Jean Paul Sartre dictates that whole basis for Existentialism is the notion of "Existence before Essence." I suppose this carries over in software engineering.
Linux came out long before anyone had a use for it.
And they say well-rounded is bad.:P
Don't let mourning lead to hatred
on
More WTC News
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This is probably the worst time to bring this up, but not every single American within this country is Christian. The whole notion of this nation was established upon the grounds of both religious and ethnic tolerance. There are so many other people out there today who are just as saddened as any Christian. New York has the highest population of JEWISH people in the world.
As an American, I plan to give blood in aid of the victims in New York. I cried when I saw the two towers collapse yesterday. But I quite simply refuse to become another victim of American bigotry just because I'm half arab, and was raised a muslim. I am NOT going to be part of the crowd that grows fearful of every attendant at 7-Eleven, or every taxi-cab driver in New York or Los Angeles.
Part of the reason that the World Trade Centers were bombed is because Terrorists fail to realize that not everyone in America are soldiers. They feel that the acts of any government justify violence against its citizens.
By having fear and suspicion in anyone who is different, our mentality is no different than that of a terrorist. And if we as a people are violent towards others uninvolved that live in this country, we are no worse than the terrorists themselves.
So please... please realize America not as just one nation, but one nation of separate, different people united. So, as Christians, Jews, Muslims, anyone... pray. For those that do not pray, simply hope. Just keep your hatred saved for the perpitrators, not those who have no choice on their heritage. Or quite simply, don't hate at all...
Okay, I'm done with what I have to say... Feel free to reply to me and flame me to your heart's content.
And when will PERL get the SSE extentions that I've been waiting for forever? Hot damn! I've been waiting years to be able to increment 4 program counters at one time.:P
Get real. SSE, 3dnow and MMX are hacks. Until any of these happens to entirely replace the functions of x87 FPU, the true compiler advantages of SSE is useless..
That is, of course, you equate how fast Quake runs on a P4 to how many Queries you have on your server running at one time, or how much longer until you find out if the Mersenne number you're testing is prime.
I plan to put one of those banners on my site, after I blow it up about 500 percent and make it in BMP format so that the banner is a five meg download. That'll show those pesky broadband people!:P
So, if it looks smart, then it must be smart? I honestly don't think so.
The marvel of the human brain is the fact that it's working massively in parallel. How many neurons exist with our brain again? And how large of a machine is this HAL that they're building?
Yes, they're working on making a machine that's gramatically correct, can learn things such as "Tables have four legs" and stuff like that. But what kind of reasoning ability will HAL be endowed with?
Ever read the short story "FeatherTop?" This is what I'm reminded of. A pumpkin blown up with smoke, that can talk about petty things to the rich.
How can a machine truly reason about objects it cannot experience or even see? That's the same as locking a person in a dark room with a flashlight, and telling them about the world outside.
I think that it's admirable that they're striving for a personal assistant that can book tickets and reserve hotel rooms. I just don't think that can compare to writing about things such as love, jealousy and deceit. Or creating theories about existance and God.
It's just such a shame that people confuse the bright sparks of humanity and ingenuity with the mudane tasks such as work that we're forced to do everyday.
The goal of these projects is to make people less like machines, not machines more like people. If machines can eventually do every single mudane task, then people are left to think and discover, instead of do action after mechanical, boring action over and over again.
I do think that a machine will eventually be able to understand everything a human can. But this will happen only when a machine can perceive everything a human can, and when a machine is structured the same way a human is.
Until then, every attempt at passing the Turing Test will fail after the human types to the machine (for long enough). A person will simply ask something obscure enough that the machine will not have the information entered into its database, while the human will simply know from experience.
It's just a shame to think that a person's mind is simply a sum of facts established over the course of a lifetime. Now how mechanical does that sound?
Even though Intel says they don't want you to use VIA, they do.
Intel wants people to use Via chipsets, even if they don't claim that they do. Right now, market share for the Pentium 4 is constantly losing ground to the Athlon, partially due to the fact that the memory / motherboard solutions are expensive, without any hope of redemption within the near future.
Why? The Rambus deal, which doesn't expire until 2002! Once the contract between Intel and Rambus expires, Intel is going to pull out all stops on making DDR motherboards. But they can't do that just yet.
The solution? Enter VIA. If there's no licensing from Intel, there's no fear of retaliation from Rambus (namely backing out of all the stock options Intel has in them). All Intel is doing is clearly telling Rambus that they aren't abandoning them... yes.
Honestly, what does Intel care? Chipsets aren't Intel's bread and butter, processors are. Why does Intel make chipsets? To assure that third party manufacturers don't cripple board speeds.
