We're really living in prosperity. It doesn't matter if big business has no need to innovate to the point where they must employ herds of people.
My suggestion is for people to get together to produce the next generation of technology. Already we see movies hyping artificial intelligence and biotech more and more frequently albeit without the optimism of Star Trek.
new technologies in demand: - less expensive but larger and lighter tablet PC, especially one that works with any pen - personal robot servant - virtual reality - long-term high capacity, portable and not-fragile backup media - aerodynamic car - solar power
I'm talking about stuff that everyone wants to buy one for themself but does not quite exist.
Therefore, don't just look for a job, create it. A fundamental principle for all the educated people is they have to use their imagination.
Large corporations might tend to be more conservative due to a view that they have all the technology they need to maintain a cash flow where they think market share can't do any more than ripple around on the whims of consumers. That is, the big fish have eaten all the little fish.
Still, there are a lot of lucrative technologies that beg to be developed, requiring large amounts of man hours, not too much risk, and promise to stay in business for a long time.
We've seen a phase where many bizarre get-rich-quick schemes and scams have failed. But there are many areas that we can look to for work, areas that require real work rather than some pie-in-the-sky web company with no real idea of how to make money.
How about an improved recycling system? Or reducing energy costs? Electronic books? Miniature GPS for valuable portable items?
Even if large businesses are not buying as many new toys, individuals still have an appetite.
Businesses might be governed by requirements as theorized by Maslow about people, but people, once they have satisfied their basic needs will turn to entertainment. Businesses are like machines - they don't need entertainment even if they provide it.
However, businesses should go beyond the profit motive and try to improve the lives of people. Is there a profit in this? Many businesses right now are in a deadlock with their competition. They know how to achieve cashflow but have no curiosity for anything outside tested business activities. As time passes, it is natural for all the simple ways of earning revenue to be explored. The successful will motivate the newcomers to emulate or copy.
It's too easy for business leaders to deprioritize the risky goals in the light of less risky goals. I will point this out to business leaders: ultimately technology will reach the level where your business area will be controlled by a small number of companies, as one may observe with car manufacturers. This technological takeover will spread to many types of businesses. This is fine - let the machines do the labor.
One of the market forces that I can think of urging businesses in comfortable positions is the escalation of competition. Customers can be won by incentives. If businesses follow narrow, low risk objectives they face steeper competition. This breaks down when technology takes over. Customers like the low pricing caused by competition but are willing to accept a benign monopoly based on improving technology on the grounds that major price increases will cause an easily implemented competitor.
People must reach for loftier goals. They should direct their businesses to reaching those goals. As businesses that we know become automated, people will lose their meaning in such activities. For example, no one will pull a plow with their bare hands if they can use a tractor. If we can extrapolate to the point where all the food production is automated, then what? Businesses need to anticipate and engineer a new world.
Message To Programmers
on
Ageism in IT?
·
· Score: 1
Aren't we paranoid now?
Does it really matter that a young person might be able to crank out an extra 50% more code?
Remember what O(n) means. If you multiply n by a constant, it's still O(n).
Also, we're all supposed to be producing faster than ever anyways. Just a few years ago, a software company might have weenie PCs with hardly enough RAM to enable compilation in less than 10 minutes and the system thrashes so badly during any run you can't add an extra line of code edgewise. Now you can do all the work before lunch (drove my manager crazy since he and I thought it would take a week when I started).
My message to programmers. - First of all, when it comes to getting hired it doesn't matter what you know, it's who you know. - It doesn't matter how fast you can produce boilerplate code. - Find new profitable uses for the computer. Computers are meant to achieve objectives faster and better. Do you see people doing something or failing to do something that may be better done or achievable with a computer? Imagine a system that can search a file cabinet for a particular piece of information while making less noise than a vacuum cleaner or electric typewriter. That's scary.
The example they have is that, if you follow the sequence on this page, the machine reaches a point that's supposed to be a gamble, but in fact you cannot win. And it's not because the output is predetermined, or the seed is the same and it happens to be a losing bet. It's a high/low gamble, so you should have a chance to win regardless of what the seed was.
Give me a break.
Who would make a slot machine that is fully equivalent of tossing a coin???
