This is a game designed by committee. If there isn't a game designer at the lead of the team with a passion for their design, then this might as well be another cookie cutter grist mill EA waste of shelf space. (Except, of course, this also isn't likely to hit the shelves.) It's nice that open source is putting together the effort to show that they can do something like this, and that it can all be free, but games aren't like other engineering projects. They require passion, and I don't see that here.
You know, I'm inclined to stick up for you, because there's some douche tax nutjob badmouthing you.
At the same time, honestly, dude, come the fuck on, if you're going to pretend that porn isn't one of the biggest sources of spam? You've got a little credibility management to do yourself, here. Look at what places like the dating sites do - there are six really bad ones, and I bet you could count them off one by one if you tried, taking over yahoo groups, craigslist, and so on. Sure, it's a really small fraction of pornographers actually doing that, but you also don't see porn cutting ties to people driving the actual traffic. The industry as a whole could be putting in a lot more effort to fight it than it actually is.
I've got some camgirl sending email and instant messages to more than a dozen accounts every day, and she's sitting sort-of-pretty at the top of the biggest "amateur" webcam payment processor. There's no question of what she does, where she does it, but iWhoever.com (because I won't name names so as not to drive traffic - but you know exactly who I mean) doesn't do a god damned thing about it.
Back when I was an on-call tech dork in college, porn was responsible for more virii, box compromise, spam and keylogging than basically every other vertical but warez put together. Seriously, dude, it's like ten percent of sites out there doing this stuff. Saying that's a blanket statement is a bit kneejerk melodramatic. There are clean pornographers, sure - places like SilverCwhoever are absolutely spotless (again with the you know who I mean) - but the rate in porn is high enough that keeping a suspicious eyebrow isn't honestly that unwise.
Am I saying anyone deserves it? Generally speaking, no, and even if they did, it's the end customers, not the vendors, getting hurt. Still, at least be honest in looking at some of your competition - there are quite a few shady characters in your neighbor's shadows.
Please don't use slashdot to advertise your services while your competition is imploding. Even being in porn, you should be able to recognize how tacky that is. It's one thing to have it in your sig - lord knows I do too - but to stand there and pretend like you're making idle conversation while you namedrop stuff like that? Honestly.
You don't see me posting when some random hosting provider does something bad. There's making yourself visible, and there's being a vulture. Which side of the line do you feel like you're on today? (And since I'm now inclined to think that the cash register is all you can hear, do you think you made more customers than you lost by leaving that bad taste in people's mouths?)
People have been dreaming of an abstract, reduced and simplified theory of the human brain since the study of the nervous system started. Nobody has quite managed yet... why don't you try?:)
I am and I have.
Bullshit. An abstract computer chess simulation routed through the physical world mimics a reduced human brain in the same way that playing with legos is a reduced version of engineering a skyscraper. You've managed to fill a webpage with a bunch of blathersceit and big words. Way to go, jack. In the meantime, all you've really got is an Armitron driver. Why chess is even on that page is something of a mystery, since your software doesn't know how to play chess - it can't even make legal moves in any more significant frequency than dice.
Trying to use computers to simulate neurons in all their biological glory is a pipe dream.
Yes yes, clueless amateurs have been saying this for decades. Go sit at the back of the class with Minsky where you belong - you're replying to an article where something has been done by saying "this is a pipe dream and cannot be done." I'm reminded of the story of the Kitty Hawk newspaper reporter who was thrown into jail for fraud, claiming that a heavier than air machine had flown; when shown photographs, the police officer who'd made the arrest calmly remarked that they were obvious fakes, and that science forbode such a thing from happening.
Well, sir, all I can say is that I'm glad your kind aren't cops anymore.
We know how several types of neurons work on a higher and simpler level: they send and receive spikes via synapses.
That's one of more than a dozen known mechanisms, actually. There are several involved mechanisms with electricity alone - pulse amplitude, duration and frequency are all involved in the electrical system, and that's before you get into what the chemicals around them are doing. Chemicals are involved in the system too. Or did you think that cocaine was just a bunch of tiny batteries?
