I would love to see Microsoft develop the ability to use the Firefox rendering engine in place of the IE rendering engine. This would allow for a true 100% switching for Windows users. Not just your web browser, but your email client, help menus, other applications that make use of the IE rendering engine would also be able to use the Gecko rendering engine.
As a Linux user, I would love to see Windows computers shipped with the default browser set to Firefox. Adoption will never happen all at once, and it will never be total. I don't expect everybody to start using Linux or even to use anything other than Windows. However, I would like to see a world were other options are viable. One means to improve Linux is to get a web browser that is in every way, at least as good as the web browsers used on other OS's.
It is far more reasonable to expect Windows users to stay on Windows yet switch to Firefox, than it is to expect them to switch to Linux. However, if they switch to Firefox, then more web sites will be designed to be compatible with Firefox. Since Firefox is a multi-platform web browser, this means that many other platforms will also have a browser that is compatible with more web sites.
So Linux users benefit, as do Windows users, Mac users, BSD, Solaris, etc.
Not only that, but your email client and web browser exist on multiple OS's, you have allot more freedom to just up and switch OS's, since these two apps are the most used computer apps.
Yeah, Lisp, a broken (they didn't even understand proper beta-reduction) reinvention of the lambda-calculus 20 to 30 years after mathematicians created it. Pretty damn innovative. What will they come up with next, arithmetic? A* is nothing more than a contrained search, and it is a hack which only works well in toy games... not real world problems. I wouldn't go bragging about A* as a cornerstone of AI. Parsers were already created in the fields of computational linguistics and automata theory before they were reinvented by the AI community. The same goes for compilers.
Anyway, just because a painter claims to be researching AI, doesn't make his paintings a product of the field of AI, the same goes for wannabe mathematicians, programming language designers, etc.
If there is a pure research wing of CS, it would be mathematics. See metamathematics, proof theory, and number theory for good examples. At its best, the field of AI has simply reinvented mathematical concepts from formal logic (semantics nets... oops, they are a fragment of FOL) to lambda-calculi (lisp... oops, we just reinvented the wheel known as the lambda-calculus).
And theoretically (very theoretically), our algorithm in a generic RDF description could be used by a sufficiently sophisticated RDF parser to autogenerate source code in a real programming language that it "understood", like C++.
You do realize that there are computability issues that would prevent such automatic programming?
Whether the benefits you get from being able to do this stuff in theory are worth the massive up front effort involved in RDF-izing enough knowledge to be useful is the real question.
This is a common claim used by proponents of AI.
1940s: "It is just around the corner."
1970s: "We just need more links in our semantic nets."
1980s: "We just need more facts input into our expert system."
early 1990 Turing Award winner for AI: "We just need more processing power. All we need is a giga-PC."
The claim that computers are not yet powerful enough is a generic claim from AI proponents, as to why their goals have yet to be realized. In fact, in the early 1990s, an Indian Turing Award winner was an AI guy. His speech was on all that is AI. Read it and you will see exactly what I am ranting about. At the end of his speech he says that the AI community's goals will be realized once we have a "giga-computer", i.e. a computer that is the price of a PC, yet can execute at a gigahertz.
Yup, Turing Award winner AI man says it himself. In his speech he basically displays all that there is to this type of person and their psuedoscience.
Yes, but all this assumes that people agree on exact precise ways of representing everything. Just as in flat UNICODE text, you can describe the same thing in multiple ways, in RDF you can also describe the same thing in multiple ways that still differ in RDF's semantics. For example, there are multiple ways to encode a ternary predicate in terms of binary predicates. Each one of these represenations will not just differ in syntax, but also in RDF's semantics. Nothing is gained!
RDF and the semantic web assume an ideal situation in which all information is complete and formatted in a uniform way.
They have yet to produce a sentient computer. They haven't come any close to doing so. There is no science to their field. There is no systematic process for obtaining such a goal.
Furthermore, computers are a very restricted form of physical system, and therefore they are limited. There are problems that are not computable, yet humans solve them on a regular basis. Even though many people like to anthropomorphize aspects of computation, there is very little in common between a human and a computer.
Considering that RDF is just a rebranding of a 30+ year old concept from AI, "semantic nets", I would have to say that RDF is a non-solution looking for another sap to pawn itself onto.
And how is the meaning behind a string of characters given? For example, lets say you want to give the meaning behind a strong of characters that describes to a human the proof of Skolem's Paradox.
Are you saying that RDF is a Turing complete programming language? How the hell would I write, for example, a C++ interpreter in RDF? Also in what sense can you describe what an algorithm does using RDF? For example, lets say I devised a new sophisticated compression algorithm. How do I describe that in RDF?
I am sure I will be modded as a troll, but somebody needs to say it, somebody needs to stop these guys.
The "Semantic web" is the latest snake oil being pawned by the AI community.
