I believe the confusion is because the Handbook is using the business definition of Software Engineer instead of the technical definition. The business definition being "an early 20s new graduate with 5 years of experience in a technology that's just been invented who has no family and is willing to work 60 hours per week for $40K p.a. plus stock shares in a company that's never shown a profit".
Mr. Talbott had ignored one of the most dangerous and dehumanizing technologies yet, the "book".
This soulless and inert device transforms the living, thinking word of Man to meaningless scratches on parchment or vellum. It leads inevitably to disrespect of knowledge and the withering of memory.
While priests and philosophers may find an occasional use for these "books", their use by the common citizen will enslave them to a technology and destroy the human spirit.
Metropolitan Living Homes
on
Robotic Ecologies
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· Score: 2, Interesting
There was an Alternate Reality Game created for the A.I movie that involved "living homes" going insane, murdering, and being murdered. This game was arguably more creative and involved than the movie.
The ARG site is gone, but there are still some notes on the living homes at the Cloudmakers site.
Thanks for the ideas everyone, they are valuable. Moodle was mentioned in the project and I will investigate it.
The specific project is for language instruction, and the type of data we wanted instructors to insert included videos of conversations, though I had hoped to provide more versatility.
The current favorite technology is WinCALIS. It's ideal for what we want to do right now, but I felt it was too limited as a general-purpose CAI program.
I don't suppose there are any unbiased users of both Moodle and WinCALIS for language instruction out there?
So, taking 'computer generated art' and sending it to, basically, a complex printing device is NOT ROBOTIC ART.
Most of the Artbots are pieces of art themselves, not printing devices. But there are others that actually create art; Shockbot creates new images using influences from its environment, RoboZoic is a performance piece.
Neither of these works are preprogrammed, and both "evolve the piece based on the way it can percieve some data...".
The astrolabe is a mechanical device for determining the positions of the stars and continents, predicting dawn and dusk, the seasons, and finding latitude.
They would appeal to ancient geeks because they are endlessly tinkerable; you can add indicators for stars or mechanical work to predict things like eclipses and conjunctions.
Chaucer was apparently quite the astrolabe hacker.
Start building by pushing a stick into the ground, or go here to download a diagram which one can print onto stiff paper.
... is because the spelling and grammar on/. is so abominable that a joke which relies on a misspelling will not even be noticed by 90% of/. readers, and assumed to be unintentional by the rest.
This is true, but what happens when AI has advanced to a level when robots are able to make their own decisions?
They don't need to be able to pass a Turing test, just be able to answer a phone, count change, package groceries, or assemble parts.
Once that happens, robots will be able to take over half of all current jobs. What "fulfilling and wonderful" jobs will replace them? Building robots? No, the robots ca do that.
It's March 4, Steve landed safely back in Salina yesterday, the press was there and Richard gave him a champagne shower.
So what happened to the fuel? The only mention on the Global Flyer page is the note "fuel readings indicated that the aircraft had lost a significant amount of fuel shortly after take-off". Were the readings wrong? Did they really add a ton of excess fuel to the original amount? Was there something wrong withthe plane? Did he get a favorable wind? Was it all a publicity stunt? What?
This illustrates one of my complaints with the media, its obsession with sensationalism. "OhMyGodThePlanesGonnaCrashAndHesGonnaDIE!!" appears on newspaper headlines worldwide, yet when the plane doesn't, in fact, crash and the pilot doesn't die, the news is ignored. If the news media, or Virgin Atlantic, makes a prediction and are wrong, I'd like to know why.
Why did they think the plane was short of fuel? Does Virgin Atlantic not know how to measure fuel? I'd think that is something that passengers flying their planes should know. Did the media sensationalize an insignificant measurement uncertainty? Their readers should know that, too.
Instead, we get total silence on the matter. I have no idea why misleading informatin was being reported worldwide, and it looks like I'll never know.
You are right; the CBC is not balanced. I believe Peter Mansbridge, the National News anchor, wrote an article in Maclean's magazine a while ago about how "balance" is destroying the news, and how he is not concerned with "balance". He is concerned about accuracy.
