When any particular subset of what we do with our brains (chess, machine vision, speech recognition, what have you) yields to research and produces commercial applications, the critics of A.I. redraw the line and that domain is no longer part of "A.I." As this continues, the problem space still considered part of "artificial intelligence" will get smaller and smaller and nay-sayers will continue to be able to say "we still don't have A.I."
I second that motion; my previous employer equipped my cube with the Contessa, also following an ergo eval. (Same employer maybe? HockeyPuck, do you work for a Really Big Router Company?) It really, really helped my back problems. I was sufficiently enthused that I tracked down a Contessa of my own for home use (for only $200 on eBay!). In my current gig, I have an Aeron, which is about 90% as good as the Contessa.
I worked for Brian Reid at DEC; he's brilliant and few can rival his record of accomplishments. And based on my own experience interviewing at Google, I'd have to say he's 100% right on in this suit.
I had occasion to interview recently with both VMWare (in 2005) and Google (in 2006). The two experiences were as different as night and day.
At VMWare, every interviewer who met with me arrived on time, demonstrated that he or she had read my resume, and asked pertinent questions about my experience and skills. (The interviewers ranged in apparent age from early 20's to late 30's.) I was asked to demonstrate, at the whiteboard, how I would design a particular IT application: server architecture; logical data model; object hierarchy. I was offered the job.
At Google, the recruiter spent the first few minutes looking for an available conference room. The interviewers were from a separate organization, not the one with the opening I was interviewing for, and both gave every indication of having been handed my resume on their way into the room. (Everyone I met appeared to be in about their mid-20's.) The first interviewer asked me to code a fixed-length circular-array object for which he could not name a real-world application. The second asked me to solve a fantasy logic puzzle ("You've got a circular jail with 100 cells...") that, I learned later, came straight from the Games page of the current issue of Make magazine. Neither was particularly articulate (one, to be fair, was not a native English speaker), although they were both quite friendly.
I was not asked to come back by Google, and was not disappointed by the news. TANSTAAFL, indeed.
BTW, I'm 42. And I'm getting out of IT to become a counseling therapist.
(I'll be at the Blue Chalk anniversary party; bring your copy of the Slash book if you want an autograph.)
A recent book, "Rare Earth" by Peter Douglas Ward and Donald Brownlee, makes a pretty plausible case that we should expect to find life -- reproducing respirating stuff of some kind -- very frequently in the universe, but intelligent life -- language, tool use, self-awareness -- very seldom, and in fact we are probably unique. It's an interesting read.
... and that's IE/Mac. Check out the Web Standards Project's press release.
Don't think I like the fact that the best browser available comes from the Borg. I lie in bed praying for the day when "ECMAScript" finally makes it into iCab. But even an anti-M$ bigot like me can recognize that Micro~1's IE/Mac team have turned out the most standards-compliant browser currently available. It's not too bloated either. And since Version 4, IE/Mac has provided the kind of cookie control that is currently such big news for IE/Windows.
There is no observable feature creep in nightly builds now because all conceivable features (Mail, News, XUL, WYSIWYG editor, auctions client, toothpick, tweezers, magnifying glass, juicer...) were thrown into the spec two years ago. Those are the features you are just now starting to see work.
The Mozilla code base might result in some decent browsers thanks to projects like Galeon that throw most of the crap away... but Mozilla itself is a big, dead, stinky, crash-prone dinosaur.
The sad part is that the "cathedral" proponents are going to use the failure of Mozilla as "proof" that big Open Source projects can't work.
Having to uncover that lower-right corner to resize is just as inconvenient as having to uncover the titlebar to move, and, according to the UI literature, happens much more frequently.
Stretch solved the latter problem quite simply: holding down the Option key let you move the window by holding any edge. There might be a similar workaround in Windows but who the hell cares.
(By the way, that "moving the window by any edge" capability in MacOS only came along with the new "fat" window frames with the Appearance control panel in OS 8.)
I, a troll? I didn't even mention the introduction of Appearance themes (with no actual Themes made available)! Oops, now I did.
