spent at an authorized clinic.
It is a point release. Perhaps you should wait till 4.0? It might be awhile though. The reason they do more point releases is because they don't want to get caught in the trap that killed the original gcc project (do recall that the current gcc tree is the egcs fork that became the official tree).
For normal code, yes. For kernel code, maybe. For instance, if you're mucking with the registers, or stack or other non-normal stuff then you may need to ensure that a particular segment of code does not actually make a function call as that would be disastrous.
This blog-exclusion idea is indicative of the current mindset regarding AI, not to mention the accomplishments of AI. (See previous story)
The true problem that needs to be fixed is that google needs to be able to grok well-formed sentences and return appropriate results. I hope that my future kids will one day be able to search the web with something better than boolean logic with a page rank assist.
Re:Maybe the problem is Minsky himself?
on
AI Going Nowhere?
·
· Score: 1
Commonplace? Quite the exaggeration. Do you really mean voice recognition or do you mean speech recognition? The first is commonly used by Apple as a way to speak your secret passphrase to unlock your computer. The second makes vast use of probabilities with basically zero understanding of content to attempt to transform dictation to type. Neither of which is particularly intelligent. Speech recognition as used by phone reservation systems is laughably inept outside of a severly constrained vocabularly. It makes me chuckle to think of my friend repeating a name into his phone over and over again until it works. Star Trek would be a laughable series with the type of AI we have today.
Image recognition is also extremely specialized and not up to expectations.
And by the way, continually parroting that phrase is not going to convince anyone. Or perhaps you are unconciously mocking the field of AI?
In other words, you read the specs in order to figure out how it works, then reimplement it using the interfaces as a guide. Reverse engineering is not magic, if you do not know how something works you will not be able to reimplement it.
Perhaps you meant that we should try to implement something that on the surface appears the same as a human brain but is internally not necessarily operating under the same principles. That's been tried. It's a very hard problem, the wisest course of action when faced with such a difficult problem is to study the only working example.
Speak for yourself. There are some forms of autism where the people think in terms of pictures. My interest in reading the book "Thinking in Pictures" was that whenever I needed to explain something it inevitably comes out in a non-verbatim format, the words are different everytime. I personally think with less emphasis on words.
As for the rainbow thing, that may have more to do with the types of sensors in our eyes. The response curves of the cones in our eyes have overlapping response curves that look like mountains centered around red, green, and blue.
Oh please not the "neural networks are the holy grail" spiel. A neural network is no different from a computer with no software. You still have to figure out how to train and apply it. Neural networks are not magic pixie dust.
The difference is that without knowledge there can be no wisdom.
Look up wisdom and you'll get definitions like "accumulated knowledge", or "the trait of utilizing knowledge and experience with common sense and insight".
So if one does not pursue knowledge, then one can never become wise. It would be ignorant to think otherwise.:-)
Re:Maybe the problem is Minsky himself?
on
AI Going Nowhere?
·
· Score: 1
Most AI ideas have seemed promising at some point, but the proof is in the results. And no, I am not familiar with those people, nor do I particularly care what their ideas are. Instead show me what they have accomplished with their ideas, maybe then I might think their research promising.
Slashdot Mirror
And please elaborate on what you mean by "most definately deformed"? Are you referring to the optical transparency properties of the spot? That has more to do with what happens to the dye when it is heated then anything else.
That was bascially rewording the parent post. The reason I put them there is that the parent post talked about the laser burning the plastic, yet made no reference nor even alluded to the purpose of the dye. <sarcasm> Sorry, my AFM is in the shop. </sarcasm> Feel free to post some pictures though.Hint: the real method has something to do with the dye you mentioned. I also really don't understand how you can go from one sentence saying the pits are burned into the plastic, then turn around and talk of the difficulty of precision coating of dye...
Actually, a long long time ago Coca-Cola did try to charge Pepsi-Cola with trademark infringement. From what I could find the year was 1938, details get fuzzy after that. Just because something is overwhelming common today does not mean that at one point people thought otherwise. Also, Coke as it is usually called is close to losing any association with the Coca-Cola company, becoming gerneric like aspirin.
One thing I still do not know is the $110,000 fee a one-time only fee or is it only for the version they certify? If it is only for a particular version then it is worthless. My guess is that TOG is not going to risk a court case because they could lose, instead they will settle with Apple to cert MacOS for much much less moola.
What I'd like to know is does the cert carry forward for all future versions (I would assume not). Are they then really saying that "no company is required to pay more than $110,000* for every major release version for the rest of time."
*Price may rise in the future.
Actually it weakens it. "*nix" implies that anything that ends in "nix" is the same. Feel free to to give an explanation for your point of view.
False advertising is false advertising regardless of whether anyone owns the words. MS recently got slapped for touting their crap as secure because it was deemed misleading advertising.
And casual use kills many terms like escalator, kleenex(?), the "cola" on the end of coke-cola, etc...
nextRedds = zeros(1, x+2*runs);
But you only use a range of [1:x+1+runs]. Is the rest meant to be zero?
