I thought at first that they just, you know, threatened to make the cancerous growth do math. I know I'd want to curl up and die if someone were forcing me to do calculus again...
You know, until I read this comment, I was taking "Even after he told me he could see the wires inside" to mean "Ha ha, he's stupid because he doesn't understand that a metal connector would short out the wires inside" rather than "Metal is not see-through."
Not if they could make significantly more ad revenue with a different show in the same time slot.
Maybe instead of not showing them at all, though, they could show them around 6am. I for one would really enjoy being able to watch an episode of a good TV show before going to work.
So you're saying the DoE, NASA, the Forestry department, Amtrak, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting have oodles of spare money laying around they can use on research into things that don't have an obvious and immediate benefit?
The original poster's point is, military funding is comparatively trivial to get when compared with, say, NASA funding.
Yeah, but the article (originally--it's now been edited to better reflect what Atkinson did, as well as stating that Tesler was a 'future Vice President' instead of 'future CEO') made it sound more like he did all of the icons than that he wrote the graphics primitives.
The point is, making OSX fully 64-bit would actually slow it down because things that work just fine with 32 bits would suddenly have to move around twice as much data and take twice as much memory, most of which would be unused. The speedup whem moving to a 64bit version of Windows is simply because the ia32 architecture is so bloody awful that AMD had nowhere to go but up with x86-64.
It wasn't the last of the Apple II line. I know that the IIc+, at least, came later.
(The IIc+ was basically a IIc on steroids. Wicked fast processor, comparatively. And, in fact, it was faster than the IIgs, despite the fact that the IIgs was a 16 bit machine and the IIc+ was an 8 bit.)
And, of course, as soon as I hit 'submit', there's a Slashdot story saying that the XBox 360 *will* be backwards compatible. So, ignore everything I've said in this thread.:)
Okay, so we have two consumers, Alucard and Bonfiglio. They both want to buy a console, but Alucard wants an XBox and Bonfiglio wants a PS2.
Suddenly, there are announcements of the new XBox 360 and PS3. But they each can only afford one console right now!
If Bonfiglio purchases a PS2 and in the future a PS3-only game comes out that he wants enough to buy a PS3 for, his PS2 is now basically worthless. His job at the bowling alley doesn't pay him that much, so he's more likely to wait for the PS3 to come out, since that will include all of the PS2 goodness he wanted.
Alucard, on the other hand, might still go ahead and get an XBox now and hope that his job at the abbatoir down the road pays him enough so that he can get an XBox 360 in the future, 'cause he wants to play Halo and the 360 won't satisfy his Halo jones.
The XBox is, for all intents and purposes, a separate console line from the XBox 360. Nobody would go out and buy both a Playstation and a Playstation 2. But it's possible that someone would go out and buy both an XBox and an XBox 360, just like people would sometimes have an NES, SNES, N64, and GameCube.
Granted, this is probably only logic that applies to the sorts of obsessive gamers who have eight or nine consoles hooked up to their TV, and the advantage from this would also probably be eaten up by the disadvantage of releasing another console that has to start out on day 1 with about five games like they did with the XBox (versus the PS2's few made-specifically-for-PS2 games plus their huge PS1 library)
Which, if we remember the lessons of Osborne, could blow up in their face. They announced the successors to the Osborne 1 way too early--people stopped buying Osborne 1s because they wanted to wait for the "just around the corner" Osborne 2. They eventually got the Osborne 2 out the door, but by then, the company had pretty much run out of money.
So I'm wondering if Microsoft's early announcement is going to screw them. Especially given that, as far as I've heard, they've made no specific announcement with regards to backwards compatibility as of yet.
(Then again, lack of backwards compatibility might just work in Microsoft's favor. People might just think of the XBox and XBox 360 as completely different systems, so they'll still buy one to play games like Halo and Halo 2 even though there's a new machine coming out in the not-too-distant future, whereas with the PS3, consumers who want to play PS2/PSX games might wait so they're not left out when PS3 games start appearing)
Larry Tesler was never CEO.
on
Apple's First Flops
·
· Score: 5, Informative
FTFA: >where he led a dozen engineers (including future Apple CEO Larry Tesler)
Larry Tesler was never CEO of Apple. He was Chief Scientist and VP.
Kinda makes me wonder about the veracity of the rest of the piece...
0-9 doesn't take any less memory to store than 1-10. You can only get 0-7 with three bits. Anything from 8 through 15 requires four bits. So a 9 and a 10 take the same amount of memory to store.