That's the only level that needs to be simulated to achieve intelligence
This is demonstrably false. Several classes of injury and disease that rob a previously functioning brain of its ability to think have literally nothing to do with its electrical system, something you'd know if you weren't a talentless hack also ran with neither education in the matter nor any form of degree. Go find out what happens in a mye
The brain is a discrete temporal mechanism
The brain isn't discrete, as the various parts of the brain operate distinctly from one another, at different speeds, using different mechanisms. The brain isn't a temporal mechanism, something which anyone with multiple sclerosis knows in a deeply tragic way. The brain is not, in fact, even a mechanism, since a mechanism has a definite design, and brains are grown (and differently, to boot.) People's brains are actually shaped differently, have different sized bits and pieces. Lots of the brain is specific purpose, but lots of it is general purpose, and the way that people handle many fundamental tasks is quite significantly different from individual to individual. Hell, not even all of us end up with cognition in the same lobe of the brain - that bit about "left brained" and "right brained" was based on actual science, something none of what you've said seems to be. If the brain was a mechanism, we'd all be working the same way.
So, not discrete, not temporal, and not a mechanism. I smell failure, and its name is MOBE2001.
discrete temporal mechanism that uses multiple integrated networks
Wait, it's discrete and it uses integrated clusters? Just what do you think discrete means?
I'm sure Markram et al are aware of this but being biologists, they can't seem to move beyond the low-level complexities.
After all, a bee's brain has only about a million neurons. It could probably be done on a desktop machine
You have a fantastically broken sense of scale. The important bit isn't the neuron count; it's the interconnect count. In the sub-oesophageal ganglia alone you're looking at billions of interconnects. If you think that would run on a desktop machine, especially after you just (failed to) read the document explaining how much horsepower it took to deal with a rat's neocortex, then I have a bridge to sell you.
Maybe you should wait until you've actually tried this stuff before you start preaching about what can or cannot be done on a PC.
a bee's behavior is amazingly sophisticated.
No, it isn't. A swarm's behavior is relatively easily described as the emergent properties of about two dozen behavioral rules. Consider taking a time machine back to the mid 1980s, when we started figuring this stuff out, so that you won't be so far behind when you begin the necessary process of playing catch-up.
Is it me or does it seem that some people have no clue as to what constitutes intelligence
Both.
and would rather spend the taxpayer's money on what can only be qualified as useless goals?
Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it's useless. The implications of a testable simulation of a biological brain are startling. Besides, the EPFL is a private institute (not everything with "federal" in the name is governmental,) and the vast bulk of this research was paid for by IBM.
Would it not be much better to implement a downsized version of the human brain (with all the various cortices) and see if it can learn and adapt to the environment?
Yeah, because if we've just now for the first time managed to simulate something that constitutes about half of one percent of a rat's brain, then surely we're in a position to implement a scaled-down human brain. Oh, and by the way, if it's scaled down, its results wouldn't be useless, or anything. Oh, and we all know how to scale a human brain down: it's in every textbook on "fantasy science for people with no ability to think through what they're saying," which they teach at the Zsa-zsa Gabor School of Diesel Mechanics.
In the meantime, we now have confirmation that our understanding of the basic principles of rat cerebral biology is complete enough that we can accurately simulate a significant and complex chunk of its brain in pure mathematics. I can't imagine how even a layman would be so dense as to think that useless. Maybe we should simulate you; lord knows we have the computing power for it.
But then again, that would be too much to ask since Markram et al don't have an overall theory of brain operation.
Wait, let me get this straight. Something you suggest is too much to ask because other people don't know how to do it? Did it occur to you to just not say it, then? Or were you too busy feigning familiarity with something you know not even the most fundamental basic principles of? You suggested something so startlingly vague that I can't even begin to imagine what precisely you mean, and now you want it to be these other, actual productive scientist's faults that your fantasy doesn't make any sense?
What exactly would you suggest is the nature of a "scaled down human brain" ? Be precise.
It's better to keep your sights as high as possible and have an excuse as to why your artificial brain or cortical column is no more intelligent than a flea
Yes, because simulating half a percent of a rat brain is a much loftier and more vapid goal than some arbitrary reduction of the human brain, cough. By the by, if you had actually read anything about the research, you wouldn't be making comparisons to fleas, since the simulated rat brain is actually quite capable. But, don't let knowledge or famili
Actually, it's a falsehood, not a fallacy. A fallacy is a flaw in reasoning, and doesn't actually mean that the conclusion is incorrect. My personal favorite example of a logical fallacy is to suggest that, in order to reduce 16/64, you simply cancel the sixes. Of course, that's total nonsense, but the result (1/4) happens to be correct.
