> Is it me, or is this story's headline totally > incoherant?
No, it's cut straight out of 'The Slashdot Guide for Guaranteeing your Submission is Accepted', chapter 2 which discusses creating a sensationalist headline that enables people to leap to conclusions about a story before reading it.
Bonus points are awarded for managing to make it sound like it's an issue of the man against the little man.
Cause yeah, I picked that up too.. the headline and following text had almost nothing to do with the actual story.
I'd suggest the guy submitted before reading the story, but trying to comprehend the lack of thought that would require makes my brain hurt.
> Currently, AI is nothing more than a magic trick. > It's not about intelligence - it's simply an > illusion that when you figure out how it works, it > is no longer impressive.
And the question that Wallace's words should be making you ask is how do you know that human intelligence isn't the exact same thing?
Can you prove that you are here typing these things today because you have some intangible gift, or you're merely doing it because your brain is capable of storing thousands upon thousands of word associations?
His interview should be forcing you to question what gives humans intelligence just as much as it should force you to think about how to get a computer to emulate it.
> Yet he has denigrated the very organ by which he > is able to formulate his thoughts, and seems to > see little, if any, use in modelling or even > studying its structure and arrangement to gain any > insight into the possible ramifications for A.I.
And what proof do you have available to suggest he's wrong?
When someone tells you to imagine a red ball, and you can feel it floating around in your head, do you "feel" it in your head because that's where the thought actually is.. or do you feel it there just because you were raised to know that your brain is where your consciousness comes from?
That's what his point was. There's no proof that the brain works the way we think it does, there's no proof that it's good at what it does, and there's no proof that when an artist creates something it was inspired by something that happened in his brain.
And as such the result is it's a bad idea to just assume that by emulating the brain we'll stumble upon true AI, just like it's a bad idea for Wallace to assume transistors will be any better at it.
> (we were supposed to be *increasing* the security of the PC's, right?)
I mean if the government was that incompetent, we'd already know who really killed JFK, right?;)
At any rate, I happen to work for the government, and I've also held a few commercial jobs, and speaking on a reletivity scale, the government network has a much better security model than any place I've ever worked.
They also have a fanatical security "reaction" team that enforces security policy, scours vulnerability lists, and watches logs daily for signs of intrusions. When that apache hole came out a few weeks ago.. they gave every website at the facility about three days to fix it, otherwise they would start black hole-ing ports of machines running unpatched servers.
Now whether we're an exception or a rule I'm not qualified to state, but the government isn't quite as stupid as you're suggesting.;)
Re:Why two ethernet controllers?
on
nForce2 Preview
·
· Score: 2
> Why two ethernet controllers?
Why not? It's also said to have 6 usb ports, which is about five more ports than most people ever need.
If the cost of adding a second port is very small, there's no reason not to do it. Saves joe power user some time and money when he realizes he needs a second port, and joe average user will never be harmed by having it there.
> If everyone took that position, we'd be fighting > all the time.
Fairly cynical view of humanity, eh?
I think your fears are unfounded, or at the least, exaggerated. Yes it can enable unsavory individuals to launch their plans of world domination with fewer restraints, but in a world where a single man can encourage his henchmen to fly planes into skyscrapers, someone will find a way to do it regardless of what the options are.
For every person that loves violence and would eagerly "fight all the time", I bet you there's two more people who want nothing more than a full belly, a warm bed, and some peace and quiet.
And as long as those peaceful people cut out the cancer when it becomes a problem, even the seductive power of a fully automated army doesn't ensure we're doomed to a future of eternal warfare.
That was actually an artifact of the way google ranks pages based on your search term.
If you enter that string now.. the top link is actually a page discussing the effects of typing that string into google.;) So in effect the popularity of that "egg" destroyed it.
Probably a good example of how well google evolves along with what people find topical, as well. Talking about tricking a search engine into calling microsoft worse than satan got more popular than websites that actually rant against M$.
..you read the article and realize the thing had a walkman-sized reciever you gotta carry around too (source site was hosed, that's a mirrored copy).
