I know how to do that. I used to have a webpage with forms for all my favorite searchengines. But that's not the issue. The issue is that the version of google offered on the google site lacks this feature.
Google is mostly used by expert users. Other users have probably not found their way to the google site yet. So based on that you would expect a site that is tailored to expert users (i.e. lots of nice features such as the before mentioned dropdown menu).
The google site seems to suffer a bit from the fact that it was created by a bunch of unix people. Great on the inside but shockingly primitive on the outside. Of course you have to consider that they are only selling what's on the inside (i.e. their search technology). But even then it would probably only help their cause if they payed some attention to the user interface.
After all, if more people start using google, more portals will consider buying their technology.
I use www.alltheweb.com too. And sometimes I even use altavista or yahoo. I also like www.google.com though it sometimes comes back with some redundant results. I.e. the same link is listed more than once. This is especially annoying if you want 100 links at once since often most of these links are duplicates. Also I noticed it doesn't find my homepage:( if I enter my full name. This indicates that google covers only a small part of the web since my homepage has been around for a few years (though, the original site now only forwards to my new site).
About the user interface. All you lynx addicts seem to be really enthousiastic about its sinplicity: a Gif, a textfield and two buttons. I seriously miss the dropdownmenu which allows you to select between 10 and 100. It only shows up after you search which usually causes me to rerun the search. As for why it is so simple, I think the engine is licensed to portals like mynetscape who use the engine on their site rather than google wanting to be another portal. Its a good thing that they keep this page around, though.
As long as I know Linux is around (since 1995, that's four years ago) I've been reading about wine. It still is rather buggy and doesn't run much software reliably.
Somehow I don't think wine will ever be a good alternative for running windows programs on windows. Of course you can design your programs to work with wine (like corel is trying to do) but its not the same thing. You can forget about ms office bcause unless MS wants this to work on wine, it will do everything to prevent it from working on wine.
This particular "thirteen year old" girl glasly accepted all his propositions. I mean there's some pretty sick idots out there on the net. If I was approached like this I would have a hard time believing I was really dealing with a thirteen year old.
If I read correctly he only told the police he had porn when they were going to check it anyway. I.e. he was trying to limit the damage.
first: the guy is a sick bastard and probably (if found guilty) deserves his punishment.
BUT: I don't like the way he was arrested. His privacy was grossly violated and I fear the FBI is likely to apply its methods for other crimes as well.
I don't like the idea of the FBI applieing 1984ish methods even if it's for the good cause of finding & arresting child abusers.
The guy was set up and subsequently arrested. He was actively approached by an undercover agent clearly with the idea of arresting him. Would the guy have actively searched for a thirteen year old girl if he wouldn't have been approached? I'm not sure. If he wouldn't have done so, he wouldn't have committed a crime and there would not have been a reason to arrest him (assuming they would not have examined his PC for kiddy porn).
"You're going to hear a lot of bull about how this is somehow a violation of his privacy, but anyone trying to lure 13 year-old girls to his house deserves to be put away for a long, long time."
Typical reaction. Most people will have this "lets lynch the guy" knee jerk reaction. But this guy is coming back in society someday. Prison, especially the american type, is not well known for its educating effect on its prisoners. In other words an already sick person goes in and somebody even more sick is likely to come out. And as I already pointed out the presumed thirteen year old girl did actively lure him to this place (and she/he wasn't even thirteen probably) which puts things in a slightly different context.
"Good. Man, I can stomach consenting people doing anything they want sexually so long as it doesn't involve kids or animals (the two groups who can't really give consent)."
Interesting to mention that I read once that both forms of sexual disorders are very common across all cultures. It's a very political correct thing and in my opinion gratuit to disapprove of it. I think if you ask most people they will agree with you that it is a distasteful thing to do but at the same time both cattle and children are the victims of horny persons often. So I'll fully agree with you on this (just to be safe).
Exactly, as this post is still young (only 5 or so replies as I'm reading, no doubt over 30 by the time I stop writing), it the inevitable "computer are not intelligent", "you can't replicate humans in computers" psotings will show up. We've been through that on several occasions.
The relevant questions to ask are: - what is conscious - when can you call a thought/idea creative - what is the difference between living and not living
I don't think any of these questions have an answer that everybody understands. being an atheist and convinced that the human being is not the perfect creature imaginable, the idea that we can create something that is creative, has a conscious and fits my very vague idea of alive is acceptable though I don't see it happening anytime soon.
Somewhere in the article it is stated that computers will match the human brains speed early next century. I'm not sure whether I can agree with this. How fast is the brain actually and do we measure this speed in gigaflops? What is more reasonable to say is that computers will soon be able to understand/parse our spoken language. Computers will have enough AI to grasp some of the semantics of what we say. For the latter to happen, we will have to provide them with a context. The more complex this context the more it can understand. Right now the context in which a computer has to understand its input is very limited. Most programs context can be put in a small number of if statements. The AI community can provide us with techniques that can enhance this context (rule based systems, belief networks, neural networks).