I am the most rabid pro-Apple, anti-Microsoft, Windows-is-a-crime-against-nature, Outlook-is-the-work-of-Satan, ILUVYOU- and Melissa-applauding, Bill-Gates-cursing bigot on the planet... and I tell you with no hesitation, bringing out the new Mac optical mouse as a single-button mouse is the stupidest move Apple has ever made. I haven't used a one-button mouse in at least five years. I dearly love my Kensington Thinking Mouse (no longer made, sadly) and I'm mildly pleased with the Kensington MouseWorks mouse which replaced it. Apple should have ditched the one-button mouse concept as soon as they introduced Contextual Menus in OS 8 (the equivalent of "right-click" for you Windows thralls).
Oh, and as long as I'm dissing Apple and praising the Borg, how about windows you can resize from any edge? There was a great shareware control panel called Stretch that gave the Mac interface this capability (one of the few things Microsoft got right and Apple got wrong, wrong, wrong), but it was incompatible with the Appearance Control Panel (introduced, and made mandatory, in OS 8).
And frankly I don't give a flying f%&* how my mouse looks with the lights off, either.
Cobalt is begging for a serious countersuit here... haven't they ever heard of a little computer about ten years ago called a NeXT? Which is now part of the very company Cobalt is accusing of ripping off the "idea" of a cubical computer?
We have had no end of trouble with our DSL service, and I put the blame squarely on Pacific Bell. Our ISP (Internet Express) and DSL provider (Covad) are on the hook every time PacBell decides to monkey with the physical lines in our neighborhood -- and PacBell is always monkeying with the lines, because our neighborhood is in the heart of Silicon Valley and PacBell has been tragically under-maintaining their infrastructure in the face of the Internet explosion. (Might PacBell also be deliberately f*cking with Covad customers, to get them to try PacBell's own competing DSL service? You'd have to be paranoid to think something like that, wouldn't you?)
Even very young children (old enough to know their letters and numbers) can be started on programming with Ken Kahn's ToonTalk, an animated programming kit that introduces even such advanced concepts as recursion and functions in a fully visual, direct-manipulation, non-notated way. Kids learn by playing with an on-screen toolbox, robots (methods), birds (message passing channels), scales (comparison operators). I saw Ken give a ToonTalk demo a few years ago and I was blown away by it.
If your kids are too old for "kid stuff", start 'em off with HyperCard, a great introduction to object-oriented programming concepts like inheritance, encapsulation, and message passing. The embedded programming language, HyperTalk, supports functions, event-based methods, recursion, etc., with a very English-like syntax. HyperCard provides a visual object hierarchy already populated with rich actions, and extensible with additional functions and methods. (The object hierarchy is not easily extensible, but by the time the kids hit that limit they will be ready for Java, Perl, or Python.)
The only drawbacks to these two great teaching tools is that neither one of them runs on Linux! (ToonTalk: Windows only; HyperCard: Mac only)
What in blue blazes do ESR's beliefs about guns (which I happen to share, FYI) have to do with the ethics of free software? Should I dismiss Dr. Meyer's opinions about free software out of hand just because he likes to dress up in drag and bugger koala bears? (I must stress that there is no reliable evidence of this!)
Another use for open-sourcing orphan software is to cut the legs off of competitors, who then have to compete with a free (as in beer) product.
Anyone else remember IntelliDraw? It was what Visio wants to be when it grows up. (Some of the early IntelliDraw developers went on to found Visio.) I still consider IntelliDraw the ideal cross-platform business- and technical-graphics software tool. Adobe got the product when they engulfed Aldus, and killed it (I assume because of perceived competition with Illustrator).
Now that Visio has achieved their wet dream of being assimilated by the Borg (they never released their program for any platform but Winduhs), I think it would behoove Adobe to open-source IntelliDraw as a Visio-killer. IntelliDraw isn't making them any money now, and Illustrator has evolved toward the fine-art direction rather than the practical diagramming that IntelliDraw was so perfect for. So I'd say Adobe has nothing to lose (and can score a big blow against M$) by open-sourcing IntelliDraw.
I agree with you that, for experienced users of each, a CLI is just as easy to use as a GUI. But the fact that GUI's are easier to learn is what enables new applications to come along. Every command-line program has a new command-line interface (Emacs vs. vi, for example) that can take months to learn to use fluently (for some users and some programs, years).
The glory of the GUI is that it enables faster adoption of new programs. A GUI user who knows how to click buttons, drag menus, etc., is 75% of the way to using any new GUI program that is introduced. A CLI user coming to a new program knows how to type (if that), and is only a tiny fraction of the way to learning to use the new program powerfully.
