On this front, a comment from Arthur 'Bomber' Harris about WWII. The army were about to go into Bruges (I think). Harris had a choice between letting the army go in and take the city with serious losses, or pulverising it from the air and killing its civilians. Harris went for the airstrike, and the army was through in 24 hours with minimal losses. Was it right or wrong? Depends on your PoV. But it meant that the British could roll over the Germans and keep on going, instead of getting stuck in a battle of attrition.
What ppl seem to have missed out on, is that the point of war is to WIN! That's what America missed out on in Vietnam - instead of a full-on steamroller, they sent their men over in dribs and drabs, and duly got their butts kicked. The Kosovo forces went in without enough ppl and without the political backing to WIN - if Michael Rose had had his way, he'd have kicked ass and taken names on anyone crossing them, as he's made quite clear in interviews. The Gulf - they knew what they had to do, they had more and better resources than the Iraqis, and they got it done.
The problem is that the "virtual war" attitude has infected the politicians too. The soldiers for the most part accept that they could be killed, but they'd rather be doing what they see as right - going in on the ground - than hanging back (in a recent report from Sierra Leone, a British squaddie said exactly that). But the politians are micromanaging them, and the politicians are only worried about the opinion polls tomorrow, not about whether the long-term benefits (ie. winning) are more desirable.
Morality isn't really the point here - shit happens. The point that ppl should be asking is, how can a war be fought most efficiently (a conventional war incidentally, for those of nuke-chem-bio warfare tendency)? Or, how can our aims (eg. to stop the Kosovans killing each other) be met most effectively? In the Kosovo case, allowing the UN to shoot and kill anyone firing on someone else would have worked wonders. Enforce this without prejudice, and you're away.
Incidentally, the few British troops in Sierra Leone are highly popular - they've even asked for a British commander of the armed forces. Why? simply cos the British are perceived as being impartial and getting the job done. Maybe the point's finally getting through.
FAST is known for its heavy-handed approach to piracy. Not long back, it sent out a flyer to a lot of companies, asking for info (and IIRC they had to pay to register). A lot of them ignored it. The ones that didn't send back a reply then got a letter saying "You may be involved in software piracy, and may be subject to legal proceedings"!
To get damages, you have to show that you've suffered loss or injury through this. Do you fancy trying to prove that? I mean, what have we lost by NVidia using the GPL'd libraries by accident? And even if we had, would you be prepared to sue NVidia, knowing that this would most likely cause them to never produce another Linux driver again? Get real!
Did anyone look at the actual speech text on the LOC site, or just the article linked from here? Cos the two don't match up!!!
Whilst the article says he used the words 'arrogant' and 'hubris', this must not have been part of the same speech transcribed here on the LOC's site. The words simply don't exist in there. Did anyone bother checking sources? Doesn't look like it - I haven't seen anyone else who bothered. So what use is it opening up the library, if no-one's going to use it? Is everyone really lazy and can't be bothered looking at the real thing, just some predigested version?
This shows up a more insidious problem today - revisionism. A journalist has a good chance of getting away with slipping in some extra details if no-one checks his source. Equally an official can get away with fluffing a speech or blowing his tracks completely if the speech is transcribed for the journalists to use. How many journalists were actually physically at the book club meeting? My money's on not very many.
I actually support what the Librarian's doing. His aim is to ignore the books around at the moment, and start with the primary source materials. Get the primary sources available, and you can get your information first-hand, instead of through some reviewer or some press flack. And I'm quite sure that the process will step forwards, getting closer to present-day material, as time goes on. Anyone who wants it all digitised instantly is just being childish - think of the quantity of archives there are! But start from the start and work forwards, and it'll get there in the end.
So what are the computers being used for? Any guesses? What is there that you can use a computer for during lessons? Granted, if it's a computer-literacy lesson (and all kids should do that kind of thing at some point, to learn that PCs aren't some wierd juju magic that can only be touched by the select shamans:-) then they're essential. But how is a PC going to help during a maths lesson, to teach kids algebra or calculus?
They're missing sight of the fact that a PC is a TOOL, not an end in itself. And what it's useful for in the main is as a text/data presentation platform - it's not a sonic screwdriver that can fix everything, and it can't in itself teach anything. Trouble is, we've already got blackboards/whiteboards for teacher-to-student stuff, which have better resolution, are easier to, and are cheaper to run. Anyone out there experienced 'death by Powerpoint'? Can you imagine subjecting kids to that? And think of the hours the teacher would have to put in for it! For student-to-teacher stuff (returning essays), there is something to be said for a word processor, but it's not like life or death. The biggest essay they're likely to write at school is about half-a-dozen sides of A4, and that's easily within range of a pen and paper.
As much as/.ers dislike fear of technology, I'd submit that there's something worse - the gratuitous dive towards technology in the belief that it'll solve all your problems. It's not worked for businesses so far (anyone been keeping track of the 'magic bullet' schemes for solving business problems? I've certainly lost count), it's not worked for governments (viz all the very recent computer cockups in Britain - incidentally, has anyone noticed how often Andersen Consulting is the culprit?), and it's not worked for the military (US Navy dead in the water from Melissa, anyone?), so I can't see how it's going to help. It's a soundbite, no more - it sounds good in a campaign, but its real effect is to show that the person's as thick as a brick and hasn't understood the issues properly. Or worse, that the person knows the money could be better spent, but is coldly going for it anyway on the grounds that it'll get them good publicity.
Incidentally, kudos to Michael for the Neal Stephenson link!:-)
Grab.
