Your SIG: (1) Kill all terrorists. (2) Convert to Islam. Unfortunately, diplomacy is not a part of either.
If you kill all the terrorists, you're just going to have more terrorists. You need to get to the source of the problem: "Why are these people now into Islamic extremism? Why does the population support the terrorists?" This is a realm where diplomacy helps, and dramatic shows of domination do not.
If you create diagrams and explanations, tablets make a huge difference.
When we solve the problem of incorporating images online, and when we have cheap tablets, you're going to see Wikipedia (and the rest of the web) light up with diagrammed explanations of things.
Visual Language is going to be big and near-ubiquitous. It'll be a lot easier to learn about stuff.
But, the pressure will be on you to make visual explanations. People will have much higher visual literacy. The knowledge in "Understanding Comics" will be near-ubiquitous- common sense. Text-only will be fogey-style.
So, after a while, the pressure will be on to use a Tablet, or whatever the future equivalent is. Perhaps you'll just write with a stylus on a table, and the camera next to you infer where you're drawing, and use a laser to print it down for you, or something. Who knows.
I frequently wonder: "What are the Chinese doing with their broadband? Are they writing Free Software with it?"
I look at the Planet Gnomemap, and I see like: 4 GNOME developers in China.
Is there a Free Software community in China?
Are they working on stuff we don't know about?
I'm having visions of like: One day, we discover there's a third pillar, in addition to just KDE and GNOME. And we didn't even know about it, because everything was worked on in Chinese, which we never searched for.
JPEG's a good example: Without JPEG, we would have been stuck in GIF land, and we wouldn't have photographs all over the web.
So, I don't really understand your point.
Most major computer advances come because we make JUST A FORMAT for what we ALREADY KNEW HOW TO DO.
Any twit can see how to send a file from here to there. That's NOTHING NEW. But it takes JUST A FORMAT like HTTP, adopted as a standard, before you get something like the World Wide Web.
It's the same here with SVG, and we're going to see the same results. We've got a big bandwagon on SVG, and it's breaking the gates.
Normally people consider "hopping on the bandwagon" a bad thing, because it implies lack of thought. But when you're building a computer technology, what you want to do is take all the stuff that everybody ALREADY KNEW HOW TO DO and get everybody to do it the same way, and then you see real powerful stuff coming out the other side.
Instead of an API here, an API there, and API over there, all different- you have one spec near universally supported, and you have all these tools associated with that one spec.
So, let's say I'm programming in Python, mmkay? Right now, if I want to make a program that allows you to hook up widgets, it's really freakin' hard. My best bet is actually to try and implement a scripting engine into Inkscape or some other drawing program, and then work from there. (But then you're trying to build everything on top of Inkscape... This isn't exactly small apps and general universal tools, now is it.)
But when SVG makes it's initial splash, people are going to have these little controls that you can embed into your Python program. You'll use PyGTK or PyQt, and get ahold of an SVG component. Then you can send it signals, add objects, receive signals, the whole nine yards. You can't do this today.
How do we know we're going to have all these embedable components and what not? Because hoards of people are on this bandwagon. Why didn't someone do this before? Because it's a hoard of work to build something like SVG.
It's one of those things where a partial solution is just not good enough: You really need the whole schebang. And everyone who cares about this kind of stuff has put their energies into SVG.
So, that's why and how these things are going to be easier.
But if you can point me to an interesting, near universally deployed system that makes it so I can easily make plug-together graphic components work, by all means: Point me to it. I've been looking for ages.
For whatever reason(s), good or bad, Flash has not taken off with developers.
I'm really not concered here with the reasons why.
But let me tell you what I see:
When I look on Planet GNOME, I see developers excited about supporting SVG.
When I look on Planet KDE, I see developers excited about supporting SVG.
When I look at what Firefox has in wings, I see SVG.
Even looking at Microsoft, we see SVG.
When I look at SVG, I see a nice, obvious, XML format. If I want to write a program that uses SVG, it's clear to me how I will do it.
When I look at Microsoft, and when I look at Free Software projects, I see lots of libraries for desktop support of Flash, either extant, or soon-to-be extant.
But, let's look in the other direction, Flash:
I see happy artists, I see happy graphic designer tyes.
I don't see platforms building Flash support in.
I see some ambiguous licenses, that leave me wondering what I can and cannot do with what's there.
I see a tiny Free Software effort, making a Flash player, but I wonder if it's legal or not. And I don't really see a lot of developers excited about it.
I see that you have to download the player as an extra step on a lot of platforms.
I don't see a real obvious way on how to make a desktop app that natively includes Flash.
In short, I don't see a whole lot of excitement about Flash, except from one crowd: Artist and graphic designer types.
The point isn't whether my perceptions about Flash or SVG themselves are correct. The point is whether my perceptions of the communities around them are correct.
If designers and art types, and a handful of programmers are excited about Flash- okay, that's one thing.
But if most programmers and developers are excited about SVG, that's another thing entirely. Who writes the apps? Who writes the programming languages? Who writes the tools?
Devs have shown themselves not to be terribly excited about Flash. However, there's a lot of excitement around SVG.
So, you know- you put 2 and 2 together, and you come out with: SVG will be the one that busts the bubble. We won't be trapped in little boxes anymore.