They don't mind VIA all that much. Consider the alternative .
Yes, there might be life. There might be signs of biological life on a planet that's far away. But what's the point? The only confirmed life on other planets far away will be from "Intellegent Life" (Meaning they have access to radios). And even if communication is possible, there's a latency of 45 years just to say hello back and forth.
"Hi" (45yrs)
"Hi" (90yrs)
"How are you?" (135yrs)
"We're fine on this planet, how are you?" (180yrs)
"We're doing okay. Too bad the person who
originally sent you this message is dead now." (225yrs)
Our condolences. (270yrs)
Looking for life this way is not only difficult, but nearly futile. Anything lower than 20th century technology on their side and they won't hear us. Anything greater than 21st technology and chances are they'll find us a LOT sooner than we'll find them.
That, and they'll be using something other than radio waves to communicate. Maybe I'm just dreaming.
Either that, or bend space just to send an alien over here to bitchslap us and tell us how silly we are.
Everyone has always complained that the Quake games seriously lack the gameplay in order to make it worth playing over and over.
In that light, here is what I think id should do:
Make a bunch of maps using the doom engine.
Add in one more weapon to the Doom2 engine (How about a triple shotgun, to go on that 1-2-3 punch?)
Make a couple of monsters out of sprites, and make their AI crummy.
Instead of midi covers of Alice in Chains, do FM synth versions of "Baby One More Time" and "Genie in a Bottle"
Include a picture of Carmack in the game box, with a shirt that says, "Shag off: I can do what I like."
Call this game Quake 4 just to screw with people's heads. Then come out with this Über-engine called Doom 3, and sell it to everyone.
Of course, no mention of any of the other linux's, Solaris, FreeBSD also not being affected by the virus.
TCP/MS is a scare tactic. Microsoft may be able to leverage the protocol into 100 million houses, but will they be able to pull the plug on more than half of the world's web sites?
And would Cisco play an active part in helping them? I doubt it. Some companies suckle milk from their consumers. Others take pride in ripping their bellies open and moving onto the next carcass.
After sifting through the overcommented, underhabitated (at least for intellegent life) areas of Slashdot, Luke and CmdrKnbi sped away from contents.pl, across the surface of the search.pl riding Larry Wall's traslation routines. CmdrKnbi had Luke stop at the edge of the code block, overlooking the vast query ?topic=perl.
"The Perl comments section," said CmdrKnbi. "You will never find a more wretched hive of trolls and Python aficionados. We must be cautious."
The article itself was muddled. Looks like the student drew a line from the midpoint of each of the vertices... Yeah, good. Rather than drawing lines perpendicular to each of the segments of the triangle (negative reciprocal of the slope of each line), he simply took the number's reciprocal.
Did all this kid simply figure out was that the three lines met at a point? What is the genius of that? Nothing in comparison to the two students a couple years back that proved how to geometrically split a line into segments of five.
I've love to see the actual journal article when it comes out. I think they're just staking this point within the triangle as theirs just to take away the credit from someone who actually finds a relevant use for this point.
Doing this in threespace on the other hand... That might be interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux came out long before anyone had a use for it.
And they say well-rounded is bad. :P
As an American, I plan to give blood in aid of the victims in New York. I cried when I saw the two towers collapse yesterday. But I quite simply refuse to become another victim of American bigotry just because I'm half arab, and was raised a muslim. I am NOT going to be part of the crowd that grows fearful of every attendant at 7-Eleven, or every taxi-cab driver in New York or Los Angeles.
Part of the reason that the World Trade Centers were bombed is because Terrorists fail to realize that not everyone in America are soldiers. They feel that the acts of any government justify violence against its citizens.
By having fear and suspicion in anyone who is different, our mentality is no different than that of a terrorist. And if we as a people are violent towards others uninvolved that live in this country, we are no worse than the terrorists themselves.
So please... please realize America not as just one nation, but one nation of separate, different people united. So, as Christians, Jews, Muslims, anyone... pray. For those that do not pray, simply hope. Just keep your hatred saved for the perpitrators, not those who have no choice on their heritage. Or quite simply, don't hate at all...
Okay, I'm done with what I have to say... Feel free to reply to me and flame me to your heart's content.
Mark El-Wakil
seventhcycle@yahoo.com
Get real. SSE, 3dnow and MMX are hacks. Until any of these happens to entirely replace the functions of x87 FPU, the true compiler advantages of SSE is useless..
That is, of course, you equate how fast Quake runs on a P4 to how many Queries you have on your server running at one time, or how much longer until you find out if the Mersenne number you're testing is prime.
I plan to put one of those banners on my site, after I blow it up about 500 percent and make it in BMP format so that the banner is a five meg download. That'll show those pesky broadband people! :P
Oh shit, there goes the planet.
