LinuxBIOS guys (now CoreBoot) have had 6 seconds from pressing the "power" button to an xterm. Combine this with Wine... No, not an ideal solution, Wine is still way behind real Windows, but for many apps it works just fine.
> the only one who can believe they are sentient is the being itself (...)
How do you think, does this mean that all of what we perceive as "the reality" is actually only happening inside our heads? The AI could "believe" that it is sentient, but that AI only "happens", or exists, inside its own CPU and memory, to which's abstractions (for example, as a set of data structures and procedures) it has access to.
How does the AI find things out about the processor and the memory it's running on? If our minds are in such a "matrix", can we do the same?
Not to be rude, but this assumption sounds stupid.
Assuming that anything metaphysical is just an invention of some hippie on crack is simply close-mindedness. *All* the progress that has *ever* been made, has been made because someone was challenging our idea of how things work. And I think, that there has been, so far, enough controversy around the topic of all this metaphysical stuff, that the only thing that it is safe to assume is that no answer should be obvious.
The moment you stop asking questions is the moment you are dead. By all definitions, a brain that has ceased to perform any activity is dead.
The final outcome (piracy still happening) might not be as significant as the lesson we're learning from RIAA. The lesson isn't that RIAA is evil or something. It's the copyright law that's fucked up. Quoting GodWasAnAlien:
> without copyright reform, the new association will become as corrupt as the first.
Remove the root cause or see the disease coming back.
> Im just pointing out that it doesnt work as it should.
Then why let it take away the control over your happiness?
I know c11n doesn't work. It can't bring you anything but what you would have otherwise; neither will it bring you happiness nor stop you from being happy. It's your own choice to be happy or not, and your own choice to let someone else choose for you.
I'm wondering. Will it have any impact on the way we feel and behave? Humans (and many other animals) are able to sense local changes in the planet's magnetic field. Many species of birds use their "magnetic sense" to find way to the south when migrating.
The burst of solar wind, cosmic rays and all that crap might have no greater effect on the living beings themselves, but how about all our delicate electronic stuff that we are used to depend on?
Wouldn't you like to see a positive LSD story on the news? To hear what it's all about, perhaps? Wouldn't that be interesting? Just for once?
"Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration - that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There's no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we're the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather."
I usually install stuff to ~/local/PROGRAMNAME/, and then make symlinks from ~/local/PROGRAMNAME/bin/* to ~/bin/, etc. A little like the GoboLinux. It might get trickier when one package depends on another, but I hadn't run into any of such. Also, if you're sharing/home with machines with varying architectures, a more complicated hierarchy would be feasible, like ~/local/ARCHNAME/PROGRAMNAME/, and maybe ~/local/ARCHNAME/bin/ for a collection of all executables for that arch, and a case statement in your.bashrc (or whatever shell you use) to set the PATH depending on the host name or uname.
I can see at least three advantages if this scheme... You don't need root to install your software, it's easier to maintain the stuff (the additional PROGRAMNAME/ directory), and there's no need to clutter/usr,/usr/local, or have another separate partition.
Eventually gets trickier if you'd like to share these packages with other users of the machine (that's the only case where I'd use/usr/local).
Haha. But what happens if your OS absolutely has to swap a page out, and there's no swap file/partition? That's it - one of your apps will die a painful death. Here are your choices: let the SSD last (theoretically) a few months longer, or have your workflow disturbed every time a swapping should occur. A tip: starting the crashed app and getting your documents / web pages / whatever back will ALSO wear the SSD.
And if you're extensively using much more than this 1GB on this small netbook, then you're probably using a wrong tool for the job anyway.
As far as I know (I'm a self-taught guitarist), this is absolute bullshit.
Well, a few months ago I wouldn't argue with you. But my girlfriend (who has been playing violin for eight years) has recently enlightened me, that for any fretless instrument, the sharps do matter very, very, very much. In a guitar or piano world, yes, E sharp would be the same tone as F. But not on a violin, where the player sometimes has to move their finger by a "width of one hair" (that's how she describes it) to get a darker or brighter tone. Even C major and A minor are whole different worlds, although these seem to contain the same sounds (the minor scales should sound brighter).
