Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Titanium, Art, Israel
You want fries with that software? If the recent report of Microsoft porting apps to *nix, intrigued you, see Paul Thurrott's piece in Windows 2000 Magazine (yes, there is such a thing). Thurrott says, in part: "I can't tell you that the port is going to produce actual products. But I can tell you that Microsoft is looking into it. No, I don't think it's smart. No, it's not what I'd do. But yes, I believe it's true. So why would Microsoft try to port its desktop applications to a platform that has absolutely no desktop market share? I've no idea." Too bad for Microsoft Linux has "absolutely no desktop market share."
Silly! The sky isn't falling! It's just sinking a little each day ... Johann writes "Here is a follow up story to last week's NY Times article which was debated here on Slashdot. The article states that 'Open water at the top of the world isn't evidence that the North Pole is melting, as an article this month in The New York Times suggested.' There are numerous quotes in the article that do suggest that global warming is fact, not fiction."
To which the dapper and elegant Party Remover adds: "The Associated Press reports that a recent New York Times story about liquid water at the North Pole was rather overstating the seriousness of the situation. It seems that the Arctic Ocean is typically 10% ice-free during the summer." And the wording of the correction is amusing, for those of us easily amused.
Getcher doo-dads! Red-hot, computer-generated doo-dads! Get 'em while they're hot, ladies and gents ... ussphoenix writes: "Regarding the /. story about Computer Makes Robot Offspring, here is an article in the journal Nature describing the system. There are also mpegs of the virtual machines and the corresponding real machines moving!"
Next week we explain the buggy-whip makers' case, too. breillysf writes: "Eric Sinrod has condensed the complicated legal issues surrounding 2600's hyperlinking ruling. You can read the article here: Upside Counsel DeCSS article. The article is concise and not filled with legal jargon. A good contribution for those with little time to understand the fundamentals of the case."
And on the DeCSS note, Jim Tyre writes "Tom Vogt, a defendant in the California DeCSS lawsuit brought by DVD CCA, has started DeArt, the DeCSS Art Contest, to further explore the expressive aspects of DeCSS. Original creations only, obviously must be related to DeCSS. The contest runs through Dec. 31, and there will be prizes. Tom and Jon Johansen are the current judges, Emmanuel Goldstein has been asked to be an additional judge. Time for Slashdotters to express their creativity in a new way." I think the most strategic contest area would be performance art. Since it must be digitized, a video recorder would be necessary, I guess. Anyone here watched Roger and Me?[grin]
And if you're feeling less artistic, don't worry: Carpman writes, "I have set up a project to create a letter to congress about the DMCA and its effects. I'm running this like an open source project, you submit, it gets reviewed, and added. Also, you can submit stand alone letters to send allong with the big letter. The page is here." Of course, note the verb sense of "carp" and this makes perfect sense ...
Oh, no, you must have misunderstood. What we meant was something totally different. thebaron writes "Here is a interesting back-pedaling by Sony in this article. One should think before opening mouth and inserting [one's] own foot, even if you're a company exec." Or perhaps especially then. As roblimo pointed out recently, big companies have trouble tying their collective shoelaces sometimes, never mind effecting their own conspiracies.
Hit that high hat, swing that hook! PenguinRadio writes: "The Washington Post notes in Tuesday's paper that Motorola has begun the necessary reporting to certain government agencies so that they can burn up the $4 billion in Iridium satellites. Interesting in this announcements is the fact that their engineers feels certain pieces of the birds may actually reach the Earth and not burn up completely. Most notably a 2 foot by 3 foot titanium fuel tank may make it through the atmosphere. Wanna bet we see it on e-bay if it does fall to earth?"
I like this little ditty in regards to the 2600 ruling:
The judge made the following analogy: "It is analogous to the publication of a bank vault combination in a national newspaper. Even if no one uses the combination to open the vault, its mere publication has the effect of defeating the bank's security system, forcing the bank to reprogram the lock."
Actually. I thought it was more like - hey, we made a car...but you have to use our gas to drive the sum'bitch!
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
I'm agnostic on the whole global warming thing, but I get a little edgy about the use of statistics that correlate "150 years" of data to predict long term effects.
:)
If the earth is given a typical 3 billion yr age, then 150 yrs is 0.000005% of the total data set.
Going with a more reasonable data: Dinosaur extinction 65 million years ago; call it 60 Myr. 150 yrs is 0.00025% of that span.
Going with 150,000 yrs (data from, say, polar ice samples) we're up to a more reasonable 0.15% data set.
Putting this in perspective: Taking 0.15% of the last 70 yrs of stock market performance data gives us the last 6 weeks of data. From 40 days of data, we will predict the stock trends for the next 70 years. That's not likely to work to well. And that's what it seems is being done with a fair portion of the global warming data.