Unless you're using binary-coded-decimal, of course, but people using binary-coded-decimal get what they deserve.
Crap. Half of my comment went away 'cause I'm a moron and forgot to entityfy my stream-insertion operator. Trying again:
#include <iostream> int main() {
cout <<"1=0"<<endl;
return 0; }
See, an artificial intelligence would be running at a higher level of abstraction than the bare formal system level. A run of the above program wouldn't prove that 1 equals 0, it would just print it out.
Douglas Hofstadter gives a much more thorough trouncing of these ideas than I did in Godel, Escher, Bach. If you haven't read it, and you still enjoy reading things that don't fit with your current worldview, I highly recommend it.
Meh. Penrose's argument boiled down to the Godellian argument against AI, which hinges on not quite understanding Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.
I.e.,: 1. GIT states, basically, that any formal system must necessarily be either incomplete or inconsistant because in any sufficiently powerful formal system, it's possible to create a sentence that basically says "This statement cannot be proven in this formal system" which is either unprovable (and therefore true, meaning the system can't represent *all* true facts) or can be proven (in which case you've just proven a falsity, so the system is inconsistant) 2. A computer is basically an instantiation of a formal system. The run of a program can be considered a 'proof' in this formal system. 3. A computer that's inconsistant is worth dum diddly do. 4. Humans can, in theory, comprehend all true facts. 5. Therefore, the mind must be because of something we don't understand.
Now, there are at least two good counterarguments to this, to wit: 1. "This sentence cannot be proven by Roger Penrose." What, you think people can prove all true facts? 2. Lemme throw a little C++ at you: #include <iostream> int main() {
cout Godel, Escher, Bach. If you haven't read it, and you still enjoy reading things that don't fit with your current worldview, I highly recommend it.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess after switching to x86, Apple felt it needed to do something not-evil to balance things out.
That smug bastard Dvorak was right.
Dammit.
I've got a copy of that.
:)
I got it cheap, 'cause it has "Defying Graviity" on the cover. You'd think someone would have caught that before it went to the printer...
Though, granted, I owned it for years before I noticed it and realized why my copy had been so cheap.
I thought at first that they just, you know, threatened to make the cancerous growth do math. I know I'd want to curl up and die if someone were forcing me to do calculus again...
You know, until I read this comment, I was taking "Even after he told me he could see the wires inside" to mean "Ha ha, he's stupid because he doesn't understand that a metal connector would short out the wires inside" rather than "Metal is not see-through."
And I was feeling so smart this morning...
Oh no you don't. I'm not falling for that one a third time!
This'll give Google enough time to add them to Google Maps before MS's launch date.
That's why the artificially-created stable one near the Deep Space Nine station was so strategically valuable.
And they had me and my sister. So that tracks
I guess the 140/100 vs 135/100 difference explains why my sister's a lesbian.
Saw it.
Laughed so hard I nearly fell down.
(Good thing I didn't, 'cause I was in the basement and it has a concrete floor)
Not if they could make significantly more ad revenue with a different show in the same time slot.
Maybe instead of not showing them at all, though, they could show them around 6am. I for one would really enjoy being able to watch an episode of a good TV show before going to work.
...
So you're saying the DoE, NASA, the Forestry department, Amtrak, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting have oodles of spare money laying around they can use on research into things that don't have an obvious and immediate benefit?
The original poster's point is, military funding is comparatively trivial to get when compared with, say, NASA funding.
Yeah, but the article (originally--it's now been edited to better reflect what Atkinson did, as well as stating that Tesler was a 'future Vice President' instead of 'future CEO') made it sound more like he did all of the icons than that he wrote the graphics primitives.
The point is, making OSX fully 64-bit would actually slow it down because things that work just fine with 32 bits would suddenly have to move around twice as much data and take twice as much memory, most of which would be unused. The speedup whem moving to a 64bit version of Windows is simply because the ia32 architecture is so bloody awful that AMD had nowhere to go but up with x86-64.
--AC
It wasn't the last of the Apple II line. I know that the IIc+, at least, came later.
(The IIc+ was basically a IIc on steroids. Wicked fast processor, comparatively. And, in fact, it was faster than the IIgs, despite the fact that the IIgs was a 16 bit machine and the IIc+ was an 8 bit.)
And, of course, as soon as I hit 'submit', there's a Slashdot story saying that the XBox 360 *will* be backwards compatible. So, ignore everything I've said in this thread. :)
Okay, so we have two consumers, Alucard and Bonfiglio. They both want to buy a console, but Alucard wants an XBox and Bonfiglio wants a PS2.
