Beth dear,
It isn't that big a deal. If you find yourself creeped out by Google then move on! Nothing is forcing you to enter your friends' emails. Resist! There's risk out there is the big bad world, Beth! Get used to it or go crawl in a hole.
Speaking as a developer who uses lots of FOSS, I think as long as there are jobs there will be a demand for open-source software. I would be worried if I worked for IBM or BEA or any of the other vendors who sell expensive stuff. My company believes in open source and when we propose to use that sort of technology, our business customers don't bat an eye.
This guy is full of it. There are so many new options coming down the pike, all essentially web apps despite their various flavors of enabling technologies. This guy has had his head in the sand. Besides--what is the alternative? Fairy Dust Apps that just live in the air and drop down out of clouds of pixie dust?
Whatever you choose--please do not let it be Trac, which is a piece of garbage. Go ahead and try to install and maintain it: I dare you. What a mishmash of bizarre pieces of other crap bolted together.
Why is it that any bozo coder who himself codes mistakes into his apps, is then hot and ready to blame the language? Dude, Java does not write itself. If you wrote it in a fragile way, then it is your fault--not the language.
All that said, I'm delighted to see the NYTimes trying new things.
Please read carefully. No where did I say Americans, as in people. Rather, I referred to the "attitude" the American Spirit, which are attitudes that can and are adopted by people from international countries who move the the United States AND ASSIMILATE HERE. So, a Russian software developer from the small Russian town of Kolpino could come here and exhibit the "American Can Do Spirit". In fact, living as I do in Brighton Beach, I daily see examples of ethnic Russians doing exactly that, having their own business empires in Brooklyn.
This is a perfect example of the best that America has to offer. The people who built these rovers obviously knew they only needed to last 90 days yet obviously they built them to last as long as possible. This makes me proud to be a member of the most advanced country on earth, even setting aside the misguided leadership we've endured for 8 years and are about to be liberated from.
I knew I couldn't trust those Skeeters! They swore they just wanted a taste of the red stuff. A now look, turning states evidence! Little blood-thieving bastards!
It is just as possible for a dedicated individual genius to have an impact. The problem is that our current society is so chock full of distractions and other interests that no person is inclined to study any one thing in sufficient depth.
If you make personal choices to devote your life to thought and study and experimentation and everything that made a Newton or Einstein or whoever, then it is still quite possible for a single person to come to conclusions not imagined by a committee of smart people.
For example: in 8th grade I was addicted to TV. My reaction? I quit TV cold turkey. I stopped watching TV and, therefore, filled my time up with doing science, reading books, building things and everything that inspires the imagination. That simple, single choice has led me to devour libraries. This is how one person could achieve that. You focus and concentrate.
Hah! Was it the COGNOS guy who quoted you that figure? I had no experience with BIRT and I was up and running on it within a week. I--a single man with no prior BIRT background--wrote the entire reporting feature in under a month. At the time, I was making $60 an hour and that would be around $9,600.00 So, unless you have a bunch of really unmotivated guys, you can save money easily and quickly going to BIRT. COGNOS needed one day to do a report. In BIRT, you could do ten a day.
The brain, we must never forget, consists of two independent hemispheres that work together--via the corpus callosum--but whose functions and methodology are different.
The left hemisphere, which is bigger and faster and evolved earlier, is mostly discrete storage locations, optimized towards the storage of individual bits of information. This same left hemisphere is optimized toward the processing of linear-sequential pattern-streams of information, such as those found in language and the maintenance of words.
Current computers work in a manner more similar to the way our older left brain hemisphere works.
The right hemisphere, which evolved later than the left, is smaller and consists more of axon/dendrite interconnections, making he right hemisphere better optimized towards the processing of visual-simultaneous pattern streams.
Virtually no current computer system even attempts to model the visual-simultaneous pattern stream processing that is done by the right hemisphere. That consists of taking in patterns of data points and comparing those to known shape and other sub shapes and the associations that are introduced and the recursive processing of gleaning information from images.
The human ear has about 30,000 neurons leading data to the brain. The human eye has about 1,000,000 neurons leading data to the brain. You can see it's an order-of-magnitude harder problem and so yes, it needs more speed!
