went smooth as silk, even on the more complicated Vista Ultimate.
why do I mention it? well. this thread will be full of nasty, snarky lies. maybe i can balance things out a bit and thank the windows team for an update well done.
now if they could just turn their attention to the fail that is 'windows ultimate extras', that would be perfect.
This is what makes slashdot the great place it truly is. I put in twenty years on the scene, and all that experience and perspective is swept aside by doubt over a simple phrase... by a couple of stiff-necked people certain there is only one true way, in casual conversation, to refer to the task of programming a computational device. knuckleheads.
tell me this. is my statement wrong? syntactically? semantically? or better yet- ask me a question about the 'codes' I refer to. anything. any language, any problem. unless you really search for a puzzler, I doubt you'd be able to stump me. Won't that prove a am a genuine, honest-to-goodness programmer? Is there anything else I might offer to prove my bona fide programmer-ness?
How else should I take such a simple minded, bitchy challenge like this?
I know why I put up with it. It isn't the same reason you might put up with the bewildering variety of distros and packages, or the millions of half finished projects on sorceforge, but it's close.
The reason I give them a little bit of slack is because they have several orders of magnitude more users, hardware configurations, applications and accessibility problems to work out with each version of the OS. For all that, they do a fairly good job of it.
I can certainly understand the argument that someone might not find the upgrade compelling. that's purely subjective, personal opinion stuff and you are welcome to it. I do start to go a little crazy when I hear people complain about the DRM (ipod anyone?) or the idea that it is a 'memory hog' (superfetch caches likely apps and keeps them in RAM when available). Ignorance like this just makes slashdot appear even worse than normal.
I'm more offended by people being this uninformed yet harsh and dismissive than I am by any amount of ascii art goatse.cx posts.
Just because Vista works for you doesn't mean it works for others."
this is a very good point. but might i mention that it probably works in the converse? that is to say, and taking a bit of liberty to expand the notion to slashdot, just because it hasn't worked well for the people here, doesn't mean it is problematic for the vast bulk of users getting along just fine.
I'd even go so far to say that the slashdot crowd is looking for trouble. i get beachball pizzas of death on os x all the time. the DRM with the itunes/ipod stuff is far worse than anything going on in vista (that protected path stuff doesn't even kick in until you are using future media like blueray or hd dvd discs. seriously.
can you even do that on a linux box?). also, i find myself reaching for ctrl+alt+backspace a few times a day on the debian box. is this because the software is faulty, the drivers? the 'poor engineering' of the OS? is it my configuration? I'd say linux systems and OS X get a free ride around here for problems at least as substantial and significant as anything vista is being called out for.
I suppose I might take it personally if I worked for microsoft, but the only thing I take away from this phenomenon is that most of the commentators on slashdot are biased, emotional and not self consistent. whether they 'work in IT' or not.
otherwise STAMEN, well played. wait. stamen... is that you, veggie-cock?
I've been using this 'abysmal failure' as a primary OS for 8 months with nary a hitch. I really have. I spend every day developing various codes with various tools, for what turns out to be many different platforms. Among a few others I have a Debian box and OS X 10.4 within reach, on equally capable hardware and I don't even bother with them. To the point where I'll probably power them down to save money on the electric bill.
I suspect all the bad mouthing comes from people trying to shoehorn the thing into old hardware, or from people who fancy themselves capable with PC maintenance but can't handle simple configuration issues. Or most likely, by people who only ran a shoddy beta or have never run it at all. I'd really like someone to explain why the OS that I'm using right now without any problems doesn't work and should be abandoned.
oh, I know, not towing the party line here will get me modded down quick. but aside from the excited FOSS fanatics here and a few ad-hit grubbing bloggopundits and the like, millions of people are getting along just fine with vista. hopping up and down while shouting about what a failure it is doesn't actually make it a failure. sorry to break it to you all.
Billions of years ago, the Emperor Gortron IV of the Hugalugag Empire discovered the existence of other intelligent races in neighboring solar systems. The very fact of this, the mere idea of other races so infuriated the Emperor that he decreed them all illegal and ordered his vast military machine to wipe them out.
His generals tried many different approaches but none served to eliminate the threat completely. In fact, often times, the attempt would so infuriate the enemy that they would buzz about the borderlands of the Empire for years on end, death-raying this, atomic blasting that until they could finally be stamped out by the Hugalugagians with plain old fashioned space wars. This only further enraged the Emperor, and so he held a contest open to any of his citizens that could fashion a means to end the threat once and for all without requiring the messiness of pitched combat and planetary siege. The race of Hugalugag was quite xenophobic from top to bottom, from the least peasant in the fields to the mighty Emperor on high, and so everyone turned their thoughts on how to eradicate the menace of 'otherness' that surrounded them.
