This is an example of how excessive GNU-ifying of everything brings in confusion. There's no such thing as GNU/Linux drivers. There are only Linux drivers. GNU has absolutely nothing to do with this story.
Your post was unreasonably aggressive and full of BS. I won't flame you back, just point out a few things:
- Electric tuners do not sit next to your amp and you can use them without anyone in the audience noticing. - If you turn your guitar/amp down so the audience doesn't hear it, you probably won't hear it either. Do you know how the sound is wired at a gig? - Re-tuning a string or two doesn't mean that you won't go out of tune with your other bandmates. - Many professional players DO have tuners and use them during gigs, because only children think it's so badass to demonstrate your tuning ninja skills on stage.
Yeah, that's the whole point of using a tuner. If you tune by ear, you have to listen to yourself, and the rest of the people have to listen with you:-)
I can understand maybe with people just starting out in learning the guitar, but with someone that knows how to tune a guitar, and having a guitar that stays in tune (ie, don't buy cheap crap), is important. But learning to tune the guitar by ear is part of the learning process.
The tuning of your guitar depends on many factors, and only one of them is the quality of the guitar. For example:
- How often and how hard you bend - How hard you bang your guitar while you play (blues vs. punk) - The gauge of the strings - How fresh/old the strings are - Use a tremolo/whammy bar? Things go way out of tune with those. - Retune your guitar often for alternate tunings? This can also affect the stability of the strings - Alternative playing methods, a la Sonic Youth (playing with drumsticks etc)
For some people, it is easy to stay in tune. For others, tuning between each song is a must, even with really good equipment.
Tuning by ear is great, if you're playing for yourself. If, however, you are playing with others, it takes quite a while to get all of you in tune, and you usually get out of tune by the end of the first song. Especially if you rehearse daily and play live often, it can become a pain.
I agree that developing a good ear is important, but when you're paying huge $$$ for the rehearsal room, or have 300 people listening to you, you don't want to spend half of your time tuning your guitar. It's something all guitar players can do by ear, but shouldn't have to keep doing it over and over again.
A vast majority of guitar players I've met (and I've met a share as I used to play live) use electric tuners for their guitar. There is nothing more embarrassing than standing on the stage and tuning 'by ear' while the whole audience is listening. From electronic tuners (some of which are digital) to an auto-tuning guitar is a very small step -- the only thing you get to do when using a tuner is tune up or down depending on what it tells you.
The fdo xserver looks truly mouthwatering, but I believe that all the drivers will have to be rewritten to truly take advantage of it. If that is the case, not only will all the great free XFree DRI drivers have to be ported over, but ATI and nVidia would have to be convinced to rewrite their drivers to this new architecture.
Yeah, let's all start holding our breaths. At the moment, the fdo xserver is completely hardware unaccelerated and until the drivers are written, it will stay that way, negating any of its advantages. I really hope this project succeeds, but things like these make me worry.
I'm not sure I agree that the definition of AI changes. AI is when a machine is capable of intelligence and the definition of intelligence doesn't change dramatically. And the definition of intelligence coincides very closely with the definition I gave: learning from experience, logical deduction, generalisation...
An example of an AI technique in common use today is the heuristics used by virus software to detect virus-like behaviour. It can also be seen in some search engines, whenever the search space is too large for an exhaustive search, for example, for solving the travelling salesman problem.
I hate MS as much as the next guy because of their hideous record when it comes to competition and quality, but since when is bundling QT and RealPlayer seen as a solution to their monopoly? I mean, I want RealPlayer AND WMP both OFF my computer, and not be forced to suffer both of them!
A real solution would be to ship completely without the media player and any DLLs relating to it, and make people download it, or allow OEMs to install a competing player if they so wish. Same should be done for IE. I know that both are buried deep into the system, but it's their problem, not mine.
Additionally, they should be required to disclose their audio and video formats. If they are truly a part of the system, then this information is needed for interoperability. Let's hope we get open file formats, and not RealPlayer rubbish being forced down our throats in addition to WMP!