But, as a scientist, I know that it's easy to poo-poo a challenging and complicated research field when I'm very ignorant of it
-----
D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
There is a lot of "pretty good" evidence that the world really is warming up in recent centuries. However, there is nothing to prove whether it is man-made or natural. The planet went through changes like this before modern humans existed, so jumping to conclusions should be avoided.
Think about it more closely: Your assuption that global warming is either "man made or natural" is incorrect - it misses the most crucial issue - that the possible presence of natural warming does not negate or neutralize the presence of artifical warming.
For example, what we see today (or ten years from now) might fall within natural boundries, thus you would seem to conclude we had little to worry about and no reason to act, but that warming could be the result of both a slight natural warming and a slight artifical one, which, damaging enough for us as that could be, would be nothing next to the warming of full on natural effects plus full on artifical effects.
You seem to think that warming is ok if it's natural. This maybe true from a holistic view, but as warming from either source could be very bad for us, personally, it seems absolutely ludicrious to exacibate and compound the problem simply because we haven't yet artifically produced a disaster as terrible as what nature can managed (and thus in the process, open ourselves up to a disaster greater than what even nature could produce on its own).
Natural doesn't mean healthy or acceptable. (And I suspect the risks from environmental change outweigh the possible risk that such change might be neccessary for some unknown reason that might turn out to be more important to our wellbeing).
Most notably a 2 foot by 3 foot titanium fuel tank may make it through the atmosphere. Wanna bet we see it on e-bay if it does fall to earth?
Why just the tank? They should put the entire Iridium network up for auction on e-bay! I bet they'd sell it, AND get a decent amount of money...
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Mabey Iridium can make their money back by selling "real parts from outer space" on Ebay or something. When they sell all the parts, they can sell their domain name there too and actually turn a profit.
"Own a peice of technological history!!! Iridium.com domain name: opening bid $4,000,000,000..."
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
Didn't you see that? Or has this just degenerated into a "let's bash timothy" because he isn't one of the original Mercury 7 Slashdotters?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It seems that right about the time I was getting around to being born, ... they were saying that industrial soceity was bringing about global COOLING!!! We were dooming ourselves to a new ice age! And now they've done a 180 and are doomsaying about global warming???
Well, come on guys... which is it?
You can't have it both ways.
Oh come off it! 30-odd years ago (I'm guessing at your age) the scientists based on the research of the day were theorizing one thing and now, after 30 years of futher research and observation, they are concluding something different. This is not suprising nor can it in any way be called hypocritical. Do you expect scientists to make one theory and stick to it for over a generation, no matter what further evidence may suggest?
You also presuppose that "they" are a monolithic block of researchers and that they speak with a unified voice. Further more, you presuppose that the exact same people from 30 years ago are the ones saying something different now when in actual fact the ones from 30 years ago are probably mostly all dead now or retired and the ones speaking today about global warming are an entirely new generation.
How your comment got moderated as "Insightful" is beyond me, when it mostly shows your profound ignorance of the scientific method and is an extreme over-simplification of the nature of the scientific community based on a hearsay anecdote of a doddering old man who obviously passed on his lack of intelligence to his progeny.
Try this on: "At one time scientists were saying that the world was flat. Now they've done a 180 and are claiming that the world is round! Well come on guys... which is it? You can't have it both ways."
Sounds rather moronic doesn't it?
Trickster Coyote
Life is an illusion.
Ideology is for ideots.
I had the opportunity to deal with the press about seven years ago. I was involved in a high visibility project that the upper management wanted to put on display. I dealt with ppl from CNN, NPR, Boston Globe, Philly Inquirer, Beyond200, among others. Only one group presented what I felt was a rational discourse of what we were doing; that was NPR.
I did learn one important thing. Those in the mainstream press are under constant time pressure to produce. They do not have sufficient time to follow up on the initial interview. Rarely is a scientist given the opportunity to review what the reporter eventually writes up. In science we have peer-review which acts as a means of filtering out garbage. The press has an editor (who probably understands less of about science than the reporter) acting as this filter.
>will push us into doing something that really
>does counter environmental changes, and those
>changes turn out to be natural and necessary.
You know... the odd thing is, that the "environmentalists" can't make up their OWN minds what is happening.
I was talking to my dad on the phone not long ago, and in the course of conversation, I mentioned the earlier article about the polar icecap melting. He's a retired submariner and has actually BEEN to the north pole before.
Well, after a few sea stories, he mentioned an intresting little tidbit. It seems that right about the time I was getting around to being born, all these "environmentalists" were, even then, claiming that all the pollutantants that we're spewing into the atmosphere was going to drastically affect the global climate. Tricky bit was, the doomsayers were NOT talking about global warming... they were saying that industrial soceity was bringing about global COOLING!!! We were dooming ourselves to a new ice age! And now they've done a 180 and are doomsaying about global warming???
Well, come on guys... which is it?