For example, when there is a federal budget "balance" says to ask both a Republican and a Democrat about it. That's what PBS would do and that's not what the CBC does, it asks an economist. When an oil company wants to put a pipeline through a reserve "balance" says to interview an oil executive and an environmentalist. CBC interviews the people living in the reserve.
The problem is that the truth isn't always "balanced", some times a thing is simply true or false. I remember the CBC being pilloried about a program on global warming because it didn't show "balance". Exactly. It showed all the best evidence for and against global warming, which was overwhelmingly in favor of it existing.
True, some times there is not a clear true or false answer. In these cases, CBC interviews experts or people affected by the issue, not arguing ideologues. Yes, they do interview politicians, businesspeople, and activists, but only on issues that affect that individual personally, not to get a sound bite.
If you want the answer to a question, would you try to find the two people most radically opposed to the question and expect them to come to an answer? Or would you try as hard as you can to get the correct answer, regardless of opposition to the question?
The CBC is always slanted to the left, so much so they would never consider inviting someone from a Left-of-Centre think tank.
Let me get this straight; they are "slanted left" so they would never invite someone from "left-of-centre"? Did you mean "right-of-centre"? You're wrong either way.
The CBC has many times interviewed people from the libertarian Fraser Institute, the arch-conservative Canadian Taxpayers' Federation, and the left-wing Centre for Policy Alternatives. David Frum (a speechwriter for G.W. Bush) has appeared several times. The difference is that they have these people only when the news is about the organization or affects the organization.
This very week the CBC National News interviewed such "left slanted" individuals as Andrew Coyne (right-wing columnist for the National Post), Allen Gregg (conservative pollster), and a columnist for the anti-Liberal Le Devoir. And none of these interviews had a Liberal flunky to provide "balance". Horrors!
While our neighbors to the north may not approve of our politics, I'd challenge them to point to one major event in history where Canada has taken leadership on the world stage.
If by "leadership" you mean invading foreign countries, I concede American dominance here.
Otherwise, there is Canada's efforts for a peaceful resolution to the Suez Crisis, for which Prime Minister Pearson won a Nobel prize.
Canada has played a role far out of proportion to its population in U.N. peacekeeping operations, and a major role in the International War Crimes Tribunal and Rome Statute, which the U.S. has largely ignored. Canada also provided significant support to the Rwandan and Balkan Genocide tribunals. Other countries' support has dwindled after these events are no longer on the front pages.
Canada was one of few countries in the world willing to accept the Boat People refugees in the 1970s, and campaigns for the rights of refugees to this day.
Canada was one of the first western countries to recognize the People's Republic of China, this under strong U.S. condemnation.
Canada is also the major supporter of the international land mines ban, also against the wishes of its allies, and a decade before Princess Di jumped aboard.
Harold Cohen has been writing computer programs that generate art since 1973.
His latest project, Aaron, is the result of many years of experiment and refinement. The K++ project can draw abstract polygons. Aaron can draw portraits, landscapes, and still lives using perspective, detail, and composition.
The frame of reference is given in the quote; "us". That is, Earth. According to the Big Bang model, the universe expanded from a point. Since every place was once at that same point, every place has an equal claim to be the "center of the universe". Picking Earth is just as valid as picking any other place.
There's another good reason to pick Earth as the center; if the universe is 13.7 billion years old then there is no way that anything - light, gravity, particles, aliens - from farther than 13.7 billion light years has reached us. We are at the centre of a 13.7 billion light year sphere containing everything which we can possibly observe.
Not only does this not rule out the possibility of light which hasn't reached us yet, it is defined by it. This observable universe, which some have called "the cosmos", expands by 1 light year every year, as light further out has time to reach us. The entire universe could well be much larger than this; we can only theorize.
By the way, the observable universe is very symmetrical in every direction, so we can consider ourselves to be at the centre even in a literal geometric sense of the word.