I've seen no proof that the Rover reasons, discovers meaning, generalizes or learns from past experience. It just runs a program which gives it very direct commands.
It's a bit like this: If I ask you to get some good tomatoes, you would break this up into several steps: Go to the market, find the tomatoes, then select some good ones. But what is a 'good' tomato? You will have to rely on your experience, your taste, and the past input from others to determine what a good tomato is. Then you would choose the tomatoes which best fit the ideal you have in your mind.
A computer cannot do that. It has no concept of what a tomato is. It doesn't deduce properties from past experiences. You can program a robot to go to the market (by giving it specific instructions on how to do that), then have it pick up tomatoes which have a certain height, weight, a given hue, and a softness, all expressed in measurable units. The robot would bring back some 'good' tomatoes according to these requirements, but it wouldn't be doing anything remotely intelligent, even though it might look like it from the outside.
Now, an AI approach to this would be to model a tomato internally, for example, using a Bayes net of different fruits, associated with different properties. A tomato would be grouped with similar fruits according to some characteristics. The computer would learn through repeated observations (like a human does), and propagate its deductions throughout the net. For example, a squashed tomato and a squashed pepper are both 'bad' fruit/vegetables, and a red pepper and a red tomato would both be 'good', but a green pepper can be good, while a green tomato cannot. The network gets updated to accommodate these observations and build a better model, up to the point where the computer can pick the 'good' fruit without being told exactly what it is.
See, in the second example, there is learning, there is deduction, and there is reasoning, as well as generalization. In the first one, there isn't. That is the fundamental difference.
Well, that seems to be the 'common' understanding of AI, but in the computer science (and other scientific fields), it has a more specific meaning. Otherwise, factoring large numbers would also be considered AI, although there is nothing intelligent about it, given a good algorithm. Finding that algorithm is what would require intelligence.
Here is a definition I like:
AI is the capacity of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot device to perform tasks commonly associated with the higher intellectual processes characteristic of humans, such as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experience. The term is also frequently applied to that branch of computer science concerned with the development of systems endowed with such capabilities. --- Herbert A. Simon, Professor of Computer Science and Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University
I am nitpicking here, but given an algorithm to extract edges and corners from two images, using the camera calibration values to calculate distance, and creating a map based on these data does not require intelligence, and as such isn't strictly AI.
The robot still follows strict instructions which find the optimal path. It will not learn if this algorithm fails a certain number of times, it will not generalise to make future computation quicker, like a human would. It does not have a concept of the obstacles. It does not get more proficient after doing the same for a while. So, even though it's a brilliant example of applied computer vision and autonomous navigation, there is very little of what is considered AI involved. Hope this clears it up a bit.
I guess it just comes from being a vision guy in a university department full of AI people:-)
I agree, the autonomous navigation of the rover is really cool, but we are just seeing the application of rather old computer vision concepts. The really interesting part is that this is the ultimate test of such a system, uncontrolled conditions and very little room for failure.
Strictly speaking, that's not a domain of artificial intelligence, but pure computer vision. There are known techniques for building a map, given processed camera images, and there is usually no reasoning involved. Just a simple algorithm to find the shortest path. The search space is usually small enough not to warrant AI techniques.
Of course, it is possible that they are using higher-level AI techniques for finding the optimal path, but I doubt it as the classical image processing techniques are fast and robust enough for this sort of task.
While it's true that Mandarin is the official dialect of mainland China (and Taiwan), that doesn't mean that all these people use it as a native language. If anything, Mandarin is the Lingua Franca of China, the same way English is in Europe and Russian used to be in the Soviet Union: most people have to learn it in order to communicate, even though they don't speak it at home, or in their cities. There are thousands of dialects (one could call them languages) in China and most Chinese will speak Mandarin with an accent or not properly.
