I'm definitely not saying that. I'm saying that with the mind the whole is more than the sum of its parts. That is, a whole lot of clever devices does not make an artificial thinker any more than five dismembered fingers make a hand. We're only starting to make intelligent special-purpose devices / tools. What we'll need to make Hal is a level beyond that. We'll need intelligent meta-processes which can integrate and make use of many such intelligent tools in an all around intelligent way.
AI is one of those funny terms which seems to only be used for futuristic technology that (when described by science journalists) sounds almost like magic. As pointed out in the article, many technologies we use all the time were once considered to be part of "AI" research. OCR as a form of pattern detection & pattern matching was once considered to be AI (handwriting recognition is still one of the benchmark tasks for any pattern-recognition system). Search engines, netfilx, etc. It seems like whenever a technology becomes commercialized and widely adopted, it is no longer "AI" in the popular imagination.
Maybe this is because it becomes mundane and commonplace, and so no longer has that "magical" feeling that is conveyed by science journalists trying to sell a story of advanced research. Once you use a pattern-recognition system everyday, you realize that its not a nascent consciousness, but just a fancy tool.
Maybe its because most commercially available "AI"s are such special-purpose systems that it becomes obvious that they are not what we meant by "AI" in the first place. An handwriting recognition system may be able to transcribe your notes just as well as a human assistant, but you wouldn't expect it to recognize the pattern of your cat. Nor would you ask it to take your cat to the vet for you.
Perhaps the real key to AI is in finding the right way of integrating many "smart" components, like intelligent text searching and pattern recognition (and many, many others) into an integrated whole. Not only so that information from one such "module" can be integrated appropriately with that from another, but also which can make and evaluate plans and actions in the complex world of human society.
This study can't dismiss free will. Basically they are able to predict, in a very limited context, what people's responses will be from their brain activity. But brain activity IS the decision-making process! So yes, naturally, if you could through a window into someone's thought-process, you could probably see what decision they will make once this process is sufficiently complete. All they've shown is that they can get a good guess at what someone will say as they get close to deciding but before they open their mouths. They can't predict what people will say just based on the stimuli that they give them (but even that isn't too hard - assuming that people mostly behave "rationally" and in accordance with social norms), so clearly their behaviours aren't pre-determined solely by environment. They need to look at brain activity, which has to be an indicator of decision making (what else could brain activity be?). They can't claim to know what you will decide before you start thinking about a question, only what you're likely to decide as you get close to being done thinking about it.
IMHO the reason that network news (and all TV for that matter) fails is that it is push-media. It creates one signal and tries to broadcast that as widely as possible. Because of this, it must always cater to the "average viewer" which is nobody in particular. Everybody has different "niche" interests, but any one niche is too small of an audience, so the motivation is always to get the widest appeal by compromising any "niche" (ie actual content) with generalized sound-bites. Internet media allows the user to select what content they want to read, so it can cater to a vast array of niche interests (even to absurd extremes sometimes). Newspapers also have this ability, because a reader can selectively read a subset of articles which interest them. With TV however, the viewer must sit and passively receive whatever content is spit out, the only choice is to change channels or turn off. This prompts the network planners to make every moment into either a sound bite or a teaser of exciting things to come, trying to hold the viewers attention with an insubstantial smear of flashy graphics and vacuous commentary.
Welcome to Rivendell Missster Underrrhill. As you can see we've had our eyes on you for some time. You seem to have been living two lives. In one you are Mr. Baggins, a respectable hobbit, you live in a hole, eat and drink a lot, and... help your gardener take out the garbage. In the other you go by the hobbit alias Frodo. One of these lives has a future in Mordor Mr. Underhill, the other does not!
Elrond:We're willing to wipe the slate clean, give you a fresh start. And all that we ask for in return is your cooperation in bringing a known ring to Mt. Doom.
Frodo:You can't scare me with this Elf crap. I know my rights; I want my prrreeecious.
Elrond:Tell me Mr. Underhill, what good is the precious is you are unable to wear it?
Elrond takes off Frodo's fing... wait. Nevermind. Wrong character.
... and therefore it really doesn't matter what the majority thinks. Sure, there is a strong influence of public opinion on the creation of new laws, but basic rights are protected against the tyranny (or apathy) of the majority.
By "life exists on other planets" do they mean other planets in our solar system or outside of it? The rationality of the answer would depend largely on this interpretation. I believe a similar survey some years ago found that a lot of americans believed that NASA had already sent astronauts to Mars - so you can see how poorly informed most people are about the current state of space science.
A common mistake everybody makes when looking at statistics like these is to forget about the baseline.
