What people keep forgetting is the shoppers really don't want a _store_. They want a _product_ and which store they buy from is secondary.
For example I wanted a Blu-ray disc. The worst user interface I could image would have be go to a few stores and visually hunt for what I wanted. Not I want to search for the product and have the search engine give me back a list of stores that offer it. Going from store to store is backwards.
But this would be very nice way to look at a product. Manufactures could use this. Some one who builds cars or boats could show off their product with a good quality VR. Used House Salesmen (aka "realestate agents) would use this too. But NOT retail stores
"...and converting FLAC format files to another format could result in substantial sound quality loss."
Absolutely NOT. When you convert from FLAC nothing is lost. It is bit for bit the same as directly ripping the CD.
If you burn a CD from the FLAC file it will be identical to the CD version, not just sounding the same but "bit-for-bit" identical.
Now of course if you convert the FLAC file to (say) MP3 or AAC then something is lost, that's the whole point of MP3: To loose the parts of the sound yur ears don't notice.
"and a second DVD containing multi-track session files for a selection of the album tracks."
Wow, this is perfect for someone like me who wants to learn how to mix music. It's hard to find first quality tracks. It would be fun to record some more tracks at home. I could do a re-mix where I get to play in Paul's band
$80 sounds expansive but in terms of the number of hours of education and entertainment no.
piano society has a LOT of classical music. All free as in beer and much of it free as in "freedom". It's all pretty good quality some from new world class performers and some from university orchestras and the like. They have enough material that it's a good site it you want to learn about a more obscure composer.
They do ask for donations and offer CDs for sale to support the site.
Oh, and one more huge source of free music -- The public library. My local library has a large selection ad will do an inter-library loan to get me a CD they don't have.
Many of the projects I did in school were micro-controller based. We designed little gadgets that tried to detect if a room was empty and turned out the lights. It had to "talk" to sensors and lights.
I think the standard undergrad "programming 101" entry level class project was to write a controller for a snack food vending machine. Inputs were the various butons and output opended dors and rotated a try and give out change.
I've heard others did ATM machines.
Just don't use PCs theyare far to complex and have huge APIs. Start the beginners on little 8-bit devices
All this means is that it will cost more money to build. You can get around the problems by using a more massive anchor at the top and building it taller. "Instable" maens you have a design where pertabations cause a kind of feedback. So what you do is build it with a certain amond of side load built in.
Ok so many this raises the cost by 4X. I don't know
Yes new beard and hair, but I bet the ratio of the width between your eyes and the width of your head has not changed. That an 100 other ratios is what the software measures.
The software creates a list of numbers from the photo. then sorts the numbers. In the sorted list faces that look a bt alike will be close to each other. It's like if in a large room they asked tall people to more to the rear, shorter ones to the front. and then older pole to the left and yong ones to the right. You would be standing near people a lot like yourself. If they continured the process and sorted peole be wieght, eye color, With of the nose, length of the left forearm and so on you eventually be standing next to your twin. Not noice in NO WAY does the software have to "recognise" people. It can't but still it works
Actually it could handle AI. If your AI project involve neural networks this could make then run very fast. Also it could do some rather simple everyday tasks well too such as transcoding media files, adjusting the color of images and the first levels of processing for voice recognition. All of these tasks involve massive numbers of simple calculatons
I can think of a place that is even more featureless: The Pacific Ocean. I've been on the ocean in a sail boat and purposely have left the GPS off. It only takes a few hours of training for anyone to learn how to not get lost and actually to get to places, even on the ocean.
Once in a class an instructor took us out at night in a good sized cruising sail boat when the Coast Guard small craft advisory in effect. He put a dut on the chart and asked "how long until we are there?" This was not some feat of skill either, pretty much normal stuff that if you could not do you'd be incompetent.
GPSes are a "nice to have" thing but not really needed. In fact there is a danger in using a GPS. You can become lazy and dependent on them and then when the unit fails you are in a bad way.
"I've been running without a pagefile, in all versions of Windows,..."
