You realize that by this you're asking of the hypothetical robot a lot more than intelligence, right?
Sure... depending on the test. That some humans fail to reach the level of performance in that task we define as "success" doesn't change that it is a test of intelligence of some kind. I have in mind social intelligence. I don't think it reasonable to include the ability to recognize rotated figures (a challenge for human intelligence but a cinch for machines) as a measure of intelligence but not the ability to extract significant features out of social situations and make decisions that lead to desired outcomes.
The reason I don't think I'll see it any time is that in order communicate, in order to *understand*, there has to be some shared experience of the things signified by communication. So, I think you'd need to develop something like the equivalent of robot childhood, adolescence and young adulthood to achieve a robot that was socially intelligent enough to participate as an equal in human society.
This does not preclude the createion of a robot centric society in which humans would not be able to participate as equals.
If the test is chess, then there are AIs that surpass the vast majority of the human race.
If the test were, let's say, safely navigating through Manhattan using the same visual signs and signals that a pedestrian would, there isn't anything close to even a relatively helpless human being.
If the test is understanding language, same thing. Ditto for cognitive flexibility, the ability to generalize mental skills learned in one situation to a different one.
Of course many of these kinds of "tests" I'm proposing are very human-centric. But narrow tests of intelligence are very algorithm-centric. The narrower the test, the more relatively "intelligent" AI will be.
Here's an interesting thought, I think. How long will it be before an AI is created that is capable of outscoring the average human on some IQ test -- given the necessary visual inputs and robotic "hands" to take the test? I don't think that's very far off. I wouldn't be surprised to see it in my lifetime. I'd be surprised to see a pedestrian robot who could navigate Manhattan as well as the average human in my lifetime, or who could take leadership and teamwork skills learned in a military job and apply them to a civilian job without reprogramming by a human.
Well, why wouldn't they be afraid. The Shah didn't knuckle under because he was timid about oppressing people.
The thing about Iran is that there's a stubborn anti-government-authority streak in their traditional Shiite Islam. Unlike the ultra-orthodox Sunnis who look back to the caliphate as a kind of divinely ordained government that could in theory be be reestablished, his ultra-orthodox Twelver Shiite counterpart is primed to look at any government, religious or secular, as invalid until the return of the 12th imam. That means that the harder a government clamps down, the more the pressure of religiously based dissent goes up.
Now this situation is interesting, because nominally it's Shiite clerics running the show. But Khameni's credentials are questionable. Technically he wasn't constitutionally qualified for his position of Supreme Leader, who is supposed to be a Marja. A Marja is supposed to have serious body of scholarly work on Islamic law, which Khamenei does not have. His field is literature. Khamenei has punished other Marjas who do not recognize his status. This further undermines his legitimacy with people who are inclined to question it.
So the net effect of this legitimacy question is to split Twelvers and seriously inflame the anti-government streak in the dissenters. He's turned Iran into a breeder reactor for martyrs.
"Turn Left at Orion" by Guy Consolmagno. Great book oriented toward small telescopes in the 60mm-100mm range.
The moon is of course a great target -- crescent is best. Jupiter is terrific, and even if your scope is a mess the Galilean moons are certainly easy to see and of historical importance. I've been able to count bands pretty easily with my 90mm refractor, but I've modded it to improve contrast. Cheap Chinese refractors often have exposed screws and shiny forward surfaces that can be fixed with Sharpie. Saturn is great, depending on how the rings are oriented. Mars is kind of ho-hum with 100mm. I'd assign Venus through binoculars if its position permits. You can at least make out its phases.
If light pollution is bad, then you aren't going to have much luck with nebulae, but binary stars are great, as are clusters and asterisms. The Pleiades (M45) are a must of course, and they're also a good naked eye object. Lots of education to be got out of those. They're about the nearest interesting thing there is to look at, and you can tie it in with anthropology if you want because they're a naked eye object.
Brocchi's Cluster is one of my favorites, and not so well known. Quite pretty, looks a bit like a coathanger. The Beehive (M44) is also nice.
Gemini offers the open cluster M35, which is OK, but one of the interesting things is to look at Castor and Pollux through a small telescope. There's a really nice color contrast that is not visible to the naked eye.
Speaking of color contrast, Albireo (at the head of the Cygnus swan) is one of the nicest small scope targets there are -- an absolutely gorgeous double star with a nice red/blue color difference. It's absolutely perfect for a scope in the 100mm range; it doesn't really get any better in a big light bucket.
Nu Draconis is another double star that's always visble in the Northern Hemisphere. I once split Nu Draconis with a pair of 10x50 binoculars hand held, if you call lying on the hood of a car with the eye cups balance on my eyebrows "hand held". It's not easy with binoculars, but a cinch to split with even a 60mm refractor.