You can't have it both ways.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
And for that crime, I hereby sentence you to whatever is picked by the random drawing. My lovely assistant Trisha will now spin the wheel. Oooooh... let's hope it doesn't land on Lethal Injection. (the crowd starts chanting, Lethal Injection, Lethal Injection!).
For those who miss the courtroom spectacle, it'll be available on DVD.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I make 2 predictions .....
(1) Not a single hit on Europe or North America.
(2) A bonanza for space souvenier hunters in outback Australia, just like Skylab.
When will the space cowboys realise we aussies don't like having other peoples space junk dropped on us ?
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
I take it efforts to explain this in court failed.
Could someone explain to me what is required to be classified as a copy protection device?
Currently, without circumventing CSS I am able to run off copies of DVDs onto VHS, or even save them into mpeg's (using two computers) and upload them to the internet for digital distribution. Commercial pirates can stamp DVDs just like CDs - also without requiring the circumvention of CSS.
If it allows all this, while lining the pockets of the movie industry with licensing fees and regional pricing etc, why is it just accepted by the court as a copy protection device - isn't the piss poor job it does of copy protection (in the few contrived scenarios where it complicats piracy) just a side effect of its actual intended purpose.
Did the MPAA present documentation proving it was designed first and formost as a copy protection device and not a player control device?
Isn't DeCSS more analogous to publishing the way that a safe works than publishing the combination? Have we really lost the right to know how equipment that we own works?
----- Protect your rights, join the eff
... all these "environmentalists" were, even then, claiming that all the pollutantants that we're spewing into the atmosphere was going to drastically affect the global climate. Tricky bit was, the doomsayers were NOT talking about global warming... they were saying that industrial soceity was bringing about global COOLING!!!
Well, come on guys... which is it?
You can't have it both ways.
If environmentalists were predicting a climate change 50 years ago that's actually pretty insightful. That the direction of the change was wrong is hardly surprising, given the massive complexity to predicting weather. We can't even reliably predict the weather for the next day! What would have been clear 50 years ago was that we were pumping massive amounts of waste into the atmosphere (and rivers etc.), so much that we were changing its composition. It's good to know that some people back then had the foresight to realise that this may have effects on the climate.
As for all the comments that doubt that global warming is going on, you only have to do a simple web search to find some statistics on how the mean temperature has risen over the past 100 years.
Here's a few links I just found:
This graph of the mean world temperature over the last 150 years
From this report
Global Temperatures
A paper from the Proceedings of National Academy of Science
And there is heaps and heaps more evidence if you care to look.
The fact that the world leaders had a conference in Kyoto to discuss global warming means that the evidence is clear enough to worry them. It should probably worry everyone else too.
That's one titanium fuel tank for each satellite. Look out below!
I'd like to nominate the guy who thought up the idea of a DeCSS code song. He should get at least an honorary award...
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
I will go and see Star Wars II cause he hasn't released a DVD yet (which in turn pees me off though you can't win on that one cause I want DVDs but I wont buy them while I can't play them with any freedom). If someone shows me how Mr. Lucas is supporting the MPAA (i.e. his membership and preferably any activity on his part for them) than that will be me out of going to movies, or renting them or giving a penny to them until this farce is sorted out.
To all those with influence, take note that you are not getting as much money out of me as you want (it is rapidly approaching nothing) and it is nowhere near what I would spend were in not for "personal politics", and many many more people will be voting with their wallets and giving you less and less cash until you can't pay your lawyers anymore so grow up and come with us intop the new frontier.
In the last 6 months I have seen 0 movies in the cinema and about 4 on video (none rented or encouraged by me) and purchased one CD single for $2 to see what codec they used for the video on it.
In the previous 6 months I saw perhaps 12 movies in the cinema and about 20 on video (many rented or encouraged by me) along with about 4 CDs.
So in six months their taking from me are down from about £120-£150 to £2.
The key is for everyone who hates what their doing to avoid giving them money....if you "have to" see Natalie Portmans new film so do it, if your "thinking" of going to see X-Men...don't!
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
I am a bit cautious to sing praises of "Linux has arrived on the desktop". Its my primary desktop (and laptop) OS... but I'll readily admit that I'm not the average user. But having said all that... something strange is afoot.
Companies that previously distanced themselves from Linux embrace it. Even harsh critics have began to adopt it. Sure... this has been all the talk for servers in the past. But now we're hearing about laptops coming factory installed with Linux (hardly server hardware). Even stranger is other Unix vendors adopting a desktop environment that's synonymous with the Linux desktop - Gnome.
So what are the numbers? If that's all you're interested in, you're missing something. There's something odd happening right now. And its got nothing to do with current marketshare.
There are, however, other issues that are subjects to discussion, namely, what causes what. Is the global warming related to CO2 increase? Is the latter due to human activity? (well, this is pretty sure, but not 100% sure). Maybe the global warming is a part of a longer trend? Can we do anything about it? Should we do anything about it? If we don't, what happens next? Does the data fit the greenhous-effect model? And so on.
