Yeah, I hadn't even really thought about this that way, and it seems quite right to me as a developer too. We no longer have the revolutions in software we had early on. Windows Vista is scarily similar to Windows 95. But Windows 3.1 wasn't to MS-DOS. So it's not just a problem of looking at the wrong timeframes. The timeframes are 11 years in both cases.
There isn't a need for a human like intelligence inside a computer. And even if there was (and I think this is key to the fallacy in this prediction), we wouldn't have the theories backing the hardware. We will most likely get some super fast hardware within these years, but what's much less certain is if AI theories will have advanced enough by then, and if the architecture will be naturally parallelized enough to take advantage of them. Because while we don't know much about how the human brain reasons, we do know that to make it at an as low temperature as 37 degrees Celsius in an as small area as our cranium (it's pretty damn amazing when you consider this!), it needs to be massively parallelized. And, again, we don't really even have the theories yet. We don't know how the software should best be written.
That's why we even in this day and age of 2008l, we're essentially running chatbots based on Eliza since 1966. Sure, there's been refinements and the new ones are slightly better, but not by much in a grand scheme. A sign of this problem is that they are giving their answers to your questions in a fraction of a second. That's not because they're amazingly well programmed; it's because the algorithms are still way too simple and based on theories from the sixties.
If the AI researches claiming "Oh, but we aren't there yet because we haven't got hardware nearly good enough yet", why aren't we even there halfway, with at least far more clever software than chatbots working on a reply to a single question for an hour? Sure, that would be impractical, but we don't even have the software for this that uses hard with even the boundaries of our current CPU's.
So at this point, if we'd make a leap to 2029 right now, all we'd get would be super fast Eliza's (I'm restricting my AI talk of "general AI" now, not in heuristic antispam algorithms, where the algorithms are very well understood and doesn't form a hurdle). The million dollar question here is: will we before 2029 have made breakthroughs in understanding the human brain well enough in how it reasons along with constructing the machines (biological or not as necessary) to approximate the structure and form the foundation on which the software can be built?
I mean, we can talk traditional transistor-based hardware all day and how fast it will be, but it will be near meaningless if we don't have the theories in place.
If they clearly didn't care, they wouldn't bother tagging the article in the first place. You obviously don't get it.
The person who tagged the article DID care.
He/she obviously doesn't want news stories of people's death unless they perhaps have had a major impact in society.
That's the part of where he cares.
This story was tagged as such for the same reason other stories are tagged "slownewsday". It's not that they care about the content, but about the contents on Slashdot.
How would you like it if after someone you knew died, someone came up to you and said "he's dead. so what?". This is different, because we aren't talking to his family on Slashdot. We're commenting news stories. Obviously I wouldn't say this to his family, I have better tact than that. But that's a social aspect. You should turn in your analogy card.
Right under this story I see a tag of "whogivesafuck."
That's just not acceptable. Why not? I don't give a fuck. I gave the topic a "slownewsday" tag too.
His family probably gives a fuck though, but I didn't even know who he was, and after reading the news title, I still don't understand how he matters more to my life than a random citizen that dies as I'm typing this. YOU don't give a fuck about that person either, whoever it is.
I'm confused. Why exactly would you want to send someone to Europa or Titan? I was not talking of sending people there, and not of Titan either.;-)
Mars (and to a lesser extent the moon) however, do hold the long-term promise of harboring self-sustained *human* life. I haven't heard much convincing things about that. Not as for a long term stay, at least. To be honest, I think a large part of the current plan is to make good PR.
I agree, it seriously pisses me off to see the long term plans being sketched up for a return to Moon, and then out to Mars. The budget that will end up comparably quite small to other US gov't agencies, but huge for NASA. When what I think what would be far more exciting, and with much more of an impact potential, would be to send out a probe to Enceladus and Europa. Both quite potential candidates for having oceans of liquid water beneath due to tidal heating from the extreme gravitational pull of their respective giant planets.
With how things are moving and how poorly NASA, ESA, and others first prioritized the ISS mission and now this thing to Mars where people will take a stroll and perhaps not find that much more than what the current rovers are finding (although yes, it will make a huge media impact for a week or so, or maybe even a month, before it disappears into the back of peoples' minds), I have low expectations on that I'll even be alive by the time we get to those moons perhaps harboring life, despite we probably having the technology for the job today!
We have identified water ice on the surface of Enceladus, we have strong support of there being active water volcanism there similar to Earth's geysers, we know not much sunlight is needed to pass through the surface to harbor life judging by extremophiles on Earth, and if there is water beneath, there'd be more water there than on Earth! Yet, we try to hunt water on Mars by theories so hard that we're to the brink of seeing what we want to see, and design a gargantuan long term exploration effort to go there. *sigh*
Yes, I agree. And if you're ready to use a Blu-ray player as part of a HTPC system, it will cost you even less. The upgrade from DVD to Blu-ray would go for $209 here in Sweden for a freaking 5x Blu-ray Pioneer player, even less if you go for cheap brands like Lite-On.
