Posts by Mage 9273 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Nov 2007
The way in which the synapse cell stores information by subtly changing the write-mode voltage is similar to how real neural pathways are strengthened and weakened during the learning process in the brain
A real synapse is only one aspect of a biological brain. We don't actually know how brains work, or where intelligence comes from, or why a rook can be as "smart" as a chimp. Or why some birds have more ability at vocabulary than a chip (no non-human has language as understood by experts in language, a vocabulary and communication is not language.).
This is interesting, as is the EU funded "human brain" project. But it has very little to do with real biology or real intelligence.
"Some state-of-the-art FPGA by the big vendors can already do this, "
AFAIK almost all can. Years ago.
The bigger issue is doing it in a useful fashion. You can do a SDR where so as to avoid wasting internal resources, the filters, noise blankers, demodulation type etc are different designs loaded from external Flash at "run" time as a result of signal conditions or operator selection, using a separate CPU even to control the JTAG.
It has always been possible to reconfigure FPGAs on the fly in PCs so as to adapt calculation algorithms during data processing.
I agree.
However I'm not convinced how useful it is compared to a program running on a CPU. An FPGA is designed by humans. It's not simple (I've done it). It's essentially like designing a PCB full of digital ICs. I'd expect that most adaptation is either an alternate pre-defined design, or different parameters (to get round lack of on-board RAM). An FPGA has some dedicated multipliers and loads of RAM based cells, implementing logic functions using a look up table. You can inefficiently implement an actual CPU core, or get ones with dedicated actual CPUs built in, but otherwise an FPGA is just a table defined TTL logic board in an expensive power hungry chip to avoid ASIC NRE. It can only "run" a program in sense of GPU, CPU or "Graph" processor by first having the design of one of those implemented in it.
You could at "run" time switch a soft defined CPU from say an x86 to an ARM, or 6502 to Z80. But I'm not sure why you would!
Not a CPU/Processor type
FPGAs can be specifically designed, but FPGA design is fixed once expressed as hardware and thereby inflexible, Graphcore says, which adds that they are also difficult to program, power-hungry and have relatively low performance.
FPGA is primarily an implementation method for prototypes or low volume production, where power consumption and die size (per chip production cost less important than ASIC NRE costs).
In theory an FPGA "could" be reconfigured at run time, rather than as a field upgrade. That's not a processor type either. Does anyone have any example of such a product in production?
Satellite backhaul. Expensive, low capacity and high latency. But quite useful for emergencies. Though hooking up a two way sat link to an emergency mobile, 45 ft (telescopic plus tilt) mobile phone base is over 15 year old tech I think.
Nothing new here.
There should be NOTHING patentable about this.
The ideas and even deployment are over 100 years old.
You can buy gear off the shelf.
Balloons have been used for radio over 100 years and useless in bad weather, tethered or not.
Kites are worse! Also been used since radio was invented.
Sat links and mobile towers with any comms type desired are off the shelf.
This is PR nonsense.
a) Google returns higher up, sites that use their services (analytics, APIs, adverts, cloud etc) to make more money.
b) Google thinks you are more interested now in using them as a bookmark service (deliberately accentuating places you visited before) rather than wanting a genuine search for places you never have seen.
So obviously the screen shot is from someone always looking for warez, those are the regular sites used and/or they run Adsense etc.
They seemed to stop being a neutral genuine search service years ago?
Hipster.
Why not do it properly and make them Public Domain.
Or put (c) ESA <any desired relaxation of Berne rights>
No-one needs the confusing and complicated CC licences. Ordinary copyright with an addendum or Public Domain is fine.
However, very friendly of them to make the imagery available.
"Well, you do have the option to choose not to buy it."
Actually no, not if you want a decent new car or TV.
Though at least with a TV you can avoid connecting it to the Internet, or set up cunning firewall rules if you do. You are lucky if you know what is embedded & connecting to a new car at all!
You can buy 3rd party supported Open Source. Or out source your open source needs to an expert support company. How do you think Red Hat makes money?
Open source doesn't need to equal DIY or in house programmers, in house support or homebrew, though sometimes that is a better idea than bought in expertise.
They are not a spare time ride sharing operation. They are an exploitive and misleading taxi booking app with exploited employee drivers. So no surprise how toxic this misleading company is internally.
They are also gathering all customer use (identify, time, route etc) and driver information, which might be illegal. They are part owned by Google.
What is all the personal information used for?
It's not even properly secured.
Women are obviously smarter than men, as they are not prepared to support such a toxic company, 25% -> 6%.
This was akin to buying fake snake oil, apart from the lack of governance.
IBM was Hollerith originally and made a machine to sort census data in the 19th C.
Watson is simply the 21st C equivalent for "big data". Someone has to put all the relevant data in first. It's only AI because in the last 40 years we have re-defined AI first as "Expert Systems" and now as "Machine Learning".
"it's not as if the EU doesn't have a huge number of regulations and staff to see they are complied with."
Actually, no. CE marks are not issued by the EU. It's also the responsibility of individual governments to inspect what is on sale to the consumer. In many cases the "regulator" or department is "captured" by big business (Comreg, Ofcom, Irish Finance Regulator and Anglo Irish Bank and many more).
The issue is not the EU, but deliberate obstruction by Governments, who often make fake claims about what the EU is demanding (which in any case is decided in the first place by the Member States.). UKIP and fellow travellers are making UK LESS consumer and privacy friendly.
Mattel has an evil "parenting" gadget like Echo.