"We have met the enemy, and he is ours." -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, US Navy
"We have met the enemy, and he is us." -- Walt Kelly, satirist
Although the book is 900+ pages, am I the only person who thinks Tolkien could use a good editor, and hence only about 700 pages of it is relevant? And the animated version was pretty damn good for the time, it's just that state-of-the-art in animation is a whole lot different now. Whaddya want, Jurassic Park effects? Get real!
Besides, the animated version only covered the first 2 parts (up to the end of the battle in the Two Towers). I don't even remember it covering Frodo, Sam and the giant spider (can't remember her name offhand), although I may be wrong. So probably more like 500 pages to cover.
Seriously, I think the animated version could have been the definitive version with a bit more funding to complete it (and maybe extend it in places), or at least a very good place-marker until FX technology improved. Didn't the animator die part-way through the last installment though? I seem to remember that's what halted it, and they couldn't get anyone else to replace him, and ran out of funding.
Excel is the main offender - there's bits of it which are different from everything else. For starters, Ctrl + left/right cursor doesn't do the word-skipping which everyone's used to, which is confusing. And it's missing some basic table-editing features - I have actually been known to copy a spreadsheet into Word, use Word's table facilities, and then copy it back, simply bcos Excel isn't as good as Word at handling tables!
Erm, I think we're going to see BIG lag on this. As an old-time MUD player, I know how big a hit the net takes during the day. Quake may get round it by minising the comms with the server, but there's known problems with that (eg. shooting through doors, auto-aim bots, etc). If you want this to scale to massive quantities of PCs, that kind of thing needs to be stopped, but that means more server comms, and more net resources. Call me a pessimist, but the sheer scale of this is going to be a problem.
Added to this, how interactive can you make a graphical thingy? On a text-based MUD, you can add extra features to your domain with commands which aren't usually used (a good example, which _is_ used, is "cut down tree with herring":) Every graphical adventure I've seen has a very limited range of options (eg. push, pull, move, turn), and you just can't get the same range of interaction. In this situation, it's possible to solve a problem simply by trying different options randomly until you find one that works - rather different from the text approach where you have to grok the _concept_.
I work for a company called Pi Technology. Anyone think we should be campaigning for a day off then?:-)
Although since we're mainly in the UK then the date doesn't really work for us (as numerous gritters have pointed out earlier). Incidentally, why do you USA-ers write the date the other way round? Is it just to be awkward?
The IRA had a superb chance of peace in NI. But they weren't willing to give up their guns, even though they'd got what they asked for (devolved government) so the British and Irish governments have just ditched it. If the IRA had handed over even a small fraction of their arsenal, the devolved 'state-like' NI parliament would still be going. And although the IRA stated its aims as a united Ireland, the Irish government doesn't actually want them! How's that for irony?!:-)
Palestine and South Africa are both examples of where a moderate liberal government can do more than all the protests in the world put together. It took liberal heads of government in both cases to put together the changeover - the 'stone throwers' had nothing to do with it.
Off-topic here, but anyway. In essence, I have to say that violent opposition only focusses the attention against fighting that opposition. I'd watch the news a bit better, mate!
The whole system of patents is pretty much dead on its feet. Whilst patents are granted to everyone with an obvious idea, ppl with genuinely new ideas are often stiffed by the process.
For starters, the patent office aren't expert in their field. They can't be - they're employed to watch, not to actually _do_, so they're always playing catch-up with the state of the art. If nothing's been patented before on a subject, then they don't know about it, regardless of the fact that the world and his brother may have been using it previously (witness Amazon).
But there's also the problem of what a patent _doesn't_ give you, which is any protection at all to the little guy. If you've invented a radical new idea, you have to spend thousands patenting it (and you have to spend that money in every country - it doesn't transfer), and all that gives you is the right to spend more money on lawyers if someone steals your idea.
A case in point for this is James Dyson, the Brit inventor who came up with the bagless vacuum cleaner. He was originally in talks with an American company for them to make vacuums with his patented idea. They turned him down, but carried on to use his patent in their stuff without paying him, secure in the knowledge that he couldn't match their lawyers. He did actually sue them, and won, but it nearly bankrupted him - it cost him around £200,000 (that's about $300,000) which was just about all his savings and venture capital, and it took 2 years to get a result.
The other thing is business ideas. I don't think there's any way Amazon's affiliate patent can be upheld - all they're doing is transferring an existing idea from the real world into the electronic arena. This isn't an original invention any more than I could claim to have created an original painting by copying an existing one and using different colours.
Basically, what we need is a patent system with teeth. Frivolous patents (like Amazon's) should be chucked out immediately, but real new ideas should be backed up with law. And there needs to be quick resolution of patent disputes, FUNDED BY THE PATENT OFFICE. If both sides pass their information to a third party at the patent office, and he makes a decision based on that information AT NO COST, then we're sorted. Or possibly make both sides lodge a deposit which they'd lose if the patent office decided they were making a frivolous complaint.
I'm always curious about government's saying "We've got something new here - quick, let's tax it!" Back several hundred years, England (and some other countries, IIRC) had a Window Tax (very tempting to do a Bill Gates joke here, but that's not the point of this post:-)
Anyway, why do we need tax? Answer - to keep the government and other state-funded stuff going. What's the most efficient way to do things? Answer - in bulk. So why do we have zillions of piddling taxes adding up to 40% earnings for middle-income folk in the UK (or 50% for the US, according to another poster)?
The only logical way I can see is to tax income for people and tax profit for companies, AND NOTHING ELSE. Can anyone think of a good reason for VAT, apart from just sneaking extra tax off ppl? Didn't think so...
And then we'd actually see LOWER taxes, cos a fair percentage of the fat-arsed crats employed chucking paper at each other would be surplus to requirements.
Grab.