Not really. On a modern OS when executable code is loaded from disk to RAM. It isn't really loaded. What they do is map the file that holds the code into virtual memory. So in effect when you run a program called "foobar.exe" you have made that file a swap file. It gets better. The OS never has to copy pages out of ram because the data is already in foobar.exe. When the OS needs space it can re-use the pages without need to write them to a swap file because it knows where to get the data.
So yu are in effect using as many swap files as programs you are running
How can you address this problem? There will always be people who figure that the easiest way to get stuff is to take it away from those who have it. Actually if yu can pullit off it's a pretty logical thing to do. Heck the geeks did this all the time 2500 years ago. Just get a bunch of guys march over to the next city and kill everyone and take their stuff. Great way to make money and get rich. I think the only way to stop it is to make sure everyone knows you can;t get away with it.
FINALLY, 2009 will be the year of Linux on the desktop. If Linux goes on every desktop in China then how long until Windows is the #2 OS in the world? There are a lot of people in China.
Back in the days when I first learned about and used the Internet (no "darpanet") we did not have ISPs. The idea of an ISP is a new thing. In the old days you got an Internet conection beacuse you knew someone else who had one and you rigged a communications line to them. Many times you could not afford to keep that line 24x7 so you connected periodically and when the connection was up you send email and NNTP (news) that had been queued. Most of use had multiple "peer" and we'd connect with some of them hourly, some of them only at night.
There is no reason we can't go back to this kind of setup, it could be done in parallel with the current ISP based setup. All our current software and servers have suport for ultiple intermitent conections. It would be kind of fun (for us geeks at least) to set up As for the links, if it's close, like two houses down the block, you can run 100BaseT wire down the back fence or use wifi with big antenna to go up to 10 miles. Ham radio has world wide reach but at very low speeds. And then there are phone modems.
who measures things like MP3 compression time when testing a filesystem?!?
They were measuring what matters: "System performance" It very well could have been the case that the fastest file system, measured on a simple bench mark gives the worst MP3 compression time. Let's say the reason the filesystem is fast is because it uses a huge amount of CPU time and RAM. So a RAM based encrypted file system might be very fast, until you run an application on it.
It's a reasonable test and what it showed is that in the real-world performance is about the same
escape is really not a problem. Much of the "stuff" in our solar system was ejected into space as it foormed. Planets that were to close were either ejected or landed in the Sun. Today all that is left are the bits that were in stable orbits the rest is long gone. The fact that this could have been ejected from it's home is not a big deal but (1) the chance that it got here and (2) that it went into orbit around the sun are a (maybe) one in a billion chance. But then with a few billion commets a one in a billion chance might happen a few times
Yes it IS about margins. Apple sells $2,000 computers and makes about 30% margin on each one. that means like $600. Apple sells directly to end users. They have their own retail stores
Microsoft sells almost all of their software wholesale and make only a few bucks per copy. MOST of the computer is not a Microsoft product. Microsoft is just a supplier to Dell or Compaq just like Seagate or Intel. So Miscroft does not make $600 off every machine like Apple. I think Dell pays MS about $40 per copy of Vista
I'd have to say in recruiting software engineers I have much more of a problem with theory-light code monkeys than I do with non-coders that are well-versed in CS theory.
A agree with the above 100% In fact our company tends to hire math, engineering and science majors with the idea that you can teach these people to write code in a few weeks but you can't teach a guy who only knows C++ Physics.
Actually we have a well rounded staff. You need the guys who know the CS theory and the math and physics people too and technical writers and graphic artists and managers. You really do need "code monkeys" but then you need the experienced older guys who can tell the monkeys what to code up.
But I do agree I see so horrible code written by "coders" who know only the details of some language but don't have a clue about (say) DBMS theory.
To answer my own post, What I'm saying is that the brain likely does NOT store information the way modern computers do. In a computer you can point to the physical place that any bit is stored. It will live inside a cell of RAM or a spot on a disk.
But if I were to to compute a Furier transform of what I'm looking at right now and then transmit it into a feedback loop that is rigges to decay with a 4 second half life. You could not point to where the picture of my coffee cup is stored.
Neurons have a long axons and the coffee cup image would be stored inside thousands of wave fronts inside thousands of axons. Many networks would use this loop as input. These networks might look for patterns or perform some kind of transformations.
