Don't laugh. Richard Dawkins predicts that "the missing link" will be born by the middle of this century. He has an essay on this in a book titled "The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-first Century". This is an interesting book consisting of 25 speculative essays by leading scientists in various fields.
Dawkins' argument is that Moore's Law will eventually make the sequencing of genomes cheap enough to be routine. He speculates that a large database of hominid genomes plus expected advances in gene manipulation would support the creation of pre-human DNA. Once this is done, an implanted embryo with the new DNA could be inserted into a human womb, and out pops the new (old?) species. If Dawkins is correct, then other non-human species such as Neanderthals are also potentially viable.
In the essay, Dawkins briefly discusses the moral implications of such a task. He concludes that any objections are easily overcome by the great service to mankind in proving the correctness of the Theory of Evolution.
Ah, but getting to a Lagrange Point requires much more energy and therefore, cost. The shuttle can only achieve low earth orbit, and in fact NASA currently has no operational system to take humans any further than the Internation Space Station.
For a commercial venture, getting people into low earth orbit is the only viable near-term solution. Putting a space hotel at the L5 point is still a long way off.
Also, what about massively distributed XP "supercomputers" like SETI@home? We just had a slashdot article discussing how the SETI version dominates the other spare-cycle-using background programs. If you summed up all the cycles in use at a given point in time, how would this stack up to the supercomputers on the list?
I realize internet-linked PCs are a different beast, but given the wide range of architectures on the top 500 supercomputer list, is it such a stretch to consider this a "supercomputer"? Anyone know how the SETI@home project would place?
If rule (1) takes precedence over rule (2), does that mean harming Microsoft executives is okay if it helps the company? Gates is probably getting out in time, but Balmer might want to be careful...
Just think what happens when the house software gets a virus! Heating and cooling different rooms to the max termperature, refrigerator turned off, all appliances whirling madly, massive phone sex bill, garage doors going up and down continuously, etc.
The sad thing about all this is that both sides are pointing to the same data and claiming it proves their point:
a) "This proves that global warming is a natural phenomenon! We're free to burn all the fossil fuels we want! We need change nothing!"
b) "It's worse than we thought! This proves that runaway greenhouse gases will thoroughly devastate the planet! We have to take drastic steps at once!"
TFA actually concludes by mentioning both points:
"Today's warming of the Arctic can, in all likelihood, be attributed to mankind's impact on the planet, but as our data suggest, natural processes operating in the past have also resulted in a significant warming and cooling of the Arctic."
It sure would be nice if someone could figure out exactly what causes the natural temperature swings. Maybe then we'd know how best to stop or reverse the human factor.
You make a good point. Perhaps the distinction between "random" and "uniformly random" is the key.
However, there is still a grey area here as illustrated by the following example. Suppose you randomly pick 10 cards from a standard deck of 52. I then example your picks and choose which card to keep. Is my choice random? By your definition it is, since the set presented to me was randomly created. However, from my point of view, my pick is entirely deterministic.
Evolution sort of works this way. The set of mutations is randomly determined, but the selection process is not random. If you take the two processes together, I suppose you end up with a stochastic aggregate, since the final outcome cannot be accurately predicted.
I agree that calling Evolution "stochastic" is more precise.
Not quite. You're confusing mutations with selection. The mutations are random, but the selection process is not. Since only the beneficial mutations are "selected" by improving the survival probability of the mutated offspring, the end product of the mutations is most definitely not random.
To summarize, mutations are random; evolution is not.
Merom reuses ~80% of the HDL code of Yonah. To you, the extent of the architectural changes in the new 20% justifies calling this a "from the ground up" design. To me, the term implies all the code was re-written from scratch. For the P4, this was the case. With Merom, some of the code from the original P6 is still present!
This is not to trivialize the changes -- 20% new code on a microprocessor is a huge effort, and the design has now morphed into sometime far beyond the initial P6. At what point is it a "new" design? Maybe it is just a matter of semantics after all.
The new Merom-based products (Conroe is the desktop version) were *NOT* designed from the ground up. The Ars Technica article repeated some Intel marketspeak that overstates the case. Merom is a major revision of Yonah, but is derived from the same code base. In fact, it is still technically a derivative of the P6 family that began with the Pentium Pro 10 years ago.
