Well let's compare. Geordie Rose spent years and millions of dollars trying (and succeeding) in building a computational device that works on radically different principles than existing computer tech, is actually useful for a lot of real-world tasks, and consumes virtually zero power - a huge feat in itself, even if it's not really a "quantum computer" in the traditional sense of the word. Whereas those people disagreeing with him are all ivory tower academics who have not built and do not plan to build any hardware. The most egregious of which is Scott Aaronson who is known for his delusional rants on everything from neuroscience to fundamental physics. I wonder which one has their head grounded more firmly in reality.
But seriously though, the fundamental principles of gate-based and adiabatic quantum computing aren't that different; it's more a continuum where on one end you have highly decoherent classical behavior, on the other you have pure quantum behavior, and in the middle you have quantum+noise behavior where tiny entanglements are being generated and decohered on a rapid scale that is too short to do quantum computing but long enough to do adiabatic quantum computing. It's possible that by investing in AQC technology, as the technology matures it will give better and better entanglement and eventually approach a pure quantum computer in capability.
It's ugly because there are a lot of different ways of rendering those graphics to your screen, and they are highly variable depending on your graphics hardware and what exactly you intend to do. If you're just drawing a bunch of browser windows you can get by with communicating with your graphics hardware on a per-pixel basis. But if you want to get into games and so on you have to provide an interface for your software to communicate with the hardware's OpenGL implementation. And you have to support a system where all of these things are happening simultaneously (like, say, an OpenGL context in one window overlaid on a browser window, or even a WebGL app running inside a browser window). And all of this has to be wrapped around a common interface, which has to be fast, reliable, and secure.
And what if a particular program has no command-line version, or the command-line version sucks and is extremely limited (e.g. running a MATLAB instance on a remote cluster)?
I don't know if you're serious or not but if you're serious you should know that no one enjoys using slow, crappy remote desktops when there is a choice. The problem is that we often have no choice.
Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way?
on
Wayland 1.5 Released
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I've built a few open source projects and been heavily criticized for my design choices but you know what? I agree with this. A lot of developers are too stubborn to make changes and it drives people away then they wonder why no one is using their project anymore.
But the flipside is true too. A lot of the time 'flaws' are actually sober and sane design choices which you have to get into the internals of the system to understand. People often don't get this and then bitch and moan about why something hasn't been done the way they like.
The Wayland devs seem pretty sober and sane so far, and I think they've made a lot of nice design choices. The problem of displaying graphics on a PC is an inherently ugly problem (and X is an ugly piece of software which visibly reflects that). If they can make it just a little bit better, it will be worth the wait, in my opinion.
If they calculate that you can't be helped and must be left to die, just say, "Sorry, I've been given specific orders to do X, so I can't help you."
All of this 'ethical debate' surrounding robots that can make life-or-death decisions has absolutely nothing to do with technology, or AI, or any issue that can be resolved technically at all. All it boils down to, is that people are mad that they can't hurt a robot that has hurt them. See, before machine intelligence we had a pretty sweet system. When a human being commits a crime, we stick them in prison. It doesn't feel good to be in prison, therefore this is "justice." But until robots can feel pain or fear or have a self-preservation instinct, prison (or, hell, even the death sentence) wouldn't affect them at all. And that's what drives people nuts. That technology has shown us that beings can exist that are smart enough to make life-or-death decisions, but lack the concept of pain or suffering and if they do something bad there's no way we can PUNISH them.
To be fair, though, it's possible to be perfectly adapted to your environment but also well-adapted to other environments (not that any creature is). It's also possible to be only slightly adapted to your environment but even less adapted to any other environment. Indeed, it's also possible to be well-adapted to your environment and to go extinct through just pure chance, without your environment changing at all. Darwin actually talked about that in The Origin of Species. A tree might produce hundreds of thousands of seeds yet on average only around one or two of them will itself ever become a mature tree. Survival is a delicate balance and it's easy to mess it up. That's why species are now going extinct at a rapid rate. When people say, "Oh, we don't really influence the environment THAT much", they're not objectively wrong, but even a small amount of disruption can cause huge ecological catastrophe.
It's not that simple. Something like a blind spot can't just be evolved away. There needs to be a pathway from "has blind spot" to "doesn't have blind spot" that doesn't go through "vastly decreased eyesight" along the way. Otherwise evolution will stick with what it has, and no amount of selection pressure can cause it to change.
We're vastly suboptimal in many ways. We're not perfectly tuned machines, we're cobbled-together from evolutionary scraps, and you can see it by looking at any part of our physiology. That's precisely the thing that makes intelligent design a stupid idea. Yet, we "work", and are capable of survival, and that's enough.
Then I suggest every programmer read every single one of the posts on this site: http://prog21.dadgum.com/ . The author has a remarkably clear head about things and a very mature outlook on programming.
