view of global warming within the scientific community, which are backed by a lot of evidence so he should expect some resistance.
Similarly, if someone came out and claimed that there is no such thing as conservation of energy, or that our models for gravity are all wrong, people aren't going to want to hear it. Generally, you only see big sea changes within fields of science when there is some crisis, when what everyone thought the basic principles were just aren't holding up. This isn't true for climate science, where people are still pretty confident that measurements indicate continually rising temperatures, probably from human cause.
So, in any case he should expect to have his views marginalized unless he can give a reason to be treated otherwise. There's no such thing as equal time for both sides of an argument in science.
If people get abnormally hostile about this issue, consider the stakes that are involved.
my understanding is that their compatibility with win32 is largely based on wine, and so it has most of the same bugs running win32, and then some.
What I'd really like to see is some major company getting behind reactos and wine. Getting a portable win32 layer really working to the point where it's no longer just a toy is going to take a major effort, more of an effort than the open source community seems willing to put forward at this time. Working win32 is a real possibility, but it needs a lot of people to get behind it.
I don't know why you'd replace terminal.app with iterm. terminal.app is by far the best terminal I've ever used.
Consider that most terminals for linux either fall into the category of small and quick to boot, but missing lots of features and are difficult to configure (rxvt, xterm, etc). Otherwise there's the big bulky terminals like konsole that take forever to boot, have kind of an ugly and bulky UI, and have lots of features, probably too many...
Let's not even think about what the one and only terminal for windows is like... Seriously, why has no third party developer *ever* made a replacement?
Terminal.app starts up fast, and has all the features I need and none that I don't configurable easily from preference panes. It is, in essence the best terminal ever and I would be glad if I could get an equivalent for windows or linux.
fink sucks, and darwin isn't a tool, it's the operating system...
Last time I used fink it was buggy, and the packages were perpetually out of date. It doesn't matter that much anyway since there are usually osx packages available directly from most large open source projects. The only thing I miss is the uninstaller, which traditionally hasn't existed because it hasn't been necessary on mac systems that kept all files related to an application in one folder.
For some reason it reminds me of metroid. I'd always missed how metroid introduced the plot without actually having any dialog... until the newer games of course.
People with english degrees will accept much lower pay to work in schools, since there aren't many other opportunities for them compared to the opportunities that people with math and engineering backgrounds have. This is another case where the school unions have screwed up the education system. Personally, I'd like to see them crushed, and new unionless school's put in place.
All of the new provisions in the GPLv3 seem guaranteed that the largely corporate market for linux will steer clear of it.
Has any major software adopted it yet? I would imagine that the FSF would be switching software like GCC, etc, over the GPLv3 since FSF supposedly owns the copyright. Has this happened? How have the existing devs reacted?
Personally, I'm a little annoyed at RMS' arrogant and loudmouthed politicking of late. My feeling is that RMS' general orneriness has extended into the GPLv3 and added a bunch of provisions he knew would cause nothing but contention in the community, and gain us nothing material.
I think that brain emulation is pointless. I also think that it would be ridiculously difficult, and that it is unlikely to ever happen. It's possible in the sense that it is possible that we will move all the water on earth and dump it into a black hole one bucket at a time, but in no stronger sense.
AI is already here and it's not that helpful for the sort of problems that you are talking about. There's already a tremendous amount of raw intelligence working on the problems facing our society. Our problem isn't a problem of lack of processing power, but a lack of time and energy in some fields, and a lack of a unifying model in others. Also, some problems are simply intractable. No matter how smart you may be, you aren't going to magically find a way to generate energy out of nothing, or find a way to move faster than the speed of light.
There are fundamental and intractable problems that limit the scope of our civilization. There is no magic bullet solution to many of these, and as such they utterly prohibit the singularity which is nothing more than a vaguely defined magic bullet for all of life's problems. That's not to say there won't be scientific revolutions, but they will be comparable in scope to previous scientific revolutions, in that greater knowledge will provide us with more certainty of our environment, and inspiration in how we deal with it, but it won't fundamentally change the rules of the game that have been so well established.
