Looking over the last few dozen " was pwned" threads seems to dispute this. The recent Java exploit thread has (AFAICS) about 3 references (out of hundreds) to windows, despite it being a windows-only problem. The very first post on the PDF exploit thread is entitled "Linux is vulnerable too". Others are similar in content for the most part, and last I recall the Debian team wasn't spared any guff for their SSL fuckup. You might just be a little oversensitive to the issue.
To play devil's advocate, there is the issue that Microsoft products have 10 times the "eyes" looking for security vulnerabilities than Linux-based products do.
According to the intertubez, which may or may not be trustworthy, approximately 2000 programmers worked on the Windows 7 codebase. I think its safe to say that most of them were not working
on kernel code. Its also pretty safe to say that not very many people outside of that group have seen said code.
Roughly 3000 developers work on the Linux kernel right now.
So even by that incredibly conservative metric, it's hard to conclude that more people have had eyes on microsoft's codebase than on linux, let alone that 10 times as many have.
To be fair, Fox is pretty bad about it- you remember the pie chart that added up to like 117% a few weeks back? Those are the same people feeding you elections returns.
You're comparing computers, hula hoops and fax machines to people that hold power over others? Granted there are some here that under the sway of the tyrannical computer but we're all under the boot of the government!
... you will suddenly realise that the great majority is a whole heap of actually necessary small things that add up.
It may look that way at first, but most of those "necessary" things weren't even invented until the last century or so, and society managed to work just fine without them. Perhaps they aren't really so necessary after all?
Well said! And after we throw the fat cats out of washington, we can rid the world once and for all of computers, hula hoops, and fax machines!
"Faced with this piece of information, someone thought the logical thing to do was to, er, write an entirely new language?"
by my understanding, the whole new language slant is because of the nightmare of c++ code out there to reuse, with unintended consequences. php is very web centric and java the last attempt at a 'universal' coding setup. python is an example of new language and how more complicated new language implementation is.
Are you suggesting that they wrote PHP to avoid code reuse, that there hasn't been an attempt at a cross-platform language since Java, and that Python is complicated, all in the same paragraph?
Seems pretty obvious to me. Those making the most noise about this imply that if one research group's conclusions predate their data, then all those who reached similar conclusions must have done the same. In the end the general public is unsure of who to trust, and the political impetus to make any real headway on environmental issues evaporates. Those who crowed about it publicly gain support, and those who produced research that supported these results suffer.
You seem to have some knowledge here, so if you don't mind (and will forgive the pun) I'd like to pick your brain about this.
Lets say we have a tabby, an ocelot, and a simulation that we are told models one of the two. Given that we're able to perform any kind of scan or procedure on the two animals, could we determine which species the simulation was using only that data?
The question is whether we are getting the right responses in this respect from the right set of neurons in reaction to the corresponding trigger.
As I see it, there's several problems here.
The first is that we don't really understand neurology all that well- higher level thought is, for the most part, a mystery to us, so identifying the "right set" isn't really possible for us at this point.
The second is that even if we were able to select the "right set", I don't think we have the imaging technology necessary to distinguish between correct and incorrect states without inducing a margin of error that would qualify our hypothesis out of existence. I may be wrong about that- it's been known to happen, and I'm not an expert.
The third is that because many different regions of the brain are involved in high level thought, the degree of confidence you can gain from any one observation matching the model is relatively low, even if you could have confidence that you're measuring the right thing and that your measurements are accurate.
Putting all of this together, the only way I can see to verify correctness would be to ensure a very tight correlation between total model state and total simulation state. AFAICT, that will require incredibly good nondestructive resolution to be practical. I don't know for sure, but as far as I do know we aren't there yet- which brings me back to the question of why they said anything if they weren't sure.
I don't really see how they would have verified that they were able to simulate a cat's brain. AFAIK, we don't have single-neuron level imaging, and the resolution on FMRI and EEG put those right out. Looking at macro level behavior would be pretty absurd- I too, can write a program that will decide to play with yarn. Unless there's something I'm missing, IBM seems to have made a claim it can't support.
One of the ways of introducing people to alternative software is to install it and have in sitting there on the menu. By removing the GIMP, they're just encouraging people to think that linux is "not ready for serious users."
The plural of anecdote obviously isn't data, but most of the people who do image editing that I know are already aware that gimp exists,
and the expectations as to what programs are installed are different coming from windows. I just don't see this as a valid point.
Between the fugly colour schemes, the stupid naming schemes, the artificial restrictions on root (hey - it's MY computer, not yours), not including the toolchain for building the system by default - even on xubuntu, etc., I'm glad I stuck with opensuse.
