Could they have chosen a worse name? I mean seriously, Go? That'll be easy to find on a search engine. Well I guess it's Google so they can special-case the word, but still.
You're absolutely right. The problem is that people don't (usually) know what their utilities actually are, at least not in absolute terms. For example, just think of the last time you answered one of those surveys that use a Likert scale (from "completely disagree" to "completely agree"). I don't know about you, but trying to decide whether I "somewhat" agree or "completely" agree isn't always easy. The same would go for range voting. (Hmm, do I give Candidate X a 3 or a 4?)
We're somewhat better at knowing our relative utilities, but even then it's difficult to put a total order on candidates in an election. For example, I might really hate two candidates, but figuring out who I hate more might be very difficult or impossible.
The best system that takes this into account is likely Condorcet voting, but Approval voting is indeed simpler (and simplicity is important - remember Florida 2000).
I doubt the problem is actual copied code. If that were the case, this would be a copyright issue, and not a patent issue.
As far as what projects Microsoft is threatening, it is more than just the kernel. It also includes the GUIs, openoffice.org, email, and others. This quote, from CNN Money, has a breakdown:
But he does break down the total number allegedly violated - 235 - into categories. He says that the Linux kernel - the deepest layer of the free operating system, which interacts most directly with the computer hardware - violates 42 Microsoft patents. The Linux graphical user interfaces - essentially, the way design elements like menus and toolbars are set up - run afoul of another 65, he claims. The Open Office suite of programs, which is analogous to Microsoft Office, infringes 45 more. E-mail programs infringe 15, while other assorted FOSS programs allegedly transgress 68.
Can anyone tell me why the open source community can't search Microsoft's patent portfolio to find these supposed infringements? I realize that there are a lot of MS patents, and thus it would require a lot of work to perform a complete search. But surely if the community can co-operate enough to develop high-quality software, then we can co-operate enough to perform a patent search. We've all heard "many eyes make all bugs shallow" - perhaps "many eyes make all patents shallow" is just as true.
Of course, to catch all of the possibilities, we might have to put on MS-tinted glasses and twist our thinking to see the way in which Linux (or some other software) actually infringes. That, and we might need a gargantuan suspension of disbelief with regards to the enforceability of the patents. Still, if it is possible for Microsoft to do such an analysis, why can't we do the same thing?
And just this morning I saw a flyer for HP systems in the Globe and Mail. All of the screens were a lovely shade of Ubuntu brown. Yeah I know... but one can dream, right?
Umm, Galileo wasn't around during the dark ages. The dark ages were from (around) 500-1000. Galileo wasn't born until 1564. Not that the church hasn't been intolerant; I agree with you there.
If you want to do AI/speech recognition, I would recommend picking up those math textbooks again, and hitting them hard. AI isn't like it used to be - a solid knowledge of probability and statistics is pretty much required these days. That being said, it *is* possible, if you're willing to put in the hours. I came from an arts background, and I'm doing a PhD in AI, so I know of what I speak.:)
I wouldn't say that the 10 commandments are really that universal. Certainly some, like the prohibition of murder are fairly universal, but some are flatly absurd to those who reject Christianity (or Judaism). For examples, see Religious Tolerance for details.
Where I worked for a while, we even stopped bothering to use the line printer for triple or quad forms. It was easier to just print the form three times on the laser. The problem with carbon paper is that you often have to burst and split it afterward, which is often a really annoying task. Bursters (for those that don't know, they take the little perforated tracks off the sides, and cut the paper into pages), IMHO, are finicky, annoying machines, and, often as not, end up cutting an important page in half, which then has to be reprinted or "reconstructed" using a photocopier.
All in all, since I spent about half my day running the burster and splitter, my employer probably saved a substantial amount, labour-wise, even if the laser printing was more expensive. All that, and the reports that came out looked a hell of a lot better, and weren't flimsy as hell.
While there are logic systems that can learn rules (SOAR, ACT-R), I'm pretty certain Prolog is not one of them. Prolog is simply a logic-programming language which, instead of following instructions (as in languages such as C), produces results as a side-effect of first-order logic theorem proving.
Whether any of these have been used for game AI, I do not know.
Ummm.. "Chipotle" peppers are smoked Jalapenos. Tough to grow smoked peppers, unless maybe he's also allowed a fireplace at work. Plus, I think the smoking process might be detrimental to the plant.:P
Re:dumb question..and here are some dumber answers
on
How Do You Use UML?
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· Score: 1
Exactly.:)
Re:dumb question..and here are some dumber answers
on
How Do You Use UML?
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· Score: 1
Aren't there any code generators that use actual grammatical speech entirely yet? If not, why not? Too hard to build or what?