One day a simple weaponsmith by the name of Nancypoo Gammatron approached the throne with his proposal. This took a great deal of courage, for when the Emperor listened to the proposals of all that had come before, he only listened far enough to find a potential weakness in the plan and immediately ordered the presenter disintegrated. Proposals had become infrequent of late, which in turn further enraged the already apoplectic Emperor when he thought on it. Nevertheless, Nancypoo felt he had a fine idea. His great innovation was all in the scale of things. The Hugalugugians would build a gun so gigantic that they could march it out to one enemy star system and use their sun as a bullet to shoot the sun of yet another enemy, and so on until all enemies even remotely able to reach them were reduced to ash before they knew what hit them.
The Emperor was pleased with this idea indeed. So impressed that he ordered ten thousand of these guns be made with all due haste. And though the Hugalugagians would need to dismantle much of their empire to construct the weapons, including many planets and stars of their own, and it would take millions of years to stage the attack, at the end, the Hugalugagians might finally have a sense of peace and security. Which is really what it is all about, in the end- assuaging the vague fears with brutal violence.
You can rest assured that the Emperor's forces cleaned out their own galaxy only to find the next galaxy over teaming with filthy others, and so the troops marched on, ever on, cleaning out one galaxy after another until any potential threat was addressed, a never ending assault on a reality that didn't jibe with their mean psychology and ancient traditions, until even today. For though we can only see a hole in the universe one billion light years across, you can bet that they've been hard at work all the time the light has taken to reach us way out here in our galaxy, so that even now there is a lonley little planet orbiting around a lonely little star in a void many times the size of the big blank spot we can make out from our hopefully remote-enough vantage point here in the Milky Way.
you seem to be under the assumption that Microsoft doesn't have the ability to file for patents in the EU. I assure you, they do.
also, U.S. patent law specifically restricts the import of products that make use of an invention, which puts quite a damper on FOSS infringers distributing the software to any meaningful extent in the world's dominant market for such wares. basement dwellers will still have ample access to all the wealth of FOSS offerings, but there's nary a US company that will deploy this stuff if only for fear of the BSA audits or direct lawsuit.
If MS holds these patents in the UK or anywhere else in the EU (plenty of international treaty goodness involved binding those patent systems), MS has the hammer they need in most of the areas that develop FOSS.
Wielding the hammer is another matter, of course- as others have pointed out, they likely seek a combination of uncertainty/doubt, licensing agreements and barriers to future development of strategically important FOSS products (Mono, perhaps?).
i'm all for synergy with these giant scale evil-scientist style public works projects, and there's an obvious idea here that i'm certain has been missed. i propose that instead of a giant, monolithic system that will only last 50 years and require so much assembly and attention that instead, we launch all the AOL cds into loose orbit at the Lagrange point between the earth and the sun. this would diffuse the solar energy by several percent (there's a lot of these CDs... we could make a pretty big cloud with pretty dense coverage), and reduce the terrible impact on our landfills and post offices.
it's probably 5 years to late to make an AOL CD joke, but the principle still stands. just getting something reflective up there is all that matters. the reflective thing doesn't have to be steerable, repairable or otherwise sophisticated at all. it only has to bounce away a percent or two of the sunlight.
I want to say right off the bat, I've had several girlfriends in the past and am working on a first kid with my beautiful wife. In other words, I've matriculated from the heady days of proving my virility. I'm not in the slightest worried about how large my reproductive organs are perceived.
This is not to say that I disparage the urge to crow about such things. I feel that it is a fundamental part of reproductive behavior. Nothing to be ashamed about. You got to advertise and strut your stuff if you are going to ever satisfy the primordial demands of producing progeny. You should, however, be ashamed of nocturnal emissions. yuck.
Likewise, I feel there is nothing to be ashamed of in enumerating your hardware on a web forum. Consider: we are all enthusiasts of computing machinery, otherwise we'd hardly be reading slashdot. What exactly is the problem with discussing the status quo among enthusiasts from time to time? The pressure to appear humble about this topic, for what appears to be concern over sexual insecurity, is a needless and ultimately, pointless peer-induced form of community repression. I think it is pretty sad.
And so I say, don't listen to the uptight wankers decrying the pursuit of enthusiasm. Embrace your geekiness, and share it with the rest of us. I'd like to know what unique and/or bizarre things people are up to in this crazy time of surplus server gear and commonplace broadband.
I've worked in the industry a good 10 years now... and i've got to say that cinematics are the worst excess of the industry, maybe second to crap marketing (read G4).
Let me tell you, a serious game Dev project involves about 60 people and 12-18 months. A whole lot of that time/effort is spent building the graphics. This involves artists working long hard hours pushing pixels and vertexes around, just to get models, textures and UI ready.
So why do game projects often take a good half the artists and devote them to these big, expensively rendered, extravagant FMVs? It is especially maddening when you consider that they are almost always skipped by people eager to get to the game play!
