Machines never make mistakes? Sure they do, but the mistakes they make aren't only an issue of programming--they're an issue of interpretation.
The point is that there is a line past which we no longer care 'why' mistakes were made - the machine is abstracted from its origins and viewed as an entity unto itself. That point is probably reached when it can actually correct the hard or software that causes the error.
For example, if we made our AI robot with old pentium chips, we could code it to do a lot of math - if, at some point it 'realized' that it was giving 'incorrect' answers when doing floating-point calculations, and started 'fixing' the answers coming from the broken FP core en route to the user, we would have a point past which the machine could be called 'aware' - at least on one level.
Any mistakes made in fp calculations past that point would be blamed on the machine itself, and not on the humans who failed QA class in high school.:P
-- blue
Re:Translators - Let the dialectizer explain it
on
Dialectizer Shut Down
·
· Score: 4
Retro-actively open-sourcing dead or dying commercial software packages has absolutely no value at all to the open source community. These things are publicity stunts designed to make companies look open source-friendly. As was noted in a previous comment, PHP burns rings around Cold Fusion.
sendmail, bind, the gimp DOES count - it kicks ass, xmms,/proc, top, kill, the entire GNU file utils set (better than the shit you get in windows, better than the shit you get w/commercial unices), vim, all of the modern window managers, the BSD tcp/ip stack, gcc, perl, python, ftp, telnet, gzip, (g)tar, any of the free print servers, diff, patch, of course, cvs, (linux's) fdisk, ipf/ipchains, (g)sed, (g)awk, cron, take your pick of shells, bsd's NFS services..
-- blue
cut + paste from yesterday's news.com article
on
New Mega Alphas
·
· Score: 3
Analysts estimate the GS80 will cost around $100,000, the GS160 around $500,000 and the GS320 more than $1 million. The high-end servers initially will come with OpenVMS or Tru64 Unix; Linux will be available later. --- snip ---
the '80 is the 8 processor, '160 is 16, i'll leave it as an excersize for the reader to figure out the '320.:P
well - the book itself has not yet been published, so i won't give ya points for what it might or might not be - but i will admit that i overlooked the 'backlash' aspect of the incident.
i still don't feel good about or want to have anything to do with JK's coverage of the issue, and i still espouse activism as opposed to whiningism - the people who feel suppressed should stand DIRECTLY up to those oppressing them, not whine on/. - but that's an entirely different issue.
Well, since Jeff appears to be reading this thread, I think it's time for a good ol' fashioned rant, and an explanation of why I posted saying that I don't want to see the book published.
There are true victims involved in the Columbine shootings, and I doubt that any of them are active/. readers.
If you were a parent or lover of someone killed in the shootings, how would you feel about all of this? Is it our place, our responsiblity to continue to harp and pound on someone else's tragedy? Don't you think that maybe all we're doing it prolonging the suffering of those who just want to move on with their lives and heal?
Also, the idea that we, as geeks, or outcasts, or the formerly societally abused should use the shootings as a sounding point to 'stand up' for other people who don't 'fit in' is WAY wrong. It's sick.
If you have something to say about how you were treated - if you feel that your natural views and actions have brought you pain from people more societally attuned, then, great, write about it - become an activist. Stand up for YOU, not in defense of the actions of some whacko fucknuts with guns.
But to use someone else's pain and suffering to make yourself feel better - to diefy the SHOOTERS as being the victims, is absolute BULLSHIT. It makes me completely ill.
And, so, my point is, if/. wants to publish a bunch of stories about how we all got our lunch money ganked when we were six, that's cool with me - making miserable people more miserable is not. It is their place to stand up and vocalize their pain, not ours.
We the true users of slashdot must act to prevent this. We must not allow a Slashdot full of nude pictures of Natalie Portman or petrification fanatasies. We must anti-troll slashdot as I am doing now.
I am a true user of/., and I don't want this book published, and I don't ever want to see Columbine discussed on/. again - and especially not by JK.