>So now, before astronauts return to the moon in 2020
oh come on. Why are we wasting money preparing for a project we know is going to get canceled? I mean... who really thinks that when it comes time to actually send someone, and we need to actually pay for it, that it's not going to get canceled? This is a lot of nonsense about one politician trying to take credit for an ambitious program and forcing another future politician to suffer from its eventual failure.
using AI for some kind of immortality is a cool scifi idea, but let's be clear that this is a totally unworkable, and somewhat nonsensical proposition. Building something that has some kind of intelligence isn't that hard. There are all sorts of AI applications out there. What is hard, if not impossible is emulating *human* intelligence. Many aspects of human intelligence, especially language processing, are incredibly sophisticated and incredibly specific to us as a species. Our intelligence is shaped by our environment, and by our evolution, so things like human language have specifically human semantic ideas about the world intertwined with syntactic and phonetic structures that evolved over time.
Let's say we built a computer that passed the turing test. What would be the point? What use does a machine have for the english language, when it could certainly communicate much more efficiently over a different medium than the air, in a potentially much more expressive format? What use does a machine have for ideas about touch, taste, and smell? Are we going to build a tongue for robots? Certainly it couldn't understand the meaning of the word "flavor" without ever having experienced taste. How do we even convey a human experience to a machine? The internal states of a machines do not resemble, and are not likely going to resemble the internal states of a human being.
In short, a good machine does just what it needs to, and nothing else, and a good artifically intelligent machine should cast off all the trappings of humanity, except to the extent that these trappings serve it's purpose. Instead intelligence should be devoted to solving the problems at hand.
singularity is a bunch of nonsense
on
Marvin Minsky On AI
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I'd like to take this opportunity to mentioned what a bunch of nonsense the singularity is. A great number of people seem convinced that technology is advancing at a pace that will transform the human species into a bunch of immortal gods with access to unlimited energy, etc. Where technology solves all of lifes problems. Essentially a high tech version of the rapture.
The general justification is that there are a bunch of exponentially increasing trends in certain isolated areas of technological development, such as moore's law, which they use to justify the idea that at some point in the near future were going to have star trek like technology. A realistic and comprehensive look at our civilization of course shows that while some industries are bounding ahead, many if not most important technologies, like our ability to produce and store energy, have made little progress. Our society is making progress in many areas at an admirable clip, but nothing like the singularity is conceivably on the horizon.
As for your idea of merging all of our minds into a single consciousness... that's just retarded. Yes, we've all heard of the borg, but real life physics and technology don't work like in star trek... In the real world that idea doesn't even make sense. Our brains aren't general purpose computers that can be clustered together... they are highly specialized pieces of equipment that are largely hardwired to tasks such as image and language processing.
In any case just making a brain *bigger* doesn't necessarily make it smarter. The kind of widely distributed computing that you are talking about is only usable for certain classes of paralizable algorithms... and arguably we don't need to have our minds "linked" any more than they are right now for us to do this anyway.
You're right, it would be stupid to do the sort of things that linus is doing when submitting patches to the kernel, but the kernel overall is a pretty successful project, whereas gnome, and particularly metacity, has major problems that generally prompt people to remove the "default gnome" desktop after some use, and replace it with something better. Generally, linus has done a good job of making sure the kernel address the core problems it faces, but gnome has not.
Generally, I think that Linus' initial comment was correct, people should just switch to a different desktop. The criticisms against gnome are out there, and the developers can either address them or lose their users. I have no particular obligation to use gnome, and no obligation to help fix it if they won't accept patches. Mostly what stops people from switching is that when you stray from the mainstream gnome/metacity combo, there's so many alternative window managers, most of which don't work that well, that people are confused and have a hard time picking out the good ones. KDE used to be the well known alternative, but it has some of the same problems as gnome. Thankfully, recently xfce has moved far to the head of the pack, as doing everything that gnome and kde do, but better and with fewer bugs.