The marvel of the human brain is the fact that it's working massively in parallel. How many neurons exist with our brain again? And how large of a machine is this HAL that they're building?
Yes, they're working on making a machine that's gramatically correct, can learn things such as "Tables have four legs" and stuff like that. But what kind of reasoning ability will HAL be endowed with?
Ever read the short story "FeatherTop?" This is what I'm reminded of. A pumpkin blown up with smoke, that can talk about petty things to the rich.
How can a machine truly reason about objects it cannot experience or even see? That's the same as locking a person in a dark room with a flashlight, and telling them about the world outside.
I think that it's admirable that they're striving for a personal assistant that can book tickets and reserve hotel rooms. I just don't think that can compare to writing about things such as love, jealousy and deceit. Or creating theories about existance and God.
It's just such a shame that people confuse the bright sparks of humanity and ingenuity with the mudane tasks such as work that we're forced to do everyday.
The goal of these projects is to make people less like machines, not machines more like people. If machines can eventually do every single mudane task, then people are left to think and discover, instead of do action after mechanical, boring action over and over again. I do think that a machine will eventually be able to understand everything a human can. But this will happen only when a machine can perceive everything a human can, and when a machine is structured the same way a human is.
Until then, every attempt at passing the Turing Test will fail after the human types to the machine (for long enough). A person will simply ask something obscure enough that the machine will not have the information entered into its database, while the human will simply know from experience.
It's just a shame to think that a person's mind is simply a sum of facts established over the course of a lifetime. Now how mechanical does that sound?
Even though Intel says they don't want you to use VIA, they do. Intel wants people to use Via chipsets, even if they don't claim that they do. Right now, market share for the Pentium 4 is constantly losing ground to the Athlon, partially due to the fact that the memory / motherboard solutions are expensive, without any hope of redemption within the near future.
Why? The Rambus deal, which doesn't expire until 2002! Once the contract between Intel and Rambus expires, Intel is going to pull out all stops on making DDR motherboards. But they can't do that just yet.
The solution? Enter VIA. If there's no licensing from Intel, there's no fear of retaliation from Rambus (namely backing out of all the stock options Intel has in them). All Intel is doing is clearly telling Rambus that they aren't abandoning them... yes.
Honestly, what does Intel care? Chipsets aren't Intel's bread and butter, processors are. Why does Intel make chipsets? To assure that third party manufacturers don't cripple board speeds.
They don't mind VIA all that much. Consider the alternative .
"Hi" (45yrs)
"Hi" (90yrs)
"How are you?" (135yrs)
"We're fine on this planet, how are you?" (180yrs)
"We're doing okay. Too bad the person who originally sent you this message is dead now." (225yrs)
Our condolences. (270yrs)
Looking for life this way is not only difficult, but nearly futile. Anything lower than 20th century technology on their side and they won't hear us. Anything greater than 21st technology and chances are they'll find us a LOT sooner than we'll find them.
That, and they'll be using something other than radio waves to communicate. Maybe I'm just dreaming.
Either that, or bend space just to send an alien over here to bitchslap us and tell us how silly we are.
Call this game Quake 4 just to screw with people's heads. Then come out with this Über-engine called Doom 3, and sell it to everyone.
HAH!
Every time some l33t d00d decides to make another iteration on the same web worm concept, companies like Linux-Mandrake can herald it as a victory:
ILOVEYOU virus doesn't work in Mandrake
Of course, no mention of any of the other linux's, Solaris, FreeBSD also not being affected by the virus.
TCP/MS is a scare tactic. Microsoft may be able to leverage the protocol into 100 million houses, but will they be able to pull the plug on more than half of the world's web sites?
And would Cisco play an active part in helping them? I doubt it. Some companies suckle milk from their consumers. Others take pride in ripping their bellies open and moving onto the next carcass.
"The Perl comments section," said CmdrKnbi. "You will never find a more wretched hive of trolls and Python aficionados. We must be cautious."
Ugh, that's the kind of password that an idiot president would have.
The article itself was muddled. Looks like the student drew a line from the midpoint of each of the vertices... Yeah, good. Rather than drawing lines perpendicular to each of the segments of the triangle (negative reciprocal of the slope of each line), he simply took the number's reciprocal. Did all this kid simply figure out was that the three lines met at a point? What is the genius of that? Nothing in comparison to the two students a couple years back that proved how to geometrically split a line into segments of five. I've love to see the actual journal article when it comes out. I think they're just staking this point within the triangle as theirs just to take away the credit from someone who actually finds a relevant use for this point. Doing this in threespace on the other hand... That might be interesting.