Just to expand on your point and counter those that must not have been around at the time:
As a person that was involved with home computers prior to IBM introducing the PC, the exponential growth was already happening. I started programming computers about 4 years before the PC was introduced, by the time it came around I remember discussing with my friends how rapidly people around us were getting into it, learning to program, new magazines popping up, etc.
The freight train was already starting to move by the time IBM introduced the PC, but IBM kicked it into gear and Compaq really got things cruising once they created the first clone. There was a void in the market that was going to get filled regardless of whether Bill Gates/MS or any other single individual or company existed.
I have some serious questions for you:
1) Do you believe that Michael Crichton has information that the climate scientists do not?
2) Do you believe Michael Crichton is smarter than the climate scientists and better able to interpret the data?
3) If either of these is true, what leads you to believe this?
I go my start programming on a 6809 in assembler. I remember being pretty happy when I would compare notes with friends using other CPU's (6502, etc.)
I also used OS-9 on the trs-80 color when developing games back around 1982. Although, I remember it more as a bunch of routines I called to do disk IO instead of having to rely on my own routines.
First, an 8088 based machine was far cheaper than 6800 series based machine
I bought a trash 80 color (6809) in 1980 for about $500, it was the cheapest machine on the market. The other trash 80's and the Apple were double that, although they came with a monitor. They used the Z80 and the 6502. The Atari also used the 6502 (If I remember correctly), but I don't remember if it just played games or if you could program that one.When the PC's came out with 8088, they were priced around $1000, not $500.
So I don't understand why you say that 8088 based machines were far cheaper than 6800 series machines. Based on what I remember about prices back then, the CPU didn't seem to be the biggest factor.
but how many other companies use the term "deliverables"?
You must be new here Tex, so I'll go easy. Just about every company with a project uses this term. I've mostly worked in the ERP world (for a looong time) and don't remember any but the smallest project where this term wasn't used.
Based on reasonable extrapolations of the rate of hardware advance, we won't be able to simulate a human brain in real time until sometime in the 2020's.
However, that is based on the previously incorrect assumption that neurons are the only kind of brain matter that is important. Now it is clear that glial cells play an important role in coordinating cognition. There are 10 times as many glial cells as there are neurons. That sets our simulation back a few years.
I think Ray Kurzwiel is way, way, too optimistic regarding the rate of progress.
The CELL processor is single precision, which translates into wrong answers most of the time. Me guess is that for problems requireing double-precision numerics, you should divide CELL based supercomputer by 10 to 100 (software emulation of double precision is MASSIVELY SLOW), so this is really a teraflop machine. No big whoop...NEXT!!!
Things move fast in technology Jethro, including this 2nd gen of the CELL proc, this is what you missed:
Double Precision FP - 190TFLOPS (5 times faster than 1st CELL)
Memory: Expanded to 32gb
Memory: DDR2 instead of Rambus
65nm (I know, I know, but it's better than 90nm)
Can you expand on why you think Java is not strongly typed? It seems to me I get an error if I try to assign an incorrect value to a var (declare as var of class X, assign to object of class Y, get runtime error)
Humans are formed from the coding in DNA so therefore the function of a brain is also contained with DNA. Therefore in time, it can be entirely understood.
DNA is a compressed code that gets translated into molecules which interact to perform functions. We must understand, not only the translation of the DNA into the appropriate molecules given the chemical state of the environment the DNA is in at that time (it varies, which is an additional level of compression of information), we must also be able to completely and accurately model the physical/chemical interactions of the molecules created.
Not impossible but I don't think anyone has claimed that it is impossible. However, the amount of knowledge and computing power we need to gain to achieve this is enourmous.
This is withing the realm of possibility, although it represents a very narrow and simplified view of what intelligence is.
Just to expand on your post: intelligence is an optimization of mapping solutions to problems which in turn are defined by goals. Different goals will result in different optimizations which, to an outside observer, can appear either intelligent or dumb depending on the outside observers own world view. When we speak of AI, most tend to think in terms of the solution mapping within the context of a set of either easily communicated goals or shared/common goals such that it seems obvious that the solutions are appropriate or not appropriate.
If the basic goal is to pass along DNA, then all of our solutions directly or indirectly lead to that. What goal do you instill in this AI and how do you instill it, to extract what we consider "intelligent" solutions to problems without having to also communicate the exact boundaries of the solutions (while at the same time not limiting the AI to only solutions we might have thought of).
While I believe there is a lot that will be accomplished with AI, but I also think that the mechanics of creating and using AI are far more complex than many realize (at least those that make predictions about super AI by 2030). I don't think you can just develop an AI, turn it on and have it solve whatever problem you throw at it, it's just another tool that will require expertise to use properly for maximum benefit.
Just to expand on this stuff: Different tools are (obviously) designed for different workloads. I have a project I was contemplating porting to the Cell. Unfortunately only 40% of my performance bottleneck could take advantage of SIMD, but that 40% could have taken advantage of an enormous number of SIMD instructions just like the workload from TFA.
