even equate every Unix supporter to someone who will slam you without reason.
No, I equated the average Unix supporter to someone who will slam me without reason. I have found this to be the case, in general.
Unfortunately, the average MacWorld reader is so infatuated with their MacOS 9 plaything that they won't stop to consider the horrible horrible flaws that plague the entire MacOS family. Even more sadly, he will steadfastly hold close to his belief that anyone who doesn't like MacOS must be an evil Microserf, and in doing so will pass on the opportunity to learn that there are things better then the Beast from Apple.
That's actually a very good look at the average Mac user. (And I'm using a Mac myself right now.)
Next time, be constructive. At least the link you provided was a decent look at languages.
Actually, the entire tunes.org site makes for excellent reading, and you can drop by at OPN #tunes anytime for a rational discussion on why Unix sucks. (The site linked to by the OP also has a lot of text which you might consider constructive.)
If Unix is indeed the wrong way to do things, it's a wonder it's survived for so many years and is now coming back not only in the free OS'es but in Apple's new commercial offering for the home user.
Why? It's Gresham's Law, as it's always been: good software drives out the bad. (Not that, say, Windows or Mac OS are any better than Unix, no... but there have been many other OSs which, despite being technically superior to Unix offerings, were deprecated for other reasons. This process was very similar to what's happening nowadays to the corporate environment, with Micro$oft's relentless push towards WinNT.)
Unix itself may not be what's so wonderful, but the fact that there is a platform with standards behind it (POSIX) that allows programmers to write once and port many ways may be what's so wonderful.
I have two things to say about that: (1) There have been standards before POSIX. (2) POSIX imposes the Unix worldview upon the programmer, and therefore constrains and hinders the system engineer's freedom to make something better out of the OS. Otherwise, no objections.
THANK YOU! I've been saying that for years! (See sig.)
Unfortunately, the average Slashdot user is so infatuated with his Linux(/BSD/HURD) plaything that he won't stop for a moment to consider the horrible horrible flaws which plague the entire Unix family (and relatives, and clones, and anything based on the Unix architecture or on its language of choice, the static, low-level "portable assembly" C). Even more sadly, he will steadfastly hold close to his belief that anyone who doesn't like Unix (or C) must be an evil Microsoftie, and in doing so will pass on the opportunity to learn that there are better things and life than the Beast from New Jersey.
Ah well - I digress. Just take a moment to look at the critique of C/C++ on the site for the Tunes project, if you will... and, as I say below, think twice before moderating the crap out of us both.
But, with a Netscape Enterprise server (Solaris) running multi-threaded, we were able to make shared read access to gdbm files fast and threadsafe in a very natural way in C. Is perl threading good enough now, and does mod_perl handle multithreaded applications?
Well, I haven't been doing full-time web development work for a few months now (thank Kibo!), but I've heard some very nice things about Perl 5.6's thread support (although, according to the official pages, it's still experimental and subject to change at any time). However, it seems to me that if it comes to a point where you definitely feel the need to have your system itself make use of "userland" multithreading, then you're still better off using C/C++ and a nice little threading library such as MIT's. (Of course, I'm not sure as to how the Netscape server works re. threads... if it handles multithreading automatically for you in an NSAPI app, then I suppose that it should do the same for Perl running on it, no? Then again, I'm just guessing.)
By the way, do any of the "other" popular scripting languages - Python, PHP, Rebol, whatever - support threading?
Two things: first, Perl isn't really slow; when you run it, most of the time is spent running Sarathy's heavily optimised code to handle things like hash lookups and regexes, not your punny little userland code;) It only _seems_ slow because of the overhead imposed by having to spawn a new interpreter and recompile the script into bytecode every time the script is run. But most of the problem is easily fixed by mod_perl.
Second, yes, the perlcc utility is able to compile a Perl script... but not by translating it to native code. No, that would be just too easy...:) Instead, perlcc embeds an entire copy of the Perl interpreter, plus a shitload of unnecessary modules, along with your program in bytecode-compiled form. The result is bloated, buggy, ugly and generally not much faster than just running your script. So it's not of much use, but if you really want to do it, you get to.
This is what you get from putting Esther Dyson (aka Lucifer herself) in charge of the Internet. Yeah, I'm really happy to trust these people with the entire domain naming system. Blergh. Seriously, they've been around for years and they've yet to get a single thing right. They have not shown one ounce of willingness to adopt an administrative policy which could be described as anything less than fascist. It's just the cherry on the top that they aren't even able to manage a mailing list -- it's no surprise that the naming system in its current state. I say kill the ICANN; let's get rid of this awful monstrosity once and for all.
(Sorry for the rant, but it really pisses me off to see my beloved network get to this point. Moderators take note: this post was not a troll, flamebait or offtopic.)