It's all just a matter of self-serving ego or laziness. The artists want 'hot' stuff on their reels, especially since the vast majority of them are sad-sack losers wishing they worked at ILM or Pixar. The Art Directors need to show their state-of-the-art grasp of tools like Maya and 3D Studio (watch for how often 'realistic' looking smoke, fire and water are used in these FMVs) and their ability to wring the fanciest looking stuff out of their artists... The producers go along with it so they are able to show non-gaming bean counters and check writers something flashy in a dark conference room, and the marketers are all behind it so they can show the flash at g3 and the other garish, cheesy game conferences. Last, we have the designers, who leverage these FMVs to give a false sense of 'depth' by establishing some silly context for their weak or uninspired game design.
In short, these FMVs represent and tie together all that is disgusting and pathetic about the game industry, with a very short list of exceptions. They are both the cause and the effect of and endless cycle of crap games, cheesy spectacle, increasingly more expensive and less entertaining choices we have today.
...but I just can't see what you guys like about this Pratchett guy. He comes off as a wanky, half-baked Douglas Adams wannabe selling semi-ironically juxtaposed fantasy cliches by the gross.
In my somewhat severe opinion, I'd say the classic M.Y.T.H. series is far more sophisticated, far more entertaining, and most importantly far more funny.
Don't get me wrong- I've consumed all the works of both authors. It's just that I've come to the conclusion that Mr. Pratchett works at the same level as the likes of Piers Anthony or Cory Doctorow(not so good). Robert Aspirin and gang, on the other hand, operate more on the level of Zelazny or Niven (moderately acceptable).
fwiw, I prefer the works of Mervyn Peake to all of this pedestrian dreck.
Google needs to solve the problem of people searching a term to get a rough idea of the meaning. They've got it covered for definitions, but more advanced concepts are still wanting.
As it is, say you are interested about what happened in 1033 AD. If you search for "1033" you get a range of pages that have anything to do with 1033 AD, instead you get info abobut RFC 1033, port 1033, california legislation s.1033, and so on. If you search for "1033 AD" you likewise get a wide range of incidental and nearly useless trivia about 1033 AD, with very little in the way of comprehensive overview.
Wikipedia has an entire page on the events of every year starting at around 900 AD, iirc. It should be the first hit for searches like that. Google is looking for a means to justify making it so, without complaint from the wikioids and without complaint from the people stressing over page rank for their site. Expect a section with an automatic overview of the wikipedia entry, similar to how they are placing image search results at the top of some searches now, or like they do with news.
The deal here is that google wants to retain the lead spot for quick reference needs. Wikipedia serves that purpose very well, but I'd say most people don't know to check it out.
4. Gspot - recurrent monitor for search terms 5. Gstring - the search term w/ syntax 6. Gmoney - alternative to paypal, with bonus ghetto street cred 7. Gwar - comprehensive music and mayhem 8. Gwiz - digital urine solutions 9. Gman - special searches for feds
do you have the ADD, or is it just some manner of reading comprehension problem that prevents you from understanding my initial post?
Adding transistors to reduce 'the adverse affects(sic) of pipeline stalls' has nothing to do with chip speed. Feature size and materials are the predominant factors in scaling clock frequency. Those other features are just hoo-haw wizbang addons that boost the performance of the chip by augmenting the quality of data flow. not the speed of data flow- the quality.
aside from the major revamp with the pentium pro, there really haven't been any major changes to the core logic since the 386. maybe you should do some reading up on this stuff before trying to spar with a professional.
The real issue with all of the features added to the x86 line over the years is working to keep the "386" in the heart of the proc fed with data. so you can take a huge chunk o' data and play musical chairs with the pieces, as they do now, or multiple tiny chunks sent to 2 or more units as they are now implementing (ahead of schedule, even), or as I am suggesting.
Also note, at 12 MHz, 128 386's could do an amazing 1.5 GHz clocks in total
I thought I mentioned speading the 386 logic up to 3-5 Ghz... I also accounted for the controlling logic overhead (thus the 64-way setup, instead of 150 (or 128 as you put it)processors).
the INMOS stuff was more along the lines of discrete processors(with built in RAM controllers- another idea dredged up from history and recently applied to the x86s) and that you can easilly string along into clusters.
What i'm talking about is maximixing the versatility of a single die (through wide distribution of simple tasks across the logic).
The inherent threading of OCCAM is interesting though. It would be quit useful for the chip I'm suggesting.
Today's CPUs are, in the final analysis, little different than the 386 launched in 1985. Notable exceptions are in details like feature size and operating frequency. Other significant differences are in the pipelining logic, crufted on instruction sets (mmx anyone?) that are rarely called into action, cache and pinouts.
Now, take a step back and imagine what a classic 386 would look like on a.09 micron process... consider that the 386 had 275,000 transistors- compared to the P4s 42 million. You could fit around 150 386s in the space (on the die) of a single P4.
Now, of course there are many advances to consider over the 386, but fundamentally, that processor logic is capable of handling 99% of 32 bit computing tasks. They may have done so slowly, but there you are.
