"Like, what if a evolved chip only works properly at a range of 35-40 C ?"
That means you have a bad fitness function. You should test each population member under a range of enviornmental conditons. The biggest problem many times in evolutionary programming is coming up with a fitness function that describes the problem space well.
Too late... Here is the BS Dell sent me when I asked why Linux wouldn't run properly on my new Inspiron 2600 laptop. They locked the video ram settings to low, and made a M$ specific hack so only XP could run properly.
Dear Ralph,
Thank you for contacting Dell eSupport & Services. We appreciate the opportunity to assist you. It?s our hope that you have a positive experience with our company. Ralph, In our commitment to ensure a faster response to you, I will be handling this issue in the absence of the previous technician.
Ralph, I understand your issue and would like to inform you that the configuration and allocation of video memory to particular applications is controlled by the operating system and cannot be set manually by the user, this feature is by design and even the newer BIOS has no option of manually setting the amount of video memory. I hope you understand.
To ask another query or get assistance with a technical issue, mail us at http://support.dell.com/us/en/emaildell/. Once again, thank you for choosing Dell.
Respectfully,
George
12345
Monday - Friday, 6am - 2:30pm
Dell e-Support and Services
--Original Message--
From: "Ralph"
The problem is with that the BIOS software does not allow one to allocate more than 1mb of video ram. The display cannot be used to its full resolution without more video memory. According to Intel the problem is with the BIOS software and not their 830m chipset:
"Intel is not responsible for the BIOS on any production Intel 830M/MG
systems.
Please contact your system manufacturer for instructions on increasing the
amount of legacy video memory set aside, if available, or for a BIOS update to
change this setting."
Dell is the manufacuer/vendor of the defective BIOS. Whom should I contact on fixing the BIOS video memory allocation error?
On a similar note Dell has been configuring their laptops with the intel 830m chipset (I purchased an Inspiron 2600) so the BIOS won't play nice with Xfree86. The BIOS only allocates 1mb of video memory which isn't enough to get full screen resolution. You need a Windows specific BIOS hack from the restore CD just to get decent screen resolution. That's bad when even the WindowsXP CD can't play nice with the BIOS settings.
Here is post on Xfree86 about it. Here is the Intel page. Notice at the bottom where they bitch at companies like Dell.
I am going to assume that they are newbies, and getting paid as newbies should. Fix that first because you care most about your company's bottom line.
When I was a newbie in a small consulting shop I faced many of the problems your co-workers have. I had no clue about the librarys I was working with (in-house, ObjectARX, MFC,..) and was too stupid to ask for help and spent all day in with my head in a book trying to catch up to speed. As long as they are newbies you become the mentor. Break projects down 1-2 day chunks that they can work on without too much trouble. Meet with them a few times each day to see if they are stuck on anything and encourage them to ask lots of questions. Also, since you have a group of them it might be nice if you split them off into pairs for some projects so one could research questions they have while the other codes. Rewards are also good. If they produce some good code show it off to others. Sometimes newbies have an attitude that they don't want to screw things up, and a little confidence goes a long way towards them beliveing in themselves.
We live in what century? Why do we still have witch scares? Every time a new technology comes along that the general populus dosen't understand congress treats it like a form of magic, and passes laws to burn the witches.
Existing laws already deal with every form of crime against one's neighbor: murder,rape, assult, theft, child abuse, kidnapping, abuse/misuse of someone's property, behaving in a reckless manner, and civil suits. Also, good laws focus on the effect and intent of one's actions and not cause. Murder is when you kill someone. Death by poison, hanging, shooting, or hacking (Killer Robots? Mutant Gerbils?) is irrelivant.
It is time for a constitututional ammendment against witch burning. That is the only way congress will stop trying to battle the black arts, and start focusing on running the country.
Question 1: How many of you learned to program on your own with little classroom instruction?
Question 2: Now that China has a fair bit of internet acess (OK, stop the Chineese SPAM server jokes) what technical knowlege are they without?
