I think the REAL joke here is making a real annoucement on April 1st and having all these people thinking it is a joke.
It is not a joke because it would be a damn lame one. The only "funny" thing in it would be the 1GB limit. Hahaha. Most users wouldn't get to that anyway. It would be as if they are saying "Free email, how ridiculous is that?!?" or "1GB, did you really believe we were THAT good?!?"
They store a lot of stuff for the web already, and if they are serious about it they can make the 1GB limit thing (especially if you think in the long term).
Not really. One should want to revise his own biases once they are evident, even for pure self-interest. Having someone pointing them out to you may help that.
Correct me if I am wrong, but MS is claiming that iTunes *technically* restricts the user somehow (I don't know how much of this is true since I don't really know the service very well). This is *much* different than the MS monopoly based on an overwhelming installed base of Windows, but without explicit technical restrictions to competitors.
It seems to me there would be hypocrisy only if Windows *technically* prevented other software (like other browsers or office suites for example) to be run.
I suppose you could interpret the comment as "congratulations to those winners which were deserving" (and not to the ones who got it by chance or unfairly).
A great example of it is the fact that the pope John Paul II didn't get the Peace prize this year. His 25-year papacy did a lot for peace, with his strong opposition to dictatorships (like in Cuba or the pre-1989 communist eastern Europe bloc), usually traveling to those places to bring more attention to his views, to the war in Iraq etc. Maybe more important were his apologies for the misdeeds of the Roman church in the past (including the long overdue apology to Galileo) and reapproximations to Jewish and Orthodox churches. Just think of it, this pope went to Israel to pray side by side with them in sinagogues.
But he wouldn't get the prize because of his views on abortion, birth control, priest's celibacy etc, which have little to do with peace but are unpopular among liberals. Not that I support those... actually, I am an atheist, in case you are wondering.
This sounds to me exactly the same as those predictions that paper, or even written language altogheter, would vanish because of computers. Truth is, people now read and write even more than before because of computers, and even though more information is stored digitally, proportionally speaking, the amount of information around is much greater because of computers and I wouldn't be surprised if printed matter increased as a result.
Cursive handwritting came to be for a reason: it is faster to use. Besides its use on paper, which seems to be here to stay, it will also be used on computers, once they are able to interpret it very easily.
Yep. The article presents the whole thing as if the guy is just right, not caring to tell why both NASA and ESA didn't bother putting his experiment on board... pretty bad journalism if you ask me.
I disagree with you; paintings have the function of causing an interesting response on the viewer. This will depend on how their internal elements are laid down and related to each other. A painting can either work or not, just like a piece of software.
Can anyone explain to me why some people say object orientation is overrated? The author of the article doesn't think "it has much to offer good programmers", for one. I would find it a pain to live without it and I think it makes things incredibly easier, especially if you throw things like generic programming into the picture. And I don't think I am brainwashed because I started programming quite before OO became widely used.
The mortality rate of driving a car is 4%?!? Maybe, maybe in a lifetime of driving, but even in that case 4% sounds too much. As for smoking, again in a lifetime and you can choose not to smoke. SARS spreads and kills much quicker than that. If it is let loose, without a cure, it will kill a LOT more than 4% of the population.
I agree that in that context HAL was not crazy but working properly. However, back in the 60's people believed you could eventualy have machines who could perfectly process information all the time. Mistakes were assumed to be the result of human faulty biological hardware, not a theoretical necessity. Today we know making perfect inference all the time to be intractable, no matter how powerful your hardware is. In order to process information in a tractable fashion, intelligent machines and us alike have to take risks of making mistakes now and then. In some of us many of these little bets outcomes are so bad that these people actually do go crazy, but that is a small enough portion of the population. The same will happen with intelligent machines, and some of them will make huge mistakes or even go consistently crazy. Which doesn't mean they will be useless, only that the proper cheks and balances will have to be put in place, like they are in place for people today.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the REAL joke here is making a real annoucement on April 1st and having all these people thinking it is a joke.
