Now all that's left to say is, I wonder what they'll do when then run out of Toy Story characters to name the releases after? Or if they switch, what they'll switch to?
By the pace in which they release their distribution, I think we should take care of the 32 bit date problem first.
You seem to forget that this is reactive technology. It, like google, produces intelligent responses to input from the user. What will the corporate bot answer when a teenager will ask it about mp3s, drugs or abortions?
No, you see, that's the entire beauty of it. Artificial Intelligence now gets to the level of the slowest humans. You see - intelligent conversation is something that makes huge leaps between sentence and sentence and each contains a high quantity of information. Since these kind of thematic algorithms are still in their very early stages, only people who's conversations contain a low enough information quotient might be fooled by them. These people are the children of AOLers.
I've been skimming the 100 replies posted thus far in search for one that actually adresses the points raised by the original article, but failing to find one, I guess I'll have to make do with the article itself.
Tolkien, in his works, did not strive to create anything new. His themes, creatures, symbols and narratives mostly derive from the vast mythological artwork of pre- and post-christian europe and mainly their revival in the national movements of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Wagner for one example among many.
Tolkien didn't try to preserve the middle-earth. All through the book the loss of its most cherished symbols - The purity of evil that is Sauron and which will surely be destroyed, The elves as the pure good that will leave lothlorien no matter what - all these are given. As is the loss of the Christian fate in its purest form of heaven and hell is abandoned in his lifetime.
Through the book, which is a lament for a time that never was, but that from now on won't even be wished for, he treats his (fallible, misguided, all-too-human) characters as young adults in need for education. It's a chase to defeat the purity of both sides because they are both possessed to the point of stagnation. But it's also a chase to perserve their heritage so that the mortal races who inherit the middle-earth will have a sense of smell which way leads too good and which to evil.
As such this is wholly a reactive work. Warning against the speed at which our modern-postmodern-pc values have swept over those who nourished us for thousands of years. But not so that we will fear the change and cringe back to the security of false metaphysics - So that we will march ahead, trusting our ability to "smell" the "right thing" and let it lead us, So that we can call the evil empire evil to its face without one solid moral claim to call our own.
I'm sorry if this babbling was too incoherent to follow. But it is very late at night here and I just had to try and articulate what is it about LOTR that captures the mind so intensively.
But this is simply describing the Uruk-hai, which didn't exist in the time of _The Hobbit_. So either goblin is a synonym for orc in the eyes of Tolkien or _The Hobbit_ is simply not consistent with LOTR (also a possibility of course)
I rechecked and you're completely right. I replied hastily since I've just read LOTR and remembered precisely where the distinction between the two races was made, and so thought you were wrong. But a quick check on the Hobbit revealed that indeed there are no orcs there and that the same stories that are attributed to them in LOTR are told in the hobbit referring to goblins (isn't grep great;-).
I guess it's now time to read the hobbit once again...
Lord of the rings was one of the first books I read in English. Being a non-native speaker I was quite intimidated by the 1500 page volume that caught the imagination of so many of my friends.
I remember clearly the day when I snuggled in bed some rainy afternoon and opened it for the first time - When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating
his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was muc
h talk and excitement in Hobbiton. That word - "eleventy" was so incorrect, and yet so right, that for me it captured the essence of this realm right from the start.
This is not reality, nor it should be, but a world consistent and pure where imagination runs free and answers only to itself.
Still at times I roll this number on my tounge, daydreaming of a world where neither good nor evil are ashamed of what they are. But I guess this kind of clarity is reserved to mythic worlds that never were and never will be.
For some reason Tolkien decided to rename the creatures that he called "goblins" in _The Hobbit_ to "orcs", and since then, "orc" has meant a creature similar to the goblins of Middle Earth.
I'm sorry but I think you're wrong. Orcs and goblins are two different races in LOTR, as can be seen from this passage After the death of Boromir (Book III Chap. 1) -
And Aragorn looked on the slain, and he said: 'Here lie many that are not folk o
f Mordor. Some are from the North, from the Misty Mountains, if I know anything
of Orcs and their kinds. And here are others strange to me. Their gear is not af
ter the manner of Orcs at all!'
There were four goblin-soldiers of greater stature, swart, slant-eyed, with thic
k legs and large hands. They were armed with short broad-bladed swords, not with
the curved scimitars usual with Orcs: and they had bows of yew, in length and s
hape like the bows of Men. Upon their shields they bore a strange device: a smal
l white hand in the centre of a black field; on the front of their iron helms wa
s set an S-rune, wrought of some white metal.
Well, if you have bothered to read the article you'd realize that in fact this new design reduces the amount of dangerous radiation absorbed by the user -
'"Yet," said Auckland, "it gives you very high isolation between the antenna and the circuit board -- and also between the handset and the user's head and hand. The specific absorption rate is one-third that of alternative, internal [antenna] offerings."'
Sorry my tone came off more impolite than intended. The subject line is the slogan of the "Mtv Cribs" program.
