This kind of applications won't have the hardware catching up to let you replace C, Asembly and VHDL with Ruby or Java for decades yet.
The part where I stated that Rev4 may be an appropriate tool for some tasks can be applied to all languages/tools. No one's writing web applications in assembly. And no one's using Jakarta Struts to control an embedded device.
Nowhere did I make any claims that Ruby, Java or Rev4 will ever replace C, Assembly or VHDL for these problems. I was speaking about the largest chunk of desktop applications and applications that a non-coder might be able to use Rev4 to produce.
Furthermore, Rev4 makes no such claims to tackle a single one of the examples you listed. So the premise to the discussion was Rev4 and its target users. No one is going to select a "dumbed down" language or technology to tackle any of the problems you listed and no one is claiming Rev4 is going to someone who's never coded tackle the problems you listed.
They are interesting problems and must be kept in mind before declaring "No one will ever program in assembly again!" But I made no such claims nor should anyone. It would take a fundamental revolution in hardware and at least one hundred years to be able to make any such claim.
There's two major sides to this issue. One seems (note I said seems, not implying at all that it's unavoidable) to be that the more human readable and dummy proof the more overhead you pay when you design/implement a programming language. You might find the C/C++ crowd commonly accuse the Java or Ruby crowd of this overhead. Indeed, Java has a garbage collector designed to protect you from memory leaks and Ruby is an interpreted language that pays a mild additional overhead since it cannot be optimized upon compilation. But that's another debate altogether, it just is evident that the more you move away from actual machine language and assembly then more overhead you pay (generally).
The other side of this issue is that computers are our servants, not the other way around (and if anyone reading this is a bot or script, don't you forget that). I don't recall where I read it but this is the reason why the string is the most important data structure in computer programming. Because simply put, the string is the best way to communicate with the user. What follows from this logic is to screw the optimizers (or 'misers, if you will) and make the servant learn the language of the master--not the other way around. And isn't this how the most complex applications have progressed? Once requiring training and years of experience, now even a kindergartner can master a word processor. Computers and applications will forever be bending over backwards for the most important thing to us: us.
And yet if an implementation of a language incurs on average of 10% overhead, your hardware will catch up in a matter of months.
And yet if you run a data center the size of Google's and have several applications in said implementation running on hundreds of thousands of machines, a cycle here and a cycle there isn't so laughable to work toward saving. And isn't it the big players that ensure the lengthy life of a language and its implementations?
So it's a good debate with several sides. Personally, I love the fact that I can code a web application in Ruby, run some old C code off sourceforge in Java with JNI (sort of) and bust out a C++ application for manipulating ID3 tags across my entire music library. To those arguing against Rev4, I ask simply "why not?" I mean, you don't have to use it, it's a natural progression so let it happen. Maybe you'll find it useful for prototyping? Maybe you'll find it's a useful tool for some problems and your toolbox will grow? Who knows?
In the end, I would like to opine that the the chip makers are forcing us towards languages that make multi-threading more intuitive and useful. I mean they concentrate on threads communicating or even implementing APIs to help automate (by enabling what is appropriate to multithread) in loops and algorithms. That's going to be a large factor on whether a new language is adopted and survives.
whats wrong with sony, samsung, or intel. I'm sure they could produce chips for government related applications, not some shady business no ones heard of before.
Are you familiar with efforts to foster American small businesses in the United States by the government (note this is nothing specific to Obama)? If you want to get into government contracts, I suggest you start a small business owned by a woman who is a minority. You'd be amazed at how easily you can land contracts and subcontracts as the government and big contractors strive to make quotas.
Mr. Wales, I think that if you approached Mark Cuban and asked him to give Wikipedia editors a cool million dollars each not to leave, you could save Wikipedia.
Boy, dreaming up solutions when you perceive financiers to be bottomless pits of money with no brains sure is easy!
I think a lot more could be written about the Northeastern Chinese province of Heilongjiang. It's got a ridiculously small Wikipedia page (even in simplified Chinese) yet is home to 38 million people and is about the area of Texas. And after all that this province has a vastly smaller page than Texas (especially if you look at Texas as a portal page). That's a higher population and area than most US states. If those people spoke English and had more access to internet, I'm sure this page could harbor a lot more encyclopedic information.
What I'm trying to say is: your articles are finished. If the world revolved around you, Wikipedia would be complete. But not to the billions of other people in the world. So keep your claims of "it's finished, dummies" to yourself.
Oh, that's right, I left them out in the garage in my flying car. You see, I was running Duke Nukem Forever in Hurd but the battery ran out of power so I set them aside to bring in and recharge at my tabletop cold fusion station. It's okay though, I'll have forever to enjoy them now that Ray Kurzweil's Singularity has happened.
