Since I don't have a PowerPC, I'll wait until someone ports Darwin to anything else, and then see what happens.
1) If Apple graciously incorporates the code and releases versions of MacOS X for other platforms, maybe I'll try it out.
2) If Steve Jobs curses them and doesn't release anything for those 'renegade' platforms, I'll sigh as I always do when Apple doesn't get it.
3) I'll wonder why people didn't make a fuss like this over BeOS. It is also rather easy to use and Unix-ish, and at least they "get it" somewhat.
However, *BSD has accomplished something big: at least we won't have people tortured by MacOS anymore. Hopefully. Now let's see how long it takes for Win2k to turn into a *real* Unix.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
The.lsm files have been standard (find them on SunSite, or whatever it's called this week), and I suppose Freshmeat's format is pretty standard on the web, too... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I completely agree, but the benchmarks and software I've seen don't reflect our perspective. (like using them for something other than Quake...)
I didn't say anything about general matrix processing; I was just wondering if it could be faster to offload some (probably specialized, yeah) work onto a graphics card; I gather it would be for certain massively parallel cases.
...and thanks for the tip! I'll try to re-implement my brute-force Life program to use OpenGL...:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I don't even know what that agreement is for, or what it would give me if I agreed to it, but since I don't have one of their cheap scanners, I can be bound to it by pressing the 'Agree' button.
So where's the 'Agree' button?
Also, my name is not "Your Signature". Sorry, try again... Could they at least have you fill out a form to generate something official-looking with the right name on it? Sheesh. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Ok, I've got a Matrox G400 32MB Dualhead that I'm very happy with, and I can run the GL versions of MESS and MAME in 1280x1024x32 and whatnot... But doesn't this all get really silly after a while?
Why would I ever need greater than 60fps in anything? And once I have that, in truecolor, why would I need much better than 800x600 in the first place? Especially if I'm too busy playing Quake to look at the graphics?
What I want to see is a more versatile, programmable hardware acceleration, like edge-detection style algorithms in hardware that lets you implement, say, Conway's Game of Life. Or let your graphics card churn away on a dataset, doing those funky matrix computations that we all love.... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Is this just for consumers, or does Handspring have to pay anything? (i.e. "The 3Com Tax", or even worse, fragmenting PalmOS...) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
"Look, honey, I've got the Prince of Darkness across the street from me! And he doesn't want my soul, he just has this bridge to sell me. It looks like a good deal..."
Suburbia already is hell; they just don't know it yet. (watch Face/Off, they say it well there; and, for anyone else from the RTP area: it's Cary. 'Nuff said.) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Obviously, once it stops promoting "The Progress of Science and useful Arts", it should stop being copyright.
I think that the current copyright laws have hurt consumers in the music and computer industries, and therefore are not promoting useful Arts anymore. Therefore, under the constitution, they should no longer be copyrighted.
Anyone want to use this as a basis for a Supreme Court case to reform copyright? (or is anyone out there ACTUALLY a lawyer who has some better ideas, and can tell me exactly how stupid that was...:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yes, if Cyc couldn't eventually add to its ontology, it would be quite limited, because eventually new things really do get created...
Incidentally, you and I can download a selected portion of the Cyc ontology; it's really so very detailed and well-thought-out that I'm amazed so much is missing! --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
The point Hofstadter is trying to make is sound, but the argument is horrible!
...say you learned everything in Spanish. And someone else speaks English. You might have a very good conceptual model going, and you might actually *think* in Spanish; the only thing you don't know is English. And you'll learn that by mapping the existing English concepts onto the Spanish ones.
How different is that from learning a "gibberish" language?
The real question is, do we have an independent idea conceptually of what these things are? Well, if you label the picture "Apple", maybe you're doing a little better than if you're just using text. (great, now it knows that apples are red, and red is #FF0000, text seems to work well so far...) But ultimately, it's a concept, and you have to represent it somehow, and text is a good start, especially if you're a computer.
