The latest issue of Wired has a very interesting article about Sony, which indicates that this is exactly where they want to go with the PlayStation. I've certainly got more faith in Sony to make a truly consumer oriented game/info device than in Microsoft doing it. Let's face it, it's not OK (if you have a choice, that is!) for your TV, stereo, game machine, internet appliance etc to barf and throw up a BSOD! Kind of wierd how people expect their entertainment devices to be reliable, but accept their PC being flaky!
Of course Microsoft (market cap. $450B) could always buy Sony ($60B) if they do end up owning the infotainment business...
Makes me wonder what an MS-AIBO would do when it crapped out...:-(
> > It is an important step to a completely > > component based architecture programmable via > > languages such as XML in as powerful a manner as > > the native API. > > XML a language? Surely not, or has it become more ambitious since I last checked up on it...
FYI, XML is now starting to be used as the representation layer for RPC/RMI in XML-RPC and SOAP. AFAIK these are both Microsoft initiatives, but given that they are based on standards and replace Microsoft's proprietary DCOM, I wouldn't write them off just because of that.
There's also libglade which allows a GTK UI to be configured at run-time via XML (not sure if there's anything equivalent in the Qt world yet).
XML seems to be becoming pretty pervasive as a method of data representation...
One of their more well-known projects [...] involves the system being a large sheet of 'paper' which you can zoom in and out of, and applications are 'windows' which can float over data...
All of which begs the original question - what exactly are they "researching" down there?!
The name of the system doesn't happen to be "Peyote", does it?;-)
Has anyone used native compiled Java (i.e. machine code - no JVM) to develop Linux/Win/Mac cross platform programs? Any problems using Swing, threads and sockets? What compiler did you use on each platform? Any compiler incompatability issues? Am I right in thinking that gjc only supports Linux of these there platforms?
Are lawyers always in dramatic court battles, doctors always in life-or-death cases, teachers always making connections to difficult kids, hookers falling in love with their clients... I'm not too impressed with those flashing inch high "Secret document" types things, but Meg Ryan's cyber romance or American Pie's chick cam seem to me to be about right.
Re:arrow of time == direction of entropy increase
on
Time Doesn't Exist
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· Score: 1
I've never understood/accepted the supposed increase in entropy (2nd law). It seems to me that factors such as gravity, and nuclear fusion, not to mention the more interesting self-organizational behaviours of matter (such as the emergence of life) tend to make the universe clumpier and more structured rather than less so. Plus if the big bang is cyclic, wouldn't that rather put a damper on this "law"? And what happens when stuff gets sucked into black holes - nature's entropy vaccuum cleaners, perhaps. Seems more like a rule of thumb, applicable in certain circumstances, rather than a "law". Call me King Canute.
Navels, keyboards and quantum mechanics
on
Time Doesn't Exist
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· Score: 1
Well, it's *one* way of interpreting the model to fit our percieved reality... there are also things like the many-worlds interpretation which avoid collapse entirely... There's also the fact that QM is a incomplete theory (not a GUT), so who knows what may be missing...
Here's a totally alternative Thursday afternoon theory for you, coming from a mad.scientist...
Maybe there's no collapse, but subatomic particles are simply the attractors of the universe's quantum dynamics?! No navel/keyboard blurring there!;-)
It certainly seems more reasonable than the Copenhagen Interpretation. BTW, I remember also reading about another collapse interpretation that also did away with the observer/measurer; the basic idea was that the Scroedringer equation described the average/longer term wave behaviour, but that it masked shorter term fluctuations that included a very low probability of (spontaneous) collase. For entities at the level of subatomic particles, this doesn't really change much, but on a classical scale the probability of some wave collapsing in a very short time becomes almost certain, and causes the collapse of the entire thing...
Well, bear in mind that concepts like "curvature of space" (and maybe even "time") are part of the general relativity model - they do not necessarily describe reality itself, nor have any direct correlate in quantum theory or the unified superstring (I forget the more correct/up-to-date name) theory. In the same way that curvature of space is a useful abstraction of the mass behaviour of gravitons (whose existence, btw, is actually predicted by superstring theory), quite likely time is in fact just a useful abstraction of some more fundamental reality/model.
