You would be equally correct in assuming that the notion of a virtual reality world created and maintained by a computer-based intelligence reflects actual work done by artificial intelligence researchers. Which is to say, you wouldn't be correct at all.
Basic questions about "What is real?" which form one backdrop of the matrix, are much, much older. Oracular paradoxes -- "What's really going to bake your noodle later is if you would have done it if I hadn't have said anything" -- are part of greek mythology. "Know thyself" -- beleive it's on a plaque on the wall in the Oracle's house. Then there's the whole "on one hand... on the other hand..." thing, which I was assured by a philosophy major friend is very greek. I think it's safe to say there are nods/borrowings from real philosophical traditions.
Well, curiously enough, it does make you think you know more about philosophy. I don't mean to be an "elitist asshole" here, but if you pick up even a short history of Western philosophy (e.g., the books by Kenny or Magee), you'll see that people have been thinking really hard about philosophical questions for a very long time, and that "The Matrix" doesn't address those questions in anything other than a superficial way.
But curiously enough, the same philosophy major friend I mentioned above -- who could digest continental philosophers, which I've always found completely obtuse -- actually found a fair bit of pleasure in the above touches/nods to philosophy, despite the fact that they weren't necessarily complete treatments.
But in the end, "The Matrix" is about philosophy to about the same extent that "Raiders Of The Lost Ark" is about archaeology, which is to say not very much at all.
And yet the interesting thing is, if you pay attention, you can actually pick up a thing or two about actual history. Neither is a formal treatment of the subject matter they use as a vehicle, it's a story. But story, in turn, can be an effective vehicle for an awful lot of good things. Including basic questions about what is real. Thousands if not millions of people who would have looked at you like you were in need of some time with a mental health professional if you were to talk about brains in jars and evil demons and shadows on the wall... these people are walking into a story about a place where reality is a construct and led to think about it.
Of course, that's the frustrating part. Where someone encounters knowledge you've had for a while, well-treaded ground, and they think it's sacred and deep. But the longer you go through this world, the more that experience becomes commonplace, so it's good to learn to handle it gracefully.:)
I think any large business where the pricing structure isn't directly related to costs is probably deeply afraid of agents that aggregate their data with competitors. You end up with a more ideal market, a more frictionless market, if you will, and they'll be forced to compete on narrower and narrower margins of profit. Of course they'll want to throw up barriers to that.
But I'll bet this issue comes down to Terms of Service and what a company can reasonably expect to be able to legally require/forbid about the use of data provided via an automated means...
Seem to recall a designer gave me an Illustrator 10 file saved to PNG once, and that came up flat/raster (but at the time, I thought that just meant that AI saved only flat/raster PNGs)....
Technically speaking, Macromedia chose PNG (which stands for Portable Network Graphics) as the native file format for Fireworks because the format has both open source and proprietary characteristics. In most applications, the default file format is proprietary, meaning other applications can't open it. PNG, however, is an open source file format. Some graphic applications and browsers can open PNGs too. However, they can only read the graphical portion of a PNG's file information. Fireworks PNG files contain a second "chunk" of data that other applications can't read, which contains proprietary information about things like slicing, interactivity, and any Live Effects that may have been applied.
As little sense as the paragraph makes if you try to parse it closely, this second "chunk" has gotta be what contains the vector information. Maybe the setup is something like the TIFF/PICT preview that some EPS files have? Sigh. I'm kindof disappointed...
You might be thinking of SVG (scalable vector graphics)
I checked this out, and you seem to be quite correct, from a shallow examination of reference materials. However... I kid you not when I say that Fireworks' default file format appears to be PNG -- and there's got to be some kind of devilry going on here, because when you're using FW, you have everything you'd expect from a vector format: editable paths/shapes, perfectly scaling text, multiple layers. But when you save it, it's.png, and you can throw it in your favorite web browser to see what it looks like flat... and then open it and have all your vector goodness there waiting for you.
This all seemed normal an hour ago when I thought PNG was a vector format, but now it seems terribly mysterious.
Everyone has their price,/. is no different. They could pay them to run FUCK LINUX ads if they wanted to. The uniforms of the linux soliders have Microsoft patches, it would seam.
Can't win, can you? If/. refused to run MS ads on principle, there'd be an outcry of censorship and talk about how it isn't bad enough you can't post here without being challenged or modded down -- you can't even BUY space here.
But since they do, they're money grubbing sellouts.