And don't neglect binoculars! Most families have a pair somewhere, and you can do some great things with them. They're just about the best thing for Andromeda (M31) which is huge -- 4 degrees across. It's hard to take it all in with a larger telescope, although your 100mm with the longest FL, widest apparent field eyepiece you have will give nice views too.
Remember, even a really cheap pair of binoculars is way better than anything Galileo ever had! The main problem is that most pairs have too much magnification for hand holding; 7x is best if you don't have some kind of support. Perhaps you could make a few copy scopes and pass them around for assignments.
One thing you can do is mount a pair of 10x binoculars in a box with a mirror so you can look down at a comfortable 45 degrees. A first surface mirror is ideal (available through surplus stores) but even a glass fronted mirror is an improvement over trying to handhold a pair of binocs with too much magnification. You can use this kind of setup with "Turn Left" or with the "National Audubon Society Field Guide to Constellations of the Northern Skies". This is a terrific pocket reference for use with binoculars, as it facilitates star hopping and identifies the most interesting objects in each constellation that can be seen with naked eye or small telescopes.
Why? To save a hundred bucks on the license, that's why.
Microsoft is not doctrinaire on this. It's just a way of getting more money. Giving the kind of person who swaps a motherboard a break really has no significant impact on their bottom line, and it keeps them in the fold.
It's rather amazing to think that this situation might even be considered by a court of law. The founding fathers would have to have been the equivalent of Mentor of Arisia to have known something like this was coming when they put the Interstate Commerce Clause and copyright clause into the Constitution.
Well, that ain't necessarily what the GP is talking about.
If you buy an OEM copy of Windows and your PC dies, can you pop the hard disk out and put it into a new PC? No. The OEM license only allows you to install that copy onto one machine *ever*.
The problem with hobbyists is that they upgrade their machines. Windows looks at the configuration of the machine, and if it has been upgraded too much, it makes you call Microsoft and explain what you are doing. Change enough things (memory, hard disk, CPU) and theoretically Microsoft can tell you to take a hike.
Technically, replacing the motherboard in your machine invalidates your OEM license. Even if you replace it with a mobo that is identical in every respect, you are supposed to buy another license. That's why OEM licenses cost so much less than retail licenses, which you can transfer between machines. Under the circumstances, given that GP's mobo died, they're cutting him some slack, but they'd be within their rights to tell him to buy a whole new license. I've been in the exact same situation, and they cut me some slack too.
Now I don't *like* that situation, but that's what Microsoft's OEM license *is*. That's why I don't buy Windows for installing on my machines. I take the hard disk out and set it aside in case I ever need to use Windows, then I put a new hard disk in with Linux. If I *were* to buy Windows, I'd spend the extra dough for a retail license rather than OEM. I know folks think they're entitled to get around OEM licensing restrictions, but I don't agree with that. If you buy an OEM license, you ought to know what you are getting yourself into.
Well, once years ago I had a job that included administering the company's minicomputer system. I screwed up a routine OS update, which was easy to do back in the closed source days when package Unix was up to each hardware vendor. The vendor gave us this crappy utility to run and I answered one of the questions wrong and before I knew it the company's databases were hosed.
Fortunately I had backups. Lots and lots of backups. Daily backups going back two weeks, weekly backups going back three months, and quarterly backups going back several years. Unfortunately they'd been taken on a flaky 9-track drive that I'd been begging to have replaced. The people I worked for were fine, but the folks who approved the capital budget just didn't believe that computer hardware could fail, I guess. I'd started the update at 6PM, after the end of the work day, so nobody would be inconvenienced. It took all night to restore the system, and then all the next day to find readable versions of all the data. I ended up going through the last ten days' backups before I'd stitched everything back together. I was finished the following day when people started coming in to work. I went home, after working forty eight hours straight. Everything was back, or within spitting distance.
Now my boss wasn't a computer guy, but he was a mensch, a good guy, and a few months later on my boss cited this incident on may annual review as an example of extraordinary dedication. When I sat down for my review and he handed me that evaluation, I read it, and then I threw it in his face.
There's nothing wrong with using Java on a resource constrained device. It works fine for most applications, although maybe not for realistic physics simulations.
Even relatively inattentive Java coding (with respect to constructing objects inadvertently) works fine for most things you'd want to do on a most devices you're likely to encounter. It's the usual thing, if you look at your code, only a tiny fraction of it tends to be performance critical.