Seems to me one of the other portable TV's would be a lot more convenient, especially considering the improved screen size. Which you know, is probably a real darn good reason why it never cought on.;)
Still, having a resolvable display in the early 80's was doing pretty darn good, even if it ended up being little more than a neat hardware hack.
What the heck is a "dying supernova" supposed to be?
If a supernova is the act of a star "dying" and throwing off it's outer layers, does that then mean that a supernova is the zombie of the star, and when the supernova died, some cosmic cleric cast turn undead on it?
Perhaps fading supernova remnant would have been a better choice.;)
at an old data center I was at..
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
..there was the "loose connector" bug.
Machines that stay running for years at a time almost never come back up cleanly after some downtime, and I can't recall the cases where walking back to the beast and planting a kick into it's chassis would "fix" the problem. We particularily enjoyed doing this to aging RAID arrays and four digit sun machines because of the amount of effort needed to get the things out of the rack and opened up.
Now most of us would realize that this was probably just reseating whatever needed reseating, but the humor value behind skilled techs fixing expensive hardware with violence is too tempting to resist.
> I suppose Alaska could be the paradise for heavy > metal and overclocking...
For only about 9 months of the year, probably a shift less. Fairbanks is deep in the interior of the state and is known for pushing 100 degrees farenheit in the summer (and then dropping to 30 below in the depths of January).
I think Fairbanks even holds a few records for the biggest seasonal variances in temperature.
Even less extreme parts of the state get to the point where you'd have to install air conditioning to get you through notable chunks of the year.
I thought the right of 'first sale' had already been well hammered out in americas courts? Once I buy something physical, it's MINE, and I have the right to resell it however I want.
Sounds to me like RIAA is trying to duplicate the software industry and relabel the 'purchase' of an album as a license.
Didn't the book publishing industry already try this?
Re:Winner: most boring use of "P2P"
on
P2P Roaming Chat
·
· Score: 2
> If this were "scalable," the developer wouldn't > require users to register by email before > downloading.
How do you know that he's not trying to limit accounts due to limited personal bandwidth? He still has to maintain a master server, and if 30,000 slashdot goons are suddenly flooding his server with new accounts you can guarantee his DSL at home is gonna melt into slag.
This is obviously a one man show, I see his email registration as more of a quality of service guarantee than any kind of statement about his software.
> If they gave a damn about you, why didn't they pay you more before?
I doubt there were any dirty motives behind the company not raising pay by leaps and bounds.
It's in a company's best interest to pay workers as little as they can get away with. If said worker happens to be one of those quiet non-complaining sorts, it's easy to get lost in the paperwork and never see a raise.
That does not by implication indicate they don't value the employee, nor are unwilling to pay more for the same employee. They're just being practical, and assuming that if no one is complaining then everyone is happy and there's no reason to rock the boat.
Trying to keep the employee with a counter-offer is surely better than them shrugging it off and making sure the door doesn't hit him in the ass on the way out.
Re:Winner: most boring use of "P2P"
on
P2P Roaming Chat
·
· Score: 3, Informative
> It's instant messaging with ugly graphics.
I think you underestimate the effort that has to go into laying out even simplistic protocols for a server and a single client to chatter with each other. Much less creating one that's scalable and avoids looking like alphabet soup.
Then to expand it to a p2p type setup where every client can (potentially) talk with every other client.
In other words the simple act of getting such a relationship between multiple systems is easily half the battle. Once you get that running, attracting interested parties to actually turn it into a game becomes child's play by comparison. The graphical frontend can easily be retooled to display the world in any fashion the coder wants.
The moon is at it's furthest point in it's orbit around earth. The effect this has is that the moon is incapable of fully blocking the sun, this is because the moon's orbit is slightly elliptic.
A rather spectacular image from a 1992 annular eclipse (the name given to this type of eclipse) can be found at APOD today.
> They would have been paid for with money seized
> from taxpayers, so if you have a job, you're paying
> for the software anyway, whether you want to use it
> or not.
This already happens. Using stuff I know about directly as evidence, look at the fermilab tools homepage. Now granted this stuff wasn't developed spontaneously, every last bit of it is an internal tool that was made freely available to the public, but the point still stands.