Seems like they're trying to 'protect' Canadian artists. I don't know much about Canadian record labels, but there are some big music names coming from Canada, like Bryan Adams, Shania Twain, Alanis Morisette, Nelly Furtado, Celine Dion...
It's not all bad though, they also have some good bands, like Godspeed You Black Emperor!:-)
My point is that we don't know what they mean when they say "15% of the operating system":
Microsoft said it did not yet know the source of leak, or how many people have access to it on the net, but confirmed it accounted for about 15% of the total code it uses.
But Microsoft said that was unlikely since the code comprised of relatively small proportion of the total source code.
Microsoft has said that this represents about 15% of the total source code for the operating system.
Those statements are quite vague. The article talks about Win2K, but Microsoft never said it was 15% of Windows2000, just that it's 15% of "the system". Who knows what they mean by that.
15% of what? They seem to be very vague about this. The link you mention claims it is 15% of the operating system. Does it mean 15% of Win2K or 15% of all Windows code (95+98+ME+NT+2000+XP+2003+CE)?
Furthermore, the most of the code in a given operating system belongs to the drivers. If it's the important 15%, then it could be completely irrelevant that you don't have the 85% that deal with graphics cards and similar.
The link seems to be slashdotted, but isn't that the company which ported IE to Unix and was rumoured to be doing something similar for MS Office?
This isn't the first time their code was leaked...
on
Microsoft Source Follow-Up
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
And knowing how prompt Microsoft are at fixing known exploits, I really wonder how anybody can consider their products secure. I mean, Valve cited the code leak as the reason for a long rewrite and delay for Half-Life 2 (it's a bloody GAME!), and Microsoft downplays such incidents. We have a new model: Security through ignoring.
Any idea when this will start showing on the other side of the pond?
The stories look very interesting, a move away from soldier-fighting-eliminator machines and back towards Asimov's humane robots. I'd certainly like to see it.
Slashdot Mirror
This is an example of how excessive GNU-ifying of everything brings in confusion. There's no such thing as GNU/Linux drivers. There are only Linux drivers. GNU has absolutely nothing to do with this story.
Your post was unreasonably aggressive and full of BS. I won't flame you back, just point out a few things:
- Electric tuners do not sit next to your amp and you can use them without anyone in the audience noticing.
- If you turn your guitar/amp down so the audience doesn't hear it, you probably won't hear it either. Do you know how the sound is wired at a gig?
- Re-tuning a string or two doesn't mean that you won't go out of tune with your other bandmates.
- Many professional players DO have tuners and use them during gigs, because only children think it's so badass to demonstrate your tuning ninja skills on stage.
Yeah, that's the whole point of using a tuner. If you tune by ear, you have to listen to yourself, and the rest of the people have to listen with you :-)
That's why you take an extra guitar to a show if you want to swap tunings around.
I can understand maybe with people just starting out in learning the guitar, but with someone that knows how to tune a guitar, and having a guitar that stays in tune (ie, don't buy cheap crap), is important. But learning to tune the guitar by ear is part of the learning process.
The tuning of your guitar depends on many factors, and only one of them is the quality of the guitar. For example:
- How often and how hard you bend
- How hard you bang your guitar while you play (blues vs. punk)
- The gauge of the strings
- How fresh/old the strings are
- Use a tremolo/whammy bar? Things go way out of tune with those.
- Retune your guitar often for alternate tunings? This can also affect the stability of the strings
- Alternative playing methods, a la Sonic Youth (playing with drumsticks etc)
For some people, it is easy to stay in tune. For others, tuning between each song is a must, even with really good equipment.
Tuning by ear is great, if you're playing for yourself. If, however, you are playing with others, it takes quite a while to get all of you in tune, and you usually get out of tune by the end of the first song. Especially if you rehearse daily and play live often, it can become a pain.
I agree that developing a good ear is important, but when you're paying huge $$$ for the rehearsal room, or have 300 people listening to you, you don't want to spend half of your time tuning your guitar. It's something all guitar players can do by ear, but shouldn't have to keep doing it over and over again.