(Of course, the real trick would be for me to make my OWN wildly popular weblog which is both fascist AND sellout! Hmmm. Maybe a neocon republican theme... )
Any SCO users out there want to pipe up and grant such a license to IBM, Redhat, etc?
That's an excellent point, and I can't help but wonder....
Suppose for a moment SCO is right -- there's some dead-on, no quibbling, not even kidding evidence of code-lifting. However, Caldera/SCO has simultaneously been releasing the same code -- which they have rights to either way -- under the GPL. Wouldn't the very act of releasing that code effectively cancel the argument that it was proprietary?
Despite its technical promise, PNG is still, after eight years, a fringe player.
It's actually supported in most broswers nowadays... the one thing you can't use it for is a CSS-specified background image, AFAIK (well, in IE, which makes it dead).
Curiously enough, Macromedia seems to use it as the default vector image format for Fireworks (perhaps even Freehand and Flash), which could make it big fast if they pushed it.
So, successfully extorting money from a dying patent and then going on to be a successful service company... yeah, SCO-Caldera would probably love to be the next Unisys.
I don't know if it's the extortion factor that made Unisys successful so much as it was the fact they realized services was much hotter business...
I remember in 1970, it took a team of engineers over 7 days to calculate Google's page rankings. Of course, most had to use slide rules because computer time was so expensive.
Fortunately, the search space was much shallower then -- fewer nodes and fewer connections.
Railroads are one of the few types of entities that aren't telcos that are likely to have continuous strips of land between metro/suburban areas.
Sell it to them as a cutting edge experiment: publicity, and maybe even a fledgling version of being able to offer passengers internet access, or internet-tracked cargo shipping, or something else.
In fact, I'm starting to wonder why I'm shooting my mouth off here on slashdot about it...
On the other hand, I wish I'd bought four or five more and sold them on eBay for $70 (plus $25 shipping because, well, it's eBay). I'm too nice.
That made me laugh out loud.:)
I've got an experience like yours, too. I stopped at a convenience store in Nebraska for dinner and some gasoline. Dinner was two slices of pizza, a bottle of Gatorade, and some fruit and candy. Gas was $10... the whole thing should have been at least $17. The purchase range up at $5 or $6. I pointed this out to the cashier, and he said "well, computer error. Guess the stuff is yours." Those are always the best. And I didn't even have to wonder if I could have sold the pizza slices on ebay.:)
Sometimes it's a really good thing to do from a human perspective, too. I once noted that a cashier had forgotten to ring up a tie after I'd gotten out to my car. I took it back in and payed for it. The cashier mentioned she'd lost her purse the week before, with $200 in it, and ID, but nobody had called, but it was good for her faith in humanity to see the contrast, even if she didn't get her money back. Your influence can be bigger than the difference in cash in the till...
It's interesting that he never said either of these things about himself. Others around him said it of Him and he didn't dispute it when they did.
My memory is a little fuzzy from not having studied the New Testament closely for a few years, but there's definitely some claims of divinity. The end of John Ch 8 was essentially Jesus claiming kinship to and/or the actual identity of Jehovah (which is why the local clergy took it as blasphemy and took up stones on the spot...), John 4 or so -- to the woman at the well -- he claims to be the messiah (though some say the Jews might have thought that was a political rather than spiritual figure...), and there's more that don't spring to mind, lots of business about talking about the Father and the Son and it's pretty clear who he means.
Of course technically, all this comes from the gospels and apostolic epistles, so really, it's all second hand in any case.:)
He didn't tell people to belive in themselves, but that the only way out was to beleive in Him. Christian thought doesn't teach to beleive in yourself (that's the Positive Thinking crowd) but instead it teaches that the self is bankrupt and you must surrender it if you're going to get anywhere - to focus on others, not the self.
Tyler Durden taught this too.:) Why don't we have pages on religion, philosophy, and Fight Club?
