If you honestly think that the "world out there" is "full of horror" and "monsters", you've got serious mental issues. Maybe you can help yourself by travelling the world - not in an army uniform, and not just to places where you are sent to shoot people your employer dislikes.
Maybe you would realize then that people all around the world have much better things to do then to conspire against people living in some remote country. Unless of course, they are being approached by you dropping bombs on their houses.
If you want to be scared about dangers to you life, why not calculate the probabilities of dying early from car accidents, lack of health insurance, being shot randomly by some disgruntled gunman on a rampage at home - all in relation to the risk of becoming the victim of some sinister terror plan?
And BTW: You might have noticed that there are many developed countries in the world that run nothing remotely similar to the NSA, CIA and DOD that have not seen any significant amount of attacks from foreign "monsters".
First, let me state that I created my Slashdot account only days ago. And while did read Slashdot articles before a few times, I am by no means used to the "classic" view, so my opinion is not biased by being used to either version.
Yes, I cannot see anything that is better in the "beta".
And even the official statements on why that "redesign" is pursued do not provide a single compelling reason what the new design would actually better.
If "more accessible and shareable by a wider audience" means: "We want to lure more Facebook-zombies and other technically challenged people on our site" then let me tell it right away: That is the perfect way to get rid of everyone actually interested in science and technology. If you want to become yet another mainstream gossip page, that is the way to go.
The absolute no-go for me with regards to the beta is the JavaScript plague. I do not want my trusted computer to execute arbitrary code downloaded from the Net. And JavaScript adds no valuable information, just wastes CPU cycles and bandwidth - just as additional "pictures" do.
... to enjoy programming (without exchanging the whole second X chromosome with a Y). But I doubt that many would opt for such a semi-gender-change.
People can deny the influence of genes on brain functions as long as they like - reality will continue to not care about such wishful thinking.
The possibilities of quantum computers today are as overstated as were the possibilities of Analog Computers in the 1960's, and I am taking bets that we won't see quantum computers outperform conventional computers on useful tasks within the next 30 years.
Quantum mechanics are a model of reality. They are a useful model, but to think that you can setup reality such that by measuring physical observables you can yield a large, accurate result that is full of information repeats the same fundamental misunderstanding that led to exxagerated expectations when Analog Computers were introduced. Theoretically, an Analog Computer (just like a quantum computer) has "infinite computing" power, even if it is a simple circular slide rule, because in theory, you can setup input values with infinite precision and yield a result with infinite precision, representing an arbitrarily complex computation. In reality, however, you cannot setup the inputs with arbitrary precision, you won't be able to measure the result with arbitrary precision, and the physical model behind a circular slide rule (the Newton mechanics) leaves some aspects of reality unmodeled, so e.g. the effects of gravity bending the space your slide rule resides in will already render the result precision finite.
Physical models are not laws that reality somehow magically abides to. Quantum mechanics are not different from Newton's mechanics in that they do not model every aspect of reality, so even if there wasn't the problem of setting up inputs and measuring outputs with arbitrary precision, results would still be tainted by effects (gravity, "dark engery", "dark matter",...) that the model does not include.
And there is no compelling reason to believe that just because humans currently favor statistical distribution functions for modelling certain aspects of reality, this reality would "evaluate zillions of possibilities results in an instant and conveniently return the one that adheres to the model". "Coherent entangled quantum states" will turn out to take more and more time to be setup and finally become "decoherent" while being measured as the amount of information that is to be procecessed increases.
The one thing that quantum computers will be good at (and maybe better than conventional computers) will be the simulation of quantum systems similar to what they are. But if you need a real banana to simulate what a real banana would do, you are not building a next generation computer - you are just setting up an experiment.
Using encryption not only saves you effort when the harddisk dies after years, it also provides security benefits during the drives lifetime and makes warranty-exchanges of young defect drives painless.
It would never occur to me to do calculations demanding enough to benefit from GPU usage by using a spreadsheet application.
And even if a GPU can accelerate the rendering of some 3D graphics in a document, I would rather want the application to do such rendering in the background once and retain the rendered image in a cache while I scroll around in the document - so that rendering speed would not really matter a lot.
The text didn't state that all accounts were active ones.
But yes, US citizens seem to have have a strong habit to live on credit. As a non-US citizen I was surprised to learn that permanently being in debt is so popular even amongst well earning people. That is very different where I live (Germany), where credit cards are not quite as popular.
I use LibreOffice a lot and actually like it, not as much as FrameMaker (before Adobe layed of its creators), but it's still a good software.
But if a fairy came by and offered me to realize a wish list with up to a thousand entries regarding Libre Office improvements, I would still not even come close to wishing GPU support for it...
... if that AI was truly good for anything (which I doubt), I would like to have it as a substitute doing the boring parts of my day job, such as talking to technically challenged people.
After death, there is nothing useful that AI could do for me.
Slashdot Mirror
If you honestly think that the "world out there" is "full of horror" and "monsters", you've got serious mental issues. Maybe you can help yourself by travelling the world - not in an army uniform, and not just to places where you are sent to shoot people your employer dislikes.