Fermilab is operated by universities across the country, but is owned by the DOE.
> think a U.S. Department of Software Development
> would result in better software?
Not by default, nor every time, but it's definetly capable of it. Again I'll use fermi as an example. Nedit is a really well done GUI text editor, I call it a "second tier" editor because it's not directly a vi or emacs clone, but it's very own beast. These days it's a highly developed, well maintained editor.
So while I'd agree to an extent that the government shouldn't have a Department of Open Source that leeches taxpayer money to create free software, I *do* have to butt in and inform you that many (if not all) government owned laboratories across the US already produce and release free software.;)
problem with the 'catering to an aging clientele' comment is that writing a book is generally a pretty intellectual thing. Music, as we have it today, is chiefly emotional.
That's not to say one or neither doesn't need talent or skills or feeling, but each one draws from it's own discrete base.
Intellect is generally something reserved for the ages, and emotion is usually best witnessed in the younger crowd.
> make a dent in MSIE's monopoly in the windows browser world?
And I retort, who fricking cares?
Mozilla is open source, freely available, and heavily cross platform. Even if AOL mothballs netscape and lays off everyone that can't be changed.
Why's it always gotta be about "conquering microsoft"? Can't people just USE the software and get on with their life? Let the dominance, or obscurity, come naturally. Long as you get software that does it's job well for you, it shouldn't matter one iota what other people are using.
This idea is, or was at one point, common in the food industry as well. They maintain the same size of packaging, yet futz with the amount of food inside it (usually reducing it some small amount) so you're essentially paying the same price for less.
Of course they never label it as "economy", they would just sneak it in without telling anyone.
It ends up being a backhanded way of raising prices. In HP's situation it seems more like a way to motivate people into buying the real profit makers sooner, but it all borrows from the same mode of thinking. Wish the story or court case was further along, be interesting to see what the eventual conclusion is because I doubt the finding would apply to only HP.
Not trying to plug the service, but I'm curious how new ideas like XM will fit into this.
I think it's easy to agree that a lot of the slashdot audience despises two things in current radio: limited playlists, tons of ads (well and yappy dj's too I guess). Both of these facts exist because the radio station has to maintain a certain level of income.
Does XM run ads? Do we know how they pick their playlists?
Seems to me a subscription based radio is the "next step". Pay a little to get less ads, get more music, get a better variety of music. I just figure paying a subscription will reduce the pressure to maximize profits just a tiny bit, leaving some wiggle room so the radio can actually be enjoyable to listen to.
> The protocol, which is part of Message Queuing, > contains a coding mistake that would threaten the > security of enterprise systems using it if it were > disclosed, Allchin said.
Then with all the billions and billions of dollars M$ has hanging out in the bank, why not hire someone and FIX THE PROBLEM. What's the problem with doing the things that make sense?!
Single best thing M$ could do to improve their product security is to adopt the 'patch often' mindset. Fix something, release a patch, everyone goes home happy.
The bi-annual (exaggeration) security patches they currently do ain't gonna do it.
..but I can bet money that the "fat" that got trimmed from your department would be quite incensed to learn the company just turned around and outsourced their jobs a few months later, probably paying out more money in the long run than it would have cost to keep full time employees.
If you've been granted "deep pockets", why not just rehire the guys that got laid off? Or hire a new crew of US citizens. Companies farming out their cash to foreign sweat shops isn't going to do diddly SQUAT to help the tech industry recover.
To everyone else, join the EFF and make a donation, because the lesson learned in this case is that small guys need big friends, and if all the small guys in the world banded together, bullying tactics like this wouldn't work. Someday you just might be the small guy.
> Minimum system requirements are a graphics card > that can do 256 colors at 1024x768 and an internet > connection.
These are the EXACT same requirements to play you needed ten years ago.
Problem being I only had a 486 at the time (bit less than 10 years ago I guess) and it simply wasn't capable of pushing 1024x768. The sheer amount of jockeying I had to do with the interface to squeeze all the important stuff into 800x600 was near epic.;)
I couldn't understand why anyone made the game like that, because at the time, that kind of resolution was unimagineable to me.
