Mayur's Posterous

The Bluetones - Sleazy Bed Track

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Re: your declaration

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LOL
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Check yo inbox? ;)

Bhatia_vs_the_world

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AHAHAHAHA!!11!!one!!

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Sintel

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Jeb Corliss wing-suit demo

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Left 4 Dead "The Sacrifice" Trailer [HD]

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Some more pictures from my trip to Nepal

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BBC News - Change to 'Bios' will make for PCs that boot in seconds

 New PCs could start in just seconds, thanks to an update to one of the oldest parts of desktop computers.

The upgrade will spell the end for the 25-year-old PC start-up software known as Bios that initialises a machine so its operating system can get going.

The code was not intended to live nearly this long, and adapting it to modern PCs is one reason they take as long as they do to warm up.

Bios' replacement, known as UEFI, will predominate in new PCs by 2011.

The acronym stands for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface and is designed to be more flexible than its venerable predecessor.

"Conventional Bios is up there with some of the physical pieces of the chip set that have been kicking around the PC since 1979," said Mark Doran, head of the UEFI Forum, which is overseeing development of the technology.

Mr Doran said the creators of the original Bios only expected it to have a lifetime of about 250,000 machines - a figure that has long been surpassed.

"They are as amazed as anyone else that now it is still alive and well in a lot of systems," he said. "It was never really designed to be extensible over time."

AMI is a firm that develops Bios software. Brian Richardson, of AMI's technical marketing team, said the age of the Bios was starting to hamper development as 64-bit computing became more common and machines mutated beyond basic desktops and laptops.

Floppy disk, Eyewire  
The Bios tells the computer what input and output devices are installed

"Drive size limits that were inherent to the original PC design - two terabytes - are going to become an issue pretty soon for those that use their PC a lot for pictures and video," he said.

Similarly, he said, as tablet computers and other smaller devices become more popular, having to get them working with a PC control system was going to cause problems.

The problem emerges, he said, because Bios expects the machine it is getting going to have the same basic internal set-up as the first PCs.

As a result, adding extra peripherals - such as keyboards that connect via USB rather than the AT or PS/2 ports of yesteryear - has been technically far from straightforward.

Similarly, the Bios forces USB drives to be identified to a PC as either a hard drive or a floppy drive.

This, said Mr Richardson, could cause problems when those thumb drives are used to get a system working while installing or re-installing an operating system.

UEFI frees any computer from being based around the blueprint and specifications of the original PCs. For instance, it does not specify that a keyboard will only connect via a specific port.

"All it says is that somewhere in the machine there's a device that can produce keyboard-type information," said Mr Doran.

Under UEFI, it will be much easier for that input to come a soft keyboard, gestures on a touchscreen or any future input device.

Rack of computers, Think Stock

UEFI is proving a boon to those managing lots of computers in data centres

"The extensible part of the name is important because we are going to have to live with this for a long time," said Mr Doran.

He added that UEFI started life as an Intel-only specification known as EFI. It morphed into a general standard when the need to replace Bios industry-wide became more widely recognised.

Alternatives to UEFI, such as Open Firmware and Coreboot, do exist and are typically used on computers that do not run chips based on Intel's x86 architecture.

The first to see the benefits of swapping old-fashioned Bios for UEFI have been system administrators who have to oversee hundreds or thousands of PCs in data centres or in offices around the world.

Before now, said Mr Doran, getting those machines working has been "pretty painful" because of the limited capabilities of Bios.

By contrast, he said, UEFI has much better support for basic net protocols - which should mean that remote management is easier from the "bare metal" upwards.

For consumers, said Mr Doran, the biggest obvious benefit of a machine running UEFI will be the speed with which it starts up.

"At the moment it can be 25-30 seconds of boot time before you see the first bit of OS sign-on," he said. "With UEFI we're getting it under a handful of seconds."

"In terms of boot speed, we're not at instant-on yet but it is already a lot better than conventional Bios can manage," he said "and we're getting closer to that every day."

Some PC and laptop makers are already using UEFI as are many firms that make embedded computers. More, said Mr Richardson, will result as motherboard makers complete the shift to using it.