Incidentally, you do realize that the person you were replying to was being sarcastic, and pointing out the very thing you tried to point out to him, yes?
Nah, it was much better right at the start before we had uids. There were few dupes, articles were really techie, and articles were always here before the mainstream news got them.// It's not like the good old days any more.
You, sir, predate me significantly, and that isn't common. I remember no such timeframe, and I've been here since probably 1997 or so (it took me a long time to make an account.) Pity what you cite is no longer the case; that sounds like a fun place to be. (I remember back when Ars was like that.)
I love it when someone with a UID in the hundreds of thousands erroneously assumes that there is a perfect correlation between UID and level of Slashdot experience.
It's not an assumption. It's demonstrated. When you see someone acting like a novice, there's no guesswork involved in saying they're acting like a novice. Settle down.
Hint: we aren't all on our first user account, and we didn't all sign up the day we started reading.
I know. I didn't sign up for almost two years. It doesn't matter if it's his fifth account: he's still bemoaning something that's essentially always been true. What I said stands.
MS went to 64 bit in Windows NT3 for the DEC Alpha back in 1992, thanks. The reason they're still making a 32-bit OS is the same reason I'm still running a 32-bit OS on my 64-bit hardware: eight years later, most companies still don't offer 64-bit device drivers.
Stop with the kludges and force the developers along
How? It's real easy to get up on a podium and tell them to do things, but until you figure out how to actually do it, it's not actually useful.
32 bit came with the 386 era and lasted a good while
Yeah, the 386 was actually Intel's fifth 32-bit processor, or fourth if you count the XScale as being an ARM (Intel just manufactures them.) Their first was the 432, and there were also the i860 and i960. The 432 was introduced on January 1 of 1981. The 386 was some time in 1985. Amusingly, the 432 also had the ability to address 1T of memory, which is another nail in the coffin of your belief that CPU addressing width is driven by RAM addressing (indeed, starting at the Pentium Pro, Intel chips had 36 bit RAM addressing.) Indeed, at that point Intel was playing catch-up: Motorola had released the 68000, a 32-bit chip, in 1979, and ISTR there being something older than that in the 32-bit consumer market, though I'll be damned if I can remember what it is.
So, you're at least seven and a half years off.
64 bit would last beyond our lifetimes anyway
Yeah, I heard people like you say that about 32-bit, too. You're not correct. Just ten years ago people were insisting that four gigabytes of RAM was an obscene amount; why, even hard drives weren't that big, at the time, and some people weren't sure what the prefix giga- meant. Of course, if you tried to remind them that the RAM limit wasn't actually the driving factor in the addressing width of a machine, they'd laugh at you as if they knew something you didn't, call you naïve and call it a day.
Now, here we are in the same position. Lots of posers going on about how this is the final chip epoch in their lifetime, even though there are already 128-bit chips in video game consoles, and 512-bit proprietary chipsets all over video cards. Thing is, 8-bit lasted about 18 years, 16-bit lasted about 15, and 32-bit lasted 12. Hell, we're already 15 years into mass market advertising for 64-bit chips. Oh, but sure, this one's never going to be replaced in your lifetime, no, no. God forbid you admit that you might just not be able to imagine every single stitch of the future. Chip addressing widths are not set solely for RAM addressing. If they were, we wouldn't have things like PAE; we'd've just moved up. I bought my first 64-bit chip in 1993 - an Alpha EV4, which was already a year old on the market, and being sold as a consumer chipset. I ran my first copy of 64-bit Windows on it. And, going by the sound of things, there's a half decent chance that that machine is older than you are.
so there is no point in stalling it indefinitely.
Nothing's stalled. Microsoft announced more than a year ago that there would be no 32-bit version of Kernel 7, and they've been 64-bit for more than 15 years. You just don't know what you're talking about. Please stop pretending to be so well learned. It makes everyone listening to you believe things that are basically nonsense.
I love it when someone with a UID in the millions acts like they've been here a long time. Guess what, kid? This is how SlashDot has always been. If you don't like it, learn to spell Digg.
