What about weight and power consumption? I know a lot of people use a laptop as a desktop replacement - BUT if they didn't also want portability they would have saved $$$ and bought a desktop. Is it really worth the extra weight and loss of battery run time to add another internal drive?
37 million AUD ($27 million US) would be a huge investment if it came out of my bank account (which would then be very much overdrawn). Coming from a company the size of Intel, it is NOT a huge investment in a new technology.
With all the American telecom and networking firms outsourcing development to China, there's no need for the Chinese government to probe US government and commercial sites from outside the enterprise firewall.
There used to be a bar (on North High St.) near OSU called "The Library". That way undergrads could tell their folks - "I spent most of the evening at The Library last night".
I just got a (cheap) Zaurus 5500. I've got a wireless router for my wife's laptop, but didn't want to use WPA and the (much) less secure WEP on the same network. So I connected a cheap wireless B PCI card to one of my PC's. Set-up the wireless card in ad-hoc mode on a different channel (well away from the G channel). I then fire-walled all ports on the card except one, and connected and rigged a proxy server listening on that port. I then set up the proxy to NOT access the local LAN.
Bottom line - I can use the Zaurus to access the Web from anywhere in (and around) the house, but my LAN is inaccessible via the wireless B network.
Time to buy a TON of Google! This time is REALLY different! I'm pouring everthing into Google! Just as soon as I finish selling all of these tulip bulbs...
Looked at the spec. quickly. Did not see any support for authentication. It would be useful to be able to provide a subscription service to selected users with some degree of security. Did I miss this in the spec. (or previous versions)? I admit I'm somewhat new to RSS.
A lot of American schools have eliminated drivers ed. It would be useful for a driving simulator (not racing) that is designed to help new drivers with both normal driving (merging, heavy traffic, navigation) and emergency situations (accident avoidance, skids, bad weather, etc).
That's a lot of money to play Halo. My resident expert on consoles (my daughter) tells me that people buy the Xbox primarily for the Halo series of games. Also, that the current incarnation of the machine has serious stability / quality problems.
Can't wait till Microsoft sues HP (purchased Compaq, which purchased DEC) for the VT100 terminals, Ken Arnold (developed curses package), IBM for TSO, and Dan Bricklin for VisiCalc. Should be interesting.
Let me respond to some of the comments in this thread:
First off, I'm not an AI researcher nor do I play one on TV. I've been to a few AI conferences including IJCAI. I've worked on speech recognition projects and a couple of rule based systems.
In the 80's, Japanese industry pushed by MITI poured hundreds of millions (perhaps billions) of dollars into the Fifth Generation project. Apart from a few commercial applications of fuzzy logic - they did not get much to show for their investment. To date this is the most spectacular failure of AI. But not the only one.
In the nineties, there was an effort to develop systems that had could 'understand' the natural world - for instance understand 'common-sense' physics. Many of these projects ran for years - but did achieve much of anything.
I worked on some systems that were rule based. They met their design objectives. But rule-based systems tend to be a real pain to maintain. Get enough rules for the system to be 'interesting' and it becomes a nightmare to debug and to system test. A number of commercial rule based systems have been replaced using more traditional (modeling) techniques.
There have been some notable successes - but as I mentioned - mostly due to Moore's law. Playing chess was considered a classic AI problem. And excellent world class chess playing programs exist. The best of these programs run on specialized hardware with a large number of very fast processors. Clever programming helps trim the search tree - but make no mistake - this is more a testament to brute force + fast parallel processing, than to AI software that 'understands' chess.
Speech recognition and automatic language translation have benefited from fast processors and elegant pattern matching techniques. But these systems have no understanding of context, which quickly becomes apparent in the event of any sort of ambiguity.
But back to game AI. In most FPS games, the 'AI' is something like the following:
- Guard A has his back to you and is talking to guard B - You blast guard B's head off with a rocket launcher - Guard A looks around, says "What was that?" Searches around for a few minutes. - Finally guard A says "Oh, well I guess it was nothing", turns his back on you and continues his conversation with the now dead guard B
My daughter plays with popular and charming "Animal Crossing" game. Clever programming, cute graphic rendering, a big state table, and a large repertoire of possible text responses helps bring the characters to "life". At least until the game is played for a while. At the point that the characters start repeating themselves, the illusion of 'intelligence' disappears.
One of my former bosses once said "If at first you don't succeed - redefine 'success'". AI has not 'succeeded' because it's a REALLY REALLY HARD set of problems. Let's not kid ourselves by lowering the bar.