1) Color schemes are a matter of personal preference.
2) Nobody cares about the name.
3) Its called 'sudo', and its a good idea. Barring that, there's only about a million ways to get actual root if you neeeeeeed it, which I doubt you do.
4) sudo apt-get install build-essential
If you found any of that difficult to grasp, I'm glad you stuck with opensuse too.
Yes, it's a flame, but ubuntu sucks for development. And now it's going to suck for users who want a bit more than average / mediocre.
I've been developing for years on Ubuntu, and find it quite comparable to the experience of developing on other.deb and.rpm systems. Don't know what
you're doing with it obviously, but given the list of problems you presented I'm doubting the problem is with Ubuntu.
That's weird- back when people didn't know better than to ask me to help them with it I had to wrestle with it all the time. Cultural difference, maybe?
Seriously, there's not a lot of people who can claim to have gone toe-to-toe with those bastards and come out the better for it. More power to you, NYCL- and if you'll tell me what you drink you've got one of them headed your way.
I won't lie- I do think I'm right here, but I apologize for the snideness. You had your point of view and I had mine and I should have treated your opinion with the respect it deserved. Again, my apologies.
I'll agree to disagree at any point here; you are, of course, entitled to your opinion, and I to mine.
I do not buy your premise that it was the creators' intention to portray christopher as anything other than a "funny looking human" as you put it, and have some pretty solid mathematical reasons for believing that it is impossible for a computational model to be simultaneously incapable of simulating the behavior of another such model and capable of generating it in the first place. For those reasons, and the others I've stated above, I think it's pretty likely that Christopher was just another poorly done character in a disposable scifi flick- but hey, more power to you if you decide to hold otherwise.
I understand what you're saying- maybe what I'm perceiving as intermittent rationality is actually just the rapid transition from the portions of an alien rationality that are comprehensible to humans to the portions that are not, and that the existence of that transition necessarily implies that christopher's system of logic was at a minimum close to the complexity of our own, making him a complex, rational character whom I don't happen to understand, for all the reasons above.
There are two problems with that that I perceive: the first is that I don't believe it was ever the creators' intent to do so- ie, you're a fanboy desperately justifying a bad movie's flaws because you didn't really enjoy it as much as you've convinced yourself you have, and can't stand for other people to have different opinions anyway- and the second is that because the authors are human, any area of nonhuman rationality that is not a subset of human rationality will be indistinguishable from irrationality to them too, ie, the character they create will have to make decisions whose outcomes are determined via an irrational process. We call such characters, regardless of the authors' intentions when creating them, irrational.
So you effectively only have two choices: either christopher was developed as an irrational character under an irrational process and you have been duped into defending his actions as being some kind of art-school philosophical commentary on anthropomorphism- something I haven't seen anybody actually involved with the movie saying, might I add- or he was just a plain old irrational character, made by people who didn't consider good characterization all that important or simply wouldn't recognize it if it slapped them in the face. Add to that the kinds of actions that christopher's supposed alien rationality gets him to take- the moments of cliche self-sacrifice, the sudden and convenient changes of heart- and applying Occam's razor seems pretty safe. Again, your mileage may vary- but at this point it looks like you're just making shit up to try and put a good light on your pet movie, and that's just sad to me.
So, what you're saying is that christopher's irrational actions stem not from the fact that he's a poorly written, shallow character with the emotional depth of a teaspoon and a penchant for hollywood moments, but are rather the result of district 9's creators cleverly realizing that they could not themselves adaquately model a nonhuman intelligence?
Even assuming that plan^H^H^H^H district 9's creators were that clever- which I HIGHLY doubt- it strains credulity to believe that they only introduced a classically brain-dead action flick moment into the movie in the name of accurately depicting an alien sentience.
I like a lot of scifi, but what are we saying if we can't judge it on the same standards we hold the rest of hollywood to? Plot, pacing, character development, camera work, and cinematics- people are calling this the best scifi movie of the year and it falls flat on its face in at least one and I'd say closer to three of those categories. Excusing it like you do is just fanboyism, and it doesn't help the credibility of scifi in general when we keep trotting out lame oxen and calling them thoroughbreds.
Slashdot Mirror
Looking over the last few dozen " was pwned" threads seems to dispute this. The recent Java exploit thread has (AFAICS) about 3 references (out of hundreds) to windows, despite it being a windows-only problem. The very first post on the PDF exploit thread is entitled "Linux is vulnerable too". Others are similar in content for the most part, and last I recall the Debian team wasn't spared any guff for their SSL fuckup. You might just be a little oversensitive to the issue.
