I've seen Grossberg give talks and read some of his papers. He has an awfully hard time deciding between saying he invented everything OR that everything is worse than what he invented 20 years ago. But somehow, he perseveres and always manages to choose one of those options for anything new under the sun.

I've seen Grossberg give talks and read some of his papers. He has an awfully hard time deciding between saying he invented everything OR that everything is worse than what he invented 20 years ago. But somehow, he perseveres and always manages to choose one of those options for anything new under the sun.

That's not to say deep learning doesn't deserve some cold water, or that Grossberg hasn't made important contributions over the years. But he has zero credibility when it comes to talking about other people's work.

I'd still be using XP today if there was an up to date Firefox for it. Best UI Microsoft ever released (though 7 comes close and even surpasses it in some ways). Insult me for wanting to use an "insecure" OS all you want, but don't you dare claim that the newer Windows releases are actually more pleasant to use!

What nonsense. SATs have been a weak predicter of success in the first year of college, and have zero predictive power after the first year. If anything, forcing schools to look harder at nonstandardized metrics might improve the quality of the student body.

Best way to evaluate somebody is on the job. Hire then with a strict 2 week contract, and then decide to give a real position to the end of said contract.

Look, there's lots of reasons to be suspicious of plant "meat". I wouldn't touch it. But salt is not one of the reasons. Lots of good science has shown that salt isn't bad for you. Your body eliminates the excess quite easily. Unfortunately Drs. cling to easy health prescriptions like "reduce sodium" when the evidence has long, long stopped supporting it.

Consoles were sold at a loss, so we don't know their true cost. Similar hardware in an Amiga might have added much more to the total bill of materials than the retail price of the N64, for instance. A better guess as to the true cost would have been the voodoo or rendition cards, expensive for sure, although I don't recall the actual numbers.

And, at least with the N64 the development costs were much lower because it was a cut down SGI, and was designed almost entirely by SGI. Interestingly, 3dfx, rendition, and SGI are all long gone - suggesting that early 3d chipset design, manufacturing, and marketing were hard to do profitably (to be fair, sgi had a long successful run and only failed because good 3d got cheap and winnt was an decent alternative to irix).

Commodore would have had none of the advantages that allowed cheap 3d in consoles. Though, you could argue that the Amiga was sold at a loss ;-)

I suspect unless they wanted to charge SGI level prices, the kind of 3d chipset commodore could have built would have been much closer to what the S3D offered - real 3D acceleration was pretty expensive in those days. The amiga was amazing for it's time by figuring out how to do a lot with cheap to produce chips. But 3D doesn't lend itself to those kinds of tricks - in the end you need fast multiplication and addition. There aren't clever hacks for that, you need a lot of transistors.

Ironic that the amiga was held back by it's specialized chips, in the end. This is really the core of my argument for why I think the amiga platform was doomed (short of a total hardware reboot, which wouldn't really have been an amiga except in name).

The 386 wasn't very good for doom - you needed a mid-level 486 to run it properly. So I'm not so sure teh '020 would have done the job either.

The video toaster cost, what $5000? sure the amiga enabled it to work, but one has to ask how much actual work the amiga did in that relationship. A shame that newtek didn't buy amiga when they were going under. I'm sure they would have been a better steward of the brand/hardware.

Maybe true, I'm not a low-level hardware guy. But I have recently booted DOS to flash my video card bios. And in the lab I worked we recently purchased a NEW machine that had an ISA slot so we could use an ancient ISA card that we needed for obscure reasons. I wasn't involved in operating it, so I don't know if we had to boot to dos to write to the bus or if we were able to get WinXP to give us low level access to the hardware.

Sure, windows 10 doesn't talk to the same hardware interfaces that DOS or Win95 did. But most of those interfaces still exist, or did 5 years ago, at least.

Not sure that's true - recall the ever popular S3D cards that were actually 3d decelerators. As far as the high-end amigas playing doom - that was without the help of those specialized chips, it was all due to the CPU. How much did those high-end amigas cost, too? Probably not that much different than a good 486.

Interesting counter argument, but I stand by calling it a hack..

One example: why did the amiga have smooth scrolling? Because video memory was organized into bitfields (literally, one bit) and you could start them at arbitrary x/y offsets relative to the upper-left hand corner of the screen, at which point they were summed into a LUT value as each pixel was rastered. Combined with clever partitioning of the color palate this allowed multiple independent scrolling backgrounds just by changing a few bytes in the registers. An awesome design if all you want to do is side scrolling 2d-games with limited pallets per layer. But it's applicability to anything we think of modern video gaming? Zero. Or modern desktop UIs, or that god-awful but still useful WWW? So it wouldn't have scaled at all - it would have been thrown away for an entirely different design. Once CPUs are powerful enough all the special purpose ASICs just limit what you can do, and are often slower to boot (remember the S3D 3d-decelerators that were all the rage in the 90s?).

3D seems to be the one modern exception, but keep in mind that GPUs are much larger than CPUs in terms of transistors (especially so once you strip out all the space that CPUs dedicate to cache). But even if you grant that the amiga had good custom chips for the time (certainly true before the 386/486 became dominate), there's no reason to think that the expertise of designing those chips would have in any way translated to good 3D chipset design.

To be fair everything looks like gold compared to win 10 (except, of course, win 8). Everytime I use my winxp machine (about 2 times a year) I fall in love with it again, probably because of the junk that has followed. Was XP the best OS possible? No way. But what has come later has been either lateral moves (win7) or mostly downgrades. I wish Linux had better quality control at the desktop level, or I'd go there.