A vast majority of guitar players I've met (and I've met a share as I used to play live) use electric tuners for their guitar. There is nothing more embarrassing than standing on the stage and tuning 'by ear' while the whole audience is listening. From electronic tuners (some of which are digital) to an auto-tuning guitar is a very small step -- the only thing you get to do when using a tuner is tune up or down depending on what it tells you.
The fdo xserver looks truly mouthwatering, but I believe that all the drivers will have to be rewritten to truly take advantage of it. If that is the case, not only will all the great free XFree DRI drivers have to be ported over, but ATI and nVidia would have to be convinced to rewrite their drivers to this new architecture.
Yeah, let's all start holding our breaths. At the moment, the fdo xserver is completely hardware unaccelerated and until the drivers are written, it will stay that way, negating any of its advantages. I really hope this project succeeds, but things like these make me worry.
Wow, dude, I want to know where I can buy a WinDildo. You HAVE to tell me!!! :-)
I'm not sure I agree that the definition of AI changes. AI is when a machine is capable of intelligence and the definition of intelligence doesn't change dramatically. And the definition of intelligence coincides very closely with the definition I gave: learning from experience, logical deduction, generalisation...
An example of an AI technique in common use today is the heuristics used by virus software to detect virus-like behaviour. It can also be seen in some search engines, whenever the search space is too large for an exhaustive search, for example, for solving the travelling salesman problem.
I hate MS as much as the next guy because of their hideous record when it comes to competition and quality, but since when is bundling QT and RealPlayer seen as a solution to their monopoly? I mean, I want RealPlayer AND WMP both OFF my computer, and not be forced to suffer both of them!
A real solution would be to ship completely without the media player and any DLLs relating to it, and make people download it, or allow OEMs to install a competing player if they so wish. Same should be done for IE. I know that both are buried deep into the system, but it's their problem, not mine.
Additionally, they should be required to disclose their audio and video formats. If they are truly a part of the system, then this information is needed for interoperability. Let's hope we get open file formats, and not RealPlayer rubbish being forced down our throats in addition to WMP!
I've seen no proof that the Rover reasons, discovers meaning, generalizes or learns from past experience. It just runs a program which gives it very direct commands.
It's a bit like this: If I ask you to get some good tomatoes, you would break this up into several steps: Go to the market, find the tomatoes, then select some good ones. But what is a 'good' tomato? You will have to rely on your experience, your taste, and the past input from others to determine what a good tomato is. Then you would choose the tomatoes which best fit the ideal you have in your mind.
A computer cannot do that. It has no concept of what a tomato is. It doesn't deduce properties from past experiences. You can program a robot to go to the market (by giving it specific instructions on how to do that), then have it pick up tomatoes which have a certain height, weight, a given hue, and a softness, all expressed in measurable units. The robot would bring back some 'good' tomatoes according to these requirements, but it wouldn't be doing anything remotely intelligent, even though it might look like it from the outside.
Now, an AI approach to this would be to model a tomato internally, for example, using a Bayes net of different fruits, associated with different properties. A tomato would be grouped with similar fruits according to some characteristics. The computer would learn through repeated observations (like a human does), and propagate its deductions throughout the net. For example, a squashed tomato and a squashed pepper are both 'bad' fruit/vegetables, and a red pepper and a red tomato would both be 'good', but a green pepper can be good, while a green tomato cannot. The network gets updated to accommodate these observations and build a better model, up to the point where the computer can pick the 'good' fruit without being told exactly what it is.
See, in the second example, there is learning, there is deduction, and there is reasoning, as well as generalization. In the first one, there isn't. That is the fundamental difference.
Well, that seems to be the 'common' understanding of AI, but in the computer science (and other scientific fields), it has a more specific meaning. Otherwise, factoring large numbers would also be considered AI, although there is nothing intelligent about it, given a good algorithm. Finding that algorithm is what would require intelligence.