Not that I know of -- they are too hard to build. Natural language is very different from the artificial programming languages. In fact, understanding natural language is one of the most difficult of the sub-fields of artificial intelligence. Natural language is vague, full of grammatical exceptions, and relies on lots of contextual information to understand a sentence. Obviously, all of these spell disaster for a programming language, which must be absolutely unambiguous.
It might be possible to specify a more "English-like" (or insert the natural language of your choice) programming language, but there would be a lot of rigid grammatical rules that aren't like regular English. The result would be an unwieldy and verbose programming language that nobody would be able to remember, since it is too close to real English (hmm, do I need to type "each object in the container" or "every object within the container"?)
A system, method and computer-readable medium support the use of a single operator that allows a comparison of two variables to determine if the two variables point to the same location in memory.
Seems to me that Lisp had just such an operator in the 50's. That's right, the eq operator! Oh wait. I guess you'd have to prepend a not to that, wouldn't you.
The page you linked says "weekend of June 20" Ferneheit 911 didn't come out until the 25th, and even that is only in selected cities.
BTW, "Supersize Me" is about some journalist that lived off of McDonald's food for a while (I forget for how long). He gained major weight and had health problems as a result. I haven't seen it, but I've heard generally good things.
Read the other article. The actual patents are linked. From the page:
Patent 5,694,546: System for automatic unattended electronic information transport between a server and a client by a vendor provided transport software with a manifest list
Patent 6,594,692: Methods for transacting electronic commerce
Patent 6,125,388: System for transporting information objects between a user station and multiple remote sources based upon user modifiable object manifest stored in the user station
Patent 6,658,464: User station software that controls transport, storage, and presentation of content from a remote source
Patent 6,611,862: User station software that controls transport and presentation of content from a remote source
Patent 6,557,054: Method and system for distributing updates by presenting directory of software available for user installation that is not already installed on user station
The way I see it, there are major ethical implications to this kind of technology. I can see it now - the first attempted use of this in a rape defense - "According to my glasses, she was lying when she said 'no', and also, she loved me!!"
Even if these things were 100% effective (and there are serious philosophical problems with ever being able to show that empirically), I think they'd be a bad idea. Believe it or not, dishonesty has its place in the maintenance of interpersonal relations. Utterly getting rid of it would likely end up being worse than the problem that we're trying to solve. Better is to help people use their own built-in ability to detect emotions/truthfulness more effectively.
Finally, any technology (currently at least) that does sucessfully detect emotions will be prone to the same kind of 'arms race' that we see in spam detection. 'Professional' liers will learn to slip by the system, rendering whatever advantage it gave us meaningless.
Slashdot Mirror
Could they have chosen a worse name? I mean seriously, Go? That'll be easy to find on a search engine. Well I guess it's Google so they can special-case the word, but still.
You're absolutely right. The problem is that people don't (usually) know what their utilities actually are, at least not in absolute terms. For example, just think of the last time you answered one of those surveys that use a Likert scale (from "completely disagree" to "completely agree"). I don't know about you, but trying to decide whether I "somewhat" agree or "completely" agree isn't always easy. The same would go for range voting. (Hmm, do I give Candidate X a 3 or a 4?)
We're somewhat better at knowing our relative utilities, but even then it's difficult to put a total order on candidates in an election. For example, I might really hate two candidates, but figuring out who I hate more might be very difficult or impossible.
The best system that takes this into account is likely Condorcet voting, but Approval voting is indeed simpler (and simplicity is important - remember Florida 2000).
I doubt the problem is actual copied code. If that were the case, this would be a copyright issue, and not a patent issue.
As far as what projects Microsoft is threatening, it is more than just the kernel. It also includes the GUIs, openoffice.org, email, and others. This quote, from CNN Money, has a breakdown:
Can anyone tell me why the open source community can't search Microsoft's patent portfolio to find these supposed infringements? I realize that there are a lot of MS patents, and thus it would require a lot of work to perform a complete search. But surely if the community can co-operate enough to develop high-quality software, then we can co-operate enough to perform a patent search. We've all heard "many eyes make all bugs shallow" - perhaps "many eyes make all patents shallow" is just as true.
Of course, to catch all of the possibilities, we might have to put on MS-tinted glasses and twist our thinking to see the way in which Linux (or some other software) actually infringes. That, and we might need a gargantuan suspension of disbelief with regards to the enforceability of the patents. Still, if it is possible for Microsoft to do such an analysis, why can't we do the same thing?
And just this morning I saw a flyer for HP systems in the Globe and Mail. All of the screens were a lovely shade of Ubuntu brown. Yeah I know... but one can dream, right?
Umm, Galileo wasn't around during the dark ages. The dark ages were from (around) 500-1000. Galileo wasn't born until 1564.
Not that the church hasn't been intolerant; I agree with you there.