For those who aren't familiar with the criticisms addressed against gnome, in summary they are that it the window manager, metatcity, is missing a lot of important features that other desktops have, that it is as buggy as all get out, and that it is kind of bloated. They are working on fixing the bugs... presumably, and people can learn to live with a little bloat these days, but the lack of critical features has driven away countless users, and fractured what would otherwise be the one true linux desktop. Some of the missing features aren't so heinous, I actually thought the one that Linus mentioned was pretty minor, but there are major broken areas of metacity like *xinerama support* (used if you ever want to plug a monitor into your laptop for instance) that the developers refuse to address for reasons that don't make sense.
>>electrons are so much smaller (and hence faster) than atoms
Electrons actually don't flow that fast through a wire. Less than a millimeter per second.
The reason why electricity is so fast, isn't because electrons are fast. It is fast for the same reason that if you have a pipe filled with water, and you start pumping more water in one side, water gushes out the other side immediately a great distance away, even though water isn't flowing through the pipe that quickly. This happens because although the water is slow, the pressure increases along the pipe much faster. Water is more or less incompressible, so pressure on one side of the pipe causes each water molecule in succession to transfer the pressure through it into the next without moving the molecules closer together by much. Thus the water moves almost as a single block, the force itself being only limited by the speed of light (ideally).
Similarly, although electrons are relatively slow to move, the voltage or electric pressure moves through the wire at the speed of light (practically at about 1/3 that speed). It is *this* speed barrier that we are currently running into in computer design, where the slowness of the speed of light over a few centimeters on a mother board will cause the signals in wires to get out of sync if one wire is slightly longer than the other. This happens there because although the voltage is moving incredibly fast, the clock rate of the circuitry is something like a billion oscillations a second. An electric pulse will only move slightly less than 10 centimeters in a billionth of a second.
lately, blizzard hasn't seemed to have *anything* in the pipeline aside from WOW upgrades. That's somewhat understandable seeing as WOW is such a huge cash cow for them... but seriously, they should at least spin off another company to make new games if that's what needs to be done.
fully destructible bodies. They've recently been adding destructible environments, i.e. environments where pieces of buildings blow off, solid volumes can be shot apart in chunks, etc.
What I haven't seen is any effort to make people die realistically. The most that is usually visible is a spot of red where the bullet hit, and some red painted on scenes behind. When someone is shot by a machine gun... or a tank for that matter, this is not what happens. A realistic portrayal of this would be a good deal more gruesome than any existing game, and I'd be interested if people could actually stand to play such a game. I suspect that one of the reasons for not making such a game, aside from the fact that walmart would never carry it, is that most game produces suspect the answer to that question is no. Still, I'm curious about what would happen.
isn't really the problem. There are a lot of guys like Draper... really a fairly large community of them.
Of the people that I've met who are like John Draper, the real problem is that they have no sense of the practical necessities of life, i.e. they don't know how to take care of themselves, they aren't willing to do boring work to make money to pay bills, they don't know how to judge people, or stay out of trouble.
Well developed skills and high intelligence are a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for success in life. Basic things, like personal hygiene, self control, and the ability to exude professionalism at least some of the time, are necessary for success in any field whatsoever.
Eccentricities are in some ways the spice of life, but people need to be able to control their social twitches, personal quirks, and neurosis in order to deal with others. Some people, usually people who have not really had much experience in the industry, imagine that if they are just good enough in the technical arena, everyone will be willing to put up with obnoxious personal habits. However, this is observably false within the industry, and this myth should be dispelled immediately.
A number of good universities offer much of their computer science curriculum online, usually just in the form of uploading course notes, or letting the public have access to their class websites. MIT notably has the opencourseware.
Realistically all these online classes do is let you see what sort of reading you'd need to do for the actual classes. Aside from that they give you access to slides which may or may not be more enlightening than the book. I've yet to see a class that's uploaded videotaped lectures.
UW's (quite notable) computer science program has every year's class website online, and from what I've seen they generally have more material than MIT's online stuff...
The same research group was working on a number of other really interesting things including a system for automatically finding the "closest" peer to connect to by using another system that maintains a map (in terms of the measured throughput from point to point) of the internet. Supposedly that technique was able to increase BT throughput by quite a bit.
The jury isn't the issue. The judge, who gets to choose what evidence in admissible, and who can throw out the case before it goes to trial, and who can throw out jury, and who can throw out the jury's decision, is the weak point when it comes to convicting someone politically powerful.