What effect do Slashdot readers think offshoring is having on the industry?
About the same effect that Dutch Elm Disease had on Elm trees.
Between H1B's and outsourcing, the industry has decimated the software engineering profession. Many of my former co-workers have bailed out after months and even years of unemployment. And these were not "Learn Web Programming in 21 Days" people - these were people with Masters degrees (or higher) in CS or EE and years of experience. In many cases they've gone back to school and have started new careers and they're not coming back. A the same time US college students and high school students do not regard software development as a good career. Enrollment is CS / EE degree programs in the US have dropped dramatically.
I'm already seeing articles about 'problems' with outsourcing in trade journals. I'm also seeing articles from industry groups about lomming 'shortages'; which always end up blaming the US 'educational system'. Makes me want to whack these people with a large clue-by-four.
When I worked at Tandem in Austin, all systems were built, run through a complete set of diagnostics and soak testing before shipment. The systems were designed as fault-tolerant and sold mostly to the telecom industry. The goal was zero defects and to NEVER ship a DOA system. Tandem's systems were expensive, and the company competed on quality, not on price. Need I add that Tandem no longer exists as an independent company. (Bought by Compaq, which was bought by HP).
True artificial intelligence is only ten years away - and has been for the past three decades. AI has been a huge disappointment. Most 'AI' problems that have been solved have been solved via brute force combined with the advance of Moore's law. From what I've seen of game 'AI' - it's more a mimicing of intelligence and not very impressive mimicing at that (not much more so than the 'Eliza' class programs of the 70's).
Slashdot Mirror
humblecoder writes:
I would imagine that those at the RIAA are all child-less, because they have no common sense when it comes to these things.
I imagine that those in the RIAA are childless cause "I work for the RIAA" is not exactly a hot pick up line.
"Thank you for riding with Johnny Cab". Can't wait for my next vacation.
What about weight and power consumption? I know a lot of people use a laptop as a desktop replacement - BUT if they didn't also want portability they would have saved $$$ and bought a desktop. Is it really worth the extra weight and loss of battery run time to add another internal drive?
37 million AUD ($27 million US) would be a huge investment if it came out of my bank account (which would then be very much overdrawn). Coming from a company the size of Intel, it is NOT a huge investment in a new technology.
With all the American telecom and networking firms outsourcing development to China, there's no need for the Chinese government to probe US government and commercial sites from outside the enterprise firewall.
There used to be a bar (on North High St.) near OSU called "The Library". That way undergrads could tell their folks - "I spent most of the evening at The Library last night".
When UT decides to get rid of that musty old Gutenberg bible - I'd be willing to take it off their hands. Heck, I'll even pay shipping.
Don't get eaten by a grue!
It's like a maze of twisty tunnels all alike.
I just got a (cheap) Zaurus 5500. I've got a wireless router for my wife's laptop, but didn't want to use WPA and the (much) less secure WEP on the same network. So I connected a cheap wireless B PCI card to one of my PC's. Set-up the wireless card in ad-hoc mode on a different channel (well away from the G channel). I then fire-walled all ports on the card except one, and connected and rigged a proxy server listening on that port. I then set up the proxy to NOT access the local LAN.
Bottom line - I can use the Zaurus to access the Web from anywhere in (and around) the house, but my LAN is inaccessible via the wireless B network.
Mine's one point twenty-one jigawatts.
Yeah, at least till the North Koreans want their plutonium back.
Ingolfke writes:
The Russian scientists believe the increasei n global temperature is due to sun spot activities, not human activities...
All left thinking people know that global warming, war, famine, pestil#########pollution, and zits are all caused by the Bush administration.
Time to buy a TON of Google! This time is REALLY different! I'm pouring everthing into Google! Just as soon as I finish selling all of these tulip bulbs ...
Looked at the spec. quickly. Did not see any support for authentication. It would be useful to be able to provide a subscription service to selected users with some degree of security. Did I miss this in the spec. (or previous versions)? I admit I'm somewhat new to RSS.
A lot of American schools have eliminated drivers ed. It would be useful for a driving simulator (not racing) that is designed to help new drivers with both normal driving (merging, heavy traffic, navigation) and emergency situations (accident avoidance, skids, bad weather, etc).
The Wilds in Cumberland, OH has 10,000 acres with African, Asian, and North American animals.
I suppose you could sell it in Australia if you marketed it under the name 'Carnimite'.