Much of the software is already here. This thing has been in planning and development for years and years and yeras. So, we already have all these libraries, that are just being integrated into the respective platforms. So: We have every reason to believe this will work.
I don't know why Flash didn't work. I don't even have to know particularly why Flash didn't work. All I have to do is see is that SVG worked: It struck the chord the developers needed to play along with.
When you open up the SVG door, you don't just make space for "pretty pictures." You ALSO get,...
Visual Programming Languages - because they're so easy to make, once it's easy to move shapes around on the screen and aggregate diagrams.
non-boxy user-interface - look at the UI all around you- it's characterized almost exclusively by boxes. Many problems are best described by hooking pieces together, spatially. But our UI is all set up for entering or selecting text into boxes.
Graphs, graphs, graphs - as in circles connected by lines. Collaborative organization of ideas on a spatial surface.
As SVG comes on line, at both the web-browser level and the desktop-programming level, and as people become proficient in these things, we'll make a major step forward in user interface.
Working with graphs will change the way we think. Our tools have, so far, afforded creating hierarchical structures. That is, it's far easier to express hierarchy with text editors, than it is to express network. Hierarchy is fine, but it's only part of the picture. The other part is more-biological looking network organizations. As the tools come online to create biological organizations (as we see appearing in message-oriented programming models, component based developments,) we'll think about programming (and perhaps our world) in very different ways.
To make this a little clearer: If you look in magazine articles where they're discussing programming architecture and software layout, you're going to see lots of 2D diagrams with lots of pieces plugging into other pieces in a graphical layout- sort of like a circuit board. This is different than the way we have traditionally programmed, which is more like a tree shape. Even within object oriented programming, because our interface still affords tree layouts. Where we have explored beyond tree layouts, (complex networks of design patterns,) we have struggled with the user interface, and people have stretched out to make better representations that capture graph-like programs: Think of your clumbsy UML editors, and things like that- really trying to hack a solution between more-or-less linear code expressions, and the 2D graphs that we're thinking in.
When SVG is well understood, documented, with tools at desktop and web levels, we should start to see native 2D programming languages, that don't feel like either toy languages, or cheap hacks riding on top of other programming languages.
Not bummed out yet? Massive parallelism works well for people doing scientific computing, but for the average joe, it's useless....rarely do I have two time-critical things to worry about at the same time.
Pretty much all apps can make use of parallel execution. If you have to interpret a big chunk of data, you can usually break it into segments, and process them in parallel, and then perform a fuse step at the end. Dividing into 2 isn't so exciting, dividing into 4 is pretty amazing.
Right now, few programs make use of parallel execution. This is why you have to run a bunch of programs at once to see basically anything. Threading and multiple processes is a nice way to take advantage of wait time, but that's different than parsing a big XML file in parallel.
Also, you're thinking about current use of computers. In the relatively near future, you're going to have CPU's cranking pretty much all the time. You're going to have face recognition running on your computers, you're cameras are going to be building 3D reconstructions of everything they see before them, yadda yadda yadda. In the nearer term, search and indexing loads are probably going to go up. There are going to be more things like the google desktop search bar that want to run and calculate all the time. We are rearchitecting our computers to support this sort of thing.
The biggest barrier to FLOSS usability is often overwhelming the user with too many options.
Solved problem. Just the distribution of the technique is taking time.
It's proven itself in GNOME: Look at a base GNOME install. It's got a clean user interface, simple user access for everyday things, consistency across apps.
The way it works is that they are super-selective at the distribution level, and they have a written set of documents that you have to conform with, in order to be included in the distro. If someone's out of conformance, but you want to be conformant, they send out a small team of people to help you solve the problems, and gain the honor of joining the distro.
How are the documents determined? There's a set of hackers who work on usability and user interface, and they put together the documents with company and community feedback. (If I understand correctly.)
It's worked, and it's worked very well. Now other groups are copying the method. In particular, if I read Planet KDE right, they're going to adopt this sort of organization as well.
The basic pattern is this:
OpenSource projects, hell, Open anything (I'm immediately thinking: "Clipart,") begins with a lot of scruffy stuff. You have broken technologies, over-configurable this, too much of that, too little of that, and it's all in one gigantic pile of stuff. This is the beginning of a concentration phase.
Then, with time, form starts to standardize, ritualize, and we start to see collections. Now, instead of people just contributing "just because," or having a million options "because someone might want it," or whatever- we start to see people targetting new higher level structures: "The GNOME Human Interface Guidelines," or the blah-blah interfacec, or whatever.
With time, these things are just assumed, and built upon, and are smooth.
So, this is basically a solved problem. About 4 years ago, everyone was sort of wondering, like you were: "Is it possible for hackers to make something with a spiffy and clean and user-friendly UI?"
It may not be as cool as OS X, but: GNOME has clearly proven that the organizational model works, and that hackers can make things that can shape into a nice user interface.
It's just a matter of spreading the knowledge of the technique, now, and adopting it.
Re:Why isn't this already out?
on
Next Generation X11
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· Score: 2, Insightful
My point is that just getting rid of the network socket won't help you any. You'll still end sending exactly the same stuff but using another mechanism, incurring in pretty much the same overhead.
If you're communicating by sockets, you have to make two context switches, right? One to call the kernel, and one from the kernel to the X server. Whereas if there was a system API, then it would be just one context switch: you call the kernel, end of story.