I'm not your son, pal.
Speaking of a whiny bitch attitude...
To play devil's advocate, there is the issue that Microsoft products have 10 times the "eyes" looking for security vulnerabilities than Linux-based products do.
According to the intertubez, which may or may not be trustworthy, approximately 2000 programmers worked on the Windows 7 codebase. I think its safe to say that most of them were not working on kernel code. Its also pretty safe to say that not very many people outside of that group have seen said code.
Roughly 3000 developers work on the Linux kernel right now.
So even by that incredibly conservative metric, it's hard to conclude that more people have had eyes on microsoft's codebase than on linux, let alone that 10 times as many have.
To be fair, Fox is pretty bad about it- you remember the pie chart that added up to like 117% a few weeks back? Those are the same people feeding you elections returns.
You're comparing computers, hula hoops and fax machines to people that hold power over others? Granted there are some here that under the sway of the tyrannical computer but we're all under the boot of the government!
Just calling retrogressivism by its name.
... you will suddenly realise that the great majority is a whole heap of actually necessary small things that add up.
It may look that way at first, but most of those "necessary" things weren't even invented until the last century or so, and society managed to work just fine without them. Perhaps they aren't really so necessary after all?
Well said! And after we throw the fat cats out of washington, we can rid the world once and for all of computers, hula hoops, and fax machines!
IME, the more beautiful you believe something to be, the more offended you are at the idea that it can be boxed up and sold.
"Faced with this piece of information, someone thought the logical thing to do was to, er, write an entirely new language?"
by my understanding, the whole new language slant is because of the nightmare of c++ code out there to reuse, with unintended consequences. php is very web centric and java the last attempt at a 'universal' coding setup. python is an example of new language and how more complicated new language implementation is.
Are you suggesting that they wrote PHP to avoid code reuse, that there hasn't been an attempt at a cross-platform language since Java, and that Python is complicated, all in the same paragraph?
ASE doesn't let you package scripts as .apk's. Google is your friend.
Came here to say this. If I can make python work using the escape hatch, you can make anything work using it.
Seems pretty obvious to me. Those making the most noise about this imply that if one research group's conclusions predate their data, then all those who reached similar conclusions must have done the same. In the end the general public is unsure of who to trust, and the political impetus to make any real headway on environmental issues evaporates. Those who crowed about it publicly gain support, and those who produced research that supported these results suffer.
I've always wondered why there's never been a push to distribute wikipedia's surver burden. It would be easy with today's technology.
I've purchased new cell phones for less than $20 without a contract before. They suck, but they do exist.
You seem to have some knowledge here, so if you don't mind (and will forgive the pun) I'd like to pick your brain about this.
Lets say we have a tabby, an ocelot, and a simulation that we are told models one of the two. Given that we're able to perform any kind of scan or procedure on the two animals, could we determine which species the simulation was using only that data?
The question is whether we are getting the right responses in this respect from the right set of neurons in reaction to the corresponding trigger.
As I see it, there's several problems here.
The first is that we don't really understand neurology all that well- higher level thought is, for the most part, a mystery to us, so identifying the "right set" isn't really possible for us at this point.
The second is that even if we were able to select the "right set", I don't think we have the imaging technology necessary to distinguish between correct and incorrect states without inducing a margin of error that would qualify our hypothesis out of existence. I may be wrong about that- it's been known to happen, and I'm not an expert.
The third is that because many different regions of the brain are involved in high level thought, the degree of confidence you can gain from any one observation matching the model is relatively low, even if you could have confidence that you're measuring the right thing and that your measurements are accurate.
Putting all of this together, the only way I can see to verify correctness would be to ensure a very tight correlation between total model state and total simulation state. AFAICT, that will require incredibly good nondestructive resolution to be practical. I don't know for sure, but as far as I do know we aren't there yet- which brings me back to the question of why they said anything if they weren't sure.
I don't really see how they would have verified that they were able to simulate a cat's brain. AFAIK, we don't have single-neuron level imaging, and the resolution on FMRI and EEG put those right out. Looking at macro level behavior would be pretty absurd- I too, can write a program that will decide to play with yarn. Unless there's something I'm missing, IBM seems to have made a claim it can't support.
One of the ways of introducing people to alternative software is to install it and have in sitting there on the menu. By removing the GIMP, they're just encouraging people to think that linux is "not ready for serious users."