They've been serving this stuff in school lunch rooms across the nation for decades! Usually covered with cold greasy brown gravy.
That's a lot of money to play Halo. My resident expert on consoles (my daughter) tells me that people buy the Xbox primarily for the Halo series of games. Also, that the current incarnation of the machine has serious stability / quality problems.
Can't wait till Microsoft sues HP (purchased Compaq, which purchased DEC) for the VT100 terminals, Ken Arnold (developed curses package), IBM for TSO, and Dan Bricklin for VisiCalc. Should be interesting.
+----------+
| Amazing! |
+----------+
Let me respond to some of the comments in this thread:
First off, I'm not an AI researcher nor do I play one on TV. I've been to a few AI conferences including IJCAI. I've worked on speech recognition projects and a couple of rule based systems.
In the 80's, Japanese industry pushed by MITI poured hundreds of millions (perhaps billions) of dollars into the Fifth Generation project. Apart from a few commercial applications of fuzzy logic - they did not get much to show for their investment. To date this is the most spectacular failure of AI. But not the only one.
In the nineties, there was an effort to develop systems that had could 'understand' the natural world - for instance understand 'common-sense' physics. Many of these projects ran for years - but did achieve much of anything.
I worked on some systems that were rule based. They met their design objectives. But rule-based systems tend to be a real pain to maintain. Get enough rules for the system to be 'interesting' and it becomes a nightmare to debug and to system test. A number of commercial rule based systems have been replaced using more traditional (modeling) techniques.
There have been some notable successes - but as I mentioned - mostly due to Moore's law. Playing chess was considered a classic AI problem. And excellent world class chess playing programs exist. The best of these programs run on specialized hardware with a large number of very fast processors. Clever programming helps trim the search tree - but make no mistake - this is more a testament to brute force + fast parallel processing, than to AI software that 'understands' chess.
Speech recognition and automatic language translation have benefited from fast processors and elegant pattern matching techniques. But these systems have no understanding of context, which quickly becomes apparent in the event of any sort of ambiguity.
But back to game AI. In most FPS games, the 'AI' is something like the following:
- Guard A has his back to you and is talking to guard B
- You blast guard B's head off with a rocket launcher
- Guard A looks around, says "What was that?" Searches around for a few minutes.
- Finally guard A says "Oh, well I guess it was nothing", turns his back on you and continues his conversation with the now dead guard B
My daughter plays with popular and charming "Animal Crossing" game. Clever programming, cute graphic rendering, a big state table, and a large repertoire of possible text responses helps bring the characters to "life". At least until the game is played for a while. At the point that the characters start repeating themselves, the illusion of 'intelligence' disappears.
One of my former bosses once said "If at first you don't succeed - redefine 'success'". AI has not 'succeeded' because it's a REALLY REALLY HARD set of problems. Let's not kid ourselves by lowering the bar.
What effect do Slashdot readers think offshoring is having on the industry?
About the same effect that Dutch Elm Disease had on Elm trees.
Between H1B's and outsourcing, the industry has decimated the software engineering profession. Many of my former co-workers have bailed out after months and even years of unemployment. And these were not "Learn Web Programming in 21 Days" people - these were people with Masters degrees (or higher) in CS or EE and years of experience. In many cases they've gone back to school and have started new careers and they're not coming back. A the same time US college students and high school students do not regard software development as a good career. Enrollment is CS / EE degree programs in the US have dropped dramatically.
I'm already seeing articles about 'problems' with outsourcing in trade journals. I'm also seeing articles from industry groups about lomming 'shortages'; which always end up blaming the US 'educational system'. Makes me want to whack these people with a large clue-by-four.
When I worked at Tandem in Austin, all systems were built, run through a complete set of diagnostics and soak testing before shipment. The systems were designed as fault-tolerant and sold mostly to the telecom industry. The goal was zero defects and to NEVER ship a DOA system. Tandem's systems were expensive, and the company competed on quality, not on price. Need I add that Tandem no longer exists as an independent company. (Bought by Compaq, which was bought by HP).
True artificial intelligence is only ten years away - and has been for the past three decades. AI has been a huge disappointment. Most 'AI' problems that have been solved have been solved via brute force combined with the advance of Moore's law. From what I've seen of game 'AI' - it's more a mimicing of intelligence and not very impressive mimicing at that (not much more so than the 'Eliza' class programs of the 70's).
That's my 2 cents - flame away.