Intelligent behavior is not limited to responding to input though. What's also needed is the ability to learn. This is where I see a problem. I'm not aware of any techniques to aquire new knowledge and add it to the existing knowledge. Neural networks are generally trained for a limited set of input with some knowledge about the output to guide this process. This is not the same thing.
Once we solved the context issue and the learning abilities, we still have consciousness and creativeness to conquer.
Consciousness is about self reflection. I.e. the ability to think about it self. To test whether animals are conscious of themselves experiments with mirrors have been performed. In these experiments a mirror was placed in the annimals environment. From the behavior of the annimals ot was deduced whether they were aware of the fact that the image in the mirror was a reflection of them. This showed that primates and dolfins recognize themselves and thus have a consiousness. The same experiment with a computer would be a bit more complicated. To feel pain (or anything else), the computer would have to be aware of itself.
Creativeness is equally hard to grasp. Lets say it is the ability to create something new from existing things (things can be ideas, concepts). The way humans invent stuff often seems a bit random. Basically what happens is that there is some input (in the form of knowledge), some sort of problem that requires creativeness to be solved. From here it gets really vague. But at the end of the process a creative solution for the problem has been found. Once we grasp this process, I'm sure we can model it. An interesting thought is that we may not need to grasp it after all. Neural networks seem to do what I described. You put something in and something comes out. What happens in between is not known but we can still use the mechanism to solve some problems.
So to summarize this somewhat lengthy post: I agree with the posting to which I replied in that we need to understand first before we can judge something to be intelligent, conscious, etc. On the other hand we already have some mechanisms (neural nets) that solve problems in a way we do not fully understand!
The original article is a clear example of so called popular science. No actual new stuff is introduced. It's just a person reflecting about developments in computer science. As for Arthur C. Clarke. I've lost some of my respect for him after watching some bullshit programs presented by him on Discovery. Some of his books were nice, though (I read most of them when I was about 14).
I'm currently living in a single room appartment which makes it easy to use my PC as a stereo replacement. If I'll ever move I will probably have separate rooms for work, sleep and livingroom. In other words my PC won't be in the livingroom. Yet this is probably the place where I would go to relax and listen to music.
Of course I could network the whole place and put pcs everywhere but that's a little bit overkill if all you want is to listen music in your livingroom. So for people like me a cd player that understands mp3 is a nice product.
Who's denying it to them anyway? They claim a right that they deny others with their strategy of crushing smaller competitors. Non of their current products has technical advantages over its competitors. Some of these products are of high quality some aren't ('innovations' in this area are welcome as far as I'm concerned).
The things they claim are innovations are not. The two most important ones are: - browser integration - java API modifications
The first is a very obvious and rather succesful attempt to outcompete other browsers. The second is violating SUN's license. In other words they stole somebodies idea and are now trying to push the real innovator (SUN) out of the market.
For all you MS haters/lovers, I have this nice ZDNet link
One thing that always strikes me as odd is that many experienced software engineers act very conservative towards new technologies and are hard to convince that a technology actually has some potential. Examples: - Each time the word Java is dropped on this site a herd of C fans jumps on it claiming that its slow and bla bla bla. They usually end saying that C is quite adequate and that we don't need all this OO shit in the first place. - Each time browsers are discussed. An awkward program called Lynx shows up. This reflects the fact that some users don't like graphical environments. - Each time X alternatives are discussed, people start worrying about standards.
People, X is ugly, Java like languages are the future and the command prompt has no future only a long past. (I'm being provocative now:-) )
Developments like above are called progress. I'm not saying all progress is good. But one should have an open mind towards progress. X has its limitations (see other recent threads, and yes I know its not a GUI). Berlin addresses some of these issues. No matter if Berlin is the right solution, these issues are real are not going away.
Conservatism slows down change both in politics and technology. This may be good if no change is needed but in my opinion that is rarely the case. As a techonlogy junky I like to see lots of change. I annoys the hell out of me that people are still bothering with C, discussing the beauty of X and proposing Lynx as a viable alternative for generation 5 browsers while it is so painfully obvious that all of these are relics of the past (which does not mean they won't be around much longer). Please move on.
One of the limitations of the current internet is that at any moment your connection may drop to only a few bytes per second which is desdly for multimedia applications. I think part of internet 2 is bandwidth guarantees (correct me if I'm wrong). I.e. you can specify what bandwidth you need for a certain connection.
Furthermore, internet 2 probably uses backbones where bandwidth is measured in gigabits or perhaps even terabit/s. This would allow for many high speed connections over one line.
BTW. there was no mention of any compression. I hope they were not transmitting raw video signals. Surely 200 Mb/s is a bit much for high quality video.
BTW2. I got flamed a few days ago in another thread for predicting that eventually TV signals can and will be distributed over the internet. Mr. flamer you stand corrected:).
Well, not having a job used to be illegal and punished by imprisonment in the USSR. There always were jobs in the labor camps...