Now I can't tell you how many hours I've spent dealing with messes created by crappy resource pooling implementations. The irony is that these were all classic examples of premature optimization. Competent programmers make things clear and correct first, then worry about fast. These incompetent implementations were from programmers who worried too much about the performance constraints of the platform and bent over backward trying to shoehorn in every optimization they could think of before ever getting a single jot of performance data. So they ended up with a buggy mess. After ripping all those optimizations out, including the resource pooling, I found that things ran *faster*, although that was less important than the fact the software was *correct*.
Now I agree that if I *were* writing something that had to be very fast (and something like a scientific simulation or cryptanalysis utility that can never be fast enough), and heap based object allocation and garbage collection were going to be a bottleneck, I'd choose something like C++ instead. It's purely a matter of optimizing programmer time either way. I don't want to have to waste my time worrying about optimization.
This kind of reminds me of the initial reaction many people had to the Wii, which was that it was not very impressive. But it's often not the computational power (or rendering power) of a system that matters as all the stuff that goes around it, the software and user interface hardware. It all has to fit together to provide a useful (or entertaining) user experience.
The computer used on Apollo 11 is less powerful than most cheap digital watches these days. That doesn't mean that you can navigate a dumb spaceship to the moon with your watch. A lot of stuff went around those primitive CPUs to make things happen.
I've worked with scientists and other field workers who don't necessarily have access to a wall socket every few hours. One of the big pains we had was when Palm stopped powering their devices with AAA. We used to be able to send people into the field with one of those big shrink wrapped blocks of AAAs, and we'd know there wasn't going to be any issue with power. The PDA became a lot more powerful, but not really any more useful for our purposes. Removable storage was a huge plus, but switching to expensive battery packs wasn't so great from our standpoint. Some of the people I worked with resorted to buying expensive solar panels, which are great in the bush if you can afford them and if they don't get stolen. An AAA powered device with an SD slot would have been perfect.
I understand the reporters used m100s for years after much more powerful laptops existed for similar concerns about being caught without power. I imagine the keyboard must be fairly good to inspire that kind of loyalty too. Maybe cheap lousy keyboard technology hadn't advanced so far in those days.
AA is a form factor. It is a popular form factor for rechargeable NiMH batteries.
Reading between the lines, this device has a battery pack made out of rechargeable AA batteries, which it recharges when it is plugged into AC. Just like a laptop really, except instead of an expensive Li ion battery it uses something cheaper like NiMH, and in a pinch you can throw any old AAs in, although you'll need a screwdriver to extract the "battery pack".
My forays into the KDE 4.x release series were unpleasant too, although not necessarily for stability problems.
Look, it's obviously a labor of love, but sometimes the eyes of love are a bit blind to faults. The hardest thing to do in any creative endeavor is to set aside some idea you really love. But you have to do it, otherwise you end up with an exuberant but irritating mess. KDE 4 had a kind of an Andy Hardy "hey kids, let's revolutionize desktop technology!" feel to it. Or maybe like an art show for young UI designer's desktop concepts. It doesn't have a natural feel to it, by which I mean that after a few minutes with it you forget you're using some arbitrary set of conventions. It's an attention grabbing user interface, and I don't want my attention grabbed. I have my own uses for my attention.
The things I value in a user interface are consistency, responsiveness, and deference. I want the interface to stay out of my way, not to educate me on somebody's philosophy of user interface design. I regard my computer a my slave. When I give it an order, I want to be able to that quickly and have the result be absolutely predictable in how long it takes and how it ends up. I am not interested in any shuck-and-jive that the user interface designers want to throw into the process.
The whole program of revolutionizing the desktop is out of date anyway.
Look. Anybody with a brain knows that many agile practices don't apply to certain kinds of projects. That's just common sense. I've been in this business long enough to have seen a parade of silver bullet methodologies go by. All of them worked for people who had the development experience, business awareness, and common sense to know when to bend the rules or ignore them. Likewise none of them would take a person incapable of delivering a project and fix that.
"Agile" is a marketing term, and like most marketing terms it's a lie. Agile works best in those places that left without guidance would try to be too agile for their own good. The places where management, if you let them, will barge in twice a day with a new direction. Now if you know developers, you know they have good days and bad days, and if you want to get anything out of them you've got to give them a long enough stretch in one direction so that they can catch the wind in their sails. So you take down a few books from your shelf, and you say, "This is the latest thing. It's *agile development*."
Immediately management gets it. It's about getting more done faster. What you don't tell them is that it's about keeping them out of your team's hair long enough to get *anything* done.
Now if you can define a good set of requirements and keep the goalposts from moving for longer periods, that's even better. Thirty days is a reasonable compromise for a sprint. You want to measure progress in a detailed way at least that often anyway, and it provides ample time to get identifiable bits done and to even try and discard a few creative approaches. But there's nothing magically necessary about changing priorities every thirty days. If you can reasonably keep them constant for six months, that'd be even better. But in *some* kinds of development that's not possible.