Another way to say this is that brain is to mind as legs are to running. Mind is a process not a physical thing.
AI can work from one of two "ends". I think it is clear the brain is built with neurons. So you might think to study neural networks. But that is like saying computers are built with many interconnected transistors and I want to design a web site so I'll study the physics of semiconductors. No, if your goal is web site yu ned to work at a higher level of abstraction, maybe at the level of PHP or Java Script. Likewise the brain almost certainly organizes networks of neurons into higher level stuctures and those structures into even higher levels. By the time you get to human level language ability you don't even need to understand much about the lowest layers.
That said, the only way I think we will ever get to a true AI i to have people work work with and understand each of the layers. It is likely far to complex for one person to understand it all. So pick a field. Do you like neural networks or computational linguistics or maybe Kinematics?
My interest is how you can use the low level primitives like neural networks to build higher level abstractions. So I think I'd call that the "middle ware". I think people have been working AI from both ends for decades but I'd like to see the ends meet.
One clue are brain waves. I think we store infomation is a rings of neural networks that use feedback. Years ago in the 50's someone seriously suggesting using "moon bounce" as a kind of computer memory. You would encode a signal and transmit it via radio to the moon. then after a few seconds it bounced back to earth and is continously retransmitted as a loop. One can store ove 2 second of dat in the free space between the earth and moon. I think the brain does this. You can store a lot of data n a delay loop. All of short term memory is in there and this holds "stuff" that might end up in longer term memory or other loops.
So if you have a theoretical background and are good at math. Work out how these interconnected feedback loops could work.. I'm pretty sure these are the structures that set just above the neural networks.
The next step is to see how you can build classical AI using loops.
I don't think you even need "good code". I worked on a project that eventually failed and all the code we looked at in those reviews was "good". Either that or we made it good. The big problem was that it did the wrong things.
The problem is not with the people who write the code. Most are OK and reviews catch gross errors but in out case we had some basic "big picture" ideas wrong.
Microsoft Vista is a good example of this. Likely the code would pass a review and has few mistakes but the problem is the dumb ideas that got written into the specifications.
It's like the "bridge to nowhere" problem. Good, competent structural engineers build something no one wants or needs.
Id say if you are looking for a Sysadmin job you don't need a four year degree in CS. It works the other way around too. If you were to have a four year degree in CS it would be a total waste of your education to then work as a sysadmin.
The university degree will NOT (I hope) taech yo the "technology of the day". They should be covering subjects that don't go out of style. Math is like that (Nobody every says "deferential equations are so 1970's")
On the other hand those support jobs, like Sysadmin and network instalations and help desk and feil repair really do depend on you knowing the "technology of the day" which universities don't typicaly teach.
I do had the CS background and I've worked in software engineering in the aerospace industry. I've worked on radar signal processors, rocket telemetry systems, guidance and navigation and secure message processing, simulations and so on. For this kind of work you want a degree in CS, math or engineering and hopefully an MS degree. For this kind of work a degree is an absolute requirement. but for work that suports a company's computing infrastructure most don't have degrees.
How ever thing about what will hapen when you are 45 or 50 years old. If you want to be in management by then some kind of degree, maybe in business or an MBA is very helpful
Leaving a password in my will is not going to work. I'd have to remember to change the will each tie I canged my password and I have many passwords.
The only practical thing is a paper list of people with contact information for each of them.
Quite frankly few of those people I correspond with via email on list servers would notice if I were gone. I'd only need to maintain a paper list with a couple dozen names on it from those few word would spread fast enough to those who need to know.
The key is "personally-identifiable". What Apple is sending is not. They are sending a hash of a page. All they are doing is taking something you just downloaded, scrambling it up and sending it back to the web.
If you are truly worried about people finding out what sites you are browsing then you need to worry a LOT about DNS servers. DNS server know your IP address and the name of every site you click. How would you know if the DNS server is logging your queries?
Slashdot Mirror
What people keep forgetting is the shoppers really don't want a _store_. They want a _product_ and which store they buy from is secondary.
