Copyright law was meant to garantee the author of a work control on the hows and how-muchs of its distribution. But please, don't let author control everybody intimate life!
First sale doctrine was introduced exactly to defeat book distributors with nosy tendencies and a thirst for undue control. If it looks like a sale, if it fells like a sale, if it sounds like a sale, then it is a sale, and nobody can tell you want you can and cannot do with your freshly bought chunk of materialistic freedom.
I can wait for the world to come to its sense and apply first-sale to software as well.
A tad heavy handed, but if everything else fails, you can always write your dream inliner yourself with Cil: http://manju.cs.berkeley.edu/cil/cil001.html
Then just make sure you go to fairtunes
and donate directly to the artists who created the music you're listening
to.
Now we can get the music and pay the artists directly, without needing a
middleman. We win - pay $4-5 for a CD. The artists win - they get $3
from the CD instead of little or nothing, as well as more people listening
to their music and hence coming to their gigs (where most make their
money).
But RIAA? Oh, you lose. We don't need you anymore.
To those who have replied to intermodal : You got your definition of an OS all wrong. An OS's job is to mediate between multiple program trying to access to same ressource. That could be the disk, the memory, the ports, the printers, etc. Msdos hardly qualifies, Win3.1 is twisted and Win95 is proper.
Msdos always just barely qualified as an operating system. It had some memory layout libraries and provided some basic disk access libraries, both of which could be ignored by programs. Win3.1 added mediation of screen estate space, of the printers and of the sound card. Those were the bad old days where the high levels function, which had fairly proper mediation, were running on a non-kernel. It was the Eric-the-half-a-bee of operating systems. Painful days indeed.
With its prehemptive scheduler, Win95 introduced clock-cycle mediation. It also brought proper memory mediation (memory "protection") For the first time, Windows was providing something more than a set of ignorable library functions, which qualified it as true OS.
You will indeed find Msdos code shipping with Win95 : it's upside down. It is part of the msoldapp compatibility layer that ran 16-bits apps, and it ran them under the new 32-bits kernel. This doesn't take anything away from Win95's OS-ness.
You are not the first one to point out that 200mhz and 266mhz fsb buses are misnomers. I fail to understand the significance that you attach to it.
Say I had two systems, the first one with one of these two-clock-side 133mhz fsb and there other with an honest-to-goodness 266mhz. Since you mention their speed would be identical, is there anyway I could tell them appart? If there is no distinguishing factor transpearing (to the programmer of the machine, say), why would anyone care to tell them appart?
Is there a difference in stability? In extensibility? Or is my question just silly?
Freenet works until the usage of freenet is blanketly outlawed. Freenet fails with the totalitarian argument : "you wouldn't be using encryption if you didn't have anything to hide".
This not only encrypt the content, but also maskarades as an innocent-looking, 100% normal, everyday happening communication.
The AI community seem to have focused on the big prize - trying to get right out to human-like intelligence through one trick poneys, like the over-publicized neutral networks. Whatever happened to the low hanging apples?
There is the first thing my Phd adviser taught me: If you cannot solve your problem, find a partial formulation, a simpler midstep. Try to solve that instead. If you still cannot, break it down some more and repeat until you can.
Amongst the promising bottom-up approaches, I noticed Bayesian Decision Networks, Common sence databases and perhaps the whole field of natural language processing. What are, according to you, the leading attempts at breaking the Hard AI problem into components?
The biggest engineering difference between software and hardware is that people find software errors acceptable, or even normal, whereas they have never reconciled themselves to, say, collapsing bridges or wings falling off of airplanes.
Or more to the point, building bridges is hardly ever self-though as a hobby. In comparison, software engineering is possibly doomed at forever rewriting ideas which are short, simple and wrong.
Also, since most software cannot be returned for refund, even if ridiculously defective, hardware shops have that extra highly non-trivial financial motivation for double checking their work before pushing it out.