Now judges have a certain degree of independence from the influence of the executive and legislative branch according to the constitution, but the legislative and executive branch are not *fond* of this independence (notice all of the whining about "activist judges" whenever a judge does something a politician doesn't like), but the other branches have had a long time to figure out ways around this. Ultimately, judges are either appointed or elected. If they are elected, then they need external money and political support. If they are appointed, then that gives the other branches an opportunity to hand pick people who are likely to take orders. Thankfully on the national level (when it's devided between dems and republicans) this doesn't happen as much, since the congress tends not to trust judges who are too cozy with the opposing party, and relatively independent people are liked best.
It's time to be realistic about the linux desktop. If it were ever going to happen, it would have been years ago.
Progress has been made on the Linux desktop front, but a grocery list of fundamental, and insurmountable problems remain.
1. Nobodies pushing linux desktops to the end user. There's no (positive) brand recognition (among desktop users), there's no marketing, there's no sales people at best buy pushing it. It might be on the shelves (in a few places) but so is a lot of software that no one ever notices.
2. Setup difficulty. Setup has improved immensely over the years, and installation is actually fairly decent now; however, it's still to hard because 2.1 Desktop users are used to *not having to do any setup whatsoever*. They are used to the OS coming with the machine. Setup on the windows and mac side consists of unpacking and hitting the power button. 2.2 Hardware detection sucks on linux. This isn't entirely linux developers fault, since they don't always have proper documentation for hardware, etc, but all those excuses mean is that it doesn't work properly, and it probably never will. 2.3 Drivers. These have gotten better, but they still suck. See 2.2 about excuses.
3. Configuration difficulty. Unlike setup difficulty this hasn't improved measurably over time. Linux configuration is still absolutely horrible from the desktop users perspective. The primary problem is flat human readable configuration files being used in places where desktop users have always used guis. The most obvious offender here is xorg.
Human readable config files make sense to developers, and administrators, but desktop users will never learn where all the files they need to edit are, let alone *what to do with them*. Unsophisticated users need preference panes, but there are few integrated into software on linux. This probably has something to do with the fact that there is no global configuration framework (like defaults on osx, or the registry on windows). Similar things exist for gtk (gconf), and indeed gnome software tends to be easily configurable, but configuration isn't a gtk specific problem and system level software like xorg can't depend on gtk to take advantage of it.
Oh, also before anyone says that novice users won't need to edit their xorg.conf, let me point out that in fact they *will* need to edit their xorg.conf because of broken hardware detection (see 2.2) and because if xinerama is turned on (most laptop users need dual screen), users can't even change their *resolution* without screwing with *at least* xorg.conf. Probably for days.
4. Linux is buggy. Very buggy. This comment is likely to earn a few flame posts, so I'd better explain it in more detail even though I think it's perfectly obvious what I mean.
The software provided with most linux distros has all sorts of very prominent show stopping conflicts, and configuration issues that users most spend *days* fixing by hand before they get a usable system. These issues eventually get fixed by the distro makers, but then new issues pop up immediately. Everyone who has installed linux on the desktop and used it for more than a few days has run into these issues.
These problems come down to the fact that the relatively small distro makes don't and can't spend the amount of money on QA that apple and microsoft can. OSX and windows certainly have all sorts of bugs, but they don't have the basic usability issues that plague linux. For OSX and windows the latest os (the one that's preloaded on it) is tested with the hardware configuration, and issues fixed before it's sent out. Patches are tested internally by a fairly large audience before the public ever even sees them. Neither of these things can happen with linux, so we are left with major usability issues that desktop users don't have the skills or patience to work through, and that many others simply don't have the time for.
>It's sad that someone may be able to buy his way out of a >murder conviction and walk away a free man.
Well, money can't buy you anything more than a fair trial, but lack of money pretty much guarantees that you are screwed, even if the evidence against you is minimal. All that money does, is guarantee that your lawyers are competent, and that you have the resources to dig up evidence on your behalf.
Now, there are other things you can do to get out of a murder conviction, like be a loved celebrity, or have political power.
