I'm not being a smartass, I really don't know the answer to this question: How would you slow down the payload of this solar sail once it reaches its destination? Doesn't it take the same amount of energy?
Assuming that this pretty much kills innovation, yadda, yadda... does it leave the road wide open for countries in Asia (India, China, etc.) to leave everyone else in the dust since they aren't fettered by all this patent bullshit?
The comment is justified, and well taken, except that there are a fair number of people who do listen to audiobooks for recreation. I realized this recently when I had to have some fairly involved surgery on my right eye, which left me bored stiff while I recovered. My fiancee was wonderful enough to bring me a stack of books on tape, and it seriously got me through the rough 2 weeks when I could do little else. Browsing through some of the support groups for eye conditions, you'll probably find a pretty large audience which don't just listen to these just to kill time on the clogged freeway, but because it's sometimes the only way they can experience reading anymore.
There are a huge number of applications that have very stringent time constraints, especially in real-time control. Other than coding in assembly, there isn't any other language out there that is as efficient (both size *and* speed count) as well optimized C code.
As an example, our lab works with humanoid robots that run in a 5ms control loop, which means that the next command (computation of inverse dynamics, etc.) has to be ready in that timeslice. If you want to do fancier stuff like machine learning and AI, you'll have to squeeze in many more operations into that tiny window. Sure, additional processors are a plus, but you still need very fast and memory efficient code.
As much as I detest the Beast of Redmond (and I *am* a Linux user), I have to admit that Microsoft Research does a huge amount of really good research in basic computer science and mathematics. And a *lot* of this research ends up in actual products.
I know for a fact that some wonderful research in statistical machine learning is actually being used on the XBox, while some equally great theory in stochastic processes is being used for image super-resolution.
While the end user might have to wait for a bit for the benefits of all the research to trickle down to the actual products themselves, from a pure research standpoint, some of that money that they squeeze out of their customers actually ends up getting spent in the right places.
If you look at the two personalities that are most influential in the GNU/Linux combination, RMS and Linus (just my opinion of course), I think it's the individual personas of these two individuals that form a striking combination that makes "Linux" (as RMS is loth to call it) so popular.
RMS is a philosopher, an evangelist. True, he's a brilliant coder too, but his primary mission now seems to be selling this "vision" that he alluded to in this article --- that of software (and consequently computing) without ownership limits.
If you read Linus' interviews on the other hand, he tends to be much more pragmatic in his entire approach to life. He's more of a "ah to hell with all this lawyer bullshit --- this is excellent code for the kernel, let's put it in" kinda guy.
If you look at the surge of "Linux" popularity over the last decade, it's primarily been the GNU/Linux combination that RMS refers to (although other combinations of GNU/* exist). I would think that it takes this combination of individuals to have this happen --- the idealistic evangelist in RMS, and the pragmatic engineer in Linus.
I speak mainly from the point of view of being a graduate student. It is frequently this relationship between an advisor (providing the vision), and the student (with the hands on hacking/research) that bears fruit.
Sure this "instant networking" is all very cool, but for most geeks in the know, we *want* to be able to configure till we die.
Security restrictions? Can I restrict the range of IP addresses that access my music folders? Password access? Encryption? I wanna tweak dammit! The problem with that is that as soon as you make the system more powerful and have all these geek-satisfying options, you need to be able to get down to the nuts and bolts of configuring it. Otherwise you end up in the same mess as MS, with users blindly enabling potentially insecure servers.
I love Linux... it's been my primary operating system for the last 4 years. I even create my presentations using PDFLaTeX (none of that sissy powerpoint shit). The only thing that has me keeping that spare 4 Gb Windows 98 partition around is the games.
So I know that Quake and several others are Linux based too, but ever since Loki died there hasn't been too much hope. *All* of the good PC games are only released for the Windows and Mac communities.
I'm a game freak... that's why I still have Windows. Plain & simple.
On the serious side though... is there any open source effort for VoIP software? In which case a person could just send an e-mail over saying... ok... start up your VoIP software at port xxxx, and I'll do the same... woohoo! we're connected!
I don't really see how blocking a *specific* set of ports can serve their purpose.
Actually even if you're just doing basic sorts, searches and manipulate data structures, its amazing how much math goes into it. Ever considered the algorithmic complexity of using binary trees versus randomized data structures like skip lists?
You can be a "computer programmer", but to be a good one that actually has a brain and knows the pros and cons of the algorithms you're coding out requires math. At least the basics of probability theory and calculus.