When you are building software to support business functions, priorities shift based on the response to competition, assumptions in the business plan that don't pan out etc. Even the software itself changes the requirements environment. I've been in situations where I know that the organization needs B, but they can't *see* that need until they've seen A first. So the quintessentially agile part of "agile" is really indispensable on these kinds of "dynamic requirements" jobs. The rest of it (unit testing etc.) is just motherhood and apple pie engineering.
Now as far as the game industry is concerned, everything I've heard about it makes it sound like a horror show. I attribute this to two things. First it is attractive to young folks enamored of the romance of creating the kind of games they love. In other words people easy to exploit. The other factor is bravado and immaturity of the company management. In time as the people in the industry mature, maybe things will change. But "methodology" isn't going to solve the problem of self-deluded and exploitative management.
Yes. I stopped posting on dKos after I had the misfortune of posting a diary next to another diary that was very similar except that it had the word 'penis' in the title. Naturally most people checked that one out first, and though I perhaps not so humbly believe that my diary was more thoughtful and nuanced, the penis titled diary rocketed to the rec list, after which there was no point in discussing that point in mine.
I should have known after the shellacking I got for saying that the whole Carrie Prejean business was blown out of proportion. There's nothing like being accused of promoting violence against women for having an opinion about free speech.
I've often thought I'd be more at home at a site dominated by thoughtful and civil persons of both liberal and conservative persuasion. Unfortunately "thoughtful" and "civil" don't get much support on either end of the political spectrum, although the left does pay lip service to them.
Well, a priori I'm on board with the "probably a good thing" notion. However we have a case where we can look at the "good thing" question after the fact.
So, here's the skinny: they ran the company into the ground, and they to walk away with a fat share of the money that was supposed to compensate the regular stockholders who are left holding shares in the ruined company.
Probably a good thing? Well, let's say I'm persuadable that it is less than a wonderful thing. [Note for they irony impaired: "'Litotes'? Now that's a word you don't hear every day."]
Let's set up a study where we have a control group who gets to do fun and interesting things, and another group where we attempt to bore them to death.
What's wrong with a site where anybody can post any kind of opinion?
Nothing. You just have to remember that. Posts on a places like dKos only speak for the poster, not "liberalism" or even "the Democratic Party", even the editorial policy of the site. The purpose of dKos is to help get Democrats elected. The vast majority of what is there does nothing useful for anyone, other than to provide Bill O'Reilly a fishing ground for something to rage at on a slow news day, Hell, he doesn't even have to wait for an outageous comment, he could post one himself. Not that i think he does, mind you. There'd be no point with an infinite number of monkeys at his beck and call.
Basically dKos is too large to police. If you are an abuser and you get noticed, you will be summarily canned, but that often takes a long time and you can simply sign up under a different name. So you can get just about anything on dKos, from astroturfing provocateurs, the usual contingent of sincere loonies, and quite a few intelligent, thoughtful people trying to make themselves heard of the bedlam.
Want to blame somebody? Blame Bush. It was the anti-Bush fervor that took dKos from a fairly interesting site to the madhouse it is today. [Note deliberate use of irony here]
Alternatively, blame the design of the site, which encourages a desperate contest to get noticed before your post falls into oblivion.
But whatever the cause, you're on your own when it comes to content posted there. It doesn't necessarily reflect the philosophy of the site's owners. It may not reflect the political philosophy of the person posting it. Most of it is junk. Some of it is worth reading. All of it is worth taking with a grain of salt.
I think Lucas nailed space opera in "Star Wars" (now retro numbered as "Ep IV"): the sense of wonder, the exuberant, don't look too closely at the seams where I stitched the archetypes together pacing. In large part its because he didn't have the budget or time to make it smooth and show you all the details. You'd see something just long enough to be interested (the Benny Goodman clarinet players in the cantina) then cut away before you had a good look.
But he couldn't keep it up.
Genres come and go in movies like any other kind of fashion. Once Hollywood turned out western after western. Most of them were dreck, a few are among the best and most thoughtful movies ever made (*The Searchers*). Space opera went from a new, full-blown maturity in Star Wars Ep IV to decadance in record time, driven by technology and vast amounts of money funding people who *could* be creative, but not on somebody else's hundred million dollar budget.
If there is any hope, it's in the kind of people who make fan films. Bad as they are, they aren't ashamed to take risks because everyone *knows* they're probably bad.
Slashdot Mirror
You realize that by this you're asking of the hypothetical robot a lot more than intelligence, right?