Slashdot Mirror
view of global warming within the scientific community, which are backed by a lot of evidence so he should expect some resistance.
Similarly, if someone came out and claimed that there is no such thing as conservation of energy, or that our models for gravity are all wrong, people aren't going to want to hear it. Generally, you only see big sea changes within fields of science when there is some crisis, when what everyone thought the basic principles were just aren't holding up. This isn't true for climate science, where people are still pretty confident that measurements indicate continually rising temperatures, probably from human cause.
So, in any case he should expect to have his views marginalized unless he can give a reason to be treated otherwise. There's no such thing as equal time for both sides of an argument in science.
If people get abnormally hostile about this issue, consider the stakes that are involved.
my understanding is that their compatibility with win32 is largely based on wine, and so it has most of the same bugs running win32, and then some.
What I'd really like to see is some major company getting behind reactos and wine. Getting a portable win32 layer really working to the point where it's no longer just a toy is going to take a major effort, more of an effort than the open source community seems willing to put forward at this time. Working win32 is a real possibility, but it needs a lot of people to get behind it.
I don't know why you'd replace terminal.app with iterm. terminal.app is by far the best terminal I've ever used.
Consider that most terminals for linux either fall into the category of small and quick to boot, but missing lots of features and are difficult to configure (rxvt, xterm, etc). Otherwise there's the big bulky terminals like konsole that take forever to boot, have kind of an ugly and bulky UI, and have lots of features, probably too many...
Let's not even think about what the one and only terminal for windows is like... Seriously, why has no third party developer *ever* made a replacement?
Terminal.app starts up fast, and has all the features I need and none that I don't configurable easily from preference panes. It is, in essence the best terminal ever and I would be glad if I could get an equivalent for windows or linux.
fink sucks, and darwin isn't a tool, it's the operating system...
Last time I used fink it was buggy, and the packages were perpetually out of date. It doesn't matter that much anyway since there are usually osx packages available directly from most large open source projects. The only thing I miss is the uninstaller, which traditionally hasn't existed because it hasn't been necessary on mac systems that kept all files related to an application in one folder.
it's because, on linux, there are too few.
For some reason it reminds me of metroid. I'd always missed how metroid introduced the plot without actually having any dialog... until the newer games of course.
People with english degrees will accept much lower pay to work in schools, since there aren't many other opportunities for them compared to the opportunities that people with math and engineering backgrounds have. This is another case where the school unions have screwed up the education system. Personally, I'd like to see them crushed, and new unionless school's put in place.
All of the new provisions in the GPLv3 seem guaranteed that the largely corporate market for linux will steer clear of it.
Has any major software adopted it yet? I would imagine that the FSF would be switching software like GCC, etc, over the GPLv3 since FSF supposedly owns the copyright. Has this happened? How have the existing devs reacted?
Personally, I'm a little annoyed at RMS' arrogant and loudmouthed politicking of late. My feeling is that RMS' general orneriness has extended into the GPLv3 and added a bunch of provisions he knew would cause nothing but contention in the community, and gain us nothing material.
I think that brain emulation is pointless. I also think that it would be ridiculously difficult, and that it is unlikely to ever happen. It's possible in the sense that it is possible that we will move all the water on earth and dump it into a black hole one bucket at a time, but in no stronger sense.
AI is already here and it's not that helpful for the sort of problems that you are talking about. There's already a tremendous amount of raw intelligence working on the problems facing our society. Our problem isn't a problem of lack of processing power, but a lack of time and energy in some fields, and a lack of a unifying model in others. Also, some problems are simply intractable. No matter how smart you may be, you aren't going to magically find a way to generate energy out of nothing, or find a way to move faster than the speed of light.
There are fundamental and intractable problems that limit the scope of our civilization. There is no magic bullet solution to many of these, and as such they utterly prohibit the singularity which is nothing more than a vaguely defined magic bullet for all of life's problems. That's not to say there won't be scientific revolutions, but they will be comparable in scope to previous scientific revolutions, in that greater knowledge will provide us with more certainty of our environment, and inspiration in how we deal with it, but it won't fundamentally change the rules of the game that have been so well established.