Iowa State may not be typical, but I would venture to say that over half of the Computer Science grad students here are from China/Taiwan. I wouldn't be suprised if the majority of CS professors in the US when our children attend university are from China. China may have inferior infrastructure compared to the US/EU, but they are neck and neck with us when it comes to technology. In the above post they have:
Give them all a pretty icon on the desktop to their own folder on a central file server. Name it "My Documents" or something. Tell them to copy all their important files to it, and to save all their work to this folder in the future. Pull a little BOFH a week later by swaping the hard drive of some guy in marketing with a defective one. If he backed up his files send out an email praising him, and if not send out an email making an example of him and tell him off about how many hours you had to screw around with the ACME hard drive utiltiy to get his files back.
Why not put it into the compiler/assembler suite? Add random jumps everywhere to foil buffer overflows. Might bloat your code and increase the run time linearly, but it would bring obscurity to a whole new level. You still have to recompile everything, but then that in itself might do the trick. On second thought try compiling on an obscure compiler. That might fool the buffer overflow demons at address #oxDEADBEEF.
Just thought of another one.
By patenting Windows XP does Microsoft control all bitstrings that have the same length as Windows XP? You could generate a random string of bits and XOR it with the Windows XP binary. The resulting XORed string could be any string the same length as the XP binary. (by XORing the string again with the same random string you get Windows XP back) There are less atoms in the universe than the number 2^n where n is the length of the XP binary.
Along this line, every digital program is a number in base 2. If one were to write a program A that outputs the number for Windows XP, and then write a program B that outputs the number for A, would program B be legal?
Program B does nothing but output a number. The number it outputs is not copyrighted.
What if you wrote a program that produced the number for the Windows XP binary minus seven? Would a program that adds seven then be copyrighted by microsoft?
Similarly,does a software binary copyright also cover the infinite number of programs that output that binary? Also, does copyright cover stuff like program B giving control over the infinite number of programs, that can be produced by the infinite number of programs, that can be produced by an infinite number of programs....
If the government actualy accepts code as speach, then software companies are screwed. They would have to outlaw every number, because it could be used as a key to generate the source code for Windows XP.
Kevin Mitnick never had to hack into a computer with script-foo. He used social enginering. Blocking unused services, backing up your data, and loading the latest security updates is fine. Problem are those pesky employees who are stupid enough to give their username/password over the phone. Blocking them from calling out can be a problem, have multiple copies of them is more of a problem, so you are left with "upgrading" them by giving them the boot.
Nucular Detonation =1000 years of CPU (from article)
Assume CPU speed doubles every two years.(More's Law)
Log(1000)/ Log(2) =9.96578 (Base 2 Log of 1000)
9.96578 * 2=19.9316 (Every two years)
Therefore in 20 years you should be able to do nuclear detonations on your Playstation. Better start putting export restrctions on those Playstations again...
For the most part academic AI falls into the catagory of engineering optimization. How can we design object X using: (neural nets, evolutionary computation, logic reduction...)on beuwulf clusters using weeks of computation so that it will perform well under condition Z in the real world?
Game AI, however, is based on the universe created inside the game, is mostly asthetic, and usualy done in real time.
Evolutionary Computations. Defining a fitness metric for some problem and then searching the space using Darwin's principle of natural selection. It has done wonders for biological computing systems, and shows(has shown) promise for getting good solutions to many "hard" problems.
Ok. Games now have a few gigs of data. Why not just load a whole OS off the disc? Developers could get as fancy and cross platform as they want as long as they can port Linux or whatever to that console's archetecture. This would royaly piss of console makers, but who cares. Maybe consoles will become more like PCs where you can get the latest console every six months instead of every two years.
If not for moral concerns I might actualy buy one. Seems they have decided to abuse the US Patent system to gain market advantage instead of building a superior product:
"Patent Protection
Ontro has 71 approved Utility Patent
claims for the product in the United
States, and other patents are pending.
In addition, the Company has filed for
patent protection in 47 foreign
countries, with over 30 approved to
date...
Ontro's patent protection should aid its long-term success. Ontro believes
competing companies will be challenged to manufacture competing designs
at lower manufacturing costs."
Human: A symetrical mass of geneticaly identical cells that have the ability to produce diferent protiens given certain enviornmental factors. I happen to consider this a "human life" in any sense. Sure it has the potential to be abstracted down to the molecular level, but it is stil a person by any wildest stretch of the imagination.