Does that mean I've got a copyright? Better yet, does that mean I've got a retroactive first-post?:) Anyway, I posted this on March 31 at night, under the "Apache ported to PalmOS" story:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE ------ (01 Apr 2000) Rafael Kaufmann of the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IMPA), at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is proud to announce the completion of his latest and boldest porting effort so far. Kaufmann, who calls himself "a transhuman optimist-slash-Evil Genius", has ported the the Debian distribution of the popular open-source operating system Linux, in its entirety (6 CDs), to a custom-built biochip residing in his skull, and accessible only through an Ethernet port in Kaufmann's left temple. The biochip is able to interact with Kaufmann via voluntary electrical impulses in certain neurons of his brain, providing what he calls a "Direct Neural Interface".
The Linux box in Kaufmann's head was operating normally, until an unidentified hacker found a previously unknown security hole in the networking code, which enabled him to acquire root priviledges to the poor cyborg's brain, which resulted in Kaufmann traveling to Hollywood, invading the home of teen movie actress Natalie Portman, stripping her clothes off and using obscure techniques to petrify her, all the while pouring hot grits down his pants. When arrested and interrogated by the Los Angeles Police Department, Kaufmann replied only with repeated shouts of "I 0wn j00, K@ufm@nn!!! F1RST P0ST!!!!! L1nuz SUX!!!!!!!!!" The brutality of this occurrence makes evident the danger of trusting such a necessary network component as your nervous system to an unsafe, open-source, easily hackable operating system as Linux.
I wonder if I'm the only person who gets nostalgic for the old days when you could buy (actually license) some software and use it as much as you want.
Actually, I'm nostalgic for the old days when you didn't have to buy it - you just mailed a blank tape to the guys at Cambridge and they'd send it back with such cool things as Gosper's new version of LIFE, new gravity modes for Spacewar, and some cool editor macros for TECO! (After all, who needs dem newfangled ARPANET nonsense, right?)
The 500 MHz G4 is capable of sustaining One Billion Floating-point Operations per Second - one gigaflops. Its peak performance is claimed to be around 8 gigaflops. A "megaflop", it stands to reason, is either a venture which failed miserably, or just a guy with a big, limp penis.
The point is: if you're going to try to use facts to support half-baked analyses, at least get the facts straight.
I'm glad to see that/. is still able to get really interesting people interviewed... and ask them good questions! Anyway, here's mine.
In a few years (maybe a couple of decades, maybe less) I'll get a shot. The millions of nanobots in this shot will lodge themselves in strategic parts of my body, including the skull, and replicate themselves to start work, eventually - over months, weeks, days, hours - converting me to a full-fledged mechanic being, with an appropriately expanded "brain" made out of neuron-workalikes which are smaller and faster. As an added benefit, it'll be fully reflective - I'll be able to control all aspects of my body's functioning, including those regarding my thought processes. I'll also be able to use my existing new brain to try and come up with better designs for brains, to which I'll be able to "upgrade" without even a warm reboot. The entire process will be painless - and gradual, so, assuming that brain and mind are inseparable, my mind won't go anywhere anyway; my sense of identity will remain there even though its constituent parts are being replaced, just as we remain the same "people" even though billions of our cells die daily. However, if I want to, I can also perform automatic reproduction, simply by taking my constituent information (maybe stored in some kind of synthetic DNA-like polymere), perhaps performing some manipulations on it beforehand, shoving it into one of my cells, putting this cell into the appropriate substrate (mostly carbon, some other minerals and an easily broken carbohydrate) and it to replicate. In a few days, ta-da! - my "son", a completely synthetic being.
So, will the new "me" be considered an AI? What about my "son"? Will society, always afraid of what they don't know, throw rocks and shun me, calling me a "freak" or "Satan's spawn"? Will the new me, with new morals adapted for a new kind of existence, decide that humans "just aren't worth it" and utterly ravage our civilisation (maybe then leaving for the stars)? What if, instead, a large portion of society decides that synthetic is the way to go? Will a new kind of Digital Divide emerge? Will the synthetics and the naturals call each other "chimps" and "automatons"? Also, the synthetic would have things much easier for them, and just might decide to leave the "chimps" behind; what kind of society do you think these "natural-born humans" would adopt? Would they become fiercely anti-synthetic, or in tacit agreement with the cyberpeople? Would they go liberal or repressive? Would they prefer an agricultural lifestyle, or remain post-industrial? Would they eventually forget that humans had once created AI, and perhaps, a few generations later, do it all over again?
If I may just point out one quick thing: it's important here to distinguish between "brain" and "mind". The former is bio-mechanical, if you will... Studying the way nurons interface, interact, develop, and the like, and how the 'subsystems' of the brain function. I think this is *not* important to AI, though it would be interesting to hear Pollack's views. The brain is just the harware, and it's *totally* different than the hardware AI is using... (Though there are obvious similarities.)
Actually, a large part of AI research (especially since the rebirth of the connectionist paradigm in the 1980's) is devoted to studying and copying the actual functionality of the human brain; the idea is that, to get a mind-like "software", you have to have a brain-like "hardware", either "real" or "emulated". These are neural networks, which can be implemented either in software or in hardware. I personally think it's a great idea. However, the mind is a very complex beast.