My thinking is, they could use some of this old logic, buff it up a little to accomodate some modern techniques and carve it all into a single die. Imagine a CPU with 64 simple processors, 4Mb of cache and some controlling logic running at 3-5 Ghz. All this in the space of and at the (manufacturing) cost of a single P4.
This chip could be used in clusters like nobody's business. An array of 128 of these processors could simultaneously handle 8,192 active threads.
What use would it be? Off the top of my head, this would be perfect for real-time monitoring, transaction processing, switching and so forth. There would also be serious advantages in the desktop space as compilers and kernels were built to adapt to the new distribution of resources. Image processing could be handled using the same techniques as SLI cards use to split the tasks up over two or more video cards, and any other large body of data could be simlarly broken up. Compilers would be designed to break a program up not into a paltry 2 or 3 threads, but into dozens. Speed and responsiveness would skyrocket, while fab costs and board speeds remained stable.
This might be the logical outcome of the current drift towards multiple CPUs per die, and it could also unite and surpass the schools of CISC vs RISC, as strategies from both would benefit the endeavor.
I'm of the opinion that even the much-vaunted conciousness of human beings can "...be replicated in functionality and coverage by a human-programmed software algorithm", which sort of sidetracks the nature of your challenge.
After all, your neurons don't just serve you all willy-nilly, just mashed together in a random heap. Each one of those brain cells is in a specific relationship with all their neighbors, and that relationship is the very essence of software.
If the mindless forces of evolution can reach this high water mark in a hit-or-miss fashion, why can't we get there in deliberate steps?
I'm sure you'll see my point, so to get back to what you are saying, I don't see a distinct seperation from intelligence, conciousness or sapience vs. the concept of 'complex algorithms'. More specifically, I don't see any of our sophisticated attempts to date as 'pretending' to be A.I., rather, I see them as progressively narrowing the gap towards 'mind-ness' all the while being both Artificial and Intelligent (even if to limited extents).
You might pick this up in some of the other comments, but I should mention that there is a disturbing trend among people of all stripes to postulate what constitutes an A.I., and in the past it has been the case that those postulates have included technology we have achieved, and at every plateau we get to, those self-same folk turn around and declaim the achievment as 'not really counting'. I think the reality of the situation is that we are making our way to the goal in leaps and bounds and each achievment is just another piece of the puzzle. But I see no reason to discount the intelligence of these software constructs simply because they fail to emulate every aspect of human existance.
What you are trying to describe is some sort of conciousness, or more particularly sapience, which is our (human) flavor of conciousness. There are many other types of intelligence, artificial or not. Even those books you mention take pains to describe this, especially in the description of the ant colony problem from GEB.
It would be a simple thing to crash an ant colony with recursion using only an eye-dropper full of the right pheremone(s). Does this mean the ant colony has no intelligence? Not at all. For another example, consider schizo-effective disorders and autism: these are obvious malfunctions with the recursion control mechanisms in the human brain. But I'd scarcely describe the poor victims of these awful conditions as lacking 'intelligence', 'conciousness' or 'sapience'. They just have a bug in the code, and your haughty dismissal of intelligent systems for lacking this capability smacks of some pretty cruel callousness.
The same principles are at play with these early examples of machine intelligence. That is to say, they can be intelligent without achieving conciousness, or can achieve conciousness while being in peril of recursion loops.
But the overarching point here is that putting some of the fundamental building blocks of machine conciousness into service, like they are in this control system, is a substantial step in the drive to get to where 'laymen' like yourself can finally be impressed.
The significance of this is quite substantial, despite the negative tone in the comments. This is a nuts and bolts implementation of Minsky-style strong A.I. and one of the first such systems to be put into production. Regardless of the limited domain it is more sophisticated than the mere self-diagnostic routines it is being compared to by the oh-so-knowledgable slashbot mindshare.
This system boh models the external world for consideration, just like our sense of imagination, and processes that information for purposes of survival, just like our sense of self awareness.
The great part of this is that it is being done by NASA, who are known for their lavish spending and attention to the entire system, particularly those low level details like the particulars of chip logic optimization, the shielding and structural stability, the operating environment &etc. This isn't meant to be a joke about bureaucracy and budget cuts, either: they have the top talent engineers in their stable despite all the politicking we hear about.
From the decidedly negative tone in the comments, you'd think the tech-happy slashbots were actually opposed to such efforts. I think the real deal is that you guys are raised on sci-fi instead of science, and fail to grasp just how this is important. So what if it's not HAL9000 or Skynet? It might be a baby step, but it's a hell of a lot more than any of you are doing.
Slashdot Mirror
went smooth as silk, even on the more complicated Vista Ultimate.
why do I mention it? well. this thread will be full of nasty, snarky lies. maybe i can balance things out a bit and thank the windows team for an update well done.
now if they could just turn their attention to the fail that is 'windows ultimate extras', that would be perfect.
I misread it as "MIT Student Gets Arrested With LED Art" which is of course very exciting as it suggests LED Art is now illegal in Mass.