Here is a definition I like:
AI is the capacity of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot device to perform tasks commonly associated with the higher intellectual processes characteristic of humans, such as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experience. The term is also frequently applied to that branch of computer science concerned with the development of systems endowed with such capabilities. --- Herbert A. Simon, Professor of Computer Science and Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University
I am nitpicking here, but given an algorithm to extract edges and corners from two images, using the camera calibration values to calculate distance, and creating a map based on these data does not require intelligence, and as such isn't strictly AI.
The robot still follows strict instructions which find the optimal path. It will not learn if this algorithm fails a certain number of times, it will not generalise to make future computation quicker, like a human would. It does not have a concept of the obstacles. It does not get more proficient after doing the same for a while. So, even though it's a brilliant example of applied computer vision and autonomous navigation, there is very little of what is considered AI involved. Hope this clears it up a bit.
I guess it just comes from being a vision guy in a university department full of AI people :-)
I agree, the autonomous navigation of the rover is really cool, but we are just seeing the application of rather old computer vision concepts. The really interesting part is that this is the ultimate test of such a system, uncontrolled conditions and very little room for failure.
Strictly speaking, that's not a domain of artificial intelligence, but pure computer vision. There are known techniques for building a map, given processed camera images, and there is usually no reasoning involved. Just a simple algorithm to find the shortest path. The search space is usually small enough not to warrant AI techniques.
Of course, it is possible that they are using higher-level AI techniques for finding the optimal path, but I doubt it as the classical image processing techniques are fast and robust enough for this sort of task.
While it's true that Mandarin is the official dialect of mainland China (and Taiwan), that doesn't mean that all these people use it as a native language. If anything, Mandarin is the Lingua Franca of China, the same way English is in Europe and Russian used to be in the Soviet Union: most people have to learn it in order to communicate, even though they don't speak it at home, or in their cities. There are thousands of dialects (one could call them languages) in China and most Chinese will speak Mandarin with an accent or not properly.
Well, the fact that India was an English colony for a long time has something to do with it. They didn't just pick English randomly.
There are some evils for which no apology is adequate :-)
Seems like they're trying to 'protect' Canadian artists. I don't know much about Canadian record labels, but there are some big music names coming from Canada, like Bryan Adams, Shania Twain, Alanis Morisette, Nelly Furtado, Celine Dion...
:-)
It's not all bad though, they also have some good bands, like Godspeed You Black Emperor!
My point is that we don't know what they mean when they say "15% of the operating system":
Microsoft said it did not yet know the source of leak, or how many people have access to it on the net, but confirmed it accounted for about 15% of the total code it uses.
But Microsoft said that was unlikely since the code comprised of relatively small proportion of the total source code.
Microsoft has said that this represents about 15% of the total source code for the operating system.
Those statements are quite vague. The article talks about Win2K, but Microsoft never said it was 15% of Windows2000, just that it's 15% of "the system". Who knows what they mean by that.
15% of what? They seem to be very vague about this. The link you mention claims it is 15% of the operating system. Does it mean 15% of Win2K or 15% of all Windows code (95+98+ME+NT+2000+XP+2003+CE)?
Furthermore, the most of the code in a given operating system belongs to the drivers. If it's the important 15%, then it could be completely irrelevant that you don't have the 85% that deal with graphics cards and similar.
The link seems to be slashdotted, but isn't that the company which ported IE to Unix and was rumoured to be doing something similar for MS Office?
And knowing how prompt Microsoft are at fixing known exploits, I really wonder how anybody can consider their products secure. I mean, Valve cited the code leak as the reason for a long rewrite and delay for Half-Life 2 (it's a bloody GAME!), and Microsoft downplays such incidents. We have a new model: Security through ignoring.
I was trying to avoid using specific terms, like 'terminator' to keep the term generic enough :-)
Any idea when this will start showing on the other side of the pond?
The stories look very interesting, a move away from soldier-fighting-eliminator machines and back towards Asimov's humane robots. I'd certainly like to see it.