This is more than just a matter of semantics. The major micro-architectural features that defined the P6 are still present in Merom. The P4 architecture (may it rest in peace) was a brand new architecture -- Merom is not.
1) OOO was not used in the original Pentium. It debuted (for Intel) in the P6 family. This includes the Pentium Pro, PII, & PIII. The P4 is also OOO, but is not a P6 derivative.
2) Super-scalar does not require multiple pipelines. The term refers to the ability to run simultaneous execution units, but these can be fed in various ways. In the Pentium, there were indeed two separate pipelines. However, the P6 dispatches micro-ops (uops) to multiple execution engines from a single pipeline. This is part of the OOO scheme, as the uops complete in a non-deterministic order. The results are held in a re-order buffer and retired in-order.
3)There are various trade-offs between in-order and out-of-order execution. Using the compiler to pre-extract parallelism simplifies the hardware, but a single binary won't be optimized for all CPUs within the same family. For example, upgrading to a CPU with a larger cache may require re-compiling the application in order to take advantage of the new hardware capability.
As for AMD vs. Intel, what's the big deal? AMD processors have been faster for the last couple of years. Intel's Conroe will reclaim the crown when it debuts next quarter. This doesn't have to be a religious war -- just buy the best system that fits your budget when you're ready to upgrade.
Umm, according to the NPR link you posted, some of NPR's revenues do indeed come from tax dollars. From the NPR site:
"On average, public radio stations (including NPR Member
stations) receive the largest percentage of their revenue
(34%) from listener support, 25% from corporate underwriting
and foundations, and 13% from CPB allocations.*
"(* These figures are derived from the most recent CPB data
available, FY02. The remaining average revenue breakdown is:
6% from local and state governments, 15% from institutional
support, and 7% from all other sources.)"
Looks like a few "red cents" from our taxes are subsidizing NPR after all.
The reason NASA does environmental and climate research is to please a voting constituent that would otherwise be opposed to space research. The green crowd will support the NASA budget if some of the dollars go towards projects they find agreeable. If all the money was spent on deep space probes, there would instead be cries for redirecting the NASA budget elsewhere.
BTW, the funding for the shuttle was partially justified in the same manner. Some of the claimed benefits of the shuttle program were to make long term weather forecasts, monitor size and health of rain forests and deserts, and search for mineral desposits non-destructively.
Unfortunately, NASA really has no choice in this. If they don't play as many political games as possible, their budget won't survive. The general public isn't keen on funding pure research, at least not to the levels NASA requires.
From TFA: 'Musicians, gamers; add in a large swath of the press citing this law as simply the "worst law ever" and the government had a big problem on its hands.'
No kidding. Essentially, the law made it illegal to buy a used electronic device. The justification was that it would keep "unsafe" devices out of circulation, but that was merely an excuse to force consumers to buy new stuff instead. Japan must have one heck of a corporate marketing lobby!
The good news is that the public outcry forced the law to be struck down before it went into effect. The amazing thing, though, is that anyone (other than corporate CEOs) thought this was a good idea in the first place.
You must be easily impressed. Frankly, I was hoping for positive results like an improvement in sensation or motion in the patients. Not killing them is not much of an accomplishment. If there's no benefit to the patients from the treatment, why would you be impressed?
From TFA: "Productivity is three times what it was 10 years ago, and the number of people working here, 650, is half what it was."
Sounds like this guy is doing exactly the same thing that Walmart does -- efficiently produce a compelling product. The only difference is Walmart makes their products compelling by their low price, whereas Snapper makes their products compelling by their relative quality. Both achieved their goals by eliminating unproductive jobs.
You're missing the point. The idea is to use the PC to manage all your digital content but to control it remotely. Nobody is talking about the user having to walk into another room to queue things up. In fact, the whole point is *NOT* to do this. Instead, the user will use a handheld remote control device that wirelessly accesses content on your PC (where ever it may be) and streams the content to your home theater system. The goal is to let you do this from your couch.