Humans in early stages of development don't have much redundancy or immunity to certain diseases, therefore the death rate from conception until 6 months old out of the womb is rather high. Many parents are saddened each year by the failure to carry pregnacys to term, and those that die within a short time of leaving the womb.
This is sick. Creating human life just to see if it will attach to an artifical womb? What have we become?
How about some Bioethics 101
Rule 0: Human life is sacred.
Rule 1: A human's life shall not be taken.
Rule 2: A human shall give consent to all expirementing done on them. This concent may not be given until they are of age(around 18).
Rule 3: Whenever possible expirements should be carried out on other organisms to minimize human suffering.
Rule 4: Research shall be carried out in a contained enviornment. Only when a new organism/product/medicne's side effects have been thouroughly tested shall it be released into "the wild"
A book that covers quantum computation architecture from the programmer's view. It would be fun to design quantum algorithms. Might be a handy skill in ten years too.
In many clusters today like KLAT2 they only use hard drives for the root nodes, and the other 98% of nodes use 2GIG of ram.
This saves you at least $150 per slave node by not buying a hard drive, thousands for having to deal with less hard drive failures, and acess times are orders of magnitutes better.
Lets do the math. 512MB of PC133 on pricewatch today was $67. For 2GIG of ram that comes out to $268 per node. For a terabyte(2modules*$67*1000GB)=$134,000.
That blows my mind. A small research lab can now own a terabyte of PC133 for under $150,000. Man, do I feel old.
Slashdot Mirror
"Like, what if a evolved chip only works properly at a range of 35-40 C ?"
That means you have a bad fitness function. You should test each population member under a range of enviornmental conditons. The biggest problem many times in evolutionary programming is coming up with a fitness function that describes the problem space well.
Too late... Here is the BS Dell sent me when I asked why Linux wouldn't run properly on my new Inspiron 2600 laptop. They locked the video ram settings to low, and made a M$ specific hack so only XP could run properly.
Dear Ralph,
Thank you for contacting Dell eSupport & Services. We appreciate the opportunity to assist you. It?s our hope that you have a positive experience with our company. Ralph, In our commitment to ensure a faster response to you, I will be handling this issue in the absence of the previous technician.
Ralph, I understand your issue and would like to inform you that the configuration and allocation of video memory to particular applications is controlled by the operating system and cannot be set manually by the user, this feature is by design and even the newer BIOS has no option of manually setting the amount of video memory. I hope you understand.
To ask another query or get assistance with a technical issue, mail us at http://support.dell.com/us/en/emaildell/. Once again, thank you for choosing Dell.
Respectfully,
George
12345
Monday - Friday, 6am - 2:30pm
Dell e-Support and Services
--Original Message--
From: "Ralph"
The problem is with that the BIOS software does not allow one to allocate more than 1mb of video ram. The display cannot be used to its full resolution without more video memory. According to Intel the problem is with the BIOS software
and not their 830m chipset:
"Intel is not responsible for the BIOS on any production Intel 830M/MG
systems.
Please contact your system manufacturer for instructions on increasing the
amount of legacy video memory set aside, if available, or for a BIOS update to
change this setting."
Dell is the manufacuer/vendor of the defective BIOS. Whom should I contact on fixing the BIOS video memory allocation error?
-Ralph
On a similar note Dell has been configuring their laptops with the intel 830m chipset (I purchased an Inspiron 2600) so the BIOS won't play nice with Xfree86. The BIOS only allocates 1mb of video memory which isn't enough to get full screen resolution. You need a Windows specific BIOS hack from the restore CD just to get decent screen resolution. That's bad when even the WindowsXP CD can't play nice with the BIOS settings.
Here is post on Xfree86 about it.
Here is the Intel page. Notice at the bottom where they bitch at companies like Dell.
I am going to assume that they are newbies, and getting paid as newbies should. Fix that first because you care most about your company's bottom line.
