Over the past few years I've used several OSS programs in pre-release versions, and the tendency I observed was for the programmers to provide "last gasp" file saves to keep you from using work when the program crashed. For instance, I never lost a keystroke when using early versions of LyX.
I don't recall ever seeing this in a commercial product, though I haven't used any commercial products to speak of lately, so perhaps the state of the art has changed. I sure used to lose a lot of work under commercial software, though.
Re:maybe I've read alt.sex.stories(.*) too much...
on
Windows XP Has Arrived
·
· Score: 2, Funny
> "XP" sounds like a story tag[0] for extreme watersports.
> An application that would attempt to guesstimate where you were on earth based on triangulating distances from known servers by means of measuring ping time.
I can reliably locate Slashdotters in meatspace by observing the time it takes for them to accumulate three troll responses to their posts.
> Here in Norway,... I also used "theatre", singular, in the first paragraph. That's because the ticket sale was limited to only one theatre in the entire country.
Here in Mordor, they aren't going to show it at all.
> Concept: The ability for artificially intelligent devices to feel emotions.
It's not at all obvious -- to me at least -- that we should want AIs to feel emotions. Who wants a warehouse full of smart bombs with hurt feelings?
Emotions can very clearly lead to inappropriate behavior. Granted, there may be times when emotions lead to positive behavior. But do they ever lead to positive behavior that couldn't be programmed into an AI without emotions? Unless that's the case then emotions are something known to be dangerous and not known to be useful, and therefore should be avoided as a life-threatening bug.
Granted, it may be a fact of nature that "intelligence" (whatever that is) is impossible without emotions. But unless/until that has been demonstrated, let's keep emotions off our wish list.
Now back to Part I:
> Concept: The idea of a computer becoming so complex it can understand, reason, listen, speak and interact in the same way as a human, including using deception and self-deception.
> Now we have: Machines that learn, software that breeds/replicates. 'Narrow AI,' i.e. computers that can perform 'narrow' tasks that previously could only be accomplished by human intelligence, such as playing games (e.g. chess) at master levels, diagnosing electrocardiograms and blood cell images, making financial investment decisions, landing jet planes, guiding cruise missiles, solving mathematical problems and so on. Currently exponential progress curve showing no sign of slowing down.
First, as with emotions, I dispute the desirability of AI agents that can knowingly deceive themselves and others.
Second, I'm not convinced that much of the laundry list in the second paragraph qualifies as "intelligence" instead of merely "appropriate algorithms". (Are we going to have to call MATLAB an intelligent agent because it's good at certain kinds of math problems?)
Third, I am amazed that they would say that we're making "exponential progress" in anything that might reasonably be called "AI". My games don't seem to ship with AIs that are "exponentially" smarter than the ones that shipped five years ago. Dish up some facts, please!
That said, here's a link to a paper [160K PDF] that someone turned me on to recently. It's from a talk some AI researchers gave at a conference last year. They start by asking where is all the cool movie-style AI, and answer with the observation that no one is working on it. Their proposal to remedy that situation is that AI researchers should get involved in game AI, because many modern games require agents that are more "intelligent" than the common solve-one-problem stuff that has been coming out of the AI community for the last few... decades.
I think the authors of that paper overstate their case by calling game AI agents "human level" AI, but at least it's a step in the right direction. It's a bit of a light-weight article, but it's an easy read. And it would be way nice if 2/3 of the world's academic AI researchers started working on gaming applications!
> Hasn't anyone learned from the mistakes of A.C. Clarke and his predictions? I'm quite sick of it.
I'm still waiting for that technology that's indistinguishable from magic. When it hits Radio Shack I'm gonna be the first kid on my block to get it, and then I can fit a brim onto my dunce cap and pass myself off as a wizard.
> Are there any Senators or Representatives that would position themselves against such legislation?
And OTOH, do we collectively have the guts to inflict an IT brain drain on them by migrating to free countries if they keep passing this kind of corporate-sponsored legislation that tramples us under foot?
> During a (anti-)DMCA presentation at school, the smartest question I got was the following: is fair use a birth right or simply a result of the sale contract?
Perhaps more to the point, is copyright a birthright, or simply the result of a legislative process that (supposedly) has the public's best interests as a guide?
> the following is the smallest 'Hello, World' program:
> 55+".dlrow,olleH">:#,_@
Ah! So the notorious seineewerasreenigneepacsteN gig was just some source accidentally shipped with the executable, rather than an attempt at obfuscation.