Best regards
Biologuary
You miss the point. This present legal issue unfortunately has greater ramifications than just for people who want to watch their dvds on their linux boxes. If code is declared not to be speech and therefore potentially illegal, then all of computer science will suffer. Surely you wouldn't be naive enough to say: "Well, I don't mind if they burn that book, because it wasn't a terribly good book anyway."
This is precisely why these global warming discussions are never conclusive. Ignorant techies on one side, and ignorant environmentalists on the other, and noone bothers to take a handbook on ecology or climatology in the hand. Hey, if you talk that "there are is no proof" then I know that you never had anything to do with science -- otherwise you would have known that there are facts, and theories, and refutations, but proofs are only in maths.
Come on. There is a global warming. There are hundreds of modells and theories that predict what happens next. And many of them do predict really dramatic changes. (And I thought that at least Americans should understand the meaning of "hurricane" or "flood". Now, you are lucky, you got the dough to save your lifes). It is not sure, whether the global changes are related to the global changes in CO2 (for which there are quite good records as well). It never will. Every model is an approximation, and constructing one that could precisely predict what happens to the weather in twenty years is not only practically, but also theoretically impossible (hint: predictive horison in models involving deterministic chaos).
My point is, we have a game with a very high stake, and you should disregard the panic-makers and do some serious reading on the subject - maybe that would convince you.
Best regards
j.
You can't have it both ways.
YOU CAN HAVE IT BOTH WAYS.
From http://www.canoe.ca/TimeCanada0009/0 4_time8.html
What is really at risk in the Arctic is part of the thermostat of Earth itself. The difference in temperature between the tropics and the poles drives the global climate system. The excess heat that collects in the tropics is dissipated at the poles, about half of it through what has been nicknamed the ocean conveyor, a vast deep-water current equivalent in flow to 100 Amazon Rivers. Much of the rest of the heat is conveyed as the energy in storms that move north from the tropics. If the poles continue to warm disproportionately faster than the tropics, the vigor of this planetary circulatory system may diminish, altering prevailing winds, ocean currents and rainfall patterns. Already, severe and unpredictable storms in the northern hemisphere may be a sign that the global system is changing. Canadians like to think they will be winners in a global-warming era. Warmer weather, the theory goes, will make it possible to grow more food for export. That could happen, but there are no guarantees. Grain production in the breadbaskets of Canada and the U.S. could be in jeopardy if rainfall becomes less steady and predictable. Moreover, greater climate change could be ahead. Growing numbers of scientists fear that the warming trend will so disrupt ocean circulation patterns that the Gulf Stream, the current that warms large parts of the northern hemisphere, could shut down. If that happens, global warming would, ironically, produce global cooling--and bring on a deep freeze.
Nosce te Ipsum
First let me criticize a few suggestions I've seen over the past few days:
(1) Launching a DDOS attack against movie companies' websites: Bad idea. This will only reinforce their accusations that we are all criminals, and turn the general public against us. The decision is frustrating, but we don't need to give them justification for what they've done.
(2) Burning DVD's in mass quantities. Are you going to loot video stores to get them? (see above) Otherwise, the movie industry already has your money, and that's the bottom line. I really don't think anyone would care aside from the protesters themselves, and maybe some neighbors who get annoyed by the smell of burning plastic.
There are other forms of entertainment than movies. Gaming, for example.
I'm discussing mainly (but not exclusively--see the end of my post) roleplaying games.
Gaming is cheaper. A typical rulebook for an RPG is $20-$30, cheaper than movie tickets for for the 4-6 people in a typical gaming group. Extra sourcebooks for a gaming system are usually only $10-15.
Gaming is more interesting. Even if you only have one rulebook, you can have a nearly endless variety of scenarios. Your best-case scenario with movies is renting, where you might be able to get 20 movies or so. This leads right into my third point...
Gaming is easier to schedule. Regardless of how much or how little time you have available, a movie (with few exceptions) takes roughly two hours to watch. The length of an RPG session can be controlled by adjusting the complexity of the storyline. I've seen games as short as 2 hours or as long as several days.
With less time available, you might want to consider a card game or board game (maybe monopoly, but I was thinking along the lines of Settlers of Catan)
Not to ramble on too much, I thought I'd post links to a few of my favorite gaming companies:
Steve Jackson Games
White Wolf Game Studio
Cheapass Games (Typically only $5 a game, I recommend Give me the Brain for a fun, short card game.
it's very cool to see the evolved automata work in real life. yeah, it might have been just a cute hack of hooking up a GA system to an automated manufacturing tool, but damn it looks cool!