It's strange to feel all deflated by reading about a cool and hackish thing like that.
I like the part where the guy before you said "It's hard to be indignant and informed, I know."
your half million standards are obnoxious and useless.
ie6 is still the defacto standard, and MSFT is make a huge effort to get everything ready for your birthday with ie8.
now stop whining and get back to work.
huh.
This is what makes slashdot the great place it truly is. I put in twenty years on the scene, and all that experience and perspective is swept aside by doubt over a simple phrase... by a couple of stiff-necked people certain there is only one true way, in casual conversation, to refer to the task of programming a computational device. knuckleheads.
tell me this. is my statement wrong? syntactically? semantically? or better yet- ask me a question about the 'codes' I refer to. anything. any language, any problem. unless you really search for a puzzler, I doubt you'd be able to stump me. Won't that prove a am a genuine, honest-to-goodness programmer? Is there anything else I might offer to prove my bona fide programmer-ness?
How else should I take such a simple minded, bitchy challenge like this?
I know why I put up with it. It isn't the same reason you might put up with the bewildering variety of distros and packages, or the millions of half finished projects on sorceforge, but it's close.
The reason I give them a little bit of slack is because they have several orders of magnitude more users, hardware configurations, applications and accessibility problems to work out with each version of the OS. For all that, they do a fairly good job of it.
I can certainly understand the argument that someone might not find the upgrade compelling. that's purely subjective, personal opinion stuff and you are welcome to it. I do start to go a little crazy when I hear people complain about the DRM (ipod anyone?) or the idea that it is a 'memory hog' (superfetch caches likely apps and keeps them in RAM when available). Ignorance like this just makes slashdot appear even worse than normal.
I'm more offended by people being this uninformed yet harsh and dismissive than I am by any amount of ascii art goatse.cx posts.
Just because Vista works for you doesn't mean it works for others."
this is a very good point. but might i mention that it probably works in the converse? that is to say, and taking a bit of liberty to expand the notion to slashdot, just because it hasn't worked well for the people here, doesn't mean it is problematic for the vast bulk of users getting along just fine.
I'd even go so far to say that the slashdot crowd is looking for trouble. i get beachball pizzas of death on os x all the time. the DRM with the itunes/ipod stuff is far worse than anything going on in vista (that protected path stuff doesn't even kick in until you are using future media like blueray or hd dvd discs. seriously.
can you even do that on a linux box?). also, i find myself reaching for ctrl+alt+backspace a few times a day on the debian box. is this because the software is faulty, the drivers? the 'poor engineering' of the OS? is it my configuration? I'd say linux systems and OS X get a free ride around here for problems at least as substantial and significant as anything vista is being called out for.
I suppose I might take it personally if I worked for microsoft, but the only thing I take away from this phenomenon is that most of the commentators on slashdot are biased, emotional and not self consistent. whether they 'work in IT' or not.
otherwise STAMEN, well played. wait. stamen... is that you, veggie-cock?
that's what you have to counter with?
here's a hint: i have a casual relationship to techy slang. that isn't really proof of 'astroturfing'
nice try though.
Such nonsense... flame bait: rabble rousing.
I've been using this 'abysmal failure' as a primary OS for 8 months with nary a hitch. I really have. I spend every day developing various codes with various tools, for what turns out to be many different platforms. Among a few others I have a Debian box and OS X 10.4 within reach, on equally capable hardware and I don't even bother with them. To the point where I'll probably power them down to save money on the electric bill.
I suspect all the bad mouthing comes from people trying to shoehorn the thing into old hardware, or from people who fancy themselves capable with PC maintenance but can't handle simple configuration issues. Or most likely, by people who only ran a shoddy beta or have never run it at all. I'd really like someone to explain why the OS that I'm using right now without any problems doesn't work and should be abandoned.
oh, I know, not towing the party line here will get me modded down quick. but aside from the excited FOSS fanatics here and a few ad-hit grubbing bloggopundits and the like, millions of people are getting along just fine with vista. hopping up and down while shouting about what a failure it is doesn't actually make it a failure. sorry to break it to you all.
Billions of years ago, the Emperor Gortron IV of the Hugalugag Empire discovered the existence of other intelligent races in neighboring solar systems. The very fact of this, the mere idea of other races so infuriated the Emperor that he decreed them all illegal and ordered his vast military machine to wipe them out.
His generals tried many different approaches but none served to eliminate the threat completely. In fact, often times, the attempt would so infuriate the enemy that they would buzz about the borderlands of the Empire for years on end, death-raying this, atomic blasting that until they could finally be stamped out by the Hugalugagians with plain old fashioned space wars. This only further enraged the Emperor, and so he held a contest open to any of his citizens that could fashion a means to end the threat once and for all without requiring the messiness of pitched combat and planetary siege. The race of Hugalugag was quite xenophobic from top to bottom, from the least peasant in the fields to the mighty Emperor on high, and so everyone turned their thoughts on how to eradicate the menace of 'otherness' that surrounded them.