You also forgot to mention KGB, party line, mandatory work in agriculture, etc., etc.
Yes you are right about this. But despite this, things were a lot better for the average russian only a decade ago. Nobody cares about freedom of speech if there's no food to feed the kids. And for many russians that's reality right now. They gained freedom (sort of, in reality much of the old communist system is still present, especially in remote areas) but in they traded in their economy.
You've got both the temporal and the causal sequence wrong. Actually, first (the cause) the socialist system collapsed, and then (the consequence) on its ruins a very strange mixture of robber-baron capitalism and a corrupt third-world statism developed
You can argue about whether the socialist system or the economy collapsed first. I'd say that they happened at the same time. The economic system had been deteriorating long before the political system collapsed. Without the arms race, the communist system might still exist (like in china). Other eastern europe countries are showing that a successful introduction of capitalism is possible (Poland is the best example)
That means that they all die each month, right? Your statement makes no sense
No it doesn't mean they die. It just means they have to rely on criminal activities to survive. It's widely known that mineworkers for instance sometimes receive no salary at all for months. So they end up selling and trading everything they own.
That was the case under socialism, too. Life expectancy did decrease after the collapse, but again, the cause for that was not introduction of capitalism, but rather the collapse of the socialist system
Alcoholism has always been a problem in Russia. The situation has definately gotten worse during the past few years. The cause definately was the unsuccesful introduction of capitalism (which in turn was caused by the collapse of the socialist system). Not the other way around.
You might be under the impression by now that I am a communist. I'm not. I'm not even defending it. I just wanted to point out that from a russian point of view the end of the cold war was not such a happy event as people in the West would like to think. I do think it was unavoidable. The current economic and political situation is far worse than it was 10 years ago. Communism has been replaced by a corruption and anarchy which in my point of view is not an improvement. The entire infrastructure of the country has collapsed. And the country has little hope of improving this situation.
close to 0. You will have to rely on your local tv station to invest money in quality programs. BTW. I wouldn't be surprised if this shows up on discovery channel at some point in time. If I'm correct discovery and the BBC have some sort of deal for exchanging documentaries (correct me if I'm wrong).
From the point of view of the soviet union things only got worse since the end of the cold war. 10 years ago all soviet citizens had jobs, ok it didn't pay well but there was food, education and heath care. Then capitalism was introduced and the whole country collapsed. Since that there have been civil wars. Corruption has entered all layers of power (up to the president judging from recent rumors). Many people in the former soviet union haven't got enough money each month to buy even the most basic stuff to stay alive. Alcoholism is a major problem and the average life expectance is about 20 years lower than in the western world.
Luckily for other countries in the situation is better (Poland, East Germany, for instance). I just wanted to point out that the end of the cold war wasn't as much fun for everybody. Probably the current economic situation in what's left of the soviet union was unavoidable. We sure didn't help the communists with their revolution, they did that themselves.
About Reagan, he's never been my favorite politician but since I'm no American I don't really care American politicians.
BTW. I don't envy America for its current lack of choice in politics. I would have a hard time picking anybody from the president candidates list in the article. Basically their main contribution to this world seems to be how much money they can collect (in all sorts of interesting ways) for their campaigns and how often they can get their ass on TV. They are prepared to say anything that pleases the average American. And it is so obvious that they are lying all the time.
I guess you still don't. Indeed it is true that it takes less experience to do a certain job in Java than in C. That does not mean that good programming skills are useless. Java rather allows skilled developers to focus on more relevant problems than fixing memory leaks. Which means they can be more productive.
I don't think the end user is a victim here because he gets more functionality faster.
"I can't help but to laugh", please share the joke and tell us why you are so valuable. Just don't forget that COBOL programmers are still wanted too. Nevertheless COBOL by now is a relic of the past. I'm not saying C/C++ (somehow I have a feeling you specialize in one of those) is going away anytime soon. Enough code has been produced during the past 20 or so years to keep guys like you busy maintaining it. You'll probably be paid well for it too since new students are not so eager to learn old languages.
As for myself, I know about C, C++, Pascal and Java. I know they each have domains where they excel. I know Java's domain is becoming larger and is starting to overlap the other languages domains.
As for my yawn, everytime Slashdot posts a story on Java, you get these people claiming Java is so slow. Usually a story follows that while loading an applet the browser crashed and that therefore Java won't get anywhere. I've posted in several threads explaining why they are wrong over the past few months and did not feel like repeating myself. As for the faster than C claim. I'll admit it's a bit a weak claim right now. I don't have any references readily available. But if you're interest is genuine, why don't you get yourself a copy of jdk 1.3 beta (I think the hotspot compiler is include) and write some simple programs to test its performance. I've been hearing some impressive stories about it (haven't verified them).
"The TV set at work connects to a roof-top antenna."
OK, you want wireless, that's possible too. But that's not my point. The point simply is that most people will have fast internet connections in a few years. Lets get this into your thick skull. Once the connections are there they might as well be used to transmit video. And I just claim that if it can be done it will be done. As for wireless TV, in Holland there are only three channels available that way. If you want to receive the rest of the channels you need a satelite dish or cable.