Nothing is worse than an AI-type. They make big claims and never deliver. They overly anthropomorphize all aspects of computation, fooling themselves into a false understanding of all that is related to computer science. For example, Emacs is "intelligent" because it includes a broken implementation of the lambda-calculus, an implementation that doesn't even properly implement beta-reduction? Since when has breadth-first search, depth-first search, and other search algorithms had anything to do with intelligence? They are just procedures for solving problems. The list goes on and on...
These people regularly try to disprove things such as the undecidability of various problems, the incompleteness of various logics, etc... as these undeniable mathematical proofs point to the fact that computers cannot be intelligent. Sure it is fun for sci-fi movies, but it surely isn't real science.
The semantic web is nothing more than AI-types recycling their same old crap. RDF and OWL, the two most popular scripting languages for the semantic web, are just "semantic nets", an AI concept from the 1970s, rehashed. Yup, when you can't sell any snake oil, just rename it to something else and profit... and profit they do, but does society ever see the AI-types' promises come to fruition?
Give me a break! Give the world a break. Computer science is just that: a science, and so the pseudoscience that is AI must be addressed by more people in the field of computer science.
"In God We Trust" and "Under God" have not been with us for a long time when we talk about Money and The Pledge. Educate yourself. These were added strictly as part of the Cold War and McCarthyism to keep "Godless Commies" out of school and from using money.
Educate myself? Why don't you educate yourself? After all, a simple web search for the phrase doesn't take that much work considering the first result in Google gives a pretty good history of how it appeared on our coinage.
In the fictional Dune universe, there was a Matrix-like AI revolt, followed by an extended war between humans and AI. After the war was resolved, the humans decided to use human computers known as Mentats, which were "giga-savants", that had their minds altered by injesting a special form of the spice.
Java and Flash on Linux are at least as good as their Windows versions. Yeah sites that use them can be slow, annoying, and sometimes, though very rarely, cause browser instability, but I see the same crap happen to my wife under Windows XP with IE.
The type of plugins that still suck on Linux are media player browser plugins. Sure there is an mplayer plugin for Mozilla, but after over a year of using it... I still feel that it is crap. So for video and music that is not streamed, I just download to a local folder and play from there. However, for streamed content, I tend to be up sh*t creek.
Screw those features, Firefox needs some real download management features. I often resort to downloading via an xterm with wget, just because I know that it is more reliable and has resuming features.
But I do agree that the Mozilla browsers need better tab management too. Java script open new window should optionally just open a new tab instead, for those that like to keep a tidy desktop. Same goes for pop-ups: they should optionally just open a new tab.
You are thinking of the "under god" phrase in the pledge. Our currency has had such things written on it at least since WWII, AFAIK. I have a coin collection... I just need to dig it out.
Separation of Church and state should be absolute, but I don't think we need to go around blowing up our "Buddhist statues"... like the Taliban did to their's. That is, we shouldn't remove the "In God We Trust" and other such things from our history/culture. They are there, they have been there for a very long time, and trying to erase that past is silly.
Now, we shouldn't allow anybody to add any new religious stuff into the realm of government, as those fundamentalist christians are doing with the ten commandments statue at that courthouse. That is wrong.
The same goes for the next time we redesign our currency. It happens occasionally so as to combat counterfeiters and such. The new designs shouldn't have religious stuff on them, but we should trigger an expensive redesigning of our currency just to remove religious references... that is just like blowing up buddhist statues.
Note that the boot.iso is in the "...os/images" directory on any mirror. When you boot the small ISO, you will be asked for the mirror URL, which as best as I remember ends in ".../os/".
Each mirror has a boot.iso: fedora/linux/core/3/i386/os/images/boot .iso
Download that, also write down or print out a few mirrors' "fedora/linux/core/3/i386/os/" directories, and then burn the CD, which is under 10MB, so there is a good chance that you can download and burn something that small without any errors. Then boot it, answer the questions, one of which will be FTP or HTTP, select the one that your mirror supports and then give it the mirror URL in the next question.
That is not a technical reason. The "hack" as you call it works perfectly well, has nice graphical frontends and many other associated tools. Anaconda is not used by Debian for a host of technical reasons, mainly being that it does not support all of the architectures that Debian must support.
Apt for RPM supports everything RPM and Fedora need, so yum is just different for the sake of being different. Yet another Linux distro fork. If Fedora would go apt, then that would do allot to mend the rift between RPM/DEB based distros, as mostly, from the end user's point of view, installing, removing, and updating packages is done through a GUI like Synaptic.
yum is not the right direction for Fedora. apt is a better standard, as it makes Linux distros as a whole more standardized for the user.
