What? No. Facebook cares about keeping people engaged, and about making itself a part of everyday life. In that sense its okay for them if its not "exciting". It no longer needs to get people's attention, now what it has to do is keep people engaged, and that means having people enjoy it. At least that's my sense, whether they will actually do this or not I have no idea.
Hmmm... Now someone has to take all the detection algorithms from facebook (for detecting who your close friends are, who your spouse is, ect.) and run them on the Star Wars characters.
If you want to have bleeding edge developer software than you may need bleeding edge developer hardware. To clarify, I don't think mainstream applications or even betas should aim at bleeding edge hardware, just that when we plan on making some new piece of software that may take years to build its okay to assume that people in the future will have better computers.
I don't like the idea of developing for current machines. With the constant advances in computers the next generation of applications, "developer apps" should be made for the next generation of computers, meaning that its okay if it's a bit of a hog. I mean, 200MB is just a drop in a bucket now.
But what about making a site that's pleasant to use. It might take more clicks to get somewhere but the style and experience is better. Sites like HN and the Drudge Report convey the information effectively but they are not necessarily as pleasant to use. Is designing a site like designing clothes? If so, function is definitely not the only consideration.
Although this article isn't by Wolfram I agree that the philosophy of his company seems to be to hype products like any normal consumer company does. The problem is this doesn't really work when your selling and academic product. No programming language management organization will claim they are "revolutionizing programming" without strong qualifiers.
I disagree. If it was open source I think enough people would write libraries for it (or add-ons or whatever they would be called) that most if not everything could be done with functions found online. In the rare event that they could not be done you could just create your own. This is similar to my annoyance over Wolfram Alpha being server side when some sort of client side solution would be way better but would involve the source code being available.
To me it looks like they have exponential growth in the number of connections between the memory elements. This would account for having exponential storage while still not violating any physical principles (also, it would not be nearly as useful as they imply).
I'd agree except for this bit:"ndeed, a practical implementation of a UMM can already be accomplished by using memelements such as memristors, memcapacitors or meminductors, although the concept can be implemented with any system with memory, whether passive or active. For instance, in this work we have proposed a simple topologically-specific architecture that, if realized in hardware, can solve the subset-sum problem in just one step with a linear number of memprocessors"
That seems to be pretty suspicious to me.
Did they build something that can break P=NP? No. If I'm right then I'll look smart and if I'm wrong than I'll be too excited to care. Also, if I'm wrong I have to go to a quite retreat somewhere and rethink the nature of reality.
From what I've read (which isn't a whole lot I admit) we've built small pieces that may possible be able to construct a memcomputer when put together but for whatever engineering reasons we haven’t actually built one. I doubt that it would be physically possible (for one if it were, why on earth did humans evolve to be so wimpy and not get overtake by a life form with a memcomputer for a brain).
We don't know if we can build UMM's. This does seem to strongly contradict a lot of ideas that no computational system in the physical world will be able to beat a Turing Machine exponentially. In a way UMM's right now are just saying "what if we can do this special computing thing" and proving that than P=NP. It only becomes surprising if we can actually build them.
In many areas this paper seems to be over stating its findings. They imply heavily that memcomputing must exist and talk about the human brain and neurology in a manner that really has no place in this kind of paper.
Well, we don't know if we can build UMM's. This does seem to strongly contradict a lot of ideas that no computational system in the physical world will be able to beat a Turing Machine exponentially. In a way UMM's right now are just saying "what if we can do this special computing thing" and proving that than P=NP. It only becomes surprising if we can actually build them.
Without Exponential Information Overhead I don't think any of it really works. I mean, that's the part that seems hard to believe. I think they get the sums based off each element being able to store data in relation to other elements but I don't get how that can physically work without effectively adding more elements.
Eh, frankly it just seems like its google slipping up. If only a few hundred bitly links have viruses I'm impressed (I'm sure there are more but the percentage still doesn't seem that bad).
Ummm... that's almost the main point of the DMCA. Among other things the DMCA made it illegal to facilitate copyright theft. This has lead to several major cases including ones where attempts have been made to have scholarly papers censored when they papers point out holes in DRM (technologies that prevent users from doing what they want with content).
Legally speaking a 5 second clip is fine but a 20 second clip is beginning to push it and several of them from the same franchise... I'm not saying it should be this way btu the fx in a movie is a form of art and thus can be copyrighted, not just the plot and other aspects of the movie.
"Beyond lobbying the companies, there is little law enforcement can do without congressional action. " Wait, what? Even with the privacy Apple and Google are offering there are huge amounts of ways to access data useful to law enforcement and the law enforcement seems to have the tools to force the companies to give it.