It has turned my world (and my view of how the music works) upside down after that one afternoon when she explained all the differences and nuances to me. Honestly, I still doubt I got all of that correctly. But I'm 100% sure that it really, really, really matters to a professional musician whether it's E# or F, or C## or D. I sometimes can't exactly tell if my guitar is tuned perfectly, while my girlfriend can tell between 440 and 442 hz (another sign of approaching apocalypse: A has been redefined to 442 hz for some obscure reasons that have to do with new pianos and that only a few professional musicians understand). I summed up our conversation, "wow, srsly anybody, even dumb, can play guitar, compared to what it gets to play a violin". She agreed with me.
> Most of the music people acquire falls out of fashion after a few short years.
This is very sad. It is just a proof of how much today's mainstream music is worth. Bands like Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Led Zeppelin - they were releasing their first albums in late 60s or early 70s, and they rocked, and they kept on rocking until they (for various reasons) couldn't do music anymore. 1973's Dark Side Of The Moon was arguably the best album in the whole history of music, and 1994's Division Bell was still a great piece of art, so it's a proof that a band could still be excellent at songwriting after the years, and after the commercial success (even, for example in the case of Pink Floyd, despite the lack of a key member (Waters)).
More modern musicians also show that they can make music that is great no matter how old it gets. For example, Tool. They've made six albums (one EP, one live), the oldest one dates back to 1992. They're ALL great. I'd say that they didn't release a ONE single song in their whole career that was weak. Hell, I'd even say that they hadn't released a single song that I didn't love. People talk about album-fillers, songs written just so that there's something to go along with the one or two good pieces, to justify the price of a full album. AEnima, Tool's 1996 release, contained 15 tracks, many of them were clearly just intros to other songs or interludes. I can't imagine that album without any single one of them.
Another band - I think almost everyone on/. now knows Nine Inch Nails. It's irony that their music is tagged as "industrial", "industrial metal", and yet Reznor is the guy who is extending his middle finger towards "the industry". And hell, he's yet another great musician. Their last release, "The Slip" must be their best album (so far it maybe can lose to "And all that could have been" and "Ghosts I-IV", I haven't decided yet; I usually just enjoy the music). And it is that album he released FOR FREE, under the Creative Commons license.
Why is mainstream music so shitty? There are simply lots of creative bastards everywhere out there, but all that the industry is caring about is buck. Of course they want an easy buck, and being creative and making interesting, inspired music isn't easy. But the worst part of this crap is that they're forcing all these "pro-IP" laws upon us, effectively turning what should serve as a scheme for protecting artists into a $-spewing machine. I know I'm not stating anything new (at least not to/. users), but it's just sickening me, how wicked crazy this shit is. Another side effect of all of this, is that even legitimate users and exchangers of *free* art are punished (there were such incidents in Poland, for example). ZAiKS, our own (polish) RIAA equivalent, insisted on charging people with fees for "illegally sharing" CC music! That's it: it doesn't even "protect" these artists, it also ignores the fact that this. music. is. Free!
I have never, ever bought a single DRMed track. It's long since I've stopped buying these overpriced CDs (wasn't buying many of them anyway). Especially overpriced in Poland, where a single CD could cost 60 to 80 zloty (25 - 35 $), sometimes even more. When I saw my friend's collection of original CDs (full discographies of many bands), I couldn't stand and just told him that he made a great job of supporting these pimps that turn the music into a whore.
Actually, I've been toying with genetic programming a while ago, and also been building a hardware RNG from an old FM radio (using the sound card as an ADC) to supply fine randomness used for the "natural selection". The goal was to make the interpreter "rewrite" itself in its own language, and then maybe see what else can it do. The Global Consciousness Project inspired me (http://noosphere.princeton.edu/) to start that experiment, but sadly all it ended up with is a half-broken implementation of my own programming language, based on Java objects (instead of text), and a half-broken old radio that neither supplied randomness nor music (:
As I've comprehended a little more of Lisp recently (I suggest learning it to every programmer, it's simply... enlightening), I think I'm going to make a second try at this project.
> just because reviewers and marketing people feel the need > to categorize and simplify absolutely everything.