For example I wanted a Blu-ray disc. The worst user interface I could image would have be go to a few stores and visually hunt for what I wanted. Not I want to search for the product and have the search engine give me back a list of stores that offer it. Going from store to store is backwards.
But this would be very nice way to look at a product. Manufactures could use this. Some one who builds cars or boats could show off their product with a good quality VR. Used House Salesmen (aka "realestate agents) would use this too. But NOT retail stores
"...and converting FLAC format files to another format could result in substantial sound quality loss."
Absolutely NOT. When you convert from FLAC nothing is lost. It is bit for bit the same as directly ripping the CD.
If you burn a CD from the FLAC file it will be identical to the CD version, not just sounding the same but "bit-for-bit" identical.
Now of course if you convert the FLAC file to (say) MP3 or AAC then something is lost, that's the whole point of MP3: To loose the parts of the sound yur ears don't notice.
"and a second DVD containing multi-track session files for a selection of the album tracks."
Wow, this is perfect for someone like me who wants to learn how to mix music. It's hard to find first quality tracks. It would be fun to record some more tracks at home. I could do a re-mix where I get to play in Paul's band
$80 sounds expansive but in terms of the number of hours of education and entertainment no.
http://pianosociety.com/
piano society has a LOT of classical music. All free as in beer and much of it free as in "freedom". It's all pretty good quality some from new world class performers and some from university orchestras and the like. They have enough material that it's a good site it you want to learn about a more obscure composer.
They do ask for donations and offer CDs for sale to support the site.
Oh, and one more huge source of free music -- The public library. My local library has a large selection ad will do an inter-library loan to get me a CD they don't have.
Better Idea: Why learn to write code on a PC?
Many of the projects I did in school were micro-controller based. We designed little gadgets that tried to detect if a room was empty and turned out the lights. It had to "talk" to sensors and lights.
I think the standard undergrad "programming 101" entry level class project was to write a controller for a snack food vending machine. Inputs were the various butons and output opended dors and rotated a try and give out change.
I've heard others did ATM machines.
Just don't use PCs theyare far to complex and have huge APIs. Start the beginners on little 8-bit devices
All this means is that it will cost more money to build. You can get around the problems by using a more massive anchor at the top and building it taller. "Instable" maens you have a design where pertabations cause a kind of feedback. So what you do is build it with a certain amond of side load built in.
Ok so many this raises the cost by 4X. I don't know
Yes new beard and hair, but I bet the ratio of the width between your eyes and the width of your head has not changed. That an 100 other ratios is what the software measures.
The software creates a list of numbers from the photo. then sorts the numbers. In the sorted list faces that look a bt alike will be close to each other. It's like if in a large room they asked tall people to more to the rear, shorter ones to the front. and then older pole to the left and yong ones to the right. You would be standing near people a lot like yourself. If they continured the process and sorted peole be wieght, eye color, With of the nose, length of the left forearm and so on you eventually be standing next to your twin. Not noice in NO WAY does the software have to "recognise" people. It can't but still it works
Actually it could handle AI. If your AI project involve neural networks this could make then run very fast. Also it could do some rather simple everyday tasks well too such as transcoding media files, adjusting the color of images and the first levels of processing for voice recognition. All of these tasks involve massive numbers of simple calculatons
I can think of a place that is even more featureless: The Pacific Ocean. I've been on the ocean in a sail boat and purposely have left the GPS off. It only takes a few hours of training for anyone to learn how to not get lost and actually to get to places, even on the ocean.
Once in a class an instructor took us out at night in a good sized cruising sail boat when the Coast Guard small craft advisory in effect. He put a dut on the chart and asked "how long until we are there?" This was not some feat of skill either, pretty much normal stuff that if you could not do you'd be incompetent.
GPSes are a "nice to have" thing but not really needed. In fact there is a danger in using a GPS. You can become lazy and dependent on them and then when the unit fails you are in a bad way.
"I've been running without a pagefile, in all versions of Windows,..."
Not really. On a modern OS when executable code is loaded from disk to RAM. It isn't really loaded. What they do is map the file that holds the code into virtual memory. So in effect when you run a program called "foobar.exe" you have made that file a swap file. It gets better. The OS never has to copy pages out of ram because the data is already in foobar.exe. When the OS needs space it can re-use the pages without need to write them to a swap file because it knows where to get the data.
