Posts by Ed Prigmore

Don't know why? you need to read more Sci-Fi

You can tell from the comments here, who the sci-fi fans are. The most obvious application for these types of screens is for HUD's, the dream app being the Augmented Reality goggles that feature in a number of sci-fi books - check out Halting State by Charles Stross amongst others. An example from this book is the police-net goggles, that allow the copper to see tags against each property they look at / walk past showing details of the residents, flagging up the crims and the neds etc.

AA1 ftw!

I've got the very basic AA1 (£180ish from Amazon), and I love it, netbooks are supposed to be small, cheap and portable, and the AA1 just is :)

I can watch films on it, browse, send emails, do small office type things (docs and spreadsheets) - yes the battery life is a downer but I can totally forgive it because of the plus points.

And the touchpad just takes a bit of getting used to, it's no biggie.

And the biggest point is cost - the eee 1000 costs almost twice as much, do you get double the functionality? Double the fun?..... no, you don't. Case closed.

Re-submit with no changes?

But how will EdeXel know if there have been changes? They can't read the original documents in Word format so they won't be able to check!

Clarkson for PM?

I thought the little You-Tube video was quite funny, it can't have cost more than about £20 to make and showed at least someone, somewhere, in Nbr 10 has a sense of humour - formerly a lost art for denzines of that abode. Possibly the first time I've ever had something positive to say about them!

@Harry Stottle

"The reason for its failure is that, in order to be able to do the - admittedly impressive - things it can do, it has to spend the whole time listening to what's going on in the world in order to make an intelligent decision "Should I be reacting to that noise?"...

However, given enough processing power, the job of parsing all the input data from the world around it and deciding if it was necessary or worth could be handled by a subroutine who's sole purpose was just that. That's what a virtual intelligence will have to be - a pile of subroutines which shout for attention from the main decision making process when something needs a reaction - and the reaction would be delegated to another subroutine.

You just need three things -

1. Inputs from the world around you - camera's, mic's, internet connection (of course) and satellite spying gear, and routines to monitor, filter and pass the relevant data to....

2. A decision making process, driven by whatever imperatives are initially programmed in - ensuring own survival, saving humans, taking over the world (delete as appropriate), which is achieved by passing commands to...

3. A set of response mechanisms, so the machine is able to actually do something about the situations that arise (steering wheel, ray gun, dancing robot drone) - and routines to drive them.

Each section would need oodles of processing power, but thats what we seem to be getting more and more of - in ten years you will probably see peta-flop EEEE Pc's.