Suddenly, there are announcements of the new XBox 360 and PS3. But they each can only afford one console right now!
If Bonfiglio purchases a PS2 and in the future a PS3-only game comes out that he wants enough to buy a PS3 for, his PS2 is now basically worthless. His job at the bowling alley doesn't pay him that much, so he's more likely to wait for the PS3 to come out, since that will include all of the PS2 goodness he wanted.
Alucard, on the other hand, might still go ahead and get an XBox now and hope that his job at the abbatoir down the road pays him enough so that he can get an XBox 360 in the future, 'cause he wants to play Halo and the 360 won't satisfy his Halo jones.
The XBox is, for all intents and purposes, a separate console line from the XBox 360. Nobody would go out and buy both a Playstation and a Playstation 2. But it's possible that someone would go out and buy both an XBox and an XBox 360, just like people would sometimes have an NES, SNES, N64, and GameCube.
Granted, this is probably only logic that applies to the sorts of obsessive gamers who have eight or nine consoles hooked up to their TV, and the advantage from this would also probably be eaten up by the disadvantage of releasing another console that has to start out on day 1 with about five games like they did with the XBox (versus the PS2's few made-specifically-for-PS2 games plus their huge PS1 library)
--AC
Which, if we remember the lessons of Osborne, could blow up in their face. They announced the successors to the Osborne 1 way too early--people stopped buying Osborne 1s because they wanted to wait for the "just around the corner" Osborne 2. They eventually got the Osborne 2 out the door, but by then, the company had pretty much run out of money.
So I'm wondering if Microsoft's early announcement is going to screw them. Especially given that, as far as I've heard, they've made no specific announcement with regards to backwards compatibility as of yet.
(Then again, lack of backwards compatibility might just work in Microsoft's favor. People might just think of the XBox and XBox 360 as completely different systems, so they'll still buy one to play games like Halo and Halo 2 even though there's a new machine coming out in the not-too-distant future, whereas with the PS3, consumers who want to play PS2/PSX games might wait so they're not left out when PS3 games start appearing)
FTFA:
>where he led a dozen engineers (including future Apple CEO Larry Tesler)
Larry Tesler was never CEO of Apple. He was Chief Scientist and VP.
Kinda makes me wonder about the veracity of the rest of the piece...
Are those ears?!?
That's what binary-coded decimal is.
There is a debate. It has not been completely accepted that micro-kernels are the way to go.
0-9 doesn't take any less memory to store than 1-10. You can only get 0-7 with three bits. Anything from 8 through 15 requires four bits. So a 9 and a 10 take the same amount of memory to store.
Unless you're using binary-coded-decimal, of course, but people using binary-coded-decimal get what they deserve.
Crap. Half of my comment went away 'cause I'm a moron and forgot to entityfy my stream-insertion operator. Trying again:
#include <iostream>
int main()
{
cout <<"1=0"<<endl;
return 0;
}
See, an artificial intelligence would be running at a higher level of abstraction than the bare formal system level. A run of the above program wouldn't prove that 1 equals 0, it would just print it out.
Douglas Hofstadter gives a much more thorough trouncing of these ideas than I did in Godel, Escher, Bach. If you haven't read it, and you still enjoy reading things that don't fit with your current worldview, I highly recommend it.
Meh. Penrose's argument boiled down to the Godellian argument against AI, which hinges on not quite understanding Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.
I.e.,:
1. GIT states, basically, that any formal system must necessarily be either incomplete or inconsistant because in any sufficiently powerful formal system, it's possible to create a sentence that basically says "This statement cannot be proven in this formal system" which is either unprovable (and therefore true, meaning the system can't represent *all* true facts) or can be proven (in which case you've just proven a falsity, so the system is inconsistant)
2. A computer is basically an instantiation of a formal system. The run of a program can be considered a 'proof' in this formal system.
3. A computer that's inconsistant is worth dum diddly do.
4. Humans can, in theory, comprehend all true facts.
5. Therefore, the mind must be because of something we don't understand.
Now, there are at least two good counterarguments to this, to wit:
1. "This sentence cannot be proven by Roger Penrose." What, you think people can prove all true facts?
2. Lemme throw a little C++ at you:
#include <iostream>
int main()
{
cout Godel, Escher, Bach. If you haven't read it, and you still enjoy reading things that don't fit with your current worldview, I highly recommend it.