Also, the uh.. is it Corel now? Or Compaq? Whoever the hell owns the netwinder, it's an ARM box, and tiny and nice.
Also, in response to the other guy, asking why someone would want ARM vs Transmeta, the answer is that code can be natively compiled for ARM, but the xmeta chip will only do translation. I dunno if there's any actual difference in that, speedwise, since they're both pokey little chips.
I do think that you can do ASM for ARM, and not for Xmeta. Could be wrong, tho.
At the heart of all of this is the BSD license. M$ changed some code and decided to redistribute it under a more restrictive license, as is their right.
So now everyone is pissed off, and wanting blood - but THINK for a minute - what you're really rebelling against is freedom - M$'s freedom to do as they wish with THEIR code, as defined by a license allowing FREEDOM. See?
If ya don't like it DONT USE IT. (Even if you do like it, don't use it, on principal.)
Every single person posting to this forum and bashing M$ while USING THEIR PRODUCTS should just shut the hell up. Vote with your wallet, not with your spare 5 minutes and a shout of 'me too!'
Thank you for that post. The people who are all jumping up and down and yelling 'censorship' are victims of both their own tiny brains and Robin Miller's (probably) unintended manipulations.
Nothing about this has anything to do with censorship, people. It is sensationalist quasijournalism at its best, it is what lay at the core of/.'s appeal, it is someone yanking your little contrarian "I wanna be a rebel, too!" noserings and leading you around the room. It makes us all look equally stupid, moreso because other media outlets are on the bandwagon. Get on with your lives. This should be decided in M$'s favor, maybe it would temper some of your misguided enthusiasms, maybe it would get Roblimo fired.
Prolly not, tho, I'm sure this is driving a lot of clickie clickies.
So, they make this chipset, and it's supposed to save you all this money, and lower TCO of workstations, by performing multiple operations.
It actually sucks, it's dog slow, etc - but it IS cheap, and it sells like hotcakes, and now a million or so peecees are around there using it.
Hehehe, sorry, I can't stop giggling at the irony of it, this chip that's made to save money is costing everyone out the butt.
In a perfect world, maybe some IT managers would sit up and say 'hrm, well, maybe we should not keep buying the cheapest piece of junk workstation that ibm/compaq/hp makes..'
The bug report states that the whole thing was a misunderstanding, that the feature was only removed from the menu, not from the code, and that it was done pending code cleanup.
The report also has something to say about news sites carrying the story without confirming that facts...
"one of linux's stregnths has always been that it more or less universally aims for the lowest common denominator."
standards bodies vary in their speed of change and the degree to which they are on the 'leading edge.' in some cases, sticking to a standard can mean that you miss a lot of good functionality, but i think those cases are rare.
more than aiming for the least common demominator, linux, or anything based on standards compliance, should aim for the greatest common factor. i understand where you could make the LCD/GCF mistake tho, as i speak a peculiar dialect of geek, and those two phrases do sound a lot alike.:)
one of linux's strengths has always been that it more or less universally aims for standards compliance. while whiz-bang 'extra functionality' may seem like an attractive target, it is usually less valuable than a system that works well, and works well with the rest of your systems.
squeezing an extra 10% of performance out of commodity hardware seems less valuable to me than knowing that your linux box will work with whatever sort of network you need to put it into.
and not in the icky proto-philosophical sense, either. The companies that are working now to make things like this possible are likely to be the next generation of media heavy-hitters... Remember how long AOL kind of languished in the background as a sort of laughingstock company? Well, they had a vision of how people would want the ineternet to look, they stuck with it, and now they own the western world.
Not that they don't suck, but, good for them.
Same idea, I think, for companies like mp3.com and whatever the company releasing this movie is..:P At some point, the IP issues will dissolve in the face of market demand - it's obvious to me that most americans don't really give a damn about IP, we want convenient access to our movies and music. As long as IP is in the way of getting that, it will be ignored.
The corporations making money off of it are going to have to find some way to make it stop being an impediment to consumption, or they will lose to the ones who offer media without the 'traditional' IP constraints.