:) it may tell us something (ie. simple associations, etc.), but it's not nearly enough from an engineering point of view
it's curious, though, that as a branch of AI research, GA has pretty much plateaued. it's been becoming apparent that there are serious limitations to the GA model of design - first and foremost, just like in connectionist systems, the GA system tells the designer nothing* about the workings of the system - a scientist looking at a GA system has no better of a chance to figure out what it's doing than when looking at a biological creature.
and secondly, GAs and connectionist systems alike are very good - in fact, entirely too good - at adapting themselves to the detils of their environment. this means they will use the strangest characteristics of the environment (or training data in case of NNs) if they're only beneficial - and not necessarily the characteristics we'd like them to use.
there's actually an amusing second-hand (third-hand?) story of the incredible adaptivity of NNs. a research lab somewhere develops what appears to be a pretty good NN-based tank detection system for aerial surveillance photographs. they train it on a corpus of photos of tanks going through some natural terrains, and it performs admirably - the program detects tanks not only in the photos similar to the training set, but also in very different ones. in other words, it's quite robust.
so they show it to the people upstairs, and they're reasonably impressed, too. so the machine is given a completely novel set of images to see how it would do - but this time, it utterly fails! everyone's baffled - what's going on, why does it fail now when it used to work so well?
only after a while someone took a good look at the two series of images, and realized - the program really learned to detect tree shadows! because the original series pictures had tanks driving through greenery, the NN detected it was more reliable to rely on that than on anything else... **
and the moral of the story is - these systems are very efficient in adapting to the given task, in whatever way is most optimal. but we as designers don't know what they're 'really' doing - we (connectionist ai people, biologists, dynamic systems people, etc.) lack the proper analytical tools to describe such complex systems. will GAs ever be used to evolve anything larger than toy insect-like agents? probably no, not until better analytical techniques are developed - that is, if ever.
r
*) all right, so i exaggerated.
**) does anyone have a reference for this story? i think i saw it in something written by dreyfus, but i can't for the life of me remember...
My other car is a cons.
So they make some Freenix apps. Either they're marginal but people buy them anyway and every other vendor collapses. Or they suck and it adds more fuel to the "well Freenix just sucks so come back to the MS fold, you are forgiven" argument.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
About 2/3rds of the earth's surface is water and that's certaintly where they will be aiming the reentries. On the other hand a substantialy higher then expected number of delta second stages have hit land (something like 5 out of 6, IIRC) so statistics of that form aren't necessicairly very useful to the guy on the ground.
-- Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE.
; the Chinese Wall never worked.)
I believe the term for what seperates the two divisions of Microsoft is "Glass wall".
(Yes, im serious, its in one of the books i read about Microsoft.)
Mark Duell
While it is heartwarming to see that you've been keeping up on your South Park episodes ("Look! The volcano erupted! Duck and cover!"), one can hardly imagine a single paragraph more chock full of right-wing hysteria and "enemy complex" than the one above.
- If you're suggesting that the government, or anybody for that matter, believes that "ducking and covering" under desks is an appropriate way to defend against an atomic blast, you are a cretin of unimaginable proportions.
- If you're suggesting that Al Gore (and Al Gore alone) personally approved Motorola's technology transfer to China, you are a laughable buffoon. You people get a little behind in the polls, and you'll say anything. (Interesting how if the economy is good, you people say we have to give Ronald Reagan the credit personally, but if it goes bad, we have to blame Clinton or Gore personally.)
- China does not have the military strength to successfully invade Taiwan, a tiny island a stone's throw off of its own shores, and yet you claim that it is somehow a threat to the United States. Sheer, unadulterated poppycock. What is it about the right wing that requires them to always have "an enemy?" Since the Soviet Union collapsed, they can no longer direct their hatred there (well, at least not all of it.) Who is our enemy now? By golly, it must be the Chinese! I've never understood why the right wing (and particularly the religious right) are so terrified of the idea of a peaceful, united world. Perhaps it's part of the damnable "New World Order" that Pat Robertson preaches about so vociferously?
- Communism is on its way out in China. Over the course of the past few years, the regime has moved to privatize several of its key state-owned industries. With the advent of the Internet and access to it spreading in China, it is ridiculous to suggest that these trends will reverse themselves. With each passing year, China inches away from being a brutal Communist regime. Within 20 years, "Communist China" wil be as much a part of history as the Berlin Wall.
Finally, I personally am glad that China is experimenting with a space program. Space exploration is a necessity, and if a bit of friendly competition can get NASA and the ESA off of their asses and step up their investments in this important field of study, then so much is the better. Admiral Ackbar, you of all people (Mon Calamari?) should appreciate the importance of space exploration.In the meantime, think for yourself. You are allowed to disagree with the Rush Limbaughs and Michael Reagans and Jerry Falwells of the world. Ask yourself what Communist China has to gain from provoking an arms race with the United States. Take a look at the trends and ask yourself -- honestly -- if you believe that the current regime is going to be in place forever. I personally feel that if the Chinese regime attempted another Tianamen Square today, there would be a bloody revolt that they would be powerless to stop.