However, remember that these projects are fundamentally at odds with anything you read in a book. That's because this is research, and that is theory. Of course theory helps enormously in implementation, and I think that both of these projects suffer from a lack of research, and a utilization of existing sane AI techniques.
But there comes a time when you have to get off your ass and do something and see if it works, instead of writing another book saying that it'll never happen, and hiding under your desk when it does. A good example of that would be "The Emporer's New Clothes", which I wasn't terribly impressed with, although it's been a long time since I read it. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
You've got that right; AOLiza has been on the net for much longer than these amateurs, and it shows. Such cunning, such skill, and oh how she plays hard-to-get!
fourteen: info?
AOLiza: i'm not sure i understand you fully.
fourteen: information 'bout you
AOLiza: oh, i?
fourteen: a/s/l?
AOLiza: i'm not sure i understand you fully.
fourteen: age?sex?location?
AOLiza: tell me more about that.
fourteen: how old are u? male/female? where
u live?
AOLiza: are such questions much on your
mind?
Your next project should be writing an AI for 'fourteen'; I think it'd be pretty easy to do as well. Just don't harass too many poor 11-year-old girls with it, okay? --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yeah, I guess slashdot is proof of the human-non-reasoning principle, eh?
Neural nets are an interesting approach as well, but in that case, you'd need a big network, and a lot of training. In that case, it might be better to do everything at once, and try to create the autonomous robot baby that learns for itself first, and go from there. Otherwise, it'd be hard to interact with anything, and I'd never want to teach a baby just from the World Wide Web as we know it today; that's cruel and unusual! --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
These are both just open versions of The CYC Project. I have serious doubts about a project like this working, but if anyone *does* get it working, they'll end up doing it first. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like they're going to *release* anything to the public anytime soon.
However, I'd rather try to gather money to buy out/opensource cycorp than re-implement everything they've done in the past 16 years; they have a huge knowledge base already built, and a lot of code, and CYC can already do some interesting reasoning. (I know there isn't much there, but read what articles you can find; it's fascinating stuff)
And only using yes/no facts for data is just stupid; the computer needs to do some reasoning, and have some structure, otherwise, it would all just take too long! That's about as stupid as 'the table method' in AI. Even simple AI's can't necessarily be represented like that, so I hope there's more to it that I just missed.
...and for those people who think computers inherently will never be able to reason: go home; you aren't welcome here. I'll argue with your facts, but I won't cater to your prejudices. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Don't those FreeBSD people have any notion of binary packages? Or would that be completely non-portable now?
I'm with the other guys: if they changed *that* much stuff, then grab a copy of Darwin; there are many crazier things out there. Otherwise, good luck writing a compiler (and an assembler, and an...) with the tools they give you. You might have more luck with a cross-compiler, in that case.:)
I completely sympathize; my school uses tcsh, and trust me, there's no good way to change that. (you can have tcsh run a bash, yeah, but then you have to port all the aliases and crud that's already set up) Whenever I want to do any real scripting, I run bash; I'm just more comfortable with it. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Ok, I finally found the paper I was citing. It's in postscript, but it's really worth reading at least once, even if it is from '95...
It's a good paper, but I'd like to see current results for the testing, too. I guess I should hunt down a copy of the FUZZ tools. I don't have a copy of NEXTSTEP, but it looks like they were using NEXTSTEP 3.2.
However, NEXT had the worst failure rate, at 43%. If they switched to the GNU tools later, well, that's fortunate, 'cause they were the best, at only 6%... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
As long as they used the tools from *BSD instead of the ones from NeXT, (which it sounds like they did) I have no problems with it.
Of course, I like the GNU Tools better, so I'd probably do what every other hacker stuck on a foreign platform would do: compile them. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
But you don't have to take it from me, take it from her!
Read this post instead, and follow the link, because pegiron deserves the credit for finding this gem... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That is an awesome speech; that has to be the best argument I've seen against the music industry yet.
...and at the end, she even quotes from Snow Crash!
