Re:You call that flourishing!?!
on
Patent Nonsense
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· Score: 1
According to this the demise of IP rights has granted them the ability to proudly cheer "We're number six! We're number six!":)
Yes, and numer 5/6 means higher than Hong Kong, Germany, Canada, the UK and Japan. To name a few.
It's a different situation
on
Patent Nonsense
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· Score: 2, Informative
I live in The Netherlands myself and while I generally disagree with the whole patent process (especially in the US) I must point out that The Netherlands and Switzerland have a very different economy than the US. Their economies are based primarily on trade and services (banking, insurance, transport). So it's not that big of a surprise to see how the patent laws developed differently from the US in these countries.
Energy of a 100 megaton bomb as a fraction of the kinetic energy of this asteroid: 1/27th
Hardly a bitch-slap. More of an abject whine.
First, thank you for the calculation. I'm not going check it because I'm a lazy SOB. But, I think 1/27 of the kinetic energy of the asteroid is quite a significant fraction if you want to stear the asteroid off its course.
A 'nudge' to the side doesn't need to be that powerful and, if done early enough, 1/27 of the asteroids kinetic energy should be more than enough.
I think you're not quite correct about this. The current top of the line CCD film scanners (4000dpi), quite closely approach the theoretical limit for chemical film at 35mm. A 4000dpi scanner gives an output of about 20 megapixels. The moment digital camera's have this resolution they are equal to film. This is only theoretically. In practice it will happen much sooner because the pixels a digital camera produces are generally much 'cleaner' than the filmgrain/scanner combo.
In my opinion digital camera's already surpassed analog camera's with 35mm film. See for example the new Canon 1D camera. It will take a little longer for medium-format film camera's to be replaced but I think this will be a matter of 2-3 years.
Re:Something that should happen more often.
on
Code Red Back For More
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· Score: 2, Informative
While this is a remote exploit, it's not nearly as severe as the default.ida one on IIS. The apache exploit can be used to gather directory listings etc. and does NOT allow arbitrary code to run.
I'll tell you why they stopped searching for life, they already found it. Or rather, it found us.
For the last couple of years the martians have been sending their best specimens to earth to infiltrate into our governments. Just recently they booked an enormous success. They managed to get one of their top spies into the most powerful position on earth. Sure, he still has a speech impediment and he still has trouble with human logic but it worked! The humans actually bought it!
AFAIK Mozilla still doesn't support roaming via HTTP/LDAP like Netscape 4.X does. This feature is enormously useful for me since I switch workplaces a lot, and between different OS's. Anyone know when/if this feature is planned?
I'd like to emphasize one thing:
With userland threads I meant non-preemptive deterministic threads. This is what txObject implements and it gives you the advantage of not having to put mutexes around everything. Because the threading is deterministic it it much easier to predict control flow and easier to debug.
Indeed. What I like especially is a mixture between userland and kernel threads. The userland threads give you the advantage of the threading design model and you only use kernel level threads when absolutely necessary.
Take a look at txObject, a C++ library which has both it's own threading engine (userland) and an abstraction of kernel threads. Unfortunately txObject threads currently don't work too well together with Linux's pthreads (due to some quirks in pthread) but this is being worked on.
This is a really nice library, sort of Java-like. With abstractions of threads, sockets, locks, timers, events etc. etc.. And a complete object model. It builds on Win32 and various *nixes and is GPL'ed.
Re:As a humanitarian I'm outraged by the waste of
on
Home Improvement
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· Score: 3
NASA is costing each and every US citizen around $742 EACH YEAR, and yet the people on the space station cannot even follow orders ?
Ok, you are clearly trolling but i still want to set the record straight.
NASA has the smallest budget of the major agencies in the Federal Government. Its budget has represented less than 1 percent of the total Federal budget each year since 1977.
The above link also mentions a total budget of 14,035 million dollars. This amounts to about 56 dollars per US citizen per year. Not quite your quoted number of $742 per year.
.. I also live about 2 miles from the Golden Gate... would have been cool to walk down and check it out.
You said it yourself...