Besides the answer that the machine spits out when you hit Hi or Low could still be random - so it's still gambling. The random number is weighted or biased to make you lose most of the time, but it's fair. It's just not nice as a coin toss.
To be really nice, the one-armed bandit holds a coin in its arm and tosses it. Lots of winning, but the jackpot is $10. A more sophisticated arm can still toss so that the desired side will appear almost all the time...
In your simulated world, you understand the concept of Monday.
why should anyone present a simulation of such a mediocre world to an envatted mind year after year? Anyone with that much computational power would have loftier goals.
In The Truman Show, Truman is kept on his island but it takes so much trouble to keep him there. The speed of light is one of the barriers that keeps the universe as we know it from taking on all kinds of bizarre states.
Do we have simulators living in a universe free of such restrictions?
Instead of bubbling air under the water to make an illusion, force air over the water, like wind over the ocean. The water will be forced to move like water rushing up a beach.
Respect for the little insect robots that learn to move their asses, ok?
But can they learn what the world really is?
They're learning is inefficient. Babies do a lot better. I think babies do better because they have better senses, they use reason, they have better memories, they can produce algorithms, etc. Put some of this into a robot. Eeek. Um don't!
Happy / sad are concepts used to generalize certain feelings and behaviors.
Can a computer really be happy or sad? Can anyone?
You might think a computer is happy when it has the right power and other conditions. If the power sags, the computer shuts down.
Windows might be said to act unhappy and nag you when its disk is full. If a Windows search finds the files you want Windows is happy.
Still, it may be silly to look at whether a computer is happy.
If I'm happy, I'm under the belief that something is going right, but if I'm unhappy, I'm under the belief that something is going badly. A computer though is impartial. It doesn't believe in good/bad or right/wrong. It just switches bits on or off. So if a computer is happy it has found a solution to a given goal, but it isn't happy by being entertained (unless you call extra cooling entertainment).
Computer emotion might be best quantified as machine states.
As a veteran of IT I was there when you had to have real skill to get involved. Also, being around during the boom I saw that attitude change and companies take on inexperienced employees because it was sooo hard to find employees in general. I worked on Bank of America's network security team and it was pretty much a training camp for unqualified employees. By the time they had some skills they realized that they could make more $ elsewhere so it was a never ending cycle
Pretty ironic that someone working for a bank finds s/he can make more $$$ elsewhere.
There doesn't seem to be a viable software product business model for the future. this is what the software industry is dead means. Until something entirely new and different comes around, computing needs are well understood
I have two words for you
virtual reality
what could MS Word 2010 possibly offer us in terms of features?
Today I have to enter my information into the word processor.
The next generation should enter the information for me.
In other words, the worst thing that's going to happen to your living standards is not that your labor is going to become cheap, it's that foreign labor is going to become more expensive.
Of course that is where the laws of tarrifs, etc try to balance the deficits of greedy companies
The problem today is not greed.
The problem is the lack of greed, a lack caused by the lack of ambition.
The rich getting rich? Don't make me laugh. Look at what the rich are doing. They play with their money, risking it in one stock or another. In the meantime companies are rightsizing. Rich people just grab whatever business models appear to work and try to take as much market share as possible.
Riches don't come from this kind of marginal business improvement.
Whatever happened to risk? Real risk?
Recall the development of jet airliners, the invention of the telephone, the photocopier, etc. A lot of the people who worked on these inventions weren't rich. The Wright brothers weren't rich. Hewlett and Packard started in a garage.
This is an age where we should be developing nanotechnology, nay picotechnology. Genetic engineering, biotech, etc. all should be ready for breakthroughs from some ambitious, poor person.
Are people looking for something to do?
Bug the rich people - get them involved in developing something new. Not indirect involvement through stock purchases or venture capital but direct management.
There must be thousands of theories worth experimenting on in medicine and science but not pursued for lack of funding or awareness.
Get the rich people off the golf courses and into the board rooms.
Look around you in the American lifestyle. Nice cars everywhere. People going shopping. There's wealth but everyone is just getting through their comfortable habitual lives.
work eat watch tv sleep go on holiday
People with comfortable jobs go to the office to juggle information not necessarily with any computer knowledge, but orchestrating a fairly proven way of conducting business. Risk free money.