Sure... depending on the test. That some humans fail to reach the level of performance in that task we define as "success" doesn't change that it is a test of intelligence of some kind. I have in mind social intelligence. I don't think it reasonable to include the ability to recognize rotated figures (a challenge for human intelligence but a cinch for machines) as a measure of intelligence but not the ability to extract significant features out of social situations and make decisions that lead to desired outcomes.
The reason I don't think I'll see it any time is that in order communicate, in order to *understand*, there has to be some shared experience of the things signified by communication. So, I think you'd need to develop something like the equivalent of robot childhood, adolescence and young adulthood to achieve a robot that was socially intelligent enough to participate as an equal in human society.
This does not preclude the createion of a robot centric society in which humans would not be able to participate as equals.
Anarchists, unite!
If the test is chess, then there are AIs that surpass the vast majority of the human race.
If the test were, let's say, safely navigating through Manhattan using the same visual signs and signals that a pedestrian would, there isn't anything close to even a relatively helpless human being.
If the test is understanding language, same thing. Ditto for cognitive flexibility, the ability to generalize mental skills learned in one situation to a different one.
Of course many of these kinds of "tests" I'm proposing are very human-centric. But narrow tests of intelligence are very algorithm-centric. The narrower the test, the more relatively "intelligent" AI will be.
Here's an interesting thought, I think. How long will it be before an AI is created that is capable of outscoring the average human on some IQ test -- given the necessary visual inputs and robotic "hands" to take the test? I don't think that's very far off. I wouldn't be surprised to see it in my lifetime. I'd be surprised to see a pedestrian robot who could navigate Manhattan as well as the average human in my lifetime, or who could take leadership and teamwork skills learned in a military job and apply them to a civilian job without reprogramming by a human.
Well, why wouldn't they be afraid. The Shah didn't knuckle under because he was timid about oppressing people.
The thing about Iran is that there's a stubborn anti-government-authority streak in their traditional Shiite Islam. Unlike the ultra-orthodox Sunnis who look back to the caliphate as a kind of divinely ordained government that could in theory be be reestablished, his ultra-orthodox Twelver Shiite counterpart is primed to look at any government, religious or secular, as invalid until the return of the 12th imam. That means that the harder a government clamps down, the more the pressure of religiously based dissent goes up.
Now this situation is interesting, because nominally it's Shiite clerics running the show. But Khameni's credentials are questionable. Technically he wasn't constitutionally qualified for his position of Supreme Leader, who is supposed to be a Marja. A Marja is supposed to have serious body of scholarly work on Islamic law, which Khamenei does not have. His field is literature. Khamenei has punished other Marjas who do not recognize his status. This further undermines his legitimacy with people who are inclined to question it.
So the net effect of this legitimacy question is to split Twelvers and seriously inflame the anti-government streak in the dissenters. He's turned Iran into a breeder reactor for martyrs.
Once the government is managing all your communications, they'll finally be able to trust you.
"Turn Left at Orion" by Guy Consolmagno. Great book oriented toward small telescopes in the 60mm-100mm range.
The moon is of course a great target -- crescent is best. Jupiter is terrific, and even if your scope is a mess the Galilean moons are certainly easy to see and of historical importance. I've been able to count bands pretty easily with my 90mm refractor, but I've modded it to improve contrast. Cheap Chinese refractors often have exposed screws and shiny forward surfaces that can be fixed with Sharpie. Saturn is great, depending on how the rings are oriented. Mars is kind of ho-hum with 100mm. I'd assign Venus through binoculars if its position permits. You can at least make out its phases.
If light pollution is bad, then you aren't going to have much luck with nebulae, but binary stars are great, as are clusters and asterisms. The Pleiades (M45) are a must of course, and they're also a good naked eye object. Lots of education to be got out of those. They're about the nearest interesting thing there is to look at, and you can tie it in with anthropology if you want because they're a naked eye object.
Brocchi's Cluster is one of my favorites, and not so well known. Quite pretty, looks a bit like a coathanger. The Beehive (M44) is also nice.
Gemini offers the open cluster M35, which is OK, but one of the interesting things is to look at Castor and Pollux through a small telescope. There's a really nice color contrast that is not visible to the naked eye.
Speaking of color contrast, Albireo (at the head of the Cygnus swan) is one of the nicest small scope targets there are -- an absolutely gorgeous double star with a nice red/blue color difference. It's absolutely perfect for a scope in the 100mm range; it doesn't really get any better in a big light bucket.
Nu Draconis is another double star that's always visble in the Northern Hemisphere. I once split Nu Draconis with a pair of 10x50 binoculars hand held, if you call lying on the hood of a car with the eye cups balance on my eyebrows "hand held". It's not easy with binoculars, but a cinch to split with even a 60mm refractor.