As TFA points out, all of the existing solutions have drawbacks (too bulky, too loud, too inconvenient). A more elegant solution is to harness the power and disk space of your PC to store and manage your digital media but wirelessly feed them into your theater system with a simple interface. That's what the new VIIV products claim to do. How well they do so remains to be seen, but if they can pull this off it could be a great product.
Indeed. One thing that's easily overlooked is that even though the hardware performance has increased exponentially, the software development has not. Those tasks that are compute-bound benefit directly from the exponential hardware growth, but other tasks do not.
Software is hard -- perhaps fundamentally so. It cannot be written exponentially faster even with infinite hardware resources. Vast hardware improvements may support vast software possibilities, but writing that software is still a daunting task.
The commentary suggests that a free service is inherently inferior to a paid one. By this logic, OSS is crap! There are very few readers of this forum who would make this claim about free software, so why don't we wait and see what Sony's free online service is like?
I realize Sony is not the most beloved of corporations right now, but this predictive ranting grows tiresome.
Everyone seems to be overlooking the most essential interactive feature of all -- the interactive program guide.
Without an interactive guide you must tune to a separate channel where all channels scroll by slowly with current and near-term only listings. With an interactive menu, you can choose which channels to monitor as well as look much farther ahead.
The pay-per-view and sports viewing angles are, IMHO, of little value. However, the interactive program guide is essential.
CPU vendors do the same thing. The Celeron and Sempron products are "crippled" high end CPUs, but it's not always a matter of crippling since the lower price points contain devices that failed to make the top bin split or have defects in one cache bank.
However, to meet demand at the low end the vendors do end up disabling features on their mainline parts to dumb them down. In most cases, though, there's no way to undo the damage.
My first reaction to this was "why not just carry a second battery?" However, the fuel cell does offer two potential advantages:
1) You don't have to shut down and swap in the second battery. 2) It can be recharged in seconds by just topping it off.
Of course, there are issues about cost, number of recharges, possible leakege, etc., but if these are resolved the fuel cell might be a viable product.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't laugh. Richard Dawkins predicts that "the missing link" will be born by the middle of this century. He has an essay on this in a book titled "The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-first Century". This is an interesting book consisting of 25 speculative essays by leading scientists in various fields.
Dawkins' argument is that Moore's Law will eventually make the sequencing of genomes cheap enough to be routine. He speculates that a large database of hominid genomes plus expected advances in gene manipulation would support the creation of pre-human DNA. Once this is done, an implanted embryo with the new DNA could be inserted into a human womb, and out pops the new (old?) species. If Dawkins is correct, then other non-human species such as Neanderthals are also potentially viable.
In the essay, Dawkins briefly discusses the moral implications of such a task. He concludes that any objections are easily overcome by the great service to mankind in proving the correctness of the Theory of Evolution.
Ah, but getting to a Lagrange Point requires much more energy and therefore, cost. The shuttle can only achieve low earth orbit, and in fact NASA currently has no operational system to take humans any further than the Internation Space Station.
For a commercial venture, getting people into low earth orbit is the only viable near-term solution. Putting a space hotel at the L5 point is still a long way off.
Also, what about massively distributed XP "supercomputers" like SETI@home? We just had a slashdot article discussing how the SETI version dominates the other spare-cycle-using background programs. If you summed up all the cycles in use at a given point in time, how would this stack up to the supercomputers on the list?
I realize internet-linked PCs are a different beast, but given the wide range of architectures on the top 500 supercomputer list, is it such a stretch to consider this a "supercomputer"? Anyone know how the SETI@home project would place?
Yes, but this doesn't change the fact that your system *blows* ...
If rule (1) takes precedence over rule (2), does that mean harming Microsoft executives is okay if it helps the company? Gates is probably getting out in time, but Balmer might want to be careful ...
Just think what happens when the house software gets a virus! Heating and cooling different rooms to the max termperature, refrigerator turned off, all appliances whirling madly, massive phone sex bill, garage doors going up and down continuously, etc.
The sad thing about all this is that both sides are pointing to the same data and claiming it proves their point:
a) "This proves that global warming is a natural phenomenon! We're free to burn all the fossil fuels we want! We need change nothing!"
b) "It's worse than we thought! This proves that runaway greenhouse gases will thoroughly devastate the planet! We have to take drastic steps at once!"