It's a PDF version of a PowerPoint deck, so it's not exactly easy to read.
Indeed, informative link but I think your signature should be at the start of your post. I was doing pretty good right up until they plugged the ansatz into the Horava’s action to produce the reduced Lagrangian.
Last Wednesday, Wal-Mart dropped the price of the oven to $17, from $28, as part of its "Black Friday" deals. Later the same day, Amazon cut its price, which had also been $28, to $18.
Well, color me confused, I see it as $18 on both Walmart's and Amazon's site.
It began last month with what appeared to be a public-relations-oriented competition on book prices, with both companies (along with Target, based in Minneapolis) dropping prices on books like "Under the Dome," by Stephen King, to below $9.
Don't get me wrong, this is great news for consumers but I think you're just seeing preperation for a Black Friday feeding frenzy and not actual 'price wars.'
'I applaud Wal-Mart. It's about time multichannel retailers stood up and refused to let their business go away.'
Wal-Mart stays away from heavily populated areas and makes most of its bank from the heartland anyway. I actually see this as Wal-Mart trying to steal a piece of the online pie if it isn't just a little bit of good ole capitalistic competition. If you think Wal-Mart's been losing business, their stock sure isn't showing it.
Police collect DNA from every suspect in a case which could lead to a criminal record...
So they started with the politicians then?
I'm serious though, the people who passed this and put it into place should first enter their own DNA into the system as a sign of good faith and unwavering confidence that this system will never be used negatively to persecute anyone nor will it ever produce a false positive on a match.
As nice as it is to think that advertisements will cover everything, a single user isn't worth a $150+ netbook.
Who said the netbook cost $150? I would guess that the bulk purchases and low requirements could allow them to cut that down to sub $40 within four or five years. And even if the netbooks had decent hardware, look at the number of servers Google runs to provide free and paid services... now what if you had idle processes on netbooks using up spare Atom (or whatever is out there) CPU time? Think about it, it could be the user footing part of your server energy bill.
Another thing is that search result advertisements and even ads on gmail are worth more because they can be really targeted. But what do you advertise on a spreadsheet app? Users aren't looking for any info or such - they're working on their spreadsheet.
Well, your logic works both ways. Why would I want to be bothered with ads when I'm busy working on my e-mail? And the data in a spreadsheet says a lot, if their doing their finances, you offer them financial products. Numbers and abbreviations give away a lot. If they are using scientific notation, you give them scientific product ads. It's also a single piece of Google's offerings. Docs and gmail are much more useful to me.
It's just out of the question that a single user would be worth $150 for Google.
You didn't list a lot of innovative ideas for their strategy to mitigate hardware cost and you also ignore the rapidly falling costs of hardware that the OLPC tried to take advantage of. I'm confident that if they embark on this endeavor, it will be well thought out and phased. I think you underestimate your worth in the eyes of Google and what it means to have you as a resource--both in purchasing power and generating content as a contributor.
Except that individual neurons have tens of thousands of possible connections to other neurons, and continually morph and change those connections. That's impossible to do on a rigid piece of hardware.
I'm no expert and I've just been reading the second link's project site on Stanford's page but your assertion to continually morph and change those connections seems to be mitigated by this strategy:
Neurogrid simulates six billion synaptic connections by using local analog communication, another choice motivated by cortical studies. Cortical axons synapse profusely in a local area, course along for a while, then do it again. Thus, nearby neurons receive inputs from largely the same axons, as expected from the map-like organization of cortical areas. Local wires running between neighboring silicon neurons emulate these patches, invoking postsynaptic potentials within a programmable radius. Using a patch radius of 6 lets us increase the number of synaptic connections a hundredfold—from 600 million to six billion—without increasing digital communication.
If they connect most (if not all) possible connections that the morphing/changing synaptic channels can take, then they use a sort of addressing technique and RAM strategy to continually morph and change:
Instead of hardwiring the silicon neurons together, as Mead did in his silicon retina, we softwired them by assigning unique addresses. Every time a spike occurs, the chip outputs that neuron’s address. This address points to a memory location (RAM) that holds the synaptic target’s address, or to multiple memory locations if the neuron has multiple synaptic targets. When this address is fed back into the chip, a post-synaptic potential is triggered at the target. An extremely efficient technique, as the same post-synaptic circuit serves all the synapses that neuron receives—virtual synapses! Encoding, translating, and decoding an address happens fast enough to route several million spikes per second, allowing a million connections to be made among a thousand silicon neurons. These softwires may be rerouted simply by overwriting the RAM’s look-up table, making it possible to specify any desired synaptic connectivity.