One proposed way to get a working mind-like NN is to design a genetic algorithm which evolve through populations of "individuals" made out of virtual "neurons" with neuron-like response, until their behaviour corresponds to that of brain parts with well-known behaviour; this would be a huge simulation, and would probably be better off distributed through a SETI@Home kind of thing, or perhaps running on some kind of Big Iron like the new Blue Gene. Why we'd want to do that is another issue, and it has to do with the real goals of AI research: is it more important to figure out how our mind really works, or would it be good enough to get a simulation which somehow works (key word is "somehow"; if you've ever looked at the output of a GP simulation after a few generations, you know what I mean: they look almost organically elegant but needlessly complex, and are almost completely incomprehensible)?
The Freenet protocol is open (although still in development). I am researching the possibility of developing an alternate implementation as a Perl module or a collection thereof - Net::Free, perhaps? - , and then developing a set of applications based on it: a command-line client for Unix, a "regular" Freenet daemon, and a Freenet-to-Web gateway. Those interested might want to email me on the above address; I'll be setting up a mailing list shortly.
No. I am a classical liberal and a little-o objectivist (not a Randroid), and thus feel perfectly comfortable making value judgements. I do think government is bad in the long run, and I do feel that government by interventionism is just plain wrong. Deal with it.
By the way... what exactly is a hypocrat, anyway? A really short guy who, uh, rules? In that case, I am a really short guy and I rule... would I qualify?:)
Alright, I'll be the first one to agree that in the end this will probably be a Good Thing for us all, but my idealistic libertarian instincts still tell me that it's wrong for the Government to be doing it, and that in an ideal world, the people themselves wouldn't let anyone get away with the kind of crap that Microsoft has been pulling out for decades, and there would be no need for regulamentation. Ah well.
Thank you, Lx. I was just about to hit the Reply to This link to object to the poster having missed my point, when I read your message. So thank you for saving me those few minutes, not to mention quite a few keystrokes *.
Also, you managed to summarise quite succintly both of my main points: that Free Sofware doesn't necessarily == Linux, and that world domination by anyone is a Bad Thing.
(*) In accordance with the popular notion that one is only alotted a fixed number of keystrokes in one's lifetime...:)
Re:My regular Unix rant, from another perspective
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Two By Katz
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That definition of objects (structs with attribute hiding) shows that you're a C man...;]
Seriously, when I talk about objects, the important thing to keep in mind is structure; however it is that they're implemented (be it as simple hash tables as in Perl or DrScheme, as C structs which are just an automated way of doing compile-time pointer arithmetic, or as parts of a larger, universal knowledge base as in some OO variants of Prolog), objects know their own structure (either by built-in information on the object itself, or by carrying around a meta-object; to solve the problem of infinite regression of metas, it's usually just conventioned that the meta-meta-object will be an universal object which both agents "know").
The point is, objects do not have to be static and compile-time only as they are in C++; and they don't have to be inefficient either, as proven by Perl's implementation, which, relative to the differences sometimes found between procedural implementations of the same functionality with C and OO implementations with C++, compares favourably to procedural Perl.
Right now, I'd say the biggest obstacle between us and a truly modern and efficient OO application-layer protocol (both for IPC and remote communication) lies in the languages used; never mind C++, in which "objects" are just structs with attribute hiding that have to be resolved at compile time; even most dynamic languages have a serious problem, in that their approach to objects is as "collections of slots" - read, hash tables. I favour more the declarative approach to OO, used in Haskell IIRC (although I'm not sure), which simply stores relationships between objects in a global database (before you ask - yes, access to another program's objects is controlled). With that approach, objects can easily be sent around, simply by serialising their correspondent relationships, which are really defined in terms of Haskell's implementation primitives - Lisp's ubiquitous linked lists.
Finally, you asked for an example of a practical, completely object-oriented computing environment... well, I can give you two: Squeak, a Smalltalk enviroment whose development is supported by Disney (at http://squeak.org), and ETH Oberon, originally just the Son of Modula, but which grew to become a full-fledged OO OS (at http://www.oberon.ethz.ch). Both can be used either as stand-alone OSs or as applications running on top of an existing OS.
About which one are you asking? About not using Linux, I kinda lied; I spend most of my work day on a Linux workstation, and it runs somewhat well - about as well as an Unix could be expected to, and better than the Sparcstation sitting next to it anyways. And, with regard to the user interface, it does beat most of the Unices out there out-of-the-box (as "out-of-the-box" as it gets when it comes to Linux anyway). But I don't run Linux on my iMac at home. Why? I don't like Unix in general very much; I dislike the X Window System even more (for both technical and "look-and-feely" reasons); I need to use quite a bit of specialised software which is not available for Linux; I occasionally do Mac development (released as Free Software whenever possible), in which case I need my (not-so-)trusty CodeWarrior for Mac... and, finally, to be honest, staring at that darned penguin for too long just gives me the creeps.:]
Now, if you want to discuss my (non-)religious options, I won't do it here (it'd be offtopic); you can email me about it, though.
Linux on a thin client is the way to go, I'd be preaching to the choir if I had to explain why
Why?