The other critical 40% of my project would have gained absolutely nothing from SIMD and on the Cell would have lost time due to branches. In this case 300 c2d's would far exceed the throughput of 8 GPU's.
That site may indeed be kooky, but I was recently reading an article in a science mag indicating that this idea may be true. It might have been in an article about time at SciAm.com, not positive though.
In this project users will map variables onto ingredients of typical recipes. After combining and cooking, the flavor of the resulting dish will determine which equations can be solved.
Good literature? I've never seen it. I don't know why people bother reading a bunch of made up crap, it's a lot more interesting (and fun) to read about real things that actually happen.
Agreed.
The other thing I can't figure out is why some people like the color green. My favorite color is blue. How can anyone like the color green?
Agreed, sometimes I would be asleep at the wheel while reading. For example, it wasn't until reading it for the 3rd time that I realized Tolkien had just detailed a 3-way encounter between Frodo and 2 elf maidens.
Yoru blogs have many words but no concrete examples of "true" parallel processing applied to problems currently viewed as best solved by sequential algorithms. If your truly parallel processors are passing messages to achieve proper sequencing, how is that better than implicit sequencing for the class of problems that require sequential processing?
If you are saying that all problems can be parallelized with a net gain in elapsed time to solve, please provide the math proof that supports that position. Don't forget to include setup time for each parallel processor and it's internal environment to get it to solve the problem at hand.
Hmmph. I'd bet it's got a really long pipeline to reach that clock speed.
Same pipeline as the Power5, same power consumption.
Later this year Intel will release the 65 nm bulk CMOS Tukwila and it will likely easily outperform the 65 nm SOI CMOS Power6 on the benchmarks of most interest to buyers of business critical servers despite running at less than half its clock frequency and having less than half its socket level bandwidth.
Itanium has been trailing Power for a few years now in those benchmarks, often by 2x per core. Why will this change?
If it were true that we could just parallelize any problem on commodity hardware then you probably wouldn't see the NSA propping up Cray with orders for the type of processors that can crunch through non-parallel problems quickly.
Because really, anybody believes Web-Two-Oh was anything but the regular web's natural evolution with a fancy name tacked on?
Web 2.0 is a definite set of "things" or "approaches" that "allow" you to (or possibly you "allow" them to) combine other "things" or "technologies" into a "newer" "-ish" mixture of "patterns" of "operation" of the "collection" of "computing" "resources" that "create" "value" beyond what "may" (or "may not") have been previously "achievable"
How hard is it really for someone to send an e-mail back to their friend or family member and ask them if they created the file they sent
Let's see how that might play out:
To: friend@xmail, From: t-maxx cowboy
Subject: Re: e-mail you sent me recently
Just wanted to verify you created the file in that e-mail you just sent me
To: t-maxx cowboy, From: friend@xmail
Subject: Re: re: e-mail you sent me recently
Which one, the list of my favorite tequilas?
To: friend@xmail, From: t-maxx cowboy
Subject: Re: re: re: e-mail you sent me recently
No, not the tequila list, the softball schedule
To: t-maxx cowboy, From: friend@xmail
Subject: Re: re: re: re: e-mail you sent me recently
Did I create it? Do you mean did I make up the schedule? No that's the league that does that
To: friend@xmail, From: t-maxx cowboy
Subject: Re: re: re: re: re: e-mail you sent me recently
I didn't mean did you make up the schedule, I meant did you create that file yourself
To: t-maxx cowboy, From: friend@xmail
Subject: Re: re: re: re: re: re: e-mail you sent me recently
I'm not sure I know what you are getting at. I merged the league schedule with our availability xls, why?
To: friend@xmail, From: t-maxx cowboy
Subject: Re: re: re: re: re: re: re: e-mail you sent me recently
I'm trying to figure out if I should open that file or not
To: t-maxx cowboy, From: friend@xmail
Subject: Re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: e-mail you sent me recently
Well, if you want to play on our F*CKING softball team you better open it and quick bugging me with these D*MN questions!
Slashdot Mirror
Just to expand on your point and counter those that must not have been around at the time:
As a person that was involved with home computers prior to IBM introducing the PC, the exponential growth was already happening. I started programming computers about 4 years before the PC was introduced, by the time it came around I remember discussing with my friends how rapidly people around us were getting into it, learning to program, new magazines popping up, etc.
The freight train was already starting to move by the time IBM introduced the PC, but IBM kicked it into gear and Compaq really got things cruising once they created the first clone. There was a void in the market that was going to get filled regardless of whether Bill Gates/MS or any other single individual or company existed.
I have some serious questions for you:
1) Do you believe that Michael Crichton has information that the climate scientists do not?
2) Do you believe Michael Crichton is smarter than the climate scientists and better able to interpret the data?
3) If either of these is true, what leads you to believe this?