Please follow the link, read the story, and either mod the parent post up two billion points, or demand that it be modded so. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
1) You're an artist; the record company (henceforth referred to as "The Man") already screwed you over.
2) The Man is "protecting" your interests, and gets a lot of money; will you ever see that money? No.
3) Since The Man publicly states this "protecting the interests of the artists" bullshit, you call them on it, and ask for your fair share. After all, if this had been a class-action suit, you would have gotten your fair share; they're just representing you.
4) Either The Man realizes what's going on, and pays you off, or they suffer the negative press as everyone realizes that they don't give a FUCK* about the artists.
5) All hell breaks lose; everyone (who hasn't already) loses faith in The Man. I laugh my ass off.
* Although I consider this post to be informative, I understand that profanity is an alternative way to get modded up, and I want to be Enoch Root when I grow up. It's cool, daddi-o. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, you're right in that no one should be able to patent something that we've all thought of at one time or another. And software patents might be more feasable if they didn't last for so long!
(17 years is a ridiculously long time to have complete control of something in computing; 17 years ago, we didn't have the Macintosh, and Microsoft actually had competition!)
However, the real reason I'm against software patents is that it comes down to patenting code, and algorithms, which is just as bad as patenting math. It would piss me off to no end to spend some time inventing a new, awesome, fast sorting algorithm (for instance), distribute it, write papers about it, whatever; and then get a cease-and-desist letter telling me that some other company just got a broad patent on *my idea* because they had something like that in the works a year ago. Screw that.
Or, for that matter, think of any significant advancement in computing or math or physics in the last 17 years, and say "what if this had been patented instead?" I can give you a few that have: GIF and RSA. In both cases, they became standards, so everyone used them, but because they were patented, everyone found alternatives, too; and now we have PNG and Blowfish and whatnot. (But what if *those* had been patented.... Sheesh.)
I wish most posters on slashdot were as kind and polite as you are. If being drunk is what it takes, then I say to you all, drink up! --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Slashdot Mirror
Since I don't have a PowerPC, I'll wait until someone ports Darwin to anything else, and then see what happens.
:)
1) If Apple graciously incorporates the code and releases versions of MacOS X for other platforms, maybe I'll try it out.
2) If Steve Jobs curses them and doesn't release anything for those 'renegade' platforms, I'll sigh as I always do when Apple doesn't get it.
3) I'll wonder why people didn't make a fuss like this over BeOS. It is also rather easy to use and Unix-ish, and at least they "get it" somewhat.
However, *BSD has accomplished something big: at least we won't have people tortured by MacOS anymore. Hopefully. Now let's see how long it takes for Win2k to turn into a *real* Unix.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Psi Phi
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
The .lsm files have been standard (find them on SunSite, or whatever it's called this week), and I suppose Freshmeat's format is pretty standard on the web, too...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I completely agree, but the benchmarks and software I've seen don't reflect our perspective. (like using them for something other than Quake...)
:)
I didn't say anything about general matrix processing; I was just wondering if it could be faster to offload some (probably specialized, yeah) work onto a graphics card; I gather it would be for certain massively parallel cases.
...and thanks for the tip! I'll try to re-implement my brute-force Life program to use OpenGL...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I don't even know what that agreement is for, or what it would give me if I agreed to it, but since I don't have one of their cheap scanners, I can be bound to it by pressing the 'Agree' button.
So where's the 'Agree' button?
Also, my name is not "Your Signature". Sorry, try again... Could they at least have you fill out a form to generate something official-looking with the right name on it? Sheesh.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Ok, I've got a Matrox G400 32MB Dualhead that I'm very happy with, and I can run the GL versions of MESS and MAME in 1280x1024x32 and whatnot... But doesn't this all get really silly after a while?
Why would I ever need greater than 60fps in anything? And once I have that, in truecolor, why would I need much better than 800x600 in the first place? Especially if I'm too busy playing Quake to look at the graphics?