There are different takes on this, though. C.S. Lewis-like takes are something to the effect that you're sacrificing a worse part of yourself to be replaced with more Christ-like personality -- you're spending your life exchanging sucky mortal personality traits for divine personality traits (and that becoming that divine person is what makes existence "heaven", rather than heaven being a place per se). There's Parker Palmer's interesting perspective in his book on education ("To Know as We are Known"), that Christ was teaching the personality of truth (vs impersonal law), as something you have a relationship with and experience through relationships that make demands on you. Some evangelicals or restorationists see relationship with Christ as a partnership... you agree to do his work (which does involve looking out for others and trying to be better), and he agrees to take care of the sin bit. There is a common thread in most of it -- flawed nature of human beings, overcome by interaction with divine -- but flawed human nature is pretty easily demonstrated empirically....:)
Still, I don't see a strong connection between Christian Theology and the matrix. Philosophy, yes, archetypes, yes, and so if your religion or personal cosmology/mythos has any depth in it, there's going to be some resonation. That doesn't mean the Matrix is metaphor or analogy. It just means they know how to tell meaningful story well.
Re:What use is AI without an operating platform
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AI Going Nowhere?
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He has a complete disregard for the question of where the AI engine will run. If an AI is to be of any more use than a curiousity then those "little autonomous robots" must function in a viable manner so that the AI has something to do when it comes to "life".
I'd prefer it remains immobile/inanimate, and merely attached to critical facilities monitoring grids or something like that, so's to minimize chances of negative action towards humans...
True story: last week I was shopping with a friend and the cashier somehow rang up the purchase at about $30 less than it should have been. Said friend pointed this out to the cashier, who then rang up the purchase at the correct price.
So retail folks often make mistakes. Sometimes in your favor, sometimes in favor of the store. Which is more impressive: remaining silent and taking advantage of it, or saying something?
Especially considering that the more you think about it, the more you realize society runs on trust and relies on people to do the right thing more often than not...
We talk about the need for robust software, well become a robust programmer. Don't paint yourself into a corner by putting it all on X technology. Learn the foo and you can adapt to anything.
I've been a software developer for the last 10 years. I got my degree in Mathematics (discrete emphasis), took some general electronics classes (basic digital and analog classes), foundation computer science stuff (algorithms/data structures, assembly language, sw engineering). I pride myself on being adaptable -- I've done DOS apps, jumped to server-side web applications, Windows-targeted multimedia apps written in Java, client side web dev (harder than it sounds), and back to server-side web apps. *I* know that I'm adaptable, that I can pick up any framework/API that's not a moving target inside of a month or two, that I'm comfortable in procedural, logical, functional, or object oriented paradigms/languages, et all.
Human resource departments don't.
They want people with 5-7 years in technology X. Even if it's J2EE or.NET. There's no recognition of the foo -- the underlying skill/mindset that makes a person adaptable. There's just the idea of direct experience working with it. I can't count the times I've had people look at my resume and say "Wow. You've done a lot of stuff" -- and yet quibble over the fact that I haven't worked with Java since 1.1, or don't currently have how to write XML DTDs committed to memory (mind you, I'm working on it, but generally, when I've had to do it, it's just so easy to look up...).
I don't even know if I'd say that's the way it shouldn't be. Sure, if companies were more enlightened, they'd hire (and listen to) people rather than cogs, but the reality is, most of them are looking at programming labor as a commodity, and they want people who can hit the ground running in a specific tech. They have no faith in the foo.
Malcolm Gladwell's article about Stanley Kaplan and the SAT should be required reading on the subject. Cool biography, and interesting examination of the idea that there is such a thing as an "uncoachable test" -- one that measures "innate" intelligence, rather than learning. Now tests don't claim that, but they do try to predict success in college.
To some extent, I can see how the latter is possible (if not perfectly accurate). If you can take a subset of subject matter, study it and master it to the point where you can bang out answers in hour-length periods, then you can probably do standard courses in education. Create original research, new thought? Maybe not, but you don't have to do that for many undergrad programs, and proably a number of grad programs. Just master what exists.
I aced several standardized tests in High School. 99%ile scores in multiple categories and overall scores. The interesting thing was that my grades rose steadily as soon as that happened... B to A-, and then my freshman year A- to A. It's a heady thing, to walk to the table, get evaluated, and get given an awful lot of chips to play with. I wrote a personal narrative about it after I had a less spectacular experience with the GMAT and the GRE.
Curious to know if anyone else has had this kind of experience, or has figured out a good way to goose their scores....
They might mean that my math degree wasn't worth a whole lot. I took the GMAT last year, scored in the 98%th percentile on the verbal section (think I missed a question), but the bottom third on the math section (probably missed almost a fourth of the questions, including six or seven I didn't get to).
Same problem on GRE (though not quite as bad). Any tips on doing well? I used to completely ice standardized tests on paper -- but the math section has really been a problem since the advent of computerized tests...