Re:AI Computer-bot runs amuck, takes over
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For a good AI story, check out "Halo" by Tom Maddox. Takes some getting into, cos it doesn't ease you into the new environment or give you easy hooks into it, like Gibson and things, but if you check it out and read it a couple of times, it really grows on you.
BTW, anyone know if Tom Maddox has done anything else? Nothing else shows up on Amazon.
"Learn from other people's mistakes - you won't have time to make them all yourself."
As Len Hutton likes to point out in his books, software engineering is (or has been) a very immature discipline. The sign of a mature discipline is that there are known good ways of doing things, and ppl can be taught these ways and why we use them. Now these kind of books are great for that, bcos it gives some idea of best practice. Sure, some ppl won't pay attention to one bit, and they'll go away and get bitten by the problem, and they'll be wiser for it. But generally ppl will think "Hey, that's a neat idea" and stick with it.
But to suggest that ppl have to basically be left to get on with it without any instruction in the best way to go about things is odd. Granted, most of us learned programming at an early age on Commodores, Acorns and Spectrums, and we picked it up as we went along. But there's no need to force other ppl to do that as some kind of initiation rite.
As an analogy, the first pilots built experimental planes and learnt to fly them by trial and error. Some of them went on to become very good pilots, but most of them crashed and burned. Nowadays, pilots go through vast quantities of training, and things are much safer for that. You see, it's not just efficiency you get from showing people the best way to do things - you get better output too. The umptitum thousand bugs in every Microsoft product show you what happens when you let things slide. Please don't tell me you want that to be the model for modern software engineering!
Looks like we're still a ways away from a holodeck, until they work out force fields, so you can imitate a chair with a force field. Can't see it working any other way. Otherwise we're limited to imitating cars, planes, etc where you don't walk around.
Never found that those VR goggles worked for me. Since I only see through one eye, I judge distance by eye focus. The VR screen can't do that yet, so it never really got me immersed. Quite apart from the generally lousy resolution.
What we want is a very high-res display with something which monitors your eyeball activity. Then it can sharpen the images at the depth you're focussing at, and blur the images at other depths. That'll give true VR. Trouble is, we're going to want something several orders of magnitude better resolution than any current LCDs.
As a followup, did anyone see Tomorrow's World (BBC) a couple of weeks back? They had a gadget which passed very small currents into the side of your head to fool your inner ear, so it feels like you're moving even though you're not. They did a demo with a group of kids, and managed to get a couple of them totally off-balance so they had to catch them b4 they fell over!
I'm a potential beneficiary of this, and this is the first I've heard of it!:-)
Anyway, the point is that this isn't for the benefit of folks like us. Anyone slagging off Ford for the low-spec base machine (I'm still using a P1 233 with a 14" monitor for software and PCB design at home BTW, and I've never needed more) is missing the point. This is for ppl who haven't got a PC, have never heard of/., and whose income is well below what most of us are on. They're not too bothered about the spec - just being able to write a letter in Word is a giant step forward for them.
The big deal for me is the cheap net access. In the UK, British Telecom owns the last mile of copper, their pricing is criminal, and our telecoms watchdog is talking about being _less_ restrictive?!?! If Ford's going to do cheap net access for its employees, that's going to remove the single biggest obstacle to getting on line for folks in the UK, the phone bill.
As you say, really important stuff will be kept on servers with mirrors. Alternatively, if a computer medium has a known lifetime (and the reader for that medium still exists), it's easy enough to transfer it onto the new medium.
The thing is, how much stuff do we want to keep? And does it matter anyway? I can't see the loss of the original copy of the Declaration of Independence, or anything like that, as being a big deal. The concepts are what's important here, not the physical object. And if information is important and it's in the public domain, it'll be copied, mirrored, reused and so on in so many different formats, you're never likely to lose it. I mean, there aren't many first editions of the Bible around, are there?;-)
Never heard such tosh. As an electronic engineer building engine controllers, I can safely say it's not going to happen any time soon. Engine controllers are built to the absolute minimum spec to get them to work, cos when you're building millions of them, a dollar difference in price makes a big, big difference. If you've got spare capacity on your processor, chances are you're going to use it to control the engine better. Either that, or you use a smaller, cheaper processor and save some more money.
And how exactly does being able to find where your car is offend you? Sorry, I just can't see that myself. The engine stalling isn't a huge problem - even on a fast road you should be able to recover from that fairly safely, although I personally can't see how your proposed gadget could stall the engine, given a reasonable standard of programming in the software - you make sure things like that don't happen. And it is currently illegal to have drive-by-wire on steering and brakes since they're safety-critical elements, and I can't see that changing any time soon. As for saying that any government would institute immunity from prosecution if its tracking kit screwed up your car, that's plain ridiculous - you're heading into paranoia territory there.
But there are location-finding add-ons available now. They're used for UPS, Securicor and FedEx trucks, and you can get them for your car - basically so if it's nicked the police can track it. I don't think tracking the thief who steals my car is a high price to pay, do you?
I don't get it. Duke Nukem is advertised with a hugely-muscled bloke. Tomb Raider is advertised with an attractive woman. Both are offensive to women. So what are we supposed to advertise with?!?!?!? It has always been something I wondered about, that women's underwear has picturs of attractive women, and men's underwear has pictures of well-endowed men. Surely if sex sells, they reverse them?;-)
On a more serious note, there is a general tendency for women to head for the nurturing stereotype and men to head for the hunter/gatherer stereotype. It's instinctive, so there's nothing you can do about it. If women want to head for other stuff (female hackers and Quake players, etc), then equal opportunities says you let them. But it doesn't mean that all women have to like that stuff, any more than it means all men have to become nursery teachers. And don't give me any "encouraging women into...." shite - just cos it's discriminating against men instead of women doesn't make it right!