I've always felt that the mainstream Quantum Theory interpretations are way too conservative, and seem to be driven by a desire to make the percieved classical world real.
IMNSHO, Schroedringers equation describes the world - period. The collapse postulate is bunk, as only serves the purpose of supporting the classical view.
The correct "interpretation" of Quantum Theory is therefore that the world actually is an evolving "probabalistic" wave equation. As classically scaled creatures, our classical perceptive systems naturally see a "collaped" view (although if reality there is no collapse), and the path of time we experience is just the history of this percieved collapsed event history.
Why would anyone want their web page to read as if it's been run through a bablefish? A translation from netspeak into, say, English is always going to suffer some mangling, and most likely is not going to allow idiom, metaphor, etc.
Machine translation will improve, but the best oranization is still going to be browser or proxy based translation. If that translation package internally uses an intermediate semantic representation, then fine, but the day/. reads like bablefish crap is the day I find myself an English web site.
You have to admire the democratic thinking though (NOT!) - rather than just foreigners seeing your web page as crap, you can (must) see it that way too! Designed by politicians, no doubt.
As you say, one of the most fascinating, and also most brilliant minds of this century. If I was selecting a "great figures of history" dinner party, Feyman would definitely be at the head of the table!
"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."
Personally I'm not sure that I want that much freedom.
In America we are lucky to have freedom of choice, but as anywhere else, not freedom of choices. The choices available to us are dictated by the tastes of the masses and the culture of this country. There may be plenty of things wrong with America, but I for one chose to live here, having moved from England. I think that trying to change a country you like is like trying to fix the "flaws" in a romantic partner - you realize that the flaws are part of the person that you were attracted to in the first place. I'm glad that America is a country where we can talk about what's wrong, but I'm not sure how many people would really like it if we truly did have complete freedom without the constraints of culture and custom.
Another one of my favorite quotes is from Henry Moore, the British sculptor:
"Form is liberating"
You can choose to view the "form" of American culture as restrictive, or you can enjoy the freedom it gives you to be American!
If he was still alive, I'm sure that Feynman would actually have made quite an interesting TV award recipient!:-) OTOH he'd probably have skipped the ceremony, and been reinventing physics at some topless bar, with Hooft & Veltman's work having been some unpublished margin notes next to his Feynman diagrams!
You can certainly gripe at their pricing, but bear in mind that Schwab are really trying to position themselves inbetween the full service brokers like Merrill, and the deep discounters like Datek ($9.99/trade), or Brown & Company ($5/trade for market orders). It's a segmented market.
My real point was that Schwab were willing to eat into their $80/trade offline business, because if they didn't others would. You can argue about their positioning, but it's hard to argue that they'd be doing much worse if they hadn't made this move.
In a similar vein, you can expect Microsoft to reduce Windows licence prices to compete with Linux, but don't expect them to reduce it to zero to have to compete. Even a Microsoft branded Linux wouldn't necessarily have to underprice other distributions if they market it correctly. The big mistake of course would be to sit pat, do nothing, and watch Linux gain unstoppable momentum.
Escape velocity may be 7 miles/sec (25,200 mph), but the shuttle doesn't completely escape Earth's gravity - it goes into orbit. The shuttle's orbital velocity is 17,000 mph.
I think this is more along the lines of Big Brother giving away his old eyeglasses since what he has now is so much better! Kind of like unveiling the SR-71 when it was already at least one (Aurora) or two generations obsoleted. Obviously the capabilities of military imaging systems are classified, but it's safe to bet that they are a *LOT* better than 1m resolution!
Your theory of causally unconnected correlation is of course logistically sound, but I disagree with your implicit assumptions that intelligence/creativity is: a) Genetic, and more importantly b) An independent trait that that is expressed via it's own genes, and hence has been independently selected for. I don't really believe (see my other post in this thread) that intelligence is primarily genetic, and once you get blow a simplistic "smart is good" argument, it's not at all obvious to me that intelligence (beyond what's normal for our species) *would* be selected for anyway! I think that the savantism-as-a-result-of-mental-illness cases give a large clue as to the true nature of high intelligence/creativity - that, in fact, these societally positive attributes are in fact a result of mental inbalance or abnormality and (in extreme cases, at least) could in fact be seen as symptoms of that! Certainly if one looks at individuals such as William Blake (the poet) or Van Gogh, it's hard to say that the traits that enabled their genius level artistic expression were things (mystical experience, and an absurdly brilliant "artist's eye", respectively) that would have any positive evolutionary benefit - in fact quite the opposite!