I saw The Matrix, then the 13th Floor, then Existenz. Each was a better treatment of the subject than the previous.
Haven't seen the other two, so I might be nitpicking or misreading a normative statement, but... part of what I was trying to say above is that the Matrix wasn't about "treating a subject" per se. It was about telling a certain kind of story.
Now, it may be true that the other two are better at telling those stories...
The kind of businesses that "enterprise" level companies contract to provide "enterprise" level support are generally not the kind that disappear overnight. Barring Enron-level fraud, of course... and even if you consider that kind of thing, my experience is that many suits simply don't. A company that is going to ask for a million bucks for their portal software and a million more to train you all on using it, is not viewed as the least transient.
And really, most IT/consulting firms don't disappear overnight. Even the beleaguered ones take years and years to die. The likelihood that you're going to be left holding the bag on promised enterprise support seems slim, especially to a suit.
Subtle philosophy? More like blatantly obvious and hackneyed oversimplification of philosophy.
Oversimplified? Maybe. Muted? You bet. But:
This is a story told in film. The premise isn't a vehicle for detailed philosophical discussion, it's for the story.
The premise, however, is one of the first full illustrations of the "brain in jar"/"shadows on the wall"/"evil demon" philosophical themes that some people are going to encounter. Philosophy students are going to find only very well-trodden ground -- but wasn't it terribly interesting to even them before familiarity bred contempt?
Furthermore, there's some interesting angles that most people totally ignore. Why would a demon keep your brain in a jar and torment you? There's evilness/enmity and that's a possibility. But in the Matrix, there's utility derived from doing so -- supposedly energy, maybe computational work. The former premise is so ridiculous to anyone who knows what's going on you wonder why they made it. I wonder if they did it to draw attention to a potential analogue: in this world, in 2003, you are plugged into a system. It's not a evil AI made VR, it's society. And it may be there are forces at work in that society that exist to keep you working as little other than a happy cog... you could use the analogy as an examination for socio/political commentary, if you like.
Buit the movie doesn't seem to, really, and in fact, the movie's peripheral treatment of philosophical elements may have been one of the wisest possible moves. And akin to what Lewis and Williams and especially Tolkien liked to do: don't work with analogy so much as archetype, and not even archetype so much as simply story. It's not about creating a symbolic tapestry that the initiated can have a field day swimming in and decoding. It's about creating a compelling experience that people can taste and draw meaning out of.
I mean, really, look at some of these responses. On/. of all places we see people crying "Why would you want to do this?". Or, "What's wrong with the eMac?"
It's not so much a "thin skin" thing as a reflection of the fact that slashdot isn't a homogenous group. Some people are going to want to do it because they can. Some people are going to want to do it to reach a new level of hardware customization. Some people are going to want to do it to have the level of configurability/performance that they could get out of a G4 tower at a cheaper price.
Some people are going to primarily concerned with price. Those people should by an eMac. Some of those people have noted this on slashdot. It's not so much a matter of thin skin as the fact that their focus and accompanying heuristics for evaluating the value of a machine make it so they don't see the other points.
And of course, we all know tha(t) Microsoft release dates never slip...
It's fun to snipe, of course, and it's nice to feel some kind of safety/security in the fact that they've been very late on many things and/or delivered with bugs.
But don't get too comfy. If you're a competitor or someone who'd like to see them go down in flames (or at least severely humbled), the important thing is beating them to the punch, and jeers from the sideline don't help win a race.
Nothing else comes close. Several months ago my machine crashed and I had to reformat my hard drive. By this time I was already having dreams ascii dungeons, monsters, and a 'd' following me around hoping for '%'. I decided maybe it was best if I didn't reinstall nethack. Though there's still those darn public nethack machines....
I don't know if I'm the best example, though. I've spent tortured nights dreaming of physics problems, one or two particularly bad nights dreaming of C++, and even come up with a Pascal algorithm or two in my sleep.
Of course, I have also come upon the secret of life once or twice in my sleep, but can never seem to remember it when I wake up...
I don't feel sorry for SCO at all, but you know, this isn't very high in the class department.
If you like, I can round up some more of the Utah slashdotters, and we can go throw rotten eggs at the building, too, and water balloon their employees, to top it off. It's a 10 minute drive from my house....