TFA actually concludes by mentioning both points:
"Today's warming of the Arctic can, in all likelihood, be attributed to mankind's impact on the planet, but as our data suggest, natural processes operating in the past have also resulted in a significant warming and cooling of the Arctic."
It sure would be nice if someone could figure out exactly what causes the natural temperature swings. Maybe then we'd know how best to stop or reverse the human factor.
You make a good point. Perhaps the distinction between "random" and "uniformly random" is the key.
However, there is still a grey area here as illustrated by the following example. Suppose you randomly pick 10 cards from a standard deck of 52. I then example your picks and choose which card to keep. Is my choice random? By your definition it is, since the set presented to me was randomly created. However, from my point of view, my pick is entirely deterministic.
Evolution sort of works this way. The set of mutations is randomly determined, but the selection process is not random. If you take the two processes together, I suppose you end up with a stochastic aggregate, since the final outcome cannot be accurately predicted.
I agree that calling Evolution "stochastic" is more precise.
Not quite. You're confusing mutations with selection. The mutations are random, but the selection process is not. Since only the beneficial mutations are "selected" by improving the survival probability of the mutated offspring, the end product of the mutations is most definitely not random.
To summarize, mutations are random; evolution is not.
Merom reuses ~80% of the HDL code of Yonah. To you, the extent of the architectural changes in the new 20% justifies calling this a "from the ground up" design. To me, the term implies all the code was re-written from scratch. For the P4, this was the case. With Merom, some of the code from the original P6 is still present!
This is not to trivialize the changes -- 20% new code on a microprocessor is a huge effort, and the design has now morphed into sometime far beyond the initial P6. At what point is it a "new" design? Maybe it is just a matter of semantics after all.
The new Merom-based products (Conroe is the desktop version) were *NOT* designed from the ground up. The Ars Technica article repeated some Intel marketspeak that overstates the case. Merom is a major revision of Yonah, but is derived from the same code base. In fact, it is still technically a derivative of the P6 family that began with the Pentium Pro 10 years ago.
This is more than just a matter of semantics. The major micro-architectural features that defined the P6 are still present in Merom. The P4 architecture (may it rest in peace) was a brand new architecture -- Merom is not.
Just to clarify a few things:
1) OOO was not used in the original Pentium. It debuted (for Intel) in the P6 family. This includes the Pentium Pro, PII, & PIII. The P4 is also OOO, but is not a P6 derivative.
2) Super-scalar does not require multiple pipelines. The term refers to the ability to run simultaneous execution units, but these can be fed in various ways. In the Pentium, there were indeed two separate pipelines. However, the P6 dispatches micro-ops (uops) to multiple execution engines from a single pipeline. This is part of the OOO scheme, as the uops complete in a non-deterministic order. The results are held in a re-order buffer and retired in-order.
3)There are various trade-offs between in-order and out-of-order execution. Using the compiler to pre-extract parallelism simplifies the hardware, but a single binary won't be optimized for all CPUs within the same family. For example, upgrading to a CPU with a larger cache may require re-compiling the application in order to take advantage of the new hardware capability.
As for AMD vs. Intel, what's the big deal? AMD processors have been faster for the last couple of years. Intel's Conroe will reclaim the crown when it debuts next quarter. This doesn't have to be a religious war -- just buy the best system that fits your budget when you're ready to upgrade.
Umm, according to the NPR link you posted, some of NPR's revenues do indeed come from tax dollars. From the NPR site:
"On average, public radio stations (including NPR Member
stations) receive the largest percentage of their revenue
(34%) from listener support, 25% from corporate underwriting
and foundations, and 13% from CPB allocations.*
"(* These figures are derived from the most recent CPB data
available, FY02. The remaining average revenue breakdown is:
6% from local and state governments, 15% from institutional
support, and 7% from all other sources.)"
Looks like a few "red cents" from our taxes are subsidizing NPR after all.
Yes, sir, Mr. Van Winkle! It shouldn't be too long ...