There was this fat-plus-shaped cursor, used by spreadsheets, that had a mangled mask, which I had noticed years before but could never get Apple to fix. So I fixed it myself
And I, for one, thank you for that.
I did tech support for schools then, and installed the OS from a special version on CD which had the standard configuration... plus a fixed version of the cursor in question. I hand-fixed the system file we used for the image using ResEdit. There were times I even fixed it on teachers' and admins' machines.
I remember noticing a few years back that the cursor wasn't malformed any more, but never knew which version fixed it.
Every Mac OS X GUI application includes a global menu bar that spans the screen. The first, system, menu on this bar is titled with an Apple logo. Someone who is not familiar with Mac OS may think think this is something specific to the application and not a standard part of the UI.
Nokia seems to think that there'd be more cool apps if there were more and better development tools. I really doubt that this is the problem.
I don't know if it's "the" problem, but it certainly is a large part of the problem.
I had the misfortune to work on a USB sync application for a Symbian device, and the development tools are a throwback to the early 1970s. Writing a simple "Hello World" application for Symbian requires hundreds of lines of C++, MMC, IDL, and makefile text.
You mention VC++ as the IDE. Yes, we used the VC++ text editor, but to actually compile a Symbian application requires a specially-customized gcc with no debugger support, and a half-dozen command-line apps with no documentation which have to be customized for every target platform. I'm in hell! I'm in HELL!!!
Think I'm making this up? Check out Russell Beattie's blog. This guy is one of the biggest Symbian boosters on the planet, and even he admits the situation is untenable.
I don't think it looks like either the Mac OS X Cocoa or Carbon API file selector.
The Cocoa file selector effectively shows a spreadsheet of all the files in all parent folders of the current one. Fast to navigate but IMHO bewildering for a novice user. Also, the favorites are in a pop-up menu that you can't drag folders to.
The Carbon file selector is based on the classic Max OS navigation service; essentially it shows a dialog with a mini-Finder (i.e. file manager). I liked this method; opening a file from an application works the same as opening it from the Finder. I regret Apple didn't continue with this in OS X.
Modding a Cubequarium
on
G4 Cubequarium
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· Score: 5, Funny
Note that this site only contains connection information for a stream of a live presentation that will be performed on Sep. 24, 2003.
You can download the webcast software, but will not be able to connect or see anything until 1 PM EDT next wednesday.
Re: Lego, no Legos!
on
Space Legos!
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· Score: 0, Redundant
The name of the product is Lego. The plural is Lego.
Incorrect. The name of the company is LEGO. According to the company web site, the name is always capitalized and is never spelled "Lego". If there were more than one company named Lego you could plausibly call them Legos, but there are not.
The LEGO company sells many products, including Creator, Designer, and Technic, which all include LEGO-brand blocks or bricks. They also sell products like Clickit and Bionicle, which do not contain bricks. There is at least one other company that sells toy bricks with are compatible with LEGO bricks. LEGO should not be considered synonymous with their toy brick products.
Slashdot Mirror
Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture tells a fictional story about real mathematics and real mathematicians.
Logicomix is an excellent graphic novel about mathematical logic.
A Certain Ambiguity uses real mathematics in a fictional quest for absolute truth.
I believe the confusion is because the Handbook is using the business definition of Software Engineer instead of the technical definition. The business definition being "an early 20s new graduate with 5 years of experience in a technology that's just been invented who has no family and is willing to work 60 hours per week for $40K p.a. plus stock shares in a company that's never shown a profit".
Mr. Talbott had ignored one of the most dangerous and dehumanizing technologies yet, the "book".
This soulless and inert device transforms the living, thinking word of Man to meaningless scratches on parchment or vellum. It leads inevitably to disrespect of knowledge and the withering of memory.
While priests and philosophers may find an occasional use for these "books", their use by the common citizen will enslave them to a technology and destroy the human spirit.
There was an Alternate Reality Game created for the A.I movie that involved "living homes" going insane, murdering, and being murdered. This game was arguably more creative and involved than the movie.