Oh dude. That reminds me of how I was enraged when I saw a Linkin Park album labeled as "Heavy Metal". Then a man came to me and said that it's only the narrow-minded people who need to categorize everything.
> If it's a good product, it doesn't have to be destroyed just because > it doesn't fit neatly on a tab of some big box store's website.
I really love the games from before ~5 years ago. Top-down GTAs, Jedi Knight series, Q3... Say, you can be a serious gamer even with a GeForce 2. You just play games that were released before GeForce 2 was on the market. It isn't like a game that was absolutely brilliant (Diablo 2 for example) suddenly became something less just because a few new ones were released in the meantime.
The most important factor in games is the fun factor, and there are thousands of games that do not need tomorrow's high-end hardware to be fun.
The only time a computer created something "all by itself" is when a human told it to do so, told it how it should look like, and even then the computer used "the million monkeys" approach (think genetic programming). That's not creativity.
Such artificial secretary probably won't need "real" AI, just sophisticated algorithms for speech recognition, parsing human language, searching the interwebs, and so on (the last 1/3 of this is already done - Google). All the tasks mentioned by GP are just searching. But all of that would be just sophisticated algorithms, coded and *invented* by a human.
There's no need for any creativity in searching for a flight to Chicago. There isn't even creativity in trying to write a better program (a million monkeys would eventually write a better one). But actually thinking about how to make a better program, and using the conclusions to *design* the improvements, is creative, and is something that a computer has never been able to do, and (IMO) probably won't be able even in 100 years.
Linux also has "lp on fire". Try "grep -n 'on fire'/usr/src/linux/drivers/char/lp.c". I think all modern Unices still have this (didn't bother to check the BSDs).
Slashdot Mirror
LinuxBIOS guys (now CoreBoot) have had 6 seconds from pressing the "power" button to an xterm. Combine this with Wine... No, not an ideal solution, Wine is still way behind real Windows, but for many apps it works just fine.
"Let's see how far can I push this knife against your skin before you start bleeding."
> the only one who can believe they are sentient is the being itself (...)
How do you think, does this mean that all of what we perceive as "the reality" is actually only happening inside our heads? The AI could "believe" that it is sentient, but that AI only "happens", or exists, inside its own CPU and memory, to which's abstractions (for example, as a set of data structures and procedures) it has access to.
How does the AI find things out about the processor and the memory it's running on? If our minds are in such a "matrix", can we do the same?
Not to be rude, but this assumption sounds stupid.
Assuming that anything metaphysical is just an invention of some hippie on crack is simply close-mindedness. *All* the progress that has *ever* been made, has been made because someone was challenging our idea of how things work. And I think, that there has been, so far, enough controversy around the topic of all this metaphysical stuff, that the only thing that it is safe to assume is that no answer should be obvious.
The moment you stop asking questions is the moment you are dead. By all definitions, a brain that has ceased to perform any activity is dead.
The final outcome (piracy still happening) might not be as significant as the lesson we're learning from RIAA. The lesson isn't that RIAA is evil or something. It's the copyright law that's fucked up. Quoting GodWasAnAlien:
> without copyright reform, the new association will become as corrupt as the first.
Remove the root cause or see the disease coming back.
> Im just pointing out that it doesnt work as it should.
Then why let it take away the control over your happiness?
I know c11n doesn't work. It can't bring you anything but what you would have otherwise; neither will it bring you happiness nor stop you from being happy. It's your own choice to be happy or not, and your own choice to let someone else choose for you.
I'm wondering. Will it have any impact on the way we feel and behave? Humans (and many other animals) are able to sense local changes in the planet's magnetic field. Many species of birds use their "magnetic sense" to find way to the south when migrating.
The burst of solar wind, cosmic rays and all that crap might have no greater effect on the living beings themselves, but how about all our delicate electronic stuff that we are used to depend on?
Holy crap. Who needs 2012 when he has this kind of shit.
> any data on effects of previous switches?
Lost, due to a hard drive failure, 780,000 years ago.
Wow, that's great that you'd be glad to see three billions of people dead. You know, it's people like you that make me feel sorry for the mankind.
Have you ever heard about "you can solve everything through love" philosophy? I swear to you, it works much better in practice than a holocaust.
If you hate that civilization so much, why don't you just move into a fuckin' cave?