What if 10% of these comfortable people just tried to solve a challenging problem with substantial risk? What if they gave up some of their watching TV or going out and just tried to achieve something? Not just a hobby but a real effort?
Picard should have included the coordinates whenever he entered something into his log.
The earth does not stand still. As it moves through the cosmos, we would have to give the exact location relative to a universal origin of coordinates.
(b) Conceal the existence or place of origin or destination of any telecommunications service
This would seem to make illegal any hardware and software designed to make use of such technologies as NAT (Network Address Translation), which is used to allow multiple computers or other devices to access a single connection to the Internet. Specifically, the ISP will see only the information about the router, which, as a consequence of the technology, blocks any information about the original computer sending the transmission.
If you look at a circuit diagram of a DSL subscriber, there is a modem that is the origin/destination of telecom service. Whatever the user does to the network cable connected to the modem, including twirling 100 metres of said cable in a rapidly changing magnetic field is no business of the ISP. The modem is not being concealed.
The interpretation that the origin/destination is some kind of router goes only half way. In this interpretation the actual origin/destination is an intelligent mind.
That's a stark difference between human intelligence and trained neural network intelligence. The network did not understand the concept of driving. It just understood the concept of executing an algorithm suited for a specific road.
A better trainer would teach the net to learn what a road is, what a collision is, different obstacles, the concept of a left turn going forward, the concept of a right turn going forward, the concept of slowing down or stopping before planning a route, the concept of planning a route too, etc. etc. etc.
purposefully sabotaging interoperability with competitors (DR-DOS, Lotus, Java, numerous others) in such a way as to put the blame on the competitor, Microsoft has proven itself to be a company who doesn't mind lying and destroying economic value as long as its complicated and is only found out years to late to save the competitor's viability
I don't have the feeling that DR-DOS, Lotus, Java are viable competitors in a world sans Microsoft. If Microsoft decided to ship nothing new for 5 years these "competitors" all put together or individually wouldn't fill the void.
I buy a lot of non-Microsoft software provided it is good for what I need it for. Microsoft dominates where others don't make good competition. It's not really that special.
People will point to Netscape and how it couldn't get anywhere due to Microsoft, but I'll bet if Netscape had true value, investors would have made it work. So far I've never had to pay for Netscape because when it first came out, it was always free as a beta version anyways. There was an expiry date, but there was always the feeling that you could get the next beta version before the old one expired.
Microsoft may lose some customers using Linux but all the stores sell Microsoft because people understand that Microsoft enables them to share their information, guides the development of new hardware, works everywhere, etc. People don't feel the same way with the competition.
Why do people get so uptight about Microsoft, as evidenced by outcries of "they should be shut down"? It's a software/computer business that provides some fairly pedestrian software. There's nothing magical or mystical. If people really thought they could do better than Microsoft, there are billions of investment dollars that could be taken out of Microsoft stock and turned into developing new software businesses or improving existing ones.
Moore's Law Indicates Exponential Intelligence
on
Forget Moore's Law?
·
· Score: 1
It's a law of economics or human behavior. It's more a statistical phenomenon of wavering reliability.
Still, Moore's Law may be a measure of intelligence. If you look at the accomplishments of dumb animals, they don't seem to get anywhere from one generation to the next if you ignore evolution, which is more an indication of being driven by the environment rather than being a master of it.
So far Moore's Law says we can double about every two years. How intelligent is that?? One answer may be "exponential".
The Turing Test looks for the presence of intelligence. Moore's Law measures the degree of intelligence, civilization, resourcefulness, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
We're really living in prosperity. It doesn't matter if big business has no need to innovate to the point where they must employ herds of people.
My suggestion is for people to get together to produce the next generation of technology. Already we see movies hyping artificial intelligence and biotech more and more frequently albeit without the optimism of Star Trek.
new technologies in demand:
- less expensive but larger and lighter tablet PC, especially one that works with any pen
- personal robot servant
- virtual reality
- long-term high capacity, portable and not-fragile backup media
- aerodynamic car
- solar power
I'm talking about stuff that everyone wants to buy one for themself but does not quite exist.