As other folk have said, men generally go for one style of games, and women go for another. More men play games, cos that's how the male mind's set up, hence there's more games aimed at men. That's all there is to it.
IIRC, nor can we most of the time!:-) We have to run it on a dumb machine and find out!
It'd be astoundingly easy to detect an infinite loop - simply track behaviour at each decision path and see how often it goes each way (similar to Transmeta's speeding-up method). Given enough times down one path, you flag the user that there might be an error. That's exactly the same as we do, only we just work with a maybe 10s timeout on data coming out of the process ("If it doesn't print out soon, I'm hitting the reset button. Right, that does it!":-)
Man will never put his hand in a food processor and pull it out unharmed.
Man will never run at 200 mph.
etc,etc...
Sometimes ppl say that something's impossible when they really mean that they can't see how it'll be done. Sometimes it really is impossible and there's damn good reasons why it can't be done. Your mission as an intelligent person, should you choose to accept it, is to figure out which of these your latest job/project/research program fits into.
Fair enough, sometimes things which look like there's good reasons for them to be impossible actually aren't, bcos the good reasons actually aren't. Hence the fact that a research project which proves a negative is just as important as the one which gets the Nobel prize - the prize-winner has used all the negative results to work out where NOT to spend his time! But that can't be taken to be the case for everything.
As for the post you're replying to, I'd reckon that programs we're writing now have no potential for consciousness - they aren't allowed to "learn" anything of substance which would affect their behaviour. If a new model of programming was developed which modelled consciousness better, unlike our current techniques which model machines and processes, then maybe we'll make it. Certainly there's plenty of raw processing power, but we've developed that without developing any substantially different ways of using it! Even with all the much-vaunted difference between languages, it's all superficial - look beneath the brightly-coloured fur and they're the same animal underneath. Some languages put on more and brighter fuzz than others to try and convince you they're something else, but there's nothing new.
If it's consciousness you want, you're looking in the wrong place anyway. I don't reckon the next advance will be made by a technologist - more likely it'll be a philosopher, or just some average bod with a bright idea, who comes up with a model (or even an implementation) of consciousness for a computer. Consider software engineers as dog-breeders, theorising about something 15 feet tall with big ears, grey skin and a long nose - maybe a dog-breeder could, after much work, produce something which looks a bit like it, but it's the guy who goes out, finds an elephant and brings it back who gets the result!;-) We're all too tied into our way of working to spend serious time looking - to continue the metaphor, we can't afford the time or money to take a trip to Africa to go hunting.:-) But sooner or later, someone will...
Title says it all. It's a Hollywood film, and like most Hollywood films it's only designed to maintain the suspension of disbelief for the duration of the film. If afterwards you think "Hang on, that's not right", then it doesn't matter. And even if (as I did) you see the flaw immediately, you're usually prepared to let it go if the film's fun.
The idea's been used much better by The Truman Show, with its take on manipulated reality - class film and no easy holes to pick in it. Or the Rachael character in BladeRunner. Or even the Judge Dredd film. Continue as required.
Plato's cave theory falls down, cos if they're men, they've been outside the cave b4. The subjects would have to be raised in the artificial environment from birth, otherwise they'd spot the flaws. Truman picks up the differences between the world he knows and what he reads or sees on TV or deduces from common sense about the outside world. The Matrix cops out by having a general 'feeling of not belonging, of looking for something else'.
So it's a fun film, with top-notch F/X, good atmosphere and an interesting premise, but let down by a scrappy screenplay and bad choice of lead actor (I mean, who told Keanu Reeves he could act? Come on, get someone like Russell Crowe or Kevin Spacey in! Keanu makes Brad Pitt look like Lawrence Olivier!). In other words, it's a standard Hollywood film.
Stepping back from the technical issues, what purpose do the record companies serve? Answer - to distribute recordings of music.
Now we all know that record companies are actually in it for the truly _vast_ profits available, and the artists themselves actually don't get very much out of it. So the wider issue is: what's the best way to distribute music? And promote it?
Well the indie groups of the 80s came and went, partly bcos most of them weren't that good. But on the distribution side, they did make a fair-size dent, particularly in the nightclub/disco market. So what's probably needed for the next-gen record companies (and give me a break if you start hearing shades of 'Imagine' here:-) is an indie-style label supporting new artists, and distributing via MP3 and CD AT LOW COSTS. I would support security for that, cos if you're not prepared to pay $3-4 for a CD, you don't deserve to live!:-) Major label may have the big names now, but the real issue is who picks up the next Hanson or Oasis, and if the record labels have their supply of new artists cut off they'll die within years. And there's quite a few small labels out there started by musicians (David Bowie, Dave Stewart, etc) who could easily pick this up.
So to a real extent it's up to the artists to vote with their feet - we've told them how we want music to be, now they can choose how to do it.
But the other issue is where artists get their real money from, and the key here is MORE LIVE PERFORMANCE. The Beatles, and pretty much every band up to the mid/late 80s, didn't get big by record labels, and didn't get that much money that way either - the concept of bands (particularly manufactured boy/girl-bands) who can't perform live is a very new concept, and one which should be shot down. After all, even the Monkees (possibly the first manufactured band) could perform live.
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On this front, a comment from Arthur 'Bomber' Harris about WWII. The army were about to go into Bruges (I think). Harris had a choice between letting the army go in and take the city with serious losses, or pulverising it from the air and killing its civilians. Harris went for the airstrike, and the army was through in 24 hours with minimal losses. Was it right or wrong? Depends on your PoV. But it meant that the British could roll over the Germans and keep on going, instead of getting stuck in a battle of attrition.