SCO's motivation is far from transparent, since their suit seems pretty darn crazy unless they've got a helluva smoking gun. But that doesn't change the fact that the big issue here isn't the survival of Linux and Free Software (if it's free software, it's nigh invulnerable as long as there's some community that gets utility out of it), but its perceived viability in the places we want to use it -- the workplace. Launching DDoS doesn't help the PR war.
It's really pretty neat. I can pickup old ticket stubs and remember things about concerts that I'd forgotten for years. An old T-shirt can bring back a memory of going shopping at Target with my sister while an old girlfriend was out of town. I've got a tie another old girlfriend gave me that brings back visiting her in the hospital. I could go on, but the really cool thing, is that I've figured out how to retrieve some of this information using abstract representations of things -- drawings or pictures -- or even sometimes simply writing some words about them. I don't have to keep the mementos around any more.
I'm thinking of maybe implementing a computer system for this, where I type in some small "key" representation, and get back some further "data" associated with it....
Kind of wish I could clean out and delete a few things from the brain system, tho'...
Slashdot Mirror
You would be equally correct in assuming that the notion of a virtual reality world created and maintained by a computer-based intelligence reflects actual work done by artificial intelligence researchers. Which is to say, you wouldn't be correct at all.
... these people are walking into a story about a place where reality is a construct and led to think about it.
:)
Basic questions about "What is real?" which form one backdrop of the matrix, are much, much older. Oracular paradoxes -- "What's really going to bake your noodle later is if you would have done it if I hadn't have said anything" -- are part of greek mythology. "Know thyself" -- beleive it's on a plaque on the wall in the Oracle's house. Then there's the whole "on one hand... on the other hand..." thing, which I was assured by a philosophy major friend is very greek. I think it's safe to say there are nods/borrowings from real philosophical traditions.
Well, curiously enough, it does make you think you know more about philosophy. I don't mean to be an "elitist asshole" here, but if you pick up even a short history of Western philosophy (e.g., the books by Kenny or Magee), you'll see that people have been thinking really hard about philosophical questions for a very long time, and that "The Matrix" doesn't address those questions in anything other than a superficial way.
But curiously enough, the same philosophy major friend I mentioned above -- who could digest continental philosophers, which I've always found completely obtuse -- actually found a fair bit of pleasure in the above touches/nods to philosophy, despite the fact that they weren't necessarily complete treatments.
But in the end, "The Matrix" is about philosophy to about the same extent that "Raiders Of The Lost Ark" is about archaeology, which is to say not very much at all.
And yet the interesting thing is, if you pay attention, you can actually pick up a thing or two about actual history. Neither is a formal treatment of the subject matter they use as a vehicle, it's a story. But story, in turn, can be an effective vehicle for an awful lot of good things. Including basic questions about what is real. Thousands if not millions of people who would have looked at you like you were in need of some time with a mental health professional if you were to talk about brains in jars and evil demons and shadows on the wall
Of course, that's the frustrating part. Where someone encounters knowledge you've had for a while, well-treaded ground, and they think it's sacred and deep. But the longer you go through this world, the more that experience becomes commonplace, so it's good to learn to handle it gracefully.
I think any large business where the pricing structure isn't directly related to costs is probably deeply afraid of agents that aggregate their data with competitors. You end up with a more ideal market, a more frictionless market, if you will, and they'll be forced to compete on narrower and narrower margins of profit. Of course they'll want to throw up barriers to that.
But I'll bet this issue comes down to Terms of Service and what a company can reasonably expect to be able to legally require/forbid about the use of data provided via an automated means...
I just wandered over to one of Macromedia's support pages and noted the following statement:
As little sense as the paragraph makes if you try to parse it closely, this second "chunk" has gotta be what contains the vector information. Maybe the setup is something like the TIFF/PICT preview that some EPS files have? Sigh. I'm kindof disappointed...
PNG is a raster image format, not vector.
.png, and you can throw it in your favorite web browser to see what it looks like flat ... and then open it and have all your vector goodness there waiting for you.
You might be thinking of SVG (scalable vector graphics)
I checked this out, and you seem to be quite correct, from a shallow examination of reference materials. However... I kid you not when I say that Fireworks' default file format appears to be PNG -- and there's got to be some kind of devilry going on here, because when you're using FW, you have everything you'd expect from a vector format: editable paths/shapes, perfectly scaling text, multiple layers. But when you save it, it's
This all seemed normal an hour ago when I thought PNG was a vector format, but now it seems terribly mysterious.