Although their page is really hard for a lay person like myself to get through, it's very informative. Having read it, I'm considerably more optimistic about the future of biological tissues and nervous systems being translated to hardware. At least people are starting back at the simple components and adding new twists.
Thanks for finally filing this CNet Crave UK stuff in Idle/Entertainment!
Re:For the record...
on
Review: Eufloria
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Mmm. Bear in mind we're talking about a regular Slashdot article contributor who can't even score a job as an editor
That's not really my goal... do you assume every time you read "<someone> writes" that <someone> is trying to 'score a job as an editor'?
, and that's on a site where the criteria for employment appears to be "Must not be beyond all reasonable doubt a small shell script".
I assure you, sir, that I am twice the shell script you are!:-D
It all makes sense now. Why Zonk moved on to do something else. Why Soulskill rarely posts a game review (four or five in a whole year?). You'd have to be insane to write reviews for games on this site. So far the discussion has been about me labeling Civ as an RTS -- I'm sorry, my mistake! It's turn based! Or about how it's a review of my experience of the game (what more can a review be than the reviewer's own experience?). Or a discussion about my rating system (I thought I said 'average' before '6 out of 10'). No one's actually talking about the game. I hope that merely means not a lot of people have played it... I did not realize I wrote such an uninformative atrocious crime-against-humanity review.
Well, I patented swallowing and digestion, so good luck getting people to chew stuff and spit it right back out. lol.
Not a problem, I have earlier patented a method and system for contacting a legal consultant in order to sue for patent infringement. Balls in your court.
METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR PLACING CHEESY COMESTIBLES INSIDE HOMO SAPIEN MANDIBLES
Abstract
A method and system for correctly and precisely placing a reasonable sized and digestible material inside the human mouth without death or injury to the consumer. This patent produces a new novel approach to the problems humans face in locating food in front of them and successfully placing it betwixt their teeth without injury to eye, nose or throat. The fact that the location of the food in front of them may or may not be immediately known inside their brain until they cast their eyes upon it establishes the validity of this patent.
Claims
A method and system for placing cheesy comestibles inside homo sapien mandibles
The method of claim 1 wherein the consumer relies on utensils (as fork, knife and spork patents apply) to correctly portion size said cheesy comestible such as to prevent choking.
The method of claim 2 wherein the consumer does not yet realize the food resides in front of them and the two apparatuses known as eyeballs must convene on said cheesy comestible thereby bringing it into focus and (where appropriate central nervous system coordination patents apply) the feed from the cerebral cortex is relayed to the arms and hands to manipulate utensils of claim 2.
"Opera for one?" Please, there is no shortage. The summary already lists Microsoft... and then there's Google and Yahoo! and Flickr and a whole lot of other global companies interested in partaking in sales to over 1/6th of the world's population. And, if we can believe this study the Chinese people by and large welcome their censorship overlords! It's not going anywhere, all we can do is aid and abet the poor 15% that want less biased information. The only services not kowtowing are those uninterested in massive profits from the country!
If you owned shares in a tech company or lead a tech company, I'm sure you'd be welcoming the Chinese overlord's business invitation as well.
Well, unless you're a Chinese speaker, you oddly have no choice other than to switch browsers if you're in China. From the end of the article:
But a weird spinoff is that if you're a foreigner in China, your non-Chinese language version of Opera Mini will not work.
I don't know why this is or if it's true or if Opera plans to fix it but I would find their implementation of a solution pretty archaic if that's one of the caveats. Hopefully they are working on fixing that.
Thank you! Finally some good news. These hatred consolidation programs cut my insane ranting down significantly and gives me more time to appreciate the finer things in life like making intricate tinfoil feathers to put into my tinfoil pimp hats. I applaud Murdoch & Ballmer for finally thinking of people like me. But it may be too little too late, ever since the government subsidized hatred and what with the sub-prime hatred rate financial crisis, I've been forced to cut down on hating as much as forty or fifty percent. Tough times we live in. Tough times.
They DO report a current trend of.15K per decade. This is far lower than the forecast.
Is there some reason you picked the Channel TLT data and not the, say, Channel TLS data which reports a negative 0.325 K/decade?
I'm no expert in any of this but the site you linked to seems to be satellite data for atmospheric temperatures. Not temperatures at the surface (which is really what we're concerned about, right? I have no doubt that the average temperature of the entire atmosphere of the earth has changed minimally -- if not been lowered erratically. The effects of what is happening on the ground are severely diluted when you include such a large volume.