Unfortunately, there are also key loggers that will do screen captures as well.
Well... they might see your address or account number or whatever, but most password fields are masked with asterisks.
Yeah, you've missed the point a bit. The keylogging part takes care of the asterisk covered password fields. What grandparent was talking about was someone saying "why not draw a keyboard on the screen, then all it'll get is mouse clicks?" That kind of approach can't be asterisk masked. Keylog to catch typed passwords, screencap to catch virtual typing.
E3's real strength was in allowing the move from a dedicated amateur to a young professional; that's how I got my foot in the door, way back when. By closing their doors to professionals, they've lost that. In the meantime, they've been doing such an appalling job with their seminars for such a long time that the actual professionals had already by and on the large stopped going; they're at GDC, and I hear there's actually an increasing group at PAX, though I haven't been to the latter. E3 cut off the thing that made it not just dominant, but in fact valuable at all, and even were they to throw the doors wide open again and to bring their prices down to something that the kids can manage, they've lost the momentum they had.
Top that off with a ton of bad will: E3 started a for-pay "social networking" system to connect the kids to the pros, charged a hundred bucks a head, and then didn't invite anyone from that list to the new show, making the networking thing utterly useless (it was borderline fraud, in my opinion - there was never anything to the system other than access to a room at a show that nobody who bought in was even allowed to go to.)
There may be a show going on under the name E3, it may be run by the same people, and it may be in the same location, but the E3 that we all knew, and sort-of loved, is gone forever.
Because then other people would try to buy the domain and resell it to the poor sap as arbitrage, a thousand slashdotters would look at the page generating ad revenue, and so on. There's no reason to give the company name, and there are ample reasons not to.
I think what he is saying is not that any code he writes will be an embarrassment, rather he is saying that his code is at the mercy of forces beyond his control or understanding, and in that way suffers in quality.
I think that's entirely a reasonable interpretation of what the original poster said, and it's relatively similar to how I read the same material. I stand, however, resolutely behind my answer, that I do not feel the same way about my own code. I haven't felt that way since the first time I learned a real formal process (in my case COCOMO II, though these days I practice PSP/TSP instead.)
but looking back on it some of the most elegant unblemished code I wrote was during school. It may have been only a toy or proof of concept but at least I understood all of it and the reasons it was being written.
This raises the worrying implication that you do not feel that you understand why your current code - presumably at work - is being written. I don't want to jump to that conclusion; it seems rude. Nonetheless, I see no other way to read that. With all due respect, from my perspective, if you don't know why you're writing the code you're writing, then it should be no surprise that you are neither satisfied with its quality or elegance.
Out in the "real world" I have found increasingly disillusioned by competing business interests, priorities, and the general feeling that code is something that can be cranked out like cogs in a factory. Not to mention the fact that in most cases sales or customer service is given priority over technology when it comes to most decisions.
If you were a carpenter, and the foreman gave you only rotten wood with which to work, that the house collapsed after being built would not be your fault. Similarly, when engineering issues are not given priority in an engineering project, that the project fails is not (necessarily) the engineers' faults. One of the most important things in my personal history of learning to behave like an engineer was when formal process gave me a way to distinguish between problems I caused and problems that were caused externally.
With all due respect, it sounds like your job is fairly broken. (Don't feel bad - that's true of more than eighty percent of software houses, according to RAND.) I was lucky to have a decent environment as my first environment, and as such I knew going into my next several jobs when warning flags started showing up.
The coding horror "software engineering explained" cartoon is pretty accurate.
Maybe, if you feel that way, it might be time to look for a better employer. Believe it or not, they're not all that way. I was once threatened with termination because my boss wanted work on a 4-dimensional 100-cell-edge to scale up to a 10k cell edge in 100x the work (100^4 vs 10000^4, laugh under your breath in 3, 2...) That said, not all bosses are like that. My boss isn't like that, and I'd like to think that I'm not (though were I, I wouldn't know it.)
If you were a boss in a company small enough that you could make Big Changes (tm), wouldn't you? And, don't you think other people like you in that situation would, too? Either you believe that the situation is so broken that success is impossible, or you believe nobody would try to fix things, or you accept that there are better jobs somewhere.
I've had better jobs. Chin up: you can too. Maybe it's time to go looking.