Learn to swim, or drown.
I've tagged the story "thetrulyparanoidusershouldgetsomehelp".
I usually install stuff to ~/local/PROGRAMNAME/, and then make symlinks from ~/local/PROGRAMNAME/bin/* to ~/bin/, etc. A little like the GoboLinux. It might get trickier when one package depends on another, but I hadn't run into any of such. Also, if you're sharing /home with machines with varying architectures, a more complicated hierarchy would be feasible, like ~/local/ARCHNAME/PROGRAMNAME/, and maybe ~/local/ARCHNAME/bin/ for a collection of all executables for that arch, and a case statement in your .bashrc (or whatever shell you use) to set the PATH depending on the host name or uname.
I can see at least three advantages if this scheme... You don't need root to install your software, it's easier to maintain the stuff (the additional PROGRAMNAME/ directory), and there's no need to clutter /usr, /usr/local, or have another separate partition.
Eventually gets trickier if you'd like to share these packages with other users of the machine (that's the only case where I'd use /usr/local).
Haha. But what happens if your OS absolutely has to swap a page out, and there's no swap file/partition? That's it - one of your apps will die a painful death. Here are your choices: let the SSD last (theoretically) a few months longer, or have your workflow disturbed every time a swapping should occur. A tip: starting the crashed app and getting your documents / web pages / whatever back will ALSO wear the SSD.
And if you're extensively using much more than this 1GB on this small netbook, then you're probably using a wrong tool for the job anyway.
OBTW, wear leveling anyone?
> E#==F
As far as I know (I'm a self-taught guitarist), this is absolute bullshit.
Well, a few months ago I wouldn't argue with you. But my girlfriend (who has been playing violin for eight years) has recently enlightened me, that for any fretless instrument, the sharps do matter very, very, very much. In a guitar or piano world, yes, E sharp would be the same tone as F. But not on a violin, where the player sometimes has to move their finger by a "width of one hair" (that's how she describes it) to get a darker or brighter tone. Even C major and A minor are whole different worlds, although these seem to contain the same sounds (the minor scales should sound brighter).
It has turned my world (and my view of how the music works) upside down after that one afternoon when she explained all the differences and nuances to me. Honestly, I still doubt I got all of that correctly. But I'm 100% sure that it really, really, really matters to a professional musician whether it's E# or F, or C## or D. I sometimes can't exactly tell if my guitar is tuned perfectly, while my girlfriend can tell between 440 and 442 hz (another sign of approaching apocalypse: A has been redefined to 442 hz for some obscure reasons that have to do with new pianos and that only a few professional musicians understand). I summed up our conversation, "wow, srsly anybody, even dumb, can play guitar, compared to what it gets to play a violin". She agreed with me.
11.) ???
12.) Cthulhu
I've heard rumors that OS X runs well on AMD CPUs (although these were just rumors; never cared to research the topic).
> Most of the music people acquire falls out of fashion after a few short years.
This is very sad. It is just a proof of how much today's mainstream music is worth. Bands like Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Led Zeppelin - they were releasing their first albums in late 60s or early 70s, and they rocked, and they kept on rocking until they (for various reasons) couldn't do music anymore. 1973's Dark Side Of The Moon was arguably the best album in the whole history of music, and 1994's Division Bell was still a great piece of art, so it's a proof that a band could still be excellent at songwriting after the years, and after the commercial success (even, for example in the case of Pink Floyd, despite the lack of a key member (Waters)).
More modern musicians also show that they can make music that is great no matter how old it gets. For example, Tool. They've made six albums (one EP, one live), the oldest one dates back to 1992. They're ALL great. I'd say that they didn't release a ONE single song in their whole career that was weak. Hell, I'd even say that they hadn't released a single song that I didn't love. People talk about album-fillers, songs written just so that there's something to go along with the one or two good pieces, to justify the price of a full album. AEnima, Tool's 1996 release, contained 15 tracks, many of them were clearly just intros to other songs or interludes. I can't imagine that album without any single one of them.