BTW. I don't like to be called a Jerk, especially with such weak argumentation. I also think star trek the next generation is a piece of crap as most of the stuff America pukes out on european television. I can't stand those mediocre sitcoms and these poorly written&acted sf series. Not to mention those mind numbing talkshows. But that's beside the point, it's just my opinion.
What makes you think cable tv still worked after the earthquake in turkey. About payment, cable tv is not free either. I live in sweden and being dutch i hardly watch Swedish television. I completely depend on my internet connection to hear important news. And I must say it's a pretty efficient way to spread news. I heard about both events you mentioned through the internet (very early by the way). I sometimes watch CNN live over my internet connection. Quality sucks of course (56 kbps) but that can be improved by throwing more bandwidth at it. As I see it that bandwidth is coming (soon) and there will be a market for streamed video. Bye bye TV.
If you have skill enough you can probably pull it of in assembly. That's not the issue. What is the issue is that time and again casestudies show c program development to be far more expensive than Java development. This is the main reason companies are favoring Java development these days.
Your way of reusing code is copy and paste. That in it self is a maintenance problem because as soon as you duplicate, you've got two pieces of code to maintain.
About perl is a powerfull language (no argument about that). The resulting products suffer from the same maintainability problems as C and Cobol. I.e. you need a skilled programmer to understand and maintain the code. Unfortuantely these skilled programmers tend to move on and leave the companies they were working for with unmainable complicated code.
I'm not saying Java doesn't have these problems. I'm only saying that with java these problems are not so big.
Then the famous performance issue. Yawn, you've got some reading to do to upgrade your skills. There are programs out there that perform as good as C on a hotspot compiler.
You are right but technically that is an RMI feature, not a Jini feature. Jini does not require the presence of an actual VM on all the devices but if one is present, it can be used for this.
You have to look through the propaganda (basic skill of a software engineer these days, if you can't your lost).
Jini is something really simple. The concept goes like this you have a lot of devices all able to their particular thing. In order to do so they need other devices to their particular thing. Jini is all about providing a dynamic way to let these devices help each other. The process is really simple: - device registers itself at the lookup service upon connection - device asks for services it needs - the lookup service gives back a ref to a suitable device - two devices previously unknown to each other are now communicating
There are plenty applications for this really simple technology (I'm abit tired so I won't bother listing them, I suppose you know the way to SUN's propaganda pages).
So this is what you can do with Jini now to why should want to do it at all:
Computers are becoming smarter smaller and cheaper. Computing power and networking is becoming dirtcheap. So cheap it can be put in any device. If it can be done it will be done. So there is a need for these devices to communicate. What would normally happen is that companies start making incompatible propietary protocols for the devices communication. But industry has learned that propietary protocols have their limitations so they want something more standard. So they sit together and try to come up with a protocol. At this point Jini comes in as an easy to use solution.
It is now only a bit more than a year rumours about Jini started spreading (I recall an article on JavaSoft June/July '98) so it has come a long way in only a year. Of course there are not many products around at this time but a lot of companies are really interested in this stuff so I expect to see some products the coming years.
Sure it would be faster but it would have taken three times as long to develop it, four times as long to debug it. It would randomly crash for no reason at all and you could forget about reusing any of the code.
I'm exagerating a little (but only a little). I think the whole thing would be pretty limited if written in C.
I'm glad you recognize perl is evil because it is. It's syntax is a nightmare and I have feeling all these nerdy scripts currently running many websites will cause a lot of maintenance problems in the future.
Java may not be the most optimal language performance wise but Java code is highly maintainable. If you want performance, hack away in C. If you want to cut your development cost in half go for Java.
Well blood is a more complex fluid than water. I think that the freezing point of water under controled circomstances (pressure and purity) is much more precise than the freezing point of blood.
OK, it took me a few minutes. Why would TV broadcasting companies kill the goose with the golden eggs??? Well simple they are not. On the contrary.
Porn and violence is good for advertising. So the last thing they want to do is get that of the screen. But they can't just broadcast more of it because then parents and politicians start to complain. Here comes the V chip! What a nice product. If you don't wan't all the porn and violence enable it. If you want porn and violence, leave it in the default position (off!).
In other words the V chip is just another symptom of America's hypocritical culture. Politicians and parents can rest assured because the V chip is going to save their children meanwhile tv companies can increase the level of violence and sex in their programs.
And since the average american is too lazy to even walk to the postbox (see other post on slashdot), most of them won't bother to enable the bloody chip (if only for the trouble you have to go through whenever you want to see a movie without the children present).
So from my point of view the V chip is brilliant since it will shut up those fucking moralists for a few years and at the same time the tv programs will get even more interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
I know how to do that. I used to have a webpage with forms for all my favorite searchengines. But that's not the issue. The issue is that the version of google offered on the google site lacks this feature.