What ppl seem to have missed out on, is that the point of war is to WIN! That's what America missed out on in Vietnam - instead of a full-on steamroller, they sent their men over in dribs and drabs, and duly got their butts kicked. The Kosovo forces went in without enough ppl and without the political backing to WIN - if Michael Rose had had his way, he'd have kicked ass and taken names on anyone crossing them, as he's made quite clear in interviews. The Gulf - they knew what they had to do, they had more and better resources than the Iraqis, and they got it done.
The problem is that the "virtual war" attitude has infected the politicians too. The soldiers for the most part accept that they could be killed, but they'd rather be doing what they see as right - going in on the ground - than hanging back (in a recent report from Sierra Leone, a British squaddie said exactly that). But the politians are micromanaging them, and the politicians are only worried about the opinion polls tomorrow, not about whether the long-term benefits (ie. winning) are more desirable.
Morality isn't really the point here - shit happens. The point that ppl should be asking is, how can a war be fought most efficiently (a conventional war incidentally, for those of nuke-chem-bio warfare tendency)? Or, how can our aims (eg. to stop the Kosovans killing each other) be met most effectively? In the Kosovo case, allowing the UN to shoot and kill anyone firing on someone else would have worked wonders. Enforce this without prejudice, and you're away.
Incidentally, the few British troops in Sierra Leone are highly popular - they've even asked for a British commander of the armed forces. Why? simply cos the British are perceived as being impartial and getting the job done. Maybe the point's finally getting through.
Grab.
Eeek! Do we want the FSF to become like FAST?
FAST is known for its heavy-handed approach to piracy. Not long back, it sent out a flyer to a lot of companies, asking for info (and IIRC they had to pay to register). A lot of them ignored it. The ones that didn't send back a reply then got a letter saying "You may be involved in software piracy, and may be subject to legal proceedings"!
To get damages, you have to show that you've suffered loss or injury through this. Do you fancy trying to prove that? I mean, what have we lost by NVidia using the GPL'd libraries by accident? And even if we had, would you be prepared to sue NVidia, knowing that this would most likely cause them to never produce another Linux driver again? Get real!
Grab.
Did anyone look at the actual speech text on the LOC site, or just the article linked from here? Cos the two don't match up!!!
Whilst the article says he used the words 'arrogant' and 'hubris', this must not have been part of the same speech transcribed here on the LOC's site. The words simply don't exist in there. Did anyone bother checking sources? Doesn't look like it - I haven't seen anyone else who bothered. So what use is it opening up the library, if no-one's going to use it? Is everyone really lazy and can't be bothered looking at the real thing, just some predigested version?
This shows up a more insidious problem today - revisionism. A journalist has a good chance of getting away with slipping in some extra details if no-one checks his source. Equally an official can get away with fluffing a speech or blowing his tracks completely if the speech is transcribed for the journalists to use. How many journalists were actually physically at the book club meeting? My money's on not very many.
I actually support what the Librarian's doing. His aim is to ignore the books around at the moment, and start with the primary source materials. Get the primary sources available, and you can get your information first-hand, instead of through some reviewer or some press flack. And I'm quite sure that the process will step forwards, getting closer to present-day material, as time goes on. Anyone who wants it all digitised instantly is just being childish - think of the quantity of archives there are! But start from the start and work forwards, and it'll get there in the end.
Grab.
So what are the computers being used for? Any guesses? What is there that you can use a computer for during lessons? Granted, if it's a computer-literacy lesson (and all kids should do that kind of thing at some point, to learn that PCs aren't some wierd juju magic that can only be touched by the select shamans :-) then they're essential. But how is a PC going to help during a maths lesson, to teach kids algebra or calculus?
/.ers dislike fear of technology, I'd submit that there's something worse - the gratuitous dive towards technology in the belief that it'll solve all your problems. It's not worked for businesses so far (anyone been keeping track of the 'magic bullet' schemes for solving business problems? I've certainly lost count), it's not worked for governments (viz all the very recent computer cockups in Britain - incidentally, has anyone noticed how often Andersen Consulting is the culprit?), and it's not worked for the military (US Navy dead in the water from Melissa, anyone?), so I can't see how it's going to help. It's a soundbite, no more - it sounds good in a campaign, but its real effect is to show that the person's as thick as a brick and hasn't understood the issues properly. Or worse, that the person knows the money could be better spent, but is coldly going for it anyway on the grounds that it'll get them good publicity.
:-)
They're missing sight of the fact that a PC is a TOOL, not an end in itself. And what it's useful for in the main is as a text/data presentation platform - it's not a sonic screwdriver that can fix everything, and it can't in itself teach anything. Trouble is, we've already got blackboards/whiteboards for teacher-to-student stuff, which have better resolution, are easier to, and are cheaper to run. Anyone out there experienced 'death by Powerpoint'? Can you imagine subjecting kids to that? And think of the hours the teacher would have to put in for it! For student-to-teacher stuff (returning essays), there is something to be said for a word processor, but it's not like life or death. The biggest essay they're likely to write at school is about half-a-dozen sides of A4, and that's easily within range of a pen and paper.
As much as
Incidentally, kudos to Michael for the Neal Stephenson link!
Grab.
"We have met the enemy, and he is ours."
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, US Navy
"We have met the enemy, and he is us."
-- Walt Kelly, satirist
Although the book is 900+ pages, am I the only person who thinks Tolkien could use a good editor, and hence only about 700 pages of it is relevant? And the animated version was pretty damn good for the time, it's just that state-of-the-art in animation is a whole lot different now. Whaddya want, Jurassic Park effects? Get real!