Funny enough, that also applies to the Greek resistance against Persian control. The Persian emperor really only wanted to levy taxes on the Greeks, not to send them off to the mines. A bunch of other countries were also paying taxes to the persians. Sparta was actually considering complying with them at first - until a bunch of historical accidents occurred which caused Athens to declare war against Persia, and the proud Spartans couldn't be seen as being weak, so they had to go along. It was of course admirable the way they defended themselves against tyranny, but it was very unpragmatic of them.
And about the Mayans, you're absolutely right, but I'm not going to take sides. In the Spanish-Mayan conflict, both sides committed atrocities at about the same level of barbarity, in my opinion.
It's a myth that the Romans were unstoppable murdering machines. It's also myth that the Spanish were unstoppable heathen-burning machines. During the height of the inquisition, how many people were burned at the stake every year, on average, in the whole empire? 25. You can look it up.
To reply to my own comment, it's unlikely that that star has been moving away at a steady speed though. Most likely it's been through an insane trajectory that has at times taken it very far away and at times closer, as it orbits around the center of the milky way along with the sun.
On average, that star has only been moving away from the sun at about 16 miles per hour. There are people who can run faster. Yet after these billions of years, even that snail's pace has been enough to put 110 light years between us.
I'm not against using existing C libraries. Most libraries I (and everyone else?) use on a day-to-day basis are C libraries, or wrappers around C libraries. I'm talking about using C for new projects.
If you're talking about language 'maturity', sure, C is mature. But an embarrasing proportion of new exploits that are found every day are simple buffer overrun exploits caused by that damned C function memcpy() somewhere in the code. 30 years of experience apparently haven't been enough to get people to stop making the same C coding mistakes. Maturity has zero bearing on reliability or bugs. Most bugs occur OUTSIDE the language implementation and standard library. Really, 'maturity' is a false god that people chase and does nothing to make you a better coder. PHP is also mature.
Really, I could go on an on.
You can do great things with C. The linux kernel is a nice piece of C code. But it takes time, discipline, and falling flat on your face many, many times. You are a human and you will make mistakes. Why go through all that hell? You should use a language that keeps you from doing stupid things.
It depends on what you want to do and what your emphasis is on (speed, security, access to bare hardware). I don't want to advocate any particular language here. But for anything you want to do, even for systems programming, there are alternatives (Go, Rust and D are just a few examples, though I personally don't recommend D). Especially, LLVM has allowed a number of new C alternatives to arise that are just as fast as C.
C++ is not elegant for larger projects. It is not elegant for any projects. And neither, honestly, is C. I can understand working with these languages when you're working with existing projects, but there is absolutely no reason to use C/C++ anymore for a new project. Believe me, I know, I programmed in C/C++ for 15 years.
Nope. Password strength is measured in terms of entropy. A word selected randomly from a dictionary of, say 5000 words contains over 12 bits of entropy. A 4-word combination would be 48-50 bits of entropy, and would be easy to remember. Now compare this with an 8-digit, totally random character string. Each character (assuming the alphabet plus numbers) contains only 6 bits of entropy, giving you 48 bits of entropy for the whole 8-digit combination. The passphrase wins. By the way, this is assuming a permuted dictionary attack. A brute-force attack would have even more trouble on a passphrase.
Depending on the type, plastic packaging can in principle be good for the environment. It's not very energy-intensive to make, can be easily recycled, can be recycled many more times than paper can, and doesn't involve cutting down trees. The key is not to stop using plastic, but to use less packaging when we can. In "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle", there's a reason why "Reduce" comes first.
Just to be clear, they only did this for two populations of people: Sardinia and polynesia, both of which have the nice property that they are isolated and thus would not mix very much with the rest of the human population.
The first versions of Unity weren't that nice, but recent iterations are quite usable and have maybe even slightly raised my productivity over the traditional desktop configuration. It was Microsoft and Gnome who didn't handle this whole mobile thingy gracefully.
A tour guide is not an official anything except an 'official guy who shows people around on tours'.
Anyway, people use that misquote when they mean to say, "See, we were lied to about fission power!" and in that sense the usage is bogus since no one who was seriously advocating the adoption of fission power in the government used that phrase to further their cause.
Now you made me explain something that should be obvious to anyone who can English. Thanks for wasting both of our time.
In fact the early people working on nuclear fission largely agreed that U-235 fission power was just a way to justify a large scale nuclear weapons program. Fast forward 60 years and that's still mostly true.
Real nuclear advancement will require development of more efficient reprocessing infrastructure and breeder reactors.