What I want to see is a more versatile, programmable hardware acceleration, like edge-detection style algorithms in hardware that lets you implement, say, Conway's Game of Life. Or let your graphics card churn away on a dataset, doing those funky matrix computations that we all love....
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Is this just for consumers, or does Handspring have to pay anything? (i.e. "The 3Com Tax", or even worse, fragmenting PalmOS...)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
All you need is some dry ice and some flourinert, and it'll run fine.
:)
Geez, what a bunch of wusses. Why, in my day...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
"Look, honey, I've got the Prince of Darkness across the street from me! And he doesn't want my soul, he just has this bridge to sell me. It looks like a good deal..."
Suburbia already is hell; they just don't know it yet. (watch Face/Off, they say it well there; and, for anyone else from the RTP area: it's Cary. 'Nuff said.)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
There's a simple answer to that:
:)
Obviously, once it stops promoting "The Progress of Science and useful Arts", it should stop being copyright.
I think that the current copyright laws have hurt consumers in the music and computer industries, and therefore are not promoting useful Arts anymore. Therefore, under the constitution, they should no longer be copyrighted.
Anyone want to use this as a basis for a Supreme Court case to reform copyright? (or is anyone out there ACTUALLY a lawyer who has some better ideas, and can tell me exactly how stupid that was...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yes, if Cyc couldn't eventually add to its ontology, it would be quite limited, because eventually new things really do get created...
Incidentally, you and I can download a selected portion of the Cyc ontology; it's really so very detailed and well-thought-out that I'm amazed so much is missing!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Hey, I have great respect for Hofstadter, and I think he had a valid point; that's why I mentioned Penrose in my example. :)
My point was, you have to start somewhere. Hopefully these guys will learn from their mistakes.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
The point Hofstadter is trying to make is sound, but the argument is horrible!
...say you learned everything in Spanish. And someone else speaks English. You might have a very good conceptual model going, and you might actually *think* in Spanish; the only thing you don't know is English. And you'll learn that by mapping the existing English concepts onto the Spanish ones.
How different is that from learning a "gibberish" language?
The real question is, do we have an independent idea conceptually of what these things are? Well, if you label the picture "Apple", maybe you're doing a little better than if you're just using text. (great, now it knows that apples are red, and red is #FF0000, text seems to work well so far...) But ultimately, it's a concept, and you have to represent it somehow, and text is a good start, especially if you're a computer.
However, remember that these projects are fundamentally at odds with anything you read in a book. That's because this is research, and that is theory. Of course theory helps enormously in implementation, and I think that both of these projects suffer from a lack of research, and a utilization of existing sane AI techniques.
But there comes a time when you have to get off your ass and do something and see if it works, instead of writing another book saying that it'll never happen, and hiding under your desk when it does. A good example of that would be "The Emporer's New Clothes", which I wasn't terribly impressed with, although it's been a long time since I read it.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Your next project should be writing an AI for 'fourteen'; I think it'd be pretty easy to do as well. Just don't harass too many poor 11-year-old girls with it, okay?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yeah, I guess slashdot is proof of the human-non-reasoning principle, eh?
Neural nets are an interesting approach as well, but in that case, you'd need a big network, and a lot of training. In that case, it might be better to do everything at once, and try to create the autonomous robot baby that learns for itself first, and go from there. Otherwise, it'd be hard to interact with anything, and I'd never want to teach a baby just from the World Wide Web as we know it today; that's cruel and unusual!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
These are both just open versions of The CYC Project. I have serious doubts about a project like this working, but if anyone *does* get it working, they'll end up doing it first. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like they're going to *release* anything to the public anytime soon.
However, I'd rather try to gather money to buy out/opensource cycorp than re-implement everything they've done in the past 16 years; they have a huge knowledge base already built, and a lot of code, and CYC can already do some interesting reasoning. (I know there isn't much there, but read what articles you can find; it's fascinating stuff)
And only using yes/no facts for data is just stupid; the computer needs to do some reasoning, and have some structure, otherwise, it would all just take too long! That's about as stupid as 'the table method' in AI. Even simple AI's can't necessarily be represented like that, so I hope there's more to it that I just missed.