...or aficionados of lesser-known sports (IPlayCricket.com, ILoveIceFishing.com)...
Interesting... over one out of every 6 people in the world is a cricket fanatic (world population = 6G, India's population = 1G), and this guy has the gall to call it a "lesser-known" sport?
What I'd really like to hear about is if this kind of behavior was duplicated in another instance. Otherwise I'd be very skeptical that this robot actually exhibited a "behavior" of wandering around trying to explore.
How much of this incident could be attributed to chance? Only by repeating it can you say for sure. I'm surprised this website is making such a big deal about this one incident when there's no proof/math/algorithms detailing an explanation of why this could've happened.
"Maybe now some young Computer Science student can spend more time on developing a good overall program, instead of spending a bunch of time writing simple things like their own sorting routine."
I teach graduate courses in AI and math, and I'd have to strongly disagree with that statement.
Isn't the point of a Computer Science education to actually learn the basic tenets of the subject? Most CS graduates get away with little or no math... now we'll have a whole bunch who've never even coded up QuickSort.
I'd understand if this policy applied to the Graduate School since the point of a graduate education would be to concentrate on the more interesting/abstract/high_level aspects of the subject. But the thought of having droves of undergrad CS students getting by using the intelligence of a select few is really scary.
Unfortunately the new release still needs support from Galeon. Installing the RPMS on my machine cause Galeon to segfault. Had to revert back to 0.9.8. Guess I'll just have to wait for Galeon 1.0.4.
Admittedly this post is about passively generated electricity, but there's also been some work on electricity generated by harnessing activity such as walking. This company for example, has been using peizoelectric devices to generate a few milliwatts of power from walking/running activities. For the most part the energy produced is insufficient for anything other than trickle-charging batteries.
For most of us here on/. putting little piezoelectric generators under each key of the keyboard, and under those mouse buttons would beat those peizoelectric shoes anytime!
I did my Bachelors in Computer Engineering and I'm currently doing my Ph.D. in Computer Science. Personally I think that Computer Engineers make better Computer Scientists. As a CE student you'll probably be exposed to a bit more math than CS students, which surprisingly is *really* important to almost any application later in life.
Computer Engineers can become Computer Scientists, not the other way around.
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It's a fairly common convention to have macro names in C/C++ be all caps. This is where I seem to use the CapsLock key the most anyway.
I'm not being a smartass, I really don't know the answer to this question: How would you slow down the payload of this solar sail once it reaches its destination? Doesn't it take the same amount of energy?
Assuming that this pretty much kills innovation, yadda, yadda... does it leave the road wide open for countries in Asia (India, China, etc.) to leave everyone else in the dust since they aren't fettered by all this patent bullshit?
The comment is justified, and well taken, except that there are a fair number of people who do listen to audiobooks for recreation. I realized this recently when I had to have some fairly involved surgery on my right eye, which left me bored stiff while I recovered. My fiancee was wonderful enough to bring me a stack of books on tape, and it seriously got me through the rough 2 weeks when I could do little else. Browsing through some of the support groups for eye conditions, you'll probably find a pretty large audience which don't just listen to these just to kill time on the clogged freeway, but because it's sometimes the only way they can experience reading anymore.
There are a huge number of applications that have very stringent time constraints, especially in real-time control. Other than coding in assembly, there isn't any other language out there that is as efficient (both size *and* speed count) as well optimized C code.
As an example, our lab works with humanoid robots that run in a 5ms control loop, which means that the next command (computation of inverse dynamics, etc.) has to be ready in that timeslice. If you want to do fancier stuff like machine learning and AI, you'll have to squeeze in many more operations into that tiny window. Sure, additional processors are a plus, but you still need very fast and memory efficient code.
As much as I detest the Beast of Redmond (and I *am* a Linux user), I have to admit that Microsoft Research does a huge amount of really good research in basic computer science and mathematics. And a *lot* of this research ends up in actual products.
I know for a fact that some wonderful research in statistical machine learning is actually being used on the XBox, while some equally great theory in stochastic processes is being used for image super-resolution.
While the end user might have to wait for a bit for the benefits of all the research to trickle down to the actual products themselves, from a pure research standpoint, some of that money that they squeeze out of their customers actually ends up getting spent in the right places.
If you look at the two personalities that are most influential in the GNU/Linux combination, RMS and Linus (just my opinion of course), I think it's the individual personas of these two individuals that form a striking combination that makes "Linux" (as RMS is loth to call it) so popular.