Tell me, if you wanted to measure the temperature outside your house, would you consult a satellite measuring microwave transmissions or a thermometer adjacent to your house?
She also doesn’t understand how Manulife accessed her photos because her Facebook profile is locked and only people she approves can look at what she posts.
Oh, please, you're talking to a generation that grew up watching Dateline and 20/20 where insurance companies hired private investigators to stalk people who would do the following:
Bring a flask of water or oil into Walmart or some supermarket.
Covertly empty it onto the floor.
Come back minutes later to 'slip' on said spill.
Sue the hell out of the store and claim crazy grief and pain charges in court.
So then you'd see the companies hiring PIs to track the people (who allegedly could barely move) tearing it up at Disney World. Yeah, scam artists and fraudsters.
You shouldn't be surprised to see insurance companies being very proactive in their searches to follow up on people. I cannot say whether or not she is legitimately getting the short end of the stick or if she's defrauding the company. Sounds like the former. If she had made claims that she never smiled and couldn't go out in public due to depression then she might have problems. Why doesn't she just get her doctor to send a note to her insurance company explaining that people suffering from this magnitude of depression (and those recovering from it) can force themselves to smile for a picture? I mean, it's likely that the insurance company got tired of paying sick leave for depression unless it could be shown to be a chemical imbalance they probably were just looking for any reason to have to stop forking over pay.
Personally, I was offered $250 by my company's health insurance plan if I signed something that said I had not used tobacco products in the past 6 months. I hadn't but a few years ago I had (what I was told) were Cuban cigars in Mexico. Those friends put pictures of me on Facebook smoking them. So what? Well, if they found contrary evidence to my claim, I faced having my insurance terminated. Not worth the $250. Be aware of what Facebook puts on display for the world--even if you think it's private it's usually not. I mean, it could be as inane as some coworker who doesn't like her sees her other friend at work tagged in a photo with 'depressed' coworker on leave and decided to copy what photos they could see and forward them on to the insurance company?
The CRU has confirmed that a breach occurred, but not that all 61 MB of released material is genuine.
Rarely do I have enough time to generate 61 MB (let alone 61 compressed MB) of data, code and e-mails that serves my political/religious purposes. So if this is tampered data or correspondence, there would almost certainly be conflicting items inside such a large repository. I'm not saying it isn't possible, it just decreases the odds that this is a hoax.
'We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents'
Why? Why a random sampling? If you're going to serve up 61 MB zipped, it might as well be 61 GB zipped. Why not release both sets ("the good stuff.tar.gz" and "everything including the inane 'what's for lunch today?' e-mails.tar.gz")?
It's borderline hilarious that the claim is made that this is 'too important to be kept under wraps' followed immediately by the 'we'll decide what you see' cloaked by the equally hilarious word "random." Random? Really? You want me to believe that you printed everything out and put it on a big spinning wheel, blindfolded yourself and then threw darts at it? I mean, come on. Nothing in the political world is random. You would have done yourself much more justice saying you've released what you feel is relevant.
Being one, I know first hand that hackers are highly disorganized. But come on, why not torrent the whole set or wikileaks it or something? I mean, I'm almost waiting for a high quality Ford Fusion ad in PDF to surface right in the middle of the compressed file saying, "Doesn't this worry you enough to go green?"
Why do you talk about it? Find someone in this list:
University rectors; professors of social sciences, history, philosophy, law and theology; directors of peace research institutes and foreign policy institutes;
Willing to Submit him for it and go back to coding. Don't go campaigning for some person to win the Nobel peace prize, call up your contacts at Washington University and discuss it with them. If you can't convince them to nominate him, it's probably not going to work.
This is not an elected award so I wouldn't waste my time trying to impose outside influence on a committee for a Nobel prize. The committee decides, not the community. I'm sure every profession has their savior/icon that they think deserves this award for revolutionizing something and altering humanity for the better. You're free to talk all you want but it's not going to change anything. Discussing it online is nothing but a waste of time unless your intentions are to embarrass Linus.
John Hodgman: "Hi, I'm a PC." *silence*
John Hodgman: "Oh, and Mac couldn't be here today because Windows 7 fiddled with his brakes. So... I guess you know who to choose."
I asked them if they had put any backdoors in Windows 7 and the representative said loudly and nervously that that was preposterous and 'patently false' while scribbling something on a piece of paper. He slid it across his desk to me. It read:
Please, they have microphones in my clothes, on the desk, in the walls, the fly buzzing by your mouth is their robot!!! Meet me by the dumpster out back around 5pm, come alone.