...and for those people who think computers inherently will never be able to reason: go home; you aren't welcome here. I'll argue with your facts, but I won't cater to your prejudices.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Don't those FreeBSD people have any notion of binary packages? Or would that be completely non-portable now?
:)
I'm with the other guys: if they changed *that* much stuff, then grab a copy of Darwin; there are many crazier things out there. Otherwise, good luck writing a compiler (and an assembler, and an...) with the tools they give you. You might have more luck with a cross-compiler, in that case.
I completely sympathize; my school uses tcsh, and trust me, there's no good way to change that. (you can have tcsh run a bash, yeah, but then you have to port all the aliases and crud that's already set up) Whenever I want to do any real scripting, I run bash; I'm just more comfortable with it.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Ok, I finally found the paper I was citing. It's in postscript, but it's really worth reading at least once, even if it is from '95...
It's a good paper, but I'd like to see current results for the testing, too. I guess I should hunt down a copy of the FUZZ tools. I don't have a copy of NEXTSTEP, but it looks like they were using NEXTSTEP 3.2.
However, NEXT had the worst failure rate, at 43%. If they switched to the GNU tools later, well, that's fortunate, 'cause they were the best, at only 6%...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
As long as they used the tools from *BSD instead of the ones from NeXT, (which it sounds like they did) I have no problems with it.
Of course, I like the GNU Tools better, so I'd probably do what every other hacker stuck on a foreign platform would do: compile them.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That's not quite how it works...
But you don't have to take it from me, take it from her!
Read this post instead, and follow the link, because pegiron deserves the credit for finding this gem...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That is an awesome speech; that has to be the best argument I've seen against the music industry yet.
...and at the end, she even quotes from Snow Crash!
Please follow the link, read the story, and either mod the parent post up two billion points, or demand that it be modded so.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, it makes sense to me...
1) You're an artist; the record company (henceforth referred to as "The Man") already screwed you over.
2) The Man is "protecting" your interests, and gets a lot of money; will you ever see that money? No.
3) Since The Man publicly states this "protecting the interests of the artists" bullshit, you call them on it, and ask for your fair share. After all, if this had been a class-action suit, you would have gotten your fair share; they're just representing you.
4) Either The Man realizes what's going on, and pays you off, or they suffer the negative press as everyone realizes that they don't give a FUCK* about the artists.
5) All hell breaks lose; everyone (who hasn't already) loses faith in The Man. I laugh my ass off.
* Although I consider this post to be informative, I understand that profanity is an alternative way to get modded up, and I want to be Enoch Root when I grow up. It's cool, daddi-o.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That's right.
And, in this case, Sun is the user of that code.
So where's their responsibility now?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
rating 6/10
summary ploddingly written but important premise
reviewer Jon Katz
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, you're right in that no one should be able to patent something that we've all thought of at one time or another. And software patents might be more feasable if they didn't last for so long!
(17 years is a ridiculously long time to have complete control of something in computing; 17 years ago, we didn't have the Macintosh, and Microsoft actually had competition!)
However, the real reason I'm against software patents is that it comes down to patenting code, and algorithms, which is just as bad as patenting math. It would piss me off to no end to spend some time inventing a new, awesome, fast sorting algorithm (for instance), distribute it, write papers about it, whatever; and then get a cease-and-desist letter telling me that some other company just got a broad patent on *my idea* because they had something like that in the works a year ago. Screw that.
Or, for that matter, think of any significant advancement in computing or math or physics in the last 17 years, and say "what if this had been patented instead?" I can give you a few that have: GIF and RSA. In both cases, they became standards, so everyone used them, but because they were patented, everyone found alternatives, too; and now we have PNG and Blowfish and whatnot. (But what if *those* had been patented.... Sheesh.)
I wish most posters on slashdot were as kind and polite as you are. If being drunk is what it takes, then I say to you all, drink up!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.