One day a simple weaponsmith by the name of Nancypoo Gammatron approached the throne with his proposal. This took a great deal of courage, for when the Emperor listened to the proposals of all that had come before, he only listened far enough to find a potential weakness in the plan and immediately ordered the presenter disintegrated. Proposals had become infrequent of late, which in turn further enraged the already apoplectic Emperor when he thought on it. Nevertheless, Nancypoo felt he had a fine idea. His great innovation was all in the scale of things. The Hugalugugians would build a gun so gigantic that they could march it out to one enemy star system and use their sun as a bullet to shoot the sun of yet another enemy, and so on until all enemies even remotely able to reach them were reduced to ash before they knew what hit them.
The Emperor was pleased with this idea indeed. So impressed that he ordered ten thousand of these guns be made with all due haste. And though the Hugalugagians would need to dismantle much of their empire to construct the weapons, including many planets and stars of their own, and it would take millions of years to stage the attack, at the end, the Hugalugagians might finally have a sense of peace and security. Which is really what it is all about, in the end- assuaging the vague fears with brutal violence.
You can rest assured that the Emperor's forces cleaned out their own galaxy only to find the next galaxy over teaming with filthy others, and so the troops marched on, ever on, cleaning out one galaxy after another until any potential threat was addressed, a never ending assault on a reality that didn't jibe with their mean psychology and ancient traditions, until even today. For though we can only see a hole in the universe one billion light years across, you can bet that they've been hard at work all the time the light has taken to reach us way out here in our galaxy, so that even now there is a lonley little planet orbiting around a lonely little star in a void many times the size of the big blank spot we can make out from our hopefully remote-enough vantage point here in the Milky Way.
you seem to be under the assumption that Microsoft doesn't have the ability to file for patents in the EU. I assure you, they do.
also, U.S. patent law specifically restricts the import of products that make use of an invention, which puts quite a damper on FOSS infringers distributing the software to any meaningful extent in the world's dominant market for such wares. basement dwellers will still have ample access to all the wealth of FOSS offerings, but there's nary a US company that will deploy this stuff if only for fear of the BSA audits or direct lawsuit.
If MS holds these patents in the UK or anywhere else in the EU (plenty of international treaty goodness involved binding those patent systems), MS has the hammer they need in most of the areas that develop FOSS.
Wielding the hammer is another matter, of course- as others have pointed out, they likely seek a combination of uncertainty/doubt, licensing agreements and barriers to future development of strategically important FOSS products (Mono, perhaps?).
i'm all for synergy with these giant scale evil-scientist style public works projects, and there's an obvious idea here that i'm certain has been missed. i propose that instead of a giant, monolithic system that will only last 50 years and require so much assembly and attention that instead, we launch all the AOL cds into loose orbit at the Lagrange point between the earth and the sun. this would diffuse the solar energy by several percent (there's a lot of these CDs... we could make a pretty big cloud with pretty dense coverage), and reduce the terrible impact on our landfills and post offices.
it's probably 5 years to late to make an AOL CD joke, but the principle still stands. just getting something reflective up there is all that matters. the reflective thing doesn't have to be steerable, repairable or otherwise sophisticated at all. it only has to bounce away a percent or two of the sunlight.
here now.
I want to say right off the bat, I've had several girlfriends in the past and am working on a first kid with my beautiful wife. In other words, I've matriculated from the heady days of proving my virility. I'm not in the slightest worried about how large my reproductive organs are perceived.
This is not to say that I disparage the urge to crow about such things. I feel that it is a fundamental part of reproductive behavior. Nothing to be ashamed about. You got to advertise and strut your stuff if you are going to ever satisfy the primordial demands of producing progeny. You should, however, be ashamed of nocturnal emissions. yuck.
Likewise, I feel there is nothing to be ashamed of in enumerating your hardware on a web forum. Consider: we are all enthusiasts of computing machinery, otherwise we'd hardly be reading slashdot. What exactly is the problem with discussing the status quo among enthusiasts from time to time? The pressure to appear humble about this topic, for what appears to be concern over sexual insecurity, is a needless and ultimately, pointless peer-induced form of community repression. I think it is pretty sad.
And so I say, don't listen to the uptight wankers decrying the pursuit of enthusiasm. Embrace your geekiness, and share it with the rest of us. I'd like to know what unique and/or bizarre things people are up to in this crazy time of surplus server gear and commonplace broadband.
I've worked in the industry a good 10 years now... and i've got to say that cinematics are the worst excess of the industry, maybe second to crap marketing (read G4).
Let me tell you, a serious game Dev project involves about 60 people and 12-18 months. A whole lot of that time/effort is spent building the graphics. This involves artists working long hard hours pushing pixels and vertexes around, just to get models, textures and UI ready.
So why do game projects often take a good half the artists and devote them to these big, expensively rendered, extravagant FMVs? It is especially maddening when you consider that they are almost always skipped by people eager to get to the game play!