Your mileage may vary, of course.
--
--
The New World Order is upon us, and it's about damned time.
actually its kinda both. it would be hot for a while (ala Venus) then cool down considerably (ala mars). I'm sure there are far smarter /.ers that could explain better. But, in my mind tinkering with the atmosphere intentionally or not is not a good idea. And for those who think all this environmental propoganda is a just a bunch of hooey and could give a damn about recycling do you honestly think that not recycling won't have an effect or that pumping exhaust into the air won't have some kind of adverse effect no matter what that may be.
Some anti-environmentalists (and i can only call them that) mention the cyclical nature of Earth in defense of their not giving a damn about the enviroment. well yeah the earth will be fine it just won't be fine for us. And as for the cycle the earth never had 6 billion people chain smoking nissans before either. In the past there was always some kinf of balance, a give and take. Now, its become more of a take, no give or very little give.
and for those that just don't care cause they won't be around in fifty years. You're a selfich bastard and should impale yourself now. I mean it. do it.
-
Okay...we have all the geeks going to Radio Shack to pick up their free CueCats (http://www.cuecat.com).
So, while they are there, get a tube of heat sink compound and send it to the north pole. Motorola then brings down Iridium carefully to the arctic ice cap, and we use the metal to make the worlds largest heat sink. Put the compound on the glaciers (make sure to fill the cracks for better transfer!).
If we all do this and it works, then we can all buy the Intel P4's without worry of more global warming.
Besides, I read someplace a while ago (wish I could find the reference) that we are actually in a warm period in the middle of an ice age!
So, Linux and Star Office represents a potential threat on the desktop and if it begins to grow in that market Microsoft will release Office on Linux and in doing so eliminate Star Office in short order through increased mindshare and leveraging their monopoly where they can. Once this is done they let the Linux version trail the Windows version and drop a few 'unsupportable' features and eventually perhaps eliminate the Linux version of the product altogether citing insufficient demand or technological hurdles.
So what? This strategy works with other commercial competition because those companys have to worry about things like shareholders and the bottom line, not just their program. So when Microsoft gains said mindshare, they *can* effectively squeeze the life out of it. But do you think GNOME programmers care about MS Office? Do you think Free Software coders have ever cared about proprietary alternatives? Sure they may copy the features, sure they may reverse engineer the file formats, but competition only makes us stronger. So when Microsoft pulls that "Hey we just couldn't make a good Office Suite on Linux because Linux sucks", we can say "Well hey, here's a damn good one. What's your deficiency?"
God Fucking Damnit
I don't know if this is the proper way or place to respond to this, but I have it on good first-person authority that Johanson was not the pioneer of CSS cracking, nor even one of the forst.. He just so happens to have written a pretty front end to the work of others, and thus ensured wider distrubution..
On a lighter but related note, I honestly hope that Mr. Johansen is forgotten quickly, as is this entire mess. DMCA is a bad law, is at conflist with natural and traditional readings of the law, and is undoubtably unconstitutional. If this is resolved quickly on appeal, no one but the money grubbing corporations beat back by its repeal will remember it..
.sig: Now legally binding!
Neal Stephenson in In the Beginning Was the Command Line makes the argument that since OS's are now free (as in beer) then in order to keep selling Windows MS must differentiate it somehow.
One way to do this would be to only write apps for Windows.
Stephenson points out the problem with this is that as more and more people move to free OS's there are less and less people using Windows and thus less and less people to buy MS's apps.
The only way out of this trap for MS is to sell apps for any and all OS's but this will cannibalize Windows sales. It will also end the Windows Everywhere dream/nightmare.
And even if MS did write apps for other OS's they could only stay in business as long as there were no free (beer) apps.
So it isn't in MS's best interest to write apps for Linux. But it isn't in MS's best interests not to write apps for Linux.
So maybe it's time to sell all that MS stock...
Steve M
OTOH, listen to the voice of the scientific majority. In it you will hear a relatively conservative, guarded discussion of global warming. Yes, there will be a vocal minority of scientists who put forth outlandish hypotheses, but the consensus of the others will return the debate to more solid ground.
There will be a report on global warming issued this year by an international multidisciple group of scientists. These reports come out every five years. Unless the politicians intervene, this report will state that human activity is having a discernable affect on global temperature increase. This plot shows measured and computed global temperature for the past 1000 yrs. I find it scary.
1) I use it on the Desktop.
Irrelevent to the marketshare.
2) A lot of people on Slashdot do as well.
Irrelevent to the marketshare.
3) There are retail boxes for WordPerfect's Office Suite, Quake 3, and several other products for Linux; brick-and-mortar software stores often have 'Linux' sections now.
Indeed. And did you notice how miserable game sales on Linux were? And you can assume most of those sales were to people who wanted to make a political statement.
4) Last I saw, Linux was about on par with MacOS for a regular user-base.