Then a few months later I got my foot into the IT industry, sat at my first Sparc station, and learned why.;)
Slashdot Mirror
> Is it me, or is this story's headline totally
> incoherant?
No, it's cut straight out of 'The Slashdot Guide for Guaranteeing your Submission is Accepted', chapter 2 which discusses creating a sensationalist headline that enables people to leap to conclusions about a story before reading it.
Bonus points are awarded for managing to make it sound like it's an issue of the man against the little man.
Cause yeah, I picked that up too.. the headline and following text had almost nothing to do with the actual story.
I'd suggest the guy submitted before reading the story, but trying to comprehend the lack of thought that would require makes my brain hurt.
> Currently, AI is nothing more than a magic trick.
> It's not about intelligence - it's simply an
> illusion that when you figure out how it works, it
> is no longer impressive.
And the question that Wallace's words should be making you ask is how do you know that human intelligence isn't the exact same thing?
Can you prove that you are here typing these things today because you have some intangible gift, or you're merely doing it because your brain is capable of storing thousands upon thousands of word associations?
His interview should be forcing you to question what gives humans intelligence just as much as it should force you to think about how to get a computer to emulate it.
> Yet he has denigrated the very organ by which he
> is able to formulate his thoughts, and seems to
> see little, if any, use in modelling or even
> studying its structure and arrangement to gain any
> insight into the possible ramifications for A.I.
And what proof do you have available to suggest he's wrong?
When someone tells you to imagine a red ball, and you can feel it floating around in your head, do you "feel" it in your head because that's where the thought actually is.. or do you feel it there just because you were raised to know that your brain is where your consciousness comes from?
That's what his point was. There's no proof that the brain works the way we think it does, there's no proof that it's good at what it does, and there's no proof that when an artist creates something it was inspired by something that happened in his brain.
And as such the result is it's a bad idea to just assume that by emulating the brain we'll stumble upon true AI, just like it's a bad idea for Wallace to assume transistors will be any better at it.
> (we were supposed to be *increasing* the security of the PC's, right?)
;)
;)
I mean if the government was that incompetent, we'd already know who really killed JFK, right?
At any rate, I happen to work for the government, and I've also held a few commercial jobs, and speaking on a reletivity scale, the government network has a much better security model than any place I've ever worked.
They also have a fanatical security "reaction" team that enforces security policy, scours vulnerability lists, and watches logs daily for signs of intrusions. When that apache hole came out a few weeks ago.. they gave every website at the facility about three days to fix it, otherwise they would start black hole-ing ports of machines running unpatched servers.
Now whether we're an exception or a rule I'm not qualified to state, but the government isn't quite as stupid as you're suggesting.
> Why two ethernet controllers?
Why not? It's also said to have 6 usb ports, which is about five more ports than most people ever need.
If the cost of adding a second port is very small, there's no reason not to do it. Saves joe power user some time and money when he realizes he needs a second port, and joe average user will never be harmed by having it there.
> If everyone took that position, we'd be fighting
> all the time.
Fairly cynical view of humanity, eh?
I think your fears are unfounded, or at the least, exaggerated. Yes it can enable unsavory individuals to launch their plans of world domination with fewer restraints, but in a world where a single man can encourage his henchmen to fly planes into skyscrapers, someone will find a way to do it regardless of what the options are.
For every person that loves violence and would eagerly "fight all the time", I bet you there's two more people who want nothing more than a full belly, a warm bed, and some peace and quiet.
And as long as those peaceful people cut out the cancer when it becomes a problem, even the seductive power of a fully automated army doesn't ensure we're doomed to a future of eternal warfare.
That was actually an artifact of the way google ranks pages based on your search term.
;) So in effect the popularity of that "egg" destroyed it.
If you enter that string now.. the top link is actually a page discussing the effects of typing that string into google.
Probably a good example of how well google evolves along with what people find topical, as well. Talking about tricking a search engine into calling microsoft worse than satan got more popular than websites that actually rant against M$.
