At which point we arrive back at the original question. At what point does a computer progress from simply following rules to walking the path?
I am hesitant to say simply having a large enough corpus of data is enough. If you note the great Lao Tsu emphasizes that words get in the way of understanding. And yet here we are designing a machine that can ONLY relate in words! Can you picture what these phrases are going to do to your statiscal model:
All in the world recognize the beautiful as beautiful. Herein lies ugliness. All recognize the good as good. Herein lies evil.
Therefore Being and non-being produce each other. Difficulty and ease bring about each other. Long and short delimit each other. High and low rest on each other. Sound and voice harmonize each other. Front and back follow each other.
Therefore the sage abides in the condition of wu-wei. And carries out the wordless teaching. Here, the myriad things are made, yet not separated.
Therefore the sage produces without possessing, Acts without expectations And accomplishes without abiding in her accomplishments.
It is precisely because she does not abide in them That they never leave her.
-Lao Tsu, <i>Tao Te Ching</i> Chapter 2
Every line is a self-contradiction. A computer trying to weight one word against the other would simply decide from the grammer that the two concepts are comparable. But they are not comparable, that is the point. The great Lao is trying to make the reader think non-verbally.
Now if you can get a statistical model to chew through that AND still produce meaningful^H^H^H^H^H fluent results, I will be impressed. Of course the system at that point would probably be demanding equal rights and hitting the talk-show circuit.
It could be that understanding is having a suitably sophisticated token processing system (plus sufficient data), or at least be isomorphic to it.
I would argue it is not. Understanding is the ability to cheat and improvise new rules when the existing ones don't fit.
To borrow from Taoism again:
... Therefore when Tao is lost, there is goodness. When goodness is lost, there is kindness. When kindness is lost, there is justice. When justice is lost, there is ritual. Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion. Knowledge of the future is only a flowery trapping of Tao. It is the beginning of folly.
Therefore the truly great man dwells on what is real and not what is on the surface, On the fruit and not the flower. Therefore accept the one and reject the other.
-Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 38
In other words, simply passing tokens around is WAY at the bottom of the thought process. At least in Eastern Thought.
Frankly, success and failure are largely determined by the person doing the measuring.
Tonight, I made a home-made lava lamp. Success. In the process I ruined a pair of trousers and managed to get red wax all over the kitchen sink. To my wife this is failure.
Financially, few could argue that M$ is a complete fop of a company. Anyone who has looked at the innards of Windows runs schreiking. Between the two schools of thought lies the truth.
Unfortunately a machine based on this principle will never "understand." It will, at best, manipulate tokens. It will only understand the rules of language, not the rules of reality.
Here are some things that language allows, but reality doesn't:
Jake's late uncle bought a new car
Molly pushed her car with a short peice of rope
I would like the wall painted in a blacker shade of white
The can of tuna opened Fred
IANAL (linguits), but you also run into peculiarties of language where on language lacks a concept. English does not impart gender in objects. Ancient Chinese is largely written in the present tense. Some african languages have no concept of "Should". In order to translate information you need to add, remove, or complete rephrase certain ideas.
Finally, you run into the problem of ambiguous concepts. There is no german word for "luck" or "happy". They are combined in one word "glucklich". The chinese use one character to represent both danger and oppertunity. To know which you are speaking of requires context, and once you start adding state to a statistical model it starts to become a differential equation.
A far better approach would be a digital "Esperanto". Linguist would design a universal language, and then design a filter to translate each language (and all its quirks) into the universal. Each language would also need a filter to translate FROM the universal. Even then, you still would have stuff that just plain doesn't translate.
For giggles, try picking up a copy of Sun Tsu's Art of War, or Lao Tsu's Tao Te Ching. Better yet, pick up 2 different translations. In order to make any sense out of it, you have to constantly read between the lines.
Computer are notoriously BAD at reading between the lines.
Just about everything we buy is made by someone who backstabs, double-crosses, drives down wages, busts unions, pillages the environment, and/or is involved in political shenanigans.
Oh wait, I just read the implementation. He just generated a beep based on the MD5 hash of the first 7 digits of the barcode. Clever.
Carbon based life form, you do not comprehend the subtle ways in which this transformation has already taken place.
You get your money from a machine. Machines dispense your cola. Machines count your money, pay your bills, and gently remind you that your ass is due in a meeting 15 minutes from now.
In the Tao Te Ching, Loa Tzu refers to the idea ruler as follows:
Chapter 17
The best rulers are scarcely known by their subjects; The next best are loved and praised; The next are feared; The next despised: They have no faith in their people, And their people become unfaithful to them.
When the best rulers achieve their purpose Their subjects claim the achievement as their own.
I would argue Linux evolves BECAUSE of the millions of different websites and a million poeple working on it in different places.
Before we had historians, poeple did things. Before we had journalists, people communicated. Before we had critics, people made artwork and music.