As they said in the article, this increase is probably due to the increase in how much various kinds of wireless devices (cellphones, blackberries, etc. ) are being used by criminals. If you wanted to confirm this, you'd have to see whether there really was such an increase. Does the general population use these kinds of devices 19% more this year than last? Do criminals? Perhaps they have been increasingly using them over several years, and only now have the police started to modify their tactics. You can only build up an argument that there is in fact an increase in "big-brotherish" surveillance if the number of such wiretaps goes well beyond the "need" for them.
More disturbing is the claim that Judges didn't reject a single request. This seems very wrong at first - especially when you have cop shows in the back of your mind where the crusading good-hearted but somewhat over-enthusiastic cop goes out searching for warrants from an old level-headed judge with flimsy evidence. It seems that there should be at least a few of these warrants which are rejected. Does are image of cops meet the reality? AlexB892 points out that it is seen as bad for a cop's career to have a wiretap requst rejected. Are cops really so diligent? Again - look to the baseline. What is the average number of rejected requests in any one year - these stats must be available somewhere. If you find that the average is only one or two rejections per year, then it seems reasonable that in any one year there might not be any at all. However, if it is much higher, you might question whether judges aren't being diligent enough in their scrutiny of the cops.
Always take statistics with a grain of salt - they're only numbers, and can be interpreted in many ways. If they're presented in the right way, they can seem to be strong evidence for some growing trend - but you really need other figures which give you the "context" to see if this is realistic - or just somebodies rhetoric.
I think that everything that is said in this article is true, except that it overlooks something. There seems to be the implicit assumption that if open source helps big companies then it won't succeed. This all comes back to what you think "success for open source" means.
* If you think that success for open source means that all software companies will go out of business, and some kind of socialistic software utopia will unfold over the earth, then this is just misguided. I don't see that this was/is ever the purpose of open source.
* If you think that success means that there will be a multitude of products at every level from home users up to large corporate solutions, then this might also be a misunderstanding. It could be that we end up seeing a pyramid effect where there is great diversity amongst home users, and less amongst companies who want "strategic solutions"
Ultimately the great thing about open source is it breaks open traditional monopolistic / oligopolistic tendencies in software - and so it is a great thing for consumers. Consumers don't even need to use open source to benefit - because just the presence of open source can alter the way that software companies sell their wares, increasing consumer surplus.
Also, it ensures that on the development side, there is a continuing source ( no pun intended ) of diversity in all areas. Think of this as a healthy condition for a vibrant ecosystem. Software developers from hobbyists to professionals, and across all levels of industry benefit from this, as it ensures a wide array of techniques and solutions to draw upon, and that most of these are documented publicly.
It may be true that at the "strategic" level, only a few solutions are found that are actually widely adopted by industry - but this is just the current status quo, so nothing has changed. It may also be that these few projects absorb all the good ideas from the rest of the field, incorporating them as features, so that there is little or no reason to switch, but it still doesn't mean that open source has "failed". If these solutions end up being open source - then this ensures that these strategic applications and the know-how that goes into them remains available to anyone.
Also, most open source projects have survived very well without big corporate support, so why should we fear that they will disappear forever? Simply because they are not picked as worthy of being strategic doesn't mean they'll dry up and die. Does it?
Here's a simple solution, get everyone using central IMAP servers for their email, have a little scripty-poo that tars the mail boxes every month & burn them to cd. Then put the CDs in paper jackets into shoeboxes & stuff them in your city archives.
I have had some extensive use of both wine and VMWare, and to be perfectly honest have found wine to be lacking. I realise that, being free software, wine has certain economic & ( dare I say it ) "ideological" advantages, but for most of the programs for which I actually need windows compatibility, I find that it simply doesn't ( yet ) cut the mustard. Also, it seems that the approach you've taken for wine of mapping libraries to their linux equivalents rather than doing actual emulation produces a vast number of compatibility issues that need to be resolved, and keeps the advancement of the wine project very slow. Could you tell me what technical advantages wine will ultimately bring once its reached full compatibility with windows, as compared to a solution like vmware.
No - this won't work because you don't conduct the entirety of the communications via this one communication channel. Essentially the "quantum" channel is used only for creating a key that one can use to communicate securely over another channel. Furthermore, as part of the verification step in the quantum protocol, the sender and receiver check the results of the quantum exchange over an open channel, and any repeater wouldn't know how to spoof this verification step successfully to fool both sides. See my reply to your original post ( http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=106190&cid=904 0839 ) for details of the protocol to see why this works.
The whole point of quantum crypto is that if someone did try to act as a repeater, then they would be detected. This is not because you would "see" them standing there intercepting your data ( although that would be a possibility ), but because the protocol used to transmit the information securely would reveal the fact that the data had been intercepted and then retrasmitted.
