Ancient Rome was environmentally benign, as long as you don't count them stripping bare the entire European continent, North Africa and the Middle East...
>What the hell is up with this anti-science bent society has come up with lately?
I think a lot of people are having trouble keeping up.
And that's a serious problem. Whenever technology moves too quickly, the result is facism. Facism is nothing more than technology in the hands of the elite. When a small number of people possess a powerful idea, it's inevitable that it will be used against the masses who don't. Hitler had tanks. Wall Street has the credit-default swap.
An anti-science bent can sound like immature whining, but it's an important signal that people are being left behind. Those people will either rebel, or get squashed. Neither one is good, because it means that most decent people will get caught in the crossfire.
>If you want to look for mathematical manipulators, perhaps you should look no further than the "producers" behind the utter crap that's top o' the pop charts today.
That's...an excellent point.
Today's mainstream producers are experts at compressing vast amounts of music history into simple formulas that appeal to millions of tweens. Take Miley Cyrus' 2007 hit, "See You Again." I could swear it's a rip-off of the 80's hit I Wear My Sunglasses at Night, and oh look....Wikipedia knows this!
Or how about Avatar? The plot is exactly the same as Terminator Salvation. And Disney's Pocahontas. And Fern Gully, according to protesting masses on imdb.
Are these things art? They're certainly impressive. They could also be better, in the sense of being less predictable.
>Mozart's greatest contribution to music wasn't neccessarily his symphonies. It was the algorithms he constructed, finding that pleasing music has mathematical undertones....These robots do no more harm to him and his legacy than Adobe Photoshop does to Pablo Picasso.
This is what's tough about Slashdot. Thirty posts in, and someone already has The Right Answer:)
Intricate music loses its appeal when it becomes an end unto itself. I like progressive rock to a point. But when it becomes raw showmanship of talent, it's less like music (a medium for communication), and more like a demo (a presentation of what's possible).
I think progressive rock in some ways is similar to what you would expect from computer-generated music. Both don't have a level of restraint that appeals to a wide audience.
As the OP stated, Mozart designed the algorithms in this software based on his own trial and error and judgment. He was, in a sense, the software author.
But my understanding of Mozart, Beethoven and others is that they were deeply passionate about their work too. They injected ingenuity, which is the art of cleverly breaking the rules and subtly expanding them.
I'm not sure how well a computer can do this. I am very interested in seeing how this goes, though. Ultimately I think computer generated music will be a wikipedia of musical forms we already know. That's not art, it's documentation. The usefulness of documentation is that it allows everyone to get educated and move on to the next great idea.
>To display the pictures, it makes sense to use the monitor gamma. But to actually modify the data using that information which is probably flawed in 99.9999999% of cases? That's just wrong.
You should read his explanation. It's pretty lucid. It has to do with the fact that the gamma is expected and built into the system. It's also largely standardized at 2.2. So to ignore the gamma is a fundamental mistake.
The purpose of the gamma is to allow fine gradients of very dark and very white. Without it, 8-bit color is basically useless....you would have black, lots of grey, and then white. No off-whites or decent shadows.
>BTW, in my opinion Ford is to GM as Apple is to MS.
Interesting.
I own a Ford. It has been reliable, and the fixes (12 years old) have been forthcoming as mold on cheese.
It's hard to imagine the parts being cheaper than they are ($17 for an O2 sensor?)
And the car just refuses to fail in any big way.
I want to get rid of this Ford because it's old, but it just won't give me a reason. Even fuel efficiency is on par with the non-hybrids released in recent years.
Roosevelt hated him. He thought Churchill was a drunk, and judged the entire UK mainland on that premise.
If Churchill was slightly more respectable, he may have enjoyed US involvement sooner. He certainly was left to enjoy being booted out of office the moment the war was over.
>it's damn near impossible to bootstrap your business when you are working two jobs just to pay the bills
Indeed. The most salient point I got from the article is that Jimmy Wales had $250,000 to spend on a half-baked idea of online encyclopedias.
For the sake of accounting, please roll this into the cost of running Wikipedia.
If everyone had $250k to throw at $RANDOM_IDEA, we wouldn't be discussing whether failure was profitable. I'm sure many businesses were started on orders of magnitude less money than this.
Jimmy Wales: "I spent $250,000 to start Wikipedia." Good for you. I'll take a house, thanks.