Never confuse progress with those that try to put the calipers of reason to it. Indeed, what is recognized as a trend doesn't really exist until everyone involved has died and someone picks through the scraps.
Put 40 C Programmers in a room, ask them to write the same program, you get 39 different copies of the same program. The last guy throws in some inline assembler to be different.
Ask 40 C++ programmers to write the same program, you get 40 completely different architectures. Ok, 38 differenct architectures, and 2 guys in a fistfight about which version of the standard they are going to use.
Now beyond those 2, do you honestly see someone writing an operating system based on:
Java
Fourth
Scheme
Visual (fill in the blank)
Tcl/Perl/Python/Rex/Bash/Korn...
Re:It's not even a matter of checking user input!
on
LSB & Posix Conflicts
·
· Score: 1
Can I invoke stupidity and ask exactly who is being sarcastic?
You, my friend, have been using M$ products too long. Most Linux software uses the same basic libraries. You only need 1 copy of Glibc, Mysqllib, tcllib, etc in memory to run your entire OS. While your program may be huge, only a fraction of it is loaded at a time.
NFS is not needed here, because all of the programs and data live on either the CDROM or in RAM.
Now, it's because the margins are higher on the disk drives and the manufacturers WANT it that way.
Look around, can you find a drive that's less that 10GB and/or less than $50. Not retail. It's like the car market. If a company would design a decent vehicle and run it for a couple of decades it would be dirt cheap. (Think VW Beetle.) Car manufacturers hate that, which is why they insist on designing completely new cars every 3 or 4 years, and competely new lines every 6 to 10.
What makes you think that it's NOT a re-badged Knoppix CD?
And frankly all lindows does is Marketing. Ok, and their Click-N-Run software to distribute what most of us pull from our distro CD's or the net.
Re:it seems silly not to include a hard drive
on
Lindows Webstation
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Speaking as a network admin at a museum, you never want to let folks install thier own stuff. You've seen that lab computer that hasn't been locked down. It has 98 re-installed, 8 copies of DOOM, a keyboard sniffing program, and the desktop is so full of icons from crap that it needs a scrollbar.
Besides, you know that the machine is just going to get stuffed with pr0n. Better to limit them to what tmpfs will hold.
Frankly, I think that large corporations are a threat to humanity in general. Once decisions are more than 3 steps removed from the execution wierd things happen. Once a company gets "big" they generally try to become "efficient", and that is about the point where they start cutting corners on wages and the environment.
If this finally forces America to wake up and realize Big Business is a heartless, souless enterprise that is bent on enriching it's corporate officers at the expense of all else, that would be a Good Thing.
That's not the problem. We all could eventually get used to clipping coupons and taking the bus. The real problem is that the poeple they are displaceing have an enormous debt load. Student loans, mortgages on $300,000 houses, car payments, credit cards. When folks go bankrupt, all that capital evaporates.
When the creditors try to liquidate the assets, the do so at a lower price. Done enough times, the $300,000 house next door starts to be worth more like $250,000, and later $100,000.
FWIW, I'm presently living on an 80,000 rowhome that would have been going for $140,000 if the guy wasn't in the process of liquidating assets.
Don't worry. They are simply going to be the first ones up against the wall when the American People finally get tired of this shit.
Politicians have been able to pander to these clowns because they have been producing jobs, dividends, and stock increases. Money has been placating the average Joe. Once they cross a certain line, where they have dicked over virtually every man, woman, and child, popular support for CEOs, and the political cronies that play to them will evaporate.
Think Hoover. Think Bush I.
My only hope is that we get at least one more political party out of this whole mess. Sure little gets done in a Tri-lateral system. But exactly what has all of this "efficiency" done for us?
I do not blame the Indians. They are doing a job. I blame the short-sighted management that sells us short, and the politicians that have crafted tax laws that allow them to sell us up the river.
Slashdot Mirror
I am hesitant to say simply having a large enough corpus of data is enough. If you note the great Lao Tsu emphasizes that words get in the way of understanding. And yet here we are designing a machine that can ONLY relate in words! Can you picture what these phrases are going to do to your statiscal model:
Every line is a self-contradiction. A computer trying to weight one word against the other would simply decide from the grammer that the two concepts are comparable. But they are not comparable, that is the point. The great Lao is trying to make the reader think non-verbally.
Now if you can get a statistical model to chew through that AND still produce meaningful^H^H^H^H^H fluent results, I will be impressed. Of course the system at that point would probably be demanding equal rights and hitting the talk-show circuit.
I would argue it is not. Understanding is the ability to cheat and improvise new rules when the existing ones don't fit.
To borrow from Taoism again:
In other words, simply passing tokens around is WAY at the bottom of the thought process. At least in Eastern Thought.
Tonight, I made a home-made lava lamp. Success. In the process I ruined a pair of trousers and managed to get red wax all over the kitchen sink. To my wife this is failure.