If we count entire paths, it would be: you-kernel-x-kernel-you, vs. you-kernel-you.
So, I would imagine that your time from calling to the time of receipt would be much faster. This could be very important in games, I would think.
Your point is interesting. But, I think these will work anyways.
The interfaces could work in the same space that your keyboard and mouse work today.
And second, people make hand gestures when they talk with each other in person. Just because they can't constantly be gesticulating constantly, it doesn't mean that it's not useful to do it now and then.
I can imagine someone lifting their hands off their keyboard, and then performing spatial operations just a few inches in the plane above. Perhaps moving a window around, perhaps drawing a path with their finger, something like that.
I went to the College bookstore and saw a book on "Consumer Behavior."
It was filled with horrendous things. It was all about how to tap into vanity and make people desire things.
Then, there's "Public Relations." Which is basically all about how to manipulate people by manipulating the media. But, they also use advertising a lot.
I have no problem with most advertising. But, before I clip my browser, they're going to have to stop pulling PR shit, and stop writing those books. Guess when that's going to happen? Never.
"What I argue is that if I'm going to be held accountable for my actions that I should be allowed to record... my actions," Mann said. "Especially if somebody else is keeping a record of my actions."
Does this make sense to anyone?
Hell yah it does.
What part is hard to get?
You: Want to hold me accountable for my actions.
Me: Okay. Then, let me keep a perfect record of them.
You: Oh, no- we're going to be watching you, and we're going to control all watching of you.
Me: What if you doctor up some photos of me? How do I defend myself?
You: I'm sorry, I didn't hear that. And, further, you never said it.
Me: Wha?
You: See, here's the complete audio recording of our whole conversation.
Me: You cut out everything after-
You: I said that this recording was complete.
Me: But-
You: None of this is happening right now. Move along, citizen.
Re:If you REALLY want to know yourself,...
on
Mapping the Mind
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· Score: 1
Surely the only way to measure experience is to examine it's products.
Really, honestly, I tell you: Experience is not measurable, but directly observable.
You can't prove to anybody that you are aware, and nobdoy can prove to anyone that you are aware.
And yet, if you're anything like me, it's very clear to you that you are aware. If you were not aware, you would just not exist. To be perfectly honest, I can't be sure that I'm not talking with someone who isn't aware. I just take it on faith that you actually are.
Does this make sense?
You're going to have to account for the reality of something that you cannot measure in your world view.
Indeed, it's mysterious that we're even capable of this very discussion. It's this sort of discussion that leads me to believe that either: (A) Experiencing things choose to observe environments that act as if the experiencing thing existed. Or, (B) Pan-psychism is true, and experience has a direct influence over the thing experienced.
Since I am a determinist, and don't believe in experience-over-mind, (no, I don't mean mind-over-matter,) I choose (A) rather than (B).
What is not true is materialism, because materialism has no mechanism to account for the existence of experience. Indeed, it's hard to get a materialist to even recognize that there is such a thing as ''experiencing.'' They can talk about brains, they can talk about electricity, but they can't see what's right in front of them: Experience.
Re:If you REALLY want to know yourself,...
on
Mapping the Mind
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· Score: 1
You suggest the universe would function as it does without personal experience, but I don't agree.
Why not?
I mean, your post is just a bunch of assertions.
You feel comfortable making these assertions, because your community supports you in them.
But, "Know Thyself" wasn't directed at a community- it was addressed to you, as an individual.
Philosphers are trained to ignore the physicality of the world.
And similarly, scientists are trained to ignore what can't be measured with instruments.
Fortunately, your own experience, while not measurable by instruments, is at least directly observable.
You have to fit this fact together with what the scientists have to say.
If you don't, you can never know thyself.
We can't translate electrical signals to thoughts, but we can detect brain activity.
Sure, but that's not what we're talking about.
Brain activity is about as interesting in this discussion as the motion of jeeps and trains.
You're confusing a neural correlate of consciousness with consciousness itself. Classic mistake.
See, for all that brain activity, it could operate just the same if there were nobody watching, as if there is somebody watching.
Do you understand this? I don't think you do.
A universe without consciousness and without human experience would be, by mechanism, nothing like this one.
Why not?
Light would flow, enter eyes, trigger neurons, neurons would bump signals against other neurons, the whole machinery would operate. Blobs of chemicals move. The cheecks flush, the mouths move, marionettes sway back and forth, all with nobody to see it.
The whole interaction of the entire world, it would go exactly the same as this one.
How could it be any different?
When you walk into the movie theater, does it change the way the movie plays? No, it's the same movie, whether anybody watches it or not.
Re:If you REALLY want to know yourself,...
on
Mapping the Mind
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· Score: 1
Ha!
I'm going to have to take you out back and talk with you about this elsewhere.
Your problem with it seems to be how you feel about who you are, not what you know about it.
No, I'm sorry, but you've mischaracterized this one. You're talking to the real deal right now.
I'm fully aware of the "Poor religious boy Wakka who can't defy the sacred teachings" story, but I assure you, that ain't it.
You're going to have to make a real argument, pick a number, and get in line.
Your challenge: The explanatory gap between the Zombie world and the world where people have experiences.
The next number's 437, but don't worry, I mow through these people so fast, you'll be up in no time. {;)}=
(Wait till I put the awareness wiki back online, we can do this one again over there.)