Unfortunately I have a bad habit of reading things aloud when I read them and by the time I was finished the fly was gone and the man sitting across from me was dead. The government doctor that rushed in the room and gave him pentobarbital in an attempt to revive him said it was due to an aneurysm caused by a robotic fly which he says he sees a lot of so it's nothing for me to look into.
Slashdot Mirror
This kind of applications won't have the hardware catching up to let you replace C, Asembly and VHDL with Ruby or Java for decades yet.
The part where I stated that Rev4 may be an appropriate tool for some tasks can be applied to all languages/tools. No one's writing web applications in assembly. And no one's using Jakarta Struts to control an embedded device.
Nowhere did I make any claims that Ruby, Java or Rev4 will ever replace C, Assembly or VHDL for these problems. I was speaking about the largest chunk of desktop applications and applications that a non-coder might be able to use Rev4 to produce.
Furthermore, Rev4 makes no such claims to tackle a single one of the examples you listed. So the premise to the discussion was Rev4 and its target users. No one is going to select a "dumbed down" language or technology to tackle any of the problems you listed and no one is claiming Rev4 is going to someone who's never coded tackle the problems you listed.
They are interesting problems and must be kept in mind before declaring "No one will ever program in assembly again!" But I made no such claims nor should anyone. It would take a fundamental revolution in hardware and at least one hundred years to be able to make any such claim.
There's two major sides to this issue. One seems (note I said seems, not implying at all that it's unavoidable) to be that the more human readable and dummy proof the more overhead you pay when you design/implement a programming language. You might find the C/C++ crowd commonly accuse the Java or Ruby crowd of this overhead. Indeed, Java has a garbage collector designed to protect you from memory leaks and Ruby is an interpreted language that pays a mild additional overhead since it cannot be optimized upon compilation. But that's another debate altogether, it just is evident that the more you move away from actual machine language and assembly then more overhead you pay (generally).
The other side of this issue is that computers are our servants, not the other way around (and if anyone reading this is a bot or script, don't you forget that). I don't recall where I read it but this is the reason why the string is the most important data structure in computer programming. Because simply put, the string is the best way to communicate with the user. What follows from this logic is to screw the optimizers (or 'misers, if you will) and make the servant learn the language of the master--not the other way around. And isn't this how the most complex applications have progressed? Once requiring training and years of experience, now even a kindergartner can master a word processor. Computers and applications will forever be bending over backwards for the most important thing to us: us.
And yet if an implementation of a language incurs on average of 10% overhead, your hardware will catch up in a matter of months.
And yet if you run a data center the size of Google's and have several applications in said implementation running on hundreds of thousands of machines, a cycle here and a cycle there isn't so laughable to work toward saving. And isn't it the big players that ensure the lengthy life of a language and its implementations?
So it's a good debate with several sides. Personally, I love the fact that I can code a web application in Ruby, run some old C code off sourceforge in Java with JNI (sort of) and bust out a C++ application for manipulating ID3 tags across my entire music library. To those arguing against Rev4, I ask simply "why not?" I mean, you don't have to use it, it's a natural progression so let it happen. Maybe you'll find it useful for prototyping? Maybe you'll find it's a useful tool for some problems and your toolbox will grow? Who knows?
In the end, I would like to opine that the the chip makers are forcing us towards languages that make multi-threading more intuitive and useful. I mean they concentrate on threads communicating or even implementing APIs to help automate (by enabling what is appropriate to multithread) in loops and algorithms. That's going to be a large factor on whether a new language is adopted and survives.
whats wrong with sony, samsung, or intel. I'm sure they could produce chips for government related applications, not some shady business no ones heard of before.
Are you familiar with efforts to foster American small businesses in the United States by the government (note this is nothing specific to Obama)? If you want to get into government contracts, I suggest you start a small business owned by a woman who is a minority. You'd be amazed at how easily you can land contracts and subcontracts as the government and big contractors strive to make quotas.
Mr. Wales, I think that if you approached Mark Cuban and asked him to give Wikipedia editors a cool million dollars each not to leave, you could save Wikipedia.
Boy, dreaming up solutions when you perceive financiers to be bottomless pits of money with no brains sure is easy!
or Heilongjiang
I think a lot more could be written about the Northeastern Chinese province of Heilongjiang. It's got a ridiculously small Wikipedia page (even in simplified Chinese) yet is home to 38 million people and is about the area of Texas. And after all that this province has a vastly smaller page than Texas (especially if you look at Texas as a portal page). That's a higher population and area than most US states. If those people spoke English and had more access to internet, I'm sure this page could harbor a lot more encyclopedic information.