(Moderators take note: this is not a troll, nor is it flamebait; this is just someone "not in the choir" (I'm not a Linux user, and I'm an atheist anyways:]) looking for rational discussion re. the benefits and disadvantages of using Linux on thin clients.)
(...) if they are going to try to sell to Joe Average Consumer.
They aren't. Wyse is targetting the corporate market, which in practice means Joe Average PHB. So, although Linux has made a quantum leap in mindshare in the past year or so, you have to keep in mind that the great majority of the corporate world is still infatuated with Microsoft's marketing department - otherwise, there'd be a lot more Microsoft-Certified Engineers out there on the streets with signs saying "Will Point-and-Click for Food" then there are. (This is especially true in "follower" markets such as Brazil, which right now is about a year or two behind the US where trends are concerned - i.e., Linux is still starting to gain momentum. In these markets, Microsoft's power and influence is even larger than it is in the US.)
If Wyse really believes that WinCE (or are they still going to call it "Windows Powered"?) provides a better foundation for their system than Linux, then let them; it's not important for them to use Linux, and it's not important to us either. A world dominated by Linux will be no better than a world dominated by Windows.
Personally, I think that both Linux and WinCE are bad choices for thin clients and other such computers. I don't believe that Linux provides any significant advantage to the corporation or the customer of these computers, in the technical aspect, particularly in comparison to other existing OSs - NetBSD has already been mentioned, and Be's IA offering (which runs on Stinger) seems rather nifty. Call me crazy, but I don't think any "regular Joe" wants to be forced to use an operating system whose primary focus has always been on an user base of hackers, sysadmins and other "advanced" users who like to play with Unix.
Someone says "but Linux is open-source". So what? So is {Free|Net|Open}BSD; so is eCos (although eCos isn't really meant to be used on thin clients, I think it'd make a nifty fit). Free Software is good, but not all Free Software is good, and not all Free Software is Linux. I personally dislike many aspects of Linux (aside from those which stem from its Unix heritage), although I'm a fierce supporter of Free Software.
In conclusion: although one must wonder why they've picked WinCE as the alternative, Linux is by no means the optimal OS for this job; come to think about it, one must wonder why they had picked Linux in the first place. IPO, anyone? And even if it were optimal (or even appropriate), it's not the responsibility of the Linux community at large (or the fraction thereof which reads Slashdot) to make sure that Wyse picked it. World domination is not a goal.
My regular Unix rant, from another perspective
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Two By Katz
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On the contrary, welcom to the *web*.
And how was the Web born? On Unix (specifically, on Tim's NeXT workstation in Geneva). But the story begins much earlier, in the early 70's.
Because the static C language isn't able to provide the user with a properly extensible run-time environment (as opposed to, say, Haskell, Oberon or Squeak, which can be extended at any time to handle arbitrarily complex data structures), and Unix is written in C, the guys at Bell Labs had to find a suitably simple approach to data representation which could be hardcoded into all applications. Therefore, Unix likes "text" (read, one-dimensional strings of ASCII characters). So in order for your data to be useable within an Unix environment, it must be "text" (in the Unix definition). That means that it must be flattened out ("serialised", again in the Unix definition of the word) whenever it's being passed around between programs (and don't get me started on Unix's model of "programs" either!).
Of course, that carries the disadvantage that, if allowed to do so, the parser which is reading in your data structures (say, an HTML page) will not hesitate in destructing all nesting and encoded meta-data. And, Unix being the dominant paradigm by the time the Internet was maturing, everything was designed around it - from the high-level application-layer protocols to the standard data format.
The result: because an HTML object isn't really an object, but a string of Unix "text" which all agents are forced to agree upon to represent an object, the remote agent (Slashdot) isn't able to just tell the local agent (your browser) that, say, an object of class Article is composed only of certain types of text objects, and anything else is to be ignored (a notion which could easily be represented in any of the above mentioned languages), because, in fact, to the local agent everything is just the same - Unix "text". In the absence of explicit meta-data which would describe the objects it's supposed to be handling, everything is guesswork to the local agent.
Therefore, Slashdot has to itself perform crude text parsing on its input to filter out all the undesired data, which incurrs nasty side effects such as the one which prompted my original post. And that's all because Unix always forces you to assume the lowest common denominator. As I said, it's been like this for 30 years, and it'll never get any better. (Not as long as we stick with Unix, anyway.)
If you want things like @array = <> to be printed out correctly in/., you can just put the code through Tom's/. Posting Script. (For which I could have sworn I had an URL or a local copy... urgh.)
Yeah, I figured it out by myself a few moments later... thanks anyway:)
In Portuguese, we call a "link"... a link! Creative, eh?:) The more vitriolic xenophobes^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdefenders of the Brazilian cultural patrimony prefer the word "vínculo", though.
Slashdot Mirror
Gresham's Law states, in fact, that bad software drives out the good, not the other way around. Sorry.
even equate every Unix supporter to someone who will slam you without reason.
No, I equated the average Unix supporter to someone who will slam me without reason. I have found this to be the case, in general.