*cough* you are insane if you think the Linux desktop base is even 1/100th the Mac installed base. Again, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof.
5) Many people use Linux as both a Desktop *and* a server as well.
Personally, I use Linux as a development and server environment. That does *not* count as a desktop environment. All my productivity apps (which are what we're talking about) are used under Win/2000.
We are talking about people who use Linux as a primary productivity workstation. Only the truly hard core can do that, because you have to sacrifice using the best apps (which are generally available for Windows or the Mac).
6) My University is converting Sun boxes into Linux boxes; they're more powerful at a lower cost, and run the same stuff (and more!) for what we have around here; University students generally count as Desktop users.
Uh, no they don't count. Otherwise, you would count Sun workstations as 'desktop' users, and that's not generally done. Even engineering people who use Unix for CAD applications usually also have a Windows box next door to it.
I guarantee you that they are not going to recommend Linux boxes to the Art Majors for them to do their reports.
7) Let Microsoft release 'Office for Linux', and watch businesses, universities, and individuals collectively put their money where their mouths are, and make Microsoft Apps richer and Microsoft OS poorer.
It's possible that Linux may become more viable if there were more standard apps available. In fact, I've gone on record as saying that it's primarily applications that hold Linux back (and the infrastructure to support sophisticated apps, but that's another topic). I don't argue that, I only argue that the current market is incredibly puny.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Wouldn't Microsoft *want* to port its applications to an OS that had no desktop market share?
I mean, not everyone can use Windows for everything, but Microsoft could still sell them apps. And if Microsoft had no competition, well, that just makes it easier for them.
Of course, people *do* use Linux on the desktop; I know, because I'm one of them. And there *are* other apps, but I'm sure if they ever released "MS-Office for Linux", a lot of people and businesses would buy it. (And then replace Windows, which is why Apps & OS need to be broken up in Microsoft; the Chinese Wall never worked.)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Microsoft has a history of bait & switch software efforts.
.NET strategy presumably desktop Linux systems become simply a client option (and second rate ones at that?). The client side office suite becomes the interface and maybe the desktop and it runs anywhere on multiple platforms. The back end server infrastructure & database is all Microsoft too. So the focus simply moves away from the OS as the desktop and you end up with an OS neutral strategy which still grows revenue because you've got a new license model which is way more lucrative.
Remember their Unix compatibility interface development software? It put competing products completely out of business, then they turn off the air supply on the Microsoft version having eliminated the threat. By this time it's too late for the now defunct product. Augment this with a few strategic patents and you have a winning strategy.
So, Linux and Star Office represents a potential threat on the desktop and if it begins to grow in that market Microsoft will release Office on Linux and in doing so eliminate Star Office in short order through increased mindshare and leveraging their monopoly where they can. Once this is done they let the Linux version trail the Windows version and drop a few 'unsupportable' features and eventually perhaps eliminate the Linux version of the product altogether citing insufficient demand or technological hurdles.
That said, with the
You're right, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Saying that there is a significant Linux "desktop" market is not that extraordinary. Over the last 5 years Linux has been growing exponentially in popularity. I think a good measure of the current number of "desktop" users (as opposed to development or server environments) is the number of shrink-wrapped Linux distributions sold. Is this number insignificant? No, it's not. Claim proven.
"It's not going to grow significant any time in the next two years."
That's a pretty incredible statement, assuming that you've been paying attention to linux for the last 2 years. If it continues to expand at half the rate it has been, the number of Linux desktops will certainly be significant. Today's linux distributions are several orders of magnitude more ready for the desktop than RedHat 4.x...just imagine where we could be in 2 more years...
I, for one, can say that my university has many linux machines available in the computer labs, and since they also have a deal with MS, would definitely benefit from and make use of MSOffice for linux.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
Like all microsoft promises, IsNotReal. In other news, mainsoft based in Israel.
Global warming alarmists ought to be especially careful to save the screaming for the real thing. They'll be taken a lot more seriously that way. The siren that goes off every day at noon gets ignored; the one that only sounds when bombs are falling is paid attention to by everybody.
And the brethren went away edified.
It wasn't really a neural net - not in the way we tend to think about it. It was something called a Perceptron - basically a very primitive (hey, it was a first step!) form of neural network, built (IIRC) out of real components (that is, each "neuron" was built from discrete parts). This was done in the late 50's - early 60's.
n .html
More on perceptrons can be found by doing a search on Google - look up "perceptron history", but here is a couple of links to get you started:
http://www.neurocomputing.org/history.htm
http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Perceptrons.Estebo
I support the EFF - do you?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
With respect to the defendants' constitutional argument, the judge stated that while the Constitution "is a framework for building a just and democratic society -- it is not a suicide pact."
Oh, dear. Nothing closer to taking one's own life than allowing people to communicate with each other and advance the art of computer science. However did our founding fathers make do in the years before the ratification of the constitution, when just anyone on the block could copy his dvds?