The basics are like this. Small particles ( like photons of light ) have a property called spin. You can set the spin of a particle when you transmit it by using the right kind of gear. You can test the spin of the particle in several different ways, but not all spins can be detected correctly by all tests. So if you have no idea what the spins are, you can't know which test to use. So if you use a random sequence of tests, you will sometimes have the right test, and sometimes not. So to transmit information, our protocol works like this ( taken from "The Code Book" by Simon Singh, p.346-7 ):
1) Alice sends Bob a series of photons, and Bob measures them.
2) Alice tells Bob on which occasions he measured them in the correct way. Although Alice is telling Bob when he made the correct measurement, she is not telling him what the correct result should have been, so this conversation can be tapped without any risk to security ).
3) Alice and Bob discard the measurements that Bob made incorrectly, and concentrate on those that he made correctly in order to create an identical pair of onetime pads.
4) Alice and Bob test the integrity of their onetime pads by testing a few of the digits.
5) If the verification procedure is satisfactory, they can use the onetime pad to encrypt a message; if the verification reveals errors, they know that the photons were being tapped by Eve, and they need to start all over again.
It is true that Eve could listen in on the line, intercepting photons sent by Alice and try to recreate the same stream of photons to Bob with the same spins. However, she can only use a test once, she can't copy a photon and test it using several different tests. So she will inevitably use the wrong test on a number of photons, and so not know what the true spin ought to be, and so can't reproduce them. She also can't know what series of tests Bob will use to test the photons he is receiving. So inevitably what would happen is this: Eve uses the wrong test on some photons, doesn't know what their spins ought to be, sends out some with different spins; Bob however uses the correct tests on some of those photons that Eve "made up", but gets different results from Alice ( because some of the spins are different from what Alice originall sent ), so when they compare results it becomes obvious that they don't have the same sequence of results. Furthermore, Eve can't know where the errors are going to come up and how she should fix them, so she couldn't intervene successfully in this verification step to make it seem correct when its not.
Long story short - you can't make a successful repeater ( down side to this is you can't use any network for transmitting the photons, as a network necessarily involves repeaters - aka routers/gateways - you must have a direct line from sender to receiver so the photons don't get altered ).
Researchers released an update to this story. It turns out further analysis of the mitochondrial DNA has revealed that the flower is actually related to dead people. The spokesman for the research group "Goths for science", dressed in an unusually black labcoat was quoted as saying: 'These are the blossoms of the damned, their sweet aroma reminds us of the futility and inevitability of our fate. Embrace it and you may be spared eternal torment. Struggle against it and your soul will be crushed like an insignificant insect in the grip of a venus fly trap FOREVER!' The spokesman then darted back to 'his dark abode', which we learned from university officials is a plant conservatory in a converted broom closet in the basement. One shocked and terrified researcher from the psychology lab down the hall was quoted as saying "I can smell dead people, I smell them all the time..."
"Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large numbers" says the old cynic, and it is just as applicable in its own way to SCO. "Never underestimate the power of greedy people who can hire lawyers". Sure WE could see that the SCO case was built on hogwash from day 1, so could most of the industry, which is why it has had little or no impact on the use of linux. However, all that aside, its still a way to make money if you can ride the bubble and get out before it bursts. If you feel you're good enough at playing financial chicken with the stock market, then yes, you can make a lot of money.
What WE forgot was that just because something has no technical merits doesn't mean it can't have some short-term financial merits. The same thing was true of the dot com bubble. Ultimately most of the businesses being developped were nothing stable, and couldn't survive long or turn a profit. That is irrelevant, however, when it comes to 'herd mentality' - because when you get enough people together they are governed by their lowest common faculties - which normally means desire and fear. Even investors who knew that the dot com thing was an artificial bubble would jump on the bandwagon, because if you could get out soon enough, you could really clean up nicely. Likewise, you don't have to believe that SCO has any chance in hell of winning, you just have to gamble on the greed of many other people and hope that it might cause enough noise to get you rich before it bursts.
I think you're taking my words too far, or further than I intend. I am not saying that ALL carpenters are less able to do design than ALL architects. I am saying that this is about what is typical. I am making a generalization, not a categorical argument. Certainly there are carpenters who have extensive design / theoretical knowledge and can perform as an architect in many circumstances. These people are generally hired as the senior tradesman in large projects, and act as intermediary between the designers and the builders. My grandfather worked in exactly this capacity for years, and was very good at it. In fact he was one of the most senior builders in all of Canada, and would travel the country to work in just such a capacity on such projects, so I do know a little bit about this.
However, I still think that there is quite a difference to be drawn between the types of occupations - perhaps it has more to do with mindset than with actual knowledge, but, on the whole, carpenters would not do as well in designing buildings as architects. Certainly I think a certain amount of this has to do with the type of training they're given, although it is of course a complex mix of social factors.