Re:I too attended the conference
on
H2K2 Wrapup
·
· Score: 2
Mike Levine is a bad example for your point. The guy was obvisouly well-prepared and a good public animator, although I gather you didn't like his style. Rather, he was victim of one of the many shameful technical breakdown at the conference. Where he planned to begin his lecture with a video tape, the crew had him rable as best as he could, filling time for almost half an hour, while they figured out how to plug their vhs.
I think his point was clear : the CIA is a buch of incompetant and the mafia runs circles around them. They survive by milking the media with sensational bursts - something they are scary good at.
The farther you try to look, the longer the exposure. For instance, the deep field pictures that came back from Huble some years ago had a few days of exposure time. Of course, you better have a mighty solid research project to justify monopolising the telescope for such long times while other labs are waiting for their turn.
Powerful telescopes are built on top of high montains and away from air routes, but not for the reason you think. The field of view of telescope is so narrow, you don't have to worry about things crossing in the way. Rather, monitors lights on the tips of air planes would generate enough background lighting to screw an exposure. Those devices realy are that sensitive to light. In fact, telescope operators tend to play trick on neibouring villagers, telling them on which days they forgot their porch light on. The lights leave a tale tell background whiteness on the pictures.
I was on the McGill Aibo robot team in '99, 2000 and 2001. Every year we coded like mad apples all through the competition, days and night relaying each other. Thus, this is the first year I can post about it
Usualy the code is divided six ways : vision, mapping, odometry, decision making, real-time sensing and real-time motion commands.
The first three set us the real robots from the simulation. No mater are much simulation leaged proud themselves about dealing with noise - gaussian noise is nothing like what Mother Nature throws at you through real sensors : shadows, glare, obstruction, tripping, pixellation, ccd noise even the crowd. All those can throw your system off on a wim.
The decision making is as easy as your base three module is solid. Its architecture gets a bit tricky though. At McGill we eventually came up with a small bytecoded language to ease the job, and ran an interpreter an the dogs. Cool stuff.
The first year competing with the Aibo, walking was the bottleneck. Whoever could walk to the ball won. The year after, the walking had gotten better, and localisation became key. Every could walk to the ball, but only the better robots had tracked their position well enough to know which direction to kick it to when arriving. In 2001, speed and reliability of the whole made the cut.
And to answer your question : yes, the Aibo stubble over all the time. It makes a good shows when compared to the larger robots which are extra careful not to run into each other. Nobody wants to break anybodyelse's research baby.
Moreover, since the Aibos are equiped with gyroscopes, getting yourself up is only a mater of : if (gyro.vertical() > 45degs) { bring the legs in, bring the legs out }
The dogies have miniature ccd camera and couldn't really tell team appart. The large wheels robots, which have full sized frame grabber, can. Acting on the information is harder. Even if you see your teamate, you have to be able to mesure speed in order to complete a pass - and that adds a source of real-world noise to your system. Few teams manage to get it right, but it gets better every year.
They are certainly more than automated kickers. Better, it does wonderful thing for robot research and is alot of fun to participate in.
Easy, check out their job openning. C++ is first, then python/perl, then Java comes up along with SQL - the usual stuff what.
Along the years, C++ has become more proheminent on that page. Sugesting that, as they grew, they translated code from the nicer but slower languages to the harder but faster one.
What if we made pc-selection-mode, pc-bindings-mode and cua.el enabled by default? It would sure smooth the learning curve. It might even make emacs less a getho-ish, by enabling uninitiates to borrow their office mate's editor for a second.
Not much would break, but enough convensions conversion would be thrown off, it would become a problem by itself.
To be honest I'm not too clear on why it isn't happening. I for sure would like it to be : I could introduce people to Emacs without having to euphemisticaly describe its keybinding as "historicaly interesting"
It is an unfortunate side effect of distributed development. You cannot change the keybindings in Emacs withtout breaking thousands of Emacs modules written by as many programmers anywhere over the world.
It doesn't get done until a unique political entity voice a vision worthy enough to focus a mass of programmers.
Distributions take that role to a certain extend, and so do the desktop groups Gnome and KDE.
Then you realize the hydrogen you buy is synthetised from natural gaz. You can also make hydrogen out coal, by first converting the coal into electricty, but it isn't any cleaner.