Besides, the animated version only covered the first 2 parts (up to the end of the battle in the Two Towers). I don't even remember it covering Frodo, Sam and the giant spider (can't remember her name offhand), although I may be wrong. So probably more like 500 pages to cover.
Seriously, I think the animated version could have been the definitive version with a bit more funding to complete it (and maybe extend it in places), or at least a very good place-marker until FX technology improved. Didn't the animator die part-way through the last installment though? I seem to remember that's what halted it, and they couldn't get anyone else to replace him, and ran out of funding.
Grab.
App consistency? Not sure about that!
Excel is the main offender - there's bits of it which are different from everything else. For starters, Ctrl + left/right cursor doesn't do the word-skipping which everyone's used to, which is confusing. And it's missing some basic table-editing features - I have actually been known to copy a spreadsheet into Word, use Word's table facilities, and then copy it back, simply bcos Excel isn't as good as Word at handling tables!
Grab.
Erm, I think we're going to see BIG lag on this. As an old-time MUD player, I know how big a hit the net takes during the day. Quake may get round it by minising the comms with the server, but there's known problems with that (eg. shooting through doors, auto-aim bots, etc). If you want this to scale to massive quantities of PCs, that kind of thing needs to be stopped, but that means more server comms, and more net resources. Call me a pessimist, but the sheer scale of this is going to be a problem.
:) Every graphical adventure I've seen has a very limited range of options (eg. push, pull, move, turn), and you just can't get the same range of interaction. In this situation, it's possible to solve a problem simply by trying different options randomly until you find one that works - rather different from the text approach where you have to grok the _concept_.
Added to this, how interactive can you make a graphical thingy? On a text-based MUD, you can add extra features to your domain with commands which aren't usually used (a good example, which _is_ used, is "cut down tree with herring"
Grab.
I work for a company called Pi Technology. Anyone think we should be campaigning for a day off then? :-)
Although since we're mainly in the UK then the date doesn't really work for us (as numerous gritters have pointed out earlier). Incidentally, why do you USA-ers write the date the other way round? Is it just to be awkward?
Grab.
I beg your pardon?! Thread drift here, but...
:-)
The IRA had a superb chance of peace in NI. But they weren't willing to give up their guns, even though they'd got what they asked for (devolved government) so the British and Irish governments have just ditched it. If the IRA had handed over even a small fraction of their arsenal, the devolved 'state-like' NI parliament would still be going. And although the IRA stated its aims as a united Ireland, the Irish government doesn't actually want them! How's that for irony?!
Palestine and South Africa are both examples of where a moderate liberal government can do more than all the protests in the world put together. It took liberal heads of government in both cases to put together the changeover - the 'stone throwers' had nothing to do with it.
Off-topic here, but anyway. In essence, I have to say that violent opposition only focusses the attention against fighting that opposition. I'd watch the news a bit better, mate!
Grab.
The whole system of patents is pretty much dead on its feet. Whilst patents are granted to everyone with an obvious idea, ppl with genuinely new ideas are often stiffed by the process.
For starters, the patent office aren't expert in their field. They can't be - they're employed to watch, not to actually _do_, so they're always playing catch-up with the state of the art. If nothing's been patented before on a subject, then they don't know about it, regardless of the fact that the world and his brother may have been using it previously (witness Amazon).
But there's also the problem of what a patent _doesn't_ give you, which is any protection at all to the little guy. If you've invented a radical new idea, you have to spend thousands patenting it (and you have to spend that money in every country - it doesn't transfer), and all that gives you is the right to spend more money on lawyers if someone steals your idea.
A case in point for this is James Dyson, the Brit inventor who came up with the bagless vacuum cleaner. He was originally in talks with an American company for them to make vacuums with his patented idea. They turned him down, but carried on to use his patent in their stuff without paying him, secure in the knowledge that he couldn't match their lawyers. He did actually sue them, and won, but it nearly bankrupted him - it cost him around £200,000 (that's about $300,000) which was just about all his savings and venture capital, and it took 2 years to get a result.
The other thing is business ideas. I don't think there's any way Amazon's affiliate patent can be upheld - all they're doing is transferring an existing idea from the real world into the electronic arena. This isn't an original invention any more than I could claim to have created an original painting by copying an existing one and using different colours.
Basically, what we need is a patent system with teeth. Frivolous patents (like Amazon's) should be chucked out immediately, but real new ideas should be backed up with law. And there needs to be quick resolution of patent disputes, FUNDED BY THE PATENT OFFICE. If both sides pass their information to a third party at the patent office, and he makes a decision based on that information AT NO COST, then we're sorted. Or possibly make both sides lodge a deposit which they'd lose if the patent office decided they were making a frivolous complaint.
Any thoughts?
Grab.
I'm always curious about government's saying "We've got something new here - quick, let's tax it!" Back several hundred years, England (and some other countries, IIRC) had a Window Tax (very tempting to do a Bill Gates joke here, but that's not the point of this post :-)
Anyway, why do we need tax? Answer - to keep the government and other state-funded stuff going. What's the most efficient way to do things? Answer - in bulk. So why do we have zillions of piddling taxes adding up to 40% earnings for middle-income folk in the UK (or 50% for the US, according to another poster)?
The only logical way I can see is to tax income for people and tax profit for companies, AND NOTHING ELSE. Can anyone think of a good reason for VAT, apart from just sneaking extra tax off ppl? Didn't think so...
And then we'd actually see LOWER taxes, cos a fair percentage of the fat-arsed crats employed chucking paper at each other would be surplus to requirements.
Grab.
For a good AI story, check out "Halo" by Tom Maddox. Takes some getting into, cos it doesn't ease you into the new environment or give you easy hooks into it, like Gibson and things, but if you check it out and read it a couple of times, it really grows on you.