Re:There is a path to cracking RSA
on
RSA Cracked - Not
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· Score: 1
It's conceivable that in a few decades a whole new class of computational devices may exist that
make cracking RSA and many other problems trivial. You have been forewarned!
In fact, breaking RSA has by far been the most revolutionary algorithm developed for quantum computers. There are a few others, like Grover's search algorithm which provide a much less exciting speedup (I don't have the numbers available here). What I find interesting is that so few useable algorithms have been developed for quantum computers, probably because it's so hard...
Another question is: how fast will these quantum computers be? It can be all nice in theory but if we can't get them to run any faster than say 1 KHz we're still not getting anywhere.
On the other hand, quantum encryption is exciting indeed! This will provide us with a secure transmission channel which is guaranteed to be secure from eavesdropping.
I did have backups and could restore almost everything. The only thing I lost was a rather new DNS zone file. But that's not the point. It's never nice to have your system crash on you beyond repair is it?
No, I don't use the 2.4.x kernels and didn't use anything experimental except for ReiserFS. It's a small server so the world won't end when it crashes.
The reason I tried ReiserFS was that it provided (much) higher performance than ext2 and the server (was) a slow machine. I thought it would be stable since both Mandrake and Suse push it as being a production quality fs, my mistake.
The question about being in the dark related to a versioning fs, not the use of ReiserFS.
Question: if nobody ever uses experimental stuff (even on a server), how are we going to evolve?
The past weekend was a nightmare for me. The root filesystem of my mailserver got severely corrupted and I had to do a complete reinstall. I had been running ReiserFS on that partition and this is how it got corrupted.
When I tried to install a 3Com 509 card it froze the system when I ifconfig'ed it and I had to reboot. Then ReiserFS did it's journal replay and when the system was up again it turned out that some files had their contents scrambled (/etc/conf.modules contained some lines from/etc/hosts!). I suspect ReiserFS did a bad journal replay which caused this. One reboot later the whole system wouldn't boot stopping at the boot loader. This all happened when using Mandrake 7.1 with ReiserFS 3.5.19.
I wonder if people have experience with ext3. I've heard it also does data journalling whereas ReiserFS only does meta-data journalling. Data journalling may cause a performance hit but I'm willing to take that for reliability.
Also, I wonder if anyone knows if versioning (used in databases like InterBase) has been used in filesystems yet. Versioning seems ideal to me for filesystems as it provides low overhead and atomicity. But maybe I'm completely in the dark here, anybody care to comment?
I don't feel like we've advanced much. Programming is still the same. If someone stopped writing code in 1990 and started up again in 2000, he wouldn't feel like the world had passed him by.
You are completely ignoring the Internet here. In 1990 most people hadn't heard of Internet and there was little programming being done that was Internet related. Nowadays it's hard finding a programming job that is not Internet related in some way.
Maybe the way we program hasn't changed much, but *what* we program sure has.
This is totally incorrect. CommuniGate Pro is a full featured messaging server and NOT only an MTA. It supports SMTP, IMAP, POP, LDAP, ACAP, HTTP. And yes it supports up to 100K accounts on ONE box.
The only thing that CommuniGate Pro doesn't support is the calendaring. But I think they are working on that. You obviously don't have a clue what you're talking about.
This is a terrible performance for a mailserver. A high performance mailserver should be able to handle 50K-100K accounts on ONE box. Take a look at CommuniGate Pro (www.stalker.com) from Stalker Software if you don't believe me. This fine server is available on almost any platform you can think of and makes Exchange look like a Mikey Mouse server in comparison.
Ok, that is a valid way of approaching this class of problems.
However, I still have three questions concerning your approach (I assume you are Chris McKinstry of the mindpixel project). I hope you will still read this post...
1) How will you deal with conflicting knowledge? It is known that humans often display conflicting knowledge about the world. For (a classic) example:
- Women love the morning star.
- Women hate the evening star.
- The morning star is Venus.
- The evening star is Venus.
- => Contradiction
2) In which way is your project different from Minskys frame approach and all the others before him? How will you deal with the frame problem?
3) Do you believe strong AI can be achieved with your project?