Hydrogen won't be a source of energy until we find a way to pump the underground sources.
Fission isn't clean enough in the long term, and fussion isn't there yet. So it seems that humanity's energy cravings will have to be furfilled by fosil fuels for some times still.
I'm just glad that here in Quebec, there is enough waterfalls to provide all the renewable energy we need.
This is still a matter of open debate. People don't agree on the impact of radioactive wastes that have to be securely stored for ten thousand years. Those that answer 'little' or 'none' might be dangerously shortsighted. Those that answer 'dissastreous' and 'inaceptable' might be technophobe paranoiacs. Though call.
The audience of slashdot is composed of a fairly wide range of opinionated individual. Even thought each reader probably have a mostly consistent point of view, the slashdot pool as a whole as little chances to be.
Sony's hardware and music departments are mostly independent from each other - and often at odd.
I'm sure Sony Music isn't too happy Sony Hardware is selling consumer grade cd duplicators.
Indeed. For the optimistic I'll add, both Graduate schools I applied to, Rice and Brown, took pride in offering a communication-skill supplement to their students. Rice's Cain Project in particular was receiving hearthfelt praises from its students.
The practitioner of literate programming can be regarded as an essayist, whose main concern is with exposition and excellence of style. Such an author, with thesaurus in hand, chooses the names of variables carefully and explains what each variable means. He or she strives for a program that is comprehensible because its concepts have been introduced in an order that is best for human understanding, using a mixture of formal and informal methods that reinforce each other.
Donald Knuth. "Literate Programming (1984)" in Literate Programming. CSLI, 1992, pg. 99.
This urban myth (that people catch many diseases from public toilets) comes from the early days of the sexual revolution. Women needed an escuse for catching all those std's and conveniently blamed public toilets.
Slashdot Mirror
Copyright law was meant to garantee the author of a work control on the hows and how-muchs of its distribution. But please, don't let author control everybody intimate life!
First sale doctrine was introduced exactly to defeat book distributors with nosy tendencies and a thirst for undue control. If it looks like a sale, if it fells like a sale, if it sounds like a sale, then it is a sale, and nobody can tell you want you can and cannot do with your freshly bought chunk of materialistic freedom.
I can wait for the world to come to its sense and apply first-sale to software as well.
A tad heavy handed, but if everything else fails, you can always write your dream inliner yourself with Cil :
http://manju.cs.berkeley.edu/cil/cil001.html
Kramnik can only evaluate three moves per second
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim. -- E. W. Dijkstra
Kramnik doesn't evaluate per say, just as much as Fritz doesn't think per say. It doesn't prevent either from playing terrific chess.
Winning the contest is more about being a good programmer than about the particuliar programming languages.
But then again, you can assume a good programmer would pick a good programming language.
First step, kazaalite.com
Then just make sure you go to fairtunes and donate directly to the artists who created the music you're listening to.
Now we can get the music and pay the artists directly, without needing a middleman. We win - pay $4-5 for a CD. The artists win - they get $3 from the CD instead of little or nothing, as well as more people listening to their music and hence coming to their gigs (where most make their money).
But RIAA? Oh, you lose. We don't need you anymore.
- Preemptive multitasking of 32-bit Windows-based applications: Win95: Yes WinNt: Yes
- Runs 16-bit Windows-based applications: Win95: Yes WinNt:Yes
- Preemptive multitasking for 16-bit Windows-based applications Win95:No WinNt:Yes
The compatibility layer which ran old 16-bits apps (winoldapp) wasn't preemptive, but the main kernel certainly was.To those who have replied to intermodal : You got your definition of an OS all wrong. An OS's job is to mediate between multiple program trying to access to same ressource. That could be the disk, the memory, the ports, the printers, etc. Msdos hardly qualifies, Win3.1 is twisted and Win95 is proper.
Msdos always just barely qualified as an operating system. It had some memory layout libraries and provided some basic disk access libraries, both of which could be ignored by programs. Win3.1 added mediation of screen estate space, of the printers and of the sound card. Those were the bad old days where the high levels function, which had fairly proper mediation, were running on a non-kernel. It was the Eric-the-half-a-bee of operating systems. Painful days indeed.