In reply to the 'what is Linux' question, McCrabb sez:
First, it's a marketplace for us to sell our Linux Professional Services. There is a great demand for companies that have no idea how to add the power of Linux to their complex computing environments.
Well, SCO certainly ranks up there as a company with no idea how to do much of anything, especially add 'the power of Linux' to a complex computing environment.
Refreshing that an executive would baldy admit to his company's cluelessness, tho.
SCO, and everyone else who makes money selling commodity operating systems, get ready for dodo-fi-cation. Once the big kids decide to take 'OS Sales' off of their balance sheets and move that income over to pure services, you guys are dead.
Hmm, hey, I can think of one other big company that makes a lot of money selling a crappy OS...:P I bet within the next year or so, we'll start hearing about M$'s 'services division' cropping up.
Nothoing personal against Elyas, but why is every post that mentions 'registry' moderated up? RPM does, in fact, 'register' packages, as does every other package manager that tracks versions.
They have to. It's implicit - tracking requires history. Sheesh.
Come on, moderators. If you don't understand the technology, DON'T moderate the posts.
Slashdot Mirror
Machines never make mistakes? Sure they do, but the mistakes they make aren't only an issue of programming--they're an issue of interpretation.
:P
The point is that there is a line past which we no longer care 'why' mistakes were made - the machine is abstracted from its origins and viewed as an entity unto itself. That point is probably reached when it can actually correct the hard or software that causes the error.
For example, if we made our AI robot with old pentium chips, we could code it to do a lot of math - if, at some point it 'realized' that it was giving 'incorrect' answers when doing floating-point calculations, and started 'fixing' the answers coming from the broken FP core en route to the user, we would have a point past which the machine could be called 'aware' - at least on one level.
Any mistakes made in fp calculations past that point would be blamed on the machine itself, and not on the humans who failed QA class in high school.
--
blue
Really he says it much better than I can:
l ect= redneck&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rinkworks.com%2Fdiale ct%2Fcopyr.shtml
http://www.rinkworks.com/dialect/dialectp.cgi?dia
--
blue
Retro-actively open-sourcing dead or dying commercial software packages has absolutely no value at all to the open source community. These things are publicity stunts designed to make companies look open source-friendly. As was noted in a previous comment, PHP burns rings around Cold Fusion.
Quake.
--
blue
sendmail, bind, the gimp DOES count - it kicks ass, xmms, /proc, top, kill, the entire GNU file utils set (better than the shit you get in windows, better than the shit you get w/commercial unices), vim, all of the modern window managers, the BSD tcp/ip stack, gcc, perl, python, ftp, telnet, gzip, (g)tar, any of the free print servers, diff, patch, of course, cvs, (linux's) fdisk, ipf/ipchains, (g)sed, (g)awk, cron, take your pick of shells, bsd's NFS services..
--
blue
Analysts estimate the GS80 will cost around $100,000, the GS160 around $500,000 and the GS320 more than $1 million. The high-end servers initially will come with OpenVMS or Tru64 Unix; Linux will be available later.
:P
--- snip ---
the '80 is the 8 processor, '160 is 16, i'll leave it as an excersize for the reader to figure out the '320.
--
blue
I think news.com was saying street price of $89 a pop for the 600.. yummy, cheap cycles.
--
blue
i was just lamenting last night how poor the troll threads have gotten lately.. this one is great. keep up the good work.
--
blue
Why should anybody listen to your posts when you aren't even willing to make an informed decision?
:P
Good point, except that you ignore the possibility that I may have read the first few installments (I did) and been thoroughly sickened by it.
But, all my ranting can't possibly sum it up as well as some AC's succinct and true statement:
pathos sells.
That's what I think it's really all about, and that's why I'm speaking out against it. Shrug.
And, I've never, ever claimed to not be an idiot.
--
blue
well - the book itself has not yet been published, so i won't give ya points for what it might or might not be - but i will admit that i overlooked the 'backlash' aspect of the incident.