No, I would not advocate outsourcing all carpenters. As I said in my original post, it all depends on the nature of the project. Returning to the analogy, if you're constructing a building in which there are a great number of identical doors, you might easily send the specifications for the doors to some other firm, perhaps overseas, and have all the doors built there. However you obviously can't outsource everything, it's just not practical, you can't have an entire apartment building constructed in Sumatra and shipped to Long Island. There has to be a certain amount of construction taking place on location, under the supervision of those in charge of the project. That was, I think, my original point - it all depends on the nature of the business you're dealing with and how central the work is to the nature of that business. Peripheral projects are easily outsourced, integral ones are not.
Sure, the analogy is not apt in all respects, but the distinction is still important in many ways. I'm sure that there are, and will be, programmers who code as 'tradesmen' who have a great deal of practical coding knowledge, far over and above the theoretical design knowledge of those with advanced training. I know from experience that there is much about good coding design which I learned as an 'apprentice' to a very experienced programmer which I have never seen taught in computer science courses. You're never going to hire an architect to do a carpenter's job, but the same is true vice-versa.
The other important difference is the entry requirements into the market. Carpentry is something you can learn entirely by doing it - either on your own or as an apprentice to a more senior carpenter. However you can't be an architect without spending a lot of time in school, and earn a degree, and then usually you also would serve as a junior member of a larger firm for a long time to gain experience.
I don't think that the reason coding is outsourced, whereas project management is not is because of the skill required. It is more because of the nature of the businesses involved, and the nature of the coding to be done. In many situations, you can't really get away with outsourcing project management, because that essentially means you don't really have control over the project, and so you don't really have control over your own business ( assuming the project is central to the business, peripheral projects can be entirely outsourced ).
The nature of the coding to be done is also important. One of the facts that I've come to realize in studying computer science is that, to a large extent, the majority of coding work is routine and does not require in-depth knowledge or familiarity with computer science techniques. Most real-world coding consists of pretty mind-numbing tasks of gluing different APIs together in a reasonable hodge-podge. Many of these tasks require only a familiarity with the syntax of a language, some familiarity with a few common APIs, and access to a machine. None of which is very skill-intensive.
During the dot-com boom many people were employed doing coding work at incredibly over-inflated salaries who had read one or two 'for-dummies' type books. This was possible because there was a shortage of coders who could do even the most routine tasks. The high salaries attainable with very little training meant that there was naturally a rush on such teach-yourself-coding books, and suddenly there was a glut of people who could do routine coding. Now, because of that glut, there is an excess of able code-monkeys to do routine programming tasks, which means that much of this work goes to the lowest bidders ( ie Asian sweat shop coders ). Supply & demand is all it is.
But the future is hopeful, I think, for those who are willing to tough it out and obtain Comp.Sci. degrees. Right now we're stuck in a kind of computational limbo where the market is not sophisticated enough to demand really sophisticated software, so there is little demand for people who can design highly sophisticated applications. There are some jobs which require knowledge of high-performance computing, knowledge of efficient algorithm design, AI, etc. but not very many. Right now basic code-monkey work is what satisfies the majority of the market demand. This is changing rapidly, I think. The more consumers get a taste for sophisticated technology, the more the demand for truly intensive software will rise, and the need for more people with real skills ( ie University level training ) will increase.
There is a big difference between a carpenter and an architect. One is a trade, the other is a profession. The confusion that is happening right now in the labour market for programmers is because this type of distinction is just now starting to emerge. It used to be that there were only professionals in the programming world. With the dot-com boom & bust this has changed, and there is now a new class of worker, who programs as a tradesman, not as a professional. The mind-set of the market has not yet come to fully realize this distinction, and so we have these problems. Eventually this will settle out and there will be two classes of programmers - those equivalent to architects with high levels of training, and those equivalent to carpenters with much practical knowledge, but little or no theoretical or 'design' skill. I expect this will occur more and more as the demand for sophisticated software increases, and we'll see the re-establishment of 'programmer' as a profession.
My girlfriend is a molecular biologist who worked for a time in a lab where they made glowing animals like this ( mostly worms, but they had some rats also ). The reason, scientifically, for making these creatures is not just for the sake of seeing if you can make them glow. Rather, if you attach the genes for the glowing proteins adjacent to the genes for some other protein you'd like to monitor in the animal's DNA, then the glowing protein will become attached to the target protein, and you can get a snapshot of how active that protein is in the organism by simply turning on a UV light. This is a very useful tool for seeing how a particular gene is expressed in the active biology of the organism, because you can watch where, when and how the proteins which that gene codes for are expressed, and in what cells. The glowing pets is just some creepy Frankensteinian commercial spin-off of this research tool.