If you're developing an Enterprise App in Java, for example, you often end up with some requirement to add reporting to the system. There are several approaches and all of them come with costs and pain. Having been the proud owner of several batches of these requirements, I have experience to offer a relevant point of view. To wit:
You need to write a custom meta-data-driven reporting system:
You can write your own. That means you handle everything from the dynamic queries to the data formatting, paging, column-click sorting, etc have fun.
You can choose that expensive, bloated behemoth Crystal Reports, that runs like a pig and is proprietary and sucks uniformly.
You can choose that expensive, slow, complex to build, ball-of-pus called COGNOS, and pay for the COGNOS consultant that comes along with it.
You can use that free, open source Java framework called BIRT, that does have its complexities but in fact is pretty easy to use and interact with.
This is precisely the kind of innovation we need to get to the kind of AI we want. Giving us the ability to do the right-hemisphere's job is what these kinds of transistor speeds will give us.
As all science-accepting persons knew, when you accept Evolution by Natural Selection as the means of development of intelligent life, it up until now has required some faith because of the impression of 500,000 monkeys pounding away on typewriters, writing:
"To be or not to be, that is the ka;lija;kja"
As believers in the accumulation of complexity, we knew we were missing something. Recently, that missing piece became apparent in a behavior of certain cancers that would attack a human and then, almost miraculously, work themselves out and end the mutation while healthy tissue grew around it. A self-healing tumor, nearly.
In my view, that innate ability to auto-correct destructive mutations is a critical and fundamental requirement for the accumulation of beneficial mutations as must have occurred for intelligent life to exist on earth--excluding Hoboken, of course.
Well, this is an easy one. You should read books on how the brain is built. I would read "On Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins to start. The idea is that you want to see how the brain functions so that we can emulate it. That means you need to understand the functions of both brain hemispheres. The left generally handles linear sequential pattern stream processing while the right handles visual simultaneous pattern stream processing. In short, the left handles language, the right images. The brain functions the way it does because of a complex interplay between these two hemispheres, each assisting the other. For example, though the left hemisphere generates language, the right structures it. So a person whose right hemisphere has been removed can still form language but they ramble and do not make any points.
The problem with AI so far is that it only attempts to replicate the functions of the left hemisphere--let alone the right or the interactions between them via the corpus callosum. If you want information on this, I suggest you look at a little open source project called the Godwhale
Don't drink hard liquor.
Eat red grapes.
Don't watch TV.
Read books constantly on a growing list of topics.
Learn a new language and continue to speak it.
Pick up new categories of interests.
In short, give your brain a workout.
Enjoy it while it lasts. I recall back in 2003 when a company I worked for forked over $8,000 for a copy of WebSphere Studio Integration Edition. And now we use free Eclipse...
A major push of corporations this year is finding ways to get on open source free alternatives...
I'm probably one of the few slashdotters who has lived in Russia. I will say that I met a ton of very smart people who are breaking from their national heritage in being hard-working. A university degree from Russia now and has always equated with a Masters in the US.
They are just smart in not buying into the crap that Microsoft sells. There are so many entire technology stacks--just as in the Java world, not in.NET--that can be had without ever spending a thin dime on software. Face it--nobody is ever going to pay when there are free alternatives. And though as a software developer this eats into my bread and butter, I know they are right.
Okay, let's see if I can make my point via analogy. If some cancer researcher were looking for years for some cancer cure--and then throwing up his hands he said: "Does anybody out there have a source of cancer cures?
It makes just as much sense as this guy doing it this way. He's not going to get any help because it's an absurd request. His only hope is a junkyard. But frankly to succeed in this type of endeavor, you have to have an adaptive mind, one that is ready to re-purpose things in your environment. I just find it baffling that this guy is unable to find something, somewhere in his environment to repurpose.
My point exactly. Gears have to have their dimensions and pitches and many other specs in alignment to work. So, for some guy to ask randomly for gears is just ludicrous. His only hope is to find an existing set of gears and take them in their entirely. For that, I cannot imagine any source other than a junkyard. I just think this guy is wildly impractical.
What kind of artist is this guy if he is not observant enough to take advantage of the many artifacts of modern life. If he's going to build something and cast metal, how in the world is he not creative enough to just enter a junkyard or two and start exploring for things that might contain the "gears" he needs. What an ass--to imply that you could get gears from different purposes and have them do anything of the sort of meshing that is required to have gears actually do anything.
I know I'm ranting but I find it shocking that someone with enough impulse to be creative would then couple that desire with the absolute obliviousness to the myriad objects in his environment. It's like the questioner grew up in a wax factory.