What I'm trying to say is: your articles are finished. If the world revolved around you, Wikipedia would be complete. But not to the billions of other people in the world. So keep your claims of "it's finished, dummies" to yourself.
Where Are Your Contact Lens Displays?
Oh, that's right, I left them out in the garage in my flying car. You see, I was running Duke Nukem Forever in Hurd but the battery ran out of power so I set them aside to bring in and recharge at my tabletop cold fusion station. It's okay though, I'll have forever to enjoy them now that Ray Kurzweil's Singularity has happened.
It's a PDF version of a PowerPoint deck, so it's not exactly easy to read.
Indeed, informative link but I think your signature should be at the start of your post. I was doing pretty good right up until they plugged the ansatz into the Horava’s action to produce the reduced Lagrangian.
Last Wednesday, Wal-Mart dropped the price of the oven to $17, from $28, as part of its "Black Friday" deals. Later the same day, Amazon cut its price, which had also been $28, to $18.
Well, color me confused, I see it as $18 on both Walmart's and Amazon's site.
It began last month with what appeared to be a public-relations-oriented competition on book prices, with both companies (along with Target, based in Minneapolis) dropping prices on books like "Under the Dome," by Stephen King, to below $9.
What? Walmart: $14.49 Amazon: $14.50
Don't get me wrong, this is great news for consumers but I think you're just seeing preperation for a Black Friday feeding frenzy and not actual 'price wars.'
'I applaud Wal-Mart. It's about time multichannel retailers stood up and refused to let their business go away.'
Wal-Mart stays away from heavily populated areas and makes most of its bank from the heartland anyway. I actually see this as Wal-Mart trying to steal a piece of the online pie if it isn't just a little bit of good ole capitalistic competition. If you think Wal-Mart's been losing business, their stock sure isn't showing it.
Police collect DNA from every suspect in a case which could lead to a criminal record ...
So they started with the politicians then?
I'm serious though, the people who passed this and put it into place should first enter their own DNA into the system as a sign of good faith and unwavering confidence that this system will never be used negatively to persecute anyone nor will it ever produce a false positive on a match.
As nice as it is to think that advertisements will cover everything, a single user isn't worth a $150+ netbook.
Who said the netbook cost $150? I would guess that the bulk purchases and low requirements could allow them to cut that down to sub $40 within four or five years. And even if the netbooks had decent hardware, look at the number of servers Google runs to provide free and paid services ... now what if you had idle processes on netbooks using up spare Atom (or whatever is out there) CPU time? Think about it, it could be the user footing part of your server energy bill.
Another thing is that search result advertisements and even ads on gmail are worth more because they can be really targeted. But what do you advertise on a spreadsheet app? Users aren't looking for any info or such - they're working on their spreadsheet.
Well, your logic works both ways. Why would I want to be bothered with ads when I'm busy working on my e-mail? And the data in a spreadsheet says a lot, if their doing their finances, you offer them financial products. Numbers and abbreviations give away a lot. If they are using scientific notation, you give them scientific product ads. It's also a single piece of Google's offerings. Docs and gmail are much more useful to me.
It's just out of the question that a single user would be worth $150 for Google.
You didn't list a lot of innovative ideas for their strategy to mitigate hardware cost and you also ignore the rapidly falling costs of hardware that the OLPC tried to take advantage of. I'm confident that if they embark on this endeavor, it will be well thought out and phased. I think you underestimate your worth in the eyes of Google and what it means to have you as a resource--both in purchasing power and generating content as a contributor.
Think about it. Think about it like a cat.
SMBC explained why cat translation products fail. Although there are financial endeavors to decode dog.
Except that individual neurons have tens of thousands of possible connections to other neurons, and continually morph and change those connections. That's impossible to do on a rigid piece of hardware.
I'm no expert and I've just been reading the second link's project site on Stanford's page but your assertion to continually morph and change those connections seems to be mitigated by this strategy:
Neurogrid simulates six billion synaptic connections by using local analog communication, another choice motivated by cortical studies. Cortical axons synapse profusely in a local area, course along for a while, then do it again. Thus, nearby neurons receive inputs from largely the same axons, as expected from the map-like organization of cortical areas. Local wires running between neighboring silicon neurons emulate these patches, invoking postsynaptic potentials within a programmable radius. Using a patch radius of 6 lets us increase the number of synaptic connections a hundredfold—from 600 million to six billion—without increasing digital communication.