Therefore, don't just look for a job, create it. A fundamental principle for all the educated people is they have to use their imagination.
Large corporations might tend to be more conservative due to a view that they have all the technology they need to maintain a cash flow where they think market share can't do any more than ripple around on the whims of consumers. That is, the big fish have eaten all the little fish.
Still, there are a lot of lucrative technologies that beg to be developed, requiring large amounts of man hours, not too much risk, and promise to stay in business for a long time.
We've seen a phase where many bizarre get-rich-quick schemes and scams have failed. But there are many areas that we can look to for work, areas that require real work rather than some pie-in-the-sky web company with no real idea of how to make money.
How about an improved recycling system? Or reducing energy costs? Electronic books? Miniature GPS for valuable portable items?
Even if large businesses are not buying as many new toys, individuals still have an appetite.
Businesses might be governed by requirements as theorized by Maslow about people, but people, once they have satisfied their basic needs will turn to entertainment. Businesses are like machines - they don't need entertainment even if they provide it.
However, businesses should go beyond the profit motive and try to improve the lives of people. Is there a profit in this? Many businesses right now are in a deadlock with their competition. They know how to achieve cashflow but have no curiosity for anything outside tested business activities. As time passes, it is natural for all the simple ways of earning revenue to be explored. The successful will motivate the newcomers to emulate or copy.
It's too easy for business leaders to deprioritize the risky goals in the light of less risky goals. I will point this out to business leaders: ultimately technology will reach the level where your business area will be controlled by a small number of companies, as one may observe with car manufacturers. This technological takeover will spread to many types of businesses. This is fine - let the machines do the labor.
One of the market forces that I can think of urging businesses in comfortable positions is the escalation of competition. Customers can be won by incentives. If businesses follow narrow, low risk objectives they face steeper competition. This breaks down when technology takes over. Customers like the low pricing caused by competition but are willing to accept a benign monopoly based on improving technology on the grounds that major price increases will cause an easily implemented competitor.
People must reach for loftier goals. They should direct their businesses to reaching those goals. As businesses that we know become automated, people will lose their meaning in such activities. For example, no one will pull a plow with their bare hands if they can use a tractor. If we can extrapolate to the point where all the food production is automated, then what? Businesses need to anticipate and engineer a new world.
Aren't we paranoid now?
Does it really matter that a young person might be able to crank out an extra 50% more code?
Remember what O(n) means. If you multiply n by a constant, it's still O(n).
Also, we're all supposed to be producing faster than ever anyways. Just a few years ago, a software company might have weenie PCs with hardly enough RAM to enable compilation in less than 10 minutes and the system thrashes so badly during any run you can't add an extra line of code edgewise. Now you can do all the work before lunch (drove my manager crazy since he and I thought it would take a week when I started).
My message to programmers.
- First of all, when it comes to getting hired it doesn't matter what you know, it's who you know.
- It doesn't matter how fast you can produce boilerplate code.
- Find new profitable uses for the computer. Computers are meant to achieve objectives faster and better. Do you see people doing something or failing to do something that may be better done or achievable with a computer? Imagine a system that can search a file cabinet for a particular piece of information while making less noise than a vacuum cleaner or electric typewriter. That's scary.
We have, at this time, no way to terminate the lightsaber blade.
The force is used to terminate the blade.
The example they have is that, if you follow the sequence on this page, the machine reaches a point that's supposed to be a gamble, but in fact you cannot win. And it's not because the output is predetermined, or the seed is the same and it happens to be a losing bet. It's a high/low gamble, so you should have a chance to win regardless of what the seed was.
Give me a break.
Who would make a slot machine that is fully equivalent of tossing a coin???
Besides the answer that the machine spits out when you hit Hi or Low could still be random - so it's still gambling. The random number is weighted or biased to make you lose most of the time, but it's fair. It's just not nice as a coin toss.
To be really nice, the one-armed bandit holds a coin in its arm and tosses it. Lots of winning, but the jackpot is $10. A more sophisticated arm can still toss so that the desired side will appear almost all the time...