If you want to do AI/speech recognition, I would recommend picking up those math textbooks again, and hitting them hard. AI isn't like it used to be - a solid knowledge of probability and statistics is pretty much required these days. That being said, it *is* possible, if you're willing to put in the hours. I came from an arts background, and I'm doing a PhD in AI, so I know of what I speak. :)
I wouldn't say that the 10 commandments are really that universal. Certainly some, like the prohibition of murder are fairly universal, but some are flatly absurd to those who reject Christianity (or Judaism). For examples, see Religious Tolerance for details.
(is this ((truly great) news))
Where I worked for a while, we even stopped bothering to use the line printer for triple or quad forms. It was easier to just print the form three times on the laser. The problem with carbon paper is that you often have to burst and split it afterward, which is often a really annoying task. Bursters (for those that don't know, they take the little perforated tracks off the sides, and cut the paper into pages), IMHO, are finicky, annoying machines, and, often as not, end up cutting an important page in half, which then has to be reprinted or "reconstructed" using a photocopier.
All in all, since I spent about half my day running the burster and splitter, my employer probably saved a substantial amount, labour-wise, even if the laser printing was more expensive. All that, and the reports that came out looked a hell of a lot better, and weren't flimsy as hell.
While there are logic systems that can learn rules (SOAR, ACT-R), I'm pretty certain Prolog is not one of them. Prolog is simply a logic-programming language which, instead of following instructions (as in languages such as C), produces results as a side-effect of first-order logic theorem proving.
Whether any of these have been used for game AI, I do not know.
Ummm.. "Chipotle" peppers are smoked Jalapenos. Tough to grow smoked peppers, unless maybe he's also allowed a fireplace at work. Plus, I think the smoking process might be detrimental to the plant. :P
Exactly. :)
Not that I know of -- they are too hard to build. Natural language is very different from the artificial programming languages. In fact, understanding natural language is one of the most difficult of the sub-fields of artificial intelligence. Natural language is vague, full of grammatical exceptions, and relies on lots of contextual information to understand a sentence. Obviously, all of these spell disaster for a programming language, which must be absolutely unambiguous.
It might be possible to specify a more "English-like" (or insert the natural language of your choice) programming language, but there would be a lot of rigid grammatical rules that aren't like regular English. The result would be an unwieldy and verbose programming language that nobody would be able to remember, since it is too close to real English (hmm, do I need to type "each object in the container" or "every object within the container"?)
Wow - the image of a Greek God is clearly visible in the clouds above! Obviously Australia has angered Zeus! :)
Seems to me that Lisp had just such an operator in the 50's. That's right, the eq operator! Oh wait. I guess you'd have to prepend a not to that, wouldn't you.
All hail Microsoft's brilliant innovation!
Mmmmmmm.... Yak Piss. I'm salivating already.
I SO want the soundtrack to this movie. Every song was absolutely perfect.
Are you kidding? There are six million or so species of insects alone out there. That's a lot of books.
Now - which language gets the dung beetle?
The page you linked says "weekend of June 20" Ferneheit 911 didn't come out until the 25th, and even that is only in selected cities.
BTW, "Supersize Me" is about some journalist that lived off of McDonald's food for a while (I forget for how long). He gained major weight and had health problems as a result. I haven't seen it, but I've heard generally good things.
Patent 5,694,546: System for automatic unattended electronic information transport between a server and a client by a vendor provided transport software with a manifest list
Patent 6,594,692: Methods for transacting electronic commerce
Patent 6,125,388: System for transporting information objects between a user station and multiple remote sources based upon user modifiable object manifest stored in the user station
Patent 6,658,464: User station software that controls transport, storage, and presentation of content from a remote source
Patent 6,611,862: User station software that controls transport and presentation of content from a remote source
Patent 6,557,054: Method and system for distributing updates by presenting directory of software available for user installation that is not already installed on user station
No 31337?
Ha! on this screenshot, I notice that they have the all imporant toilet paper template... a must have. :)
The way I see it, there are major ethical implications to this kind of technology. I can see it now - the first attempted use of this in a rape defense - "According to my glasses, she was lying when she said 'no', and also, she loved me!!"
Even if these things were 100% effective (and there are serious philosophical problems with ever being able to show that empirically), I think they'd be a bad idea. Believe it or not, dishonesty has its place in the maintenance of interpersonal relations. Utterly getting rid of it would likely end up being worse than the problem that we're trying to solve. Better is to help people use their own built-in ability to detect emotions/truthfulness more effectively.
Finally, any technology (currently at least) that does sucessfully detect emotions will be prone to the same kind of 'arms race' that we see in spam detection. 'Professional' liers will learn to slip by the system, rendering whatever advantage it gave us meaningless.
I guess I'll just have to be sure to get the chip in my left hand then...