Regardless, copyRedds for example will at its largest be 2*numIters + x+2*sum([1:numIters]). redds will add to its initial size x*sum([1:numIters]) elements. And nextRedds will at most be x+2*numIters. You should allocate all of these at the max sizes required, and use the necessary indicies within the loop instead. e.g.,
redds = [redds; nextRedds(1, a:b)];
would be
redds(length(redds)+ [1:x] = nextRedds(1, runs+[1:x]);
I have no idea where you got your 1.49GB figure from as `x' is unknown to me. sum([1:N]) = (N+1)*(N/2) is about N^2. For N=10k then that's about 3/4 GB of RAM. So I guess your number is plausible. If you don't have that much RAM then now you know why it runs so slow, you can't escape that fact that that is indeed how much RAM will be trying to use at the end of the loop. I'm not sure about Windows, but I think it will continually allocate swap on the local harddrives which would allow you to run this monstrosity without running out of memory. I'd be willing to bet that the computer at the school has several GBs of RAM, that would explain the enourmous speed difference.
Looks to me like the problem is the line right above the part you posted:
nextRedds = zeros(1, x+2*runs);
The reason this is bad is because you reallocate it slightly bigger at the beginning of every run. This wastes a lot of time in malloc. You should allocate it before the loop at the biggest size necessary, and then initialize it as you already are.
This part
redds = [redds; nextRedds(1, a:b)];
is especially bad because you are forcing Octave to grow your matrix on every loop. You should also preallocate this before the loop. In general, allowing Matlab/Octave to automatically enlarge arrays as needed results in disasterous performance. This is in general bad style, especially if one day you decide to code this up in C or something for speed, you would have to recode all your allocation code.
Just curious but are you generating plots just for looking or for eps? I've been looking for awhile for the best eps plot generator (for latex) and I'm currently using epstk with octave. Seems to be the best, most importantly it allows one to numerically specify dash length, thickness, and color of plot lines. Necessary for busy plots. It also has the ability to use arbitrary symbols for plotting.
Yeah that $40billion is quite a bit. But if their market is stagnated, their sales flat, there will be no demand for their stock since it won't be a growth stock anymore. At some point they will have to start tapping that cash reserve to do stock buy backs in order to hold their stock up. Not to mention that a lot of people will jump ship if their stock incentive is no longer worthwhile. Having been in a dying company let me tell you that it is always better to be the first off the boat, if you're wrong you can always come back. Win win either way.
Yup. I always thought Connectix was MSs plan to migrate to something like a non-x86 64bit Intel chip. Similar to the way Apple migrated from the 68k to the PPC.
Interesting. Another aspect is that it creates a barrier to entry. Presummably by paying the $35 mil they are saying that Amazon et al would also have to pay $35 mil. Kinda sneaky if you ask me.
I think to start the process towards this type of model is that non-emergency services could be handled similar to what is done for car insurance. The insurance company would give you the necessary quantity of money for the operation and you get to choose the rest. Any savings go in your pocket. There probably should be a requirement that some portion of the money be spent at an authorized clinic.
It is a point release. Perhaps you should wait till 4.0? It might be awhile though. The reason they do more point releases is because they don't want to get caught in the trap that killed the original gcc project (do recall that the current gcc tree is the egcs fork that became the official tree).
For normal code, yes. For kernel code, maybe. For instance, if you're mucking with the registers, or stack or other non-normal stuff then you may need to ensure that a particular segment of code does not actually make a function call as that would be disastrous.
The true problem that needs to be fixed is that google needs to be able to grok well-formed sentences and return appropriate results. I hope that my future kids will one day be able to search the web with something better than boolean logic with a page rank assist.
Image recognition is also extremely specialized and not up to expectations.
And by the way, continually parroting that phrase is not going to convince anyone. Or perhaps you are unconciously mocking the field of AI?
Perhaps you meant that we should try to implement something that on the surface appears the same as a human brain but is internally not necessarily operating under the same principles. That's been tried. It's a very hard problem, the wisest course of action when faced with such a difficult problem is to study the only working example.
As for the rainbow thing, that may have more to do with the types of sensors in our eyes. The response curves of the cones in our eyes have overlapping response curves that look like mountains centered around red, green, and blue.
The definition of reverse engineering is to figure out how something works in order to reimplement it.
Oh please not the "neural networks are the holy grail" spiel. A neural network is no different from a computer with no software. You still have to figure out how to train and apply it. Neural networks are not magic pixie dust.
Look up wisdom and you'll get definitions like "accumulated knowledge", or "the trait of utilizing knowledge and experience with common sense and insight".
So if one does not pursue knowledge, then one can never become wise. It would be ignorant to think otherwise. :-)
Most AI ideas have seemed promising at some point, but the proof is in the results. And no, I am not familiar with those people, nor do I particularly care what their ideas are. Instead show me what they have accomplished with their ideas, maybe then I might think their research promising.