So yu are in effect using as many swap files as programs you are running
How can you address this problem? There will always be people who figure that the easiest way to get stuff is to take it away from those who have it. Actually if yu can pullit off it's a pretty logical thing to do. Heck the geeks did this all the time 2500 years ago. Just get a bunch of guys march over to the next city and kill everyone and take their stuff. Great way to make money and get rich. I think the only way to stop it is to make sure everyone knows you can;t get away with it.
FINALLY, 2009 will be the year of Linux on the desktop. If Linux goes on every desktop in China then how long until Windows is the #2 OS in the world? There are a lot of people in China.
Back in the days when I first learned about and used the Internet (no "darpanet") we did not have ISPs. The idea of an ISP is a new thing. In the old days you got an Internet conection beacuse you knew someone else who had one and you rigged a communications line to them. Many times you could not afford to keep that line 24x7 so you connected periodically and when the connection was up you send email and NNTP (news) that had been queued. Most of use had multiple "peer" and we'd connect with some of them hourly, some of them only at night.
There is no reason we can't go back to this kind of setup, it could be done in parallel with the current ISP based setup. All our current software and servers have suport for ultiple intermitent conections. It would be kind of fun (for us geeks at least) to set up As for the links, if it's close, like two houses down the block, you can run 100BaseT wire down the back fence or use wifi with big antenna to go up to 10 miles. Ham radio has world wide reach but at very low speeds. And then there are phone modems.
who measures things like MP3 compression time when testing a filesystem?!?
They were measuring what matters: "System performance" It very well could have been the case that the fastest file system, measured on a simple bench mark gives the worst MP3 compression time. Let's say the reason the filesystem is fast is because it uses a huge amount of CPU time and RAM. So a RAM based encrypted file system might be very fast, until you run an application on it.
It's a reasonable test and what it showed is that in the real-world performance is about the same
escape is really not a problem. Much of the "stuff" in our solar system was ejected into space as it foormed. Planets that were to close were either ejected or landed in the Sun. Today all that is left are the bits that were in stable orbits the rest is long gone. The fact that this could have been ejected from it's home is not a big deal but (1) the chance that it got here and (2) that it went into orbit around the sun are a (maybe) one in a billion chance. But then with a few billion commets a one in a billion chance might happen a few times
Yes it IS about margins. Apple sells $2,000 computers and makes about 30% margin on each one. that means like $600. Apple sells directly to end users. They have their own retail stores
Microsoft sells almost all of their software wholesale and make only a few bucks per copy. MOST of the computer is not a Microsoft product. Microsoft is just a supplier to Dell or Compaq just like Seagate or Intel. So Miscroft does not make $600 off every machine like Apple. I think Dell pays MS about $40 per copy of Vista
I'd have to say in recruiting software engineers I have much more of a problem with theory-light code monkeys than I do with non-coders that are well-versed in CS theory.
A agree with the above 100% In fact our company tends to hire math, engineering and science majors with the idea that you can teach these people to write code in a few weeks but you can't teach a guy who only knows C++ Physics.
Actually we have a well rounded staff. You need the guys who know the CS theory and the math and physics people too and technical writers and graphic artists and managers. You really do need "code monkeys" but then you need the experienced older guys who can tell the monkeys what to code up.
But I do agree I see so horrible code written by "coders" who know only the details of some language but don't have a clue about (say) DBMS theory.
To answer my own post, What I'm saying is that the brain likely does NOT store information the way modern computers do. In a computer you can point to the physical place that any bit is stored. It will live inside a cell of RAM or a spot on a disk.
But if I were to to compute a Furier transform of what I'm looking at right now and then transmit it into a feedback loop that is rigges to decay with a 4 second half life. You could not point to where the picture of my coffee cup is stored.
Neurons have a long axons and the coffee cup image would be stored inside thousands of wave fronts inside thousands of axons. Many networks would use this loop as input. These networks might look for patterns or perform some kind of transformations.
Another way to say this is that brain is to mind as legs are to running. Mind is a process not a physical thing.