Yeah
In your simulated world, you understand the concept of Monday.
why should anyone present a simulation of such a mediocre world to an envatted mind year after year? Anyone with that much computational power would have loftier goals.
In The Truman Show, Truman is kept on his island but it takes so much trouble to keep him there. The speed of light is one of the barriers that keeps the universe as we know it from taking on all kinds of bizarre states.
Do we have simulators living in a universe free of such restrictions?
It was a faucet, seemingly suspended in mid-air, with an endless supply of water coming from it.
I've seen this
Kudos to this guy though, for taking the concept and wedding it to Escher in a novel way
Not so fast now
The faucet had water coming down. Dyson's faucet has the water going up and laminar flow to boot if you need the challenge.
Not that easy if the faucet is way higher than the diameter of the water cylinder. Must be a Dyson vacuum cleaner in the faucet!
Instead of bubbling air under the water to make an illusion, force air over the water, like wind over the ocean. The water will be forced to move like water rushing up a beach.
As others here have said, what good is a brain until we get a useful BODY working?
The brain will prevent the body from kicking itself in the ass
Respect for the little insect robots that learn to move their asses, ok?
But can they learn what the world really is?
They're learning is inefficient. Babies do a lot better. I think babies do better because they have better senses, they use reason, they have better memories, they can produce algorithms, etc. Put some of this into a robot. Eeek. Um don't!
Happy / sad are concepts used to generalize certain feelings and behaviors.
Can a computer really be happy or sad? Can anyone?
You might think a computer is happy when it has the right power and other conditions. If the power sags, the computer shuts down.
Windows might be said to act unhappy and nag you when its disk is full. If a Windows search finds the files you want Windows is happy.
Still, it may be silly to look at whether a computer is happy.
If I'm happy, I'm under the belief that something is going right, but if I'm unhappy, I'm under the belief that something is going badly. A computer though is impartial. It doesn't believe in good/bad or right/wrong. It just switches bits on or off. So if a computer is happy it has found a solution to a given goal, but it isn't happy by being entertained (unless you call extra cooling entertainment).
Computer emotion might be best quantified as machine states.
As a veteran of IT I was there when you had to have real skill to get involved. Also, being around during the boom I saw that attitude change and companies take on inexperienced employees because it was sooo hard to find employees in general. I worked on Bank of America's network security team and it was pretty much a training camp for unqualified employees. By the time they had some skills they realized that they could make more $ elsewhere so it was a never ending cycle
Pretty ironic that someone working for a bank finds s/he can make more $$$ elsewhere.
I have two words for you
virtual reality
Today I have to enter my information into the word processor.
The next generation should enter the information for me.
Think: SimWordProcessorUser
Not at the birthrates we're looking at
The problem today is not greed.
The problem is the lack of greed, a lack caused by the lack of ambition.
The rich getting rich? Don't make me laugh. Look at what the rich are doing. They play with their money, risking it in one stock or another. In the meantime companies are rightsizing. Rich people just grab whatever business models appear to work and try to take as much market share as possible.
Riches don't come from this kind of marginal business improvement.
Whatever happened to risk? Real risk?
Recall the development of jet airliners, the invention of the telephone, the photocopier, etc. A lot of the people who worked on these inventions weren't rich. The Wright brothers weren't rich. Hewlett and Packard started in a garage.
This is an age where we should be developing nanotechnology, nay picotechnology. Genetic engineering, biotech, etc. all should be ready for breakthroughs from some ambitious, poor person.
Are people looking for something to do?
Bug the rich people - get them involved in developing something new. Not indirect involvement through stock purchases or venture capital but direct management.
There must be thousands of theories worth experimenting on in medicine and science but not pursued for lack of funding or awareness.
Get the rich people off the golf courses and into the board rooms.
Look around you in the American lifestyle. Nice cars everywhere. People going shopping. There's wealth but everyone is just getting through their comfortable habitual lives.
work eat watch tv sleep go on holiday
People with comfortable jobs go to the office to juggle information not necessarily with any computer knowledge, but orchestrating a fairly proven way of conducting business. Risk free money.