Re:If you REALLY want to know yourself,...
on
Mapping the Mind
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· Score: 1
I've lived on that side of the tracks as well,... I have arguments over in that camp too.
Basically, the idea that there isn't an experience: I think that's absurd. "Who's being fooled" is the question.
There are people who hear: "The goal is to extinguish the Self. The Self is an illusion, extinguish the Self."
They, in a state of confusion, take this to mean: "Experience is an illusion, extinguish experience." That is, they take it as their lifes mission to live unconsciously- what we call a "Zombie" in the consciousness debate. Strange but true.
Really, my personal belief, is that it's a confusion over the meaning of the use of the word "Self."
I think what is really meant is to be selfless. That is, be caring, be friendly, let go to the tides of life. Don't be clinging, don't grip the self, things like that.
Now, there's an additional mystical element to it, where you're alone in the forest, and hanging with your thoughts, and being with nature. Or, you've locked yourself indoors, shuttered the windows, and withdrawn into the worlds within. Either way: The experience can be like dropping yourself, and experiencing the myriad worlds, peaces, blisses, outside/insider ourselves. This is inversion, it is not an extinction.
Extinguishing the Self in the Buddhist sense is the extinguishing of the mind, grasping, these sorts of things.
But, God no, it's not extinguishing Awareness. I assure you, Buddha was happily experiencing when he talked about extinguishing the Self.
And thus, we remain with an interesting scientific and metaphysical problem: Understanding what we are, how it is we come to be here, etc., etc.,.
Experiences do not seem to arrive in a "heap," rather, they seem to flow one into the other. We never experience two experiences at the same time, nor half; It seems to be singular and atomic.
People who claim to be experiencing two things at once- they are just experiencing multiple minds at the same time. Entirely doable. But i mean, if you're experiencing two things at once, the question is then: Who's experiencing that? You're back at one experience.
Awareness is still mysterious.
Both science&argument and meditation&mysticism have given me insight into the problem, but it's a tough nut to crack.
I'm most enthused right now by Chalmers' work, which is examining the nature of explanation, doing a lot of meta-analysis over the form of the arguments & explanations, and working out what our possibilities are there.
I think we're close to being able to make a statement like: "It is either impossible to understand awareness, or awareness must come in one of the following forms: Pan-Psychism, Dream-World, yadda-yadda-yadda..."
Re:If you REALLY want to know yourself,...
on
Mapping the Mind
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· Score: 1
Ah, well, that's a different theory I'm somewhat sympathetic to,... uh,... we'll have to talk about that later.
Re:If you REALLY want to know yourself,...
on
Mapping the Mind
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· Score: 1
(laugh)
{:)}=
Thank you, you've just now made my day. {:)}=
Re:If you REALLY want to know yourself,...
on
Mapping the Mind
·
· Score: 1
The Zombie hypothesis isn't about free will.
I have no problem with rails.
The Zombie hypothesis is about awareness,consciousness.
It's about why there's a light and sound show going on.
Two identical worlds: The same things happen in both of them. Only, in one world, in addition to the happenings, there are experiences. And in the other world, it's just- it's like a computer running in the closet that nobody knows about. This second universe is called the "Zombie" universe, because there are people are there, but there's no experience behind it.
But, by mechanism, the two worlds are completely identical.
The argument is this: The universe would function just the same if there was no experience going on. So, why is there an experience going on. How does that work. That kind of thing.
Nah, I can make a microscope that can look at itself. It's very easy: You just build a curved tube and stick a bunch of mirrors in.
I can make my computer verify it's own existance too; It can watch the instruction pointer count on and on.
Tongues can taste themselves.
Jars can't contain jars, (unless they are Kleinn jars,) but we can understand the human brain: Look, someone just wrote about it. Hierarchy of abstractions, it's a machinery, and it's completely subject to analysis, decomposition into parts, etc., etc.,.
This is a variant of the Circular-Cosmic-...Consciousness argument, itself a variant of the Scientist's God of the Gaps: the "Emergence" or "Complexity" words.
Understanding that when the brain twitches like so, we see a red splotch, is about as interesting as understanding that when I paint with red in a drawing program, that we see red splotches. They are just different external mechanisms, with respect to an awareness.
We still do not understand the mechanisms of experience, we haven't really explained anything, but brain mechanics.
There is no distinction between the two, they are actually one and the same, and there is no reason to think otherwise; it's only a matter of perspective.
There's actually a very large and relevant distinction between cause and effect.
Saying otherwise here is just mysticism masquerading as a scientific world-view; Wishful thinking on the part of scientists who do not understand experience, and are would rather shove it under the rug, frequently by redefining the word "experience" or "consciousness."
If you can say, "When this nerve quivers, there is an experience," that's one thing.
When you say, "When this nerve quivers, that is what experience is," you've just either engaged in mysticism. You've just said that the table in front of you is aware, and you don't even know it.
The reason that we are in the theater is because we are in the theater.
This is something that I agree with. When I raise those questions, it's as a challenge, not because I'm confused.
Specificly, I'm challenging the materialists to fill an explanatory gap.
The gap is this: If the universe would function just as well without anyone experiencing it, then why are we experiencing it?
The poor response from the materialists is: Well, it does make a difference. From there, the argument goes into language games about "what is experience," with the materialist saying it's one thing, and trying to pin religious connotations on anyone who says otherwise.