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Well let's compare. Geordie Rose spent years and millions of dollars trying (and succeeding) in building a computational device that works on radically different principles than existing computer tech, is actually useful for a lot of real-world tasks, and consumes virtually zero power - a huge feat in itself, even if it's not really a "quantum computer" in the traditional sense of the word. Whereas those people disagreeing with him are all ivory tower academics who have not built and do not plan to build any hardware. The most egregious of which is Scott Aaronson who is known for his delusional rants on everything from neuroscience to fundamental physics. I wonder which one has their head grounded more firmly in reality.
But seriously though, the fundamental principles of gate-based and adiabatic quantum computing aren't that different; it's more a continuum where on one end you have highly decoherent classical behavior, on the other you have pure quantum behavior, and in the middle you have quantum+noise behavior where tiny entanglements are being generated and decohered on a rapid scale that is too short to do quantum computing but long enough to do adiabatic quantum computing. It's possible that by investing in AQC technology, as the technology matures it will give better and better entanglement and eventually approach a pure quantum computer in capability.
It's ugly because there are a lot of different ways of rendering those graphics to your screen, and they are highly variable depending on your graphics hardware and what exactly you intend to do. If you're just drawing a bunch of browser windows you can get by with communicating with your graphics hardware on a per-pixel basis. But if you want to get into games and so on you have to provide an interface for your software to communicate with the hardware's OpenGL implementation. And you have to support a system where all of these things are happening simultaneously (like, say, an OpenGL context in one window overlaid on a browser window, or even a WebGL app running inside a browser window). And all of this has to be wrapped around a common interface, which has to be fast, reliable, and secure.
And what if a particular program has no command-line version, or the command-line version sucks and is extremely limited (e.g. running a MATLAB instance on a remote cluster)?
I don't know if you're serious or not but if you're serious you should know that no one enjoys using slow, crappy remote desktops when there is a choice. The problem is that we often have no choice.
I've built a few open source projects and been heavily criticized for my design choices but you know what? I agree with this. A lot of developers are too stubborn to make changes and it drives people away then they wonder why no one is using their project anymore.
But the flipside is true too. A lot of the time 'flaws' are actually sober and sane design choices which you have to get into the internals of the system to understand. People often don't get this and then bitch and moan about why something hasn't been done the way they like.
The Wayland devs seem pretty sober and sane so far, and I think they've made a lot of nice design choices. The problem of displaying graphics on a PC is an inherently ugly problem (and X is an ugly piece of software which visibly reflects that). If they can make it just a little bit better, it will be worth the wait, in my opinion.
I get that, but what if along the way of obtaining popularity, you lose the purpose of your mission?
Not saying that that's what you're doing, it's just that it's not so clear-cut to me what the right decision is in this case.
If they calculate that you can't be helped and must be left to die, just say, "Sorry, I've been given specific orders to do X, so I can't help you."
All of this 'ethical debate' surrounding robots that can make life-or-death decisions has absolutely nothing to do with technology, or AI, or any issue that can be resolved technically at all. All it boils down to, is that people are mad that they can't hurt a robot that has hurt them. See, before machine intelligence we had a pretty sweet system. When a human being commits a crime, we stick them in prison. It doesn't feel good to be in prison, therefore this is "justice." But until robots can feel pain or fear or have a self-preservation instinct, prison (or, hell, even the death sentence) wouldn't affect them at all. And that's what drives people nuts. That technology has shown us that beings can exist that are smart enough to make life-or-death decisions, but lack the concept of pain or suffering and if they do something bad there's no way we can PUNISH them.
To be fair, though, it's possible to be perfectly adapted to your environment but also well-adapted to other environments (not that any creature is). It's also possible to be only slightly adapted to your environment but even less adapted to any other environment. Indeed, it's also possible to be well-adapted to your environment and to go extinct through just pure chance, without your environment changing at all. Darwin actually talked about that in The Origin of Species. A tree might produce hundreds of thousands of seeds yet on average only around one or two of them will itself ever become a mature tree. Survival is a delicate balance and it's easy to mess it up. That's why species are now going extinct at a rapid rate. When people say, "Oh, we don't really influence the environment THAT much", they're not objectively wrong, but even a small amount of disruption can cause huge ecological catastrophe.
It's not that simple. Something like a blind spot can't just be evolved away. There needs to be a pathway from "has blind spot" to "doesn't have blind spot" that doesn't go through "vastly decreased eyesight" along the way. Otherwise evolution will stick with what it has, and no amount of selection pressure can cause it to change.
We're vastly suboptimal in many ways. We're not perfectly tuned machines, we're cobbled-together from evolutionary scraps, and you can see it by looking at any part of our physiology. That's precisely the thing that makes intelligent design a stupid idea. Yet, we "work", and are capable of survival, and that's enough.
Then I suggest every programmer read every single one of the posts on this site: http://prog21.dadgum.com/ . The author has a remarkably clear head about things and a very mature outlook on programming.