RMS is a philosopher, an evangelist. True, he's a brilliant coder too, but his primary mission now seems to be selling this "vision" that he alluded to in this article --- that of software (and consequently computing) without ownership limits.
If you read Linus' interviews on the other hand, he tends to be much more pragmatic in his entire approach to life. He's more of a "ah to hell with all this lawyer bullshit --- this is excellent code for the kernel, let's put it in" kinda guy.
If you look at the surge of "Linux" popularity over the last decade, it's primarily been the GNU/Linux combination that RMS refers to (although other combinations of GNU/* exist). I would think that it takes this combination of individuals to have this happen --- the idealistic evangelist in RMS, and the pragmatic engineer in Linus.
I speak mainly from the point of view of being a graduate student. It is frequently this relationship between an advisor (providing the vision), and the student (with the hands on hacking/research) that bears fruit.
I could be wrong... just my $.02
12 inch vibrator! Save the environment while you pleasure yourself!
Sure this "instant networking" is all very cool, but for most geeks in the know, we *want* to be able to configure till we die.
Security restrictions? Can I restrict the range of IP addresses that access my music folders? Password access? Encryption? I wanna tweak dammit! The problem with that is that as soon as you make the system more powerful and have all these geek-satisfying options, you need to be able to get down to the nuts and bolts of configuring it. Otherwise you end up in the same mess as MS, with users blindly enabling potentially insecure servers.
...the bus company hits him with a DMCA violation? I mean surely the timings of their buses are sensitive and copyrighted material!
Rebooting every 3 minutes should give them the impression that there are multiple id sequences too! :))
So I know that Quake and several others are Linux based too, but ever since Loki died there hasn't been too much hope. *All* of the good PC games are only released for the Windows and Mac communities.
I'm a game freak... that's why I still have Windows. Plain & simple.
On the serious side though... is there any open source effort for VoIP software? In which case a person could just send an e-mail over saying... ok... start up your VoIP software at port xxxx, and I'll do the same... woohoo! we're connected!
I don't really see how blocking a *specific* set of ports can serve their purpose.
Actually even if you're just doing basic sorts, searches and manipulate data structures, its amazing how much math goes into it. Ever considered the algorithmic complexity of using binary trees versus randomized data structures like skip lists?
You can be a "computer programmer", but to be a good one that actually has a brain and knows the pros and cons of the algorithms you're coding out requires math. At least the basics of probability theory and calculus.
....that explains why the site went down so quick!
Interesting... over one out of every 6 people in the world is a cricket fanatic (world population = 6G, India's population = 1G), and this guy has the gall to call it a "lesser-known" sport?
Judge: So you say he stole what?
[...silence...]
Judge: Do you think I have all day?
lawyer: I just told you!
Judge: So what did you say he stole?
lawyer: He stole...[silence]...
Judge: Cat got your tongue?
...
Umm...I think you've just been banged for your MS buck. :)
What I'd really like to hear about is if this kind of behavior was duplicated in another instance. Otherwise I'd be very skeptical that this robot actually exhibited a "behavior" of wandering around trying to explore.
How much of this incident could be attributed to chance? Only by repeating it can you say for sure. I'm surprised this website is making such a big deal about this one incident when there's no proof/math/algorithms detailing an explanation of why this could've happened.
"Maybe now some young Computer Science student can spend more time on developing a good overall program, instead of spending a bunch of time writing simple things like their own sorting routine."
I teach graduate courses in AI and math, and I'd have to strongly disagree with that statement. Isn't the point of a Computer Science education to actually learn the basic tenets of the subject? Most CS graduates get away with little or no math... now we'll have a whole bunch who've never even coded up QuickSort.
I'd understand if this policy applied to the Graduate School since the point of a graduate education would be to concentrate on the more interesting/abstract/high_level aspects of the subject. But the thought of having droves of undergrad CS students getting by using the intelligence of a select few is really scary.
Unfortunately the new release still needs support from Galeon. Installing the RPMS on my machine cause Galeon to segfault. Had to revert back to 0.9.8. Guess I'll just have to wait for Galeon 1.0.4.
Admittedly this post is about passively generated electricity, but there's also been some work on electricity generated by harnessing activity such as walking. This company for example, has been using peizoelectric devices to generate a few milliwatts of power from walking/running activities. For the most part the energy produced is insufficient for anything other than trickle-charging batteries.
/. putting little piezoelectric generators under each key of the keyboard, and under those mouse buttons would beat those peizoelectric shoes anytime!
For most of us here on
Computer Engineers can become Computer Scientists, not the other way around.