Apology accepted:-) I guess my lack of familiarity with American culture causes me to sometimes accept things at face value when they're supposed to be subtle references.
Extrapolating the future from the current situation will get you in trouble. Reality changes. No software can take into account all future input. Look up "misfeature" in the jargon file.
I think you understood the opposite of what I was trying to say - exactly because you cannot predict all the future uses a software unit will have, you cannot perform a statistical analysis of when, if at all, it'll break.
While the first part of the original post was constructive ("Does it run Linux" has its place in the "Dept." part but definitely not as the article title), calling Michael a monster is nothing but an ad hominem attack and a lowly flame, and should be moderated as such.
And as for flames, who exacly is the "Homo" in your post?
GEB = Godel, Escher and Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
Thanks.
BTW, the way to type a letter that does no exist on your OS. In DOS, you could type <Alt>-ddd where ddd is the decimal entry from the current code-page. In Windows there is the "Character Map" utility for that. I guess other OSs has their own means to that end.
Actually, you could get a random software error. If I recall correctly, one average every 3 months a cosmic ray from space will actually toggle a bit in your system memory. So, technically, you could have a random software error. Not likely =) but possible!
But if it is the RAM that was affected directly by the cosmic particle, wasn't it the hardware that was at fault here? You can have software measures to counter it, such as checksumming the memory, but the failure itself did not originate in the software.
Please forgive me, O clueful one, for offending your knowledgable sensibilities and enlighten this poor soul - What lacks in my mathematical education? And who/what/why is/are GEB?
The reason why statistical terms such as "mean time between failure" is commonly applied to hardware is that hardware is bound to fail sooner or later. Accumulation of damage from friction, shaking etc. means that sooner or later all things physical will break. This is just the second law of thermodynamics - it's not a question of "whether" - its a question of "when".
Software, of the other hand, is a digital entity, so its function doesn't change with time. If it was broken on the 10,000th time around, it was broken all along. Whether anyone noticed it was broken is completely another issue.
He just wanted to know if it makes a difference whether you miss the commercials because you're fast-forwarding or making a sandwhich, going to the bathroom, reading Slashdot, whatever. Wouldn't you be stealing?
This isn't just a question of possibility, but also of convenience. Advertisers know that a certain percentage of the viewers are taking a leak/flipping channels/whatever when the commercials are on, but they also know that since it is somewhat inconvenient to do so, many will sink into that trance-like state that is crucial for delivering their message. Although fast forwarding through time-shifted commercials isn't different in principle, in practice only a very small percentage will watch them.
This is very similar to the current legal battle against DeCSS. The MPAA is fully aware that the source has spreaded through the internet and that any half-competent geek can use it to create copies of DVDs. But the point remains that it is still very inconvenient to do it. By fighting it (or its distributors, in the case of 2600) they make sure that no commercial entity will create DVD players or proprietry software that uses DeCSS in an easy to use way.
On the one hand, this is really where Free software can thrive - the guerilla force to spear-head legal changes. On the other hand, it might enforce the already poor name hackers have made for themselves.
Well, actually, if you look at this cnet article -
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-5924503.html you'll see that Microsoft has decided to release USB 2.0 support for Windows XP as a separate patch.
Which isn't to say that everything's quiet behind the curtain. Similar "protection" schemes can probably be tunneled on top of USB as well as on top of IEEE1394.
Slashdot Mirror
If they continue behaving like this I just might miss them one day.
Now all that's left to say is, I wonder what they'll do when then run out of Toy Story characters to name the releases after? Or if they switch, what they'll switch to?
By the pace in which they release their distribution, I think we should take care of the 32 bit date problem first.
I pity the three year old that knows the meaning of the word.
You seem to forget that this is reactive technology. It, like google, produces intelligent responses to input from the user. What will the corporate bot answer when a teenager will ask it about mp3s, drugs or abortions?
Push is not a technology. Push is a political agendum.
No, you see, that's the entire beauty of it. Artificial Intelligence now gets to the level of the slowest humans. You see - intelligent conversation is something that makes huge leaps between sentence and sentence and each contains a high quantity of information.
Since these kind of thematic algorithms are still in their very early stages, only people who's conversations contain a low enough information quotient might be fooled by them.
These people are the children of AOLers.
Tolkien, in his works, did not strive to create anything new. His themes, creatures, symbols and narratives mostly derive from the vast mythological artwork of pre- and post-christian europe and mainly their revival in the national movements of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Wagner for one example among many.
Tolkien didn't try to preserve the middle-earth. All through the book the loss of its most cherished symbols - The purity of evil that is Sauron and which will surely be destroyed, The elves as the pure good that will leave lothlorien no matter what - all these are given. As is the loss of the Christian fate in its purest form of heaven and hell is abandoned in his lifetime.
Through the book, which is a lament for a time that never was, but that from now on won't even be wished for, he treats his (fallible, misguided, all-too-human) characters as young adults in need for education. It's a chase to defeat the purity of both sides because they are both possessed to the point of stagnation. But it's also a chase to perserve their heritage so that the mortal races who inherit the middle-earth will have a sense of smell which way leads too good and which to evil.