>Apple, McDonalds, Google, Dell and others have grown from small enterprises into big corporations. Some of that is luck, being at the right place at the right time and all that, but not all of it.
Most of the success is going straight for the dollars.
Apple: Survived for decades on educational grant money until the iMac. Gave up on writing software and re-purposed BSD (good idea). Hit big with phones and music devices. Has essentially always been a niche company, surviving on sheer religion, until the jog dial on the iPod made them famous. Future: As always, niche.
Dell: Gave an aura of respectability to cheapness. Offered a configurable website that was highly practical to end-users. Eventually realized that there's little growth potential in being the most efficient, practical-minded middleman. Where are they now?
McDonald's: Scouted new locations by helicopter. Outsourced risk to naive franchisees. Consistently lowered labor costs by simplifying the process. Built a brand name around bottom-of-the-barrel offerings that only a kid could digest. Focused on kids. Success.
Google: Went into the market with the pre-eminent search technology. Built a strong revenue stream from advertising revenue. Has consistently innovated into new areas of software (gmail, maps).
But here's a shocking statistic. Total amount of money I've paid to Google in the last ten years:
$0.
Hell, I actually considered stopping at McDonald's on the way home.
While the profit margins can be 2-3x what you're spending on raw materials, it quickly gets eaten up by the mountain of labor and fixed costs (rent).
In short, restaurants only make money when they're really busy. Logically, only a handful of restaurants in a given area can be really busy, and the rest will be struggling.
Consider a pizzeria. Rent could easily be $150/day. Labor, another $150. At $10/pie, consider a $5 profit margin. You will need to sell 60 pies a day just to break even.
It sure looks nice when a day's work gets you $600. None of it is yours, of course.
Yes, but an ultralight, ultra stiff frame would accomplish a lot. Imagine a 500lb car that gets slammed by an SUV and doesn't deform at all.
Sure, it would get thrown a hell of a distance, and the G forces might be severe, but I bet you could find a happy medium assuming you had access to ultra stiff materials in the first place.
>A top speed of 30mph...and it just went from cool to useless.
Hardly. I average 20-30mph to work each day. That's getting up to 60mph and then stopping at a light every couple of minutes. Considering I'm getting 1/2 to 1/3 the speed of my car, that's a pretty awful road network I have to use.
Ideally you would get this thing up to 30mph and then actually drive it for more than two minutes at a time.
As long as you're competing with 200hp monsters on the main road, these ultralights will creep up to normal-ish weight.
But if all the cars on the road were ultralights, it's unlikely that you would need air bags, crumple zones, or whatever else is slowing you down.
A bike is basically the minimalist model of what you should be basing the design on. It carries 1 passenger (how often do you give someone a ride to work?), 20-30lbs of cargo (milk and bread, for example), does about 10mph (maybe more...I have a mountain bike), and has no shell or safety features. It costs practically nothing to maintain, meaning there's nothing stopping you from having 2 or 3 vehicles (of varying weights) for different purposes. The only downsides of a bike is that it's slowish, and you might have to shower afterward.
But as long as you don't crash into an SUV, that's good enough. The solution is to get the SUVs on the parkway where they belong.
What we need are new roads for these cars. Essentially something along the lines of a glorified bike path.
At that point, these cars will essentially design themselves. They're so lightweight...I can imagine hundreds of different varieties will pop into existence.
These roads would be cheaper and easier to maintain, and require fewer traffic signals.
Now if someone would only come out with a decent version of SimCity, I could at least play with my fantasy.
When I get a little older, I'm going to propose that to the school board. "Try a budget of zero, and see how that goes."
I'm sure daisies and daffodils will spring up everywhere. People will be happier. Kids will lead more productive, fulfilling lives. Except for the cop families (read: welfare patrons), who will complain that they're not getting the usual government handout that they need to survive.
>I'm not sure how comfortable I'd be sending my 16 year old off to college somewhere.
Right. Because it's oh-so-difficult for a sixteen-year-old to drink some beers and pass out at midnight.
That's what passes for a college "party", btw.
If you don't think your teenager can handle the incredibly tame, 100%-teenager-oriented environment that is college, then you've probably failed as a parent, or have a kid with an unusually weak constitution.
The reason they are proposing doing away with Junior and Senior year of h.s. is because they're finally acknowledging that it's USELESS. This is a free country. You're not supposed to subject people to crap they don't want.