And don't neglect binoculars! Most families have a pair somewhere, and you can do some great things with them. They're just about the best thing for Andromeda (M31) which is huge -- 4 degrees across. It's hard to take it all in with a larger telescope, although your 100mm with the longest FL, widest apparent field eyepiece you have will give nice views too.
Remember, even a really cheap pair of binoculars is way better than anything Galileo ever had! The main problem is that most pairs have too much magnification for hand holding; 7x is best if you don't have some kind of support. Perhaps you could make a few copy scopes and pass them around for assignments.
One thing you can do is mount a pair of 10x binoculars in a box with a mirror so you can look down at a comfortable 45 degrees. A first surface mirror is ideal (available through surplus stores) but even a glass fronted mirror is an improvement over trying to handhold a pair of binocs with too much magnification. You can use this kind of setup with "Turn Left" or with the "National Audubon Society Field Guide to Constellations of the Northern Skies". This is a terrific pocket reference for use with binoculars, as it facilitates star hopping and identifies the most interesting objects in each constellation that can be seen with naked eye or small telescopes.
Why? To save a hundred bucks on the license, that's why.
Microsoft is not doctrinaire on this. It's just a way of getting more money. Giving the kind of person who swaps a motherboard a break really has no significant impact on their bottom line, and it keeps them in the fold.
It's rather amazing to think that this situation might even be considered by a court of law. The founding fathers would have to have been the equivalent of Mentor of Arisia to have known something like this was coming when they put the Interstate Commerce Clause and copyright clause into the Constitution.
Well, that ain't necessarily what the GP is talking about.
If you buy an OEM copy of Windows and your PC dies, can you pop the hard disk out and put it into a new PC? No. The OEM license only allows you to install that copy onto one machine *ever*.
The problem with hobbyists is that they upgrade their machines. Windows looks at the configuration of the machine, and if it has been upgraded too much, it makes you call Microsoft and explain what you are doing. Change enough things (memory, hard disk, CPU) and theoretically Microsoft can tell you to take a hike.
Technically, replacing the motherboard in your machine invalidates your OEM license. Even if you replace it with a mobo that is identical in every respect, you are supposed to buy another license. That's why OEM licenses cost so much less than retail licenses, which you can transfer between machines. Under the circumstances, given that GP's mobo died, they're cutting him some slack, but they'd be within their rights to tell him to buy a whole new license. I've been in the exact same situation, and they cut me some slack too.
Now I don't *like* that situation, but that's what Microsoft's OEM license *is*. That's why I don't buy Windows for installing on my machines. I take the hard disk out and set it aside in case I ever need to use Windows, then I put a new hard disk in with Linux. If I *were* to buy Windows, I'd spend the extra dough for a retail license rather than OEM. I know folks think they're entitled to get around OEM licensing restrictions, but I don't agree with that. If you buy an OEM license, you ought to know what you are getting yourself into.
However it does allow you to drive a nail with your banana.
You want to know what a *real* prick acts like?
Well, once years ago I had a job that included administering the company's minicomputer system. I screwed up a routine OS update, which was easy to do back in the closed source days when package Unix was up to each hardware vendor. The vendor gave us this crappy utility to run and I answered one of the questions wrong and before I knew it the company's databases were hosed.
Fortunately I had backups. Lots and lots of backups. Daily backups going back two weeks, weekly backups going back three months, and quarterly backups going back several years. Unfortunately they'd been taken on a flaky 9-track drive that I'd been begging to have replaced. The people I worked for were fine, but the folks who approved the capital budget just didn't believe that computer hardware could fail, I guess. I'd started the update at 6PM, after the end of the work day, so nobody would be inconvenienced. It took all night to restore the system, and then all the next day to find readable versions of all the data. I ended up going through the last ten days' backups before I'd stitched everything back together. I was finished the following day when people started coming in to work. I went home, after working forty eight hours straight. Everything was back, or within spitting distance.
Now my boss wasn't a computer guy, but he was a mensch, a good guy, and a few months later on my boss cited this incident on may annual review as an example of extraordinary dedication. When I sat down for my review and he handed me that evaluation, I read it, and then I threw it in his face.
*That* is the way a real prick acts.
"Hearts do not break / They sting and ache."
There's nothing wrong with using Java on a resource constrained device. It works fine for most applications, although maybe not for realistic physics simulations.
Even relatively inattentive Java coding (with respect to constructing objects inadvertently) works fine for most things you'd want to do on a most devices you're likely to encounter. It's the usual thing, if you look at your code, only a tiny fraction of it tends to be performance critical.