Unfortunately, the average MacWorld reader is so infatuated with their MacOS 9 plaything that they won't stop to consider the horrible horrible flaws that plague the entire MacOS family. Even more sadly, he will steadfastly hold close to his belief that anyone who doesn't like MacOS must be an evil Microserf, and in doing so will pass on the opportunity to learn that there are things better then the Beast from Apple.
That's actually a very good look at the average Mac user. (And I'm using a Mac myself right now.)
Next time, be constructive. At least the link you provided was a decent look at languages.
Actually, the entire tunes.org site makes for excellent reading, and you can drop by at OPN #tunes anytime for a rational discussion on why Unix sucks. (The site linked to by the OP also has a lot of text which you might consider constructive.)
If Unix is indeed the wrong way to do things, it's a wonder it's survived for so many years and is now coming back not only in the free OS'es but in Apple's new commercial offering for the home user.
Why? It's Gresham's Law, as it's always been: good software drives out the bad. (Not that, say, Windows or Mac OS are any better than Unix, no... but there have been many other OSs which, despite being technically superior to Unix offerings, were deprecated for other reasons. This process was very similar to what's happening nowadays to the corporate environment, with Micro$oft's relentless push towards WinNT.)
Unix itself may not be what's so wonderful, but the fact that there is a platform with standards behind it (POSIX) that allows programmers to write once and port many ways may be what's so wonderful.
I have two things to say about that: (1) There have been standards before POSIX. (2) POSIX imposes the Unix worldview upon the programmer, and therefore constrains and hinders the system engineer's freedom to make something better out of the OS. Otherwise, no objections.
THANK YOU! I've been saying that for years! (See sig.)
Unfortunately, the average Slashdot user is so infatuated with his Linux(/BSD/HURD) plaything that he won't stop for a moment to consider the horrible horrible flaws which plague the entire Unix family (and relatives, and clones, and anything based on the Unix architecture or on its language of choice, the static, low-level "portable assembly" C). Even more sadly, he will steadfastly hold close to his belief that anyone who doesn't like Unix (or C) must be an evil Microsoftie, and in doing so will pass on the opportunity to learn that there are better things and life than the Beast from New Jersey.
Ah well - I digress. Just take a moment to look at the critique of C/C++ on the site for the Tunes project, if you will... and, as I say below, think twice before moderating the crap out of us both.
But, with a Netscape Enterprise server (Solaris) running multi-threaded, we were able to make shared read access to gdbm files fast and threadsafe in a very natural way in C. Is perl threading good enough now, and does mod_perl handle multithreaded applications?
Well, I haven't been doing full-time web development work for a few months now (thank Kibo!), but I've heard some very nice things about Perl 5.6's thread support (although, according to the official pages, it's still experimental and subject to change at any time). However, it seems to me that if it comes to a point where you definitely feel the need to have your system itself make use of "userland" multithreading, then you're still better off using C/C++ and a nice little threading library such as MIT's. (Of course, I'm not sure as to how the Netscape server works re. threads... if it handles multithreading automatically for you in an NSAPI app, then I suppose that it should do the same for Perl running on it, no? Then again, I'm just guessing.)
By the way, do any of the "other" popular scripting languages - Python, PHP, Rebol, whatever - support threading?
Two things: first, Perl isn't really slow; when you run it, most of the time is spent running Sarathy's heavily optimised code to handle things like hash lookups and regexes, not your punny little userland code ;) It only _seems_ slow because of the overhead imposed by having to spawn a new interpreter and recompile the script into bytecode every time the script is run. But most of the problem is easily fixed by mod_perl.
:) Instead, perlcc embeds an entire copy of the Perl interpreter, plus a shitload of unnecessary modules, along with your program in bytecode-compiled form. The result is bloated, buggy, ugly and generally not much faster than just running your script. So it's not of much use, but if you really want to do it, you get to.
Second, yes, the perlcc utility is able to compile a Perl script... but not by translating it to native code. No, that would be just too easy...
(P.S.: Cool username... I've always preferred post-Syd Floyd myself, though.)
This is what you get from putting Esther Dyson (aka Lucifer herself) in charge of the Internet. Yeah, I'm really happy to trust these people with the entire domain naming system. Blergh. Seriously, they've been around for years and they've yet to get a single thing right. They have not shown one ounce of willingness to adopt an administrative policy which could be described as anything less than fascist. It's just the cherry on the top that they aren't even able to manage a mailing list -- it's no surprise that the naming system in its current state. I say kill the ICANN; let's get rid of this awful monstrosity once and for all.
(Sorry for the rant, but it really pisses me off to see my beloved network get to this point. Moderators take note: this post was not a troll, flamebait or offtopic.)