The plural of anecdote obviously isn't data, but most of the people who do image editing that I know are already aware that gimp exists, and the expectations as to what programs are installed are different coming from windows. I just don't see this as a valid point.
Between the fugly colour schemes, the stupid naming schemes, the artificial restrictions on root (hey - it's MY computer, not yours), not including the toolchain for building the system by default - even on xubuntu, etc., I'm glad I stuck with opensuse.
1) Color schemes are a matter of personal preference.
2) Nobody cares about the name.
3) Its called 'sudo', and its a good idea. Barring that, there's only about a million ways to get actual root if you neeeeeeed it, which I doubt you do.
4) sudo apt-get install build-essential
If you found any of that difficult to grasp, I'm glad you stuck with opensuse too.
Yes, it's a flame, but ubuntu sucks for development. And now it's going to suck for users who want a bit more than average / mediocre.
I've been developing for years on Ubuntu, and find it quite comparable to the experience of developing on other .deb and .rpm systems. Don't know what
you're doing with it obviously, but given the list of problems you presented I'm doubting the problem is with Ubuntu.
That's weird- back when people didn't know better than to ask me to help them with it I had to wrestle with it all the time. Cultural difference, maybe?
Seriously, there's not a lot of people who can claim to have gone toe-to-toe with those bastards and come out the better for it. More power to you, NYCL- and if you'll tell me what you drink you've got one of them headed your way.
I won't lie- I do think I'm right here, but I apologize for the snideness. You had your point of view and I had mine and I should have treated your opinion with the respect it deserved. Again, my apologies.
I'll agree to disagree at any point here; you are, of course, entitled to your opinion, and I to mine.
I do not buy your premise that it was the creators' intention to portray christopher as anything other than a "funny looking human" as you put it, and have some pretty solid mathematical reasons for believing that it is impossible for a computational model to be simultaneously incapable of simulating the behavior of another such model and capable of generating it in the first place. For those reasons, and the others I've stated above, I think it's pretty likely that Christopher was just another poorly done character in a disposable scifi flick- but hey, more power to you if you decide to hold otherwise.
I understand what you're saying- maybe what I'm perceiving as intermittent rationality is actually just the rapid transition from the portions of an alien rationality that are comprehensible to humans to the portions that are not, and that the existence of that transition necessarily implies that christopher's system of logic was at a minimum close to the complexity of our own, making him a complex, rational character whom I don't happen to understand, for all the reasons above.
There are two problems with that that I perceive: the first is that I don't believe it was ever the creators' intent to do so- ie, you're a fanboy desperately justifying a bad movie's flaws because you didn't really enjoy it as much as you've convinced yourself you have, and can't stand for other people to have different opinions anyway- and the second is that because the authors are human, any area of nonhuman rationality that is not a subset of human rationality will be indistinguishable from irrationality to them too, ie, the character they create will have to make decisions whose outcomes are determined via an irrational process. We call such characters, regardless of the authors' intentions when creating them, irrational.
So you effectively only have two choices: either christopher was developed as an irrational character under an irrational process and you have been duped into defending his actions as being some kind of art-school philosophical commentary on anthropomorphism- something I haven't seen anybody actually involved with the movie saying, might I add- or he was just a plain old irrational character, made by people who didn't consider good characterization all that important or simply wouldn't recognize it if it slapped them in the face. Add to that the kinds of actions that christopher's supposed alien rationality gets him to take- the moments of cliche self-sacrifice, the sudden and convenient changes of heart- and applying Occam's razor seems pretty safe. Again, your mileage may vary- but at this point it looks like you're just making shit up to try and put a good light on your pet movie, and that's just sad to me.
For the slow in the audience, that's option A, actually.
So, what you're saying is that christopher's irrational actions stem not from the fact that he's a poorly written, shallow character with the emotional depth of a teaspoon and a penchant for hollywood moments, but are rather the result of district 9's creators cleverly realizing that they could not themselves adaquately model a nonhuman intelligence?
Even assuming that plan^H^H^H^H district 9's creators were that clever- which I HIGHLY doubt- it strains credulity to believe that they only introduced a classically brain-dead action flick moment into the movie in the name of accurately depicting an alien sentience.
I like a lot of scifi, but what are we saying if we can't judge it on the same standards we hold the rest of hollywood to? Plot, pacing, character development, camera work, and cinematics- people are calling this the best scifi movie of the year and it falls flat on its face in at least one and I'd say closer to three of those categories. Excusing it like you do is just fanboyism, and it doesn't help the credibility of scifi in general when we keep trotting out lame oxen and calling them thoroughbreds.