Re:Jobs always wanted to be Bill Gates
on
The Apple Two
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· Score: 1
Unlike me, you must converse a lot with people who live in caves as they apparently don't know who Steve Jobs is. Even back in the 70s Steve Jobs was well known. He's only become increasingly well known in the past decade.
Decades or centuries from now, when the history of the personal computer is written, no one will give a rat's ass who made more billions from it (BTW, a Mexican business magnate is now richer than Bill Gates, does anyone care?).
What will be recorded is who the innovators were, and in that account, Jobs will go down as the innovator, and Gates as the (sadly lame) imitator.
The pragmatic answer to the chinese room is that the non-chinese-speaking person in the room in combination with the book of algorithmic instructions, considered together as a system, does understand chinese.
Searle's mistake is an identity error - the failure to see that a computer with no software is not the same identity as a computer with software loaded inot it. The latter quite possibly could understand chinese (or some other domain) while the former most definitely does not.
Very much so. Human beings differ from chimpanzees in that human children will do exactly what they see elders do even if there is no reason to do so. Chimpanzees will see that something is unnecessary, and simply skip that bit. Human children are imitation machines.
Why? Because human culture is too complex for each individual to recapitulate it from scratch in each generation. As a result, humans can learn far more than they ever could have acquired through individual experience (plus). Unfortunately, this leaves human children vulnerable to GIGO and systematic deception (minus).
Fortunately, when we mature, we develop the ability to reason independently and modify the beliefs we swallowed uncritically as children. Some of us use this ability, though most don't in order to avoid straining social relationships.
1. providing it with an unavoidable goal (survival for living things, any objective function which must be maximized for a program), 2. ways of influencing that goal (behaviors for organisms, functions that vary in the degree to which they contribute to the objective function for programs) 3. means of modifying the ways of influencing the goal (changed behavior based on past results of pain or pleasure for organisms, modification of functions based on past results for the objective function for programs)
this general paradigm for programs already exists; it's called genetic programming
More usage of integer addition would also help because integer addition does not dictate the order in which operations are done. So we should limit everything that programmers are allowed to perform to integer additon - or SQL - whichever is more restrictive.
In case the sarcasm isn't completely obvious, the challenge is to allow programmers to continue to program much as they do now while allowing the language runtime and/or OS to automatically parallelize as many tasks as possible with minimal additional explicit annotation by the programmer.
Anyone can get great parallelism if we restrict all programs to what are known as embarrassingly parallel problems (by, for example, restricting programmers to the sorts of orthogonal selects parent mentions, or restricting programs to nothing but addition or other obviously commutative operations). Similarly, increased performance can be had by requiring the programmer to explicitly manage tasks, threads, mutex locks, sempahores, etc.
The trick is to get the increased performance without either restricting programmer freedom on the one hand, and without burdening the programmer with explicit management of concurrency on the other.
Just gonna burn some karma here since you've unfortunately been modded 0 flamebait:
As much as I enjoy tinkering w/ open source and recognise its massive contribution, why is it so hard for freetards to grasp the key issue:
For normal users (or even geeks who don't have the time/energy to care), walled garden that "just works" beats open solution that "sorta works" (even 'mostly') 10 times out of 10
You sir, are absolutely right, no matter how much we people who read slashdot, we denizens of the extreme right hand tail of the user bell curve, wish it weren't so.
And considering that these numbers are close, and that the overwhelming majority of lay people have no idea whatsoever what XML is, but these same lay people would have to be living in a cave not to know what the iPhone is, we must conclude that XML triumphs over the iPhone in suckitute.
Federal law trumps private license agreements. Criminal law trumps private license agreements. For example, if someone were murdered because of the terms of a private license agreement both the defense and the prosecution would have the right to know the entire text of the license agreement and to make that text known in whole to the jury.
If federal law requires that any license that an arm of the federal government enters into be available to the general public (whose government it is btw, just in case someone forgot), then that license agreement will be made public and any provision that the agreement be kept secret is not binding on the federal government.
They only have the legal authority to restrict your actions if you AGREE to the agreement. Otherwise, if you don't agree to the agreement, the text of the agreement is protected by copyright, so you couldn't reproduce it in full any more than you could legally post the entire text of the latest Stephen King novel on the net.
Now that the FOIA request version is out this is moot, but before this the most that anyone could do would be for someone who did NOT agree to the agreement to post small quotations from it for example in an op-ed piece under fair use provisions of copyright law.
As a prospective developer, you don't need the FOIA just to find out what terms you might agree to should you join the developer program. It's not as if you join the developer program with license agreement sight unseen. This would of course have no legal standing (i.e., a license cannot be binding on a party who has no knowledge of it at the time the "agreement" is supposedly entered into). Just like click-through EULAs, before you can join, you are presented with the agreement to read and if you don't like it, you don't join and don't agree to it.