Seems to me one of the other portable TV's would be a lot more convenient, especially considering the improved screen size. Which you know, is probably a real darn good reason why it never cought on. ;)
Still, having a resolvable display in the early 80's was doing pretty darn good, even if it ended up being little more than a neat hardware hack.
What the heck is a "dying supernova" supposed to be?
;)
If a supernova is the act of a star "dying" and throwing off it's outer layers, does that then mean that a supernova is the zombie of the star, and when the supernova died, some cosmic cleric cast turn undead on it?
Perhaps fading supernova remnant would have been a better choice.
..there was the "loose connector" bug.
Machines that stay running for years at a time almost never come back up cleanly after some downtime, and I can't recall the cases where walking back to the beast and planting a kick into it's chassis would "fix" the problem. We particularily enjoyed doing this to aging RAID arrays and four digit sun machines because of the amount of effort needed to get the things out of the rack and opened up.
Now most of us would realize that this was probably just reseating whatever needed reseating, but the humor value behind skilled techs fixing expensive hardware with violence is too tempting to resist.
> I suppose Alaska could be the paradise for heavy
> metal and overclocking...
For only about 9 months of the year, probably a shift less. Fairbanks is deep in the interior of the state and is known for pushing 100 degrees farenheit in the summer (and then dropping to 30 below in the depths of January).
I think Fairbanks even holds a few records for the biggest seasonal variances in temperature.
Even less extreme parts of the state get to the point where you'd have to install air conditioning to get you through notable chunks of the year.
I thought the right of 'first sale' had already been well hammered out in americas courts? Once I buy something physical, it's MINE, and I have the right to resell it however I want.
Sounds to me like RIAA is trying to duplicate the software industry and relabel the 'purchase' of an album as a license.
Didn't the book publishing industry already try this?
> If this were "scalable," the developer wouldn't
> require users to register by email before
> downloading.
How do you know that he's not trying to limit accounts due to limited personal bandwidth? He still has to maintain a master server, and if 30,000 slashdot goons are suddenly flooding his server with new accounts you can guarantee his DSL at home is gonna melt into slag.
This is obviously a one man show, I see his email registration as more of a quality of service guarantee than any kind of statement about his software.
> If they gave a damn about you, why didn't they pay you more before?
I doubt there were any dirty motives behind the company not raising pay by leaps and bounds.
It's in a company's best interest to pay workers as little as they can get away with. If said worker happens to be one of those quiet non-complaining sorts, it's easy to get lost in the paperwork and never see a raise.
That does not by implication indicate they don't value the employee, nor are unwilling to pay more for the same employee. They're just being practical, and assuming that if no one is complaining then everyone is happy and there's no reason to rock the boat.
Trying to keep the employee with a counter-offer is surely better than them shrugging it off and making sure the door doesn't hit him in the ass on the way out.
> It's instant messaging with ugly graphics.
I think you underestimate the effort that has to go into laying out even simplistic protocols for a server and a single client to chatter with each other. Much less creating one that's scalable and avoids looking like alphabet soup.
Then to expand it to a p2p type setup where every client can (potentially) talk with every other client.
In other words the simple act of getting such a relationship between multiple systems is easily half the battle. Once you get that running, attracting interested parties to actually turn it into a game becomes child's play by comparison. The graphical frontend can easily be retooled to display the world in any fashion the coder wants.
A rather spectacular image from a 1992 annular eclipse (the name given to this type of eclipse) can be found at APOD today.
> from taxpayers, so if you have a job, you're paying
> for the software anyway, whether you want to use it
> or not.
This already happens. Using stuff I know about directly as evidence, look at the fermilab tools homepage. Now granted this stuff wasn't developed spontaneously, every last bit of it is an internal tool that was made freely available to the public, but the point still stands. Fermilab is operated by universities across the country, but is owned by the DOE.
> think a U.S. Department of Software Development
> would result in better software?
Not by default, nor every time, but it's definetly capable of it. Again I'll use fermi as an example. Nedit is a really well done GUI text editor, I call it a "second tier" editor because it's not directly a vi or emacs clone, but it's very own beast. These days it's a highly developed, well maintained editor.