Slashdot Mirror
In Soviet Russia Google searches you!
I'm definitely not saying that. I'm saying that with the mind the whole is more than the sum of its parts. That is, a whole lot of clever devices does not make an artificial thinker any more than five dismembered fingers make a hand. We're only starting to make intelligent special-purpose devices / tools. What we'll need to make Hal is a level beyond that. We'll need intelligent meta-processes which can integrate and make use of many such intelligent tools in an all around intelligent way.
AI is one of those funny terms which seems to only be used for futuristic technology that (when described by science journalists) sounds almost like magic. As pointed out in the article, many technologies we use all the time were once considered to be part of "AI" research. OCR as a form of pattern detection & pattern matching was once considered to be AI (handwriting recognition is still one of the benchmark tasks for any pattern-recognition system). Search engines, netfilx, etc. It seems like whenever a technology becomes commercialized and widely adopted, it is no longer "AI" in the popular imagination.
Maybe this is because it becomes mundane and commonplace, and so no longer has that "magical" feeling that is conveyed by science journalists trying to sell a story of advanced research. Once you use a pattern-recognition system everyday, you realize that its not a nascent consciousness, but just a fancy tool.
Maybe its because most commercially available "AI"s are such special-purpose systems that it becomes obvious that they are not what we meant by "AI" in the first place. An handwriting recognition system may be able to transcribe your notes just as well as a human assistant, but you wouldn't expect it to recognize the pattern of your cat. Nor would you ask it to take your cat to the vet for you.
Perhaps the real key to AI is in finding the right way of integrating many "smart" components, like intelligent text searching and pattern recognition (and many, many others) into an integrated whole. Not only so that information from one such "module" can be integrated appropriately with that from another, but also which can make and evaluate plans and actions in the complex world of human society.
This study can't dismiss free will. Basically they are able to predict, in a very limited context, what people's responses will be from their brain activity. But brain activity IS the decision-making process! So yes, naturally, if you could through a window into someone's thought-process, you could probably see what decision they will make once this process is sufficiently complete. All they've shown is that they can get a good guess at what someone will say as they get close to deciding but before they open their mouths. They can't predict what people will say just based on the stimuli that they give them (but even that isn't too hard - assuming that people mostly behave "rationally" and in accordance with social norms), so clearly their behaviours aren't pre-determined solely by environment. They need to look at brain activity, which has to be an indicator of decision making (what else could brain activity be?). They can't claim to know what you will decide before you start thinking about a question, only what you're likely to decide as you get close to being done thinking about it.
Ding, dong the witch is dead.
IMHO the reason that network news (and all TV for that matter) fails is that it is push-media. It creates one signal and tries to broadcast that as widely as possible. Because of this, it must always cater to the "average viewer" which is nobody in particular. Everybody has different "niche" interests, but any one niche is too small of an audience, so the motivation is always to get the widest appeal by compromising any "niche" (ie actual content) with generalized sound-bites. Internet media allows the user to select what content they want to read, so it can cater to a vast array of niche interests (even to absurd extremes sometimes). Newspapers also have this ability, because a reader can selectively read a subset of articles which interest them. With TV however, the viewer must sit and passively receive whatever content is spit out, the only choice is to change channels or turn off. This prompts the network planners to make every moment into either a sound bite or a teaser of exciting things to come, trying to hold the viewers attention with an insubstantial smear of flashy graphics and vacuous commentary.
Repost but still funny so many years later:
... help your gardener take out the garbage. In the other you go by the hobbit alias Frodo. One of these lives has a future in Mordor Mr. Underhill, the other does not!
Welcome to Rivendell Missster Underrrhill. As you can see we've had our eyes on you for some time. You seem to have been living two lives. In one you are Mr. Baggins, a respectable hobbit, you live in a hole, eat and drink a lot, and
Elrond:We're willing to wipe the slate clean, give you a fresh start. And all that we ask for in return is your cooperation in bringing a known ring to Mt. Doom.
Frodo:You can't scare me with this Elf crap. I know my rights; I want my prrreeecious.
Elrond:Tell me Mr. Underhill, what good is the precious is you are unable to wear it?
Elrond takes off Frodo's fing... wait. Nevermind. Wrong character.
(Thanks to Aqua_Geek for the 2nd half)
... and therefore it really doesn't matter what the majority thinks. Sure, there is a strong influence of public opinion on the creation of new laws, but basic rights are protected against the tyranny (or apathy) of the majority.
By "life exists on other planets" do they mean other planets in our solar system or outside of it? The rationality of the answer would depend largely on this interpretation. I believe a similar survey some years ago found that a lot of americans believed that NASA had already sent astronauts to Mars - so you can see how poorly informed most people are about the current state of space science.