Standardization between programs, as Vanders mentioned, speeds user learning of new programs as well, by increasing what users already know that is applicable to whatever new program they encounter. Apple's "interface police" made it possible for the Mac to do this very well; Windows does it poorly, and Un*x does it not at all.
The power of GUI's comes from the quirk of human memory that it is easier for humans to recognize something (such as, picking an item from a drop-down menu) than to recall something (such as, typing tar xvf foo.tar). The GUI also enables the human/computer interaction to take advantage of the fact that human memory is spatially based; the user can use their physical memory to assist their symbolic memory (we don't even need to consciously think, "I know that button is over here someplace," we just go there). The ability to memorize not-very-mnemonic command names is not widely distributed in the general population. You and I can do it, but why would we want to when the computer can remind us? I have other uses for my neurons than memorizing all the command-line switches for ls (or worse, the permissions codes for chmod).
Intermute selectively blocks cookies by domain name (e.g., you can tell it to block all cookies, and then specify exceptions for sites that need them).
It's not open source... but it's cheap. And it does block cookies. When I try the test page, all I get is "Cookie blocked by InterMute".
I'm not 100% fond of the company... they have discontinued all versions except Windows. But if you're stuck using Windows -- I'm currently contracting for a Big Name PC manufacturer where non-MS OS'es are prohibited by company policy -- the control InterMute gives you is indispensible.
Hey, while you're at their site, ask them (nicely) to reinstate the UNIX and Mac versions. (The product is written in Java, so supporting these platforms should not be rocket science.)
How about posting the entire content of the book to a website so people can read it online for free. If you're not making a profit, then why not? It can't hurt profits if there aren't supposed to be any. And that might help get to a wider audience.
As another poster already mentioned, the people who most need to see these messages are not online. Recognize that there are people who are not like you.
Just because Andover and Katz aren't making any personal gain from the book, don't assume that profitability of the book is unimportant. Firstly, a book has to make a profit to stay in print. Secondly, the profits from the book can be applied to good causes to help relieve the torment of teen geeks and publicize their plight.
It all starts with Foresight Institute, which is essentially where nanotechnology (in the precise sense of "machines manufactured to atomic precision") got started.
Of course, Eric Drexler's book Engines of Creation started it all. Unbounding the Future, by Drexler, Chris Peterson, and Gayle Pergamit, is a less technical popularization of the ideas put forth in Engines. Drexler's Nanosystems is the authoritative technical book on the subject.
Zyvex researcherRalph Merkle is acknowledged worldwide as one of foremost authorities on nanotechnology; his nanotech website is the definitive starting place for locating nanotech resources on the web.
Joy later asked Merkle 'Do you think biological weaponry gives an advantage to the offensive or defensive,' to which Merkle embarrassingly replied, 'I'm not sure.'
Why should Ralph Merkle be embarrassed to admit that he hasn't jumped to a premature opinion about the extremely complex ramifications of an unprecedentedly powerful technology that hasn't even been invented yet?
Bill Joy (or, as I heard several people call him that day, "Kill Joy") inadvertently helped Merkle make this point later on. He asked the crowd to "raise your hands if you think nanotech favors offense", and got about half of the hall. In response to "raise your hands if you think nanotech favors defense", he got about a third. But when Ralph Merkle then asked, "raise your hand if you think we need more study to find out," over two thirds of the audience raised their hands.
If it was me, I'd give a big chunk of it to Foresight Institute, but I'm biased. Christine Peterson, ED of Foresight, coined the term "Open Source"; and being a Senior Associate (donate more than a couple hundred dollars a year) lets you hobnob with the cool people who show up for Senior Associates Gatherings... past attendees have included Jeff Bezos, Tim O'Reilly, Esther Dyson, and SF authors David Brin, Gregory Benford, and Vernor Vinge.
If that seems a bit indirect to you, then I'd strongly urge that you put the money toward legal and political efforts, like the aforementioned EFF or its European counterpart(s). I know that certain elements in the EU are pushing for a U.S.-style patent system, which would be a disaster. Find out who's opposing it and give them a hand.
Slashdot Mirror
Life imitates Battlestar Galactica
When any particular subset of what we do with our brains (chess, machine vision, speech recognition, what have you) yields to research and produces commercial applications, the critics of A.I. redraw the line and that domain is no longer part of "A.I." As this continues, the problem space still considered part of "artificial intelligence" will get smaller and smaller and nay-sayers will continue to be able to say "we still don't have A.I."