Does that mean I've got a copyright? Better yet, does that mean I've got a retroactive first-post? :) Anyway, I posted this on March 31 at night, under the "Apache ported to PalmOS" story:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE ------ (01 Apr 2000) Rafael Kaufmann of the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IMPA), at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is proud to announce the completion of his latest and boldest porting effort so far. Kaufmann, who calls himself "a transhuman optimist-slash-Evil Genius", has ported the the Debian distribution of the popular open-source operating system Linux, in its entirety (6 CDs), to a custom-built biochip residing in his skull, and accessible only through an Ethernet port in Kaufmann's left temple. The biochip is able to interact with Kaufmann via voluntary electrical impulses in certain neurons of his brain, providing what he calls a "Direct Neural Interface".
The Linux box in Kaufmann's head was operating normally, until an unidentified hacker found a previously unknown security hole in the networking code, which enabled him to acquire root priviledges to the poor cyborg's brain, which resulted in Kaufmann traveling to Hollywood, invading the home of teen movie actress Natalie Portman, stripping her clothes off and using obscure techniques to petrify her, all the while pouring hot grits down his pants. When arrested and interrogated by the Los Angeles Police Department, Kaufmann replied only with repeated shouts of "I 0wn j00, K@ufm@nn!!! F1RST P0ST!!!!! L1nuz SUX!!!!!!!!!" The brutality of this occurrence makes evident the danger of trusting such a necessary network component as your nervous system to an unsafe, open-source, easily hackable operating system as Linux.
I wonder if I'm the only person who gets nostalgic for the old days when you could buy (actually license) some software and use it as much as you want.
Actually, I'm nostalgic for the old days when you didn't have to buy it - you just mailed a blank tape to the guys at Cambridge and they'd send it back with such cool things as Gosper's new version of LIFE, new gravity modes for Spacewar, and some cool editor macros for TECO! (After all, who needs dem newfangled ARPANET nonsense, right?)
*looks out the window*
Let's see... Copacabana Beach, check. The Christ statue, check. The Bread Loaf, check. Nope, not here.
It worked, Carmen. You're safe now. Those fools' will never suspect a thing... now let's just erase this paragraph and click Subm--
The 500 MHz G4 is capable of sustaining One Billion Floating-point Operations per Second - one gigaflops. Its peak performance is claimed to be around 8 gigaflops. A "megaflop", it stands to reason, is either a venture which failed miserably, or just a guy with a big, limp penis.
The point is: if you're going to try to use facts to support half-baked analyses, at least get the facts straight.
I'm glad to see that /. is still able to get really interesting people interviewed... and ask them good questions! Anyway, here's mine.
In a few years (maybe a couple of decades, maybe less) I'll get a shot. The millions of nanobots in this shot will lodge themselves in strategic parts of my body, including the skull, and replicate themselves to start work, eventually - over months, weeks, days, hours - converting me to a full-fledged mechanic being, with an appropriately expanded "brain" made out of neuron-workalikes which are smaller and faster. As an added benefit, it'll be fully reflective - I'll be able to control all aspects of my body's functioning, including those regarding my thought processes. I'll also be able to use my existing new brain to try and come up with better designs for brains, to which I'll be able to "upgrade" without even a warm reboot. The entire process will be painless - and gradual, so, assuming that brain and mind are inseparable, my mind won't go anywhere anyway; my sense of identity will remain there even though its constituent parts are being replaced, just as we remain the same "people" even though billions of our cells die daily. However, if I want to, I can also perform automatic reproduction, simply by taking my constituent information (maybe stored in some kind of synthetic DNA-like polymere), perhaps performing some manipulations on it beforehand, shoving it into one of my cells, putting this cell into the appropriate substrate (mostly carbon, some other minerals and an easily broken carbohydrate) and it to replicate. In a few days, ta-da! - my "son", a completely synthetic being.
So, will the new "me" be considered an AI? What about my "son"? Will society, always afraid of what they don't know, throw rocks and shun me, calling me a "freak" or "Satan's spawn"? Will the new me, with new morals adapted for a new kind of existence, decide that humans "just aren't worth it" and utterly ravage our civilisation (maybe then leaving for the stars)? What if, instead, a large portion of society decides that synthetic is the way to go? Will a new kind of Digital Divide emerge? Will the synthetics and the naturals call each other "chimps" and "automatons"? Also, the synthetic would have things much easier for them, and just might decide to leave the "chimps" behind; what kind of society do you think these "natural-born humans" would adopt? Would they become fiercely anti-synthetic, or in tacit agreement with the cyberpeople? Would they go liberal or repressive? Would they prefer an agricultural lifestyle, or remain post-industrial? Would they eventually forget that humans had once created AI, and perhaps, a few generations later, do it all over again?
If I may just point out one quick thing: it's important here to distinguish between "brain" and "mind". The former is bio-mechanical, if you will... Studying the way nurons interface, interact, develop, and the like, and how the 'subsystems' of the brain function. I think this is *not* important to AI, though it would be interesting to hear Pollack's views. The brain is just the harware, and it's *totally* different than the hardware AI is using... (Though there are obvious similarities.)
Actually, a large part of AI research (especially since the rebirth of the connectionist paradigm in the 1980's) is devoted to studying and copying the actual functionality of the human brain; the idea is that, to get a mind-like "software", you have to have a brain-like "hardware", either "real" or "emulated". These are neural networks, which can be implemented either in software or in hardware. I personally think it's a great idea. However, the mind is a very complex beast.
