taks

several ways. first, the memristors store their current "state" indefinitely. you can set one to a given value, walk away for several years, come back and query it and it will have the same value. this is because the material itself actually changes. next, they're fast. couple that with their non-volatile nature, and you have extremely high-speed FLASH. in fact, you can use these instead of regular RAM. all you have to do to read them is apply a small voltage and measure the current that comes out. no switching involved. this also means very low power. they're very small (and work better as they get smaller) and can easily be stacked for multi-dimensional circuits. current device technology does't really permit that. couple these points with the two-dimensional transistors that krezack pointed out and you've got the makings for extremely dense, low power, and very high speed processors. i see them being implemented in custom application circuits. they mention FPGAs, for example, which are generally used for massive parallel signal processing tasks (one algorithm i just wrote, 3 lines of code inside of two loops, would take 100 GFLOPS and the data is only 3.28 MS/s). i spend about half of my time converting my algorithms into useful block diagrams for FPGA designers so they can write code to implement my design. i have to play all sorts of tricks to balance gains by bit shifting, windowing, etc., to make sure my desired signal passes through the "circuit" they develop without losing too much information along the way. not to mention the fact that FPGAs don't deal with floating point arithmetic well (takes lots of resources) and a divide is ridiculous to implement (and slow). these little circuits would allow a sort of "analog" FPGA implementation that currently does not exist, at least not anything that i can use. they would also allow me to implement my own design without having to pay for an expensive VHDL/Verilog designer (which i can do for software stuff, but not FPGA stuff). taks that 100 GFLOP process can be executed in real-time for probably 5 W of power in an FPGA. the FPGA we use is a xilinx 4 SX55 (www.xilinx.com).

most problems that i deal with are actually linearly separable. multipath in communications systems, albeit time varying, it varies slowly enough that the statistics may be tracked, allowing continual separation. i have a cool radar one in which the line of sight signal breaks through the sidelobes of the antenna and corrupts the desired signal which is reflected off of the environment. a simple little semi-adaptive separator is used to pull out the direct path (known as direct path breakthrough) from the reflected. a perceptron approach would make this insanely simple to do. probably the more appropriate version of what i do. their is an oddity in the way things are referenced. i had never heard the term perceptron (or at least, not that i recall... dropped neural networks before i got my masters even) till reading cichocki and now it seems the hard-core ICA folks tend to use that terminology liberally. of course, component analysis ideas are not popular in the US for whatever reason. most of this type of work is done in helsinki and japan. there's a terminology difference between signal processing engineers and neural network folks, too. taks

me. you'll have to find a way to either trick me into accepting socialist ideals or convince me that all hope is lost and i should just jump off a cliff. you can go the MDK route, but i'm jabba the hut big so it might be difficult, or at least time consuming. your schizophrenic madman idea sounds kinda funny. i can see him now, wandering around muttering to himself. yakman indeed! taks

the issue with the war wasn't the point, it was how actor/actress political positions effect the ability to watch their movies/shows without throwing up. what jane did was not just reprehensible, it was treasonous. interestingly, i don't recall henry being as poltically outspoken (though he was a veteran). he came from a different time, however. taks

ah, mesh and i are both tarded. taks

ut oh. oh, i'm playing IWD2 again. i got bored of SoZ and wanted some old skool IE action. one of the hardest things is switching my mind-set from NWN2 3.5E rules to IWD2 3E rules. subtle, but enough to make me think a bit more when i level since i'm so used to the 3.5E crpg thing that we've all grown accustomed to. taks

alan alda was about as cynical about war (in general) as one could possibly be, and yes, it came through when he started writing and directing. there's even a futurama episode that spoofs him switching (literally) between comedy and drama. of course, MASH was a cynical anti-war show to begin with, but it was originally supposed to be about the vietnam war, not the korean war. guess they were worried about pissing off the recent vietnam vets. my list of actors that i can stomach has shrunk over the years. fortunately, i never liked jane fonda, susan sarandon or tim robbins to begin with (well, jacob's ladder was good). taks

bobby goren played by vincent d'onofrio. he's one of my favorite actors in general, though this character in particular. new season starts january 9, btw. fry and bender from futurama. i have my 5-year old son quoting both of them now. we were driving in the car the other day and there was some soundbite on the radio taken from a futurama episode and john suddenly exclaimed "now just hold on a second! that was futurama!" taks