Everyone has their price, /. is no different. They could pay them to run FUCK LINUX ads if they wanted to. The uniforms of the linux soliders have Microsoft patches, it would seam.
/. refused to run MS ads on principle, there'd be an outcry of censorship and talk about how it isn't bad enough you can't post here without being challenged or modded down -- you can't even BUY space here.
Can't win, can you? If
But since they do, they're money grubbing sellouts.
(Of course, the real trick would be for me to make my OWN wildly popular weblog which is both fascist AND sellout! Hmmm. Maybe a neocon republican theme... )
Any SCO users out there want to pipe up and grant such a license to IBM, Redhat, etc?
That's an excellent point, and I can't help but wonder....
Suppose for a moment SCO is right -- there's some dead-on, no quibbling, not even kidding evidence of code-lifting. However, Caldera/SCO has simultaneously been releasing the same code -- which they have rights to either way -- under the GPL. Wouldn't the very act of releasing that code effectively cancel the argument that it was proprietary?
Despite its technical promise, PNG is still, after eight years, a fringe player.
It's actually supported in most broswers nowadays... the one thing you can't use it for is a CSS-specified background image, AFAIK (well, in IE, which makes it dead).
Curiously enough, Macromedia seems to use it as the default vector image format for Fireworks (perhaps even Freehand and Flash), which could make it big fast if they pushed it.
So, successfully extorting money from a dying patent and then going on to be a successful service company... yeah, SCO-Caldera would probably love to be the next Unisys.
I don't know if it's the extortion factor that made Unisys successful so much as it was the fact they realized services was much hotter business...
I remember in 1970, it took a team of engineers over 7 days to calculate Google's page rankings. Of course, most had to use slide rules because computer time was so expensive.
Fortunately, the search space was much shallower then -- fewer nodes and fewer connections.
Railroad Sponsorship.
Railroads are one of the few types of entities that aren't telcos that are likely to have continuous strips of land between metro/suburban areas.
Sell it to them as a cutting edge experiment: publicity, and maybe even a fledgling version of being able to offer passengers internet access, or internet-tracked cargo shipping, or something else.
In fact, I'm starting to wonder why I'm shooting my mouth off here on slashdot about it...
On the other hand, I wish I'd bought four or five more and sold them on eBay for $70 (plus $25 shipping because, well, it's eBay). I'm too nice.
:)
:)
That made me laugh out loud.
I've got an experience like yours, too. I stopped at a convenience store in Nebraska for dinner and some gasoline. Dinner was two slices of pizza, a bottle of Gatorade, and some fruit and candy. Gas was $10... the whole thing should have been at least $17. The purchase range up at $5 or $6. I pointed this out to the cashier, and he said "well, computer error. Guess the stuff is yours." Those are always the best. And I didn't even have to wonder if I could have sold the pizza slices on ebay.
Sometimes it's a really good thing to do from a human perspective, too. I once noted that a cashier had forgotten to ring up a tie after I'd gotten out to my car. I took it back in and payed for it. The cashier mentioned she'd lost her purse the week before, with $200 in it, and ID, but nobody had called, but it was good for her faith in humanity to see the contrast, even if she didn't get her money back. Your influence can be bigger than the difference in cash in the till...
It's interesting that he never said either of these things about himself. Others around him said it of Him and he didn't dispute it when they did.
:)
:) Why don't we have pages on religion, philosophy, and Fight Club?
:)
My memory is a little fuzzy from not having studied the New Testament closely for a few years, but there's definitely some claims of divinity. The end of John Ch 8 was essentially Jesus claiming kinship to and/or the actual identity of Jehovah (which is why the local clergy took it as blasphemy and took up stones on the spot...), John 4 or so -- to the woman at the well -- he claims to be the messiah (though some say the Jews might have thought that was a political rather than spiritual figure...), and there's more that don't spring to mind, lots of business about talking about the Father and the Son and it's pretty clear who he means.
Of course technically, all this comes from the gospels and apostolic epistles, so really, it's all second hand in any case.
He didn't tell people to belive in themselves, but that the only way out was to beleive in Him. Christian thought doesn't teach to beleive in yourself (that's the Positive Thinking crowd) but instead it teaches that the self is bankrupt and you must surrender it if you're going to get anywhere - to focus on others, not the self.
Tyler Durden taught this too.