It's all just a matter of self-serving ego or laziness. The artists want 'hot' stuff on their reels, especially since the vast majority of them are sad-sack losers wishing they worked at ILM or Pixar. The Art Directors need to show their state-of-the-art grasp of tools like Maya and 3D Studio (watch for how often 'realistic' looking smoke, fire and water are used in these FMVs) and their ability to wring the fanciest looking stuff out of their artists... The producers go along with it so they are able to show non-gaming bean counters and check writers something flashy in a dark conference room, and the marketers are all behind it so they can show the flash at g3 and the other garish, cheesy game conferences. Last, we have the designers, who leverage these FMVs to give a false sense of 'depth' by establishing some silly context for their weak or uninspired game design.
In short, these FMVs represent and tie together all that is disgusting and pathetic about the game industry, with a very short list of exceptions. They are both the cause and the effect of and endless cycle of crap games, cheesy spectacle, increasingly more expensive and less entertaining choices we have today.
"If I ever meet you, I will Kick Your Ass"
I've always pronounced SUSE like "sue us". don't know why.
...but I just can't see what you guys like about this Pratchett guy. He comes off as a wanky, half-baked Douglas Adams wannabe selling semi-ironically juxtaposed fantasy cliches by the gross.
In my somewhat severe opinion, I'd say the classic M.Y.T.H. series is far more sophisticated, far more entertaining, and most importantly far more funny.
Don't get me wrong- I've consumed all the works of both authors. It's just that I've come to the conclusion that Mr. Pratchett works at the same level as the likes of Piers Anthony or Cory Doctorow(not so good). Robert Aspirin and gang, on the other hand, operate more on the level of Zelazny or Niven (moderately acceptable).
fwiw, I prefer the works of Mervyn Peake to all of this pedestrian dreck.
Google needs to solve the problem of people searching a term to get a rough idea of the meaning. They've got it covered for definitions, but more advanced concepts are still wanting.
As it is, say you are interested about what happened in 1033 AD. If you search for "1033" you get a range of pages that have anything to do with 1033 AD, instead you get info abobut RFC 1033, port 1033, california legislation s.1033, and so on. If you search for "1033 AD" you likewise get a wide range of incidental and nearly useless trivia about 1033 AD, with very little in the way of comprehensive overview.
Wikipedia has an entire page on the events of every year starting at around 900 AD, iirc. It should be the first hit for searches like that. Google is looking for a means to justify making it so, without complaint from the wikioids and without complaint from the people stressing over page rank for their site. Expect a section with an automatic overview of the wikipedia entry, similar to how they are placing image search results at the top of some searches now, or like they do with news.
The deal here is that google wants to retain the lead spot for quick reference needs. Wikipedia serves that purpose very well, but I'd say most people don't know to check it out.
it keeps going:
4. Gspot - recurrent monitor for search terms
5. Gstring - the search term w/ syntax
6. Gmoney - alternative to paypal, with bonus ghetto street cred
7. Gwar - comprehensive music and mayhem
8. Gwiz - digital urine solutions
9. Gman - special searches for feds
do you have the ADD, or is it just some manner of reading comprehension problem that prevents you from understanding my initial post?
Adding transistors to reduce 'the adverse affects(sic) of pipeline stalls' has nothing to do with chip speed. Feature size and materials are the predominant factors in scaling clock frequency. Those other features are just hoo-haw wizbang addons that boost the performance of the chip by augmenting the quality of data flow. not the speed of data flow- the quality.
aside from the major revamp with the pentium pro, there really haven't been any major changes to the core logic since the 386. maybe you should do some reading up on this stuff before trying to spar with a professional.
The real issue with all of the features added to the x86 line over the years is working to keep the "386" in the heart of the proc fed with data. so you can take a huge chunk o' data and play musical chairs with the pieces, as they do now, or multiple tiny chunks sent to 2 or more units as they are now implementing (ahead of schedule, even), or as I am suggesting.
Also note, at 12 MHz, 128 386's could do an amazing 1.5 GHz clocks in total
I thought I mentioned speading the 386 logic up to 3-5 Ghz... I also accounted for the controlling logic overhead (thus the 64-way setup, instead of 150 (or 128 as you put it)processors).
the INMOS stuff was more along the lines of discrete processors(with built in RAM controllers- another idea dredged up from history and recently applied to the x86s) and that you can easilly string along into clusters.
What i'm talking about is maximixing the versatility of a single die (through wide distribution of simple tasks across the logic).
The inherent threading of OCCAM is interesting though. It would be quit useful for the chip I'm suggesting.
Today's CPUs are, in the final analysis, little different than the 386 launched in 1985. Notable exceptions are in details like feature size and operating frequency. Other significant differences are in the pipelining logic, crufted on instruction sets (mmx anyone?) that are rarely called into action, cache and pinouts.