Here's a better tip to save you 80 bucks:
use rubber cement thinner!
A common mistake everybody makes when looking at statistics like these is to forget about the baseline.
As they said in the article, this increase is probably due to the increase in how much various kinds of wireless devices (cellphones, blackberries, etc. ) are being used by criminals. If you wanted to confirm this, you'd have to see whether there really was such an increase. Does the general population use these kinds of devices 19% more this year than last? Do criminals? Perhaps they have been increasingly using them over several years, and only now have the police started to modify their tactics. You can only build up an argument that there is in fact an increase in "big-brotherish" surveillance if the number of such wiretaps goes well beyond the "need" for them.
More disturbing is the claim that Judges didn't reject a single request. This seems very wrong at first - especially when you have cop shows in the back of your mind where the crusading good-hearted but somewhat over-enthusiastic cop goes out searching for warrants from an old level-headed judge with flimsy evidence. It seems that there should be at least a few of these warrants which are rejected. Does are image of cops meet the reality? AlexB892 points out that it is seen as bad for a cop's career to have a wiretap requst rejected. Are cops really so diligent? Again - look to the baseline. What is the average number of rejected requests in any one year - these stats must be available somewhere. If you find that the average is only one or two rejections per year, then it seems reasonable that in any one year there might not be any at all. However, if it is much higher, you might question whether judges aren't being diligent enough in their scrutiny of the cops.
Always take statistics with a grain of salt - they're only numbers, and can be interpreted in many ways. If they're presented in the right way, they can seem to be strong evidence for some growing trend - but you really need other figures which give you the "context" to see if this is realistic - or just somebodies rhetoric.
I think that everything that is said in this article is true, except that it overlooks something. There seems to be the implicit assumption that if open source helps big companies then it won't succeed. This all comes back to what you think "success for open source" means.
* If you think that success for open source means that all software companies will go out of business, and some kind of socialistic software utopia will unfold over the earth, then this is just misguided. I don't see that this was/is ever the purpose of open source.
* If you think that success means that there will be a multitude of products at every level from home users up to large corporate solutions, then this might also be a misunderstanding. It could be that we end up seeing a pyramid effect where there is great diversity amongst home users, and less amongst companies who want "strategic solutions"
Ultimately the great thing about open source is it breaks open traditional monopolistic / oligopolistic tendencies in software - and so it is a great thing for consumers. Consumers don't even need to use open source to benefit - because just the presence of open source can alter the way that software companies sell their wares, increasing consumer surplus.
Also, it ensures that on the development side, there is a continuing source ( no pun intended ) of diversity in all areas. Think of this as a healthy condition for a vibrant ecosystem. Software developers from hobbyists to professionals, and across all levels of industry benefit from this, as it ensures a wide array of techniques and solutions to draw upon, and that most of these are documented publicly.
It may be true that at the "strategic" level, only a few solutions are found that are actually widely adopted by industry - but this is just the current status quo, so nothing has changed. It may also be that these few projects absorb all the good ideas from the rest of the field, incorporating them as features, so that there is little or no reason to switch, but it still doesn't mean that open source has "failed". If these solutions end up being open source - then this ensures that these strategic applications and the know-how that goes into them remains available to anyone.
Also, most open source projects have survived very well without big corporate support, so why should we fear that they will disappear forever? Simply because they are not picked as worthy of being strategic doesn't mean they'll dry up and die. Does it?
Here's a simple solution, get everyone using central IMAP servers for their email, have a little scripty-poo that tars the mail boxes every month & burn them to cd. Then put the CDs in paper jackets into shoeboxes & stuff them in your city archives.
I have had some extensive use of both wine and VMWare, and to be perfectly honest have found wine to be lacking. I realise that, being free software, wine has certain economic & ( dare I say it ) "ideological" advantages, but for most of the programs for which I actually need windows compatibility, I find that it simply doesn't ( yet ) cut the mustard. Also, it seems that the approach you've taken for wine of mapping libraries to their linux equivalents rather than doing actual emulation produces a vast number of compatibility issues that need to be resolved, and keeps the advancement of the wine project very slow. Could you tell me what technical advantages wine will ultimately bring once its reached full compatibility with windows, as compared to a solution like vmware.
what can I say - great minds roll in the same gutter =)
No - this won't work because you don't conduct the entirety of the communications via this one communication channel. Essentially the "quantum" channel is used only for creating a key that one can use to communicate securely over another channel. Furthermore, as part of the verification step in the quantum protocol, the sender and receiver check the results of the quantum exchange over an open channel, and any repeater wouldn't know how to spoof this verification step successfully to fool both sides. See my reply to your original post ( http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=106190&cid=904 0839 ) for details of the protocol to see why this works.