One of the other marks of incompetence is bandying about hollow platitudes in order to imply a defect where you don't know there actually to be one; it's called argumentum ad hominem, and you can't pass discretionary writing courses at most decent universities until you've learned not to do it. Surprisingly, just because I'm proud of my work doesn't mean it's crap. Just because you don't know why your code is crap doesn't mean I don't know why my code isn't crap. Go read a book on software process. My defect rates are below one every thousand lines of code (and frankly, I'd be shocked if you had a sense of whether or not that was any good, or even how a person might know that about their own code.)
Oh, and by the by? That second one you want is both non causa pro causa and internally inconsistent. Furthermore, it's absolute horseshit. The vast bulk of the talented programmers who I employ have absolutely no idea what their own skill level is - most of them think themselves average, and the remainder think themselves much better than they actually are. Most children understand that just because it sounds true doesn't mean that it necessarily is true; apparently you do not.
Just because you believe all programmers are incompetent doesn't mean that an engineer must prostrate themselves to be clueful. Grow up.
Oh, enough with the ad verecundiam nonsense. Goëthe was a fiction writer, and at no point did I hide my limitations. I said I wasn't ashamed of my code. Go play faux deep thinker with the other sixth grade level thinkers in the presidential cabinet.
Incidentally, it's actually a biblical quote, not Goëthe, so even though you're pretending that he ought to know something about humility or the observation of one's limitations, something that anyone familiar with Goëthe's actual history would never do, your ad verecundiam is false. Just because some internet site pulled it out of one of his books doesn't mean he's who coined the term; you might as well suggest that Heaven and Hell were Dante Alghieri's ideas.
Maybe you should try reading Goethe before quoting him again. There's a reason the first three sites that come up with your quote verbatim on google spell his last name three different ways, all wrongly - it's because you've chosen to believe Geocities without reference. Name dropping essentially never makes a person look smart, but given that you misattributed the quote, misspelled the misattribution, and managed even to miss the point of the phrase, well, all I can say is "damn, dude."
There's a big difference between "I have no limits" and "I am not ashamed of my work." If you can't sort that out, better to just not condescend to people in public.
A typo that removes four letters from a nine letter word? Seems unlikely to me. (Not so much to the anonymous coward who mimiced you, though, nor to the second AC who mimiced the first AC's inability to spell a word they were already looking at...)
Pretty much any mass replicator sells them. I go to CD-ROM 2 Go, personally. You might be surprised how many options are out there for cases - if you go to a dozen replicators, you're going to find 30 different kinds of case, with different features - cut wheels, closed-case ejection levers, clear back panelling, N-tray, fold up inserts (think children's popup books), all sorts of stuff. Google around for a while. It's fascinating what weirdness you can buy.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a game designed by committee. If there isn't a game designer at the lead of the team with a passion for their design, then this might as well be another cookie cutter grist mill EA waste of shelf space. (Except, of course, this also isn't likely to hit the shelves.) It's nice that open source is putting together the effort to show that they can do something like this, and that it can all be free, but games aren't like other engineering projects. They require passion, and I don't see that here.
No game of value here. Thank you, drive through.
You know, I'm inclined to stick up for you, because there's some douche tax nutjob badmouthing you.
At the same time, honestly, dude, come the fuck on, if you're going to pretend that porn isn't one of the biggest sources of spam? You've got a little credibility management to do yourself, here. Look at what places like the dating sites do - there are six really bad ones, and I bet you could count them off one by one if you tried, taking over yahoo groups, craigslist, and so on. Sure, it's a really small fraction of pornographers actually doing that, but you also don't see porn cutting ties to people driving the actual traffic. The industry as a whole could be putting in a lot more effort to fight it than it actually is.
I've got some camgirl sending email and instant messages to more than a dozen accounts every day, and she's sitting sort-of-pretty at the top of the biggest "amateur" webcam payment processor. There's no question of what she does, where she does it, but iWhoever.com (because I won't name names so as not to drive traffic - but you know exactly who I mean) doesn't do a god damned thing about it.
Back when I was an on-call tech dork in college, porn was responsible for more virii, box compromise, spam and keylogging than basically every other vertical but warez put together. Seriously, dude, it's like ten percent of sites out there doing this stuff. Saying that's a blanket statement is a bit kneejerk melodramatic. There are clean pornographers, sure - places like SilverCwhoever are absolutely spotless (again with the you know who I mean) - but the rate in porn is high enough that keeping a suspicious eyebrow isn't honestly that unwise.