I am still critical of your approach (as well as the Open Mind project) but nevertheless I wish you the best of luck. Research in this area must never stop.
I think I could have read you're post better myself. We seem to be talking about different things. You're talking about the amount of atoms it would take with McKinstry's approach, I'm talking about AI in general.
Indeed, if you want to model the "less than" relationship for all natural numbers as "1 is less than 2" etc. it is clear the amount of memory required would be infinite. This is quite dumb however, there are formal definitions of the "less than" relationship for natural numbers which can be stated in a few lines.
Just goes to show that McKinstry's idea is very flawed indeed.
Hey, read my post. Entirely. I'm not saying I support McKinstry's idea at all. The only thing i'm saying is that replicating human knowledge wouldn't take more than the atoms in the universe.
In fact I strongly disagree with McKinstry's approach, as stated in my original post.
McKinstry hasn't addressed why most real AI folks think his project is the equivalent of the Emperor's New Clothes: There will never be enough "mindpixels" to build anything constructive with, because the amount one would need to do so exceeds the number of atoms in the universe.
This makes no sense at all. The domain of all human knowledge is a finite domain. There is no indication at all that it would take more than the number of atoms in the universe to store it. In fact, we ourselves are pretty successful in storing it in just a fraction of the universe's atoms:-).
I think you're confusing this with something like the chess game, of which has been proven that it would take more than the number of atoms in the universe to store all possible chess games in memory (thus finding the perfect chess game).
That said, I don't think the mindpixel project is going to be successful in any major way. This project is just a new trendy version of the classical attempt to model all human knowledge with symbolic information. A database of human knowledge modeled in logic just isn't flexible enough. Others have tried this and have failed. To name a 'few': Descartes, Leibiz, Hussertl, Heidegger, the early Wittgenstein, Winograd, Minsky, etc. etc. etc.. The list goes on and on, and these are not the least of names either...
This whole problem is often referred to as the 'frame problem' of AI (named after Minsky's concept of frames). This is not even close to being solved yet and in my opinion is one of the hardest problems ever to be encountered by science.
Slashdot Mirror
According to this the demise of IP rights has granted them the ability to proudly cheer "We're number six! We're number six!" :)
Yes, and numer 5/6 means higher than Hong Kong, Germany, Canada, the UK and Japan. To name a few.
I live in The Netherlands myself and while I generally disagree with the whole patent process
(especially in the US) I must point out that The Netherlands and Switzerland have a very different
economy than the US. Their economies are based primarily on trade and services (banking,
insurance, transport).
So it's not that big of a surprise to see how the patent laws developed differently from the US in
these countries.
Energy of a 100 megaton bomb as a fraction of the kinetic energy of this asteroid: 1/27th
Hardly a bitch-slap. More of an abject whine.
First, thank you for the calculation. I'm not going check it because I'm a lazy SOB. But, I think 1/27 of the kinetic energy of the asteroid is quite a significant fraction if you want to stear the asteroid off its course.
A 'nudge' to the side doesn't need to be that powerful and, if done early enough, 1/27 of the asteroids kinetic energy should be more than enough.
I think you're not quite correct about this. The current top of the line CCD film scanners (4000dpi), quite closely approach the theoretical limit for chemical film at 35mm. A 4000dpi scanner gives an output of about 20 megapixels. The moment digital camera's have this resolution they are equal to film. This is only theoretically. In practice it will happen much sooner because the pixels a digital camera produces are generally much 'cleaner' than the filmgrain/scanner combo.
In my opinion digital camera's already surpassed analog camera's with 35mm film. See for example the new Canon 1D camera. It will take a little longer for medium-format film camera's to be replaced but I think this will be a matter of 2-3 years.
While this is a remote exploit, it's not nearly as severe as the default.ida one on IIS. The apache exploit can be used to gather directory listings etc. and does NOT allow arbitrary code to run.
I'll tell you why they stopped searching for life, they already found it. Or rather, it found us.