Google TV certainly breaks this law. People are better NEVER connecting Smart TV to Internet, but using PS4 or some media box for Netflix etc. Most Smart TV makers seem to have abandoned their own GUI for Google's Android TV, which apart from being spyware, is a rubbish UX for TVs.
1984 was really about 1948 politics. However Orwell would be amazed that every democracy has allowed the Corporate "Big Brother" spying on their citizens via Browser stats, web cookies, clear pixels, javascript etc on the Internet as well as evil IoT personal data monetising products, Facebook (a dictator's wet dream), Echo, Spot, Siri, Chrome Browser, Chrome OS/Chrome Book, Android wearables, Android on phones, iOS, Windows 10, Android TV and etc.
A Psion organiser with a USB read/writable mini-disc able to play music, video or hold data.
Plus a laptop with a 4:3 screen (1920 x 1440) able to run at 48, 50, 60, 75 fps (instead of stupid 60fps only and only 1080 lines). CD/DVD/BD bay, parallel & serial ports, firewire port, Analogue TV out (able to do 240, 405, 440, 525, 625 and 819 lines) as well as USB 2/3, HDMI and VGA. Optical audio I/O too. SD card reader, SIM reader. IR sensor and emitter to clone remote controls. 433MHz / 385MHz SDR to sense or operate doorbells, weather stations, IR remote extenders etc.
OS to be 2017 "Classic Edition XP Pro".
"Today we are close to taking our next step." That's today. It's happening right now and, let's be honest, most of it is happening on Facebook. All those pictures and updates – that is where the real work of humanity is occurring right now.
That's so delusional.
Facebook steals privacy, enables, bullying, causes depression. Email, Skype and phone are better for families scattered apart to stay in touch. You need email and phone to register with facebook.
Crimes against humanity.
Google Fiber has been instrumental making the web faster and better for everyone
Do Google-ish employees really believe what they say?
No doubt faster for people that got Google fiber and had no other fibre option.
But "better" and "everyone"?
I wonder what data Google's tame ISP stores and forwards on their users?
Websites were 1990s. Internet is about 10 years older in use, and designed earlier still.
The address size wasn't an issue for CPU word size or CPU address size.
A basic problem is that no internet resource using IP6 can turn off IP4 till everyone is using IP6 as there is zero interoperability.
At present "clients" have to use IP4 too, even if using IP6 because too much of the internet isn't accessible on IP6 only.
It's a mess.
Like BASIC (cut down Fortran) it was invented purely for TEACHING. As such it was better, but not suitable for the "real" world. Turbo Pascal helped. By early 1990s there were very many suitable languages for secure, military, aerospace and telecoms. Pascal wasn't one of them. Even Modula-2, Ada or C++ with a scanner to check for people misusing it as C would have been far batter. Turbo Pascal became Delphi as it incorporated much from Modula-2, but was too limited compared to other languages.
We seem to have applied very little of what was learnt in 1970s and 1980s.
Most code is shocking quality.
Agile promotes bad practices.
Too much emphasis on "pretty GUI" rather than ergonomic and Functional and not enough on separation of the application and OS into functional services with secure resilient APIs that don't explicitly use pointers.
Not enough time is spent on design, especially internal interfaces.
AI is a dream.
Quantum computing is for very narrow applications, as such if ever mainstream it will be a co-processor, such as 387 FPU was for the 386.
If it was really about demand, then increasing capacity and speed by adding more base stations, having smaller cells etc. But the ROI investment isn't there unless they charge per Mbyte per hour.
They don't need ANY more spectrum outside 900MHz to 2,600MHz ( 0.9GHz to 2.6GHz).
It's driven by regulators wanting to sell licences.
It's been used by FWALA licence holders for 12+ years in Ireland.
One company used nomadic indoor terminals instead of outdoor aerials and had the most rubbish service.
Mobile was tested 10 years ago by Intel, Motorola and various ISps. Rubbish. The frequency is too high. One company went to indoor WiMax to replace the older gear, then LTE. It's still rubbish because the frequency is too high.
The 3.5GHz band is only good for open plan office Femto cells or fixed outdoor aerials using "nearly" line of sight.
Basic physics that no "5G" marketing can bypass.
"Never" is rarely forever. It seems right now, for value, Android is only option, as Apple is overpriced for the contents. Certainly there won't be any mainstream "smart phone" option other than Android and Apple for quite a while.
I quite liked the idea of the double sided phone, eInk one side and LCD or AMOLED on the other. I'd like a bit more variety in form factor. I know that occasionally non-slab Android phones come out, but you only see them on obscure web sites. In terms of form factor, it seems the size is the main choice now.
The flaming batteries and Christmas helped Apple. They are a niche, and the iPhone 8 may focus more on being expensive and fashionable. Swiss fashion watch vs Timex "Ironman" and Casio.
Windows and Blackberry collapse is no surprise.
I added another plug in to help fix the scroll bars.
It's crazy that "Classic Theme Restorer" is needed. Everyone I've set up hates the default FF.
Also why are various privacy settings STILL wrong by default (3rd party cookies).
Why isn't NoScript built in?
I can upvote the CTR post and article enough!
Too much attenuation and interference at ground level. Really you'd want a roof top "discone" and a receiver listening on an unused part of 900MHz to 2GHz, though most of it is in use.
A GPS unit has multiple 1.4GHz receivers, but too specialist, as are the radio sets in a Smart phone.
A cheap USB TV stick has a "bypass mode" and will allow 850MHz to 1700MHz, but it's only 8 bit so you'd want a pre-filter, AGC, LNA and outdoor aerial like a discone. From about $6
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