The FOIA release of the agreement has made the agreement available to the general public, which includes the many millions who have never gone to Apple's developer site and tried to join the iPhone dev program. This of course means that the nature of its terms will become more general knowledge among the wider public, rather than just being a topic of conversation of that tiny minority who are Apple developers.
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." - Lord Acton
When Apple was the underdog, they weren't in a position to bend developers to their will. Now that they are in the driver's seat wrt mp3 players and smart phones, they can. Most of the time you'll find that when people can do something that is in their interest but screws other people over, they will choose to do that thing, because most people are quite selfish. Apple as a group of self-interested people (a.k.a., a corporation) is no exception. Moreover, the law in the US actually requires that corporations always act in the best financial interests of their shareholders, which has always been interpreted by courts to mean that the corporation has a positive duty to maximize profit in any legal way.
Apple now has the market power to impose draconian license agreements on their developers. Apple takes this option because having the abilities that this license agreement gives them (e.g., ability to arbitrarily remove any app at any time) increases profit - for example, no lengthy court proceedings over app removal, no defending lawsuits from flyover bible thumpers who think app X is too explicit for their 7 year old children (and your 7 year old is using your iPhone why exactly?)
When we enshrine selfishness as the highest legal good it should come as no surprise that corporations act selfishly.
Apple is not preventing, nor can they legally prevent, developers from developing apps for their own iPhones or other people's iPhones. This is why there are many apps available for so called "jailbroken" iPhones.
This developer agreement is for developers who choose to develop apps for Apple iPhone App Store. You do not need to buy apps from this app store to use your iPhone. You do not need to distribute apps you develop through the apple app store.
People are free to do what they want if they buy a full price iPhone, and many have jailbroken theirs to work with other carriers as is their right, and written and/or downloaded apps that were written by developers who did not have to and did not agree to the license agreement linked to in TFA.
However, if you do choose to develop apps for apples own online iphone app store, then yes, you do need to follow apple's rules, because, yes, IT IS APPLE'S APP STORE, not yours.
You misunderstand the definition of natural selection. The term exists in contradistinction to the term "artificial selection" which is to say, human controlled selective breeding of the kind that gives rise to domesticated animals. The llama is the result of artificial selection. Its wild ancestor, the guanaco, is the result of natural selection.
Take the well known example of lactose tolerance. Nobody ever conducted a lactose tolerance breeding eugenics program - our ancestors didn't coral whole villages and kill those who were lactose intolerant and force those who were lactose tolerant to breed with each other (this is how artificial selection works). Lactose tolerance in European and African populations where it is prevalent, arose through natural seleciton. Those that were able to digest milk as adults (i.e., the lactose tolerant ones) left more offspring in areas where milk was widely available. This is an example of natural selection, not artificial selection.
It is also a direct result of cuture. The only reason milk was and is available is because of the domestication of cattle, which is a cultural activity. So here is an example where natural selection, (the increase in lactose tolerance among adults), was influenced by culture, (the domestication of dairy cattle).
Milk drinking is a direct result of culture - the domestication of cattle for meat and dairy. None of our human ancestors could ever drink milk from a wild Aurochs and survive - (think 2-3 meter horn span, one metric ton, and very touchy).
White americans who aren't upper middle class also have crap healthcare in the USA. They can be and often are kicked out of their insurance plans when they become ill. Yes, it kind of defeats the purpose of health insurance if it gets terminated when you get ill, but that's how many lower quality plans work, and these are the sorts of plans that many low to middle income *white* americans have through their employers.
The whole point of color management is that you don't have to do anything. The OS takes care of presenting consistent color across different applications, different monitors, and different printers. All that's required is that the OS has a ColorSync profile for the relevant device, and these are provided by hardware manufacturers (like Apple, Epson, HP, etc.) and installed along with driver software.
Seems like you're just bad at statistics. Since the overwhelming majority of the population is not technically sophisticated, it would still be a good bet that any random person you saw with an iPhone would not be technically sophisticated, even if every geek on the planet owned one.
I have a similar method to yours for determining that people are not nobel prize winning physicists that involves nike footwear...
Slashdot Mirror
Unlike me, you must converse a lot with people who live in caves as they apparently don't know who Steve Jobs is. Even back in the 70s Steve Jobs was well known. He's only become increasingly well known in the past decade.
Decades or centuries from now, when the history of the personal computer is written, no one will give a rat's ass who made more billions from it (BTW, a Mexican business magnate is now richer than Bill Gates, does anyone care?).
What will be recorded is who the innovators were, and in that account, Jobs will go down as the innovator, and Gates as the (sadly lame) imitator.