With its prehemptive scheduler, Win95 introduced clock-cycle mediation. It also brought proper memory mediation (memory "protection") For the first time, Windows was providing something more than a set of ignorable library functions, which qualified it as true OS.
You will indeed find Msdos code shipping with Win95 : it's upside down. It is part of the msoldapp compatibility layer that ran 16-bits apps, and it ran them under the new 32-bits kernel. This doesn't take anything away from Win95's OS-ness.
You are not the first one to point out that 200mhz and 266mhz fsb buses are misnomers. I fail to understand the significance that you attach to it.
Say I had two systems, the first one with one of these two-clock-side 133mhz fsb and there other with an honest-to-goodness 266mhz. Since you mention their speed would be identical, is there anyway I could tell them appart? If there is no distinguishing factor transpearing (to the programmer of the machine, say), why would anyone care to tell them appart?
Is there a difference in stability? In extensibility? Or is my question just silly?
Freenet works until the usage of freenet is blanketly outlawed. Freenet fails with the totalitarian argument : "you wouldn't be using encryption if you didn't have anything to hide".
This not only encrypt the content, but also maskarades as an innocent-looking, 100% normal, everyday happening communication.
you'd just get another copy of the same thing
Not quite a refund, ain't it?
which is why people so avidly consume the crappy stuff
Which is why people came up with open source.
The AI community seem to have focused on the big prize - trying to get right out to human-like intelligence through one trick poneys, like the over-publicized neutral networks. Whatever happened to the low hanging apples?
There is the first thing my Phd adviser taught me: If you cannot solve your problem, find a partial formulation, a simpler midstep. Try to solve that instead. If you still cannot, break it down some more and repeat until you can.
Amongst the promising bottom-up approaches, I noticed Bayesian Decision Networks, Common sence databases and perhaps the whole field of natural language processing. What are, according to you, the leading attempts at breaking the Hard AI problem into components?
Or more to the point, building bridges is hardly ever self-though as a hobby. In comparison, software engineering is possibly doomed at forever rewriting ideas which are short, simple and wrong.
Also, since most software cannot be returned for refund, even if ridiculously defective, hardware shops have that extra highly non-trivial financial motivation for double checking their work before pushing it out.
There is also a marketing problem.
It's all detailed in my report
Mike Levine is a bad example for your point. The guy was obvisouly well-prepared and a good public animator, although I gather you didn't like his style. Rather, he was victim of one of the many shameful technical breakdown at the conference. Where he planned to begin his lecture with a video tape, the crew had him rable as best as he could, filling time for almost half an hour, while they figured out how to plug their vhs.
I think his point was clear : the CIA is a buch of incompetant and the mafia runs circles around them. They survive by milking the media with sensational bursts - something they are scary good at.
The farther you try to look, the longer the exposure. For instance, the deep field pictures that came back from Huble some years ago had a few days of exposure time. Of course, you better have a mighty solid research project to justify monopolising the telescope for such long times while other labs are waiting for their turn.
Powerful telescopes are built on top of high montains and away from air routes, but not for the reason you think. The field of view of telescope is so narrow, you don't have to worry about things crossing in the way. Rather, monitors lights on the tips of air planes would generate enough background lighting to screw an exposure. Those devices realy are that sensitive to light. In fact, telescope operators tend to play trick on neibouring villagers, telling them on which days they forgot their porch light on. The lights leave a tale tell background whiteness on the pictures.
Cd drives have a very mild notion of their absolute position along the disk. I bet this drive has an extra sensor for angular position on the spindle.
I was on the McGill Aibo robot team in '99, 2000 and 2001. Every year we coded like mad apples all through the competition, days and night relaying each other. Thus, this is the first year I can post about it
Usualy the code is divided six ways : vision, mapping, odometry, decision making, real-time sensing and real-time motion commands.
The first three set us the real robots from the simulation. No mater are much simulation leaged proud themselves about dealing with noise - gaussian noise is nothing like what Mother Nature throws at you through real sensors : shadows, glare, obstruction, tripping, pixellation, ccd noise even the crowd. All those can throw your system off on a wim.