Now I can't tell you how many hours I've spent dealing with messes created by crappy resource pooling implementations. The irony is that these were all classic examples of premature optimization. Competent programmers make things clear and correct first, then worry about fast. These incompetent implementations were from programmers who worried too much about the performance constraints of the platform and bent over backward trying to shoehorn in every optimization they could think of before ever getting a single jot of performance data. So they ended up with a buggy mess. After ripping all those optimizations out, including the resource pooling, I found that things ran *faster*, although that was less important than the fact the software was *correct*.
Now I agree that if I *were* writing something that had to be very fast (and something like a scientific simulation or cryptanalysis utility that can never be fast enough), and heap based object allocation and garbage collection were going to be a bottleneck, I'd choose something like C++ instead. It's purely a matter of optimizing programmer time either way. I don't want to have to waste my time worrying about optimization.
So?
This kind of reminds me of the initial reaction many people had to the Wii, which was that it was not very impressive. But it's often not the computational power (or rendering power) of a system that matters as all the stuff that goes around it, the software and user interface hardware. It all has to fit together to provide a useful (or entertaining) user experience.
The computer used on Apollo 11 is less powerful than most cheap digital watches these days. That doesn't mean that you can navigate a dumb spaceship to the moon with your watch. A lot of stuff went around those primitive CPUs to make things happen.
I've worked with scientists and other field workers who don't necessarily have access to a wall socket every few hours. One of the big pains we had was when Palm stopped powering their devices with AAA. We used to be able to send people into the field with one of those big shrink wrapped blocks of AAAs, and we'd know there wasn't going to be any issue with power. The PDA became a lot more powerful, but not really any more useful for our purposes. Removable storage was a huge plus, but switching to expensive battery packs wasn't so great from our standpoint. Some of the people I worked with resorted to buying expensive solar panels, which are great in the bush if you can afford them and if they don't get stolen. An AAA powered device with an SD slot would have been perfect.
I understand the reporters used m100s for years after much more powerful laptops existed for similar concerns about being caught without power. I imagine the keyboard must be fairly good to inspire that kind of loyalty too. Maybe cheap lousy keyboard technology hadn't advanced so far in those days.
AA is a form factor. It is a popular form factor for rechargeable NiMH batteries.
Reading between the lines, this device has a battery pack made out of rechargeable AA batteries, which it recharges when it is plugged into AC. Just like a laptop really, except instead of an expensive Li ion battery it uses something cheaper like NiMH, and in a pinch you can throw any old AAs in, although you'll need a screwdriver to extract the "battery pack".
My forays into the KDE 4.x release series were unpleasant too, although not necessarily for stability problems.
Look, it's obviously a labor of love, but sometimes the eyes of love are a bit blind to faults. The hardest thing to do in any creative endeavor is to set aside some idea you really love. But you have to do it, otherwise you end up with an exuberant but irritating mess. KDE 4 had a kind of an Andy Hardy "hey kids, let's revolutionize desktop technology!" feel to it. Or maybe like an art show for young UI designer's desktop concepts. It doesn't have a natural feel to it, by which I mean that after a few minutes with it you forget you're using some arbitrary set of conventions. It's an attention grabbing user interface, and I don't want my attention grabbed. I have my own uses for my attention.
The things I value in a user interface are consistency, responsiveness, and deference. I want the interface to stay out of my way, not to educate me on somebody's philosophy of user interface design. I regard my computer a my slave. When I give it an order, I want to be able to that quickly and have the result be absolutely predictable in how long it takes and how it ends up. I am not interested in any shuck-and-jive that the user interface designers want to throw into the process.
The whole program of revolutionizing the desktop is out of date anyway.
How do you accurately estimate programming time?
Answer this question, and you will know The Way: How do you accurately measure programming accomplishment?
It's open source. Renaming the sucker would be the easiest fork *ever*.
Look. Anybody with a brain knows that many agile practices don't apply to certain kinds of projects. That's just common sense. I've been in this business long enough to have seen a parade of silver bullet methodologies go by. All of them worked for people who had the development experience, business awareness, and common sense to know when to bend the rules or ignore them. Likewise none of them would take a person incapable of delivering a project and fix that.
"Agile" is a marketing term, and like most marketing terms it's a lie. Agile works best in those places that left without guidance would try to be too agile for their own good. The places where management, if you let them, will barge in twice a day with a new direction. Now if you know developers, you know they have good days and bad days, and if you want to get anything out of them you've got to give them a long enough stretch in one direction so that they can catch the wind in their sails. So you take down a few books from your shelf, and you say, "This is the latest thing. It's *agile development*."
Immediately management gets it. It's about getting more done faster. What you don't tell them is that it's about keeping them out of your team's hair long enough to get *anything* done.