The reason NASA does environmental and climate research is to please a voting constituent that would otherwise be opposed to space research. The green crowd will support the NASA budget if some of the dollars go towards projects they find agreeable. If all the money was spent on deep space probes, there would instead be cries for redirecting the NASA budget elsewhere.
BTW, the funding for the shuttle was partially justified in the same manner. Some of the claimed benefits of the shuttle program were to make long term weather forecasts, monitor size and health of rain forests and deserts, and search for mineral desposits non-destructively.
Unfortunately, NASA really has no choice in this. If they don't play as many political games as possible, their budget won't survive. The general public isn't keen on funding pure research, at least not to the levels NASA requires.
From TFA: 'Musicians, gamers; add in a large swath of the press citing this law as simply the "worst law ever" and the government had a big problem on its hands.'
No kidding. Essentially, the law made it illegal to buy a used electronic device. The justification was that it would keep "unsafe" devices out of circulation, but that was merely an excuse to force consumers to buy new stuff instead. Japan must have one heck of a corporate marketing lobby!
The good news is that the public outcry forced the law to be struck down before it went into effect. The amazing thing, though, is that anyone (other than corporate CEOs) thought this was a good idea in the first place.
You must be easily impressed. Frankly, I was hoping for positive results like an improvement in sensation or motion in the patients. Not killing them is not much of an accomplishment. If there's no benefit to the patients from the treatment, why would you be impressed?
From TFA: "Productivity is three times what it was 10 years ago, and the number of people working here, 650, is half what it was."
Sounds like this guy is doing exactly the same thing that Walmart does -- efficiently produce a compelling product. The only difference is Walmart makes their products compelling by their low price, whereas Snapper makes their products compelling by their relative quality. Both achieved their goals by eliminating unproductive jobs.
You're missing the point. The idea is to use the PC to manage all your digital content but to control it remotely. Nobody is talking about the user having to walk into another room to queue things up. In fact, the whole point is *NOT* to do this. Instead, the user will use a handheld remote control device that wirelessly accesses content on your PC (where ever it may be) and streams the content to your home theater system. The goal is to let you do this from your couch.
As TFA points out, all of the existing solutions have drawbacks (too bulky, too loud, too inconvenient). A more elegant solution is to harness the power and disk space of your PC to store and manage your digital media but wirelessly feed them into your theater system with a simple interface. That's what the new VIIV products claim to do. How well they do so remains to be seen, but if they can pull this off it could be a great product.
Indeed. One thing that's easily overlooked is that even though the hardware performance has increased exponentially, the software development has not. Those tasks that are compute-bound benefit directly from the exponential hardware growth, but other tasks do not.
Software is hard -- perhaps fundamentally so. It cannot be written exponentially faster even with infinite hardware resources. Vast hardware improvements may support vast software possibilities, but writing that software is still a daunting task.
My thoughts exactly.
The commentary suggests that a free service is inherently inferior to a paid one. By this logic, OSS is crap! There are very few readers of this forum who would make this claim about free software, so why don't we wait and see what Sony's free online service is like?
I realize Sony is not the most beloved of corporations right now, but this predictive ranting grows tiresome.
Everyone seems to be overlooking the most essential interactive feature of all -- the interactive program guide.
Without an interactive guide you must tune to a separate channel where all channels scroll by slowly with current and near-term only listings. With an interactive menu, you can choose which channels to monitor as well as look much farther ahead.
The pay-per-view and sports viewing angles are, IMHO, of little value. However, the interactive program guide is essential.
CPU vendors do the same thing. The Celeron and Sempron products are "crippled" high end CPUs, but it's not always a matter of crippling since the lower price points contain devices that failed to make the top bin split or have defects in one cache bank.
However, to meet demand at the low end the vendors do end up disabling features on their mainline parts to dumb them down. In most cases, though, there's no way to undo the damage.
My first reaction to this was "why not just carry a second battery?" However, the fuel cell does offer two potential advantages:
1) You don't have to shut down and swap in the second battery.
2) It can be recharged in seconds by just topping it off.
Of course, there are issues about cost, number of recharges, possible leakege, etc., but if these are resolved the fuel cell might be a viable product.
According to quotationspage.com, it was George Bernard Shaw:
"England and America are two countries separated by a common language."