The ARG site is gone, but there are still some notes on the living homes at the Cloudmakers site.
The specific project is for language instruction, and the type of data we wanted instructors to insert included videos of conversations, though I had hoped to provide more versatility.
The current favorite technology is WinCALIS. It's ideal for what we want to do right now, but I felt it was too limited as a general-purpose CAI program. I don't suppose there are any unbiased users of both Moodle and WinCALIS for language instruction out there?
Mac OS X is able to read NTFS drives, but not write to them. Sadly, if you want a cross-platform R/W drive format, Fat32 is the only option.
Neither of these works are preprogrammed, and both "evolve the piece based on the way it can percieve some data ...".
They would appeal to ancient geeks because they are endlessly tinkerable; you can add indicators for stars or mechanical work to predict things like eclipses and conjunctions. Chaucer was apparently quite the astrolabe hacker.
Start building by pushing a stick into the ground, or go here to download a diagram which one can print onto stiff paper.
... is because the spelling and grammar on /. is so abominable that a joke which relies on a misspelling will not even be noticed by 90% of /. readers, and assumed to be unintentional by the rest.
This is true, but what happens when AI has advanced to a level when robots are able to make their own decisions?
They don't need to be able to pass a Turing test, just be able to answer a phone, count change, package groceries, or assemble parts.
Once that happens, robots will be able to take over half of all current jobs. What "fulfilling and wonderful" jobs will replace them? Building robots? No, the robots ca do that.
So what happened to the fuel? The only mention on the Global Flyer page is the note "fuel readings indicated that the aircraft had lost a significant amount of fuel shortly after take-off". Were the readings wrong? Did they really add a ton of excess fuel to the original amount? Was there something wrong withthe plane? Did he get a favorable wind? Was it all a publicity stunt? What?
This illustrates one of my complaints with the media, its obsession with sensationalism. "OhMyGodThePlanesGonnaCrashAndHesGonnaDIE!!" appears on newspaper headlines worldwide, yet when the plane doesn't, in fact, crash and the pilot doesn't die, the news is ignored. If the news media, or Virgin Atlantic, makes a prediction and are wrong, I'd like to know why.
Why did they think the plane was short of fuel? Does Virgin Atlantic not know how to measure fuel? I'd think that is something that passengers flying their planes should know. Did the media sensationalize an insignificant measurement uncertainty? Their readers should know that, too.
Instead, we get total silence on the matter. I have no idea why misleading informatin was being reported worldwide, and it looks like I'll never know.
For example, when there is a federal budget "balance" says to ask both a Republican and a Democrat about it. That's what PBS would do and that's not what the CBC does, it asks an economist. When an oil company wants to put a pipeline through a reserve "balance" says to interview an oil executive and an environmentalist. CBC interviews the people living in the reserve.
The problem is that the truth isn't always "balanced", some times a thing is simply true or false. I remember the CBC being pilloried about a program on global warming because it didn't show "balance". Exactly. It showed all the best evidence for and against global warming, which was overwhelmingly in favor of it existing.
True, some times there is not a clear true or false answer. In these cases, CBC interviews experts or people affected by the issue, not arguing ideologues. Yes, they do interview politicians, businesspeople, and activists, but only on issues that affect that individual personally, not to get a sound bite.
If you want the answer to a question, would you try to find the two people most radically opposed to the question and expect them to come to an answer? Or would you try as hard as you can to get the correct answer, regardless of opposition to the question?
Let me get this straight; they are "slanted left" so they would never invite someone from "left-of-centre"? Did you mean "right-of-centre"? You're wrong either way.The CBC has many times interviewed people from the libertarian Fraser Institute, the arch-conservative Canadian Taxpayers' Federation, and the left-wing Centre for Policy Alternatives. David Frum (a speechwriter for G.W. Bush) has appeared several times. The difference is that they have these people only when the news is about the organization or affects the organization.
This very week the CBC National News interviewed such "left slanted" individuals as Andrew Coyne (right-wing columnist for the National Post), Allen Gregg (conservative pollster), and a columnist for the anti-Liberal Le Devoir. And none of these interviews had a Liberal flunky to provide "balance". Horrors!