precisely why i capitalized on it. i never argued that i wasn't an arrogant ass. taks

econ if i'm not mistaken, right deraldin? fun stuff. math developed to describe what amounts to emotion. ick. taks

never said i could do that... you can't even participate in a joke without a strawman. i can tell you, however, that 2^12<4097<2^13. that's a useful tool to be able to do that withough resorting to a calculator. i don't need to claim any vague intellectual superiority. i just like making tools like you look stupid, that's all. btw, what i did in that one thread was hardly "madcap." beleive it or not, that's actually how people that understand numbers think and what they do when they work with numbers in their heads. it's also a big advantage to be able to calculate logs in your head when you deal with them daily. it is not my fault you don't get it. taks

the memristor is going to change the world, if it can work as they claim. speed notwithstanding, and element that can essentially assume any value, and stay there, and be read out instantaneously means huge strides for allowing everything else. in other words, such a beast is what will enable the advances that will spawn true AI. that graphene transistor suffers from two problems compared to the memristor: it isn't as dense, and it is an active component. couple it with the memristor, however, and two dimensional processors with distributed memory become a reality perhaps. taks

4097>krezack taks

the paper chua wrote is that big? why on earth were you carrying it around twice a week? what the heck was it? you've apparently not delved into component analysis techniques. the ability to configure neurons to adapt and solve problems is beyond belief, IMO. cichocki has a good book on the matter and he describes things in the "perceptron" manner, rather than as standard adaptive processes. the simple benefits to general electronics, microprocessors included, is going to be the immediate revolution. this is bigger than the transistor. the other stuff will take time and more smart people to realize true benefits. taks

tell us how you really feel, kaftan. quit holding back. taks

funny quote from the aritcle: "They say three weeks in the lab will save you a day in the library every time." taks

perhaps. chua, along with the guys that developed the actual circuits, deserves a nobel for this discovery if it pans out. the article links to some dissension in the engineering ranks, which i have yet to read, but that is not uncommon nor unexpected so i'll tentatively side with the discoverers for now reserving final judgment till i get all the facts. taks

the memristor. predicted in 1971, proved may 1 of this year (well, published). http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/dec08/7024 from the article: "...the influence of memristance obeys an inverse square law: memristance is a million times as important at the nanometer scale as it is at the micrometer scale, and it

as i recall, once you get yourself close enough the next room will appear, i.e., the "black door" will go away, and you'll then be able to target it properly using your mouse. that had me thinking when i first got there long before soz came out. taks

one of my bosses from harris (i worked with 5 "bosses" and one other "employee" while at harris) used to call in to IT to complain about the computers. their response was always along the lines of "well, your engineers aren't complaining to us" and he snark back "yes, you're correct, they aren't because they're spending their time fixing the issues that weren't supposed to exist in the first place!" he was livid. from somebody? what, did you sneak up behind the poor sap and just stick a needle in? ^GD: agreed. my mother worked dillards while i was in high school. that didn't last long (now she's classified as an engineer with boeing, oddly enough). taks

i'm sick, too, walsh. ugh. came home yesterday after only 1.5 hours in the orifice. not ready this morning and my son had school canceled so he stayed with me. he's throwing up now as well (i'm not gurfing, but my stomach doesn't feel right). hang in there DR. taks

i spent all day yesterday on the slopes at copper mountain. the skis i demo'd were outstanding (nordica afterburner), though the skier was not faring as well. in fact, i started out with my boots a bit looser than they should be for the runs i was on (steep blues and blacks with a few bumps here and there), which resulted in more pain than i should have been experiencing. i was sloppy and out of shape, which made things worse, too. today i want to curl up with a bottle of morphine and just sleep. ah, but it was nice to be back after 20 months (i didn't ski last year due to school). taks i should add: john did ski school and we had to pry him off the training slope at the end of the day.

i don't have any problems with it. there must be a user configuration issue (windows) that impacts performance. now, i have lots of anomalies, but my framerate is pretty solid. taks

i quite like SoZ, but i am also rather disappointed with many of the bugs and some of the design decisions. there seems to be a variety of problems associated with the inclusion of tony k's AI. i was using it before with MotB and the OC, and never had the problems i'm having now. i'm glad i'm not using a dual-wield character. taks

well i'll be danged. just checked and the avengers will be out in a couple years with iron man, the hulk, captain america and thor. that's what i get for being ill-informed on the comic book world. taks