The pragmatic answer to the chinese room is that the non-chinese-speaking person in the room in combination with the book of algorithmic instructions, considered together as a system, does understand chinese.
Searle's mistake is an identity error - the failure to see that a computer with no software is not the same identity as a computer with software loaded inot it. The latter quite possibly could understand chinese (or some other domain) while the former most definitely does not.
Don't you lose your geek membership card for not knowing who Alonzo Church was?
Very much so. Human beings differ from chimpanzees in that human children will do exactly what they see elders do even if there is no reason to do so. Chimpanzees will see that something is unnecessary, and simply skip that bit. Human children are imitation machines.
Why? Because human culture is too complex for each individual to recapitulate it from scratch in each generation. As a result, humans can learn far more than they ever could have acquired through individual experience (plus). Unfortunately, this leaves human children vulnerable to GIGO and systematic deception (minus).
Fortunately, when we mature, we develop the ability to reason independently and modify the beliefs we swallowed uncritically as children. Some of us use this ability, though most don't in order to avoid straining social relationships.
That's your parent's whole point.
You get learning by:
1. providing it with an unavoidable goal (survival for living things, any objective function which must be maximized for a program),
2. ways of influencing that goal (behaviors for organisms, functions that vary in the degree to which they contribute to the objective function for programs)
3. means of modifying the ways of influencing the goal (changed behavior based on past results of pain or pleasure for organisms, modification of functions based on past results for the objective function for programs)
this general paradigm for programs already exists; it's called genetic programming
More usage of integer addition would also help because integer addition does not dictate the order in which operations are done. So we should limit everything that programmers are allowed to perform to integer additon - or SQL - whichever is more restrictive.
In case the sarcasm isn't completely obvious, the challenge is to allow programmers to continue to program much as they do now while allowing the language runtime and/or OS to automatically parallelize as many tasks as possible with minimal additional explicit annotation by the programmer.
Anyone can get great parallelism if we restrict all programs to what are known as embarrassingly parallel problems (by, for example, restricting programmers to the sorts of orthogonal selects parent mentions, or restricting programs to nothing but addition or other obviously commutative operations). Similarly, increased performance can be had by requiring the programmer to explicitly manage tasks, threads, mutex locks, sempahores, etc.
The trick is to get the increased performance without either restricting programmer freedom on the one hand, and without burdening the programmer with explicit management of concurrency on the other.
Just gonna burn some karma here since you've unfortunately been modded 0 flamebait:
As much as I enjoy tinkering w/ open source and recognise its massive contribution, why is it so hard for freetards to grasp the key issue:
For normal users (or even geeks who don't have the time/energy to care), walled garden that "just works" beats open solution that "sorta works" (even 'mostly') 10 times out of 10
You sir, are absolutely right, no matter how much we people who read slashdot, we denizens of the extreme right hand tail of the user bell curve, wish it weren't so.
"xml sucks" produce 21,300 results
"iphone sucks" produces 30,900 results.
And considering that these numbers are close, and that the overwhelming majority of lay people have no idea whatsoever what XML is, but these same lay people would have to be living in a cave not to know what the iPhone is, we must conclude that XML triumphs over the iPhone in suckitute.
Yes, the people who prefer not to have a physical keyboard are called iPhone users.
Don't look now, but there are millions of us.
Federal law trumps private license agreements. Criminal law trumps private license agreements. For example, if someone were murdered because of the terms of a private license agreement both the defense and the prosecution would have the right to know the entire text of the license agreement and to make that text known in whole to the jury.
If federal law requires that any license that an arm of the federal government enters into be available to the general public (whose government it is btw, just in case someone forgot), then that license agreement will be made public and any provision that the agreement be kept secret is not binding on the federal government.
They only have the legal authority to restrict your actions if you AGREE to the agreement. Otherwise, if you don't agree to the agreement, the text of the agreement is protected by copyright, so you couldn't reproduce it in full any more than you could legally post the entire text of the latest Stephen King novel on the net.
Now that the FOIA request version is out this is moot, but before this the most that anyone could do would be for someone who did NOT agree to the agreement to post small quotations from it for example in an op-ed piece under fair use provisions of copyright law.
If Apple was the Borg the cube ship would be white and shiny, but lack USB ports.
been there, done that.
As a prospective developer, you don't need the FOIA just to find out what terms you might agree to should you join the developer program. It's not as if you join the developer program with license agreement sight unseen. This would of course have no legal standing (i.e., a license cannot be binding on a party who has no knowledge of it at the time the "agreement" is supposedly entered into). Just like click-through EULAs, before you can join, you are presented with the agreement to read and if you don't like it, you don't join and don't agree to it.