What if 10% of these comfortable people just tried to solve a challenging problem with substantial risk? What if they gave up some of their watching TV or going out and just tried to achieve something? Not just a hobby but a real effort?
So they're having a sale. That's fine. The price will go up when they find they have fewer programmers than tasks.
If they can't raise their rates you start wondering what's wrong.
The whole idea is disturbing. It's not a question of whether a private free service has the right.
What if
it was a company's hiring policy to reject resumes from certain places (other than jails and the like)?
Do people expect the origin of an otherwise qualified person to determine whether they are hiring a troublemaker?
For Pete's sake, these resumes are coming from the Internet so they are coming from a civilization advanced enough to even have computers.
A lot of people want to work in the US to escape their oppressive governments. They're being told that they are bad people.
I have one of these 4-way buttons on a Compaq laptop.
It's not a new idea. Besides it's just a joystick sans stick.
I like the scroll wheel better since I can change scrolling up and down faster.
I don't want to scroll left and right because typically no one puts any information a little to the right or left.
Picard should have included the coordinates whenever he entered something into his log.
The earth does not stand still. As it moves through the cosmos, we would have to give the exact location relative to a universal origin of coordinates.
If you look at a circuit diagram of a DSL subscriber, there is a modem that is the origin/destination of telecom service. Whatever the user does to the network cable connected to the modem, including twirling 100 metres of said cable in a rapidly changing magnetic field is no business of the ISP. The modem is not being concealed.
The interpretation that the origin/destination is some kind of router goes only half way. In this interpretation the actual origin/destination is an intelligent mind.
The best way to solve the spam problem is
you spammers get a clue
go do something useful with your lives
sell me something i want
i'm too desensitized for your porn
That's a stark difference between human intelligence and trained neural network intelligence. The network did not understand the concept of driving. It just understood the concept of executing an algorithm suited for a specific road.
A better trainer would teach the net to learn what a road is, what a collision is, different obstacles, the concept of a left turn going forward, the concept of a right turn going forward, the concept of slowing down or stopping before planning a route, the concept of planning a route too, etc. etc. etc.
Just as supercomputers are being used to simulate nuclear weapons, use supercomputers to simulate model rockets.
High price causes increased supply. Anyone who needs to earn some cash can publish transcripts.
purposefully sabotaging interoperability with competitors (DR-DOS, Lotus, Java, numerous others) in such a way as to put the blame on the competitor, Microsoft has proven itself to be a company who doesn't mind lying and destroying economic value as long as its complicated and is only found out years to late to save the competitor's viability
I don't have the feeling that DR-DOS, Lotus, Java are viable competitors in a world sans Microsoft. If Microsoft decided to ship nothing new for 5 years these "competitors" all put together or individually wouldn't fill the void.
I buy a lot of non-Microsoft software provided it is good for what I need it for. Microsoft dominates where others don't make good competition. It's not really that special.
People will point to Netscape and how it couldn't get anywhere due to Microsoft, but I'll bet if Netscape had true value, investors would have made it work. So far I've never had to pay for Netscape because when it first came out, it was always free as a beta version anyways. There was an expiry date, but there was always the feeling that you could get the next beta version before the old one expired.
Microsoft may lose some customers using Linux but all the stores sell Microsoft because people understand that Microsoft enables them to share their information, guides the development of new hardware, works everywhere, etc. People don't feel the same way with the competition.
Why do people get so uptight about Microsoft, as evidenced by outcries of "they should be shut down"? It's a software/computer business that provides some fairly pedestrian software. There's nothing magical or mystical. If people really thought they could do better than Microsoft, there are billions of investment dollars that could be taken out of Microsoft stock and turned into developing new software businesses or improving existing ones.
It's a law of economics or human behavior. It's more a statistical phenomenon of wavering reliability.
Still, Moore's Law may be a measure of intelligence. If you look at the accomplishments of dumb animals, they don't seem to get anywhere from one generation to the next if you ignore evolution, which is more an indication of being driven by the environment rather than being a master of it.
So far Moore's Law says we can double about every two years. How intelligent is that?? One answer may be "exponential".
The Turing Test looks for the presence of intelligence. Moore's Law measures the degree of intelligence, civilization, resourcefulness, etc.