I second that motion; my previous employer equipped my cube with the Contessa, also following an ergo eval. (Same employer maybe? HockeyPuck, do you work for a Really Big Router Company?) It really, really helped my back problems. I was sufficiently enthused that I tracked down a Contessa of my own for home use (for only $200 on eBay!). In my current gig, I have an Aeron, which is about 90% as good as the Contessa.
I worked for Brian Reid at DEC; he's brilliant and few can rival his record of accomplishments. And based on my own experience interviewing at Google, I'd have to say he's 100% right on in this suit.
I had occasion to interview recently with both VMWare (in 2005) and Google (in 2006). The two experiences were as different as night and day.
At VMWare, every interviewer who met with me arrived on time, demonstrated that he or she had read my resume, and asked pertinent questions about my experience and skills. (The interviewers ranged in apparent age from early 20's to late 30's.) I was asked to demonstrate, at the whiteboard, how I would design a particular IT application: server architecture; logical data model; object hierarchy. I was offered the job.
At Google, the recruiter spent the first few minutes looking for an available conference room. The interviewers were from a separate organization, not the one with the opening I was interviewing for, and both gave every indication of having been handed my resume on their way into the room. (Everyone I met appeared to be in about their mid-20's.) The first interviewer asked me to code a fixed-length circular-array object for which he could not name a real-world application. The second asked me to solve a fantasy logic puzzle ("You've got a circular jail with 100 cells...") that, I learned later, came straight from the Games page of the current issue of Make magazine. Neither was particularly articulate (one, to be fair, was not a native English speaker), although they were both quite friendly.
I was not asked to come back by Google, and was not disappointed by the news. TANSTAAFL, indeed.
BTW, I'm 42. And I'm getting out of IT to become a counseling therapist.
(I'll be at the Blue Chalk anniversary party; bring your copy of the Slash book if you want an autograph.)
Please mod this up to make it more visible (or better yet, can it be edited into the main article, Hemos? Thanks)
But "A Discordian is prohibited from believing what s/he reads".
WildBlue (formerly iSky) will be offering two-way satellite internet in late 2001 (for those of us who prefer not to deal with either AOL or MSN).
A recent book, "Rare Earth" by Peter Douglas Ward and Donald Brownlee, makes a pretty plausible case that we should expect to find life -- reproducing respirating stuff of some kind -- very frequently in the universe, but intelligent life -- language, tool use, self-awareness -- very seldom, and in fact we are probably unique. It's an interesting read.
At work (Windows) I use InterMute (now "AdSubtract") and at home (Mac) I browse with iCab. I haven't seen an ad on the web in weeks...
Don't think I like the fact that the best browser available comes from the Borg. I lie in bed praying for the day when "ECMAScript" finally makes it into iCab. But even an anti-M$ bigot like me can recognize that Micro~1's IE/Mac team have turned out the most standards-compliant browser currently available. It's not too bloated either. And since Version 4, IE/Mac has provided the kind of cookie control that is currently such big news for IE/Windows.
The Mozilla code base might result in some decent browsers thanks to projects like Galeon that throw most of the crap away... but Mozilla itself is a big, dead, stinky, crash-prone dinosaur.
The sad part is that the "cathedral" proponents are going to use the failure of Mozilla as "proof" that big Open Source projects can't work.
Stretch solved the latter problem quite simply: holding down the Option key let you move the window by holding any edge. There might be a similar workaround in Windows but who the hell cares.
(By the way, that "moving the window by any edge" capability in MacOS only came along with the new "fat" window frames with the Appearance control panel in OS 8.)
I, a troll? I didn't even mention the introduction of Appearance themes (with no actual Themes made available)! Oops, now I did.
Oh, and as long as I'm dissing Apple and praising the Borg, how about windows you can resize from any edge? There was a great shareware control panel called Stretch that gave the Mac interface this capability (one of the few things Microsoft got right and Apple got wrong, wrong, wrong), but it was incompatible with the Appearance Control Panel (introduced, and made mandatory, in OS 8).
And frankly I don't give a flying f%&* how my mouse looks with the lights off, either.
Cobalt is begging for a serious countersuit here... haven't they ever heard of a little computer about ten years ago called a NeXT? Which is now part of the very company Cobalt is accusing of ripping off the "idea" of a cubical computer?
Damn all monopolies! Die, PacBell, die! Die, Microsoft, die! Die die die 666 fornicate die.