> LISP needs a powerful IDE like MSCV++ with syntax-sensitive indenting, keyword auto-completion, and chroma-coding (perhaps they already do?)
Never seen MSCV++, but mere lowly Emacs does at least part of this, and could be programmed to do the rest.
> One thing that makes me shy away from using LISP for commercial product is the long pauses of the garbage collector that kicks in at unpredictable times. I would like to have a guaranteed maximum pause time.
There are lots of garbage collection strategies around, addressed to different tradeoffs, so maybe there is a Lisp implementation that uses one that will suit you.
However, in the limit, the garbage collector has to find memory as fast as your program consumes it. You could have a gc that only spent, say, 1ms whenever it butted in to do its business, but if your program is grabbing memory too fast you'd just get lots of 1ms interruptions without too much substantial computation between them. At some point your gc has to be in equilibrium with your program, regardless of what strategy it uses.
> From the looks of it, the ability to create a reflexive mapping between an arbitrary XML document and an interpretable programming language is too powerful to be ignored.
I looked at XML and thought it was too much syntax for a relatively simple problem, so I already ditched it in favor of Scheme as a data representation language.
Other people are taking the same route, e.g., Xconq uses a Scheme-like language for its scenario data.
Notice that your "stylesheet" can just be a program that does arbitrary transformations on your data, and also that you can include executable code in either the data, the stylesheet, or both. (Sandbox those applications, though!)
FWIW, when I was first learning Scheme I spent an evening writing a program that would accept an ad hoc "SBML" (Scheme-Based Markup Language) as input, and spit out an HTML output.
There's an old claim that "those who don't know Lisp are doomed to reinvent it, badly". IMO that claim was a prophecy of the coming of XML.
> I've been scoffed at by lisp fans, but most had never used ML.
I'm one of those who've never used ML (along with a dozen other languages I wish I had time to try), so this is not intended as a scoff. However:
> Sophisticated type systems, catching most bugs before your program is run, ensuring safety, etc.
I'm a fan of that too, which is why I almost always program in Ada. However, I also see the value of dynamic typing as used by the Lisp family of languages. It makes some stuff really easy, at the cost of having to be careful with the coding. (Horrors, that we should ever feel a need to be careful with our coding!) It's not really so hard, when you start thinking functionally: every function is a filter that accepts data of some particular type(s) and returns a result of some particular type(s). You need to enforce a discipline of ensuring that every function is called with an appropriate type or else of ensuring that every function checks the types of its arguments, but that's very doable.
> Increased modularity and abstraction
<noscoff>That's an interesting claim, since I always thought you could make Lisp as modular and abstract as you cared to.</noscoff>
> Pattern matching
Seen that in 1st-semester CS classes that use Scheme.
> (subjectively) more natural syntax
You may be on to something more than subjective, there.
> Scheme can be taught to the students within the first two weeks of class.
Actually, a single lecture is enough to get them started on the study of recursion. You can postpone coverage of the bells and whistles (such as there are) until later in the semester.
Add:
1b. Scheme is different enough from the languages that the students already know that it will rock the boat for any nascent notions that there is only one way to do things (and that "their" language does it "right", which, alas, seems to be a dearly held belief for many Slashdaughters).
3. The simplicity of Scheme lets you expose students to simple correctness proofs during their first semester in CS. (You essentially treat Scheme code as a funny kind of algebraic syntax, and "solve" the code directly.)
4. It exposes students to functional programming (which otherwise they will only see for a couple of weeks during their programming languages class).
CS is not (usually) taught as a trade program. One of the major goals of a college education is to expand your mental horizons. Scheme does that.
Slashdot Mirror
> If the page can't be viewed, even in vanilla HTML, then MSN.com has made an amature blunder. You don't design pages to keep people out...
You do if you have a 90% market share, and desperately want the other 10%.
> So, it sounds like M$ is checking the USER-AGENT HTTP header for certain strings, and displaying the "Upgrade to IE" page if yours doesn't match.
Garsh, that's such a surprise after what they did with DR-DOS.
Over the past few years I've used several OSS programs in pre-release versions, and the tendency I observed was for the programmers to provide "last gasp" file saves to keep you from using work when the program crashed. For instance, I never lost a keystroke when using early versions of LyX.
I don't recall ever seeing this in a commercial product, though I haven't used any commercial products to speak of lately, so perhaps the state of the art has changed. I sure used to lose a lot of work under commercial software, though.