The FOIA release of the agreement has made the agreement available to the general public, which includes the many millions who have never gone to Apple's developer site and tried to join the iPhone dev program. This of course means that the nature of its terms will become more general knowledge among the wider public, rather than just being a topic of conversation of that tiny minority who are Apple developers.
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." - Lord Acton
When Apple was the underdog, they weren't in a position to bend developers to their will. Now that they are in the driver's seat wrt mp3 players and smart phones, they can. Most of the time you'll find that when people can do something that is in their interest but screws other people over, they will choose to do that thing, because most people are quite selfish. Apple as a group of self-interested people (a.k.a., a corporation) is no exception. Moreover, the law in the US actually requires that corporations always act in the best financial interests of their shareholders, which has always been interpreted by courts to mean that the corporation has a positive duty to maximize profit in any legal way.
Apple now has the market power to impose draconian license agreements on their developers. Apple takes this option because having the abilities that this license agreement gives them (e.g., ability to arbitrarily remove any app at any time) increases profit - for example, no lengthy court proceedings over app removal, no defending lawsuits from flyover bible thumpers who think app X is too explicit for their 7 year old children (and your 7 year old is using your iPhone why exactly?)
When we enshrine selfishness as the highest legal good it should come as no surprise that corporations act selfishly.
Apple is not preventing, nor can they legally prevent, developers from developing apps for their own iPhones or other people's iPhones. This is why there are many apps available for so called "jailbroken" iPhones.
This developer agreement is for developers who choose to develop apps for Apple iPhone App Store. You do not need to buy apps from this app store to use your iPhone. You do not need to distribute apps you develop through the apple app store.
People are free to do what they want if they buy a full price iPhone, and many have jailbroken theirs to work with other carriers as is their right, and written and/or downloaded apps that were written by developers who did not have to and did not agree to the license agreement linked to in TFA.
However, if you do choose to develop apps for apples own online iphone app store, then yes, you do need to follow apple's rules, because, yes, IT IS APPLE'S APP STORE, not yours.
You misunderstand the definition of natural selection. The term exists in contradistinction to the term "artificial selection" which is to say, human controlled selective breeding of the kind that gives rise to domesticated animals. The llama is the result of artificial selection. Its wild ancestor, the guanaco, is the result of natural selection.
Take the well known example of lactose tolerance. Nobody ever conducted a lactose tolerance breeding eugenics program - our ancestors didn't coral whole villages and kill those who were lactose intolerant and force those who were lactose tolerant to breed with each other (this is how artificial selection works). Lactose tolerance in European and African populations where it is prevalent, arose through natural seleciton. Those that were able to digest milk as adults (i.e., the lactose tolerant ones) left more offspring in areas where milk was widely available. This is an example of natural selection, not artificial selection.
It is also a direct result of cuture. The only reason milk was and is available is because of the domestication of cattle, which is a cultural activity. So here is an example where natural selection, (the increase in lactose tolerance among adults), was influenced by culture, (the domestication of dairy cattle).
Milk drinking is a direct result of culture - the domestication of cattle for meat and dairy. None of our human ancestors could ever drink milk from a wild Aurochs and survive - (think 2-3 meter horn span, one metric ton, and very touchy).
And you seem to put atheism as a tenant and pillar of intelligence.
So atheism pays rent to intelligence? The word you're looking for is "tenet" not "tenant."
White americans who aren't upper middle class also have crap healthcare in the USA. They can be and often are kicked out of their insurance plans when they become ill. Yes, it kind of defeats the purpose of health insurance if it gets terminated when you get ill, but that's how many lower quality plans work, and these are the sorts of plans that many low to middle income *white* americans have through their employers.
The whole point of color management is that you don't have to do anything. The OS takes care of presenting consistent color across different applications, different monitors, and different printers. All that's required is that the OS has a ColorSync profile for the relevant device, and these are provided by hardware manufacturers (like Apple, Epson, HP, etc.) and installed along with driver software.
but ironically, it will probably run Star Wars games just fine...
mod parent up. I know several successful tech entrepreneurs who are most curious about this one issue.
The iPad has an available camera connector, so you can provide software to access the connected camera.
Seems like you're just bad at statistics. Since the overwhelming majority of the population is not technically sophisticated, it would still be a good bet that any random person you saw with an iPhone would not be technically sophisticated, even if every geek on the planet owned one.
I have a similar method to yours for determining that people are not nobel prize winning physicists that involves nike footwear...
* I'm not saying the stupid law is anything but a stupid law, but when you buy locked hardware you're buying Communism.
A capitalist corporation locking down the hardware they sell in order to maximize profit for investors is communism?
Communsim would be if the state appropriated Apple's intellectual property and made it freely available to the public.
Apple's behavior is classic capitalism, and very, very far from communism.