But if you're not a materialist idiot, it's clear: Experience is "this" (waving my hands around.) It's not a neural encoding, it's not a neural correlate of consciousness, it's not any of these things. It's the actual raw experience of experiencing.
(This is where the materialist pretends to be sleeping, and, as we all know, you can't wake someone who's pretending to be asleep.)
Anything that is not measurable within the medium of this world is not something that a materialist can acknowledge. And experience is not measurable. What this means is, the materialist can't see his or her own self- something that's having an experience. Because experience is inconvenient to their world view: Something that they directly perceive, more directly than anything else, but that they cannot measure.
It's too bad, really.
I think Chalmers & Gang have just decided to shrug and ignore the die-hard materialists. It's like trying to explain to a Christian that the Earth wasn't made 6,000BC: You're just not going to get anywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Your SIG: (1) Kill all terrorists. (2) Convert to Islam. Unfortunately, diplomacy is not a part of either.
If you kill all the terrorists, you're just going to have more terrorists. You need to get to the source of the problem: "Why are these people now into Islamic extremism? Why does the population support the terrorists?" This is a realm where diplomacy helps, and dramatic shows of domination do not.
OpenExchange?
It's that little bit about, "Well, you have a 90% chance of failing and going completely broke."
If you create diagrams and explanations, tablets make a huge difference.
When we solve the problem of incorporating images online, and when we have cheap tablets, you're going to see Wikipedia (and the rest of the web) light up with diagrammed explanations of things.
Visual Language is going to be big and near-ubiquitous. It'll be a lot easier to learn about stuff.
But, the pressure will be on you to make visual explanations. People will have much higher visual literacy. The knowledge in "Understanding Comics" will be near-ubiquitous- common sense. Text-only will be fogey-style.
So, after a while, the pressure will be on to use a Tablet, or whatever the future equivalent is. Perhaps you'll just write with a stylus on a table, and the camera next to you infer where you're drawing, and use a laser to print it down for you, or something. Who knows.
I frequently wonder: "What are the Chinese doing with their broadband? Are they writing Free Software with it?"
I look at the Planet Gnome map, and I see like: 4 GNOME developers in China.
Is there a Free Software community in China?
Are they working on stuff we don't know about?
I'm having visions of like: One day, we discover there's a third pillar, in addition to just KDE and GNOME. And we didn't even know about it, because everything was worked on in Chinese, which we never searched for.
JPEG's a good example: Without JPEG, we would have been stuck in GIF land, and we wouldn't have photographs all over the web.
So, I don't really understand your point.
Most major computer advances come because we make JUST A FORMAT for what we ALREADY KNEW HOW TO DO.
Any twit can see how to send a file from here to there. That's NOTHING NEW. But it takes JUST A FORMAT like HTTP, adopted as a standard, before you get something like the World Wide Web.
It's the same here with SVG, and we're going to see the same results. We've got a big bandwagon on SVG, and it's breaking the gates.
Normally people consider "hopping on the bandwagon" a bad thing, because it implies lack of thought. But when you're building a computer technology, what you want to do is take all the stuff that everybody ALREADY KNEW HOW TO DO and get everybody to do it the same way, and then you see real powerful stuff coming out the other side.
Instead of an API here, an API there, and API over there, all different- you have one spec near universally supported, and you have all these tools associated with that one spec.
So, let's say I'm programming in Python, mmkay? Right now, if I want to make a program that allows you to hook up widgets, it's really freakin' hard. My best bet is actually to try and implement a scripting engine into Inkscape or some other drawing program, and then work from there. (But then you're trying to build everything on top of Inkscape... This isn't exactly small apps and general universal tools, now is it.)
But when SVG makes it's initial splash, people are going to have these little controls that you can embed into your Python program. You'll use PyGTK or PyQt, and get ahold of an SVG component. Then you can send it signals, add objects, receive signals, the whole nine yards. You can't do this today.
How do we know we're going to have all these embedable components and what not? Because hoards of people are on this bandwagon. Why didn't someone do this before? Because it's a hoard of work to build something like SVG.
It's one of those things where a partial solution is just not good enough: You really need the whole schebang. And everyone who cares about this kind of stuff has put their energies into SVG.
So, that's why and how these things are going to be easier.
But if you can point me to an interesting, near universally deployed system that makes it so I can easily make plug-together graphic components work, by all means: Point me to it. I've been looking for ages.
I'm really not concered here with the reasons why.
But let me tell you what I see:
But, let's look in the other direction, Flash:
In short, I don't see a whole lot of excitement about Flash, except from one crowd: Artist and graphic designer types.
The point isn't whether my perceptions about Flash or SVG themselves are correct. The point is whether my perceptions of the communities around them are correct.
If designers and art types, and a handful of programmers are excited about Flash- okay, that's one thing.
But if most programmers and developers are excited about SVG, that's another thing entirely. Who writes the apps? Who writes the programming languages? Who writes the tools?
Devs have shown themselves not to be terribly excited about Flash. However, there's a lot of excitement around SVG.
So, you know- you put 2 and 2 together, and you come out with: SVG will be the one that busts the bubble. We won't be trapped in little boxes anymore.
Much of the software is already here. This thing has been in planning and development for years and years and yeras. So, we already have all these libraries, that are just being integrated into the respective platforms. So: We have every reason to believe this will work.