I'd say a two foot by three foot fuel tank has a good chance of hitting the ground. I've seen (and touched) a two foot titanium ball from a delta second stage. You can see pictures of things that have survived on my company's website.
Disclamer: I do not speak for The Aerospace Corporation in any capacity.
-- Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE.
I've been doing some work with GAs myself, and the tank recognition problem you mention is NOT a problem inherent to GAs - the training set was chosen poorly. They ARE prone to over-adapting to what are, in hindsight, irrelevant details. But most of this can be overcome by a careful selection of the training set. This really is very hard - it needs to be progressively more difficult, but at a slow, steady pace. Want to teach it to recognize tanks? Maybe start with silhouttes of tanks on white paper, move on to tanks with a few distractions thrown in, then on to tanks in simple scenarios (on a road, in a ditch etc.), then on to <a series of harder stuff>.
Teaching GAs is very similar to teaching young children to read - you start out with REALLY simple stuff like a few select letters (say, the ones in the child's name), train that until they get the idea, move on to more letters and perhaps assign a few select words to each letter (like "A as in Apple", "B as in Banana"), then on to REALLY simple two-letter words etc.
Toss a couple of Harry Potter books their way instead and train exclusively and intensively on those, and you get children that can, by and large, recite the entire text but can not read simple newspaper texts. Not because your children are stupid, not because Harry Potter books are bad, not because you didn't try really hard - it just wasn't the right thing to do (read: wrong training set).
IMHO the reason why GAs typically have the problems you mention (and they are very real problems) is that the average GA designer/trainer is a traditional programmer. That's not a bad thing to be, but it doesn't turn you into a good teacher. Choosing a training set is SOOOO difficult, and might I suggest that GA-training require a different mindset than ordinary programming. Maybe we should try having professional teachers have a go at designing training set...
Black holes are where God divided by zero
I seem to recall reading that the sun has entered a cool phase recently. Apparently some scientists have been using antenna arrays in deep mine shafts to measure the sun's activity. The evidence (which struck me as sketchy, but I'm a computer scientist, not a physicist) implies a correlation between cool solar phases and ice ages. If that were the case then we should be in or entering an ice-age. However other evidence implies global warming.
The simple fact of the matter is that it's a very complicated system and we don't understand it yet. It's also a system that our lives collectively depend on. We don't have a spare earth so there are no second chances. I think that caution is in order.
I'm not arguing for extreem actions; my SO lives on the other side of the continent and it's just too far without jets. But what I am saying is that we need to start think very carefully about the results of pollution. Global warming (or cooling if you prefer) is not the only issue here. There are already plenty of cases demonstrating what mercury and other heavy metals will do to people if (or maybe when is more appropriate) they get into a water supply. We have no idea about the possible long term effects of genetically enginered organisms. We have advanced at an almost exponential speed technologically and naturally we haven't completely figured out the ramifacations of these changes.
We live in a capitalist society and there isn't much dirrect incentive (as in things that will show up on the bottom line by the next financial quarter) to spend money to control polution. Indeed there is a strong incentive to avoid anything that increases immediate and obvious costs without providing additional revenue.
I believe that the long term costs of pollution will be devastating. Even if we associate financial costs to pollution through legislation (which I doubt will happen), I expect that these taxes or penalties will not be severe enough to provide sufficient incentive.
Here is a worst case scenario. Assume that both the solar thermometer amd greenhouse theories are correct. That would mean that we are currently experiencing a Maunder minimum (which would lead to an ice age in the abscence of other phenomenon) balanced by greenhouse warming. What happens when the sun heats up again?
In summary, it' mission critical, complicated to the point that we don't really understand it, and we're fucking with it.
"To blow recursion, you must first blow recus
Excuse me for not remembering to laugh...
I too have Linux as my only desktop OS at home. At work I have Linux on my laptop (definitely not a server). In just our little corner of my work building, maybe 25 cubicles, there are three Linux laptops, a LinuxPPC, and at least three people who use Linux at home as their desktop (two dual boot with FreeBSD). None of these are servers.
No, I don't expect that those in the business or human resources buildings would be able to cope with with anything other than Mac or Win. But then, they can barely cope with what they've got.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
timothy sez Too bad for Microsoft Linux has "absolutely no desktop market share."
From this comment, I'm to assume that Timothy thinks that this statement is untrue? (and, please, literalist fools go away. "Absolutely no" means "too little to be relevent to anything").
Well, in my book, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. And to claim that Linux has any sort of desktop market share is most definitely an extraordinary claim. Note the work 'desktop' not 'server', please.
So where's the proof?
[To quote Jack Nicholson: "You want the truth? You can't handle the truth!"]
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I am far more concerned that "environmentalists" will push us into doing something that really does counter environmental changes, and those changes turn out to be natural and necessary.
My mom is not a Karma whore!
I missed something, what does this have to do with Isreal?