> "XP" sounds like a story tag[0] for extreme watersports.
I thought it was the emoticon for "dead".
> An application that would attempt to guesstimate where you were on earth based on triangulating distances from known servers by means of measuring ping time.
I can reliably locate Slashdotters in meatspace by observing the time it takes for them to accumulate three troll responses to their posts.
> Here in Norway,
Here in Mordor, they aren't going to show it at all.
I guess this gives us a new take on the term "astroturfing", eh?
First, from Part II:
> Concept: The ability for artificially intelligent devices to feel emotions.
It's not at all obvious -- to me at least -- that we should want AIs to feel emotions. Who wants a warehouse full of smart bombs with hurt feelings?
Emotions can very clearly lead to inappropriate behavior. Granted, there may be times when emotions lead to positive behavior. But do they ever lead to positive behavior that couldn't be programmed into an AI without emotions? Unless that's the case then emotions are something known to be dangerous and not known to be useful, and therefore should be avoided as a life-threatening bug.
Granted, it may be a fact of nature that "intelligence" (whatever that is) is impossible without emotions. But unless/until that has been demonstrated, let's keep emotions off our wish list.
Now back to Part I:
> Concept: The idea of a computer becoming so complex it can understand, reason, listen, speak and interact in the same way as a human, including using deception and self-deception.
> Now we have: Machines that learn, software that breeds/replicates. 'Narrow AI,' i.e. computers that can perform 'narrow' tasks that previously could only be accomplished by human intelligence, such as playing games (e.g. chess) at master levels, diagnosing electrocardiograms and blood cell images, making financial investment decisions, landing jet planes, guiding cruise missiles, solving mathematical problems and so on. Currently exponential progress curve showing no sign of slowing down.
First, as with emotions, I dispute the desirability of AI agents that can knowingly deceive themselves and others.
Second, I'm not convinced that much of the laundry list in the second paragraph qualifies as "intelligence" instead of merely "appropriate algorithms". (Are we going to have to call MATLAB an intelligent agent because it's good at certain kinds of math problems?)
Third, I am amazed that they would say that we're making "exponential progress" in anything that might reasonably be called "AI". My games don't seem to ship with AIs that are "exponentially" smarter than the ones that shipped five years ago. Dish up some facts, please!
That said, here's a link to a paper [160K PDF] that someone turned me on to recently. It's from a talk some AI researchers gave at a conference last year. They start by asking where is all the cool movie-style AI, and answer with the observation that no one is working on it. Their proposal to remedy that situation is that AI researchers should get involved in game AI, because many modern games require agents that are more "intelligent" than the common solve-one-problem stuff that has been coming out of the AI community for the last few... decades.
I think the authors of that paper overstate their case by calling game AI agents "human level" AI, but at least it's a step in the right direction. It's a bit of a light-weight article, but it's an easy read. And it would be way nice if 2/3 of the world's academic AI researchers started working on gaming applications!
> Hasn't anyone learned from the mistakes of A.C. Clarke and his predictions? I'm quite sick of it.
I'm still waiting for that technology that's indistinguishable from magic. When it hits Radio Shack I'm gonna be the first kid on my block to get it, and then I can fit a brim onto my dunce cap and pass myself off as a wizard.
> Are there any Senators or Representatives that would position themselves against such legislation?
And OTOH, do we collectively have the guts to inflict an IT brain drain on them by migrating to free countries if they keep passing this kind of corporate-sponsored legislation that tramples us under foot?
> Maybe Windows will stay ahead of Linux forever... but that will take a lot of running from a horse that will surely get tired.
And Microsoft has to run with a very heavy load on its back: profitability.
MS has to develop and sell Windows in ways that maximize their share prices. Linux developers are bound only by what they actually want in an OS.
Ultimately, profitability is in direct conflict with consumers' interests, so over the long haul the game would seem to be stacked against Microsoft.
> If Gecko is replacing IE all we need now is something to replace AOL & Compuserve
Yeah, if we could whip up a GNU AOL, then we could threaten Microsoft execs with gaol.
> As long as we're going for broke, how's about a little preemption [tech9.net] too?
I also have a patch that makes it print "Hello World" when it boots, so the geek who wants everything should download that, too.
> During a (anti-)DMCA presentation at school, the smartest question I got was the following: is fair use a birth right or simply a result of the sale contract?
Perhaps more to the point, is copyright a birthright, or simply the result of a legislative process that (supposedly) has the public's best interests as a guide?