I don't know why Flash didn't work. I don't even have to know particularly why Flash didn't work. All I have to do is see is that SVG worked: It struck the chord the developers needed to play along with.
When you open up the SVG door, you don't just make space for "pretty pictures." You ALSO get,...
As SVG comes on line, at both the web-browser level and the desktop-programming level, and as people become proficient in these things, we'll make a major step forward in user interface.
Working with graphs will change the way we think. Our tools have, so far, afforded creating hierarchical structures. That is, it's far easier to express hierarchy with text editors, than it is to express network. Hierarchy is fine, but it's only part of the picture. The other part is more-biological looking network organizations. As the tools come online to create biological organizations (as we see appearing in message-oriented programming models, component based developments,) we'll think about programming (and perhaps our world) in very different ways.
To make this a little clearer: If you look in magazine articles where they're discussing programming architecture and software layout, you're going to see lots of 2D diagrams with lots of pieces plugging into other pieces in a graphical layout- sort of like a circuit board. This is different than the way we have traditionally programmed, which is more like a tree shape. Even within object oriented programming, because our interface still affords tree layouts. Where we have explored beyond tree layouts, (complex networks of design patterns,) we have struggled with the user interface, and people have stretched out to make better representations that capture graph-like programs: Think of your clumbsy UML editors, and things like that- really trying to hack a solution between more-or-less linear code expressions, and the 2D graphs that we're thinking in.
When SVG is well understood, documented, with tools at desktop and web levels, we should start to see native 2D programming languages, that don't feel like either toy languages, or cheap hacks riding on top of other programming languages.
I've written more about this at Futures:SvgRevolution.
Not bummed out yet? Massive parallelism works well for people doing scientific computing, but for the average joe, it's useless. ...rarely do I have two time-critical things to worry about at the same time.
In the 2005 Intel keynote speech, distributed computation expert Justin Rattner noted that "without language support, this isn't going to work."
Pretty much all apps can make use of parallel execution. If you have to interpret a big chunk of data, you can usually break it into segments, and process them in parallel, and then perform a fuse step at the end. Dividing into 2 isn't so exciting, dividing into 4 is pretty amazing.
Right now, few programs make use of parallel execution. This is why you have to run a bunch of programs at once to see basically anything. Threading and multiple processes is a nice way to take advantage of wait time, but that's different than parsing a big XML file in parallel.
Also, you're thinking about current use of computers. In the relatively near future, you're going to have CPU's cranking pretty much all the time. You're going to have face recognition running on your computers, you're cameras are going to be building 3D reconstructions of everything they see before them, yadda yadda yadda. In the nearer term, search and indexing loads are probably going to go up. There are going to be more things like the google desktop search bar that want to run and calculate all the time. We are rearchitecting our computers to support this sort of thing.
The biggest barrier to FLOSS usability is often overwhelming the user with too many options.
Solved problem. Just the distribution of the technique is taking time.
It's proven itself in GNOME: Look at a base GNOME install. It's got a clean user interface, simple user access for everyday things, consistency across apps.
The way it works is that they are super-selective at the distribution level, and they have a written set of documents that you have to conform with, in order to be included in the distro. If someone's out of conformance, but you want to be conformant, they send out a small team of people to help you solve the problems, and gain the honor of joining the distro.
How are the documents determined? There's a set of hackers who work on usability and user interface, and they put together the documents with company and community feedback. (If I understand correctly.)
It's worked, and it's worked very well. Now other groups are copying the method. In particular, if I read Planet KDE right, they're going to adopt this sort of organization as well.
The basic pattern is this:
OpenSource projects, hell, Open anything (I'm immediately thinking: "Clipart,") begins with a lot of scruffy stuff. You have broken technologies, over-configurable this, too much of that, too little of that, and it's all in one gigantic pile of stuff. This is the beginning of a concentration phase.
Then, with time, form starts to standardize, ritualize, and we start to see collections. Now, instead of people just contributing "just because," or having a million options "because someone might want it," or whatever- we start to see people targetting new higher level structures: "The GNOME Human Interface Guidelines," or the blah-blah interfacec, or whatever.
With time, these things are just assumed, and built upon, and are smooth.
So, this is basically a solved problem. About 4 years ago, everyone was sort of wondering, like you were: "Is it possible for hackers to make something with a spiffy and clean and user-friendly UI?"
It may not be as cool as OS X, but: GNOME has clearly proven that the organizational model works, and that hackers can make things that can shape into a nice user interface.
It's just a matter of spreading the knowledge of the technique, now, and adopting it.
My point is that just getting rid of the network socket won't help you any. You'll still end sending exactly the same stuff but using another mechanism, incurring in pretty much the same overhead.
Well, what the other guy was saying makes sense to me.
If you're communicating by sockets, you have to make two context switches, right? One to call the kernel, and one from the kernel to the X server. Whereas if there was a system API, then it would be just one context switch: you call the kernel, end of story.
If we count entire paths, it would be: you-kernel-x-kernel-you, vs. you-kernel-you.
So, I would imagine that your time from calling to the time of receipt would be much faster. This could be very important in games, I would think.
Your point is interesting. But, I think these will work anyways.
The interfaces could work in the same space that your keyboard and mouse work today.
And second, people make hand gestures when they talk with each other in person. Just because they can't constantly be gesticulating constantly, it doesn't mean that it's not useful to do it now and then.