If your kids are too old for "kid stuff", start 'em off with HyperCard, a great introduction to object-oriented programming concepts like inheritance, encapsulation, and message passing. The embedded programming language, HyperTalk, supports functions, event-based methods, recursion, etc., with a very English-like syntax. HyperCard provides a visual object hierarchy already populated with rich actions, and extensible with additional functions and methods. (The object hierarchy is not easily extensible, but by the time the kids hit that limit they will be ready for Java, Perl, or Python.)
The only drawbacks to these two great teaching tools is that neither one of them runs on Linux! (ToonTalk: Windows only; HyperCard: Mac only)
Email: Bertrand.Meyer@csse.monash.edu.au
Home Page: http://www.sd.monash.edu.au/~bertrand/
Anyone else remember IntelliDraw? It was what Visio wants to be when it grows up. (Some of the early IntelliDraw developers went on to found Visio.) I still consider IntelliDraw the ideal cross-platform business- and technical-graphics software tool. Adobe got the product when they engulfed Aldus, and killed it (I assume because of perceived competition with Illustrator).
Now that Visio has achieved their wet dream of being assimilated by the Borg (they never released their program for any platform but Winduhs), I think it would behoove Adobe to open-source IntelliDraw as a Visio-killer. IntelliDraw isn't making them any money now, and Illustrator has evolved toward the fine-art direction rather than the practical diagramming that IntelliDraw was so perfect for. So I'd say Adobe has nothing to lose (and can score a big blow against M$) by open-sourcing IntelliDraw.
The glory of the GUI is that it enables faster adoption of new programs. A GUI user who knows how to click buttons, drag menus, etc., is 75% of the way to using any new GUI program that is introduced. A CLI user coming to a new program knows how to type (if that), and is only a tiny fraction of the way to learning to use the new program powerfully.
Standardization between programs, as Vanders mentioned, speeds user learning of new programs as well, by increasing what users already know that is applicable to whatever new program they encounter. Apple's "interface police" made it possible for the Mac to do this very well; Windows does it poorly, and Un*x does it not at all.
The power of GUI's comes from the quirk of human memory that it is easier for humans to recognize something (such as, picking an item from a drop-down menu) than to recall something (such as, typing tar xvf foo.tar ). The GUI also enables the human/computer interaction to take advantage of the fact that human memory is spatially based; the user can use their physical memory to assist their symbolic memory (we don't even need to consciously think, "I know that button is over here someplace," we just go there). The ability to memorize not-very-mnemonic command names is not widely distributed in the general population. You and I can do it, but why would we want to when the computer can remind us? I have other uses for my neurons than memorizing all the command-line switches for ls (or worse, the permissions codes for chmod ).
It's not open source... but it's cheap. And it does block cookies. When I try the test page, all I get is "Cookie blocked by InterMute".
I'm not 100% fond of the company... they have discontinued all versions except Windows. But if you're stuck using Windows -- I'm currently contracting for a Big Name PC manufacturer where non-MS OS'es are prohibited by company policy -- the control InterMute gives you is indispensible.
Hey, while you're at their site, ask them (nicely) to reinstate the UNIX and Mac versions. (The product is written in Java, so supporting these platforms should not be rocket science.)
Of course, Eric Drexler's book Engines of Creation started it all. Unbounding the Future , by Drexler, Chris Peterson, and Gayle Pergamit, is a less technical popularization of the ideas put forth in Engines. Drexler's Nanosystems is the authoritative technical book on the subject.
Zyvex researcherRalph Merkle is acknowledged worldwide as one of foremost authorities on nanotechnology; his nanotech website is the definitive starting place for locating nanotech resources on the web.
Bill Joy (or, as I heard several people call him that day, "Kill Joy") inadvertently helped Merkle make this point later on. He asked the crowd to "raise your hands if you think nanotech favors offense", and got about half of the hall. In response to "raise your hands if you think nanotech favors defense", he got about a third. But when Ralph Merkle then asked, "raise your hand if you think we need more study to find out," over two thirds of the audience raised their hands.
If that seems a bit indirect to you, then I'd strongly urge that you put the money toward legal and political efforts, like the aforementioned EFF or its European counterpart(s). I know that certain elements in the EU are pushing for a U.S.-style patent system, which would be a disaster. Find out who's opposing it and give them a hand.
The link given in the main article only worked on the day the article was published; its permanent location is here.