>So now, before astronauts return to the moon in 2020
oh come on. Why are we wasting money preparing for a project we know is going to get canceled? I mean... who really thinks that when it comes time to actually send someone, and we need to actually pay for it, that it's not going to get canceled? This is a lot of nonsense about one politician trying to take credit for an ambitious program and forcing another future politician to suffer from its eventual failure.
using AI for some kind of immortality is a cool scifi idea, but let's be clear that this is a totally unworkable, and somewhat nonsensical proposition. Building something that has some kind of intelligence isn't that hard. There are all sorts of AI applications out there. What is hard, if not impossible is emulating *human* intelligence. Many aspects of human intelligence, especially language processing, are incredibly sophisticated and incredibly specific to us as a species. Our intelligence is shaped by our environment, and by our evolution, so things like human language have specifically human semantic ideas about the world intertwined with syntactic and phonetic structures that evolved over time.
Let's say we built a computer that passed the turing test. What would be the point? What use does a machine have for the english language, when it could certainly communicate much more efficiently over a different medium than the air, in a potentially much more expressive format? What use does a machine have for ideas about touch, taste, and smell? Are we going to build a tongue for robots? Certainly it couldn't understand the meaning of the word "flavor" without ever having experienced taste. How do we even convey a human experience to a machine? The internal states of a machines do not resemble, and are not likely going to resemble the internal states of a human being.
In short, a good machine does just what it needs to, and nothing else, and a good artifically intelligent machine should cast off all the trappings of humanity, except to the extent that these trappings serve it's purpose. Instead intelligence should be devoted to solving the problems at hand.
I'd like to take this opportunity to mentioned what a bunch of nonsense the singularity is. A great number of people seem convinced that technology is advancing at a pace that will transform the human species into a bunch of immortal gods with access to unlimited energy, etc. Where technology solves all of lifes problems. Essentially a high tech version of the rapture.
The general justification is that there are a bunch of exponentially increasing trends in certain isolated areas of technological development, such as moore's law, which they use to justify the idea that at some point in the near future were going to have star trek like technology. A realistic and comprehensive look at our civilization of course shows that while some industries are bounding ahead, many if not most important technologies, like our ability to produce and store energy, have made little progress. Our society is making progress in many areas at an admirable clip, but nothing like the singularity is conceivably on the horizon.
As for your idea of merging all of our minds into a single consciousness... that's just retarded. Yes, we've all heard of the borg, but real life physics and technology don't work like in star trek... In the real world that idea doesn't even make sense. Our brains aren't general purpose computers that can be clustered together... they are highly specialized pieces of equipment that are largely hardwired to tasks such as image and language processing.
In any case just making a brain *bigger* doesn't necessarily make it smarter. The kind of widely distributed computing that you are talking about is only usable for certain classes of paralizable algorithms... and arguably we don't need to have our minds "linked" any more than they are right now for us to do this anyway.
You're right, it would be stupid to do the sort of things that linus is doing when submitting patches to the kernel, but the kernel overall is a pretty successful project, whereas gnome, and particularly metacity, has major problems that generally prompt people to remove the "default gnome" desktop after some use, and replace it with something better. Generally, linus has done a good job of making sure the kernel address the core problems it faces, but gnome has not.
Generally, I think that Linus' initial comment was correct, people should just switch to a different desktop. The criticisms against gnome are out there, and the developers can either address them or lose their users. I have no particular obligation to use gnome, and no obligation to help fix it if they won't accept patches. Mostly what stops people from switching is that when you stray from the mainstream gnome/metacity combo, there's so many alternative window managers, most of which don't work that well, that people are confused and have a hard time picking out the good ones. KDE used to be the well known alternative, but it has some of the same problems as gnome. Thankfully, recently xfce has moved far to the head of the pack, as doing everything that gnome and kde do, but better and with fewer bugs.
For those who aren't familiar with the criticisms addressed against gnome, in summary they are that it the window manager, metatcity, is missing a lot of important features that other desktops have, that it is as buggy as all get out, and that it is kind of bloated. They are working on fixing the bugs... presumably, and people can learn to live with a little bloat these days, but the lack of critical features has driven away countless users, and fractured what would otherwise be the one true linux desktop. Some of the missing features aren't so heinous, I actually thought the one that Linus mentioned was pretty minor, but there are major broken areas of metacity like *xinerama support* (used if you ever want to plug a monitor into your laptop for instance) that the developers refuse to address for reasons that don't make sense.