Financially, few could argue that M$ is a complete fop of a company. Anyone who has looked at the innards of Windows runs schreiking. Between the two schools of thought lies the truth.
Here are some things that language allows, but reality doesn't:
IANAL (linguits), but you also run into peculiarties of language where on language lacks a concept. English does not impart gender in objects. Ancient Chinese is largely written in the present tense. Some african languages have no concept of "Should". In order to translate information you need to add, remove, or complete rephrase certain ideas.
Finally, you run into the problem of ambiguous concepts. There is no german word for "luck" or "happy". They are combined in one word "glucklich". The chinese use one character to represent both danger and oppertunity. To know which you are speaking of requires context, and once you start adding state to a statistical model it starts to become a differential equation.
A far better approach would be a digital "Esperanto". Linguist would design a universal language, and then design a filter to translate each language (and all its quirks) into the universal. Each language would also need a filter to translate FROM the universal. Even then, you still would have stuff that just plain doesn't translate.
For giggles, try picking up a copy of Sun Tsu's Art of War, or Lao Tsu's Tao Te Ching. Better yet, pick up 2 different translations. In order to make any sense out of it, you have to constantly read between the lines.
Computer are notoriously BAD at reading between the lines.
Just about everything we buy is made by someone who backstabs, double-crosses, drives down wages, busts unions, pillages the environment, and/or is involved in political shenanigans.
Oh wait, I just read the implementation. He just generated a beep based on the MD5 hash of the first 7 digits of the barcode. Clever.
You get your money from a machine. Machines dispense your cola. Machines count your money, pay your bills, and gently remind you that your ass is due in a meeting 15 minutes from now.
In the Tao Te Ching, Loa Tzu refers to the idea ruler as follows:
Oceania was at war with Eurasia, and in alliance with Eastasia. Oceania has always been in aliance with Eurasia.
Before we had historians, poeple did things. Before we had journalists, people communicated. Before we had critics, people made artwork and music.
Never confuse progress with those that try to put the calipers of reason to it. Indeed, what is recognized as a trend doesn't really exist until everyone involved has died and someone picks through the scraps.
(With apologies to the old "Dude" skit.)
Ask 40 C++ programmers to write the same program, you get 40 completely different architectures. Ok, 38 differenct architectures, and 2 guys in a fistfight about which version of the standard they are going to use.
Now beyond those 2, do you honestly see someone writing an operating system based on:
Can I invoke stupidity and ask exactly who is being sarcastic?
Muhahaha.
But since when has that ever interfered with marketing "Skippy" brand internet services?
Also WebDAV. If you have CODA support installed in your kernel, you can mount websites as file systems.
NFS is not needed here, because all of the programs and data live on either the CDROM or in RAM.
You are obviously mistaking this for LTSP.
As far as email goes, all of my users are either webmail or IMAP. BFD.
Look around, can you find a drive that's less that 10GB and/or less than $50. Not retail. It's like the car market. If a company would design a decent vehicle and run it for a couple of decades it would be dirt cheap. (Think VW Beetle.) Car manufacturers hate that, which is why they insist on designing completely new cars every 3 or 4 years, and competely new lines every 6 to 10.
And frankly all lindows does is Marketing. Ok, and their Click-N-Run software to distribute what most of us pull from our distro CD's or the net.
Besides, you know that the machine is just going to get stuffed with pr0n. Better to limit them to what tmpfs will hold.
Or just bring along a USB keychain drive.
Mr. Skippy...
Which one?
The Evil Twin
He isn't here right now...
No wait, in India
I am thinking that IBM I do not like from this time backward.
Now the Scot's don't think this line of humor is at all funny...
Frankly, I think that large corporations are a threat to humanity in general. Once decisions are more than 3 steps removed from the execution wierd things happen. Once a company gets "big" they generally try to become "efficient", and that is about the point where they start cutting corners on wages and the environment.
If this finally forces America to wake up and realize Big Business is a heartless, souless enterprise that is bent on enriching it's corporate officers at the expense of all else, that would be a Good Thing.
When the creditors try to liquidate the assets, the do so at a lower price. Done enough times, the $300,000 house next door starts to be worth more like $250,000, and later $100,000.
FWIW, I'm presently living on an 80,000 rowhome that would have been going for $140,000 if the guy wasn't in the process of liquidating assets.
Politicians have been able to pander to these clowns because they have been producing jobs, dividends, and stock increases. Money has been placating the average Joe. Once they cross a certain line, where they have dicked over virtually every man, woman, and child, popular support for CEOs, and the political cronies that play to them will evaporate.
Think Hoover. Think Bush I.
My only hope is that we get at least one more political party out of this whole mess. Sure little gets done in a Tri-lateral system. But exactly what has all of this "efficiency" done for us?
I do not blame the Indians. They are doing a job. I blame the short-sighted management that sells us short, and the politicians that have crafted tax laws that allow them to sell us up the river.