Stop trying to figure out what we're "pushing" kids to do with this. The plan is to give back two years of their lives that essentially have been stolen so they can do whatever the Hell they want in this Free Country of ours.
Sixteen year olds don't know what they want to go for college? How about "AWAY"?
>Sure, some kids, like 2 entire kids out of 6 billion. would be mature enough to be great at 16 out and on their own.
Are you shitting me? My cat was doing fine on its own after about a year.
There's many things about a college environment that can make a young student feel "not mature enough." But that's because college is fake. If you had to do normal things like shop for food and pay rent, I think you'd find that 16 is *plenty* old enough to shove Corn Flakes in your mouth, bro.
That's all a good observation - that college's value is social. That's certainly obvious to me after X number of interviews where they didn't give two shits that I'd gone to college at all, let alone what classes I took.
But here's a newsflash: Rich kids can be some of the least socialized. Coddled and isolated from the outside world, they can be of shockingly little practical value unless specifically molded to a task (which college happily does for them).
Let's take Harvard, for example. They produced the Unabomber. They produced Barack "Empty Shell" Obama. They produced any number of people who went on to join religious cults. And their suicide rate is 1.5 students per year.
>Since the very definition of "works according to specification" implies the absence of any vulnerabilities, is it really so hard to see why the blame is put on the software authors
What about the client who purchased the software? Aren't they responsible for specifying what they want?
It seems backwards to hold the vendor responsible for testing. The client has to define what the software is supposed to do.
Toyota's Prius braking problem is a perfect example. It gets fooled when you go over a bump. Who was supposed to think of that, the developers in a lab, or the managers who ship the thing?
Slashdot Mirror
Ruthless. I felt like I was watching District 9.
Since few people will click on the link without knowing what it is, this is about Liberia ("America's Africa"), Ak-47's, and eating people's hearts.
>for some reason I can't put my finger on, I smell evil
Maybe because you didn't RTFA?
That's the usual reason for couched speculation here on Slashdot.
Ancient Rome was environmentally benign, as long as you don't count them stripping bare the entire European continent, North Africa and the Middle East...
Other than that, totally benign.
>What the hell is up with this anti-science bent society has come up with lately?
I think a lot of people are having trouble keeping up.
And that's a serious problem. Whenever technology moves too quickly, the result is facism. Facism is nothing more than technology in the hands of the elite. When a small number of people possess a powerful idea, it's inevitable that it will be used against the masses who don't. Hitler had tanks. Wall Street has the credit-default swap.
An anti-science bent can sound like immature whining, but it's an important signal that people are being left behind. Those people will either rebel, or get squashed. Neither one is good, because it means that most decent people will get caught in the crossfire.
>If you want to look for mathematical manipulators, perhaps you should look no further than the "producers" behind the utter crap that's top o' the pop charts today.
That's...an excellent point.
Today's mainstream producers are experts at compressing vast amounts of music history into simple formulas that appeal to millions of tweens. Take Miley Cyrus' 2007 hit, "See You Again." I could swear it's a rip-off of the 80's hit I Wear My Sunglasses at Night, and oh look....Wikipedia knows this!
Or how about Avatar? The plot is exactly the same as Terminator Salvation. And Disney's Pocahontas. And Fern Gully, according to protesting masses on imdb.
Are these things art? They're certainly impressive. They could also be better, in the sense of being less predictable.
>Mozart's greatest contribution to music wasn't neccessarily his symphonies. It was the algorithms he constructed, finding that pleasing music has mathematical undertones....These robots do no more harm to him and his legacy than Adobe Photoshop does to Pablo Picasso.
:)
This is what's tough about Slashdot. Thirty posts in, and someone already has The Right Answer
Cue 300 off-topic posts...
Intricate music loses its appeal when it becomes an end unto itself. I like progressive rock to a point. But when it becomes raw showmanship of talent, it's less like music (a medium for communication), and more like a demo (a presentation of what's possible).
I think progressive rock in some ways is similar to what you would expect from computer-generated music. Both don't have a level of restraint that appeals to a wide audience.
As the OP stated, Mozart designed the algorithms in this software based on his own trial and error and judgment. He was, in a sense, the software author.
But my understanding of Mozart, Beethoven and others is that they were deeply passionate about their work too. They injected ingenuity, which is the art of cleverly breaking the rules and subtly expanding them.