One proposed way to get a working mind-like NN is to design a genetic algorithm which evolve through populations of "individuals" made out of virtual "neurons" with neuron-like response, until their behaviour corresponds to that of brain parts with well-known behaviour; this would be a huge simulation, and would probably be better off distributed through a SETI@Home kind of thing, or perhaps running on some kind of Big Iron like the new Blue Gene. Why we'd want to do that is another issue, and it has to do with the real goals of AI research: is it more important to figure out how our mind really works, or would it be good enough to get a simulation which somehow works (key word is "somehow"; if you've ever looked at the output of a GP simulation after a few generations, you know what I mean: they look almost organically elegant but needlessly complex, and are almost completely incomprehensible)?
(In all instances, YMMV.)
The Freenet protocol is open (although still in development). I am researching the possibility of developing an alternate implementation as a Perl module or a collection thereof - Net::Free, perhaps? - , and then developing a set of applications based on it: a command-line client for Unix, a "regular" Freenet daemon, and a Freenet-to-Web gateway. Those interested might want to email me on the above address; I'll be setting up a mailing list shortly.
No. I am a classical liberal and a little-o objectivist (not a Randroid), and thus feel perfectly comfortable making value judgements. I do think government is bad in the long run, and I do feel that government by interventionism is just plain wrong. Deal with it.
:)
By the way... what exactly is a hypocrat, anyway? A really short guy who, uh, rules? In that case, I am a really short guy and I rule... would I qualify?
Alright, I'll be the first one to agree that in the end this will probably be a Good Thing for us all, but my idealistic libertarian instincts still tell me that it's wrong for the Government to be doing it, and that in an ideal world, the people themselves wouldn't let anyone get away with the kind of crap that Microsoft has been pulling out for decades, and there would be no need for regulamentation. Ah well.
Thank you, Lx. I was just about to hit the Reply to This link to object to the poster having missed my point, when I read your message. So thank you for saving me those few minutes, not to mention quite a few keystrokes *.
:)
Also, you managed to summarise quite succintly both of my main points: that Free Sofware doesn't necessarily == Linux, and that world domination by anyone is a Bad Thing.
(*) In accordance with the popular notion that one is only alotted a fixed number of keystrokes in one's lifetime...
That definition of objects (structs with attribute hiding) shows that you're a C man... ;]
Seriously, when I talk about objects, the important thing to keep in mind is structure; however it is that they're implemented (be it as simple hash tables as in Perl or DrScheme, as C structs which are just an automated way of doing compile-time pointer arithmetic, or as parts of a larger, universal knowledge base as in some OO variants of Prolog), objects know their own structure (either by built-in information on the object itself, or by carrying around a meta-object; to solve the problem of infinite regression of metas, it's usually just conventioned that the meta-meta-object will be an universal object which both agents "know").
The point is, objects do not have to be static and compile-time only as they are in C++; and they don't have to be inefficient either, as proven by Perl's implementation, which, relative to the differences sometimes found between procedural implementations of the same functionality with C and OO implementations with C++, compares favourably to procedural Perl.
Right now, I'd say the biggest obstacle between us and a truly modern and efficient OO application-layer protocol (both for IPC and remote communication) lies in the languages used; never mind C++, in which "objects" are just structs with attribute hiding that have to be resolved at compile time; even most dynamic languages have a serious problem, in that their approach to objects is as "collections of slots" - read, hash tables. I favour more the declarative approach to OO, used in Haskell IIRC (although I'm not sure), which simply stores relationships between objects in a global database (before you ask - yes, access to another program's objects is controlled). With that approach, objects can easily be sent around, simply by serialising their correspondent relationships, which are really defined in terms of Haskell's implementation primitives - Lisp's ubiquitous linked lists.
Finally, you asked for an example of a practical, completely object-oriented computing environment... well, I can give you two: Squeak, a Smalltalk enviroment whose development is supported by Disney (at http://squeak.org), and ETH Oberon, originally just the Son of Modula, but which grew to become a full-fledged OO OS (at http://www.oberon.ethz.ch). Both can be used either as stand-alone OSs or as applications running on top of an existing OS.
About which one are you asking? About not using Linux, I kinda lied; I spend most of my work day on a Linux workstation, and it runs somewhat well - about as well as an Unix could be expected to, and better than the Sparcstation sitting next to it anyways. And, with regard to the user interface, it does beat most of the Unices out there out-of-the-box (as "out-of-the-box" as it gets when it comes to Linux anyway). But I don't run Linux on my iMac at home. Why? I don't like Unix in general very much; I dislike the X Window System even more (for both technical and "look-and-feely" reasons); I need to use quite a bit of specialised software which is not available for Linux; I occasionally do Mac development (released as Free Software whenever possible), in which case I need my (not-so-)trusty CodeWarrior for Mac... and, finally, to be honest, staring at that darned penguin for too long just gives me the creeps. :]
Now, if you want to discuss my (non-)religious options, I won't do it here (it'd be offtopic); you can email me about it, though.