There are different takes on this, though. C.S. Lewis-like takes are something to the effect that you're sacrificing a worse part of yourself to be replaced with more Christ-like personality -- you're spending your life exchanging sucky mortal personality traits for divine personality traits (and that becoming that divine person is what makes existence "heaven", rather than heaven being a place per se). There's Parker Palmer's interesting perspective in his book on education ("To Know as We are Known"), that Christ was teaching the personality of truth (vs impersonal law), as something you have a relationship with and experience through relationships that make demands on you. Some evangelicals or restorationists see relationship with Christ as a partnership... you agree to do his work (which does involve looking out for others and trying to be better), and he agrees to take care of the sin bit. There is a common thread in most of it -- flawed nature of human beings, overcome by interaction with divine -- but flawed human nature is pretty easily demonstrated empirically....
Still, I don't see a strong connection between Christian Theology and the matrix. Philosophy, yes, archetypes, yes, and so if your religion or personal cosmology/mythos has any depth in it, there's going to be some resonation. That doesn't mean the Matrix is metaphor or analogy. It just means they know how to tell meaningful story well.
He has a complete disregard for the question of where the AI engine will run. If an AI is to be of any more use than a curiousity then those "little autonomous robots" must function in a viable manner so that the AI has something to do when it comes to "life".
I'd prefer it remains immobile/inanimate, and merely attached to critical facilities monitoring grids or something like that, so's to minimize chances of negative action towards humans...
True story: last week I was shopping with a friend and the cashier somehow rang up the purchase at about $30 less than it should have been. Said friend pointed this out to the cashier, who then rang up the purchase at the correct price.
So retail folks often make mistakes. Sometimes in your favor, sometimes in favor of the store. Which is more impressive: remaining silent and taking advantage of it, or saying something?
Especially considering that the more you think about it, the more you realize society runs on trust and relies on people to do the right thing more often than not...
We talk about the need for robust software, well become a robust programmer. Don't paint yourself into a corner by putting it all on X technology. Learn the foo and you can adapt to anything.
.NET. There's no recognition of the foo -- the underlying skill/mindset that makes a person adaptable. There's just the idea of direct experience working with it. I can't count the times I've had people look at my resume and say "Wow. You've done a lot of stuff" -- and yet quibble over the fact that I haven't worked with Java since 1.1, or don't currently have how to write XML DTDs committed to memory (mind you, I'm working on it, but generally, when I've had to do it, it's just so easy to look up...).
I've been a software developer for the last 10 years. I got my degree in Mathematics (discrete emphasis), took some general electronics classes (basic digital and analog classes), foundation computer science stuff (algorithms/data structures, assembly language, sw engineering). I pride myself on being adaptable -- I've done DOS apps, jumped to server-side web applications, Windows-targeted multimedia apps written in Java, client side web dev (harder than it sounds), and back to server-side web apps. *I* know that I'm adaptable, that I can pick up any framework/API that's not a moving target inside of a month or two, that I'm comfortable in procedural, logical, functional, or object oriented paradigms/languages, et all.
Human resource departments don't.
They want people with 5-7 years in technology X. Even if it's J2EE or
I don't even know if I'd say that's the way it shouldn't be. Sure, if companies were more enlightened, they'd hire (and listen to) people rather than cogs, but the reality is, most of them are looking at programming labor as a commodity, and they want people who can hit the ground running in a specific tech. They have no faith in the foo.
Malcolm Gladwell's article about Stanley Kaplan and the SAT should be required reading on the subject. Cool biography, and interesting examination of the idea that there is such a thing as an "uncoachable test" -- one that measures "innate" intelligence, rather than learning. Now tests don't claim that, but they do try to predict success in college.
To some extent, I can see how the latter is possible (if not perfectly accurate). If you can take a subset of subject matter, study it and master it to the point where you can bang out answers in hour-length periods, then you can probably do standard courses in education. Create original research, new thought? Maybe not, but you don't have to do that for many undergrad programs, and proably a number of grad programs. Just master what exists.
I aced several standardized tests in High School. 99%ile scores in multiple categories and overall scores. The interesting thing was that my grades rose steadily as soon as that happened... B to A-, and then my freshman year A- to A. It's a heady thing, to walk to the table, get evaluated, and get given an awful lot of chips to play with. I wrote a personal narrative about it after I had a less spectacular experience with the GMAT and the GRE.
Curious to know if anyone else has had this kind of experience, or has figured out a good way to goose their scores....