I can imagine someone lifting their hands off their keyboard, and then performing spatial operations just a few inches in the plane above. Perhaps moving a window around, perhaps drawing a path with their finger, something like that.
When it get's attached to this.
I went to the College bookstore and saw a book on "Consumer Behavior."
It was filled with horrendous things. It was all about how to tap into vanity and make people desire things.
Then, there's "Public Relations." Which is basically all about how to manipulate people by manipulating the media. But, they also use advertising a lot.
I have no problem with most advertising. But, before I clip my browser, they're going to have to stop pulling PR shit, and stop writing those books. Guess when that's going to happen? Never.
Perhaps, but:
People are talking about these issues in Slashdot now, are they not?
For those who don't figure it out, at least they've been primed.
I personally believe that the intended target has been hit.
"What I argue is that if I'm going to be held accountable for my actions that I should be allowed to record ... my actions," Mann said. "Especially if somebody else is keeping a record of my actions."
Does this make sense to anyone?
Hell yah it does.
What part is hard to get?
You: Want to hold me accountable for my actions.
Me: Okay. Then, let me keep a perfect record of them.
You: Oh, no- we're going to be watching you, and we're going to control all watching of you.
Me: What if you doctor up some photos of me? How do I defend myself?
You: I'm sorry, I didn't hear that. And, further, you never said it.
Me: Wha?
You: See, here's the complete audio recording of our whole conversation.
Me: You cut out everything after-
You: I said that this recording was complete.
Me: But-
You: None of this is happening right now. Move along, citizen.
Surely the only way to measure experience is to examine it's products.
Really, honestly, I tell you: Experience is not measurable, but directly observable.
You can't prove to anybody that you are aware, and nobdoy can prove to anyone that you are aware.
And yet, if you're anything like me, it's very clear to you that you are aware. If you were not aware, you would just not exist. To be perfectly honest, I can't be sure that I'm not talking with someone who isn't aware. I just take it on faith that you actually are.
Does this make sense?
You're going to have to account for the reality of something that you cannot measure in your world view.
Indeed, it's mysterious that we're even capable of this very discussion. It's this sort of discussion that leads me to believe that either: (A) Experiencing things choose to observe environments that act as if the experiencing thing existed. Or, (B) Pan-psychism is true, and experience has a direct influence over the thing experienced.
Since I am a determinist, and don't believe in experience-over-mind, (no, I don't mean mind-over-matter,) I choose (A) rather than (B).
What is not true is materialism, because materialism has no mechanism to account for the existence of experience. Indeed, it's hard to get a materialist to even recognize that there is such a thing as ''experiencing.'' They can talk about brains, they can talk about electricity, but they can't see what's right in front of them: Experience.
You suggest the universe would function as it does without personal experience, but I don't agree.
Why not?
I mean, your post is just a bunch of assertions.
You feel comfortable making these assertions, because your community supports you in them.
But, "Know Thyself" wasn't directed at a community- it was addressed to you, as an individual.
Philosphers are trained to ignore the physicality of the world.
And similarly, scientists are trained to ignore what can't be measured with instruments.
Fortunately, your own experience, while not measurable by instruments, is at least directly observable.
You have to fit this fact together with what the scientists have to say.
If you don't, you can never know thyself.
We can't translate electrical signals to thoughts, but we can detect brain activity.
Sure, but that's not what we're talking about.
Brain activity is about as interesting in this discussion as the motion of jeeps and trains.
You're confusing a neural correlate of consciousness with consciousness itself. Classic mistake.
See, for all that brain activity, it could operate just the same if there were nobody watching, as if there is somebody watching.
Do you understand this? I don't think you do.
A universe without consciousness and without human experience would be, by mechanism, nothing like this one.
Why not?
Light would flow, enter eyes, trigger neurons, neurons would bump signals against other neurons, the whole machinery would operate. Blobs of chemicals move. The cheecks flush, the mouths move, marionettes sway back and forth, all with nobody to see it.
The whole interaction of the entire world, it would go exactly the same as this one.
How could it be any different?
When you walk into the movie theater, does it change the way the movie plays? No, it's the same movie, whether anybody watches it or not.
Ha!
I'm going to have to take you out back and talk with you about this elsewhere.
Your problem with it seems to be how you feel about who you are, not what you know about it.
No, I'm sorry, but you've mischaracterized this one. You're talking to the real deal right now.
I'm fully aware of the "Poor religious boy Wakka who can't defy the sacred teachings" story, but I assure you, that ain't it.
You're going to have to make a real argument, pick a number, and get in line.
Your challenge: The explanatory gap between the Zombie world and the world where people have experiences.
The next number's 437, but don't worry, I mow through these people so fast, you'll be up in no time. {;)}=
(Wait till I put the awareness wiki back online, we can do this one again over there.)
I've lived on that side of the tracks as well,... I have arguments over in that camp too.
Basically, the idea that there isn't an experience: I think that's absurd. "Who's being fooled" is the question.
There are people who hear: "The goal is to extinguish the Self. The Self is an illusion, extinguish the Self."
They, in a state of confusion, take this to mean: "Experience is an illusion, extinguish experience." That is, they take it as their lifes mission to live unconsciously- what we call a "Zombie" in the consciousness debate. Strange but true.