I agree, if Samsung followed the back then Blu-ray specs when making their drive, what more can they do... *shrug*
Does it play Profile 1.0 discs? Yes? Fine. It is a Profile 1.0 player.
As for Profile 1.1, they key here would be: was it a requirement of the Profile 1.0 spec to support a Blu-ray profile upgrade path? If not, I don't see what this man can expect. And if not, if he's pissed about that, he should rather direct his complaints at the full Blu-ray Disc Association instead, who collectively took that decision.
Wow, Slashdot ate my whole comment besides that link... A bug?
Anyway, besides rudely just posting a link like that in response, I was going to say that proof-of-concept code has at least already been published, and his point is that FreeBSD, NetBSD, DragonFlyBSD has fixes available. Apple is currently working on a fix for OS X. OpenBSD is not planning to fix this. More info can be found in my parent link.
The flaw in the PRNG is not exploitable. Not unless you are root on the local machine and have the ability to stop all other processes. Wait.. what?
This could potentially provide a platform for attacks involving prediction of IP sequences and thus TCP data injection attacks.
Where is a local machine access required for that? It could provide attacks on the network traffic itself, by merely knowing which operating systems are involved in it.
I think it's a good marketing goal. It has made it comparably easy to give the users the choice of desktop environment, and if they don't care, they can just pick Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS or some newbie friendly distro and not care about it.
They choose the OS to run the apps they want on the hardware they want. So Linus seems to still be completely accurate in his opinion. I agree, and I think one way to turn their argument "if it were up to Torvalds, beauty and intuition would take a backseat to functionality" on its head is to ask oneself -- where would Linux be today if Linus had the opposite stance? I think it would be much more like Windows, with GUI components in the kernel for cheap graphic performance at the cost of a piss poor design that can and likely will lead to security holes and instability.
One contributing reason to why Linux looks and functions as well as it does today is because the kernel/OS designers have focused on the actual OS, and the graphic designers and GUI developers have focused on their thing. Linus is perhaps not a good GUI designer. Why not let him do the thing he enjoys most? This is an open source OS. Linus doesn't even need worry about the GUI, because there's very little of that tied into the Linux kernel. If Linux becomes popular enough, it'll attract the human-computer interface designers that enjoy doing that sort of development as much as Linus enjoys working on the kernel.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think that can happen with Saturn's gravity tearing things up and putting things in orbit until they can form a larger body?
And if it could, I'd think it should have happened many million years ago already?
This is nothing to joke about!
We're right now arming ourselves with our pitchforks and riding our elks and polar bears to raid TPB here in Sweden!
They can at most sue them for some sort of grey area "contributory copyright infringement"...
I rest my case...
Yeah, I hadn't even really thought about this that way, and it seems quite right to me as a developer too. We no longer have the revolutions in software we had early on. Windows Vista is scarily similar to Windows 95. But Windows 3.1 wasn't to MS-DOS. So it's not just a problem of looking at the wrong timeframes. The timeframes are 11 years in both cases.
That's why we even in this day and age of 2008l, we're essentially running chatbots based on Eliza since 1966. Sure, there's been refinements and the new ones are slightly better, but not by much in a grand scheme. A sign of this problem is that they are giving their answers to your questions in a fraction of a second. That's not because they're amazingly well programmed; it's because the algorithms are still way too simple and based on theories from the sixties.
If the AI researches claiming "Oh, but we aren't there yet because we haven't got hardware nearly good enough yet", why aren't we even there halfway, with at least far more clever software than chatbots working on a reply to a single question for an hour? Sure, that would be impractical, but we don't even have the software for this that uses hard with even the boundaries of our current CPU's.
So at this point, if we'd make a leap to 2029 right now, all we'd get would be super fast Eliza's (I'm restricting my AI talk of "general AI" now, not in heuristic antispam algorithms, where the algorithms are very well understood and doesn't form a hurdle). The million dollar question here is: will we before 2029 have made breakthroughs in understanding the human brain well enough in how it reasons along with constructing the machines (biological or not as necessary) to approximate the structure and form the foundation on which the software can be built?
I mean, we can talk traditional transistor-based hardware all day and how fast it will be, but it will be near meaningless if we don't have the theories in place.
The person who tagged the article DID care.
He/she obviously doesn't want news stories of people's death unless they perhaps have had a major impact in society.
That's the part of where he cares.