Why are so many Fedora people interested in yum, when apt is far more commonplace and has a wider array of tools available to support it? If Fedora would standardize on apt for RPM, this would help mend the RPM/DEB divide, as a higher-level layer would abstract the differences between the two from the user's perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
I would love to see Microsoft develop the ability to use the Firefox rendering engine in place of the IE rendering engine. This would allow for a true 100% switching for Windows users. Not just your web browser, but your email client, help menus, other applications that make use of the IE rendering engine would also be able to use the Gecko rendering engine.
As a Linux user, I would love to see Windows computers shipped with the default browser set to Firefox. Adoption will never happen all at once, and it will never be total. I don't expect everybody to start using Linux or even to use anything other than Windows. However, I would like to see a world were other options are viable. One means to improve Linux is to get a web browser that is in every way, at least as good as the web browsers used on other OS's.
It is far more reasonable to expect Windows users to stay on Windows yet switch to Firefox, than it is to expect them to switch to Linux. However, if they switch to Firefox, then more web sites will be designed to be compatible with Firefox. Since Firefox is a multi-platform web browser, this means that many other platforms will also have a browser that is compatible with more web sites.
So Linux users benefit, as do Windows users, Mac users, BSD, Solaris, etc.
Not only that, but your email client and web browser exist on multiple OS's, you have allot more freedom to just up and switch OS's, since these two apps are the most used computer apps.
Yeah, Lisp, a broken (they didn't even understand proper beta-reduction) reinvention of the lambda-calculus 20 to 30 years after mathematicians created it. Pretty damn innovative. What will they come up with next, arithmetic? A* is nothing more than a contrained search, and it is a hack which only works well in toy games... not real world problems. I wouldn't go bragging about A* as a cornerstone of AI. Parsers were already created in the fields of computational linguistics and automata theory before they were reinvented by the AI community. The same goes for compilers.
Anyway, just because a painter claims to be researching AI, doesn't make his paintings a product of the field of AI, the same goes for wannabe mathematicians, programming language designers, etc.
If there is a pure research wing of CS, it would be mathematics. See metamathematics, proof theory, and number theory for good examples. At its best, the field of AI has simply reinvented mathematical concepts from formal logic (semantics nets... oops, they are a fragment of FOL) to lambda-calculi (lisp... oops, we just reinvented the wheel known as the lambda-calculus).
You do realize that there are computability issues that would prevent such automatic programming?
This is a common claim used by proponents of AI.
1940s: "It is just around the corner."
1970s: "We just need more links in our semantic nets."
1980s: "We just need more facts input into our expert system."
early 1990 Turing Award winner for AI: "We just need more processing power. All we need is a giga-PC."
2000s: "We just need more data in RDF."
The claim that computers are not yet powerful enough is a generic claim from AI proponents, as to why their goals have yet to be realized. In fact, in the early 1990s, an Indian Turing Award winner was an AI guy. His speech was on all that is AI. Read it and you will see exactly what I am ranting about. At the end of his speech he says that the AI community's goals will be realized once we have a "giga-computer", i.e. a computer that is the price of a PC, yet can execute at a gigahertz.
Yup, Turing Award winner AI man says it himself. In his speech he basically displays all that there is to this type of person and their psuedoscience.
Yes, but all this assumes that people agree on exact precise ways of representing everything. Just as in flat UNICODE text, you can describe the same thing in multiple ways, in RDF you can also describe the same thing in multiple ways that still differ in RDF's semantics. For example, there are multiple ways to encode a ternary predicate in terms of binary predicates. Each one of these represenations will not just differ in syntax, but also in RDF's semantics. Nothing is gained!
RDF and the semantic web assume an ideal situation in which all information is complete and formatted in a uniform way.
But flat UNICODE text is enough to describe all knowledge. I fail to see what is gained.
They have yet to produce a sentient computer. They haven't come any close to doing so. There is no science to their field. There is no systematic process for obtaining such a goal.
Furthermore, computers are a very restricted form of physical system, and therefore they are limited. There are problems that are not computable, yet humans solve them on a regular basis. Even though many people like to anthropomorphize aspects of computation, there is very little in common between a human and a computer.
Each new wave of bullshit from the AI community lives for about 5-8 years before it completely dies on its lies and crap.
Considering that RDF is just a rebranding of a 30+ year old concept from AI, "semantic nets", I would have to say that RDF is a non-solution looking for another sap to pawn itself onto.
And how is the meaning behind a string of characters given? For example, lets say you want to give the meaning behind a strong of characters that describes to a human the proof of Skolem's Paradox.
Are you saying that RDF is a Turing complete programming language? How the hell would I write, for example, a C++ interpreter in RDF? Also in what sense can you describe what an algorithm does using RDF? For example, lets say I devised a new sophisticated compression algorithm. How do I describe that in RDF?
Kim can do searching and calculations. Those are primitive forms of processing.
I am sure I will be modded as a troll, but somebody needs to say it, somebody needs to stop these guys.
The "Semantic web" is the latest snake oil being pawned by the AI community.