So while I'd agree to an extent that the government shouldn't have a Department of Open Source that leeches taxpayer money to create free software, I *do* have to butt in and inform you that many (if not all) government owned laboratories across the US already produce and release free software. ;)
So it *can* work.
problem with the 'catering to an aging clientele' comment is that writing a book is generally a pretty intellectual thing. Music, as we have it today, is chiefly emotional.
That's not to say one or neither doesn't need talent or skills or feeling, but each one draws from it's own discrete base.
Intellect is generally something reserved for the ages, and emotion is usually best witnessed in the younger crowd.
> make a dent in MSIE's monopoly in the windows browser world?
And I retort, who fricking cares?
Mozilla is open source, freely available, and heavily cross platform. Even if AOL mothballs netscape and lays off everyone that can't be changed.
Why's it always gotta be about "conquering microsoft"? Can't people just USE the software and get on with their life? Let the dominance, or obscurity, come naturally. Long as you get software that does it's job well for you, it shouldn't matter one iota what other people are using.
This idea is, or was at one point, common in the food industry as well. They maintain the same size of packaging, yet futz with the amount of food inside it (usually reducing it some small amount) so you're essentially paying the same price for less.
Of course they never label it as "economy", they would just sneak it in without telling anyone.
It ends up being a backhanded way of raising prices. In HP's situation it seems more like a way to motivate people into buying the real profit makers sooner, but it all borrows from the same mode of thinking. Wish the story or court case was further along, be interesting to see what the eventual conclusion is because I doubt the finding would apply to only HP.
Not trying to plug the service, but I'm curious how new ideas like XM will fit into this.
I think it's easy to agree that a lot of the slashdot audience despises two things in current radio: limited playlists, tons of ads (well and yappy dj's too I guess). Both of these facts exist because the radio station has to maintain a certain level of income.
Does XM run ads? Do we know how they pick their playlists?
Seems to me a subscription based radio is the "next step". Pay a little to get less ads, get more music, get a better variety of music. I just figure paying a subscription will reduce the pressure to maximize profits just a tiny bit, leaving some wiggle room so the radio can actually be enjoyable to listen to.
Course the question is, does XM achieve this?
From the story:
> The protocol, which is part of Message Queuing,
> contains a coding mistake that would threaten the
> security of enterprise systems using it if it were
> disclosed, Allchin said.
Then with all the billions and billions of dollars M$ has hanging out in the bank, why not hire someone and FIX THE PROBLEM. What's the problem with doing the things that make sense?!
Single best thing M$ could do to improve their product security is to adopt the 'patch often' mindset. Fix something, release a patch, everyone goes home happy.
The bi-annual (exaggeration) security patches they currently do ain't gonna do it.
..but I can bet money that the "fat" that got trimmed from your department would be quite incensed to learn the company just turned around and outsourced their jobs a few months later, probably paying out more money in the long run than it would have cost to keep full time employees.
If you've been granted "deep pockets", why not just rehire the guys that got laid off? Or hire a new crew of US citizens. Companies farming out their cash to foreign sweat shops isn't going to do diddly SQUAT to help the tech industry recover.
Isn't this the sort of thing the EFF exists for?
To everyone else, join the EFF and make a donation, because the lesson learned in this case is that small guys need big friends, and if all the small guys in the world banded together, bullying tactics like this wouldn't work. Someday you just might be the small guy.
> Minimum system requirements are a graphics card
;)
;)
> that can do 256 colors at 1024x768 and an internet
> connection.
These are the EXACT same requirements to play you needed ten years ago.
Problem being I only had a 486 at the time (bit less than 10 years ago I guess) and it simply wasn't capable of pushing 1024x768. The sheer amount of jockeying I had to do with the interface to squeeze all the important stuff into 800x600 was near epic.
I couldn't understand why anyone made the game like that, because at the time, that kind of resolution was unimagineable to me.
Then a few months later I got my foot into the IT industry, sat at my first Sparc station, and learned why.