He said that 2011 would be the year that sales of UEFI machines start to dominate.

"I would say we are at the edge of the tipping point right now," he said.

 

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Astronomer Seeks ET Machines


People have always held a biased view of the world around them. It’s an aspect of being human.

It took until the 17th century for us to reject Aristotle’s vision of a universe where our Sun and the stars revolved around the Earth. Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Senior Astronomer Seth Shostak points out that up until a century ago, the scientific community believed a vast engineering society was responsible for building an irrigation system on the surface of Mars. Discovering the Martians could, in principle, be done by simply turning an Earth-based telescope in the direction of the Red Planet. Now it seems that our best chance for finding Martian life is to dig deep into the surface in search of subterranean microbes.

Our idea of extraterrestrial life has changed drastically in 100 years, but our search strategies have not kept up. In his upcoming paper “What ET will look like and why should we care?” for the November-December issue of Acta Astronautica, Shostak argues that SETI might be more successful if it shifts the search away from biology and focuses squarely on artificial intelligence. Shostak sees a clear distinction between life and intelligence: he says we should be searching for extraterrestrial machines.

“Continuing to hunt for our analogs – technically competent biological sentients – may be an enterprise with less than promising prospect, as it focuses on a highly transient prey,” Shostak says.

Our own technological advances since World War II make a great case for his position. Medical advancements since the 1950s show human beings becoming more bionic as digital and mechanical breakthroughs have found their way into our bodies. The development of true Artificial intelligence (AI) is, by some estimates, just a few decades away. When considering Moore’s Law—which shows a pattern of accelerating returns in technological improvement—Shostak is forced to believe humanity’s main role in the universe might be the creation of its successor.

“The continued exponential growth in computer power implies that even consumer-grade computers will have the processing power of a human brain by the year 2040,” he says.

If and when we do create true AI, it would surpass us quickly. An AI would have the power to self-direct its own evolution.

“If we build a machine with the intellectual capability of one human, then within 5 years, its successor is more intelligent than all humanity combined,” he says.

The window between a society’s technological birth and its shift to artificial intelligence is amazingly small.

“Once any society invents the technology that could put them in touch with the cosmos, they are at most only a few hundred years away from changing their own paradigm of sentience to artificial intelligence,” he says. Because artificial sentience would almost inevitably outlast and outperform its fleshy, needy predecessors, Shostak concludes that any aliens we detect will be machines.

ET machines would be infinitely more intelligent and durable than the biological intelligence that invented them. Intelligent machines would in a sense be immortal, or at least indefinitely repairable, and would not need to exist in the biologically hospitable “Goldilocks Zone” most SETI searches focus on. An AI could self-direct its own evolution. Every new instance of an AI would be created with the sum total of its predecessor’s knowledge preloaded.

The machines would require two primary resources: energy to operate with and materials to maintain or advance their structure. Because of these requirements, Shostak thinks SETI ought to consider expanding its search to the energy- and matter-rich neighborhoods of hot stars, black holes and neutron stars.

Bok globules are another search target for sentient machines. These dense regions of dust and gas are notorious for producing multiple-star systems. At around negative 441 degrees Fahrenheit, they are about 160 degrees F colder than most of interstellar space.

This climate could be a major draw because thermodynamics implies that machinery will be more efficient in cool regions that can function as a large “heat sink”. A Bok globule’s super-cooled environment might represent the Goldilocks Zone for the machines, says Shostak. But because black holes and Bok globules are not hospitable to life as we know it, they are not on SETI's radar.

“Machines have different needs,” he says. “They have no obvious limits to the length of their existence, and consequently could easily dominate the intelligence of the cosmos. In particular, since they can evolve on timescales far, far shorter than biological evolution, it could very well be that the first machines on the scene thoroughly dominate the intelligence in the galaxy. It’s a “winner take all” scenario.”

“While it’s not easy trying to figure the best SETI strategy to uncover these super sentients, it seems worthwhile to spend at least some of our SETI efforts trying to establish their presence,” he adds.

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