When I was a newbie in a small consulting shop I faced many of the problems your co-workers have. I had no clue about the librarys I was working with (in-house, ObjectARX, MFC,..) and was too stupid to ask for help and spent all day in with my head in a book trying to catch up to speed. As long as they are newbies you become the mentor. Break projects down 1-2 day chunks that they can work on without too much trouble. Meet with them a few times each day to see if they are stuck on anything and encourage them to ask lots of questions. Also, since you have a group of them it might be nice if you split them off into pairs for some projects so one could research questions they have while the other codes. Rewards are also good. If they produce some good code show it off to others. Sometimes newbies have an attitude that they don't want to screw things up, and a little confidence goes a long way towards them beliveing in themselves.
We live in what century? Why do we still have witch scares? Every time a new technology comes along that the general populus dosen't understand congress treats it like a form of magic, and passes laws to burn the witches.
Existing laws already deal with every form of crime against one's neighbor: murder,rape, assult, theft, child abuse, kidnapping, abuse/misuse of someone's property, behaving in a reckless manner, and civil suits. Also, good laws focus on the effect and intent of one's actions and not cause. Murder is when you kill someone. Death by poison, hanging, shooting, or hacking (Killer Robots? Mutant Gerbils?) is irrelivant.
It is time for a constitututional ammendment against witch burning. That is the only way congress will stop trying to battle the black arts, and start focusing on running the country.
Question 1: How many of you learned to program on your own with little classroom instruction?
Question 2: Now that China has a fair bit of internet acess (OK, stop the Chineese SPAM server jokes) what technical knowlege are they without?
Iowa State may not be typical, but I would venture to say that over half of the Computer Science grad students here are from China/Taiwan. I wouldn't be suprised if the majority of CS professors in the US when our children attend university are from China. China may have inferior infrastructure compared to the US/EU, but they are neck and neck with us when it comes to technology. In the above post they have:
#6)-educated people
and That is all it takes.
Did we say pitchblende? Only $750 USD and you can have a nice size chunk for yourself. Hmm. Wonder if you can make a good misquito lamp out of it...
Central File Server
Give them all a pretty icon on the desktop to their own folder on a central file server. Name it "My Documents" or something. Tell them to copy all their important files to it, and to save all their work to this folder in the future. Pull a little BOFH a week later by swaping the hard drive of some guy in marketing with a defective one. If he backed up his files send out an email praising him, and if not send out an email making an example of him and tell him off about how many hours you had to screw around with the ACME hard drive utiltiy to get his files back.
Why not put it into the compiler/assembler suite? Add random jumps everywhere to foil buffer overflows. Might bloat your code and increase the run time linearly, but it would bring obscurity to a whole new level. You still have to recompile everything, but then that in itself might do the trick. On second thought try compiling on an obscure compiler. That might fool the buffer overflow demons at address #oxDEADBEEF.
Just thought of another one.
By patenting Windows XP does Microsoft control all bitstrings that have the same length as Windows XP? You could generate a random string of bits and XOR it with the Windows XP binary. The resulting XORed string could be any string the same length as the XP binary. (by XORing the string again with the same random string you get Windows XP back) There are less atoms in the universe than the number 2^n where n is the length of the XP binary.
Along this line, every digital program is a number in base 2. If one were to write a program A that outputs the number for Windows XP, and then write a program B that outputs the number for A, would program B be legal?
Program B does nothing but output a number. The number it outputs is not copyrighted.
What if you wrote a program that produced the number for the Windows XP binary minus seven? Would a program that adds seven then be copyrighted by microsoft?
Similarly,does a software binary copyright also cover the infinite number of programs that output that binary? Also, does copyright cover stuff like program B giving control over the infinite number of programs, that can be produced by the infinite number of programs, that can be produced by an infinite number of programs....
If the government actualy accepts code as speach, then software companies are screwed. They would have to outlaw every number, because it could be used as a key to generate the source code for Windows XP.
Kevin Mitnick never had to hack into a computer with script-foo. He used social enginering. Blocking unused services, backing up your data, and loading the latest security updates is fine. Problem are those pesky employees who are stupid enough to give their username/password over the phone. Blocking them from calling out can be a problem, have multiple copies of them is more of a problem, so you are left with "upgrading" them by giving them the boot.
This is a distributed computation, so speed dosen't matter as long as the chip has enough transistors to run all the threads concurently.