The obvious answer, then, is to genetically breed-out the genes that correlate between insanity and intelligence.
IMHO I'm not sure that is even theoretically achievable. Intelligence is notoriously difficult to define, but I think that in this context (intelligence going hand in hand with insanity), we're talking creativity, whether in the realm of science or art. I personally believe that part of creativity comes from having a more inward than outward looking mind - being able to see things in more abstract rather than concrete terms, as happens when we're dreaming and not constrained with the the perceptual grounding of reality. Creative genius/intelligence may well be a result of not being so connected with reality, and therefore inseparable from it. Indeed, there are many cases - read some of Oliver Sachs books - where savantism has emerged as a direct result of mental illness!
Hey, Austin Powers might drive a flakey Jag (no surprise an American company bought them!), but the real thing - Bond - drove an Austin Martin. Is 0-62mph in 3.9 sec, top end over 200mph good enough for you! Of course they are a tad pricey...:-(
The technology to select the sex of your children (via various methods of sperm selection) already exists in the lab, even if it is not (legally, at least) commercially available in the US.
AFAIK, providing a stimulating developmental environment for your child can lead to (huge) increases in intelligence. I remember a documentary about one couple (intelligent, but not genius level) who set out to do this (classical music, mobiles, manipulative toys, adult talk vs coochie-coo, etc), and sure enough "created" a child prodigy freak that graduated university at age 14...
Slashdot Mirror
The latest issue of Wired has a very interesting article about Sony, which indicates that this is exactly where they want to go with the PlayStation. I've certainly got more faith in Sony to make a truly consumer oriented game/info device than in Microsoft doing it. Let's face it, it's not OK (if you have a choice, that is!) for your TV, stereo, game machine, internet appliance etc to barf and throw up a BSOD! Kind of wierd how people expect their entertainment devices to be reliable, but accept their PC being flaky!
:-(
Of course Microsoft (market cap. $450B) could always buy Sony ($60B) if they do end up owning the infotainment business...
Makes me wonder what an MS-AIBO would do when it crapped out...
> > It is an important step to a completely
> > component based architecture programmable via
> > languages such as XML in as powerful a manner as
> > the native API.
>
> XML a language? Surely not, or has it become more ambitious since I last checked up on it...
FYI, XML is now starting to be used as the representation layer for RPC/RMI in XML-RPC and SOAP. AFAIK these are both Microsoft initiatives, but given that they are based on standards and replace Microsoft's proprietary DCOM, I wouldn't write them off just because of that.
There's also libglade which allows a GTK UI to be configured at run-time via XML (not sure if there's anything equivalent in the Qt world yet).
XML seems to be becoming pretty pervasive as a method of data representation...
If they're going to try to bring back mammoths, and are going to be a bit short on the DNA...
:-)
Anyone for glowing green mammoths?!
Mammoth 2000 - now in your choice of day-glo colors!
One of their more well-known projects [...] involves the system being a large sheet of 'paper' which you can zoom in and out of, and applications are 'windows' which can float over data...
;-)
All of which begs the original question - what exactly are they "researching" down there?!
The name of the system doesn't happen to be "Peyote", does it?
"Dummies in a nutshell", or " O'Reilly books for dummies" ? :-)
Has anyone used native compiled Java (i.e. machine code - no JVM) to develop Linux/Win/Mac cross platform programs? Any problems using Swing, threads and sockets? What compiler did you use on each platform? Any compiler incompatability issues? Am I right in thinking that gjc only supports Linux of these there platforms?
Are lawyers always in dramatic court battles, doctors always in life-or-death cases, teachers always making connections to difficult kids, hookers falling in love with their clients... I'm not too impressed with those flashing inch high "Secret document" types things, but Meg Ryan's cyber romance or American Pie's chick cam seem to me to be about right.