Funny enough, that also applies to the Greek resistance against Persian control. The Persian emperor really only wanted to levy taxes on the Greeks, not to send them off to the mines. A bunch of other countries were also paying taxes to the persians. Sparta was actually considering complying with them at first - until a bunch of historical accidents occurred which caused Athens to declare war against Persia, and the proud Spartans couldn't be seen as being weak, so they had to go along. It was of course admirable the way they defended themselves against tyranny, but it was very unpragmatic of them.
And about the Mayans, you're absolutely right, but I'm not going to take sides. In the Spanish-Mayan conflict, both sides committed atrocities at about the same level of barbarity, in my opinion.
It's a myth that the Romans were unstoppable murdering machines. It's also myth that the Spanish were unstoppable heathen-burning machines. During the height of the inquisition, how many people were burned at the stake every year, on average, in the whole empire? 25. You can look it up.
To reply to my own comment, it's unlikely that that star has been moving away at a steady speed though. Most likely it's been through an insane trajectory that has at times taken it very far away and at times closer, as it orbits around the center of the milky way along with the sun.
On average, that star has only been moving away from the sun at about 16 miles per hour. There are people who can run faster. Yet after these billions of years, even that snail's pace has been enough to put 110 light years between us.
They are quite different. I never said otherwise.
I'm not against using existing C libraries. Most libraries I (and everyone else?) use on a day-to-day basis are C libraries, or wrappers around C libraries. I'm talking about using C for new projects.
If you're talking about language 'maturity', sure, C is mature. But an embarrasing proportion of new exploits that are found every day are simple buffer overrun exploits caused by that damned C function memcpy() somewhere in the code. 30 years of experience apparently haven't been enough to get people to stop making the same C coding mistakes. Maturity has zero bearing on reliability or bugs. Most bugs occur OUTSIDE the language implementation and standard library. Really, 'maturity' is a false god that people chase and does nothing to make you a better coder. PHP is also mature.
Really, I could go on an on.
You can do great things with C. The linux kernel is a nice piece of C code. But it takes time, discipline, and falling flat on your face many, many times. You are a human and you will make mistakes. Why go through all that hell? You should use a language that keeps you from doing stupid things.
It depends on what you want to do and what your emphasis is on (speed, security, access to bare hardware). I don't want to advocate any particular language here. But for anything you want to do, even for systems programming, there are alternatives (Go, Rust and D are just a few examples, though I personally don't recommend D). Especially, LLVM has allowed a number of new C alternatives to arise that are just as fast as C.
There's D, Rust, and Go, to name a few. All of which are designed for systems programming and are far more modern than C and much safer as well.
C++ is not elegant for larger projects. It is not elegant for any projects. And neither, honestly, is C. I can understand working with these languages when you're working with existing projects, but there is absolutely no reason to use C/C++ anymore for a new project. Believe me, I know, I programmed in C/C++ for 15 years.
It's time to move on.
Nope. Password strength is measured in terms of entropy. A word selected randomly from a dictionary of, say 5000 words contains over 12 bits of entropy. A 4-word combination would be 48-50 bits of entropy, and would be easy to remember. Now compare this with an 8-digit, totally random character string. Each character (assuming the alphabet plus numbers) contains only 6 bits of entropy, giving you 48 bits of entropy for the whole 8-digit combination. The passphrase wins. By the way, this is assuming a permuted dictionary attack. A brute-force attack would have even more trouble on a passphrase.
Depending on the type, plastic packaging can in principle be good for the environment. It's not very energy-intensive to make, can be easily recycled, can be recycled many more times than paper can, and doesn't involve cutting down trees. The key is not to stop using plastic, but to use less packaging when we can. In "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle", there's a reason why "Reduce" comes first.
Just to be clear, they only did this for two populations of people: Sardinia and polynesia, both of which have the nice property that they are isolated and thus would not mix very much with the rest of the human population.
The first versions of Unity weren't that nice, but recent iterations are quite usable and have maybe even slightly raised my productivity over the traditional desktop configuration. It was Microsoft and Gnome who didn't handle this whole mobile thingy gracefully.
Code always fails in exciting and new ways that no one can think of before the fact.
A tour guide is not an official anything except an 'official guy who shows people around on tours'.
Anyway, people use that misquote when they mean to say, "See, we were lied to about fission power!" and in that sense the usage is bogus since no one who was seriously advocating the adoption of fission power in the government used that phrase to further their cause.
Now you made me explain something that should be obvious to anyone who can English. Thanks for wasting both of our time.
Once it was "power so cheap we won't even bother to meter it".
No one ever said that about fission reactors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
In fact the early people working on nuclear fission largely agreed that U-235 fission power was just a way to justify a large scale nuclear weapons program. Fast forward 60 years and that's still mostly true.
Real nuclear advancement will require development of more efficient reprocessing infrastructure and breeder reactors.