Nothing is worse than an AI-type. They make big claims and never deliver. They overly anthropomorphize all aspects of computation, fooling themselves into a false understanding of all that is related to computer science. For example, Emacs is "intelligent" because it includes a broken implementation of the lambda-calculus, an implementation that doesn't even properly implement beta-reduction? Since when has breadth-first search, depth-first search, and other search algorithms had anything to do with intelligence? They are just procedures for solving problems. The list goes on and on...
These people regularly try to disprove things such as the undecidability of various problems, the incompleteness of various logics, etc... as these undeniable mathematical proofs point to the fact that computers cannot be intelligent. Sure it is fun for sci-fi movies, but it surely isn't real science.
The semantic web is nothing more than AI-types recycling their same old crap. RDF and OWL, the two most popular scripting languages for the semantic web, are just "semantic nets", an AI concept from the 1970s, rehashed. Yup, when you can't sell any snake oil, just rename it to something else and profit... and profit they do, but does society ever see the AI-types' promises come to fruition?
Give me a break! Give the world a break. Computer science is just that: a science, and so the pseudoscience that is AI must be addressed by more people in the field of computer science.
McAfee went back in time and killed Alan Turing. Then they made it look like a suicide before they returned the present.
Educate myself? Why don't you educate yourself? After all, a simple web search for the phrase doesn't take that much work considering the first result in Google gives a pretty good history of how it appeared on our coinage.
In the fictional Dune universe, there was a Matrix-like AI revolt, followed by an extended war between humans and AI. After the war was resolved, the humans decided to use human computers known as Mentats, which were "giga-savants", that had their minds altered by injesting a special form of the spice.
Java and Flash on Linux are at least as good as their Windows versions. Yeah sites that use them can be slow, annoying, and sometimes, though very rarely, cause browser instability, but I see the same crap happen to my wife under Windows XP with IE.
The type of plugins that still suck on Linux are media player browser plugins. Sure there is an mplayer plugin for Mozilla, but after over a year of using it... I still feel that it is crap. So for video and music that is not streamed, I just download to a local folder and play from there. However, for streamed content, I tend to be up sh*t creek.
Screw those features, Firefox needs some real download management features. I often resort to downloading via an xterm with wget, just because I know that it is more reliable and has resuming features.
But I do agree that the Mozilla browsers need better tab management too. Java script open new window should optionally just open a new tab instead, for those that like to keep a tidy desktop. Same goes for pop-ups: they should optionally just open a new tab.
You are thinking of the "under god" phrase in the pledge. Our currency has had such things written on it at least since WWII, AFAIK. I have a coin collection... I just need to dig it out.
Separation of Church and state should be absolute, but I don't think we need to go around blowing up our "Buddhist statues"... like the Taliban did to their's. That is, we shouldn't remove the "In God We Trust" and other such things from our history/culture. They are there, they have been there for a very long time, and trying to erase that past is silly.
Now, we shouldn't allow anybody to add any new religious stuff into the realm of government, as those fundamentalist christians are doing with the ten commandments statue at that courthouse. That is wrong.
The same goes for the next time we redesign our currency. It happens occasionally so as to combat counterfeiters and such. The new designs shouldn't have religious stuff on them, but we should trigger an expensive redesigning of our currency just to remove religious references... that is just like blowing up buddhist statues.
Note that the boot.iso is in the "...os/images" directory on any mirror. When you boot the small ISO, you will be asked for the mirror URL, which as best as I remember ends in ".../os/".
Each mirror has a boot.iso:t .iso
fedora/linux/core/3/i386/os/images/boo
Download that, also write down or print out a few mirrors' "fedora/linux/core/3/i386/os/" directories, and then burn the CD, which is under 10MB, so there is a good chance that you can download and burn something that small without any errors. Then boot it, answer the questions, one of which will be FTP or HTTP, select the one that your mirror supports and then give it the mirror URL in the next question.
Then the install is as if you used a CD.
That is not a technical reason. The "hack" as you call it works perfectly well, has nice graphical frontends and many other associated tools. Anaconda is not used by Debian for a host of technical reasons, mainly being that it does not support all of the architectures that Debian must support.
Apt for RPM supports everything RPM and Fedora need, so yum is just different for the sake of being different. Yet another Linux distro fork. If Fedora would go apt, then that would do allot to mend the rift between RPM/DEB based distros, as mostly, from the end user's point of view, installing, removing, and updating packages is done through a GUI like Synaptic.
yum is not the right direction for Fedora. apt is a better standard, as it makes Linux distros as a whole more standardized for the user.
Why are so many Fedora people interested in yum, when apt is far more commonplace and has a wider array of tools available to support it? If Fedora would standardize on apt for RPM, this would help mend the RPM/DEB divide, as a higher-level layer would abstract the differences between the two from the user's perspective.