Google is mostly used by expert users. Other users have probably not found their way to the google site yet. So based on that you would expect a site that is tailored to expert users (i.e. lots of nice features such as the before mentioned dropdown menu).
The google site seems to suffer a bit from the fact that it was created by a bunch of unix people. Great on the inside but shockingly primitive on the outside. Of course you have to consider that they are only selling what's on the inside (i.e. their search technology). But even then it would probably only help their cause if they payed some attention to the user interface.
After all, if more people start using google, more portals will consider buying their technology.
I use www.alltheweb.com too. And sometimes I even use altavista or yahoo. I also like www.google.com though it sometimes comes back with some redundant results. I.e. the same link is listed more than once. This is especially annoying if you want 100 links at once since often most of these links are duplicates. Also I noticed it doesn't find my homepage :( if I enter my full name. This indicates that google covers only a small part of the web since my homepage has been around for a few years (though, the original site now only forwards to my new site).
About the user interface. All you lynx addicts seem to be really enthousiastic about its sinplicity: a Gif, a textfield and two buttons. I seriously miss the dropdownmenu which allows you to select between 10 and 100. It only shows up after you search which usually causes me to rerun the search. As for why it is so simple, I think the engine is licensed to portals like mynetscape who use the engine on their site rather than google wanting to be another portal. Its a good thing that they keep this page around, though.
As long as I know Linux is around (since 1995, that's four years ago) I've been reading about wine. It still is rather buggy and doesn't run much software reliably.
Somehow I don't think wine will ever be a good alternative for running windows programs on windows. Of course you can design your programs to work with wine (like corel is trying to do) but its not the same thing. You can forget about ms office bcause unless MS wants this to work on wine, it will do everything to prevent it from working on wine.
This particular "thirteen year old" girl glasly accepted all his propositions. I mean there's some pretty sick idots out there on the net. If I was approached like this I would have a hard time believing I was really dealing with a thirteen year old.
If I read correctly he only told the police he had porn when they were going to check it anyway. I.e. he was trying to limit the damage.
first: the guy is a sick bastard and probably (if found guilty) deserves his punishment.
BUT: I don't like the way he was arrested. His privacy was grossly violated and I fear the FBI is likely to apply its methods for other crimes as well.
I don't like the idea of the FBI applieing 1984ish methods even if it's for the good cause of finding & arresting child abusers.
The guy was set up and subsequently arrested. He was actively approached by an undercover agent clearly with the idea of arresting him. Would the guy have actively searched for a thirteen year old girl if he wouldn't have been approached? I'm not sure. If he wouldn't have done so, he wouldn't have committed a crime and there would not have been a reason to arrest him (assuming they would not have examined his PC for kiddy porn).
"You're going to hear a lot of bull about how this is somehow a violation of his privacy, but anyone trying to lure 13 year-old girls to his house deserves to be put away for a long, long time."
Typical reaction. Most people will have this "lets lynch the guy" knee jerk reaction. But this guy is coming back in society someday. Prison, especially the american type, is not well known for its educating effect on its prisoners. In other words an already sick person goes in and somebody even more sick is likely to come out. And as I already pointed out the presumed thirteen year old girl did actively lure him to this place (and she/he wasn't even thirteen probably) which puts things in a slightly different context.
"Good. Man, I can stomach consenting people doing anything they want sexually so long as it doesn't involve kids or animals (the two groups who can't really give consent)."
Interesting to mention that I read once that both forms of sexual disorders are very common across all cultures. It's a very political correct thing and in my opinion gratuit to disapprove of it. I think if you ask most people they will agree with you that it is a distasteful thing to do but at the same time both cattle and children are the victims of horny persons often. So I'll fully agree with you on this (just to be safe).
Exactly, as this post is still young (only 5 or so replies as I'm reading, no doubt over 30 by the time I stop writing), it the inevitable "computer are not intelligent", "you can't replicate humans in computers" psotings will show up. We've been through that on several occasions.
The relevant questions to ask are:
- what is conscious
- when can you call a thought/idea creative
- what is the difference between living and not living
I don't think any of these questions have an answer that everybody understands. being an atheist and convinced that the human being is not the perfect creature imaginable, the idea that we can create something that is creative, has a conscious and fits my very vague idea of alive is acceptable though I don't see it happening anytime soon.
Somewhere in the article it is stated that computers will match the human brains speed early next century. I'm not sure whether I can agree with this. How fast is the brain actually and do we measure this speed in gigaflops? What is more reasonable to say is that computers will soon be able to understand/parse our spoken language. Computers will have enough AI to grasp some of the semantics of what we say. For the latter to happen, we will have to provide them with a context. The more complex this context the more it can understand. Right now the context in which a computer has to understand its input is very limited. Most programs context can be put in a small number of if statements.
The AI community can provide us with techniques that can enhance this context (rule based systems, belief networks, neural networks).