Another band - I think almost everyone on /. now knows Nine Inch Nails. It's irony that their music is tagged as "industrial", "industrial metal", and yet Reznor is the guy who is extending his middle finger towards "the industry". And hell, he's yet another great musician. Their last release, "The Slip" must be their best album (so far it maybe can lose to "And all that could have been" and "Ghosts I-IV", I haven't decided yet; I usually just enjoy the music). And it is that album he released FOR FREE, under the Creative Commons license.
Why is mainstream music so shitty? There are simply lots of creative bastards everywhere out there, but all that the industry is caring about is buck. Of course they want an easy buck, and being creative and making interesting, inspired music isn't easy. But the worst part of this crap is that they're forcing all these "pro-IP" laws upon us, effectively turning what should serve as a scheme for protecting artists into a $-spewing machine. I know I'm not stating anything new (at least not to /. users), but it's just sickening me, how wicked crazy this shit is. Another side effect of all of this, is that even legitimate users and exchangers of *free* art are punished (there were such incidents in Poland, for example). ZAiKS, our own (polish) RIAA equivalent, insisted on charging people with fees for "illegally sharing" CC music! That's it: it doesn't even "protect" these artists, it also ignores the fact that this. music. is. Free!
I have never, ever bought a single DRMed track. It's long since I've stopped buying these overpriced CDs (wasn't buying many of them anyway). Especially overpriced in Poland, where a single CD could cost 60 to 80 zloty (25 - 35 $), sometimes even more. When I saw my friend's collection of original CDs (full discographies of many bands), I couldn't stand and just told him that he made a great job of supporting these pimps that turn the music into a whore.
Just a random rant of an unknown artist.
> I suspect that this begins the downward spiral of heavy-handed DRM.
Heh, is it a NIN reference? (:
All that's left is to try to be happy anyway.
Actually, I've been toying with genetic programming a while ago, and also been building a hardware RNG from an old FM radio (using the sound card as an ADC) to supply fine randomness used for the "natural selection". The goal was to make the interpreter "rewrite" itself in its own language, and then maybe see what else can it do. The Global Consciousness Project inspired me (http://noosphere.princeton.edu/) to start that experiment, but sadly all it ended up with is a half-broken implementation of my own programming language, based on Java objects (instead of text), and a half-broken old radio that neither supplied randomness nor music (:
As I've comprehended a little more of Lisp recently (I suggest learning it to every programmer, it's simply... enlightening), I think I'm going to make a second try at this project.
> just because reviewers and marketing people feel the need
> to categorize and simplify absolutely everything.
Oh dude. That reminds me of how I was enraged when I saw a Linkin Park album labeled as "Heavy Metal". Then a man came to me and said that it's only the narrow-minded people who need to categorize everything.
> If it's a good product, it doesn't have to be destroyed just because
> it doesn't fit neatly on a tab of some big box store's website.
You made me want to start writing songs again (:
> I know, 2001 called and want their games back
I really love the games from before ~5 years ago. Top-down GTAs, Jedi Knight series, Q3... Say, you can be a serious gamer even with a GeForce 2. You just play games that were released before GeForce 2 was on the market. It isn't like a game that was absolutely brilliant (Diablo 2 for example) suddenly became something less just because a few new ones were released in the meantime.
The most important factor in games is the fun factor, and there are thousands of games that do not need tomorrow's high-end hardware to be fun.
AI won't be solved until computers are creative.
The only time a computer created something "all by itself" is when a human told it to do so, told it how it should look like, and even then the computer used "the million monkeys" approach (think genetic programming). That's not creativity.
Such artificial secretary probably won't need "real" AI, just sophisticated algorithms for speech recognition, parsing human language, searching the interwebs, and so on (the last 1/3 of this is already done - Google). All the tasks mentioned by GP are just searching. But all of that would be just sophisticated algorithms, coded and *invented* by a human.
There's no need for any creativity in searching for a flight to Chicago. There isn't even creativity in trying to write a better program (a million monkeys would eventually write a better one). But actually thinking about how to make a better program, and using the conclusions to *design* the improvements, is creative, and is something that a computer has never been able to do, and (IMO) probably won't be able even in 100 years.
Linux also has "lp on fire". Try "grep -n 'on fire' /usr/src/linux/drivers/char/lp.c". I think all modern Unices still have this (didn't bother to check the BSDs).