/. - but that's an entirely different issue.
i still don't feel good about or want to have anything to do with JK's coverage of the issue, and i still espouse activism as opposed to whiningism - the people who feel suppressed should stand DIRECTLY up to those oppressing them, not whine on
--
blue
No, jackass, apparently you've forgotten that JK's stories hellmouth center around people coming out and telling stories about how they
IDENTIFY WITH THE KILLERS.
see?
The killers are not the victims.
Some days, it's not even worth posting. I did get a massive kick out of having a post I signed with 'trolls rule' modded as 'troll.'
--
blue
Well, since Jeff appears to be reading this thread, I think it's time for a good ol' fashioned rant, and an explanation of why I posted saying that I don't want to see the book published.
/. readers.
/. wants to publish a bunch of stories about how we all got our lunch money ganked when we were six, that's cool with me - making miserable people more miserable is not. It is their place to stand up and vocalize their pain, not ours.
There are true victims involved in the Columbine shootings, and I doubt that any of them are active
If you were a parent or lover of someone killed in the shootings, how would you feel about all of this? Is it our place, our responsiblity to continue to harp and pound on someone else's tragedy? Don't you think that maybe all we're doing it prolonging the suffering of those who just want to move on with their lives and heal?
Also, the idea that we, as geeks, or outcasts, or the formerly societally abused should use the shootings as a sounding point to 'stand up' for other people who don't 'fit in' is WAY wrong. It's sick.
If you have something to say about how you were treated - if you feel that your natural views and actions have brought you pain from people more societally attuned, then, great, write about it - become an activist. Stand up for YOU, not in defense of the actions of some whacko fucknuts with guns.
But to use someone else's pain and suffering to make yourself feel better - to diefy the SHOOTERS as being the victims, is absolute BULLSHIT. It makes me completely ill.
And, so, my point is, if
--
blue
We the true users of slashdot must act to prevent this. We must not allow a Slashdot full of nude pictures of Natalie Portman or petrification fanatasies. We must anti-troll slashdot as I am doing now.
/., and I don't want this book published, and I don't ever want to see Columbine discussed on /. again - and especially not by JK.
I am a true user of
Trolls rule.
--
blue
Preferrably JK, so I can filter it out.
Thanks,
--
blue
http://develo per.intel.com/design/strong/quicklist/eval-plat/sa -110.htm
This is an ARM chip on a PCI card. You can also get it with a little backplane and build your own linux ARM box. Fun fun.
I need more me's, or more time in the day. So many fun things to hack, so little time.
--
blue
Has anyone ported linux to ARM?
Heh, what kind of a question is that?
http://www.arm.uk.linux.org/
Also, the uh.. is it Corel now? Or Compaq? Whoever the hell owns the netwinder, it's an ARM box, and tiny and nice.
Also, in response to the other guy, asking why someone would want ARM vs Transmeta, the answer is that code can be natively compiled for ARM, but the xmeta chip will only do translation. I dunno if there's any actual difference in that, speedwise, since they're both pokey little chips.
I do think that you can do ASM for ARM, and not for Xmeta. Could be wrong, tho.
--
blue
Here's what really hurts:
At the heart of all of this is the BSD license. M$ changed some code and decided to redistribute it under a more restrictive license, as is their right.
So now everyone is pissed off, and wanting blood - but THINK for a minute - what you're really rebelling against is freedom - M$'s freedom to do as they wish with THEIR code, as defined by a license allowing FREEDOM. See?
If ya don't like it DONT USE IT. (Even if you do like it, don't use it, on principal.)
Every single person posting to this forum and bashing M$ while USING THEIR PRODUCTS should just shut the hell up. Vote with your wallet, not with your spare 5 minutes and a shout of 'me too!'
--
blue
Thank you for that post. The people who are all jumping up and down and yelling 'censorship' are victims of both their own tiny brains and Robin Miller's (probably) unintended manipulations.
/.'s appeal, it is someone yanking your little contrarian "I wanna be a rebel, too!" noserings and leading you around the room. It makes us all look equally stupid, moreso because other media outlets are on the bandwagon. Get on with your lives. This should be decided in M$'s favor, maybe it would temper some of your misguided enthusiasms, maybe it would get Roblimo fired.