The whole point of quantum crypto is that if someone did try to act as a repeater, then they would be detected. This is not because you would "see" them standing there intercepting your data ( although that would be a possibility ), but because the protocol used to transmit the information securely would reveal the fact that the data had been intercepted and then retrasmitted.
The basics are like this. Small particles ( like photons of light ) have a property called spin. You can set the spin of a particle when you transmit it by using the right kind of gear. You can test the spin of the particle in several different ways, but not all spins can be detected correctly by all tests. So if you have no idea what the spins are, you can't know which test to use. So if you use a random sequence of tests, you will sometimes have the right test, and sometimes not. So to transmit information, our protocol works like this ( taken from "The Code Book" by Simon Singh, p.346-7 ):
1) Alice sends Bob a series of photons, and Bob measures them.
2) Alice tells Bob on which occasions he measured them in the correct way. Although Alice is telling Bob when he made the correct measurement, she is not telling him what the correct result should have been, so this conversation can be tapped without any risk to security ).
3) Alice and Bob discard the measurements that Bob made incorrectly, and concentrate on those that he made correctly in order to create an identical pair of onetime pads.
4) Alice and Bob test the integrity of their onetime pads by testing a few of the digits.
5) If the verification procedure is satisfactory, they can use the onetime pad to encrypt a message; if the verification reveals errors, they know that the photons were being tapped by Eve, and they need to start all over again.
It is true that Eve could listen in on the line, intercepting photons sent by Alice and try to recreate the same stream of photons to Bob with the same spins. However, she can only use a test once, she can't copy a photon and test it using several different tests. So she will inevitably use the wrong test on a number of photons, and so not know what the true spin ought to be, and so can't reproduce them. She also can't know what series of tests Bob will use to test the photons he is receiving. So inevitably what would happen is this: Eve uses the wrong test on some photons, doesn't know what their spins ought to be, sends out some with different spins; Bob however uses the correct tests on some of those photons that Eve "made up", but gets different results from Alice ( because some of the spins are different from what Alice originall sent ), so when they compare results it becomes obvious that they don't have the same sequence of results. Furthermore, Eve can't know where the errors are going to come up and how she should fix them, so she couldn't intervene successfully in this verification step to make it seem correct when its not.
Long story short - you can't make a successful repeater ( down side to this is you can't use any network for transmitting the photons, as a network necessarily involves repeaters - aka routers/gateways - you must have a direct line from sender to receiver so the photons don't get altered ).
Researchers released an update to this story. It turns out further analysis of the mitochondrial DNA has revealed that the flower is actually related to dead people. The spokesman for the research group "Goths for science", dressed in an unusually black labcoat was quoted as saying: 'These are the blossoms of the damned, their sweet aroma reminds us of the futility and inevitability of our fate. Embrace it and you may be spared eternal torment. Struggle against it and your soul will be crushed like an insignificant insect in the grip of a venus fly trap FOREVER!' The spokesman then darted back to 'his dark abode', which we learned from university officials is a plant conservatory in a converted broom closet in the basement. One shocked and terrified researcher from the psychology lab down the hall was quoted as saying "I can smell dead people, I smell them all the time..."
They'll have to pack those into the next lander.
Every time the spirit rover moves and doesn't get stuck on something, take a drink.
What WE forgot was that just because something has no technical merits doesn't mean it can't have some short-term financial merits. The same thing was true of the dot com bubble. Ultimately most of the businesses being developped were nothing stable, and couldn't survive long or turn a profit. That is irrelevant, however, when it comes to 'herd mentality' - because when you get enough people together they are governed by their lowest common faculties - which normally means desire and fear. Even investors who knew that the dot com thing was an artificial bubble would jump on the bandwagon, because if you could get out soon enough, you could really clean up nicely. Likewise, you don't have to believe that SCO has any chance in hell of winning, you just have to gamble on the greed of many other people and hope that it might cause enough noise to get you rich before it bursts.
I think you're taking my words too far, or further than I intend. I am not saying that ALL carpenters are less able to do design than ALL architects. I am saying that this is about what is typical. I am making a generalization, not a categorical argument. Certainly there are carpenters who have extensive design / theoretical knowledge and can perform as an architect in many circumstances. These people are generally hired as the senior tradesman in large projects, and act as intermediary between the designers and the builders. My grandfather worked in exactly this capacity for years, and was very good at it. In fact he was one of the most senior builders in all of Canada, and would travel the country to work in just such a capacity on such projects, so I do know a little bit about this.
However, I still think that there is quite a difference to be drawn between the types of occupations - perhaps it has more to do with mindset than with actual knowledge, but, on the whole, carpenters would not do as well in designing buildings as architects. Certainly I think a certain amount of this has to do with the type of training they're given, although it is of course a complex mix of social factors.