Am I saying anyone deserves it? Generally speaking, no, and even if they did, it's the end customers, not the vendors, getting hurt. Still, at least be honest in looking at some of your competition - there are quite a few shady characters in your neighbor's shadows.
Please don't use slashdot to advertise your services while your competition is imploding. Even being in porn, you should be able to recognize how tacky that is. It's one thing to have it in your sig - lord knows I do too - but to stand there and pretend like you're making idle conversation while you namedrop stuff like that? Honestly.
You don't see me posting when some random hosting provider does something bad. There's making yourself visible, and there's being a vulture. Which side of the line do you feel like you're on today? (And since I'm now inclined to think that the cash register is all you can hear, do you think you made more customers than you lost by leaving that bad taste in people's mouths?)
Bullshit. An abstract computer chess simulation routed through the physical world mimics a reduced human brain in the same way that playing with legos is a reduced version of engineering a skyscraper. You've managed to fill a webpage with a bunch of blathersceit and big words. Way to go, jack. In the meantime, all you've really got is an Armitron driver. Why chess is even on that page is something of a mystery, since your software doesn't know how to play chess - it can't even make legal moves in any more significant frequency than dice.
Yes yes, clueless amateurs have been saying this for decades. Go sit at the back of the class with Minsky where you belong - you're replying to an article where something has been done by saying "this is a pipe dream and cannot be done." I'm reminded of the story of the Kitty Hawk newspaper reporter who was thrown into jail for fraud, claiming that a heavier than air machine had flown; when shown photographs, the police officer who'd made the arrest calmly remarked that they were obvious fakes, and that science forbode such a thing from happening.
Well, sir, all I can say is that I'm glad your kind aren't cops anymore.
That's one of more than a dozen known mechanisms, actually. There are several involved mechanisms with electricity alone - pulse amplitude, duration and frequency are all involved in the electrical system, and that's before you get into what the chemicals around them are doing. Chemicals are involved in the system too. Or did you think that cocaine was just a bunch of tiny batteries?
This is demonstrably false. Several classes of injury and disease that rob a previously functioning brain of its ability to think have literally nothing to do with its electrical system, something you'd know if you weren't a talentless hack also ran with neither education in the matter nor any form of degree. Go find out what happens in a mye
The brain isn't discrete, as the various parts of the brain operate distinctly from one another, at different speeds, using different mechanisms. The brain isn't a temporal mechanism, something which anyone with multiple sclerosis knows in a deeply tragic way. The brain is not, in fact, even a mechanism, since a mechanism has a definite design, and brains are grown (and differently, to boot.) People's brains are actually shaped differently, have different sized bits and pieces. Lots of the brain is specific purpose, but lots of it is general purpose, and the way that people handle many fundamental tasks is quite significantly different from individual to individual. Hell, not even all of us end up with cognition in the same lobe of the brain - that bit about "left brained" and "right brained" was based on actual science, something none of what you've said seems to be. If the brain was a mechanism, we'd all be working the same way.
So, not discrete, not temporal, and not a mechanism. I smell failure, and its name is MOBE2001.
Wait, it's discrete and it uses integrated clusters? Just what do you think discrete means?
You have a fantastically broken sense of scale. The important bit isn't the neuron count; it's the interconnect count. In the sub-oesophageal ganglia alone you're looking at billions of interconnects. If you think that would run on a desktop machine, especially after you just (failed to) read the document explaining how much horsepower it took to deal with a rat's neocortex, then I have a bridge to sell you.
Maybe you should wait until you've actually tried this stuff before you start preaching about what can or cannot be done on a PC.
No, it isn't. A swarm's behavior is relatively easily described as the emergent properties of about two dozen behavioral rules. Consider taking a time machine back to the mid 1980s, when we started figuring this stuff out, so that you won't be so far behind when you begin the necessary process of playing catch-up.
Both.
Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it's useless. The implications of a testable simulation of a biological brain are startling. Besides, the EPFL is a private institute (not everything with "federal" in the name is governmental,) and the vast bulk of this research was paid for by IBM.