>>electrons are so much smaller (and hence faster) than atoms
Electrons actually don't flow that fast through a wire. Less than a millimeter per second.
The reason why electricity is so fast, isn't because electrons are fast. It is fast for the same reason that if you have a pipe filled with water, and you start pumping more water in one side, water gushes out the other side immediately a great distance away, even though water isn't flowing through the pipe that quickly. This happens because although the water is slow, the pressure increases along the pipe much faster. Water is more or less incompressible, so pressure on one side of the pipe causes each water molecule in succession to transfer the pressure through it into the next without moving the molecules closer together by much. Thus the water moves almost as a single block, the force itself being only limited by the speed of light (ideally).
Similarly, although electrons are relatively slow to move, the voltage or electric pressure moves through the wire at the speed of light (practically at about 1/3 that speed). It is *this* speed barrier that we are currently running into in computer design, where the slowness of the speed of light over a few centimeters on a mother board will cause the signals in wires to get out of sync if one wire is slightly longer than the other. This happens there because although the voltage is moving incredibly fast, the clock rate of the circuitry is something like a billion oscillations a second. An electric pulse will only move slightly less than 10 centimeters in a billionth of a second.
there's more than one?
dupe.
I don't have a link for the original on hand, but this was linked a few days ago...
lately, blizzard hasn't seemed to have *anything* in the pipeline aside from WOW upgrades. That's somewhat understandable seeing as WOW is such a huge cash cow for them... but seriously, they should at least spin off another company to make new games if that's what needs to be done.
fully destructible bodies. They've recently been adding destructible environments, i.e. environments where pieces of buildings blow off, solid volumes can be shot apart in chunks, etc.
What I haven't seen is any effort to make people die realistically. The most that is usually visible is a spot of red where the bullet hit, and some red painted on scenes behind. When someone is shot by a machine gun... or a tank for that matter, this is not what happens. A realistic portrayal of this would be a good deal more gruesome than any existing game, and I'd be interested if people could actually stand to play such a game. I suspect that one of the reasons for not making such a game, aside from the fact that walmart would never carry it, is that most game produces suspect the answer to that question is no. Still, I'm curious about what would happen.
isn't really the problem. There are a lot of guys like Draper... really a fairly large community of them.
Of the people that I've met who are like John Draper, the real problem is that they have no sense of the practical necessities of life, i.e. they don't know how to take care of themselves, they aren't willing to do boring work to make money to pay bills, they don't know how to judge people, or stay out of trouble.
Well developed skills and high intelligence are a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for success in life. Basic things, like personal hygiene, self control, and the ability to exude professionalism at least some of the time, are necessary for success in any field whatsoever.
Eccentricities are in some ways the spice of life, but people need to be able to control their social twitches, personal quirks, and neurosis in order to deal with others. Some people, usually people who have not really had much experience in the industry, imagine that if they are just good enough in the technical arena, everyone will be willing to put up with obnoxious personal habits. However, this is observably false within the industry, and this myth should be dispelled immediately.
A number of good universities offer much of their computer science curriculum online, usually just in the form of uploading course notes, or letting the public have access to their class websites. MIT notably has the opencourseware.
Realistically all these online classes do is let you see what sort of reading you'd need to do for the actual classes. Aside from that they give you access to slides which may or may not be more enlightening than the book. I've yet to see a class that's uploaded videotaped lectures.
UW's (quite notable) computer science program has every year's class website online, and from what I've seen they generally have more material than MIT's online stuff...
The same research group was working on a number of other really interesting things including a system for automatically finding the "closest" peer to connect to by using another system that maintains a map (in terms of the measured throughput from point to point) of the internet. Supposedly that technique was able to increase BT throughput by quite a bit.
The jury isn't the issue. The judge, who gets to choose what evidence in admissible, and who can throw out the case before it goes to trial, and who can throw out jury, and who can throw out the jury's decision, is the weak point when it comes to convicting someone politically powerful.