Well, if More's law holds up:
Nucular Detonation =1000 years of CPU (from article)
Assume CPU speed doubles every two years.(More's Law)
Log(1000)/ Log(2) =9.96578 (Base 2 Log of 1000)
9.96578 * 2=19.9316 (Every two years)
Therefore in 20 years you should be able to do nuclear detonations on your Playstation. Better start putting export restrctions on those Playstations again...
With a website called GOTO they have to be messed up. No wonder they got a patent.
...
Patent Clerk:"Yes! Here is your patent. Just stop making me read uncommented GOTO code! Arghh
For the most part academic AI falls into the catagory of engineering optimization. How can we design object X using: (neural nets, evolutionary computation, logic reduction...)on beuwulf clusters using weeks of computation so that it will perform well under condition Z in the real world?
Game AI, however, is based on the universe created inside the game, is mostly asthetic, and usualy done in real time.
Evolutionary Computations. Defining a fitness metric for some problem and then searching the space using Darwin's principle of natural selection. It has done wonders for biological computing systems, and shows(has shown) promise for getting good solutions to many "hard" problems.
Ok. Games now have a few gigs of data. Why not just load a whole OS off the disc? Developers could get as fancy and cross platform as they want as long as they can port Linux or whatever to that console's archetecture. This would royaly piss of console makers, but who cares. Maybe consoles will become more like PCs where you can get the latest console every six months instead of every two years.
If not for moral concerns I might actualy buy one. Seems they have decided to abuse the US Patent system to gain market advantage instead of building a superior product:
"Patent Protection
Ontro has 71 approved Utility Patent claims for the product in the United States, and other patents are pending. In addition, the Company has filed for patent protection in 47 foreign countries, with over 30 approved to date...
Ontro's patent protection should aid its long-term success. Ontro believes competing companies will be challenged to manufacture competing designs at lower manufacturing costs."
I see you haven't got gturing installed yet. A must for Computational Theory, and it can run any program with polynomial time modifications.
If you ask me GNU Applications and a few other programs are the killer apps for GNU/Linux as a CS student.
1. GCC, Binutils, Emacs/Vim (General Hacking)
2. Mesa (Graphics)
3. Bison/Flex (Compilers)
4. Linux (Operating Systems)
5. Various Packet Analyizers (Networking/Security)
5. MySQL/Postgres (Databases)
The only non opensource application I use is Mathematica, but Wolfram provides student discouts and packages such as Combinatorica are opensource.
Human: A symetrical mass of geneticaly identical cells that have the ability to produce diferent protiens given certain enviornmental factors. I happen to consider this a "human life" in any sense. Sure it has the potential to be abstracted down to the molecular level, but it is stil a person by any wildest stretch of the imagination.
Humans in early stages of development don't have much redundancy or immunity to certain diseases, therefore the death rate from conception until 6 months old out of the womb is rather high. Many parents are saddened each year by the failure to carry pregnacys to term, and those that die within a short time of leaving the womb.
This is sick. Creating human life just to see if it will attach to an artifical womb? What have we become?
How about some Bioethics 101
Rule 0: Human life is sacred.
Rule 1: A human's life shall not be taken.
Rule 2: A human shall give consent to all expirementing done on them. This concent may not be given until they are of age(around 18).
Rule 3: Whenever possible expirements should be carried out on other organisms to minimize human suffering.
Rule 4: Research shall be carried out in a contained enviornment. Only when a new organism/product/medicne's side effects have been thouroughly tested shall it be released into "the wild"
Hacker's Handbook of Quantum Algorithm Design
A book that covers quantum computation architecture from the programmer's view. It would be fun to design quantum algorithms. Might be a handy skill in ten years too.
In many clusters today like KLAT2 they only use hard drives for the root nodes, and the other 98% of nodes use 2GIG of ram.
This saves you at least $150 per slave node by not buying a hard drive, thousands for having to deal with less hard drive failures, and acess times are orders of magnitutes better.
Lets do the math. 512MB of PC133 on pricewatch today was $67. For 2GIG of ram that comes out to $268 per node. For a terabyte(2modules*$67*1000GB)=$134,000.
That blows my mind. A small research lab can now own a terabyte of PC133 for under $150,000. Man, do I feel old.