It is not a joke because it would be a damn lame one. The only "funny" thing in it would be the 1GB limit. Hahaha. Most users wouldn't get to that anyway. It would be as if they are saying "Free email, how ridiculous is that?!?" or "1GB, did you really believe we were THAT good?!?"
They store a lot of stuff for the web already, and if they are serious about it they can make the 1GB limit thing (especially if you think in the long term).
Not really. One should want to revise his own biases once they are evident, even for pure self-interest. Having someone pointing them out to you may help that.
Correct me if I am wrong, but MS is claiming that iTunes *technically* restricts the user somehow (I don't know how much of this is true since I don't really know the service very well). This is *much* different than the MS monopoly based on an overwhelming installed base of Windows, but without explicit technical restrictions to competitors.
It seems to me there would be hypocrisy only if Windows *technically* prevented other software (like other browsers or office suites for example) to be run.
Rodrigo
I suppose you could interpret the comment as "congratulations to those winners which were deserving" (and not to the ones who got it by chance or unfairly).
A great example of it is the fact that the pope John Paul II didn't get the Peace prize this year. His 25-year papacy did a lot for peace, with his strong opposition to dictatorships (like in Cuba or the pre-1989 communist eastern Europe bloc), usually traveling to those places to bring more attention to his views, to the war in Iraq etc. Maybe more important were his apologies for the misdeeds of the Roman church in the past (including the long overdue apology to Galileo) and reapproximations to Jewish and Orthodox churches. Just think of it, this pope went to Israel to pray side by side with them in sinagogues.
But he wouldn't get the prize because of his views on abortion, birth control, priest's celibacy etc, which have little to do with peace but are unpopular among liberals. Not that I support those... actually, I am an atheist, in case you are wondering.
Gee, only if Gauss were a pedophile... he died at almost 80 when Nobel was about 20. I suppose his wife was about the same age.
This sounds to me exactly the same as those predictions that paper, or even written language altogheter, would vanish because of computers. Truth is, people now read and write even more than before because of computers, and even though more information is stored digitally, proportionally speaking, the amount of information around is much greater because of computers and I wouldn't be surprised if printed matter increased as a result.
Cursive handwritting came to be for a reason: it is faster to use. Besides its use on paper, which seems to be here to stay, it will also be used on computers, once they are able to interpret it very easily.
Yep. The article presents the whole thing as if the guy is just right, not caring to tell why both NASA and ESA didn't bother putting his experiment on board... pretty bad journalism if you ask me.
I disagree with you; paintings have the function of causing an interesting response on the viewer. This will depend on how their internal elements are laid down and related to each other. A painting can either work or not, just like a piece of software.
what we are REALLY worried about is speling Nazis. :p
:P
Did you mean "spelling Nazis"?
Can anyone explain to me why some people say object orientation is overrated? The author of the article doesn't think "it has much to offer good programmers", for one. I would find it a pain to live without it and I think it makes things incredibly easier, especially if you throw things like generic programming into the picture. And I don't think I am brainwashed because I started programming quite before OO became widely used.
The mortality rate of driving a car is 4%?!? Maybe, maybe in a lifetime of driving, but even in that case 4% sounds too much. As for smoking, again in a lifetime and you can choose not to smoke. SARS spreads and kills much quicker than that. If it is let loose, without a cure, it will kill a LOT more than 4% of the population.
I agree that in that context HAL was not crazy but working properly. However, back in the 60's people believed you could eventualy have machines who could perfectly process information all the time. Mistakes were assumed to be the result of human faulty biological hardware, not a theoretical necessity. Today we know making perfect inference all the time to be intractable, no matter how powerful your hardware is. In order to process information in a tractable fashion, intelligent machines and us alike have to take risks of making mistakes now and then. In some of us many of these little bets outcomes are so bad that these people actually do go crazy, but that is a small enough portion of the population. The same will happen with intelligent machines, and some of them will make huge mistakes or even go consistently crazy. Which doesn't mean they will be useless, only that the proper cheks and balances will have to be put in place, like they are in place for people today.