As such this is wholly a reactive work. Warning against the speed at which our modern-postmodern-pc values have swept over those who nourished us for thousands of years. But not so that we will fear the change and cringe back to the security of false metaphysics - So that we will march ahead, trusting our ability to "smell" the "right thing" and let it lead us, So that we can call the evil empire evil to its face without one solid moral claim to call our own.
I'm sorry if this babbling was too incoherent to follow. But it is very late at night here and I just had to try and articulate what is it about LOTR that captures the mind so intensively.
I rechecked and you're completely right. I replied hastily since I've just read LOTR and remembered precisely where the distinction between the two races was made, and so thought you were wrong. But a quick check on the Hobbit revealed that indeed there are no orcs there and that the same stories that are attributed to them in LOTR are told in the hobbit referring to goblins (isn't grep great ;-).
I guess it's now time to read the hobbit once again...
I remember clearly the day when I snuggled in bed some rainy afternoon and opened it for the first time - When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was muc h talk and excitement in Hobbiton. That word - "eleventy" was so incorrect, and yet so right, that for me it captured the essence of this realm right from the start.
This is not reality, nor it should be, but a world consistent and pure where imagination runs free and answers only to itself.
Still at times I roll this number on my tounge, daydreaming of a world where neither good nor evil are ashamed of what they are. But I guess this kind of clarity is reserved to mythic worlds that never were and never will be.
I'm sorry but I think you're wrong. Orcs and goblins are two different races in LOTR, as can be seen from this passage After the death of Boromir (Book III Chap. 1) -
And Aragorn looked on the slain, and he said: 'Here lie many that are not folk o f Mordor. Some are from the North, from the Misty Mountains, if I know anything of Orcs and their kinds. And here are others strange to me. Their gear is not af ter the manner of Orcs at all!'
There were four goblin-soldiers of greater stature, swart, slant-eyed, with thic k legs and large hands. They were armed with short broad-bladed swords, not with the curved scimitars usual with Orcs: and they had bows of yew, in length and s hape like the bows of Men. Upon their shields they bore a strange device: a smal l white hand in the centre of a black field; on the front of their iron helms wa s set an S-rune, wrought of some white metal.
'"Yet," said Auckland, "it gives you very high isolation between the antenna and the circuit board -- and also between the handset and the user's head and hand. The specific absorption rate is one-third that of alternative, internal [antenna] offerings."'
Apology accepted :-) I guess my lack of familiarity with American culture causes me to sometimes accept things at face value when they're supposed to be subtle references.
Extrapolating the future from the current situation will get you in trouble. Reality changes. No software can take into account all future input. Look up "misfeature" in the jargon file.
I think you understood the opposite of what I was trying to say - exactly because you cannot predict all the future uses a software unit will have, you cannot perform a statistical analysis of when, if at all, it'll break.
And as for flames, who exacly is the "Homo" in your post?
Thanks.
BTW, the way to type a letter that does no exist on your OS. In DOS, you could type <Alt>-ddd where ddd is the decimal entry from the current code-page. In Windows there is the "Character Map" utility for that. I guess other OSs has their own means to that end.
But if it is the RAM that was affected directly by the cosmic particle, wasn't it the hardware that was at fault here? You can have software measures to counter it, such as checksumming the memory, but the failure itself did not originate in the software.
Please forgive me, O clueful one, for offending your knowledgable sensibilities and enlighten this poor soul - What lacks in my mathematical education? And who/what/why is/are GEB?
Software, of the other hand, is a digital entity, so its function doesn't change with time. If it was broken on the 10,000th time around, it was broken all along. Whether anyone noticed it was broken is completely another issue.
This isn't just a question of possibility, but also of convenience. Advertisers know that a certain percentage of the viewers are taking a leak/flipping channels/whatever when the commercials are on, but they also know that since it is somewhat inconvenient to do so, many will sink into that trance-like state that is crucial for delivering their message. Although fast forwarding through time-shifted commercials isn't different in principle, in practice only a very small percentage will watch them.
This is very similar to the current legal battle against DeCSS. The MPAA is fully aware that the source has spreaded through the internet and that any half-competent geek can use it to create copies of DVDs. But the point remains that it is still very inconvenient to do it. By fighting it (or its distributors, in the case of 2600) they make sure that no commercial entity will create DVD players or proprietry software that uses DeCSS in an easy to use way.
On the one hand, this is really where Free software can thrive - the guerilla force to spear-head legal changes. On the other hand, it might enforce the already poor name hackers have made for themselves.
Well, actually, if you look at this cnet article - http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-5924503.html you'll see that Microsoft has decided to release USB 2.0 support for Windows XP as a separate patch.
Which isn't to say that everything's quiet behind the curtain. Similar "protection" schemes can probably be tunneled on top of USB as well as on top of IEEE1394.
Let me get this straight- they claim a patent on shamelessly attacking the US Govt.?!
I think /. has lots of prior art here...