I've never understood/accepted the supposed increase in entropy (2nd law). It seems to me that factors such as gravity, and nuclear fusion, not to mention the more interesting self-organizational behaviours of matter (such as the emergence of life) tend to make the universe clumpier and more structured rather than less so. Plus if the big bang is cyclic, wouldn't that rather put a damper on this "law"? And what happens when stuff gets sucked into black holes - nature's entropy vaccuum cleaners, perhaps. Seems more like a rule of thumb, applicable in certain circumstances, rather than a "law". Call me King Canute.
Well, it's *one* way of interpreting the model to fit our percieved reality... there are also things like the many-worlds interpretation which avoid collapse entirely... There's also the fact that QM is a incomplete theory (not a GUT), so who knows what may be missing...
...
;-)
Here's a totally alternative Thursday afternoon theory for you, coming from a mad.scientist
Maybe there's no collapse, but subatomic particles are simply the attractors of the universe's quantum dynamics?! No navel/keyboard blurring there!
It certainly seems more reasonable than the Copenhagen Interpretation. BTW, I remember also reading about another collapse interpretation that also did away with the observer/measurer; the basic idea was that the Scroedringer equation described the average/longer term wave behaviour, but that it masked shorter term fluctuations that included a very low probability of (spontaneous) collase. For entities at the level of subatomic particles, this doesn't really change much, but on a classical scale the probability of some wave collapsing in a very short time becomes almost certain, and causes the collapse of the entire thing...
Thanks for the link - I'll finish reading it.
Why would it have to start anywhere? So you can set your absolute time clock? If it exists at all, time is certainly relative.
Well, bear in mind that concepts like "curvature of space" (and maybe even "time") are part of the general relativity model - they do not necessarily describe reality itself, nor have any direct correlate in quantum theory or the unified superstring (I forget the more correct/up-to-date name) theory. In the same way that curvature of space is a useful abstraction of the mass behaviour of gravitons (whose existence, btw, is actually predicted by superstring theory), quite likely time is in fact just a useful abstraction of some more fundamental reality/model.
I've always felt that the mainstream Quantum Theory interpretations are way too conservative, and seem to be driven by a desire to make the percieved classical world real.
;-)
IMNSHO, Schroedringers equation describes the world - period. The collapse postulate is bunk, as only serves the purpose of supporting the classical view.
The correct "interpretation" of Quantum Theory is therefore that the world actually is an evolving "probabalistic" wave equation. As classically scaled creatures, our classical perceptive systems naturally see a "collaped" view (although if reality there is no collapse), and the path of time we experience is just the history of this percieved collapsed event history.
There again, I might be wrong!
Why would anyone want their web page to read as if it's been run through a bablefish? A translation from netspeak into, say, English is always going to suffer some mangling, and most likely is not going to allow idiom, metaphor, etc.
/. reads like bablefish crap is the day I find myself an English web site.
Machine translation will improve, but the best oranization is still going to be browser or proxy based translation. If that translation package internally uses an intermediate semantic representation, then fine, but the day
You have to admire the democratic thinking though (NOT!) - rather than just foreigners seeing your web page as crap, you can (must) see it that way too! Designed by politicians, no doubt.
Yes, I've read it. :-)
There's a new Feynman book just out, based on transcripts of his own words: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.
As you say, one of the most fascinating, and also most brilliant minds of this century. If I was selecting a "great figures of history" dinner party, Feyman would definitely be at the head of the table!
As Janis Joplin sang:
"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."
Personally I'm not sure that I want that much freedom.
In America we are lucky to have freedom of choice, but as anywhere else, not freedom of choices. The choices available to us are dictated by the tastes of the masses and the culture of this country. There may be plenty of things wrong with America, but I for one chose to live here, having moved from England. I think that trying to change a country you like is like trying to fix the "flaws" in a romantic partner - you realize that the flaws are part of the person that you were attracted to in the first place. I'm glad that America is a country where we can talk about what's wrong, but I'm not sure how many people would really like it if we truly did have complete freedom without the constraints of culture and custom.