For the last couple of years the martians have been sending their best specimens to earth to infiltrate into our governments. Just recently they booked an enormous success. They managed to get one of their top spies into the most powerful position on earth. Sure, he still has a speech impediment and he still has trouble with human logic but it worked! The humans actually bought it!
AFAIK Mozilla still doesn't support roaming via HTTP/LDAP like Netscape 4.X does. This feature is enormously useful for me since I switch workplaces a lot, and between different OS's. Anyone know when/if this feature is planned?
I'd like to emphasize one thing:
With userland threads I meant non-preemptive deterministic threads. This is what txObject implements and it gives you the advantage of not having to put mutexes around everything. Because the threading is deterministic it it much easier to predict control flow and easier to debug.
Indeed. What I like especially is a mixture between userland and kernel threads. The userland threads give you the advantage of the threading design model and you only use kernel level threads when absolutely necessary.
Take a look at txObject, a C++ library which has both it's own threading engine (userland) and an abstraction of kernel threads. Unfortunately txObject threads currently don't work too well together with Linux's pthreads (due to some quirks in pthread) but this is being worked on.
This is a really nice library, sort of Java-like. With abstractions of threads, sockets, locks, timers, events etc. etc.. And a complete object model. It builds on Win32 and various *nixes and is GPL'ed.
NASA is costing each and every US citizen around $742 EACH YEAR, and yet the people on the space station cannot even follow orders ?
0 3-HQ.html:
Ok, you are clearly trolling but i still want to set the record straight.
From http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/facts/HTML/FS-0
NASA has the smallest budget of the major agencies in the Federal Government. Its budget has represented less than 1 percent of the total Federal budget each year since 1977.
The above link also mentions a total budget of 14,035 million dollars. This amounts to about 56 dollars per US citizen per year. Not quite your quoted number of $742 per year.
I'm seeing an obvious lack of Joeheads here.
Warning: not for the faint-hearted.
.. I also live about 2 miles from the Golden Gate... would have been cool to walk down and check it out.
You said it yourself...
It's conceivable that in a few decades a whole new class of computational devices may exist that make cracking RSA and many other problems trivial. You have been forewarned!
In fact, breaking RSA has by far been the most revolutionary algorithm developed for quantum computers. There are a few others, like Grover's search algorithm which provide a much less exciting speedup (I don't have the numbers available here). What I find interesting is that so few useable algorithms have been developed for quantum computers, probably because it's so hard...
Another question is: how fast will these quantum computers be? It can be all nice in theory but if we can't get them to run any faster than say 1 KHz we're still not getting anywhere.
On the other hand, quantum encryption is exciting indeed! This will provide us with a secure transmission channel which is guaranteed to be secure from eavesdropping.
>The Microsoft admins are probably aliasing those IPs via router
That still gives them a single point of failure, namely: the router.
I did have backups and could restore almost everything. The only thing I lost was a rather new DNS zone file. But that's not the point. It's never nice to have your system crash on you beyond repair is it?
No, the reason was performance (see my other post in this thread).
No, I don't use the 2.4.x kernels and didn't use anything experimental except for ReiserFS. It's a small server so the world won't end when it crashes.
The reason I tried ReiserFS was that it provided (much) higher performance than ext2 and the server (was) a slow machine. I thought it would be stable since both Mandrake and Suse push it as being a production quality fs, my mistake.
The question about being in the dark related to a versioning fs, not the use of ReiserFS.
Question: if nobody ever uses experimental stuff (even on a server), how are we going to evolve?
The past weekend was a nightmare for me. The root filesystem of my mailserver got severely corrupted and I had to do a complete reinstall. I had been running ReiserFS on that partition and this is how it got corrupted.
/etc/hosts!). I suspect ReiserFS did a bad journal replay which caused this. One reboot later the whole system wouldn't boot stopping at the boot loader. This all happened when using Mandrake 7.1 with ReiserFS 3.5.19.
When I tried to install a 3Com 509 card it froze the system when I ifconfig'ed it and I had to reboot. Then ReiserFS did it's journal replay and when the system was up again it turned out that some files had their contents scrambled (/etc/conf.modules contained some lines from
I wonder if people have experience with ext3. I've heard it also does data journalling whereas ReiserFS only does meta-data journalling. Data journalling may cause a performance hit but I'm willing to take that for reliability.