Slashdot Mirror
Beth dear, It isn't that big a deal. If you find yourself creeped out by Google then move on! Nothing is forcing you to enter your friends' emails. Resist! There's risk out there is the big bad world, Beth! Get used to it or go crawl in a hole.
Speaking as a developer who uses lots of FOSS, I think as long as there are jobs there will be a demand for open-source software. I would be worried if I worked for IBM or BEA or any of the other vendors who sell expensive stuff. My company believes in open source and when we propose to use that sort of technology, our business customers don't bat an eye.
Forgive me but how reliable could such a cheap product be? I am willing to suspend disbelief but this sounds like good old fashioned BS.
This guy is full of it. There are so many new options coming down the pike, all essentially web apps despite their various flavors of enabling technologies. This guy has had his head in the sand. Besides--what is the alternative? Fairy Dust Apps that just live in the air and drop down out of clouds of pixie dust?
Whatever you choose--please do not let it be Trac, which is a piece of garbage. Go ahead and try to install and maintain it: I dare you. What a mishmash of bizarre pieces of other crap bolted together.
Why is it that any bozo coder who himself codes mistakes into his apps, is then hot and ready to blame the language? Dude, Java does not write itself. If you wrote it in a fragile way, then it is your fault--not the language. All that said, I'm delighted to see the NYTimes trying new things.
Please read carefully. No where did I say Americans, as in people. Rather, I referred to the "attitude" the American Spirit, which are attitudes that can and are adopted by people from international countries who move the the United States AND ASSIMILATE HERE. So, a Russian software developer from the small Russian town of Kolpino could come here and exhibit the "American Can Do Spirit". In fact, living as I do in Brighton Beach, I daily see examples of ethnic Russians doing exactly that, having their own business empires in Brooklyn.
This is a perfect example of the best that America has to offer. The people who built these rovers obviously knew they only needed to last 90 days yet obviously they built them to last as long as possible. This makes me proud to be a member of the most advanced country on earth, even setting aside the misguided leadership we've endured for 8 years and are about to be liberated from.
I knew I couldn't trust those Skeeters! They swore they just wanted a taste of the red stuff. A now look, turning states evidence! Little blood-thieving bastards!
It is just as possible for a dedicated individual genius to have an impact. The problem is that our current society is so chock full of distractions and other interests that no person is inclined to study any one thing in sufficient depth.
If you make personal choices to devote your life to thought and study and experimentation and everything that made a Newton or Einstein or whoever, then it is still quite possible for a single person to come to conclusions not imagined by a committee of smart people.
For example: in 8th grade I was addicted to TV. My reaction? I quit TV cold turkey. I stopped watching TV and, therefore, filled my time up with doing science, reading books, building things and everything that inspires the imagination. That simple, single choice has led me to devour libraries. This is how one person could achieve that. You focus and concentrate.
Hah! Was it the COGNOS guy who quoted you that figure? I had no experience with BIRT and I was up and running on it within a week. I--a single man with no prior BIRT background--wrote the entire reporting feature in under a month. At the time, I was making $60 an hour and that would be around $9,600.00 So, unless you have a bunch of really unmotivated guys, you can save money easily and quickly going to BIRT. COGNOS needed one day to do a report. In BIRT, you could do ten a day.
I heartily agree with your #2.
The brain, we must never forget, consists of two independent hemispheres that work together--via the corpus callosum--but whose functions and methodology are different.
The left hemisphere, which is bigger and faster and evolved earlier, is mostly discrete storage locations, optimized towards the storage of individual bits of information. This same left hemisphere is optimized toward the processing of linear-sequential pattern-streams of information, such as those found in language and the maintenance of words.
Current computers work in a manner more similar to the way our older left brain hemisphere works.
The right hemisphere, which evolved later than the left, is smaller and consists more of axon/dendrite interconnections, making he right hemisphere better optimized towards the processing of visual-simultaneous pattern streams.
Virtually no current computer system even attempts to model the visual-simultaneous pattern stream processing that is done by the right hemisphere. That consists of taking in patterns of data points and comparing those to known shape and other sub shapes and the associations that are introduced and the recursive processing of gleaning information from images.
The human ear has about 30,000 neurons leading data to the brain. The human eye has about 1,000,000 neurons leading data to the brain. You can see it's an order-of-magnitude harder problem and so yes, it needs more speed!