BTW, anyone know if Tom Maddox has done anything else? Nothing else shows up on Amazon.
Grab.
My favourite quote:-
"Learn from other people's mistakes - you won't have time to make them all yourself."
As Len Hutton likes to point out in his books, software engineering is (or has been) a very immature discipline. The sign of a mature discipline is that there are known good ways of doing things, and ppl can be taught these ways and why we use them. Now these kind of books are great for that, bcos it gives some idea of best practice. Sure, some ppl won't pay attention to one bit, and they'll go away and get bitten by the problem, and they'll be wiser for it. But generally ppl will think "Hey, that's a neat idea" and stick with it.
But to suggest that ppl have to basically be left to get on with it without any instruction in the best way to go about things is odd. Granted, most of us learned programming at an early age on Commodores, Acorns and Spectrums, and we picked it up as we went along. But there's no need to force other ppl to do that as some kind of initiation rite.
As an analogy, the first pilots built experimental planes and learnt to fly them by trial and error. Some of them went on to become very good pilots, but most of them crashed and burned. Nowadays, pilots go through vast quantities of training, and things are much safer for that. You see, it's not just efficiency you get from showing people the best way to do things - you get better output too. The umptitum thousand bugs in every Microsoft product show you what happens when you let things slide. Please don't tell me you want that to be the model for modern software engineering!
GraB.
Moving Pictures is a bit tedious. Pyramids is definitely worth it though.
Do you have second-hand bookshops around your way? I've picked up quite a few there recently (including the afore-mentioned Pyramids).
Grab.
Looks like we're still a ways away from a holodeck, until they work out force fields, so you can imitate a chair with a force field. Can't see it working any other way. Otherwise we're limited to imitating cars, planes, etc where you don't walk around.
Never found that those VR goggles worked for me. Since I only see through one eye, I judge distance by eye focus. The VR screen can't do that yet, so it never really got me immersed. Quite apart from the generally lousy resolution.
What we want is a very high-res display with something which monitors your eyeball activity. Then it can sharpen the images at the depth you're focussing at, and blur the images at other depths. That'll give true VR. Trouble is, we're going to want something several orders of magnitude better resolution than any current LCDs.
As a followup, did anyone see Tomorrow's World (BBC) a couple of weeks back? They had a gadget which passed very small currents into the side of your head to fool your inner ear, so it feels like you're moving even though you're not. They did a demo with a group of kids, and managed to get a couple of them totally off-balance so they had to catch them b4 they fell over!
Grab.
I'm a potential beneficiary of this, and this is the first I've heard of it! :-)
/., and whose income is well below what most of us are on. They're not too bothered about the spec - just being able to write a letter in Word is a giant step forward for them.
Anyway, the point is that this isn't for the benefit of folks like us. Anyone slagging off Ford for the low-spec base machine (I'm still using a P1 233 with a 14" monitor for software and PCB design at home BTW, and I've never needed more) is missing the point. This is for ppl who haven't got a PC, have never heard of
The big deal for me is the cheap net access. In the UK, British Telecom owns the last mile of copper, their pricing is criminal, and our telecoms watchdog is talking about being _less_ restrictive?!?! If Ford's going to do cheap net access for its employees, that's going to remove the single biggest obstacle to getting on line for folks in the UK, the phone bill.
As you say, really important stuff will be kept on servers with mirrors. Alternatively, if a computer medium has a known lifetime (and the reader for that medium still exists), it's easy enough to transfer it onto the new medium.
;-)
The thing is, how much stuff do we want to keep? And does it matter anyway? I can't see the loss of the original copy of the Declaration of Independence, or anything like that, as being a big deal. The concepts are what's important here, not the physical object. And if information is important and it's in the public domain, it'll be copied, mirrored, reused and so on in so many different formats, you're never likely to lose it. I mean, there aren't many first editions of the Bible around, are there?
Never heard such tosh. As an electronic engineer building engine controllers, I can safely say it's not going to happen any time soon. Engine controllers are built to the absolute minimum spec to get them to work, cos when you're building millions of them, a dollar difference in price makes a big, big difference. If you've got spare capacity on your processor, chances are you're going to use it to control the engine better. Either that, or you use a smaller, cheaper processor and save some more money.
And how exactly does being able to find where your car is offend you? Sorry, I just can't see that myself. The engine stalling isn't a huge problem - even on a fast road you should be able to recover from that fairly safely, although I personally can't see how your proposed gadget could stall the engine, given a reasonable standard of programming in the software - you make sure things like that don't happen. And it is currently illegal to have drive-by-wire on steering and brakes since they're safety-critical elements, and I can't see that changing any time soon. As for saying that any government would institute immunity from prosecution if its tracking kit screwed up your car, that's plain ridiculous - you're heading into paranoia territory there.
But there are location-finding add-ons available now. They're used for UPS, Securicor and FedEx trucks, and you can get them for your car - basically so if it's nicked the police can track it. I don't think tracking the thief who steals my car is a high price to pay, do you?
I don't get it. Duke Nukem is advertised with a hugely-muscled bloke. Tomb Raider is advertised with an attractive woman. Both are offensive to women. So what are we supposed to advertise with?!?!?!? It has always been something I wondered about, that women's underwear has picturs of attractive women, and men's underwear has pictures of well-endowed men. Surely if sex sells, they reverse them? ;-)
...." shite - just cos it's discriminating against men instead of women doesn't make it right!