No, I would not advocate outsourcing all carpenters. As I said in my original post, it all depends on the nature of the project. Returning to the analogy, if you're constructing a building in which there are a great number of identical doors, you might easily send the specifications for the doors to some other firm, perhaps overseas, and have all the doors built there. However you obviously can't outsource everything, it's just not practical, you can't have an entire apartment building constructed in Sumatra and shipped to Long Island. There has to be a certain amount of construction taking place on location, under the supervision of those in charge of the project. That was, I think, my original point - it all depends on the nature of the business you're dealing with and how central the work is to the nature of that business. Peripheral projects are easily outsourced, integral ones are not.
Sure, the analogy is not apt in all respects, but the distinction is still important in many ways. I'm sure that there are, and will be, programmers who code as 'tradesmen' who have a great deal of practical coding knowledge, far over and above the theoretical design knowledge of those with advanced training. I know from experience that there is much about good coding design which I learned as an 'apprentice' to a very experienced programmer which I have never seen taught in computer science courses. You're never going to hire an architect to do a carpenter's job, but the same is true vice-versa.
The other important difference is the entry requirements into the market. Carpentry is something you can learn entirely by doing it - either on your own or as an apprentice to a more senior carpenter. However you can't be an architect without spending a lot of time in school, and earn a degree, and then usually you also would serve as a junior member of a larger firm for a long time to gain experience.
I don't think that the reason coding is outsourced, whereas project management is not is because of the skill required. It is more because of the nature of the businesses involved, and the nature of the coding to be done. In many situations, you can't really get away with outsourcing project management, because that essentially means you don't really have control over the project, and so you don't really have control over your own business ( assuming the project is central to the business, peripheral projects can be entirely outsourced ).
The nature of the coding to be done is also important. One of the facts that I've come to realize in studying computer science is that, to a large extent, the majority of coding work is routine and does not require in-depth knowledge or familiarity with computer science techniques. Most real-world coding consists of pretty mind-numbing tasks of gluing different APIs together in a reasonable hodge-podge. Many of these tasks require only a familiarity with the syntax of a language, some familiarity with a few common APIs, and access to a machine. None of which is very skill-intensive.
During the dot-com boom many people were employed doing coding work at incredibly over-inflated salaries who had read one or two 'for-dummies' type books. This was possible because there was a shortage of coders who could do even the most routine tasks. The high salaries attainable with very little training meant that there was naturally a rush on such teach-yourself-coding books, and suddenly there was a glut of people who could do routine coding. Now, because of that glut, there is an excess of able code-monkeys to do routine programming tasks, which means that much of this work goes to the lowest bidders ( ie Asian sweat shop coders ). Supply & demand is all it is.
But the future is hopeful, I think, for those who are willing to tough it out and obtain Comp.Sci. degrees. Right now we're stuck in a kind of computational limbo where the market is not sophisticated enough to demand really sophisticated software, so there is little demand for people who can design highly sophisticated applications. There are some jobs which require knowledge of high-performance computing, knowledge of efficient algorithm design, AI, etc. but not very many. Right now basic code-monkey work is what satisfies the majority of the market demand. This is changing rapidly, I think. The more consumers get a taste for sophisticated technology, the more the demand for truly intensive software will rise, and the need for more people with real skills ( ie University level training ) will increase.
There is a big difference between a carpenter and an architect. One is a trade, the other is a profession. The confusion that is happening right now in the labour market for programmers is because this type of distinction is just now starting to emerge. It used to be that there were only professionals in the programming world. With the dot-com boom & bust this has changed, and there is now a new class of worker, who programs as a tradesman, not as a professional. The mind-set of the market has not yet come to fully realize this distinction, and so we have these problems. Eventually this will settle out and there will be two classes of programmers - those equivalent to architects with high levels of training, and those equivalent to carpenters with much practical knowledge, but little or no theoretical or 'design' skill. I expect this will occur more and more as the demand for sophisticated software increases, and we'll see the re-establishment of 'programmer' as a profession.
My girlfriend is a molecular biologist who worked for a time in a lab where they made glowing animals like this ( mostly worms, but they had some rats also ). The reason, scientifically, for making these creatures is not just for the sake of seeing if you can make them glow. Rather, if you attach the genes for the glowing proteins adjacent to the genes for some other protein you'd like to monitor in the animal's DNA, then the glowing protein will become attached to the target protein, and you can get a snapshot of how active that protein is in the organism by simply turning on a UV light. This is a very useful tool for seeing how a particular gene is expressed in the active biology of the organism, because you can watch where, when and how the proteins which that gene codes for are expressed, and in what cells. The glowing pets is just some creepy Frankensteinian commercial spin-off of this research tool.