Maybe you would realize then that people all around the world have much better things to do then to conspire against people living in some remote country. Unless of course, they are being approached by you dropping bombs on their houses.
If you want to be scared about dangers to you life, why not calculate the probabilities of dying early from car accidents, lack of health insurance, being shot randomly by some disgruntled gunman on a rampage at home - all in relation to the risk of becoming the victim of some sinister terror plan?
And BTW: You might have noticed that there are many developed countries in the world that run nothing remotely similar to the NSA, CIA and DOD that have not seen any significant amount of attacks from foreign "monsters".
Quick, somebody make a screenshot, we've found the one single thought-to-be-extinct user that likes the beta:-)
Too bad he's not bold enough to state that under a user name...
First, let me state that I created my Slashdot account only days ago. And while did read Slashdot articles before a few times, I am by no means used to the "classic" view, so my opinion is not biased by being used to either version.
Yes, I cannot see anything that is better in the "beta".
And even the official statements on why that "redesign" is pursued do not provide a single compelling reason what the new design would actually better.
If "more accessible and shareable by a wider audience" means: "We want to lure more Facebook-zombies and other technically challenged people on our site" then let me tell it right away: That is the perfect way to get rid of everyone actually interested in science and technology. If you want to become yet another mainstream gossip page, that is the way to go.
The absolute no-go for me with regards to the beta is the JavaScript plague. I do not want my trusted computer to execute arbitrary code downloaded from the Net. And JavaScript adds no valuable information, just wastes CPU cycles and bandwidth - just as additional "pictures" do.
And while we're at it: "recent" observations on physical functions influenced by gender should also be considered instead of being denied for political correctness reasons.
... to enjoy programming (without exchanging the whole second X chromosome with a Y). But I doubt that many would opt for such a semi-gender-change. People can deny the influence of genes on brain functions as long as they like - reality will continue to not care about such wishful thinking.
The possibilities of quantum computers today are as overstated as were the possibilities of Analog Computers in the 1960's, and I am taking bets that we won't see quantum computers outperform conventional computers on useful tasks within the next 30 years.
Quantum mechanics are a model of reality. They are a useful model, but to think that you can setup reality such that by measuring physical observables you can yield a large, accurate result that is full of information repeats the same fundamental misunderstanding that led to exxagerated expectations when Analog Computers were introduced. Theoretically, an Analog Computer (just like a quantum computer) has "infinite computing" power, even if it is a simple circular slide rule, because in theory, you can setup input values with infinite precision and yield a result with infinite precision, representing an arbitrarily complex computation. In reality, however, you cannot setup the inputs with arbitrary precision, you won't be able to measure the result with arbitrary precision, and the physical model behind a circular slide rule (the Newton mechanics) leaves some aspects of reality unmodeled, so e.g. the effects of gravity bending the space your slide rule resides in will already render the result precision finite.
Physical models are not laws that reality somehow magically abides to. Quantum mechanics are not different from Newton's mechanics in that they do not model every aspect of reality, so even if there wasn't the problem of setting up inputs and measuring outputs with arbitrary precision, results would still be tainted by effects (gravity, "dark engery", "dark matter", ...) that the model does not include.
And there is no compelling reason to believe that just because humans currently favor statistical distribution functions for modelling certain aspects of reality, this reality would "evaluate zillions of possibilities results in an instant and conveniently return the one that adheres to the model". "Coherent entangled quantum states" will turn out to take more and more time to be setup and finally become "decoherent" while being measured as the amount of information that is to be procecessed increases.
The one thing that quantum computers will be good at (and maybe better than conventional computers) will be the simulation of quantum systems similar to what they are. But if you need a real banana to simulate what a real banana would do, you are not building a next generation computer - you are just setting up an experiment.
Using encryption not only saves you effort when the harddisk dies after years, it also provides security benefits during the drives lifetime and makes warranty-exchanges of young defect drives painless.
I recommend this entertaining quiz for more insight on how peaceful either religion is.
... than making peace with your neighbours. ;-)
It would never occur to me to do calculations demanding enough to benefit from GPU usage by using a spreadsheet application. And even if a GPU can accelerate the rendering of some 3D graphics in a document, I would rather want the application to do such rendering in the background once and retain the rendered image in a cache while I scroll around in the document - so that rendering speed would not really matter a lot.
The text didn't state that all accounts were active ones. But yes, US citizens seem to have have a strong habit to live on credit. As a non-US citizen I was surprised to learn that permanently being in debt is so popular even amongst well earning people. That is very different where I live (Germany), where credit cards are not quite as popular.
I use LibreOffice a lot and actually like it, not as much as FrameMaker (before Adobe layed of its creators), but it's still a good software. But if a fairy came by and offered me to realize a wish list with up to a thousand entries regarding Libre Office improvements, I would still not even come close to wishing GPU support for it...
... if that AI was truly good for anything (which I doubt), I would like to have it as a substitute doing the boring parts of my day job, such as talking to technically challenged people. After death, there is nothing useful that AI could do for me.