Also, I wonder if anyone knows if versioning (used in databases like InterBase) has been used in filesystems yet. Versioning seems ideal to me for filesystems as it provides low overhead and atomicity. But maybe I'm completely in the dark here, anybody care to comment?
I don't feel like we've advanced much. Programming is still the same. If someone stopped writing code in 1990 and started up again in 2000, he wouldn't feel like the world had passed him by.
You are completely ignoring the Internet here. In 1990 most people hadn't heard of Internet and there was little programming being done that was Internet related. Nowadays it's hard finding a programming job that is not Internet related in some way.
Maybe the way we program hasn't changed much, but *what* we program sure has.
This is totally incorrect. CommuniGate Pro is a full featured messaging server and NOT only an MTA. It supports SMTP, IMAP, POP, LDAP, ACAP, HTTP. And yes it supports up to 100K accounts on ONE box. The only thing that CommuniGate Pro doesn't support is the calendaring. But I think they are working on that. You obviously don't have a clue what you're talking about.
This is a terrible performance for a mailserver. A high performance mailserver should be able to handle 50K-100K accounts on ONE box. Take a look at CommuniGate Pro (www.stalker.com) from Stalker Software if you don't believe me. This fine server is available on almost any platform you can think of and makes Exchange look like a Mikey Mouse server in comparison.
Ok, that is a valid way of approaching this class of problems.
However, I still have three questions concerning your approach (I assume you are Chris McKinstry of the mindpixel project). I hope you will still read this post...
1) How will you deal with conflicting knowledge? It is known that humans often display conflicting knowledge about the world. For (a classic) example:
- Women love the morning star.
- Women hate the evening star.
- The morning star is Venus.
- The evening star is Venus.
- => Contradiction
2) In which way is your project different from Minskys frame approach and all the others before him? How will you deal with the frame problem?
3) Do you believe strong AI can be achieved with your project?
I am still critical of your approach (as well as the Open Mind project) but nevertheless I wish you the best of luck. Research in this area must never stop.
I think I could have read you're post better myself. We seem to be talking about different things. You're talking about the amount of atoms it would take with McKinstry's approach, I'm talking about AI in general.
.
Indeed, if you want to model the "less than" relationship for all natural numbers as "1 is less than 2" etc. it is clear the amount of memory required would be infinite. This is quite dumb however, there are formal definitions of the "less than" relationship for natural numbers which can be stated in a few lines
Just goes to show that McKinstry's idea is very flawed indeed.
Hey, read my post. Entirely. I'm not saying I support McKinstry's idea at all. The only thing i'm saying is that replicating human knowledge wouldn't take more than the atoms in the universe.
In fact I strongly disagree with McKinstry's approach, as stated in my original post.
McKinstry hasn't addressed why most real AI folks think his project is the equivalent of the Emperor's New Clothes: There will never be enough "mindpixels" to build anything constructive with, because the amount one would need to do so exceeds the number of atoms in the universe.
:-).
This makes no sense at all. The domain of all human knowledge is a finite domain. There is no indication at all that it would take more than the number of atoms in the universe to store it. In fact, we ourselves are pretty successful in storing it in just a fraction of the universe's atoms
I think you're confusing this with something like the chess game, of which has been proven that it would take more than the number of atoms in the universe to store all possible chess games in memory (thus finding the perfect chess game).
That said, I don't think the mindpixel project is going to be successful in any major way. This project is just a new trendy version of the classical attempt to model all human knowledge with symbolic information. A database of human knowledge modeled in logic just isn't flexible enough. Others have tried this and have failed. To name a 'few': Descartes, Leibiz, Hussertl, Heidegger, the early Wittgenstein, Winograd, Minsky, etc. etc. etc.. The list goes on and on, and these are not the least of names either...
This whole problem is often referred to as the 'frame problem' of AI (named after Minsky's concept of frames). This is not even close to being solved yet and in my opinion is one of the hardest problems ever to be encountered by science.