If they connect most (if not all) possible connections that the morphing/changing synaptic channels can take, then they use a sort of addressing technique and RAM strategy to continually morph and change:
Instead of hardwiring the silicon neurons together, as Mead did in his silicon retina, we softwired them by assigning unique addresses. Every time a spike occurs, the chip outputs that neuron’s address. This address points to a memory location (RAM) that holds the synaptic target’s address, or to multiple memory locations if the neuron has multiple synaptic targets. When this address is fed back into the chip, a post-synaptic potential is triggered at the target. An extremely efficient technique, as the same post-synaptic circuit serves all the synapses that neuron receives—virtual synapses! Encoding, translating, and decoding an address happens fast enough to route several million spikes per second, allowing a million connections to be made among a thousand silicon neurons. These softwires may be rerouted simply by overwriting the RAM’s look-up table, making it possible to specify any desired synaptic connectivity.
Although their page is really hard for a lay person like myself to get through, it's very informative. Having read it, I'm considerably more optimistic about the future of biological tissues and nervous systems being translated to hardware. At least people are starting back at the simple components and adding new twists.
We Have: Putting one page of data on one page
They Had: Dividing data up into eight pages to maximize pageviews
Thanks for finally filing this CNet Crave UK stuff in Idle/Entertainment!
Mmm. Bear in mind we're talking about a regular Slashdot article contributor who can't even score a job as an editor
That's not really my goal ... do you assume every time you read "<someone> writes" that <someone> is trying to 'score a job as an editor'?
, and that's on a site where the criteria for employment appears to be "Must not be beyond all reasonable doubt a small shell script".
I assure you, sir, that I am twice the shell script you are! :-D
... I did not realize I wrote such an uninformative atrocious crime-against-humanity review.
It all makes sense now. Why Zonk moved on to do something else. Why Soulskill rarely posts a game review (four or five in a whole year?). You'd have to be insane to write reviews for games on this site. So far the discussion has been about me labeling Civ as an RTS -- I'm sorry, my mistake! It's turn based! Or about how it's a review of my experience of the game (what more can a review be than the reviewer's own experience?). Or a discussion about my rating system (I thought I said 'average' before '6 out of 10'). No one's actually talking about the game. I hope that merely means not a lot of people have played it
So much for casually writing game reviews!
Well, I patented swallowing and digestion, so good luck getting people to chew stuff and spit it right back out. lol.
Not a problem, I have earlier patented a method and system for contacting a legal consultant in order to sue for patent infringement. Balls in your court.
Abstract
A method and system for correctly and precisely placing a reasonable sized and digestible material inside the human mouth without death or injury to the consumer. This patent produces a new novel approach to the problems humans face in locating food in front of them and successfully placing it betwixt their teeth without injury to eye, nose or throat. The fact that the location of the food in front of them may or may not be immediately known inside their brain until they cast their eyes upon it establishes the validity of this patent.
Claims
Prepare to starve.
"Opera for one?" Please, there is no shortage. The summary already lists Microsoft ... and then there's Google and Yahoo! and Flickr and a whole lot of other global companies interested in partaking in sales to over 1/6th of the world's population. And, if we can believe this study the Chinese people by and large welcome their censorship overlords! It's not going anywhere, all we can do is aid and abet the poor 15% that want less biased information. The only services not kowtowing are those uninterested in massive profits from the country!
If you owned shares in a tech company or lead a tech company, I'm sure you'd be welcoming the Chinese overlord's business invitation as well.
But a weird spinoff is that if you're a foreigner in China, your non-Chinese language version of Opera Mini will not work.
I don't know why this is or if it's true or if Opera plans to fix it but I would find their implementation of a solution pretty archaic if that's one of the caveats. Hopefully they are working on fixing that.
Murdoch-Microsoft Deal In the Works
Thank you! Finally some good news. These hatred consolidation programs cut my insane ranting down significantly and gives me more time to appreciate the finer things in life like making intricate tinfoil feathers to put into my tinfoil pimp hats. I applaud Murdoch & Ballmer for finally thinking of people like me. But it may be too little too late, ever since the government subsidized hatred and what with the sub-prime hatred rate financial crisis, I've been forced to cut down on hating as much as forty or fifty percent. Tough times we live in. Tough times.
They DO report a current trend of .15K per decade. This is far lower than the forecast.
Is there some reason you picked the Channel TLT data and not the, say, Channel TLS data which reports a negative 0.325 K/decade?
I'm no expert in any of this but the site you linked to seems to be satellite data for atmospheric temperatures. Not temperatures at the surface (which is really what we're concerned about, right? I have no doubt that the average temperature of the entire atmosphere of the earth has changed minimally -- if not been lowered erratically. The effects of what is happening on the ground are severely diluted when you include such a large volume.