Yeah, because if we've just now for the first time managed to simulate something that constitutes about half of one percent of a rat's brain, then surely we're in a position to implement a scaled-down human brain. Oh, and by the way, if it's scaled down, its results wouldn't be useless, or anything. Oh, and we all know how to scale a human brain down: it's in every textbook on "fantasy science for people with no ability to think through what they're saying," which they teach at the Zsa-zsa Gabor School of Diesel Mechanics.
In the meantime, we now have confirmation that our understanding of the basic principles of rat cerebral biology is complete enough that we can accurately simulate a significant and complex chunk of its brain in pure mathematics. I can't imagine how even a layman would be so dense as to think that useless. Maybe we should simulate you; lord knows we have the computing power for it.
Wait, let me get this straight. Something you suggest is too much to ask because other people don't know how to do it? Did it occur to you to just not say it, then? Or were you too busy feigning familiarity with something you know not even the most fundamental basic principles of? You suggested something so startlingly vague that I can't even begin to imagine what precisely you mean, and now you want it to be these other, actual productive scientist's faults that your fantasy doesn't make any sense?
What exactly would you suggest is the nature of a "scaled down human brain" ? Be precise.
Yes, because simulating half a percent of a rat brain is a much loftier and more vapid goal than some arbitrary reduction of the human brain, cough. By the by, if you had actually read anything about the research, you wouldn't be making comparisons to fleas, since the simulated rat brain is actually quite capable. But, don't let knowledge or famili
Incidentally, you do realize that the person you were replying to was being sarcastic, and pointing out the very thing you tried to point out to him, yes?
So, you're at least seven and a half years off.Yeah, I heard people like you say that about 32-bit, too. You're not correct. Just ten years ago people were insisting that four gigabytes of RAM was an obscene amount; why, even hard drives weren't that big, at the time, and some people weren't sure what the prefix giga- meant. Of course, if you tried to remind them that the RAM limit wasn't actually the driving factor in the addressing width of a machine, they'd laugh at you as if they knew something you didn't, call you naïve and call it a day.
Now, here we are in the same position. Lots of posers going on about how this is the final chip epoch in their lifetime, even though there are already 128-bit chips in video game consoles, and 512-bit proprietary chipsets all over video cards. Thing is, 8-bit lasted about 18 years, 16-bit lasted about 15, and 32-bit lasted 12. Hell, we're already 15 years into mass market advertising for 64-bit chips. Oh, but sure, this one's never going to be replaced in your lifetime, no, no. God forbid you admit that you might just not be able to imagine every single stitch of the future. Chip addressing widths are not set solely for RAM addressing. If they were, we wouldn't have things like PAE; we'd've just moved up. I bought my first 64-bit chip in 1993 - an Alpha EV4, which was already a year old on the market, and being sold as a consumer chipset. I ran my first copy of 64-bit Windows on it. And, going by the sound of things, there's a half decent chance that that machine is older than you are.Nothing's stalled. Microsoft announced more than a year ago that there would be no 32-bit version of Kernel 7, and they've been 64-bit for more than 15 years. You just don't know what you're talking about. Please stop pretending to be so well learned. It makes everyone listening to you believe things that are basically nonsense.
I love it when someone with a UID in the millions acts like they've been here a long time. Guess what, kid? This is how SlashDot has always been. If you don't like it, learn to spell Digg.
Not really. Of course, I don't actually see anything wrong with wanting to eliminate waste in the development cycle...
E3's real strength was in allowing the move from a dedicated amateur to a young professional; that's how I got my foot in the door, way back when. By closing their doors to professionals, they've lost that. In the meantime, they've been doing such an appalling job with their seminars for such a long time that the actual professionals had already by and on the large stopped going; they're at GDC, and I hear there's actually an increasing group at PAX, though I haven't been to the latter. E3 cut off the thing that made it not just dominant, but in fact valuable at all, and even were they to throw the doors wide open again and to bring their prices down to something that the kids can manage, they've lost the momentum they had.
Top that off with a ton of bad will: E3 started a for-pay "social networking" system to connect the kids to the pros, charged a hundred bucks a head, and then didn't invite anyone from that list to the new show, making the networking thing utterly useless (it was borderline fraud, in my opinion - there was never anything to the system other than access to a room at a show that nobody who bought in was even allowed to go to.)