Intelligent behavior is not limited to responding to input though. What's also needed is the ability to learn. This is where I see a problem. I'm not aware of any techniques to aquire new knowledge and add it to the existing knowledge. Neural networks are generally trained for a limited set of input with some knowledge about the output to guide this process. This is not the same thing.
Once we solved the context issue and the learning abilities, we still have consciousness and creativeness to conquer.
Consciousness is about self reflection. I.e. the ability to think about it self. To test whether animals are conscious of themselves experiments with mirrors have been performed. In these experiments a mirror was placed in the annimals environment. From the behavior of the annimals ot was deduced whether they were aware of the fact that the image in the mirror was a reflection of them. This showed that primates and dolfins recognize themselves and thus have a consiousness. The same experiment with a computer would be a bit more complicated. To feel pain (or anything else), the computer would have to be aware of itself.
Creativeness is equally hard to grasp. Lets say it is the ability to create something new from existing things (things can be ideas, concepts). The way humans invent stuff often seems a bit random. Basically what happens is that there is some input (in the form of knowledge), some sort of problem that requires creativeness to be solved. From here it gets really vague. But at the end of the process a creative solution for the problem has been found. Once we grasp this process, I'm sure we can model it. An interesting thought is that we may not need to grasp it after all. Neural networks seem to do what I described. You put something in and something comes out. What happens in between is not known but we can still use the mechanism to solve some problems.
So to summarize this somewhat lengthy post:
I agree with the posting to which I replied in that we need to understand first before we can judge something to be intelligent, conscious, etc. On the other hand we already have some mechanisms (neural nets) that solve problems in a way we do not fully understand!
The original article is a clear example of so called popular science. No actual new stuff is introduced. It's just a person reflecting about developments in computer science. As for Arthur C. Clarke. I've lost some of my respect for him after watching some bullshit programs presented by him on Discovery. Some of his books were nice, though (I read most of them when I was about 14).
I'm currently living in a single room appartment which makes it easy to use my PC as a stereo replacement. If I'll ever move I will probably have separate rooms for work, sleep and livingroom. In other words my PC won't be in the livingroom. Yet this is probably the place where I would go to relax and listen to music.
Of course I could network the whole place and put pcs everywhere but that's a little bit overkill if all you want is to listen music in your livingroom. So for people like me a cd player that understands mp3 is a nice product.
Who's denying it to them anyway? They claim a right that they deny others with their strategy of crushing smaller competitors. Non of their current products has technical advantages over its competitors. Some of these products are of high quality some aren't ('innovations' in this area are welcome as far as I'm concerned).
The things they claim are innovations are not. The two most important ones are:
- browser integration
- java API modifications
The first is a very obvious and rather succesful attempt to outcompete other browsers.
The second is violating SUN's license. In other words they stole somebodies idea and are now trying to push the real innovator (SUN) out of the market.
For all you MS haters/lovers, I have this nice ZDNet link
One thing that always strikes me as odd is that many experienced software engineers act very conservative towards new technologies and are hard to convince that a technology actually has some potential.
:-) )
Examples:
- Each time the word Java is dropped on this site a herd of C fans jumps on it claiming that its slow and bla bla bla. They usually end saying that C is quite adequate and that we don't need all this OO shit in the first place.
- Each time browsers are discussed. An awkward program called Lynx shows up. This reflects the fact that some users don't like graphical environments.
- Each time X alternatives are discussed, people start worrying about standards.
People, X is ugly, Java like languages are the future and the command prompt has no future only a long past. (I'm being provocative now
Developments like above are called progress. I'm not saying all progress is good. But one should have an open mind towards progress. X has its limitations (see other recent threads, and yes I know its not a GUI). Berlin addresses some of these issues. No matter if Berlin is the right solution, these issues are real are not going away.
Conservatism slows down change both in politics and technology. This may be good if no change is needed but in my opinion that is rarely the case. As a techonlogy junky I like to see lots of change. I annoys the hell out of me that people are still bothering with C, discussing the beauty of X and proposing Lynx as a viable alternative for generation 5 browsers while it is so painfully obvious that all of these are relics of the past (which does not mean they won't be around much longer). Please move on.
One of the limitations of the current internet is that at any moment your connection may drop to only a few bytes per second which is desdly for multimedia applications. I think part of internet 2 is bandwidth guarantees (correct me if I'm wrong). I.e. you can specify what bandwidth you need for a certain connection.
:).
Furthermore, internet 2 probably uses backbones where bandwidth is measured in gigabits or perhaps even terabit/s. This would allow for many high speed connections over one line.
BTW. there was no mention of any compression. I hope they were not transmitting raw video signals. Surely 200 Mb/s is a bit much for high quality video.
BTW2. I got flamed a few days ago in another thread for predicting that eventually TV signals can and will be distributed over the internet. Mr. flamer you stand corrected
Well, not having a job used to be illegal and punished by imprisonment in the USSR. There always were jobs in the labor camps...
You also forgot to mention KGB, party line, mandatory work in agriculture, etc., etc.