I go my start programming on a 6809 in assembler. I remember being pretty happy when I would compare notes with friends using other CPU's (6502, etc.)
I also used OS-9 on the trs-80 color when developing games back around 1982. Although, I remember it more as a bunch of routines I called to do disk IO instead of having to rely on my own routines.
So I don't understand why you say that 8088 based machines were far cheaper than 6800 series machines. Based on what I remember about prices back then, the CPU didn't seem to be the biggest factor.
You must be new here Tex, so I'll go easy. Just about every company with a project uses this term. I've mostly worked in the ERP world (for a looong time) and don't remember any but the smallest project where this term wasn't used.
Based on reasonable extrapolations of the rate of hardware advance, we won't be able to simulate a human brain in real time until sometime in the 2020's.
However, that is based on the previously incorrect assumption that neurons are the only kind of brain matter that is important. Now it is clear that glial cells play an important role in coordinating cognition. There are 10 times as many glial cells as there are neurons. That sets our simulation back a few years.
I think Ray Kurzwiel is way, way, too optimistic regarding the rate of progress.
Things move fast in technology Jethro, including this 2nd gen of the CELL proc, this is what you missed:
Double Precision FP - 190TFLOPS (5 times faster than 1st CELL)
Memory: Expanded to 32gb
Memory: DDR2 instead of Rambus
65nm (I know, I know, but it's better than 90nm)
Can you expand on why you think Java is not strongly typed? It seems to me I get an error if I try to assign an incorrect value to a var (declare as var of class X, assign to object of class Y, get runtime error)
But look, no bugs!
DNA is a compressed code that gets translated into molecules which interact to perform functions. We must understand, not only the translation of the DNA into the appropriate molecules given the chemical state of the environment the DNA is in at that time (it varies, which is an additional level of compression of information), we must also be able to completely and accurately model the physical/chemical interactions of the molecules created.
Not impossible but I don't think anyone has claimed that it is impossible. However, the amount of knowledge and computing power we need to gain to achieve this is enourmous.
Just to expand on your post: intelligence is an optimization of mapping solutions to problems which in turn are defined by goals. Different goals will result in different optimizations which, to an outside observer, can appear either intelligent or dumb depending on the outside observers own world view. When we speak of AI, most tend to think in terms of the solution mapping within the context of a set of either easily communicated goals or shared/common goals such that it seems obvious that the solutions are appropriate or not appropriate.
If the basic goal is to pass along DNA, then all of our solutions directly or indirectly lead to that. What goal do you instill in this AI and how do you instill it, to extract what we consider "intelligent" solutions to problems without having to also communicate the exact boundaries of the solutions (while at the same time not limiting the AI to only solutions we might have thought of).
While I believe there is a lot that will be accomplished with AI, but I also think that the mechanics of creating and using AI are far more complex than many realize (at least those that make predictions about super AI by 2030). I don't think you can just develop an AI, turn it on and have it solve whatever problem you throw at it, it's just another tool that will require expertise to use properly for maximum benefit.
Just to expand on this stuff: Different tools are (obviously) designed for different workloads. I have a project I was contemplating porting to the Cell. Unfortunately only 40% of my performance bottleneck could take advantage of SIMD, but that 40% could have taken advantage of an enormous number of SIMD instructions just like the workload from TFA.
The other critical 40% of my project would have gained absolutely nothing from SIMD and on the Cell would have lost time due to branches. In this case 300 c2d's would far exceed the throughput of 8 GPU's.
"This code is robust without being pretentious"
That site may indeed be kooky, but I was recently reading an article in a science mag indicating that this idea may be true. It might have been in an article about time at SciAm.com, not positive though.
When I order a mocha, now I ask for 2.0 % milk
In this project users will map variables onto ingredients of typical recipes. After combining and cooking, the flavor of the resulting dish will determine which equations can be solved.
The other thing I can't figure out is why some people like the color green. My favorite color is blue. How can anyone like the color green?
Agreed, sometimes I would be asleep at the wheel while reading. For example, it wasn't until reading it for the 3rd time that I realized Tolkien had just detailed a 3-way encounter between Frodo and 2 elf maidens.
Yoru blogs have many words but no concrete examples of "true" parallel processing applied to problems currently viewed as best solved by sequential algorithms. If your truly parallel processors are passing messages to achieve proper sequencing, how is that better than implicit sequencing for the class of problems that require sequential processing?
If you are saying that all problems can be parallelized with a net gain in elapsed time to solve, please provide the math proof that supports that position. Don't forget to include setup time for each parallel processor and it's internal environment to get it to solve the problem at hand.
Same pipeline as the Power5, same power consumption.
Itanium has been trailing Power for a few years now in those benchmarks, often by 2x per core. Why will this change?
If it were true that we could just parallelize any problem on commodity hardware then you probably wouldn't see the NSA propping up Cray with orders for the type of processors that can crunch through non-parallel problems quickly.
There will always be a need for both.
Got it?
I think you're being a little hard on the IRS.