Otherwise, there is Canada's efforts for a peaceful resolution to the Suez Crisis, for which Prime Minister Pearson won a Nobel prize.
Canada has played a role far out of proportion to its population in U.N. peacekeeping operations, and a major role in the International War Crimes Tribunal and Rome Statute, which the U.S. has largely ignored. Canada also provided significant support to the Rwandan and Balkan Genocide tribunals. Other countries' support has dwindled after these events are no longer on the front pages.
Canada was one of few countries in the world willing to accept the Boat People refugees in the 1970s, and campaigns for the rights of refugees to this day.
Canada was one of the first western countries to recognize the People's Republic of China, this under strong U.S. condemnation.
Canada is also the major supporter of the international land mines ban, also against the wishes of its allies, and a decade before Princess Di jumped aboard.
IO Desktop is a source package for the prototype-based language Io, and its web site is www.iolanguage.com, not www.iodesktop.com.
His latest project, Aaron, is the result of many years of experiment and refinement. The K++ project can draw abstract polygons. Aaron can draw portraits, landscapes, and still lives using perspective, detail, and composition.
There's another good reason to pick Earth as the center; if the universe is 13.7 billion years old then there is no way that anything - light, gravity, particles, aliens - from farther than 13.7 billion light years has reached us. We are at the centre of a 13.7 billion light year sphere containing everything which we can possibly observe.
Not only does this not rule out the possibility of light which hasn't reached us yet, it is defined by it. This observable universe, which some have called "the cosmos", expands by 1 light year every year, as light further out has time to reach us. The entire universe could well be much larger than this; we can only theorize.
By the way, the observable universe is very symmetrical in every direction, so we can consider ourselves to be at the centre even in a literal geometric sense of the word.
I did tech support for schools then, and installed the OS from a special version on CD which had the standard configuration... plus a fixed version of the cursor in question. I hand-fixed the system file we used for the image using ResEdit. There were times I even fixed it on teachers' and admins' machines.
I remember noticing a few years back that the cursor wasn't malformed any more, but never knew which version fixed it.
Thanks for making the world a better place.
Every Mac OS X GUI application includes a global menu bar that spans the screen. The first, system, menu on this bar is titled with an Apple logo. Someone who is not familiar with Mac OS may think think this is something specific to the application and not a standard part of the UI.
For example, some guy named Wally Rodriguez built a similar Mac-based system.
I had the misfortune to work on a USB sync application for a Symbian device, and the development tools are a throwback to the early 1970s. Writing a simple "Hello World" application for Symbian requires hundreds of lines of C++, MMC, IDL, and makefile text.
You mention VC++ as the IDE. Yes, we used the VC++ text editor, but to actually compile a Symbian application requires a specially-customized gcc with no debugger support, and a half-dozen command-line apps with no documentation which have to be customized for every target platform. I'm in hell! I'm in HELL!!!
Think I'm making this up? Check out Russell Beattie's blog. This guy is one of the biggest Symbian boosters on the planet, and even he admits the situation is untenable.
The Cocoa file selector effectively shows a spreadsheet of all the files in all parent folders of the current one. Fast to navigate but IMHO bewildering for a novice user. Also, the favorites are in a pop-up menu that you can't drag folders to.
The Carbon file selector is based on the classic Max OS navigation service; essentially it shows a dialog with a mini-Finder (i.e. file manager). I liked this method; opening a file from an application works the same as opening it from the Finder. I regret Apple didn't continue with this in OS X.
Now all it needs is some glowing fish!
You can download the webcast software, but will not be able to connect or see anything until 1 PM EDT next wednesday.
The LEGO company sells many products, including Creator, Designer, and Technic, which all include LEGO-brand blocks or bricks. They also sell products like Clickit and Bionicle, which do not contain bricks. There is at least one other company that sells toy bricks with are compatible with LEGO bricks. LEGO should not be considered synonymous with their toy brick products.