.09 micron process... consider that the 386 had 275,000 transistors- compared to the P4s 42 million. You could fit around 150 386s in the space (on the die) of a single P4.
Now, take a step back and imagine what a classic 386 would look like on a
Now, of course there are many advances to consider over the 386, but fundamentally, that processor logic is capable of handling 99% of 32 bit computing tasks. They may have done so slowly, but there you are.
My thinking is, they could use some of this old logic, buff it up a little to accomodate some modern techniques and carve it all into a single die. Imagine a CPU with 64 simple processors, 4Mb of cache and some controlling logic running at 3-5 Ghz. All this in the space of and at the (manufacturing) cost of a single P4.
This chip could be used in clusters like nobody's business. An array of 128 of these processors could simultaneously handle 8,192 active threads.
What use would it be? Off the top of my head, this would be perfect for real-time monitoring, transaction processing, switching and so forth. There would also be serious advantages in the desktop space as compilers and kernels were built to adapt to the new distribution of resources. Image processing could be handled using the same techniques as SLI cards use to split the tasks up over two or more video cards, and any other large body of data could be simlarly broken up. Compilers would be designed to break a program up not into a paltry 2 or 3 threads, but into dozens. Speed and responsiveness would skyrocket, while fab costs and board speeds remained stable.
This might be the logical outcome of the current drift towards multiple CPUs per die, and it could also unite and surpass the schools of CISC vs RISC, as strategies from both would benefit the endeavor.
I'm of the opinion that even the much-vaunted conciousness of human beings can " ...be replicated in functionality and coverage by a human-programmed software algorithm", which sort of sidetracks the nature of your challenge.
After all, your neurons don't just serve you all willy-nilly, just mashed together in a random heap. Each one of those brain cells is in a specific relationship with all their neighbors, and that relationship is the very essence of software.
If the mindless forces of evolution can reach this high water mark in a hit-or-miss fashion, why can't we get there in deliberate steps?
I'm sure you'll see my point, so to get back to what you are saying, I don't see a distinct seperation from intelligence, conciousness or sapience vs. the concept of 'complex algorithms'. More specifically, I don't see any of our sophisticated attempts to date as 'pretending' to be A.I., rather, I see them as progressively narrowing the gap towards 'mind-ness' all the while being both Artificial and Intelligent (even if to limited extents).
You might pick this up in some of the other comments, but I should mention that there is a disturbing trend among people of all stripes to postulate what constitutes an A.I., and in the past it has been the case that those postulates have included technology we have achieved, and at every plateau we get to, those self-same folk turn around and declaim the achievment as 'not really counting'. I think the reality of the situation is that we are making our way to the goal in leaps and bounds and each achievment is just another piece of the puzzle. But I see no reason to discount the intelligence of these software constructs simply because they fail to emulate every aspect of human existance.
What you are trying to describe is some sort of conciousness, or more particularly sapience, which is our (human) flavor of conciousness. There are many other types of intelligence, artificial or not. Even those books you mention take pains to describe this, especially in the description of the ant colony problem from GEB.
It would be a simple thing to crash an ant colony with recursion using only an eye-dropper full of the right pheremone(s). Does this mean the ant colony has no intelligence? Not at all. For another example, consider schizo-effective disorders and autism: these are obvious malfunctions with the recursion control mechanisms in the human brain. But I'd scarcely describe the poor victims of these awful conditions as lacking 'intelligence', 'conciousness' or 'sapience'. They just have a bug in the code, and your haughty dismissal of intelligent systems for lacking this capability smacks of some pretty cruel callousness.
The same principles are at play with these early examples of machine intelligence. That is to say, they can be intelligent without achieving conciousness, or can achieve conciousness while being in peril of recursion loops.
But the overarching point here is that putting some of the fundamental building blocks of machine conciousness into service, like they are in this control system, is a substantial step in the drive to get to where 'laymen' like yourself can finally be impressed.
The significance of this is quite substantial, despite the negative tone in the comments. This is a nuts and bolts implementation of Minsky-style strong A.I. and one of the first such systems to be put into production. Regardless of the limited domain it is more sophisticated than the mere self-diagnostic routines it is being compared to by the oh-so-knowledgable slashbot mindshare.
This system boh models the external world for consideration, just like our sense of imagination, and processes that information for purposes of survival, just like our sense of self awareness.
The great part of this is that it is being done by NASA, who are known for their lavish spending and attention to the entire system, particularly those low level details like the particulars of chip logic optimization, the shielding and structural stability, the operating environment &etc. This isn't meant to be a joke about bureaucracy and budget cuts, either: they have the top talent engineers in their stable despite all the politicking we hear about.
From the decidedly negative tone in the comments, you'd think the tech-happy slashbots were actually opposed to such efforts. I think the real deal is that you guys are raised on sci-fi instead of science, and fail to grasp just how this is important. So what if it's not HAL9000 or Skynet? It might be a baby step, but it's a hell of a lot more than any of you are doing.