There may be a show going on under the name E3, it may be run by the same people, and it may be in the same location, but the E3 that we all knew, and sort-of loved, is gone forever.
Because then other people would try to buy the domain and resell it to the poor sap as arbitrage, a thousand slashdotters would look at the page generating ad revenue, and so on. There's no reason to give the company name, and there are ample reasons not to.
With all due respect, it sounds like your job is fairly broken. (Don't feel bad - that's true of more than eighty percent of software houses, according to RAND.) I was lucky to have a decent environment as my first environment, and as such I knew going into my next several jobs when warning flags started showing up.Maybe, if you feel that way, it might be time to look for a better employer. Believe it or not, they're not all that way. I was once threatened with termination because my boss wanted work on a 4-dimensional 100-cell-edge to scale up to a 10k cell edge in 100x the work (100^4 vs 10000^4, laugh under your breath in 3, 2...) That said, not all bosses are like that. My boss isn't like that, and I'd like to think that I'm not (though were I, I wouldn't know it.)
If you were a boss in a company small enough that you could make Big Changes (tm), wouldn't you? And, don't you think other people like you in that situation would, too? Either you believe that the situation is so broken that success is impossible, or you believe nobody would try to fix things, or you accept that there are better jobs somewhere.
I've had better jobs. Chin up: you can too. Maybe it's time to go looking.
One of the other marks of incompetence is bandying about hollow platitudes in order to imply a defect where you don't know there actually to be one; it's called argumentum ad hominem, and you can't pass discretionary writing courses at most decent universities until you've learned not to do it. Surprisingly, just because I'm proud of my work doesn't mean it's crap. Just because you don't know why your code is crap doesn't mean I don't know why my code isn't crap. Go read a book on software process. My defect rates are below one every thousand lines of code (and frankly, I'd be shocked if you had a sense of whether or not that was any good, or even how a person might know that about their own code.)
Oh, and by the by? That second one you want is both non causa pro causa and internally inconsistent. Furthermore, it's absolute horseshit. The vast bulk of the talented programmers who I employ have absolutely no idea what their own skill level is - most of them think themselves average, and the remainder think themselves much better than they actually are. Most children understand that just because it sounds true doesn't mean that it necessarily is true; apparently you do not.
Just because you believe all programmers are incompetent doesn't mean that an engineer must prostrate themselves to be clueful. Grow up.
Oh, enough with the ad verecundiam nonsense. Goëthe was a fiction writer, and at no point did I hide my limitations. I said I wasn't ashamed of my code. Go play faux deep thinker with the other sixth grade level thinkers in the presidential cabinet.
Incidentally, it's actually a biblical quote, not Goëthe, so even though you're pretending that he ought to know something about humility or the observation of one's limitations, something that anyone familiar with Goëthe's actual history would never do, your ad verecundiam is false. Just because some internet site pulled it out of one of his books doesn't mean he's who coined the term; you might as well suggest that Heaven and Hell were Dante Alghieri's ideas.
Maybe you should try reading Goethe before quoting him again. There's a reason the first three sites that come up with your quote verbatim on google spell his last name three different ways, all wrongly - it's because you've chosen to believe Geocities without reference. Name dropping essentially never makes a person look smart, but given that you misattributed the quote, misspelled the misattribution, and managed even to miss the point of the phrase, well, all I can say is "damn, dude."
There's a big difference between "I have no limits" and "I am not ashamed of my work." If you can't sort that out, better to just not condescend to people in public.
Er, no. I thought he was asking whether other people felt the same way of their own code. As such, that's what I answered.
A typo that removes four letters from a nine letter word? Seems unlikely to me. (Not so much to the anonymous coward who mimiced you, though, nor to the second AC who mimiced the first AC's inability to spell a word they were already looking at...)
Pretty much any mass replicator sells them. I go to CD-ROM 2 Go, personally. You might be surprised how many options are out there for cases - if you go to a dozen replicators, you're going to find 30 different kinds of case, with different features - cut wheels, closed-case ejection levers, clear back panelling, N-tray, fold up inserts (think children's popup books), all sorts of stuff. Google around for a while. It's fascinating what weirdness you can buy.
It's just you.
Hey, man, d'you want to smoke some Labrador?