Linux on a thin client is the way to go, I'd be preaching to the choir if I had to explain why
:]) looking for rational discussion re. the benefits and disadvantages of using Linux on thin clients.)
Why?
(Moderators take note: this is not a troll, nor is it flamebait; this is just someone "not in the choir" (I'm not a Linux user, and I'm an atheist anyways
(...) if they are going to try to sell to Joe Average Consumer.
They aren't. Wyse is targetting the corporate market, which in practice means Joe Average PHB. So, although Linux has made a quantum leap in mindshare in the past year or so, you have to keep in mind that the great majority of the corporate world is still infatuated with Microsoft's marketing department - otherwise, there'd be a lot more Microsoft-Certified Engineers out there on the streets with signs saying "Will Point-and-Click for Food" then there are. (This is especially true in "follower" markets such as Brazil, which right now is about a year or two behind the US where trends are concerned - i.e., Linux is still starting to gain momentum. In these markets, Microsoft's power and influence is even larger than it is in the US.)
If Wyse really believes that WinCE (or are they still going to call it "Windows Powered"?) provides a better foundation for their system than Linux, then let them; it's not important for them to use Linux, and it's not important to us either. A world dominated by Linux will be no better than a world dominated by Windows.
Personally, I think that both Linux and WinCE are bad choices for thin clients and other such computers. I don't believe that Linux provides any significant advantage to the corporation or the customer of these computers, in the technical aspect, particularly in comparison to other existing OSs - NetBSD has already been mentioned, and Be's IA offering (which runs on Stinger) seems rather nifty. Call me crazy, but I don't think any "regular Joe" wants to be forced to use an operating system whose primary focus has always been on an user base of hackers, sysadmins and other "advanced" users who like to play with Unix.
Someone says "but Linux is open-source". So what? So is {Free|Net|Open}BSD; so is eCos (although eCos isn't really meant to be used on thin clients, I think it'd make a nifty fit). Free Software is good, but not all Free Software is good, and not all Free Software is Linux. I personally dislike many aspects of Linux (aside from those which stem from its Unix heritage), although I'm a fierce supporter of Free Software.
In conclusion: although one must wonder why they've picked WinCE as the alternative, Linux is by no means the optimal OS for this job; come to think about it, one must wonder why they had picked Linux in the first place. IPO, anyone? And even if it were optimal (or even appropriate), it's not the responsibility of the Linux community at large (or the fraction thereof which reads Slashdot) to make sure that Wyse picked it. World domination is not a goal.
On the contrary, welcom to the *web*.
And how was the Web born? On Unix (specifically, on Tim's NeXT workstation in Geneva). But the story begins much earlier, in the early 70's.
Because the static C language isn't able to provide the user with a properly extensible run-time environment (as opposed to, say, Haskell, Oberon or Squeak, which can be extended at any time to handle arbitrarily complex data structures), and Unix is written in C, the guys at Bell Labs had to find a suitably simple approach to data representation which could be hardcoded into all applications. Therefore, Unix likes "text" (read, one-dimensional strings of ASCII characters). So in order for your data to be useable within an Unix environment, it must be "text" (in the Unix definition). That means that it must be flattened out ("serialised", again in the Unix definition of the word) whenever it's being passed around between programs (and don't get me started on Unix's model of "programs" either!).
Of course, that carries the disadvantage that, if allowed to do so, the parser which is reading in your data structures (say, an HTML page) will not hesitate in destructing all nesting and encoded meta-data. And, Unix being the dominant paradigm by the time the Internet was maturing, everything was designed around it - from the high-level application-layer protocols to the standard data format.
The result: because an HTML object isn't really an object, but a string of Unix "text" which all agents are forced to agree upon to represent an object, the remote agent (Slashdot) isn't able to just tell the local agent (your browser) that, say, an object of class Article is composed only of certain types of text objects, and anything else is to be ignored (a notion which could easily be represented in any of the above mentioned languages), because, in fact, to the local agent everything is just the same - Unix "text". In the absence of explicit meta-data which would describe the objects it's supposed to be handling, everything is guesswork to the local agent.
Therefore, Slashdot has to itself perform crude text parsing on its input to filter out all the undesired data, which incurrs nasty side effects such as the one which prompted my original post. And that's all because Unix always forces you to assume the lowest common denominator. As I said, it's been like this for 30 years, and it'll never get any better. (Not as long as we stick with Unix, anyway.)
Yep. Welcome to Unix. It's been like this for 30 years, and it'll never get any better.
If you want things like @array = <> to be printed out correctly in /., you can just put the code through Tom's /. Posting Script. (For which I could have sworn I had an URL or a local copy... urgh.)
Yeah, I figured it out by myself a few moments later... thanks anyway :)
:) The more vitriolic xenophobes^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdefenders of the Brazilian cultural patrimony prefer the word "vínculo", though.
In Portuguese, we call a "link"... a link! Creative, eh?