The decision making is as easy as your base three module is solid. Its architecture gets a bit tricky though. At McGill we eventually came up with a small bytecoded language to ease the job, and ran an interpreter an the dogs. Cool stuff.
The first year competing with the Aibo, walking was the bottleneck. Whoever could walk to the ball won. The year after, the walking had gotten better, and localisation became key. Every could walk to the ball, but only the better robots had tracked their position well enough to know which direction to kick it to when arriving. In 2001, speed and reliability of the whole made the cut.
And to answer your question : yes, the Aibo stubble over all the time. It makes a good shows when compared to the larger robots which are extra careful not to run into each other. Nobody wants to break anybodyelse's research baby.
Moreover, since the Aibos are equiped with gyroscopes, getting yourself up is only a mater of : if (gyro.vertical() > 45degs) { bring the legs in, bring the legs out }
The dogies have miniature ccd camera and couldn't really tell team appart. The large wheels robots, which have full sized frame grabber, can. Acting on the information is harder. Even if you see your teamate, you have to be able to mesure speed in order to complete a pass - and that adds a source of real-world noise to your system. Few teams manage to get it right, but it gets better every year.
They are certainly more than automated kickers. Better, it does wonderful thing for robot research and is alot of fun to participate in.
Easy, check out their job openning. C++ is first, then python/perl, then Java comes up along with SQL - the usual stuff what.
Along the years, C++ has become more proheminent on that page. Sugesting that, as they grew, they translated code from the nicer but slower languages to the harder but faster one.
What if we made pc-selection-mode, pc-bindings-mode and cua.el enabled by default? It would sure smooth the learning curve. It might even make emacs less a getho-ish, by enabling uninitiates to borrow their office mate's editor for a second.
Not much would break, but enough convensions conversion would be thrown off, it would become a problem by itself.
To be honest I'm not too clear on why it isn't happening. I for sure would like it to be : I could introduce people to Emacs without having to euphemisticaly describe its keybinding as "historicaly interesting"
It is an unfortunate side effect of distributed development. You cannot change the keybindings in Emacs withtout breaking thousands of Emacs modules written by as many programmers anywhere over the world.
It doesn't get done until a unique political entity voice a vision worthy enough to focus a mass of programmers.
Distributions take that role to a certain extend, and so do the desktop groups Gnome and KDE.
Then you realize the hydrogen you buy is synthetised from natural gaz. You can also make hydrogen out coal, by first converting the coal into electricty, but it isn't any cleaner.
Hydrogen won't be a source of energy until we find a way to pump the underground sources.
Fission isn't clean enough in the long term, and fussion isn't there yet. So it seems that humanity's energy cravings will have to be furfilled by fosil fuels for some times still.
I'm just glad that here in Quebec, there is enough waterfalls to provide all the renewable energy we need.
This is still a matter of open debate. People don't agree on the impact of radioactive wastes that have to be securely stored for ten thousand years. Those that answer 'little' or 'none' might be dangerously shortsighted. Those that answer 'dissastreous' and 'inaceptable' might be technophobe paranoiacs. Though call.
The audience of slashdot is composed of a fairly wide range of opinionated individual. Even thought each reader probably have a mostly consistent point of view, the slashdot pool as a whole as little chances to be.
I'm sure Sony Music isn't too happy Sony Hardware is selling consumer grade cd duplicators.
There is hope of more Knuth!
The practitioner of literate programming can be regarded as an essayist, whose main concern is with exposition and excellence of style. Such an author, with thesaurus in hand, chooses the names of variables carefully and explains what each variable means. He or she strives for a program that is comprehensible because its concepts have been introduced in an order that is best for human understanding, using a mixture of formal and informal methods that reinforce each other. Donald Knuth. "Literate Programming (1984)" in Literate Programming. CSLI, 1992, pg. 99.
This urban myth (that people catch many diseases from public toilets) comes from the early days of the sexual revolution. Women needed an escuse for catching all those std's and conveniently blamed public toilets.