Yes you are right about this. But despite this, things were a lot better for the average russian only a decade ago. Nobody cares about freedom of speech if there's no food to feed the kids. And for many russians that's reality right now. They gained freedom (sort of, in reality much of the old communist system is still present, especially in remote areas) but in they traded in their economy.
You've got both the temporal and the causal sequence wrong. Actually, first (the cause) the socialist system collapsed, and then (the consequence) on its ruins a very strange mixture of robber-baron capitalism and a corrupt third-world statism developed
You can argue about whether the socialist system or the economy collapsed first. I'd say that they happened at the same time. The economic system had been deteriorating long before the political system collapsed. Without the arms race, the communist system might still exist (like in china). Other eastern europe countries are showing that a successful introduction of capitalism is possible (Poland is the best example)
That means that they all die each month, right? Your statement makes no sense
No it doesn't mean they die. It just means they have to rely on criminal activities to survive. It's widely known that mineworkers for instance sometimes receive no salary at all for months. So they end up selling and trading everything they own.
That was the case under socialism, too. Life expectancy did decrease after the collapse, but again, the cause for that was not introduction of capitalism, but rather the collapse of the socialist system
Alcoholism has always been a problem in Russia. The situation has definately gotten worse during the past few years. The cause definately was the unsuccesful introduction of capitalism (which in turn was caused by the collapse of the socialist system). Not the other way around.
You might be under the impression by now that I am a communist. I'm not. I'm not even defending it. I just wanted to point out that from a russian point of view the end of the cold war was not such a happy event as people in the West would like to think. I do think it was unavoidable. The current economic and political situation is far worse than it was 10 years ago. Communism has been replaced by a corruption and anarchy which in my point of view is not an improvement. The entire infrastructure of the country has collapsed. And the country has little hope of improving this situation.
close to 0. You will have to rely on your local tv station to invest money in quality programs. BTW. I wouldn't be surprised if this shows up on discovery channel at some point in time. If I'm correct discovery and the BBC have some sort of deal for exchanging documentaries (correct me if I'm wrong).
From the point of view of the soviet union things only got worse since the end of the cold war. 10 years ago all soviet citizens had jobs, ok it didn't pay well but there was food, education and heath care. Then capitalism was introduced and the whole country collapsed. Since that there have been civil wars. Corruption has entered all layers of power (up to the president judging from recent rumors). Many people in the former soviet union haven't got enough money each month to buy even the most basic stuff to stay alive. Alcoholism is a major problem and the average life expectance is about 20 years lower than in the western world.
Luckily for other countries in the situation is better (Poland, East Germany, for instance). I just wanted to point out that the end of the cold war wasn't as much fun for everybody. Probably the current economic situation in what's left of the soviet union was unavoidable. We sure didn't help the communists with their revolution, they did that themselves.
About Reagan, he's never been my favorite politician but since I'm no American I don't really care American politicians.
BTW. I don't envy America for its current lack of choice in politics. I would have a hard time picking anybody from the president candidates list in the article. Basically their main contribution to this world seems to be how much money they can collect (in all sorts of interesting ways) for their campaigns and how often they can get their ass on TV. They are prepared to say anything that pleases the average American. And it is so obvious that they are lying all the time.
Doesn't Corel have a similar tool. I'm not sure here but if so they might port it to Linux as they are currently doing with their other products.
"Oh, I see..",
I guess you still don't. Indeed it is true that it takes less experience to do a certain job in Java than in C. That does not mean that good programming skills are useless. Java rather allows skilled developers to focus on more relevant problems than fixing memory leaks. Which means they can be more productive.
I don't think the end user is a victim here because he gets more functionality faster.
"I can't help but to laugh", please share the joke and tell us why you are so valuable. Just don't forget that COBOL programmers are still wanted too. Nevertheless COBOL by now is a relic of the past. I'm not saying C/C++ (somehow I have a feeling you specialize in one of those) is going away anytime soon. Enough code has been produced during the past 20 or so years to keep guys like you busy maintaining it. You'll probably be paid well for it too since new students are not so eager to learn old languages.
As for myself, I know about C, C++, Pascal and Java. I know they each have domains where they excel. I know Java's domain is becoming larger and is starting to overlap the other languages domains.
As for my yawn, everytime Slashdot posts a story on Java, you get these people claiming Java is so slow. Usually a story follows that while loading an applet the browser crashed and that therefore Java won't get anywhere.
I've posted in several threads explaining why they are wrong over the past few months and did not feel like repeating myself. As for the faster than C claim. I'll admit it's a bit a weak claim right now. I don't have any references readily available. But if you're interest is genuine, why don't you get yourself a copy of jdk 1.3 beta (I think the hotspot compiler is include) and write some simple programs to test its performance. I've been hearing some impressive stories about it (haven't verified them).
"The TV set at work connects to a roof-top antenna."
OK, you want wireless, that's possible too. But that's not my point. The point simply is that most people will have fast internet connections in a few years. Lets get this into your thick skull. Once the connections are there they might as well be used to transmit video. And I just claim that if it can be done it will be done. As for wireless TV, in Holland there are only three channels available that way. If you want to receive the rest of the channels you need a satelite dish or cable.