I'm not sure how well a computer can do this. I am very interested in seeing how this goes, though. Ultimately I think computer generated music will be a wikipedia of musical forms we already know. That's not art, it's documentation. The usefulness of documentation is that it allows everyone to get educated and move on to the next great idea.
>To display the pictures, it makes sense to use the monitor gamma. But to actually modify the data using that information which is probably flawed in 99.9999999% of cases? That's just wrong.
You should read his explanation. It's pretty lucid. It has to do with the fact that the gamma is expected and built into the system. It's also largely standardized at 2.2. So to ignore the gamma is a fundamental mistake.
The purpose of the gamma is to allow fine gradients of very dark and very white. Without it, 8-bit color is basically useless....you would have black, lots of grey, and then white. No off-whites or decent shadows.
>BTW, in my opinion Ford is to GM as Apple is to MS.
Interesting.
I own a Ford. It has been reliable, and the fixes (12 years old) have been forthcoming as mold on cheese.
It's hard to imagine the parts being cheaper than they are ($17 for an O2 sensor?)
And the car just refuses to fail in any big way.
I want to get rid of this Ford because it's old, but it just won't give me a reason. Even fuel efficiency is on par with the non-hybrids released in recent years.
Roosevelt hated him. He thought Churchill was a drunk, and judged the entire UK mainland on that premise.
If Churchill was slightly more respectable, he may have enjoyed US involvement sooner. He certainly was left to enjoy being booted out of office the moment the war was over.
If NeXT sold to Apple for $400M, why did NeXT die?
I've sold software that I wrote for $40m. It's still in use. http://us.lastminute.com/
Maybe "one hit wonder" is inaccurate, but "cult leader" may be sufficient.
>it's damn near impossible to bootstrap your business when you are working two jobs just to pay the bills
Indeed. The most salient point I got from the article is that Jimmy Wales had $250,000 to spend on a half-baked idea of online encyclopedias.
For the sake of accounting, please roll this into the cost of running Wikipedia.
If everyone had $250k to throw at $RANDOM_IDEA, we wouldn't be discussing whether failure was profitable. I'm sure many businesses were started on orders of magnitude less money than this.
Jimmy Wales: "I spent $250,000 to start Wikipedia." Good for you. I'll take a house, thanks.
>Apple, McDonalds, Google, Dell and others have grown from small enterprises into big corporations. Some of that is luck, being at the right place at the right time and all that, but not all of it.
Most of the success is going straight for the dollars.
Apple: Survived for decades on educational grant money until the iMac. Gave up on writing software and re-purposed BSD (good idea). Hit big with phones and music devices. Has essentially always been a niche company, surviving on sheer religion, until the jog dial on the iPod made them famous. Future: As always, niche.
Dell: Gave an aura of respectability to cheapness. Offered a configurable website that was highly practical to end-users. Eventually realized that there's little growth potential in being the most efficient, practical-minded middleman. Where are they now?
McDonald's: Scouted new locations by helicopter. Outsourced risk to naive franchisees. Consistently lowered labor costs by simplifying the process. Built a brand name around bottom-of-the-barrel offerings that only a kid could digest. Focused on kids. Success.
Google: Went into the market with the pre-eminent search technology. Built a strong revenue stream from advertising revenue. Has consistently innovated into new areas of software (gmail, maps).
But here's a shocking statistic. Total amount of money I've paid to Google in the last ten years:
$0.
Hell, I actually considered stopping at McDonald's on the way home.
Restauranting is a terrible business to go into.
While the profit margins can be 2-3x what you're spending on raw materials, it quickly gets eaten up by the mountain of labor and fixed costs (rent).
In short, restaurants only make money when they're really busy. Logically, only a handful of restaurants in a given area can be really busy, and the rest will be struggling.
Consider a pizzeria. Rent could easily be $150/day. Labor, another $150. At $10/pie, consider a $5 profit margin. You will need to sell 60 pies a day just to break even.
It sure looks nice when a day's work gets you $600. None of it is yours, of course.
Yes, but an ultralight, ultra stiff frame would accomplish a lot. Imagine a 500lb car that gets slammed by an SUV and doesn't deform at all.
Sure, it would get thrown a hell of a distance, and the G forces might be severe, but I bet you could find a happy medium assuming you had access to ultra stiff materials in the first place.