This story was tagged as such for the same reason other stories are tagged "slownewsday". It's not that they care about the content, but about the contents on Slashdot.
I hope you get it now.
That's just not acceptable. Why not? I don't give a fuck. I gave the topic a "slownewsday" tag too.
His family probably gives a fuck though, but I didn't even know who he was, and after reading the news title, I still don't understand how he matters more to my life than a random citizen that dies as I'm typing this. YOU don't give a fuck about that person either, whoever it is.
This quiz will change people's perceptions of Windows Vista.
[ ] Fact
[x] Fiction
I agree, it's like comparing an actual stretching of a gaping asshole compared to only simulating the properties of the skin as it stretches.
:-(
Or something. Damn, I've been scarred by goatse for life.
I agree, it seriously pisses me off to see the long term plans being sketched up for a return to Moon, and then out to Mars. The budget that will end up comparably quite small to other US gov't agencies, but huge for NASA. When what I think what would be far more exciting, and with much more of an impact potential, would be to send out a probe to Enceladus and Europa. Both quite potential candidates for having oceans of liquid water beneath due to tidal heating from the extreme gravitational pull of their respective giant planets.
With how things are moving and how poorly NASA, ESA, and others first prioritized the ISS mission and now this thing to Mars where people will take a stroll and perhaps not find that much more than what the current rovers are finding (although yes, it will make a huge media impact for a week or so, or maybe even a month, before it disappears into the back of peoples' minds), I have low expectations on that I'll even be alive by the time we get to those moons perhaps harboring life, despite we probably having the technology for the job today!
We have identified water ice on the surface of Enceladus, we have strong support of there being active water volcanism there similar to Earth's geysers, we know not much sunlight is needed to pass through the surface to harbor life judging by extremophiles on Earth, and if there is water beneath, there'd be more water there than on Earth! Yet, we try to hunt water on Mars by theories so hard that we're to the brink of seeing what we want to see, and design a gargantuan long term exploration effort to go there. *sigh*
Whatever you do, don't mess with this guy and his beard of respectable size.
If you ever feel overly nerdy when using Linux, just give the men behind the OS a thought and you'll feel much better!
Yes, I agree. And if you're ready to use a Blu-ray player as part of a HTPC system, it will cost you even less. The upgrade from DVD to Blu-ray would go for $209 here in Sweden for a freaking 5x Blu-ray Pioneer player, even less if you go for cheap brands like Lite-On.
I agree, if Samsung followed the back then Blu-ray specs when making their drive, what more can they do... *shrug*
Does it play Profile 1.0 discs? Yes? Fine. It is a Profile 1.0 player.
As for Profile 1.1, they key here would be: was it a requirement of the Profile 1.0 spec to support a Blu-ray profile upgrade path? If not, I don't see what this man can expect. And if not, if he's pissed about that, he should rather direct his complaints at the full Blu-ray Disc Association instead, who collectively took that decision.
Agreed. Of course Tele2 wish to keep their subscribing pirates.
Someone just told me that it would help if I'd switch to Li
Wow, Slashdot ate my whole comment besides that link... A bug?
Anyway, besides rudely just posting a link like that in response, I was going to say that proof-of-concept code has at least already been published, and his point is that FreeBSD, NetBSD, DragonFlyBSD has fixes available. Apple is currently working on a fix for OS X. OpenBSD is not planning to fix this. More info can be found in my parent link.
This could potentially provide a platform for attacks involving prediction of IP sequences and thus TCP data injection attacks.
Where is a local machine access required for that? It could provide attacks on the network traffic itself, by merely knowing which operating systems are involved in it.
That doctype is simply <!DOCTYPE HTML>!
I think it's a good marketing goal. It has made it comparably easy to give the users the choice of desktop environment, and if they don't care, they can just pick Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS or some newbie friendly distro and not care about it.
So Linus seems to still be completely accurate in his opinion. I agree, and I think one way to turn their argument "if it were up to Torvalds, beauty and intuition would take a backseat to functionality" on its head is to ask oneself -- where would Linux be today if Linus had the opposite stance? I think it would be much more like Windows, with GUI components in the kernel for cheap graphic performance at the cost of a piss poor design that can and likely will lead to security holes and instability.
One contributing reason to why Linux looks and functions as well as it does today is because the kernel/OS designers have focused on the actual OS, and the graphic designers and GUI developers have focused on their thing. Linus is perhaps not a good GUI designer. Why not let him do the thing he enjoys most? This is an open source OS. Linus doesn't even need worry about the GUI, because there's very little of that tied into the Linux kernel. If Linux becomes popular enough, it'll attract the human-computer interface designers that enjoy doing that sort of development as much as Linus enjoys working on the kernel.