Now judges have a certain degree of independence from the influence of the executive and legislative branch according to the constitution, but the legislative and executive branch are not *fond* of this independence (notice all of the whining about "activist judges" whenever a judge does something a politician doesn't like), but the other branches have had a long time to figure out ways around this. Ultimately, judges are either appointed or elected. If they are elected, then they need external money and political support. If they are appointed, then that gives the other branches an opportunity to hand pick people who are likely to take orders. Thankfully on the national level (when it's devided between dems and republicans) this doesn't happen as much, since the congress tends not to trust judges who are too cozy with the opposing party, and relatively independent people are liked best.
It's time to be realistic about the linux desktop. If it were ever going to happen, it would have been years ago.
Progress has been made on the Linux desktop front, but a grocery list of fundamental, and insurmountable problems remain.
1. Nobodies pushing linux desktops to the end user. There's no (positive) brand recognition (among desktop users), there's no marketing, there's no sales people at best buy pushing it. It might be on the shelves (in a few places) but so is a lot of software that no one ever notices.
2. Setup difficulty. Setup has improved immensely over the years, and installation is actually fairly decent now; however, it's still to hard because
2.1 Desktop users are used to *not having to do any setup whatsoever*. They are used to the OS coming with the machine. Setup on the windows and mac side consists of unpacking and hitting the power button.
2.2 Hardware detection sucks on linux. This isn't entirely linux developers fault, since they don't always have proper documentation for hardware, etc, but all those excuses mean is that it doesn't work properly, and it probably never will.
2.3 Drivers. These have gotten better, but they still suck. See 2.2 about excuses.
3. Configuration difficulty. Unlike setup difficulty this hasn't improved measurably over time. Linux configuration is still absolutely horrible from the desktop users perspective. The primary problem is flat human readable configuration files being used in places where desktop users have always used guis. The most obvious offender here is xorg.
Human readable config files make sense to developers, and administrators, but desktop users will never learn where all the files they need to edit are, let alone *what to do with them*. Unsophisticated users need preference panes, but there are few integrated into software on linux. This probably has something to do with the fact that there is no global configuration framework (like defaults on osx, or the registry on windows). Similar things exist for gtk (gconf), and indeed gnome software tends to be easily configurable, but configuration isn't a gtk specific problem and system level software like xorg can't depend on gtk to take advantage of it.
Oh, also before anyone says that novice users won't need to edit their xorg.conf, let me point out that in fact they *will* need to edit their xorg.conf because of broken hardware detection (see 2.2) and because if xinerama is turned on (most laptop users need dual screen), users can't even change their *resolution* without screwing with *at least* xorg.conf. Probably for days.
4. Linux is buggy. Very buggy. This comment is likely to earn a few flame posts, so I'd better explain it in more detail even though I think it's perfectly obvious what I mean.
The software provided with most linux distros has all sorts of very prominent show stopping conflicts, and configuration issues that users most spend *days* fixing by hand before they get a usable system. These issues eventually get fixed by the distro makers, but then new issues pop up immediately. Everyone who has installed linux on the desktop and used it for more than a few days has run into these issues.
These problems come down to the fact that the relatively small distro makes don't and can't spend the amount of money on QA that apple and microsoft can. OSX and windows certainly have all sorts of bugs, but they don't have the basic usability issues that plague linux. For OSX and windows the latest os (the one that's preloaded on it) is tested with the hardware configuration, and issues fixed before it's sent out. Patches are tested internally by a fairly large audience before the public ever even sees them. Neither of these things can happen with linux, so we are left with major usability issues that desktop users don't have the skills or patience to work through, and that many others simply don't have the time for.
5. Games don'
>It's sad that someone may be able to buy his way out of a
>murder conviction and walk away a free man.
Well, money can't buy you anything more than a fair trial, but lack of money pretty much guarantees that you are screwed, even if the evidence against you is minimal. All that money does, is guarantee that your lawyers are competent, and that you have the resources to dig up evidence on your behalf.
Now, there are other things you can do to get out of a murder conviction, like be a loved celebrity, or have political power.