Really, my personal belief, is that it's a confusion over the meaning of the use of the word "Self."
I think what is really meant is to be selfless. That is, be caring, be friendly, let go to the tides of life. Don't be clinging, don't grip the self, things like that.
Now, there's an additional mystical element to it, where you're alone in the forest, and hanging with your thoughts, and being with nature. Or, you've locked yourself indoors, shuttered the windows, and withdrawn into the worlds within. Either way: The experience can be like dropping yourself, and experiencing the myriad worlds, peaces, blisses, outside/insider ourselves. This is inversion, it is not an extinction.
Extinguishing the Self in the Buddhist sense is the extinguishing of the mind, grasping, these sorts of things.
But, God no, it's not extinguishing Awareness. I assure you, Buddha was happily experiencing when he talked about extinguishing the Self.
And thus, we remain with an interesting scientific and metaphysical problem: Understanding what we are, how it is we come to be here, etc., etc.,.
Experiences do not seem to arrive in a "heap," rather, they seem to flow one into the other. We never experience two experiences at the same time, nor half; It seems to be singular and atomic.
People who claim to be experiencing two things at once- they are just experiencing multiple minds at the same time. Entirely doable. But i mean, if you're experiencing two things at once, the question is then: Who's experiencing that? You're back at one experience.
Awareness is still mysterious.
Both science&argument and meditation&mysticism have given me insight into the problem, but it's a tough nut to crack.
I'm most enthused right now by Chalmers' work, which is examining the nature of explanation, doing a lot of meta-analysis over the form of the arguments & explanations, and working out what our possibilities are there.
I think we're close to being able to make a statement like: "It is either impossible to understand awareness, or awareness must come in one of the following forms: Pan-Psychism, Dream-World, yadda-yadda-yadda..."
Ah, well, that's a different theory I'm somewhat sympathetic to,... uh,... we'll have to talk about that later.
(laugh)
{:)}=
Thank you, you've just now made my day. {:)}=
The Zombie hypothesis isn't about free will.
I have no problem with rails.
The Zombie hypothesis is about awareness, consciousness.
It's about why there's a light and sound show going on.
Two identical worlds: The same things happen in both of them. Only, in one world, in addition to the happenings, there are experiences. And in the other world, it's just- it's like a computer running in the closet that nobody knows about. This second universe is called the "Zombie" universe, because there are people are there, but there's no experience behind it.
But, by mechanism, the two worlds are completely identical.
The argument is this: The universe would function just the same if there was no experience going on. So, why is there an experience going on. How does that work. That kind of thing.
Nah, I can make a microscope that can look at itself. It's very easy: You just build a curved tube and stick a bunch of mirrors in.
I can make my computer verify it's own existance too; It can watch the instruction pointer count on and on.
Tongues can taste themselves.
Jars can't contain jars, (unless they are Kleinn jars,) but we can understand the human brain: Look, someone just wrote about it. Hierarchy of abstractions, it's a machinery, and it's completely subject to analysis, decomposition into parts, etc., etc.,.
This is a variant of the Circular-Cosmic-...Consciousness argument, itself a variant of the Scientist's God of the Gaps: the "Emergence" or "Complexity" words.
Understanding that when the brain twitches like so, we see a red splotch, is about as interesting as understanding that when I paint with red in a drawing program, that we see red splotches. They are just different external mechanisms, with respect to an awareness.
We still do not understand the mechanisms of experience, we haven't really explained anything, but brain mechanics.
There is no distinction between the two, they are actually one and the same, and there is no reason to think otherwise; it's only a matter of perspective.
There's actually a very large and relevant distinction between cause and effect.
Saying otherwise here is just mysticism masquerading as a scientific world-view; Wishful thinking on the part of scientists who do not understand experience, and are would rather shove it under the rug, frequently by redefining the word "experience" or "consciousness."
If you can say, "When this nerve quivers, there is an experience," that's one thing.
When you say, "When this nerve quivers, that is what experience is," you've just either engaged in mysticism. You've just said that the table in front of you is aware, and you don't even know it.
No, you are correct:
The reason that we are in the theater is because we are in the theater.
This is something that I agree with. When I raise those questions, it's as a challenge, not because I'm confused.
Specificly, I'm challenging the materialists to fill an explanatory gap.
The gap is this: If the universe would function just as well without anyone experiencing it, then why are we experiencing it?
The poor response from the materialists is: Well, it does make a difference. From there, the argument goes into language games about "what is experience," with the materialist saying it's one thing, and trying to pin religious connotations on anyone who says otherwise.
But if you're not a materialist idiot, it's clear: Experience is "this" (waving my hands around.) It's not a neural encoding, it's not a neural correlate of consciousness, it's not any of these things. It's the actual raw experience of experiencing.
(This is where the materialist pretends to be sleeping, and, as we all know, you can't wake someone who's pretending to be asleep.)
Anything that is not measurable within the medium of this world is not something that a materialist can acknowledge. And experience is not measurable. What this means is, the materialist can't see his or her own self- something that's having an experience. Because experience is inconvenient to their world view: Something that they directly perceive, more directly than anything else, but that they cannot measure.
It's too bad, really.
I think Chalmers & Gang have just decided to shrug and ignore the die-hard materialists. It's like trying to explain to a Christian that the Earth wasn't made 6,000BC: You're just not going to get anywhere.