Nothing about this has anything to do with censorship, people. It is sensationalist quasijournalism at its best, it is what lay at the core of
Prolly not, tho, I'm sure this is driving a lot of clickie clickies.
--
blue
surprise, slashdot readers can't handle the responsibility of an open forum and abuse their freedom to POST.
--
blue
So, they make this chipset, and it's supposed to save you all this money, and lower TCO of workstations, by performing multiple operations.
It actually sucks, it's dog slow, etc - but it IS cheap, and it sells like hotcakes, and now a million or so peecees are around there using it.
Hehehe, sorry, I can't stop giggling at the irony of it, this chip that's made to save money is costing everyone out the butt.
In a perfect world, maybe some IT managers would sit up and say 'hrm, well, maybe we should not keep buying the cheapest piece of junk workstation that ibm/compaq/hp makes..'
Or maybe not.
--
blue
The bug report states that the whole thing was a misunderstanding, that the feature was only removed from the menu, not from the code, and that it was done pending code cleanup.
The report also has something to say about news sites carrying the story without confirming that facts...
So, this is here, why?
--
blue
"one of linux's stregnths has always been that it more or less universally aims for the lowest common denominator."
:)
standards bodies vary in their speed of change and the degree to which they are on the 'leading edge.' in some cases, sticking to a standard can mean that you miss a lot of good functionality, but i think those cases are rare.
more than aiming for the least common demominator, linux, or anything based on standards compliance, should aim for the greatest common factor. i understand where you could make the LCD/GCF mistake tho, as i speak a peculiar dialect of geek, and those two phrases do sound a lot alike.
--
blue
one of linux's strengths has always been that it more or less universally aims for standards compliance. while whiz-bang 'extra functionality' may seem like an attractive target, it is usually less valuable than a system that works well, and works well with the rest of your systems.
squeezing an extra 10% of performance out of commodity hardware seems less valuable to me than knowing that your linux box will work with whatever sort of network you need to put it into.
all IMHO, of course.
--
blue
and not in the icky proto-philosophical sense, either. The companies that are working now to make things like this possible are likely to be the next generation of media heavy-hitters... Remember how long AOL kind of languished in the background as a sort of laughingstock company? Well, they had a vision of how people would want the ineternet to look, they stuck with it, and now they own the western world.
:P At some point, the IP issues will dissolve in the face of market demand - it's obvious to me that most americans don't really give a damn about IP, we want convenient access to our movies and music. As long as IP is in the way of getting that, it will be ignored.
Not that they don't suck, but, good for them.
Same idea, I think, for companies like mp3.com and whatever the company releasing this movie is..
The corporations making money off of it are going to have to find some way to make it stop being an impediment to consumption, or they will lose to the ones who offer media without the 'traditional' IP constraints.
--
blue
In reply to the 'what is Linux' question, McCrabb sez:
:P I bet within the next year or so, we'll start hearing about M$'s 'services division' cropping up.
First, it's a marketplace for us to sell our Linux Professional Services. There is a great demand for companies that have no idea how to add the power of Linux to their complex computing environments.
Well, SCO certainly ranks up there as a company with no idea how to do much of anything, especially add 'the power of Linux' to a complex computing environment.
Refreshing that an executive would baldy admit to his company's cluelessness, tho.
SCO, and everyone else who makes money selling commodity operating systems, get ready for dodo-fi-cation. Once the big kids decide to take 'OS Sales' off of their balance sheets and move that income over to pure services, you guys are dead.
Hmm, hey, I can think of one other big company that makes a lot of money selling a crappy OS...
--
blue
Nothoing personal against Elyas, but why is every post that mentions 'registry' moderated up? RPM does, in fact, 'register' packages, as does every other package manager that tracks versions.
They have to. It's implicit - tracking requires history. Sheesh.
Come on, moderators. If you don't understand the technology, DON'T moderate the posts.
Thanks.
--
blue