I bet people who live on the corners have high hedges on purpose, since their properties are more exposed than others.
>A top speed of 30mph...and it just went from cool to useless.
Hardly. I average 20-30mph to work each day. That's getting up to 60mph and then stopping at a light every couple of minutes. Considering I'm getting 1/2 to 1/3 the speed of my car, that's a pretty awful road network I have to use.
Ideally you would get this thing up to 30mph and then actually drive it for more than two minutes at a time.
As long as you're competing with 200hp monsters on the main road, these ultralights will creep up to normal-ish weight.
But if all the cars on the road were ultralights, it's unlikely that you would need air bags, crumple zones, or whatever else is slowing you down.
A bike is basically the minimalist model of what you should be basing the design on. It carries 1 passenger (how often do you give someone a ride to work?), 20-30lbs of cargo (milk and bread, for example), does about 10mph (maybe more...I have a mountain bike), and has no shell or safety features. It costs practically nothing to maintain, meaning there's nothing stopping you from having 2 or 3 vehicles (of varying weights) for different purposes. The only downsides of a bike is that it's slowish, and you might have to shower afterward.
But as long as you don't crash into an SUV, that's good enough. The solution is to get the SUVs on the parkway where they belong.
What we need are new roads for these cars. Essentially something along the lines of a glorified bike path.
At that point, these cars will essentially design themselves. They're so lightweight...I can imagine hundreds of different varieties will pop into existence.
These roads would be cheaper and easier to maintain, and require fewer traffic signals.
Now if someone would only come out with a decent version of SimCity, I could at least play with my fantasy.
Good. They should cut all of it and close down.
When I get a little older, I'm going to propose that to the school board. "Try a budget of zero, and see how that goes."
I'm sure daisies and daffodils will spring up everywhere. People will be happier. Kids will lead more productive, fulfilling lives. Except for the cop families (read: welfare patrons), who will complain that they're not getting the usual government handout that they need to survive.
>I'm not sure how comfortable I'd be sending my 16 year old off to college somewhere.
Right. Because it's oh-so-difficult for a sixteen-year-old to drink some beers and pass out at midnight.
That's what passes for a college "party", btw.
If you don't think your teenager can handle the incredibly tame, 100%-teenager-oriented environment that is college, then you've probably failed as a parent, or have a kid with an unusually weak constitution.
The reason they are proposing doing away with Junior and Senior year of h.s. is because they're finally acknowledging that it's USELESS. This is a free country. You're not supposed to subject people to crap they don't want.
Stop trying to figure out what we're "pushing" kids to do with this. The plan is to give back two years of their lives that essentially have been stolen so they can do whatever the Hell they want in this Free Country of ours.
Sixteen year olds don't know what they want to go for college? How about "AWAY"?
>Sure, some kids, like 2 entire kids out of 6 billion. would be mature enough to be great at 16 out and on their own.
Are you shitting me? My cat was doing fine on its own after about a year.
There's many things about a college environment that can make a young student feel "not mature enough." But that's because college is fake. If you had to do normal things like shop for food and pay rent, I think you'd find that 16 is *plenty* old enough to shove Corn Flakes in your mouth, bro.
That's all a good observation - that college's value is social. That's certainly obvious to me after X number of interviews where they didn't give two shits that I'd gone to college at all, let alone what classes I took.
But here's a newsflash: Rich kids can be some of the least socialized. Coddled and isolated from the outside world, they can be of shockingly little practical value unless specifically molded to a task (which college happily does for them).
Let's take Harvard, for example. They produced the Unabomber. They produced Barack "Empty Shell" Obama. They produced any number of people who went on to join religious cults. And their suicide rate is 1.5 students per year.
Point being, there's no shortage of wackos at Ivy League schools. In a Crimson survey, 10% of Harvard students reported seriously considering suicide in the past year. Good luck "networking" in that environment.
I would say, start working at 16. Unless you're tragically dumb, in which case, Harvard is probably for you.
>Since the very definition of "works according to specification" implies the absence of any vulnerabilities, is it really so hard to see why the blame is put on the software authors
What about the client who purchased the software? Aren't they responsible for specifying what they want?
It seems backwards to hold the vendor responsible for testing. The client has to define what the software is supposed to do.
Toyota's Prius braking problem is a perfect example. It gets fooled when you go over a bump. Who was supposed to think of that, the developers in a lab, or the managers who ship the thing?