On a more serious note, there is a general tendency for women to head for the nurturing stereotype and men to head for the hunter/gatherer stereotype. It's instinctive, so there's nothing you can do about it. If women want to head for other stuff (female hackers and Quake players, etc), then equal opportunities says you let them. But it doesn't mean that all women have to like that stuff, any more than it means all men have to become nursery teachers. And don't give me any "encouraging women into
As other folk have said, men generally go for one style of games, and women go for another. More men play games, cos that's how the male mind's set up, hence there's more games aimed at men. That's all there is to it.
Grab.
Agreed, it's only a first pass. I did type in a better version but it got wiped by a server screwup, and I couldn't be bothered typing it in again! :-)
Grab.
IIRC, nor can we most of the time! :-) We have to run it on a dumb machine and find out!
:-)
It'd be astoundingly easy to detect an infinite loop - simply track behaviour at each decision path and see how often it goes each way (similar to Transmeta's speeding-up method). Given enough times down one path, you flag the user that there might be an error. That's exactly the same as we do, only we just work with a maybe 10s timeout on data coming out of the process ("If it doesn't print out soon, I'm hitting the reset button. Right, that does it!"
Grab.
Man will never put his hand in a food processor and pull it out unharmed.
;-) We're all too tied into our way of working to spend serious time looking - to continue the metaphor, we can't afford the time or money to take a trip to Africa to go hunting. :-) But sooner or later, someone will...
Man will never run at 200 mph.
etc,etc...
Sometimes ppl say that something's impossible when they really mean that they can't see how it'll be done. Sometimes it really is impossible and there's damn good reasons why it can't be done. Your mission as an intelligent person, should you choose to accept it, is to figure out which of these your latest job/project/research program fits into.
Fair enough, sometimes things which look like there's good reasons for them to be impossible actually aren't, bcos the good reasons actually aren't. Hence the fact that a research project which proves a negative is just as important as the one which gets the Nobel prize - the prize-winner has used all the negative results to work out where NOT to spend his time! But that can't be taken to be the case for everything.
As for the post you're replying to, I'd reckon that programs we're writing now have no potential for consciousness - they aren't allowed to "learn" anything of substance which would affect their behaviour. If a new model of programming was developed which modelled consciousness better, unlike our current techniques which model machines and processes, then maybe we'll make it. Certainly there's plenty of raw processing power, but we've developed that without developing any substantially different ways of using it! Even with all the much-vaunted difference between languages, it's all superficial - look beneath the brightly-coloured fur and they're the same animal underneath. Some languages put on more and brighter fuzz than others to try and convince you they're something else, but there's nothing new.
If it's consciousness you want, you're looking in the wrong place anyway. I don't reckon the next advance will be made by a technologist - more likely it'll be a philosopher, or just some average bod with a bright idea, who comes up with a model (or even an implementation) of consciousness for a computer. Consider software engineers as dog-breeders, theorising about something 15 feet tall with big ears, grey skin and a long nose - maybe a dog-breeder could, after much work, produce something which looks a bit like it, but it's the guy who goes out, finds an elephant and brings it back who gets the result!
Grab.
Title says it all. It's a Hollywood film, and like most Hollywood films it's only designed to maintain the suspension of disbelief for the duration of the film. If afterwards you think "Hang on, that's not right", then it doesn't matter. And even if (as I did) you see the flaw immediately, you're usually prepared to let it go if the film's fun.
The idea's been used much better by The Truman Show, with its take on manipulated reality - class film and no easy holes to pick in it. Or the Rachael character in BladeRunner. Or even the Judge Dredd film. Continue as required.
Plato's cave theory falls down, cos if they're men, they've been outside the cave b4. The subjects would have to be raised in the artificial environment from birth, otherwise they'd spot the flaws. Truman picks up the differences between the world he knows and what he reads or sees on TV or deduces from common sense about the outside world. The Matrix cops out by having a general 'feeling of not belonging, of looking for something else'.
So it's a fun film, with top-notch F/X, good atmosphere and an interesting premise, but let down by a scrappy screenplay and bad choice of lead actor (I mean, who told Keanu Reeves he could act? Come on, get someone like Russell Crowe or Kevin Spacey in! Keanu makes Brad Pitt look like Lawrence Olivier!). In other words, it's a standard Hollywood film.
Graham.
I believe that was actually Men In Black.
Stepping back from the technical issues, what purpose do the record companies serve? Answer - to distribute recordings of music.
:-) is an indie-style label supporting new artists, and distributing via MP3 and CD AT LOW COSTS. I would support security for that, cos if you're not prepared to pay $3-4 for a CD, you don't deserve to live! :-) Major label may have the big names now, but the real issue is who picks up the next Hanson or Oasis, and if the record labels have their supply of new artists cut off they'll die within years. And there's quite a few small labels out there started by musicians (David Bowie, Dave Stewart, etc) who could easily pick this up.
Now we all know that record companies are actually in it for the truly _vast_ profits available, and the artists themselves actually don't get very much out of it. So the wider issue is: what's the best way to distribute music? And promote it?
Well the indie groups of the 80s came and went, partly bcos most of them weren't that good. But on the distribution side, they did make a fair-size dent, particularly in the nightclub/disco market. So what's probably needed for the next-gen record companies (and give me a break if you start hearing shades of 'Imagine' here
So to a real extent it's up to the artists to vote with their feet - we've told them how we want music to be, now they can choose how to do it.
But the other issue is where artists get their real money from, and the key here is MORE LIVE PERFORMANCE. The Beatles, and pretty much every band up to the mid/late 80s, didn't get big by record labels, and didn't get that much money that way either - the concept of bands (particularly manufactured boy/girl-bands) who can't perform live is a very new concept, and one which should be shot down. After all, even the Monkees (possibly the first manufactured band) could perform live.
Just a few incoherent thoughts...
Graham.