Remind me again why I wanted a copy of the
Oh, yeah... Some people out there actually use MS products. I keep forgetting.
> the following is the smallest 'Hello, World' program:
> 55+".dlrow
Ah! So the notorious seineewerasreenigneepacsteN gig was just some source accidentally shipped with the executable, rather than an attempt at obfuscation.
> LISP needs a powerful IDE like MSCV++ with syntax-sensitive indenting, keyword auto-completion, and chroma-coding (perhaps they already do?)
Never seen MSCV++, but mere lowly Emacs does at least part of this, and could be programmed to do the rest.
> One thing that makes me shy away from using LISP for commercial product is the long pauses of the garbage collector that kicks in at unpredictable times. I would like to have a guaranteed maximum pause time.
There are lots of garbage collection strategies around, addressed to different tradeoffs, so maybe there is a Lisp implementation that uses one that will suit you.
However, in the limit, the garbage collector has to find memory as fast as your program consumes it. You could have a gc that only spent, say, 1ms whenever it butted in to do its business, but if your program is grabbing memory too fast you'd just get lots of 1ms interruptions without too much substantial computation between them. At some point your gc has to be in equilibrium with your program, regardless of what strategy it uses.
> From the looks of it, the ability to create a reflexive mapping between an arbitrary XML document and an interpretable programming language is too powerful to be ignored.
I looked at XML and thought it was too much syntax for a relatively simple problem, so I already ditched it in favor of Scheme as a data representation language.
Other people are taking the same route, e.g., Xconq uses a Scheme-like language for its scenario data.
Notice that your "stylesheet" can just be a program that does arbitrary transformations on your data, and also that you can include executable code in either the data, the stylesheet, or both. (Sandbox those applications, though!)
FWIW, when I was first learning Scheme I spent an evening writing a program that would accept an ad hoc "SBML" (Scheme-Based Markup Language) as input, and spit out an HTML output.
There's an old claim that "those who don't know Lisp are doomed to reinvent it, badly". IMO that claim was a prophecy of the coming of XML.
> I've been scoffed at by lisp fans, but most had never used ML.
I'm one of those who've never used ML (along with a dozen other languages I wish I had time to try), so this is not intended as a scoff. However:
> Sophisticated type systems, catching most bugs before your program is run, ensuring safety, etc.
I'm a fan of that too, which is why I almost always program in Ada. However, I also see the value of dynamic typing as used by the Lisp family of languages. It makes some stuff really easy, at the cost of having to be careful with the coding. (Horrors, that we should ever feel a need to be careful with our coding!) It's not really so hard, when you start thinking functionally: every function is a filter that accepts data of some particular type(s) and returns a result of some particular type(s). You need to enforce a discipline of ensuring that every function is called with an appropriate type or else of ensuring that every function checks the types of its arguments, but that's very doable.
> Increased modularity and abstraction
<noscoff>That's an interesting claim, since I always thought you could make Lisp as modular and abstract as you cared to.</noscoff>
> Pattern matching
Seen that in 1st-semester CS classes that use Scheme.
> (subjectively) more natural syntax
You may be on to something more than subjective, there.
> In it he claims that mathematicians should love Lisp because Lisp is basically set theory, and all mathematicians love set theory.
To say nothing of recursive functions (in the mathematical sense). Lisp is, at its core, and implementation of Church's lambda calculus.
> Scheme can be taught to the students within the first two weeks of class.
Actually, a single lecture is enough to get them started on the study of recursion. You can postpone coverage of the bells and whistles (such as there are) until later in the semester.
Add:
1b. Scheme is different enough from the languages that the students already know that it will rock the boat for any nascent notions that there is only one way to do things (and that "their" language does it "right", which, alas, seems to be a dearly held belief for many Slashdaughters).
3. The simplicity of Scheme lets you expose students to simple correctness proofs during their first semester in CS. (You essentially treat Scheme code as a funny kind of algebraic syntax, and "solve" the code directly.)
4. It exposes students to functional programming (which otherwise they will only see for a couple of weeks during their programming languages class).
CS is not (usually) taught as a trade program. One of the major goals of a college education is to expand your mental horizons. Scheme does that.
s/lose/loose/
> but it seems like only Disney could market Gonzo--don't they own the Muppets?
At least one other muppet is known to be a lose cannon.
> Wonder if someone at X-10 is reading this...or reading the book?
No, X-10 is a write-only operation.
Skins? Back in my day commandos only kept the ears.