BTW. I don't like to be called a Jerk, especially with such weak argumentation. I also think star trek the next generation is a piece of crap as most of the stuff America pukes out on european television. I can't stand those mediocre sitcoms and these poorly written&acted sf series. Not to mention those mind numbing talkshows. But that's beside the point, it's just my opinion.
What makes you think cable tv still worked after the earthquake in turkey. About payment, cable tv is not free either.
I live in sweden and being dutch i hardly watch Swedish television. I completely depend on my internet connection to hear important news. And I must say it's a pretty efficient way to spread news. I heard about both events you mentioned through the internet (very early by the way).
I sometimes watch CNN live over my internet connection. Quality sucks of course (56 kbps) but that can be improved by throwing more bandwidth at it.
As I see it that bandwidth is coming (soon) and there will be a market for streamed video. Bye bye TV.
If you have skill enough you can probably pull it of in assembly. That's not the issue. What is the issue is that time and again casestudies show c program development to be far more expensive than Java development. This is the main reason companies are favoring Java development these days.
Your way of reusing code is copy and paste. That in it self is a maintenance problem because as soon as you duplicate, you've got two pieces of code to maintain.
About perl is a powerfull language (no argument about that). The resulting products suffer from the same maintainability problems as C and Cobol. I.e. you need a skilled programmer to understand and maintain the code. Unfortuantely these skilled programmers tend to move on and leave the companies they were working for with unmainable complicated code.
I'm not saying Java doesn't have these problems. I'm only saying that with java these problems are not so big.
Then the famous performance issue. Yawn, you've got some reading to do to upgrade your skills. There are programs out there that perform as good as C on a hotspot compiler.
While you are at it you'll also want to try netbeans www.netbeans.com/org (i'm not so sure)
You are right but technically that is an RMI feature, not a Jini feature. Jini does not require the presence of an actual VM on all the devices but if one is present, it can be used for this.
You have to look through the propaganda (basic skill of a software engineer these days, if you can't your lost).
Jini is something really simple. The concept goes like this you have a lot of devices all able to their particular thing. In order to do so they need other devices to their particular thing. Jini is all about providing a dynamic way to let these devices help each other.
The process is really simple:
- device registers itself at the lookup service upon connection
- device asks for services it needs
- the lookup service gives back a ref to a suitable device
- two devices previously unknown to each other are now communicating
There are plenty applications for this really simple technology (I'm abit tired so I won't bother listing them, I suppose you know the way to SUN's propaganda pages).
So this is what you can do with Jini now to why should want to do it at all:
Computers are becoming smarter smaller and cheaper. Computing power and networking is becoming dirtcheap. So cheap it can be put in any device. If it can be done it will be done. So there is a need for these devices to communicate. What would normally happen is that companies start making incompatible propietary protocols for the devices communication.
But industry has learned that propietary protocols have their limitations so they want something more standard. So they sit together and try to come up with a protocol. At this point Jini comes in as an easy to use solution.
It is now only a bit more than a year rumours about Jini started spreading (I recall an article on JavaSoft June/July '98) so it has come a long way in only a year. Of course there are not many products around at this time but a lot of companies are really interested in this stuff so I expect to see some products the coming years.
Sure it would be faster but it would have taken three times as long to develop it, four times as long to debug it. It would randomly crash for no reason at all and you could forget about reusing any of the code.
I'm exagerating a little (but only a little). I think the whole thing would be pretty limited if written in C.
I'm glad you recognize perl is evil because it is. It's syntax is a nightmare and I have feeling all these nerdy scripts currently running many websites will cause a lot of maintenance problems in the future.
Java may not be the most optimal language performance wise but Java code is highly maintainable. If you want performance, hack away in C. If you want to cut your development cost in half go for Java.
i'm dutch
Well blood is a more complex fluid than water. I think that the freezing point of water under controled circomstances (pressure and purity) is much more precise than the freezing point of blood.
OK, it took me a few minutes. Why would TV broadcasting companies kill the goose with the golden eggs??? Well simple they are not. On the contrary.
Porn and violence is good for advertising. So the last thing they want to do is get that of the screen. But they can't just broadcast more of it because then parents and politicians start to complain. Here comes the V chip! What a nice product. If you don't wan't all the porn and violence enable it. If you want porn and violence, leave it in the default position (off!).
In other words the V chip is just another symptom of America's hypocritical culture. Politicians and parents can rest assured because the V chip is going to save their children meanwhile tv companies can increase the level of violence and sex in their programs.
And since the average american is too lazy to even walk to the postbox (see other post on slashdot), most of them won't bother to enable the bloody chip (if only for the trouble you have to go through whenever you want to see a movie without the children present).
So from my point of view the V chip is brilliant since it will shut up those fucking moralists for a few years and at the same time the tv programs will get even more interesting.