But it also runs as a free standing object outside of any Eclipse instance.
If you're developing an Enterprise App in Java, for example, you often end up with some requirement to add reporting to the system. There are several approaches and all of them come with costs and pain. Having been the proud owner of several batches of these requirements, I have experience to offer a relevant point of view. To wit:
You need to write a custom meta-data-driven reporting system:
This is precisely the kind of innovation we need to get to the kind of AI we want. Giving us the ability to do the right-hemisphere's job is what these kinds of transistor speeds will give us.
As all science-accepting persons knew, when you accept Evolution by Natural Selection as the means of development of intelligent life, it up until now has required some faith because of the impression of 500,000 monkeys pounding away on typewriters, writing:
"To be or not to be, that is the ka;lija;kja"
As believers in the accumulation of complexity, we knew we were missing something. Recently, that missing piece became apparent in a behavior of certain cancers that would attack a human and then, almost miraculously, work themselves out and end the mutation while healthy tissue grew around it. A self-healing tumor, nearly.
In my view, that innate ability to auto-correct destructive mutations is a critical and fundamental requirement for the accumulation of beneficial mutations as must have occurred for intelligent life to exist on earth--excluding Hoboken, of course.
Well, this is an easy one. You should read books on how the brain is built. I would read "On Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins to start. The idea is that you want to see how the brain functions so that we can emulate it. That means you need to understand the functions of both brain hemispheres. The left generally handles linear sequential pattern stream processing while the right handles visual simultaneous pattern stream processing. In short, the left handles language, the right images. The brain functions the way it does because of a complex interplay between these two hemispheres, each assisting the other. For example, though the left hemisphere generates language, the right structures it. So a person whose right hemisphere has been removed can still form language but they ramble and do not make any points. The problem with AI so far is that it only attempts to replicate the functions of the left hemisphere--let alone the right or the interactions between them via the corpus callosum. If you want information on this, I suggest you look at a little open source project called the Godwhale
Don't drink hard liquor. Eat red grapes. Don't watch TV. Read books constantly on a growing list of topics. Learn a new language and continue to speak it. Pick up new categories of interests. In short, give your brain a workout.
Enjoy it while it lasts. I recall back in 2003 when a company I worked for forked over $8,000 for a copy of WebSphere Studio Integration Edition. And now we use free Eclipse... A major push of corporations this year is finding ways to get on open source free alternatives...
Yes, it is. If you look at the requirements to receive a degree in Russia, it requires the amount of work that would be required in a US Masters.
I'm probably one of the few slashdotters who has lived in Russia. I will say that I met a ton of very smart people who are breaking from their national heritage in being hard-working. A university degree from Russia now and has always equated with a Masters in the US. They are just smart in not buying into the crap that Microsoft sells. There are so many entire technology stacks--just as in the Java world, not in .NET--that can be had without ever spending a thin dime on software. Face it--nobody is ever going to pay when there are free alternatives. And though as a software developer this eats into my bread and butter, I know they are right.
Okay, let's see if I can make my point via analogy. If some cancer researcher were looking for years for some cancer cure--and then throwing up his hands he said: "Does anybody out there have a source of cancer cures?
It makes just as much sense as this guy doing it this way. He's not going to get any help because it's an absurd request. His only hope is a junkyard. But frankly to succeed in this type of endeavor, you have to have an adaptive mind, one that is ready to re-purpose things in your environment. I just find it baffling that this guy is unable to find something, somewhere in his environment to repurpose.
My point exactly. Gears have to have their dimensions and pitches and many other specs in alignment to work. So, for some guy to ask randomly for gears is just ludicrous. His only hope is to find an existing set of gears and take them in their entirely. For that, I cannot imagine any source other than a junkyard. I just think this guy is wildly impractical.
What kind of artist is this guy if he is not observant enough to take advantage of the many artifacts of modern life. If he's going to build something and cast metal, how in the world is he not creative enough to just enter a junkyard or two and start exploring for things that might contain the "gears" he needs. What an ass--to imply that you could get gears from different purposes and have them do anything of the sort of meshing that is required to have gears actually do anything. I know I'm ranting but I find it shocking that someone with enough impulse to be creative would then couple that desire with the absolute obliviousness to the myriad objects in his environment. It's like the questioner grew up in a wax factory.