Another one of my favorite quotes is from Henry Moore, the British sculptor:
"Form is liberating"
You can choose to view the "form" of American culture as restrictive, or you can enjoy the freedom it gives you to be American!
How free do you really want to be?
21 million TV channels! That's a whole lifetime of channel surfin'! :-)
If he was still alive, I'm sure that Feynman would actually have made quite an interesting TV award recipient! :-) OTOH he'd probably have skipped the ceremony, and been reinventing physics at some topless bar, with Hooft & Veltman's work having been some unpublished margin notes next to his Feynman diagrams!
You can certainly gripe at their pricing, but bear in mind that Schwab are really trying to position themselves inbetween the full service brokers like Merrill, and the deep discounters like Datek ($9.99/trade), or Brown & Company ($5/trade for market orders). It's a segmented market.
My real point was that Schwab were willing to eat into their $80/trade offline business, because if they didn't others would. You can argue about their positioning, but it's hard to argue that they'd be doing much worse if they hadn't made this move.
In a similar vein, you can expect Microsoft to reduce Windows licence prices to compete with Linux, but don't expect them to reduce it to zero to have to compete. Even a Microsoft branded Linux wouldn't necessarily have to underprice other distributions if they market it correctly. The big mistake of course would be to sit pat, do nothing, and watch Linux gain unstoppable momentum.
Escape velocity may be 7 miles/sec (25,200 mph), but the shuttle doesn't completely escape Earth's gravity - it goes into orbit. The shuttle's orbital velocity is 17,000 mph.
I think this is more along the lines of Big Brother giving away his old eyeglasses since what he has now is so much better! Kind of like unveiling the SR-71 when it was already at least one (Aurora) or two generations obsoleted. Obviously the capabilities of military imaging systems are classified, but it's safe to bet that they are a *LOT* better than 1m resolution!
Your theory of causally unconnected correlation is of course logistically sound, but I disagree with your implicit assumptions that intelligence/creativity is:
a) Genetic, and more importantly
b) An independent trait that that is expressed via it's own genes, and hence has been independently selected for.
I don't really believe (see my other post in this thread) that intelligence is primarily genetic, and once you get blow a simplistic "smart is good" argument, it's not at all obvious to me that intelligence (beyond what's normal for our species) *would* be selected for anyway! I think that the savantism-as-a-result-of-mental-illness cases give a large clue as to the true nature of high intelligence/creativity - that, in fact, these societally positive attributes are in fact a result of mental inbalance or abnormality and (in extreme cases, at least) could in fact be seen as symptoms of that! Certainly if one looks at individuals such as William Blake (the poet) or Van Gogh, it's hard to say that the traits that enabled their genius level artistic expression were things (mystical experience, and an absurdly brilliant "artist's eye", respectively) that would have any positive evolutionary benefit - in fact quite the opposite!
The obvious answer, then, is to genetically breed-out the genes that correlate between insanity and intelligence.
IMHO I'm not sure that is even theoretically achievable. Intelligence is notoriously difficult to define, but I think that in this context (intelligence going hand in hand with insanity), we're talking creativity, whether in the realm of science or art. I personally believe that part of creativity comes from having a more inward than outward looking mind - being able to see things in more abstract rather than concrete terms, as happens when we're dreaming and not constrained with the the perceptual grounding of reality. Creative genius/intelligence may well be a result of not being so connected with reality, and therefore inseparable from it. Indeed, there are many cases - read some of Oliver Sachs books - where savantism has emerged as a direct result of mental illness!
Hey, Austin Powers might drive a flakey Jag (no surprise an American company bought them!), but the real thing - Bond - drove an Austin Martin. Is 0-62mph in 3.9 sec, top end over 200mph good enough for you! Of course they are a tad pricey... :-(
;-)
As for Beebs, well I did use work for Acorn!
The technology to select the sex of your children (via various methods of sperm selection) already exists in the lab, even if it is not (legally, at least) commercially available in the US.
AFAIK, providing a stimulating developmental environment for your child can lead to (huge) increases in intelligence. I remember a documentary about one couple (intelligent, but not genius level) who set out to do this (classical music, mobiles, manipulative toys, adult talk vs coochie-coo, etc), and sure enough "created" a child prodigy freak that graduated university at age 14...