AI can work from one of two "ends". I think it is clear the brain is built with neurons. So you might think to study neural networks. But that is like saying computers are built with many interconnected transistors and I want to design a web site so I'll study the physics of semiconductors. No, if your goal is web site yu ned to work at a higher level of abstraction, maybe at the level of PHP or Java Script. Likewise the brain almost certainly organizes networks of neurons into higher level stuctures and those structures into even higher levels. By the time you get to human level language ability you don't even need to understand much about the lowest layers.
That said, the only way I think we will ever get to a true AI i to have people work work with and understand each of the layers. It is likely far to complex for one person to understand it all. So pick a field. Do you like neural networks or computational linguistics or maybe Kinematics?
My interest is how you can use the low level primitives like neural networks to build higher level abstractions. So I think I'd call that the "middle ware". I think people have been working AI from both ends for decades but I'd like to see the ends meet.
One clue are brain waves. I think we store infomation is a rings of neural networks that use feedback. Years ago in the 50's someone seriously suggesting using "moon bounce" as a kind of computer memory. You would encode a signal and transmit it via radio to the moon. then after a few seconds it bounced back to earth and is continously retransmitted as a loop. One can store ove 2 second of dat in the free space between the earth and moon. I think the brain does this. You can store a lot of data n a delay loop. All of short term memory is in there and this holds "stuff" that might end up in longer term memory or other loops.
So if you have a theoretical background and are good at math. Work out how these interconnected feedback loops could work.. I'm pretty sure these are the structures that set just above the neural networks.
The next step is to see how you can build classical AI using loops.
I don't think you even need "good code". I worked on a project that eventually failed and all the code we looked at in those reviews was "good". Either that or we made it good. The big problem was that it did the wrong things.
The problem is not with the people who write the code. Most are OK and reviews catch gross errors but in out case we had some basic "big picture" ideas wrong.
Microsoft Vista is a good example of this. Likely the code would pass a review and has few mistakes but the problem is the dumb ideas that got written into the specifications.
It's like the "bridge to nowhere" problem. Good, competent structural engineers build something no one wants or needs.
Id say if you are looking for a Sysadmin job you don't need a four year degree in CS. It works the other way around too. If you were to have a four year degree in CS it would be a total waste of your education to then work as a sysadmin.
The university degree will NOT (I hope) taech yo the "technology of the day". They should be covering subjects that don't go out of style. Math is like that (Nobody every says "deferential equations are so 1970's")
On the other hand those support jobs, like Sysadmin and network instalations and help desk and feil repair really do depend on you knowing the "technology of the day" which universities don't typicaly teach.
I do had the CS background and I've worked in software engineering in the aerospace industry. I've worked on radar signal processors, rocket telemetry systems, guidance and navigation and secure message processing, simulations and so on. For this kind of work you want a degree in CS, math or engineering and hopefully an MS degree. For this kind of work a degree is an absolute requirement. but for work that suports a company's computing infrastructure most don't have degrees.
How ever thing about what will hapen when you are 45 or 50 years old. If you want to be in management by then some kind of degree, maybe in business or an MBA is very helpful
Leaving a password in my will is not going to work. I'd have to remember to change the will each tie I canged my password and I have many passwords.
The only practical thing is a paper list of people with contact information for each of them.
Quite frankly few of those people I correspond with via email on list servers would notice if I were gone. I'd only need to maintain a paper list with a couple dozen names on it from those few word would spread fast enough to those who need to know.
"But spending billions to build out a grid for this without the standardization in place will fail."
What has to be standardized is the last 10 foot of cable. They are building the grid, that part that feeds that last ten feet.
The key is "personally-identifiable". What Apple is sending is not. They are sending a hash of a page. All they are doing is taking something you just downloaded, scrambling it up and sending it back to the web.
If you are truly worried about people finding out what sites you are browsing then you need to worry a LOT about DNS servers. DNS server know your IP address and the name of every site you click. How would you know if the DNS server is logging your queries?
But it also means, all your sweat stays INSIDE... BAD idea...
No, not at all. This coating would act just like Gortex. Vapour could pass but not liquid