Tell me, if you wanted to measure the temperature outside your house, would you consult a satellite measuring microwave transmissions or a thermometer adjacent to your house?
She also doesn’t understand how Manulife accessed her photos because her Facebook profile is locked and only people she approves can look at what she posts.
Oh, please, you're talking to a generation that grew up watching Dateline and 20/20 where insurance companies hired private investigators to stalk people who would do the following:
So then you'd see the companies hiring PIs to track the people (who allegedly could barely move) tearing it up at Disney World. Yeah, scam artists and fraudsters.
You shouldn't be surprised to see insurance companies being very proactive in their searches to follow up on people. I cannot say whether or not she is legitimately getting the short end of the stick or if she's defrauding the company. Sounds like the former. If she had made claims that she never smiled and couldn't go out in public due to depression then she might have problems. Why doesn't she just get her doctor to send a note to her insurance company explaining that people suffering from this magnitude of depression (and those recovering from it) can force themselves to smile for a picture? I mean, it's likely that the insurance company got tired of paying sick leave for depression unless it could be shown to be a chemical imbalance they probably were just looking for any reason to have to stop forking over pay.
Personally, I was offered $250 by my company's health insurance plan if I signed something that said I had not used tobacco products in the past 6 months. I hadn't but a few years ago I had (what I was told) were Cuban cigars in Mexico. Those friends put pictures of me on Facebook smoking them. So what? Well, if they found contrary evidence to my claim, I faced having my insurance terminated. Not worth the $250. Be aware of what Facebook puts on display for the world--even if you think it's private it's usually not. I mean, it could be as inane as some coworker who doesn't like her sees her other friend at work tagged in a photo with 'depressed' coworker on leave and decided to copy what photos they could see and forward them on to the insurance company?
The CRU has confirmed that a breach occurred, but not that all 61 MB of released material is genuine.
Rarely do I have enough time to generate 61 MB (let alone 61 compressed MB) of data, code and e-mails that serves my political/religious purposes. So if this is tampered data or correspondence, there would almost certainly be conflicting items inside such a large repository. I'm not saying it isn't possible, it just decreases the odds that this is a hoax.
'We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents'
Why? Why a random sampling? If you're going to serve up 61 MB zipped, it might as well be 61 GB zipped. Why not release both sets ("the good stuff.tar.gz" and "everything including the inane 'what's for lunch today?' e-mails.tar.gz")?
It's borderline hilarious that the claim is made that this is 'too important to be kept under wraps' followed immediately by the 'we'll decide what you see' cloaked by the equally hilarious word "random." Random? Really? You want me to believe that you printed everything out and put it on a big spinning wheel, blindfolded yourself and then threw darts at it? I mean, come on. Nothing in the political world is random. You would have done yourself much more justice saying you've released what you feel is relevant.
Being one, I know first hand that hackers are highly disorganized. But come on, why not torrent the whole set or wikileaks it or something? I mean, I'm almost waiting for a high quality Ford Fusion ad in PDF to surface right in the middle of the compressed file saying, "Doesn't this worry you enough to go green?"
Is it worthy of wider attention and discussion?
Why do you talk about it? Find someone in this list:
University rectors; professors of social sciences, history, philosophy, law and theology; directors of peace research institutes and foreign policy institutes;
Willing to Submit him for it and go back to coding. Don't go campaigning for some person to win the Nobel peace prize, call up your contacts at Washington University and discuss it with them. If you can't convince them to nominate him, it's probably not going to work.
This is not an elected award so I wouldn't waste my time trying to impose outside influence on a committee for a Nobel prize. The committee decides, not the community. I'm sure every profession has their savior/icon that they think deserves this award for revolutionizing something and altering humanity for the better. You're free to talk all you want but it's not going to change anything. Discussing it online is nothing but a waste of time unless your intentions are to embarrass Linus.
and Windows 7 was my idea.
John Hodgman: "Hi, I'm a PC." ... I guess you know who to choose."
*silence*
John Hodgman: "Oh, and Mac couldn't be here today because Windows 7 fiddled with his brakes. So
Please, they have microphones in my clothes, on the desk, in the walls, the fly buzzing by your mouth is their robot!!! Meet me by the dumpster out back around 5pm, come alone.
Unfortunately I have a bad habit of reading things aloud when I read them and by the time I was finished the fly was gone and the man sitting across from me was dead. The government doctor that rushed in the room and gave him pentobarbital in an attempt to revive him said it was due to an aneurysm caused by a robotic fly which he says he sees a lot of so it's nothing for me to look into.
I guess there's no story here after all.