Now if you can define a good set of requirements and keep the goalposts from moving for longer periods, that's even better. Thirty days is a reasonable compromise for a sprint. You want to measure progress in a detailed way at least that often anyway, and it provides ample time to get identifiable bits done and to even try and discard a few creative approaches. But there's nothing magically necessary about changing priorities every thirty days. If you can reasonably keep them constant for six months, that'd be even better. But in *some* kinds of development that's not possible.
When you are building software to support business functions, priorities shift based on the response to competition, assumptions in the business plan that don't pan out etc. Even the software itself changes the requirements environment. I've been in situations where I know that the organization needs B, but they can't *see* that need until they've seen A first. So the quintessentially agile part of "agile" is really indispensable on these kinds of "dynamic requirements" jobs. The rest of it (unit testing etc.) is just motherhood and apple pie engineering.
Now as far as the game industry is concerned, everything I've heard about it makes it sound like a horror show. I attribute this to two things. First it is attractive to young folks enamored of the romance of creating the kind of games they love. In other words people easy to exploit. The other factor is bravado and immaturity of the company management. In time as the people in the industry mature, maybe things will change. But "methodology" isn't going to solve the problem of self-deluded and exploitative management.
Yes. I stopped posting on dKos after I had the misfortune of posting a diary next to another diary that was very similar except that it had the word 'penis' in the title. Naturally most people checked that one out first, and though I perhaps not so humbly believe that my diary was more thoughtful and nuanced, the penis titled diary rocketed to the rec list, after which there was no point in discussing that point in mine.
I should have known after the shellacking I got for saying that the whole Carrie Prejean business was blown out of proportion. There's nothing like being accused of promoting violence against women for having an opinion about free speech.
I've often thought I'd be more at home at a site dominated by thoughtful and civil persons of both liberal and conservative persuasion. Unfortunately "thoughtful" and "civil" don't get much support on either end of the political spectrum, although the left does pay lip service to them.
Well, a priori I'm on board with the "probably a good thing" notion. However we have a case where we can look at the "good thing" question after the fact.
So, here's the skinny: they ran the company into the ground, and they to walk away with a fat share of the money that was supposed to compensate the regular stockholders who are left holding shares in the ruined company.
Probably a good thing? Well, let's say I'm persuadable that it is less than a wonderful thing. [Note for they irony impaired: "'Litotes'? Now that's a word you don't hear every day."]
Yes!
Let's set up a study where we have a control group who gets to do fun and interesting things, and another group where we attempt to bore them to death.
What's wrong with a site where anybody can post any kind of opinion?
Nothing. You just have to remember that. Posts on a places like dKos only speak for the poster, not "liberalism" or even "the Democratic Party", even the editorial policy of the site. The purpose of dKos is to help get Democrats elected. The vast majority of what is there does nothing useful for anyone, other than to provide Bill O'Reilly a fishing ground for something to rage at on a slow news day, Hell, he doesn't even have to wait for an outageous comment, he could post one himself. Not that i think he does, mind you. There'd be no point with an infinite number of monkeys at his beck and call.
Basically dKos is too large to police. If you are an abuser and you get noticed, you will be summarily canned, but that often takes a long time and you can simply sign up under a different name. So you can get just about anything on dKos, from astroturfing provocateurs, the usual contingent of sincere loonies, and quite a few intelligent, thoughtful people trying to make themselves heard of the bedlam.
Want to blame somebody? Blame Bush. It was the anti-Bush fervor that took dKos from a fairly interesting site to the madhouse it is today. [Note deliberate use of irony here]
Alternatively, blame the design of the site, which encourages a desperate contest to get noticed before your post falls into oblivion.
But whatever the cause, you're on your own when it comes to content posted there. It doesn't necessarily reflect the philosophy of the site's owners. It may not reflect the political philosophy of the person posting it. Most of it is junk. Some of it is worth reading. All of it is worth taking with a grain of salt.
I thought he had some kind of uncontrollable sex addiction. Now I see he's just been turned out to stud.
I think Lucas nailed space opera in "Star Wars" (now retro numbered as "Ep IV"): the sense of wonder, the exuberant, don't look too closely at the seams where I stitched the archetypes together pacing. In large part its because he didn't have the budget or time to make it smooth and show you all the details. You'd see something just long enough to be interested (the Benny Goodman clarinet players in the cantina) then cut away before you had a good look.
But he couldn't keep it up.
Genres come and go in movies like any other kind of fashion. Once Hollywood turned out western after western. Most of them were dreck, a few are among the best and most thoughtful movies ever made (*The Searchers*). Space opera went from a new, full-blown maturity in Star Wars Ep IV to decadance in record time, driven by technology and vast amounts of money funding people who *could* be creative, but not on somebody else's hundred million dollar budget.
If there is any hope, it's in the kind of people who make fan films. Bad as they are, they aren't ashamed to take risks because everyone *knows* they're probably bad.