They might mean that my math degree wasn't worth a whole lot. I took the GMAT last year, scored in the 98%th percentile on the verbal section (think I missed a question), but the bottom third on the math section (probably missed almost a fourth of the questions, including six or seven I didn't get to).
...
Same problem on GRE (though not quite as bad). Any tips on doing well? I used to completely ice standardized tests on paper -- but the math section has really been a problem since the advent of computerized tests
I saw The Matrix, then the 13th Floor, then Existenz. Each was a better treatment of the subject than the previous.
Haven't seen the other two, so I might be nitpicking or misreading a normative statement, but... part of what I was trying to say above is that the Matrix wasn't about "treating a subject" per se. It was about telling a certain kind of story.
Now, it may be true that the other two are better at telling those stories...
The kind of businesses that "enterprise" level companies contract to provide "enterprise" level support are generally not the kind that disappear overnight. Barring Enron-level fraud, of course... and even if you consider that kind of thing, my experience is that many suits simply don't. A company that is going to ask for a million bucks for their portal software and a million more to train you all on using it, is not viewed as the least transient.
And really, most IT/consulting firms don't disappear overnight. Even the beleaguered ones take years and years to die. The likelihood that you're going to be left holding the bag on promised enterprise support seems slim, especially to a suit.
You're going to need a better argument.
Oversimplified? Maybe. Muted? You bet. But:
I mean, really, look at some of these responses. /. of all places we see people crying "Why would you want to do this?". Or, "What's wrong with the eMac?"
On
It's not so much a "thin skin" thing as a reflection of the fact that slashdot isn't a homogenous group. Some people are going to want to do it because they can. Some people are going to want to do it to reach a new level of hardware customization. Some people are going to want to do it to have the level of configurability/performance that they could get out of a G4 tower at a cheaper price.
Some people are going to primarily concerned with price. Those people should by an eMac. Some of those people have noted this on slashdot. It's not so much a matter of thin skin as the fact that their focus and accompanying heuristics for evaluating the value of a machine make it so they don't see the other points.
And of course, we all know tha(t) Microsoft release dates never slip...
It's fun to snipe, of course, and it's nice to feel some kind of safety/security in the fact that they've been very late on many things and/or delivered with bugs.
But don't get too comfy. If you're a competitor or someone who'd like to see them go down in flames (or at least severely humbled), the important thing is beating them to the punch, and jeers from the sideline don't help win a race.
it's only "free" if you don't include the tens of thousands of dollars spent on tuition.
You're confusing a brain with a diploma. It's understandable, though... lots of people make the same mistake.
Including most of my prospective employers....
Nothing else comes close. Several months ago my machine crashed and I had to reformat my hard drive. By this time I was already having dreams ascii dungeons, monsters, and a 'd' following me around hoping for '%'. I decided maybe it was best if I didn't reinstall nethack. Though there's still those darn public nethack machines....
I don't know if I'm the best example, though. I've spent tortured nights dreaming of physics problems, one or two particularly bad nights dreaming of C++, and even come up with a Pascal algorithm or two in my sleep.
Of course, I have also come upon the secret of life once or twice in my sleep, but can never seem to remember it when I wake up...
Nobody's going to feel sorry for SCO
I don't feel sorry for SCO at all, but you know, this isn't very high in the class department.
If you like, I can round up some more of the Utah slashdotters, and we can go throw rotten eggs at the building, too, and water balloon their employees, to top it off. It's a 10 minute drive from my house....
SCO's motivation is far from transparent, since their suit seems pretty darn crazy unless they've got a helluva smoking gun. But that doesn't change the fact that the big issue here isn't the survival of Linux and Free Software (if it's free software, it's nigh invulnerable as long as there's some community that gets utility out of it), but its perceived viability in the places we want to use it -- the workplace. Launching DDoS doesn't help the PR war.
It's really pretty neat. I can pickup old ticket stubs and remember things about concerts that I'd forgotten for years. An old T-shirt can bring back a memory of going shopping at Target with my sister while an old girlfriend was out of town. I've got a tie another old girlfriend gave me that brings back visiting her in the hospital. I could go on, but the really cool thing, is that I've figured out how to retrieve some of this information using abstract representations of things -- drawings or pictures -- or even sometimes simply writing some words about them. I don't have to keep the mementos around any more.
I'm thinking of maybe implementing a computer system for this, where I type in some small "key" representation, and get back some further "data" associated with it....
Kind of wish I could clean out and delete a few things from the brain system, tho'...